X-Files Science Part II: Bugs, Hybrids and Hypnosis

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to the Mind. My
name is Joe mccornet and I'm Christian Sager. Hey. Robert
lamb Our host of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, isn't
with us this week. This is our first solo flight.

(00:24):
But if you listen to the episode that we released
earlier this week, you will know that we are doing
a two parter on the science behind the X Files
right right right, And if you didn't catch our last
episode on the science of the X Files that was
part one, you should probably go back and listen to
that one first. It came out earlier this week because
our our first one, we're the we introduced the concept
of the X Files for people who aren't fans of

(00:46):
the show, who haven't seen it themselves, so you can
sort of follow along. In fact, we just got done
being on periscope and somebody asked us who they wanted
to know. I've never seen the show before? Can I
still listen to these episodes? And the answer is absolutely yeah.
We really hope they will be interesting anyway, but especially
so if you're a fan of the show. Even if
you're not a fