X-Files Science Part I: Mutants & Parasites

With the return of television's The X-Files, it's never been a better time to look at the science behind the show. Join Joe and Christian as they examine the possibilities of classic Monsters of the Week, including otherworldly parasites, killer mutants, talking tattoos and more. We'll add present research to the scientific theories surrounding the show during its initial release to find if the truth is out there.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from house Stop
works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Christian Sager and I'm Joe McCormick. And
our regular host Robert Lamb is out on vacation this week.
So this is Baby's first solo flight. Yeah, this is

(00:24):
our first time the two of us since we joined
the show early in the two of us doing an
episode without Robert, and we knew this was coming up
because it was a scheduled vacation. We also knew that
The X Files is coming back on January. This isn't
a commercial. I didn't get paid by Fox to do
this January. I think it's a Sunday Joe and I

(00:47):
are crazy X Files fans. We basically talked about the
X Files. I would say at least once a day
with each other. Yeah, we've referenced in on the show
a decent amount of times too. And I think that's
been basically because pretty much since we took over as
as hosts on the show. I think we've both been
going back through the back catalog of of the X
Files on Netflix. My wife Rachel and I have been

(01:09):
watching them and it has been so much fun. Yeah,
I'm the same. I've been rewatching them along with comal
Non Johnny's podcast, The X Files Files, uh and just
loving every second of it. But um so, this is
our two part X Files extravaganza where we're going to
talk about the science of the X Files. Really kind

(01:30):
of the perfect angle for stuff to blow your mind, right,
because it's weird, it's interesting, it's sort of about the
strangeness of reality, and and it hits all of our
big themes here. I'd i'd say what we do on
this show is science the bizarre and big questions and mysteries,
and that's sort of what the show is all about,
though within with an admittedly conspiratorial kind of angle. If

(01:52):
you're not familiar with The X Files, we hope you'll
still be able to enjoy this episode anyway. So just
to give a brief set up of what the show is,
there are two FBI agents named Molder and Scully. Molder
is David Duchovny. Scully is Gillian Anderson Jillian or Gillian Jillian.
I think it depends because uh, you know, she's she's

(02:12):
I believe, like half British or something like that, So
maybe it's Gillian when she's on The Fall and Jillian
when she's on Hannibal. I'll just have to call her Scully.
So Molder and Scully are are investigating paranormal phenomena for
the FBI. And Moulder is a true believer. He believes
in whatever you could believe in. He believes in its
psychic powers, alien abductions, pyrokinesis, whatever it is. Yeah, he's

(02:36):
on board. And Scully is a skeptic. She's a scientific skeptic,
and she always wants to come up with an explanation
of phenomena based on what we actually know about science,
rather than referring to unproven phenomena that are just sort
of speculative, like alien abductions, and is usually trying to
find some kind of empirical way to figure out what happened,

(02:57):
and whereas Moulder just goes with these hunches. And let's
be honest here, like nine times out of ten, mulders
hunch is current. It's more than nine times out of ten,
it's every single time we were we were struggling to
think of an episode where the skeptical viewpoint turns out
to be correct. It never does, you, I think there's
a couple and the Scullies character. Along the way. As

(03:21):
she has exposed somewhere and more of this stuff, she
becomes less of a skeptic and more of like she's
willing to believe as long as there's quantifiable evidence available
to her, well as one should be. I mean, that's
sort of the spirit of skepticism. It's not that you
should never believe, but you shouldn't believe until until you've
got a good reason to. That reminds me at my

(03:42):
desktop here at work on my laptop that I'm reading
off of now, it's that picture of Scully, and it says,
our lady of skepticism. She is. She is a wonderful
patron saint and a good guiding light for us on
this show. Because while, as we've said on the show
The X Files, it's pretty much always the paranoia a
mole or the aliens or whatever that turns out to

(04:02):
be true, what we do on stuff to blow your
mind is often look at strange phenomenon and try to
understand what a scientific explanation for that phenomena is or
could be. Yeah, I think if Scully was born like
twenty you know, years later, she would have been a
great podcast host rather than at the I Agent, she
probably would have found herself working at How Stuff Works.

(04:23):
She's very she's very taciturn um. So we should mention
at the top here that we have one primary resource, uh,
that we're using on these episodes, and we we'd like
to give a shout out to that, especially that we're
gonna bring in some other sources to but our but
our best resource on this was a book by Gene
Cavelos called The Science of the X Files. It was

(04:45):
published in Gene Cavelos is an astrophysicist and mathematician now
a science and science fiction writer. And I was, I've
been enjoying this book. It's great, isn't it. Yeah, it's
a well researched book. One thing about it though, is
that it was written in nine and playing of science
has changed since then. So we'll also be trying to
update and incorporate new sources to go along with some

(05:08):
of the leads that she established in this book, which
by a large the double check whether the facts that
she said in nine were either still accurate or maybe
there had been some new scientific discoveries since then. Yeah. Yeah,
And there was another book there there were two books
that were published in the nineties about the science of
the X Files. It was such a popular show, then
it makes sense. The other one is called The Real

(05:30):
Science of the X Files Microbes, Meteorites and Mutants. And
unfortunately we couldn't get a hold of a copy of this,
and you know, I stupidly was like, oh, yeah, I'll
just download one of these to my Kindle or something
like that. Note they're not available on Kindle. They're out
of print. But luckily the local library here and we
we live in while I live Indicatur, Georgia, you're in

(05:50):
Atlanta now, uh, but it had a copy, so I
was able to reserve it and we've been sharing it
and it's you know, I gotta say, not only is
it great for these episodes that we're going to do
about the science of the X Files, but there are
topics in there that she just kind of casually brings
up that I'm like, oh, this is great fodder for
future episodes of stuff to blow your mind. So I

(06:11):
think we're marked that for later. Yeah, this is a
rich resource for us. Well, I think we should actually
get into some of the topics. Some of these, uh,
some of these episodes of the X Files and what
we can say about the science behind them or the
not so scientific concepts behind them. Uh and and at
least find some kind of foothold in the real world.
So if we're going to start, we've got to start

(06:32):
with what is probably the most recognized monster of the
week for the X Files, and that is, of course,
the Flukeman. If you have never seen the Flukeman, pause
this right now. Yeah, going google Flukeman and look at
a picture of this monster. I love this monster design.
It looks to me, I've said this before, like a

(06:54):
toilet paper mummy that gotten wet and has lipstick on.
So it's got this occurring open mouth with red lips,
creepy eyes, and then this kind of like melted white exterior. Yeah.
I posted a photo of Flukeman to our Facebook page
yesterday as sort of a hint as to what we're

(07:14):
going to be working on this week, and there are
a lot of people who engaged with it and either
got really excited about because they recognized it from the
X Files or they condemned us to tell because they
were just yeah, yeah, So the premise of Flukeman, the
episode that Flukeman appears in is called The Host and
I believe it's right at the beginning of the second season. Um,

(07:36):
and so we're gonna try not to spoil the show,
but also the show is like twenty years old at
this point. You know, we're gonna basically describe to you
the premise of these episodes pretty quickly and then dive
into the science of of of how they work. Right, So,
the premise of the Host the Host episode is that
there's a creature that arrives in the United States. I

(07:57):
believe it comes over on a Russian oiled hanker. Yeah yeah,
or it's or maybe it's a freight or it's our
ship crossing the the ocean. It comes from a Russian ship,
and it is believed to be coming from Chernobyl. I
believe it's always like either toxic, like a combination of
like sewage and like radioactive waste from Chernobyl in this

(08:18):
ship or something. Why are they bringing that across the ocean.
They're probably just going to dump it in the ocean, man, right,
they want to dump it off the coast of New Jersey. Well,
sure enough they do. And or well, actually it begins
with this guy gets dragged into the sludge because the
flukeman is in there, right. But then there seems to

(08:39):
be a phenomenon emerging after this of something going on
in the New Jersey sewers, right right. Yeah, So there's
basically this creature that's crawling around in there. It's emerging,
and it's either feeding on humans or it's biting them
and infecting them with their parasitic young. And there's this
infamous scene from it where there's a guy who was
bitten by it, uh and and he's in the shower

(09:00):
and he just starts coughing up flukeworms and it's so disgusting.
I mean even now, like I rewatched it recently and
it's pretty disgusting. I can't believe that they got away
with it at the time. Eventually, the implication is that
this is some sort of strange mutant hybrid of it's
like a fluke and a human somewhere in between. Somehow

(09:23):
the radio activity affected the regular flukeworm flatworm, which is
also known as a trematode. Uh. These are basically parasites
that feed off hosts. They're real things, and they usually
attached themselves to our well in human cases to our
internal organs, but you can find them occasionally attached to
your exterior as well. So there's a human liver fluke right, Yeah,

(09:46):
it's called Clinarcus senensis, and this is one of the
ones that Cavellos mainly focuses on in her examination of flukeman.
But this is a flatworm that wants to get inside
your body and make a comfortable little nest in your liver.
It's real and it is, you know, as with many
of the parasites that we've covered on stuff to blow
your mind over the years. Yeah. It's goal is to

(10:09):
go through a reproductive cycle and a life cycle within
a host, right, hence the title the host um. So
this particular flukeworm, it only becomes an adult once it
gets inside a human being and is in our bile
duct or another. Not just a human being, Yeah, any mammal.
And the way that they get in us is by

(10:30):
eating fish, by us eating us eating, So the mammal
eats the fish that carries the fluke. The fluke gets
in you and says I've done it. I've made it.
Time to mature, right, time to become a man, become
a fluke man, and Basically, what they do is that
once they're inside a mammal, they eat the tissue and
the blood close to your liver um. So this is

(10:51):
another common X Files theme, is it? Livers are tasty?
Uh yeah, we'll talk about that again later. So the
fluke real flukes, release their larva into your bile duct
and their hermaphrodites uh so they have both male and
female sex organs. And these larva leave mammal bodies through
feces and then a snail comes comes along and eats

(11:14):
the feces, so the larva gets inside the snail. And
then if the snail is eaten by a fish or
you know, some other kind of marine animal, uh, then
it is infested with these larva which subsequently end up
inside of us or a bear or dog or whatever.
The complicated life cycle. Yeah, and it's man. Parasites are amazing,

(11:36):
I know, like the Robert has gushed a lot about
them on the show, but I agree with them, Like
they have such specialized life systems that they've evolved into
to to uh connect with very particular kinds of hosts too,
And yeah, yeah that's nice. Um. So here's the thing.

(11:56):
When they get inside these fish. They're inside these cysts
that they formed that are like protective. I guess bubbles
is a good way to describe them. Right, So what
happens if you turn that fish into some sushi, Well,
if you eat raw fish, then that cyst is inside
your body and it emerges and turns into its adult
form of the flukeworm. So one of the things that

(12:19):
Cavelos notes that we we should probably mention is that
the title fluke Man that's given to this creature probably
is not accurate because this creature would have both male
and female organs, right right, it's a Misnow, it's not
really a flukeman. It's a fluke person. But you know,
here's some nerdy X Files knowledge for you. Uh my
favorite and I think your favorite to X Files writer,

(12:41):
Darren Morgan was the guy wearing the costume as this
fluke creature. So he was the West toilet paper mommy
with lipstick. Yeah, he had the fruit punch mouth there,
I think, h I think he. You know, maybe that's
why they called it a fluke man because there was
a man in it. But if I remember that costume correctly,
it's not like there were human reproductive organs or anything

(13:05):
like that, not that you could see. Yeah, so all right,
the fluke larva though, would not be coughed up like
they were in this episode. Right. So, fluke larva primarily
exit our bodies through the digestive track and the feces.
They're usually not coughed up. And this is a common
thing for lots of types of parasites that get in
your body. They reproduced by by making you, so a

(13:29):
lot of them cause diarrhea and stuff to be expelled
in your feces deliberately, or they just get out kind
of passively that way, hopefully to get into water supply
or to be eaten by some creature that will eat
your feces to make it to the next stage in
their life cycle. And this is a common theme of
the parasites and the X Files too. We're going to
talk about ice later and that is also how that

(13:49):
particular creature exit your body. But yeah, even in real
life with lung flukes, which are attached to your lungs,
you cough up their eggs if you have them in you,
but you re swallow them so they passed down through
your digestive tract. It's not like you're spitting up these
fluke eggs and then they hatch everywhere, right, because then
how would the snails get to them. I have to

(14:10):
imagine it would be an evolutionary disadvantage for a parasite
to exit the body coughing up huge mature worms, because
it seems like that'd be so alarming other creatures would
immediately want to get away from that creature. From New Hope,
it works great for TV, right, like these bloody flukes
in the shower, But it does parasitism is a stealth

(14:32):
game exactly. Yeah, and so Cavellos also notes, you know, yes,
radiation does produce mutations, but probably not as dramatic a
change is what we see with the fluke man. Well,
this is a common thing we see in science fiction.
Is sort of a very loose understanding of the idea
of how radiation causes mutations and organisms like radiation can

(14:54):
encourage the mutation, right, especially like in your germ cells.
If you're exposed to more radiation, you might give birth
to children that have more mutations than average. But generally,
like if you're hanging out near the near the reactor
wreckage in Chernobyl, that's not gonna that's not gonna make
you into a different kind of animal. It's probably just

(15:15):
gonna kill you, right, Yeah, you're more likely to get sick,
have cellular degeneration or deterioration, or just die. Yeah, And
so okay, Flukeman. Actually, you know, Robert wrote about Flukeman
years ago for Stuff to Blow your Mind. If you
go to the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
there's a great Monster of the Week piece that he

(15:35):
wrote about Flukeman and flukes in general. So if you're
you're interested in more about this, go check that out.
And we also dug up a little bit of information,
uh that apparently in two thousand nine and two thousand
and ten, well after this book was written, in after
the X Files was over US, flukewarm infections increased significantly.
And there's a really weird reason why. It's because people

(15:57):
were taking a lot more river cruise trips, you know
those ones where you like, you get on those um
what do they call them those kinds of boats, not
quite river boat maybe paddle boats, paddle boats, that's what
I'm thinking of. Uh, and they started a paddle boat
with that wouldn't be a cruise boat. Steamboats, I'm sure
it's a boat boat anyway, it's a pite on these boats. Yeah,

(16:20):
they're designed specifically for you to join a sect luxurious
parasite cruise. They were feeding people raw crawfish, and uh,
you know, basically these raw crawfish were infected with the
fluke larva like we've been talking about um. And so yeah,
in the previous forty years before that, there had only
been seven cases of flukeworm infection in North America, but

(16:44):
just in two thousand nine and two thousand and ten
there were nine because of this particular thing. So I'd
like to think in the last five years that these
riverbrook boats have stopped giving people raw crawfish and growing
potential flukeman's inside of them, one would hope so well.
Of course, The Host is not the only episode of
the X Files to feature parasites. Parasites are a really

(17:07):
common theme, especially on these Monster of the Week episodes,
because I mean, it's it's fertile ground to uh to mine,
I would say for the sort of mixing metaphors is
a fertile ground. Mind fertile ground anyway, It's a good
place to look if you want some ideas for weird
ways that animals, especially mutations or aliens or something could

(17:28):
take advantage of the human body in ways that make
a squirm. Yeah. And so another one of these episodes
that addresses parasitism in a particularly gross yet maybe scientifically
interesting way is called f Emasculata. Yeah, and they're more
focusing on something that there's a differentiation here that we
will call out in a minute. They're parasitoids, not necessarily parasites.

(17:52):
But the premise of this episode is that I don't
even remember where it was, maybe South America or something.
It will wear the bug orginally came from. There's some
kind of bug. It's like a beetle, and it carries
a disease that has one of these parasitoids. And yeah,
they're in a prison. Somebody mails a leg of bore
I think, to a prisoner that's in and this leg

(18:15):
of bore is infected with this parasitoid. Uh. And so
subsequently these two prisoners get infected as well, but they
just happened to escape the prison. And so the episode
is basically Molder and Scully chasing these guys across the
United States to make sure that they don't spread this plague. Okay, now,
what kind of infection is this is it is? It? Does?
It kind of outwardly resemble a bacterial infection or something.

(18:37):
It's super gross. The attacks the human immune system, causing
pustules to form on your skin nice and and that
leads to death within thirty six hours. But the way
that it spreads is the pustules erupt So these the
gooey pustules pop stuff everyone people, which subsequently get more
larva on the people. Yeah. Um, so, first of all,

(19:00):
this episode presents the idea that this is an undiscovered
species that nobody has ever heard of before. Uh, and
you know, I believe that, they say, you know, that's
why we were totally unprepared for this as a potential
health problem. Yeah, it's that is a hundred percent possible. Yeah,
there are tons of species that we don't know exists. Yeah,

(19:22):
at the time when this book was written in there
were somewhere between one point five and a hundred million.
That's how like vague it is. They don't know undiscovered
species Usually there's small things like ants or beetles like
that in this case, right, but the rainforest in particular
is home to an incredibly diverse set of species. So

(19:42):
that's why it's particularly difficult for us to catalog all
of them. And I know there have always been scientists
trying to update the estimate. You know what, what's the number?
We suspect to someday be able to find numbers of
species on the Earth that are unknown. So it seems
that the most recent estimate that I could find, at
least came in twenty eleven. There was a study that

(20:03):
estimated that Earth has almost eight point eight million species
in total, and we've only discovered about a quarter of
that eight point eight million. Uh So like there, I
think their estimate was something like one point nine million
have been found. But then this is the funny part,
right The study says, well, we could be off by

(20:23):
about one point three million species, uh and that this
number could anywhere be anywhere between seven point five million
and ten point one million total species. So it's you know,
again like super vague abroad reach. But yes, it's possible
that there's a bug out there somewhere in South America
that we don't know about, right, Well, I mean that's

(20:45):
certain that there are bugs we don't know about. The
question is like, could we discover something that really surprises
us and I think that that's plausible. Yeah, we could absolutely. Uh.
So there's about two hundred and fifty thousand or somewhere
between two hundred fifty five hundred thousand species of parasitoids. Um.
The example that they gave in the book was the

(21:05):
scuttle fly. That's kind of one of the more well
known ones. It lays its eggs in the head of
a fire ant, uh and when that hatches, it kills
the ant. And then that's not enough. It uses the
ant's head as a little cocoon, so a safe place
for it to mature in like a like a cradle
ant head cradle. And yeah, we know about wasp parasitoids

(21:27):
that can take over ants. They can take over spiders
and all kinds of other insects and they either end
up like draining their their life from within, or they
take their their resources, or sometimes they even you know,
we've talked about like a zombie type insects before on
the show. They'll they'll take over these animals, sorry, these
insects and force them to defend the parasitoid. Yeah, it's

(21:53):
not pretty. So almost all of these parasitoids are what
we understand as arthur pods right, uh, and these they
sometimes use other arthropods as their hosts, which is even
that's like imagine if a like a little person climbed
inside of you and was the parasite inside of you.
If yeah, like a like a like a tiny little

(22:14):
humanoid with arms and legs just climbed down your throat
and was the parasitoid inside you and then maybe burst
out a week later. Why isn't that an episode of
The X Files. Well, I haven't written it yet, yeah, um,
but so yeah, so we've got you know, they're not
necessarily all adapted from a million physiology. This is what

(22:34):
we were talking about earlier about how these things are
so fascinating, right because they're adapted very specifically for the
species that they live in conjunction with. Okay, so, but
this parasite, in particular, the F masculata, and I think
F that stands for like a genus name, So that's
like would imagine the name of the species. Here we're
dealing with. What does Cavela say about about it in

(22:56):
the end? Is it is it similar to anything in reality? Yes?
So she says that it's similar to the blow fly,
which is another parasitoid that we're you know, somewhat familiar with. Uh.
They don't actually kill their hosts. They burrow into wounds.
These are blowflies. They burrow into wounds and their larva
eat dead flesh. But did the wounds explode, Not to

(23:18):
my knowledge, but I believe with blowflies, like, aren't blow
flies the type of larva that we're used to clean
out wounds during Like I think it was like World
War One or World War two, Like you could you
could put their larva in an open wound and it
would clean out the necrotic flesh that was there. Uh.
And obviously you wouldn't want to leave it there because

(23:38):
then they would hatch. But they but they were used
actually for that function. Yeah, I mean maggot therapy is
a is a type of therapy that has been used
and I think in some cases still is used. They
eat the necrotic flesh and they leave the healthy flesh alone.
So Cavellos makes a distinction though, and I think that
this is a good one that m ski a lot

(24:00):
of isn't necessarily just the beetle, right, and it it's
two beings. It's the beetle and then it's a parasite
virus that exists in the beetle and that grows inside
the human body, suppressing the immune system and causing these
wounds which the bugs subsequently lays its eggs inside. So

(24:23):
she thinks that it's like a two parter here, that
there's more going on, and that scullion molder don't quite
have the biology right um, and that the virus needs
to bug needs the bugs to spread in the same
way that the bugs would need the virus to reproduce.
So in that way, it could be kind of like
a like a composite organism. Like right, if you look
at a lichen you know about like lichen or you know,

(24:46):
there are really two different organisms that have combined so
closely together that they've formed a sort of super organism.
Lichen Is is made of algae and then also made
of fungus, and they they've just become so depending on
one another that they're now like a single organism. Well,
that's a great segue into our next X Files Monster

(25:07):
of the Week, which is another parasite of a kind,
but it's a fungus parasite in particular, this fungus lives
in volcanoes. Yeah, so that would make it probably some
kind of extreme of file. Right. So we're talking about
the episode Firewalker, which is it's I don't know, it's
not one of my favorite ones, but the science is

(25:29):
kind of interesting in it, and it had guest stars
Bradley Whitford, which I really enjoyed. He's like the crazed
scientist who's left over from this mad exploration to the volcano.
So Bradley Whitford is the guy from the West Wing
who would do all those cute walking talks. Yes, that's him,
that's him. He was also on that other Aaron Sarkin

(25:49):
show was a Studio sixty on the Sunset Strip. I
don't know, I never saw it was a studio with
a number. I just don't remember the number. I'm I'm
annoyed by the cute walking talks. But I did like
him in Cavin in the Woods. Oh yeah, he's great
in that. Yeah. So the idea here is that he's
a scientist with another group of scientists that are studying
a volcano. They have a like robot called Firewalker that

(26:13):
they send into the volcano to do like examinations. The
robot gets these fungal spores on it and then it
comes back and infects everybody, and the fungal spores grow
inside the lungs of these people and then burst outward,
releasing more spores infecting more people. We're kind of seeing
a theme, yeah, the bursting. Okay, so the idea of

(26:33):
an organism that lives under extremely high heat conditions is
kind of strange because heat is one of the ways
that we think of as being most dependable to kill
off any organisms we don't want on sure. Yeah, I mean, like,
you know, you want to sterilize silverware or surgical instruments
or something like that, you heat it up, and we
typically think, well, nothing's going to survive, but that's not true. Uh,

(26:56):
and hopefully there aren't any extreme of files on our
surgical instruments. But yeah, Scully says something to that effect
in the episode. She's like, well, nothing can survive inside
of volcano. This is her skepticism, nothing can survive inside
of volcano. But you know, Cavello's points out extremophiles could, uh,
they grow best actually in these extreme conditions, right. So, well,

(27:18):
the kinds that are adapted to really temperature exactly, and
those are called thermophiles. We know about kinds that live
near underwater volcanic events or next to pools of boiling water.
And yeah, some even lived inside volcanoes. Are never heard
of that before. Yeah, this is what you know, she
mentions in there, and uh so, okay, here's the thing. Though,

(27:39):
the heat range established in that episode of the Firewalker
Robot is a hundred and forty three to three hundred degrees. Now,
I do feel pretty certain that no organism, no matter what,
could survive three hundred degrees. Yeah, And this is where
Cavellos kind of works around this is that she hypothesizes
that it might not actually be an extreme a file

(28:01):
this particular fungus and she but she's got an answer.
She's got kind of like before with the idea that
uh fm esculata is two beings instead of one being.
She's got an interesting hypothesis that contradicts what Scully comes
up with. Um. She says that it's unlikely that it
would be a fungus in particular, right because they the

(28:23):
fungus wouldn't be able to survive. But perhaps that is
the spore of a fungus that doesn't live in the
volcano but near the volcano, and the scores were blown
along to where the firewalker was maybe exiting the volcano. Okay, well,
I mean that makes it easier to Yeah, so maybe
it's not an extreme a file necessarily, but they just

(28:44):
kind of blew onto this robot or whatever. But um,
it opens up a possibility. Well but wait, hold on,
if you can say that, it's like, you know, oh well,
wait a minute, what if these aliens didn't really come
from space come from space? They came from can to death. Yeah,
I mean it's true, and that, you know, we get
to the Canadian aliens in season seven of the X Files.

(29:06):
But no, I agree with you. You're right, it's a
little weird. But I like that where she's going with
this because it opens up the possibility of talking about Um.
One of the problems with these extremely files is that like, yeah,
they can exist in these extreme environments, but then they
wouldn't necessarily also be able to exist, for instance, in
the human lung. Right, So I did a little bit

(29:27):
of looking up here to see, you know what, what's
the possibility here of these fungus spores blowing around on
a volcano. And sure enough, there have been fungal spores
that have been discovered on the volcanic desert of Mount
Fuji and Japan, so not inside it, but like, you know,
the outside volcanic area around it. So Okay, it's theoretical

(29:48):
that theoretically possible that one of these fungus has a
spore it gets blown up, uh maybe to the lip
or top of the volcano where Firewalker robot is roaming
around the and then gets on it there. Well, I
believe I remember in the show was going around in
these caves, these like hot caves that were lava tubes.
I guess, oh, yeah, on the volcano, so that might

(30:11):
be a different kind of environment too. But yeah, I
think we've you know, established probably not possible for it
to exist in a volcano. But you know, she's come
up with her best possible answer as to how this
fungus could have ended up this, especially this unknown fungus, right,
how it could have ended up on this robot. I mean,
what is it? What does it live on? If it's

(30:31):
in a kind of dark, super hot environment. Well, most
thermophiles consume sulfur of some kind or another, and they
say in the episode of Firewalker that this thing eats
hydrogen sulfide um So it's interesting though, because if the
fungus fed off sulfur, how would it still grow inside

(30:51):
human lungs? Right, Like, we don't have a ton of
sulfur in our lungs. But Cavellos again finds an answer
for that. She says, well, actually, and some of the
amino acids in our body, there are sulfides in there,
so maybe it would be like somehow pulling the sulfides
out of the amino acids. The problem with that, though,
is that within a moist lung environment, if the fungus

(31:14):
was producing sulfur dioxide, that would turn into sulfuric acid
inside our lungs, which would you know, pretty much kill
its human host. So Firewalker not so great at the
at the adapting spectacularly to exist with its host, right,
doesn't sound like it's it's been really thought through as well.

(31:35):
Maybe I'd be curious to see who the different writers
were on these parasite episodes and how much research they did. So.
The other thing that's really unique about the Firewalker life form.
I know that the robots called Firewalker, but I guess
we're calling this creature Firewalker as well, right, is that
they say in the episode that it's silicon based, silicone

(31:55):
based rather than carbon based, So almost all life as
we understand its carbon based. I think all life we
know about on Earth is carbon based. I mean, scientists
have talked about astrobiology for a while, has talked about, well,
could there be life forms on another planet that are
based on a different kind of atomic structure than that

(32:16):
on Earth? Because you know, we all are, right, we
all have DNA, you know, or even even viruses that
you know don't have all of the characteristics we would
think of as as being life necessarily still are carbon based,
and silicon is this proposed atom. It's like, well, you know,
maybe silicon based molecules could be the basis for some

(32:38):
other kind of biochemistry that's different than the biochemistry and
life on Earth. And I've read some criticisms of that.
I think some people I think that's very implausible. I mean,
you never really know for sure. Well, there's the classic
Star Trek episode where they meet the silicon based alien Horta.

(32:58):
I've never seen. That's basically empirical science. Yeah, I haven't
seen it either, but it came up when I was
researching the possibility of silicon life forms. So Yeah, you're right.
Carbon is the most conducive form for life, right because
it can easily form bonds with other atoms, it's flexible,
it can form thousands of different compounds. Those can be

(33:21):
broken down, and they can facilitate different processes within an organism. Right. Silicon, however,
is called it's known as tetravalent, so the bonds it
creates are either too strong to be broken down or
too weak to hold together for these particular processes, so
they don't form compounds with what's called handedness. Uh. And

(33:42):
the the analogy that Cavelos uses here, which I like, uh,
is that you think of a right hand trying to
wear a left handed glove. That's basically what it's like
with silicon trying to attach itself in a particular way
with enzymes in order to facilitate life. Uh. I mean yeah,
that that's another good point about the matching nous. I mean,

(34:05):
would a silicon based life form, even if it could exist,
could it possibly parasitize a carbon based life form? And
would the carbon based life form even have the kinds
of molecules available silicon based life form would need for
its metabolism and and much like how they're you know, speculating, Well,
if you have this sulfur dioxide creating thing in your lungs,

(34:27):
it would just make sulfuric acid. Also, the the products
that would be emitted from these silicon life forms wouldn't
necessarily work out, right. So, well, this is a thing
that comes through in a lot of these sci fi
scenarios about parasites is that typically parasites don't want to
kill their hosts. I mean, you always have killing in
in the in the science fiction because it ups the

(34:48):
anti You know, if it just kind of made you
feel sick and then you've got better, that wouldn't be
such a dramatic story. But but yeah, I mean a
parasite that kills its host is kind of doing bad job, right, Yeah,
So I think about it this way. Okay, So carbon
life forms they oxidized, right, We oxidized and unite oxygen.

(35:10):
Maybe during burning it becomes a gas like carbon dioxide.
We emit carbon dioxide. But if silicon oxidizes, it becomes
a solid silicon dioxide, which is also known as silica,
which is sand. Right, So imagine this creature. I guess
it's just coughing up sand. Constantly. Um so. Yeah, So

(35:31):
that's one very simple reason why it probably couldn't support life,
although I'm sure somebody with an interesting enough imagination would
be able to envision a sand breathing creature of some type. Well,
actually sandworms of dune. I think Robert and I in
an episode we did about about alien life forms in
the shapes they could take. We talked about sand based life,

(35:53):
like a life that that had this silica basis, and
we referenced the Stephen King short story Beach where yeah,
it seems to have sentient sand dunes as a life form.
So this next X Files episode, which is yet another parasite,
and this is this is the last parasite. Yeah, and
it's well at least the last one we're going to

(36:14):
cover here. There's probably hundreds of bears the X Files.
But this is another classic X Files episode. It's I
think it's the best episode of the first season. It's
one of my favorites. It's called Ice. It's basically the
movie The Thing. Yeah, it's an homage to the Thing. Uh.
And they're basically paranoia worms that get inside you. And
in fact, last night I I rewatched the episode in

(36:37):
preparation for us to record this because I was just
I really like that episode. It's got some great moments
from other character actors. Felicity Huffman shows up in it.
So yeah, in this episode Ice, what happens? We have
Molder and Scully flying up to this Arctic research station
because it seems that all of the people on the
station have killed each other. And well, yeah, the cold

(36:59):
open begins with there's dead bodies everywhere, and there's two
guys left and they're about to kill each other, but
then they turn their guns on themselves and each of
them kills themselves and they keep saying over and over again,
we are not who we are, something like to that effect, right, yeah,
something like that. Yeah, And so Molder and Scully and
a team of other people get there, and this team
is kind of important because then we can we can

(37:22):
play the factions in Paranoia game. And they discovered that
this Arctic research station had come across what was it,
a frozen meteorite. Yeah, well they were they were researching
and drilling down into ice that was inside a meteorite
crater I believe, Okay, Yeah, and so it was it
was many thousands of years old, and they came across

(37:44):
this organism that they brought back to the research station
with them. That's a tiny worm of some sort, and
essentially what happens is the worm gets into people and
turns them paranoid and they started killing. Yeah, and it's
like all these other parasites that we've been talking about
out it it enters its host inside a larval form.
In this particular case, it's it's real gross. It moves

(38:06):
around on the back of your neck and somehow attaches
to your hypothalamus. You can see it's scuttling around under
the skin. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's not pretty. Uh, And
there's I had forgotten about this until I rewatched it
last night. But one of the ways that they can
tell if you're infected with the worm as you start
getting these like little black nodules growing under like your
armpit and stuff like that. Uh. But yeah, they say

(38:30):
that it's uh, it stimulates the chemical act of colon
that's in the hypothalamus and that this causes the hosts
in this case to exhibit extreme paranoia and then subsequent violence.
So that's why all the other scientists all killed each
other and themselves. They're infected by this worm, and it's

(38:52):
a paranoia worm. So let's set aside the alien stuff
for a second and just say, is some kind of
terrestrial paranoia worm visible at all? Well, it's probably not
an extreme aphile like we're just talking about earlier, right
with Firewalker, because again, how would it be able to
survive in both these extreme cold conditions and then also

(39:13):
in the relative heat of the human body. It wouldn't
be adapted for both, right, So it's probably of terrestrial origin,
even though Molder immediately is like, oh, this is from
matter space, it's an alien It was in a meteorite.
We have to document this. It's proof of alien life, right, right,
But the Cavella says in her book, sell you, Ule Molder,

(39:34):
it's probably actually terrestrial origin since it's evolved in particular
to be a parasite with mammalion hosts, right, or I mean,
I guess the possibility is that this meteorite is from
a planet where there are hosts that are just like
dogs and humans, because it also infects a dog in
the episode. Right. Okay, Well, as we've talked about in
the other episodes, one of one of the things that's

(39:56):
common to these worm infections in the body is that
they need to get out of your body to pass
on to the next host somehow, and typically they're going
to do that through the most attractive method of feces,
as we said earlier, right, and yet again in this episode,
like with the flukeman. Uh, it's it's well, it's not
entirely spelled out, but we know at least one person

(40:17):
gets infected from a bite, so that somehow the larva
of this worm or in the saliva of the dog
that bites a guy. He's the pilot in his name
is Bear. Uh. And Bear gets bitten by the dog
and then he gets infected, he gets paranoid and he
starts attacking everybody. Right, Uh so yeah, why why doesn't

(40:38):
it just go the good old right out the digestive system,
tried and true parasite method. Instead it's this bite thing.
And the other problem with this, right is that you're
even if you're provoked into violence, you're not necessarily going
to always bite your victim. Yeah, it seems like they're

(41:00):
I don't know, relying vaguely on the notion that this
is adapted to an animal that bites when provoked, though
humans don't necessarily do that. I mean, I guess if
you imagined it was adapted to mammals on Earth, a
lot of mammals probably bite when provoked. Yeah, And I
think that the writers were probably thinking along the lines
of rabies, sort of like a combination of a tape

(41:21):
worm in rabies here and that like it would be
spread by a bite, uh or or in the episode
that I had forgotten this but rewatching it last night,
they just at some points just take the worm and
shove it in somebody's ear, and that's how they get infected,
which is also gross. It reminds me Raphicon. It reminds
me exactly of that scene. So what's what's this stuff

(41:42):
you said that the worm produces that causes the paranoia
and violence? Would would that actually work? So it's it's
again it's a setal coline uh. And it's supposedly it's
interacting with that hypothalamust trying to trigger our fight or
flight mechanism, right, which would lead to the bites. I guess. Uh.

(42:02):
But like I said, in the episode, they're they're shooting
guns at each other, they're punching each other. So I
don't know if that does the worm any good. The acetalcoline,
it has a way more complex relationship with the human
body than just making you violent or paranoid. So, uh,
you know the research that Cavelos pulls out, she says
that toxins like saren like saren gas, Yeah, they can

(42:25):
break that down and they can cause similar effects of paranoia,
but it very low doses. At high doses acetalcoline, however,
it just basically stimulates your body's parasympathetic system and it
slows down functions like your heartbeat, blood pressure, and ultimately
leads to respiratory paralysis. So again, like the I don't know.

(42:47):
And there was another aspect in the episode that I
noticed last night that they didn't really talk about even
in caveluss book, which is that this thing like exists
specifically in ammonia, like it's evolved to be an ammonia
dwelling worm. And there's some implication that there'd be a
connection the ammonia and the aceticcoline. I that doesn't particularly

(43:11):
line up, so I guess we'd have to go no, Uh,
this thing couldn't exist in the ice as it did, right,
and also be did not exist in the ice and
be it and be a parasite that could infect humans
and other mammals, and then the acetacoline. It would have
to have a very refined way of accessing that within

(43:32):
the hypothalamus in order to get those specific, violent paranoid
reactions out of people. Yeah. I think this is a
thing that you see in science fiction writing a lot
is they'll take a supposed fact about a neurotransmitter or
some kind of hormone or chemical that they know of
that's active in the body and kind of oversimplify what
it does or overstate a correlation. You've probably read some

(43:56):
stuff along these lines. For example, with the hormone oxytocin.
Remember people say, oh, this is the love hormone, it
makes you be in love, and you know that that's
not exactly accurate. It's much more complex than that. It
causes complex cascading effects, and it is involved with other
hormones and combinations of things. It's just not as simple

(44:17):
as this one neurotransmitter causes this macro behavior on the
on the large scale exactly. So I think we can
safely scratch ice off as being something that we should
be terrified of making its way into the human population.
From watching this X Files episode, so with that, I
think we need to take a break, but we when

(44:37):
we come back, we're going to transition away from parasites
and talking about some other strange science of the X files. Perfect. Hey, everybody,
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(44:58):
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(45:19):
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(46:03):
that stamps dot com into s t U F F. Alright,
so we're back. We're moving now from parasites into another
classic X Files A way to come up with a
villain for a Monster of the Week. It's a mutant,
right of course, and some of the most famous ones

(46:24):
are mutants. We've got Tombs who we're going to talk
about from the classic episode Squeeze and uh, of course
Leonard Betts. We gotta talk about Leonard Betts. That's one
of the most famous X Files episodes. Uh. And I
learned this from listening to Comin on Johnny's podcast. But
apparently it was the most watched episode of all time

(46:44):
because it happened to air like right during a Super Bowl,
like right after a super Bowl. Well, it's not a
bad one to do exactly. Yeah. So let's just established
right up front from Kveliss book and also just from
general science about mutations. Uh that that you know, the
possibilities here are about inheritance evolution and how mutation could

(47:07):
alter instances of I guess we would consider them natural selection,
right ull, sure, Yeah, I mean, mutation is an inherent
part of evolution. It's it's how random change occurs, but
mainly it's beneficial traits that are bred into this particular species,
right right, Well, all kinds of mutations occur, and most

(47:28):
of them have no effect whatsoever, or they are slightly detrimental,
but natural selection tends to mean that those mutations are
eliminated over time. And so if you have a mutation
that makes you worse at surviving, obviously you're less likely
to pass that gene onto your kids because you won't

(47:48):
be having any kids, or you'll have fewer kids than
the one with the beneficial gene or at least without
the negative gene. But are are we likely to encounter
mutants in the real world, as in mutants with these
big noticeable powers that powers fundamentally change, Yeah, how they
interact with their environment? You're gonna meet somebody who has wings. No,

(48:11):
you're not, because in one sense, yes, we're all mutants.
I mean we all inherit some amount of mutation from
our parents germ cells than our selves. Of course continue
to mutate throughout life, but in the most relevant sense,
we're not going to be able to mutate to have wings,
or mutate to become goo and then reform into a human,

(48:34):
or have any of these other huge macro mutations and mutations.
And creatures that survive into adulthood tend to have extremely
small or almost non existent impacts on the body. And
the way species change over time is through the accumulation
of mutations, not through one gigantic mutation that makes you
massively different. Alright, so let's get into Leonard Bets then.

(48:58):
So the premise of the Leonard Bets episode uh is
basically that this is a guy with a mutation in
which all the cells in his body are cancerous. Right, yeah,
So well we don't get there first, right, First, Heason E.
M T who gets his head cut off, that he
survives the decapitation exactly, so he gets his head cut

(49:19):
clean off in an ambulance accident. Leonard is fully decapitated,
and later his headless body gets up, flees from the
morgue and gets busy trying to regrow ahead. Okay, and
I believe the way he does that is by like
taking a bath in iodine. Right, Yeah, he gets into
some iodine. Don't know why. I don't think even Cavello

(49:42):
has had an idea about why iodine, But he gets
into it. He gets into a bath. Yeah, and a
bath of iodine is creepy, I guess. It leaves these
weird brown stains on him, and so that looks creepy enough,
I guess. But and he eventually regrows ahead through powerful cancer,
the powers of cancer. I mean to say, he is, actually,

(50:02):
we find out, made of cancer and eats cancer and
eats cancer, and so he's he's participating in a wonderful
cancer economy that allows him to regenerate not only lost limbs,
but a lost head. Now, it's not uncommon to hear
discussion about the extremely brief, momentary survival of decapitation, but

(50:26):
that's usually talking about the head of surviving decapitation, not
the body. So, for example, there there are legends that
the heads of people like Charles, the first of England
or or Anne Boleyn appeared to try to talk after
they were severed from the bodies of the people. Yeah,
I've heard that. We did an episode of the of
the show What the Stuff video show that Joe and

(50:48):
I write for, and I wrote about the Worst Ways
to die and decapitations were in there and that those
legends showed up right, And so the debate sort of
continues about whether severed head can can experience consciousness beyond
a second or two. Maybe they do, maybe they don't,
But like we said, that's the head. The really weird
thing about the story of Leonard Bets in this episode

(51:11):
is that the body survives decapitation and his body gets
up and walks away from an ambulance crash. Yeah, walks home,
I think, or maybe walks out of the morgue somewhere
to take. Walks to the iodine store and says, give
me all of you, like a whole. Yeah. And the

(51:31):
best part of the dumbest part of this episode, Multa
walks in s he's a bathtub full of iodine and
doesn't bother to look in it. He's just like, okay, cool,
it turns around, it walks out, and then this guy's
body emerges with a newly grown ahead. Whenever I see
a bathtub full of iodine, I reach in. Yeah, exactly,
that's what you should always do. You take like a
broom handle, just stick it in there. See what's going on.

(51:53):
So this might be kind of obvious, but it's probably
worth saying. Why does a decapitation kill you? Obviously, the brain,
especially the brain stem, is sort of the command center
for the impulses that control the body. So without the
command center, you can't breathe, you can't digest food, you
can't perform directed movements of the muscles. It's kind of

(52:15):
like taking the CPU out of your computer. You're just
nothing much is going to happen. Then, of course, on
top of that, you've got for the body itself, you'll
have catastrophic blood loss. So many blood vessels carry blood
up to the head and it's a very high pressure.
It's gonna pump it up there, right, So you're gonna
get a nice like Quentin Tarantino blood squirting effect. Yeah,

(52:37):
when you cut the head off, you're just gonna gush
blood out, have immediate loss, immediate massive loss of blood,
and that massive sudden loss of blood and blood pressure
means blood can't get to all the lower body tissues
to supply them with nutrients, and they're just they're out
of luck. And then of course the final thing is
you can't eat without a mouth. Yeah, I guess that's

(52:58):
a problem. So it's pretty obvious why creatures like us
can't survive decapitation. But one of the weirdest facts is
that some animals sort of can not forever. But I
want to talk for a second about cockroaches. Now. I
found this great old Scientific American article from two thousand

(53:19):
seven that spoke to several experts about cockroach decapitation. So
you can cut a cockroach's head off and its body
doesn't immediately die. That's I mean people out there, I'm
I just kind of genuinely generally don't like cockroaches, But
there's people out there who are like definitely afraid of them.

(53:40):
That's got to really squip them out. So cockroaches don't
have blood vessels and high blood pressure like we do.
So you cut a cockroaches head off, it doesn't gush
all of its important fluids out immediately. A cockroach has
an open circulatory system. This is what it's referred to,
so it doesn't have blood vessels. It's just kind of
a it's just kind of a bag of juice. And

(54:02):
when you get it, when it gets its head cut off,
it doesn't all gush out. It can just kind of
like seal itself off and then it's it's it's still okay.
Basically being called blooded, cockroaches don't need to eat as
much as animals like us, so they can also survive
decapitation much longer without eating, you know, because the head
isn't there to eat, so the body can kind of

(54:25):
hang around for a while. You could also just like
maybe take a like a slurry ivy and just plug
it right into the decapitated head part, just feed it
that way. According to this Scientific American article I read,
there have been experiments in the lab, but yeah, they
there's this entomologist named Christopher Tipping at Delaware Valley College
and Doylestown, Pennsylvania at least at the time, and and

(54:48):
he'd done a bunch of cockroach decapitation to study. He
did it very carefully, I'm sure he did. And then
they got some dental wax to seal up the wound
after they cut the head off off and this prevented
them from losing all their fluids. Yeah, and they said
that the bodies without the head lasted for several weeks

(55:09):
in a jar. Wow weeks. Yeah, these things live for
weeks without their head. So imagine this like performing this
experiment on human being. You cut its head off, you
see it with dental wax, and then you put it
in a giant jar. Now, the body doesn't necessarily even

(55:29):
the cockroach body doesn't necessarily do a whole lot without
the head. Uh, But insects don't necessarily control all of
their body movements with the brain alone. They were still
able to do some things because they have these clumps
of ganglia throughout the body tissues which can act sort
of like simple local mini brains. Yeah. That's one of

(55:51):
the reasons why cockroaches and this is something else we
could cover in a cockrotch episode, But why they're such
a great model for building robots off of actually because
their legs and limbs act both centrally from you know,
like a central nervous system. But then each one has
its own independent movement and it's almost like it has

(56:13):
its own little brain. That's not the right way really
to put it. It's not the right metaphor, but uh,
they act independently of the central nervous is. Yeah. One
of the crazy things that was in this Scientific American
article is that apparently roaches need their whole body in
order to remember things. So you can also cut a
roaches head off in the head can continue to live

(56:34):
under lab conditions, but the head without the body won't
remember things that the roach could remember before it got
its body cut off. Oh that's interesting, Okay, some memories
stored there. So there are some animals that might sort
of be able to live without a head for a
little while and that and that's pretty creepy on its own. Now,

(56:57):
what about regrowing ahead as Leonard bed steps. That sounds
like kind of a tall order because right exactly, Uh,
it's it's not exactly a head in the way we
think of. But there is an excellent little animal called
snail fur that I read about. They can regrow its
head in a way, though, like I said, it's not

(57:19):
like a skull with a brain in it. It's it's
this tentacled upper part of the animal. Snail fur are
these tiny stalk like animals that look like living hair
and You can find them growing on hermit crab shells,
and they give the hermit crab this look like it's
a crazed insect, and a clown wig. It's this this

(57:40):
hilarious pink clown wig. And sometimes fish come along and
bite off the heads. They just chop off the end
of the stalk of the snail fur that has its
little tentacles, and then the stalk grows it's tiny tentacled
head back in a couple of days. And it does
this using retained embrion stem cells that detect the head

(58:02):
is missing and then grow to replace the lost tissues,
which is kind of amazing. But then again, it's not
a head like our head. Yeah, but then again, there
are some interesting possibilities about what humans could be able
to regrow. I mean, obviously we know that if you
cut a human's arm off, they don't grow an arm back,

(58:23):
but some animals do. And we also know that we
our genome has the knowledge about how to grow an arm,
how to grow a leg, and how to grow ahead.
Because it's done it before. This has already happened to
you once. The question is why won't it do it again? Well, um,

(58:43):
you look to like salamanders or newts for an answer
to this, right, So they regrow limbs all the time.
The way that they do it is by differentiating their
cells underneath the wound, by basically making the cells go
back to like an embryonic state, like cancer cells. Right. Uh, So,
you know, maybe there's some plausibility there with the whole

(59:03):
cancerous aspect of Leonard Bets. But you know, as they grow,
they recognize whether they have a normal or abnormal neighbor
around them, and that's how those sentiment or a new
cells regrow into the right kinds of things. Right, That's
how they know how to grow into a hand or
a finger or whatever you need. And they're mainly guided

(59:24):
by fibroblast cells. But then of course, there there's the
question of if an organism could regrow its head, would
that still be you? I mean, if you could get
your head cut off and then grow a new one back,
would that really be you growing a head back? Or
would that just mean you were dead and then a

(59:44):
different person that's basically a clone of your body grows
a new head. Yeah, I mean, I think the sci
fi implication of the Leonard Bets episode is that his
consciousness is like stored in every cell of his body,
and so he can lose his head and then re
grow it and remember everything because like every cell contains
is I don't know, overall memory. Well that's obviously ridiculous. Yeah, yeah,

(01:00:09):
that much more than that sounds made up than being
made of cancer and growing a head back. Uh, this
whole concept of Leonard Bets being made of cancer. I mean,
there's a reason they invoked this in that, like we said,
there is a sort of similarity or association between the
kinds of stem cells that differentiate into body cells and

(01:00:32):
then become a new arm or become ahead or something
when you're when your cells are dividing and you're growing
and cancer cells because cancer cells are cells that that
grow rapidly. They have uncontrolled cell division. And the other
issue with them is that they don't differentiate into the
body tissues that we would normally use. And normally a

(01:00:54):
cell divides and it's a type of cell that is
dedicated to making a certain kind to body tissue. It's
the you know, a muscle cell or a liver cells
what its role is, right, Yeah, the cancer cells are
more they're just kind of glop they're saying, no, I
don't want to be a brain cell. I want to
be just some cancer, right. And in fact, for cancer

(01:01:15):
cells to continue to grow to like tumor, suppressing genes
usually have to be damaged as well the genetics that
we have that keep those cells from growing into tumors.
So you're looking at either genetic damage, like a mutation
like where I guess assuming Leonard bets hash or something
that's epigenetic, right, something that's external that changes the expression

(01:01:37):
of those genes. But Leonard Betts, Yeah, I don't know
if that exactly works out. Yeah, I mean, part of
the problem is that Leonard bets body cells couldn't really
be cancer cells because he has a body. I mean,
if his body were may just be a pile of
it would just be cancer. I mean, part of the
whole thing, like we're saying about cancer cells is that

(01:02:00):
they don't make useful normal cells. And so if he's
got muscle cells to move around and brain cells to
think with, and cells for digesting food and all the
other cells that make a body, then that seems almost
by definition not cancer. Well. So okay, So in Cavello's book,
she has a hypothesis for this. She says that she
thinks that the pathologist that looks at Leonard Betts cells

(01:02:22):
and says, oh, they're all made a cancer. That the
reason why is because you can mistake some kind of
cells basically for kids, like if you just look closely
at the cells instead of outwardly at the at the
macroscopic effects exactly. Yeah, and that like the distinctions would
be if they're crowded together because of their rapid division,
and then also if they have a small skirt of

(01:02:46):
cytoplasm around them. So you know, she posits that maybe
this person, the pathologist just saw that and went, but
it's cancer. Okay. So we've pretty much, I think debunked
the idea that Leonard Betts is going to be a
functional mutant, right right, unless he's a cockroach in disguise,
ye I I just even then, I don't know that
it adds up necessarily, but we this is a good

(01:03:09):
opportunity for us to move from Leonard Betts, who was
the most watched episode of the X Files, to probably
the most famous other than the flukeman Uh mutant of
the X Files. And this is of course Eugene Victor
Tombs from the episodes Squeeze and Tombs another mutant. Yeah,
so Eugene Victor Tombs is played by Doug Hutchinson. You

(01:03:31):
you might remember this guy from a Lost or from
the Green Mile. He's he's a uh ubiquitous creep in Hollywood.
He always shows up playing a creepy looking guy. And
he shows up in the third episode of The X File,
so he's very early on and he sort of establishes
the monster of the Week model. I would say he
plays a serial killer with creepy, glowing yellow eyes who

(01:03:52):
has this recurring pattern where he hibernates in a cocoon
made of newspapers and bile for thirty years and then
wakes up. He kills five people and eats through livers.
Then he goes back to hybrid. So that's back to
the old that that livers is and good that some
of those parasites love the liver. The fictional X Files
pars I saw a story saying that they came up

(01:04:14):
with the idea for him to eat livers after Chris
Carter rates some fuag raw. That's true. It might not
be true, but that that's the story at least, So anyway,
he stalks his victims using a pretty amazing power, and
that power is to squeeze himself into and through tiny openings,

(01:04:34):
for example, a six by twelve inch chimney, a six
by eighteen inch ventilation shaft in an office building, and
at one point he even seems to be trying to
come up through a toilet sewer pipe, but if I
recall correctly, he is thwarted by a childlock on the
toilet lid, which is got to be the most interesting

(01:04:55):
way a serial killer was ever prevented from doing his duty.
So how how realistic is this could even if you
were a mutant, uh, you know, which is basically what
they just say in the episode. They're like, oh, it's
I think this guy's a mutant who has been living
for hundreds of years or whatever, right, and of course

(01:05:17):
he's right. Well, you know. Cavelos in her book points
to this famous circus contortionist with the Jim Rose Circus
side show act, known as the Armenian rubber Man. And
I found a photo online of this guy from a
show he did in the nineteen nineties where he's playing
an electric guitar with his legs behind his head. So

(01:05:38):
he's very, very flexible and can fit through tiny openings
and stuff. This guy, according to Cavelos, could fit his
whole body through the frame of a tennis racket, and
not through those huge tennis rackets we used today, but
those like tiny old tennis rackets you see people using
in old movies, which that's this oval about eight inches

(01:06:00):
by eleven inches, so that's tiny. So for Toombs is
early stunts with the six by twelve inch chimney and
the six by teen inch ventilation shaft. This might be
a case where no superhuman mutation is required, just simply
pushing the limits of human contortionist mobility. Somebody might be
able to do that, right, Yeah, yeah, well somebody who's

(01:06:24):
a contortionist, somebody who's either practiced this or has some
kind of physiological abnormality that allows them to squeeze their bodies.
But but is there any sort of inherited condition that
can make you any more squeezeable than even the average
contortions born born Eugene Victor Tombs leave out the eating

(01:06:45):
livers part and the sewer pipe, which I'm gonna get
back to, so maybe sort of Cavello's points to a
condition known as Ailer's dan Los syndrome. And I went
and look this up, and there are actually many different
types of Ailer's dan Los syndrome. What they have in
common is that they affect the body's connective tissue, like
the collagen that your body generates to form ligaments and

(01:07:08):
connecting tissues in between bones and muscles and things like that.
And all the different types of this disorder affect the
joints and the skin, and they're associated with what's known
as hypermobility, which is unusually mobile joints, both large joints
and small ones, so like your knees and your fingers.

(01:07:28):
And one particular subtype of Ailor's DANLST is known as
the hypermobility type, affecting up to one in every ten
thousand or fifteen thousand people. Really, yeah, and the hypermobility
subtype of the disease and is especially intense in causing
this hypermobility condition. Where the hypermobile joints um they're not

(01:07:49):
really a superpower, but they are. They have a much
wider range of flexibility and movement than normal people's joints do,
but they're also prone to freak went dislocation and partial dislocation,
which can be very painful and cause difficulty with many
activities in life. So this is not a condition you want.
So it's possible that somebody with this condition could contort

(01:08:14):
themselves in such a way to make it through these
very tiny openings. But let's establish this. There's two episodes
of the Eugene Tunes. The first is Squeeze and the
things that you described there, that somebody might be able
to make it through those things, like the ventilation shaft
thing isn't all that big, but that they ca all
that small that they find him in like in the

(01:08:35):
parking garage in that episode, But in the following episode
he doesn't totally bonker stuff like squeeze his face through
like prison bars and stuff and coming up through the toilet. Yeah,
you know, I mean that that's just I find that
unlikely person would be able to write, yes exactly. I

(01:08:57):
mean I'll get to that in a second. Now, there
are some animals that have really really amazing uh fit thruitiveness.
Let's call it this trade, the ability to squeeze through
amazingly small openings, and one of them would be the octopus.
So I found this video it's a Bermuda Institute of
Ocean Services student Raymond Decal and his advisor James B.

(01:09:21):
Wood didn't experiment in November two thousand six, and it's
on tape. You can watch it on YouTube where they
got this octopus to speak. The species was an octopus macropus,
or the white spotted octopus. And they put this octopus
in an enclosed, clear plastic box underwater, and the box
had a single hole in the side where the octopus

(01:09:42):
could escape, except the hole was only one inch in diameter,
like two and a half centimeters. And this was not
a tiny octopus. This wasn't one of those little little guys.
This species can grow up to fifteen centimeters long in
the body and up to a meter long including the arms.
It's hard to tell a exactly how big the particular
one in the video was because it's very uh okay, yeah,

(01:10:06):
but it looks at least two feet long arms included,
so it's big. And it squeezes out through the hole.
It squeezes out through this inch wide hole that's just tiny.
It puts its whole body through. You can see the
part where it's beak kind of pops through and then
after that, it's it's just going. And there's a whole
other video I found that's sort of less scientific and

(01:10:29):
kind of sadder of people on a boat with an
octopus on the deck and I don't know how it
got there. I assume they caught it somehow. And it's
a very large octopus and it pokes one of its
arms through a through a hole in the side of
the bulwark on the boat and I guess feels water
down there. Oh, I've seen this as well. Yeah, and

(01:10:51):
they're yelling at it. They're like, look, it's escaping, but
it's squeeze. It's amazing watching it squeeze through this tiny,
tiny slip much smaller than the octopus his body. And
James b Would the guy, one of the guys associated
with that first video I mentioned. He explains that this
is not just extreme survival behavior for the octopus. This
is not like the the Octopus equivalent of the James

(01:11:13):
Franco movie where he cuts his own arm off right,
And this is normal behavior for an octopus. In an
email to National Geographic for an article about this, uh
Wood told them that octopuses typically live in layers with
restrictive openings to protect them from predators, and every time
they enter or leave their house, they squeeze through small

(01:11:35):
holes or crevices. So this is just part of the
octopus's normal life to squeeze through, you know, a hole
the size of a quarter or something. But do octopus
pie We've had this conversation before. The octopuses do do
Octopuses eat each other's livers and then live for hundreds
of years in piles of newspaper. You know, I don't
even know if an octopus has a liver, Probably and

(01:11:56):
an octopuses eat each other that they cannibalize. Remember we
we look that up for a previous episode. They are
serial killers. We established that before. In fact, sometimes when
an octopus catches another octopus to cannibalize, it takes it
back into its layer and then it places rocks over
the entrance to the layer so it can eat with privacy.
So Eugene Tombs is part man, part octopus. That sounds

(01:12:20):
about right, can squeeze and it and it eats its
own kind. So yeah, but of course, then again the octopus.
It's it's less impressive for the octopus to do this
than for a creature like us, because they don't have
rigid structures like bones, except for maybe the beak um.
So no matter how flexible or hyper mobile, even if
Tombs had some kind of condition that caused hypermobility and

(01:12:45):
the joints, he wouldn't be able to fit up a
sewage pipe because being human, he has a skull and
he has a rib cage, and these structures do not flex. Yeah,
if they do, I mean the purpose of the skull
is to put checked the brain from physical trauma. So
assuming he did have a flexible skull like made out

(01:13:05):
of flexible cartilage like the bones of a shark might
be or something, he would almost definitely suffer brain damage
and organ damage. Coming up through a tiny pot. Does
seem to kind of have a bit of brain damage,
doesn't he? In those episodes, like I remember him being
like a little, uh like unfamiliar. Maybe it's just from

(01:13:25):
him being an hibernation for dozens of years, right, but
he's like very unfamiliar with how things work around him
and how to interact with with other human beings. But
so maybe that's possibilities or it could just be because
he's smushing his brain too hard. Yeah, he sleeps every
thirty years for thirty years, I guess, okay, And there's
one more episode where Scully and another guy both get

(01:13:48):
tattoos that cause hallucinations and talk to them because the
tattoos are contaminated with ergotism. Yeah, And the reason why
we feel like we have to mention these is because
stuff to Biliar mind is just this year talked about
ergotism and about the hallucinatory effects of them. So we're
not gonna spend a ton of time on it here
because there's a whole another episode that you could go

(01:14:08):
listen to it. But that is absolutely a real thing. Yeah,
you should go check out the episode Robert and I
did from last summer called the Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism. Uh,
it is true that ergotism is a real thing, and
it is not pretty, and it's not just Ergotism shows
up several times in the X Files. It's not just
in that Never Again episode with the tattoos. It's also
in some other episodes. As Cavello's points out, well, I

(01:14:30):
mean it's a convenient it's a convenient plot point if
you want to explain some violent, nightmarish hallucinations. Yeah, yeah,
absolutely so. Yeah, if you want to learn more about that.
I don't think that you guys end up getting into
why Jodie Foster would particularly be the voice of ergotism
inside your head, but as she is in this episode. Yeah,

(01:14:51):
so this guy gets a tattoo and it's Jodie Foster's voice,
talking trash about other women stuff and essentially just encouraging
him to do evil. But but but this is yet again
like another example of the writers on X Files doing
some research, and you know, they stretched things a bit
here and there, but there's scientific basis to this, all right,
So that's gonna have to be it for the first

(01:15:13):
part of our exploration of the science of the X Files.
But please come and join us again. Next time. We're
gonna explore some recurring themes to the show, like monsters
based on insects and deep regression hypnosis. Yeah, we'll talk
about alien hybrids and uh, all kind of big themes,
weaponized bees. Oh yeah, it's gonna be fun. So if

(01:15:34):
you've got questions related to this first episode or any
comments or feedback, you can get in touch with us
on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. Those are all blow the mind
and if you want to talk to us on periscope.
You can try to catch us at noon Eastern Standard
time on Friday's when we will be doing periscope most weeks. Yeah,
And as Robert would say, there you have it. If

(01:15:56):
you want to have more of it, though, you could
go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com um
where we're going to have all kinds of things related
to this, and the landing pages for these podcast episodes
will link out to the various content that we've been
talking about throughout the case throughout this episode, such as
theogoutism episode or how to how to live without a head.

(01:16:17):
And if you want to email us Christian, how can
they do that? Well, for that direct form of communication, Joe,
you would email us at below the mind at how
stuff works dot com. Well more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.

(01:16:45):
Remember ba ba blah bla blah blah bla fire than
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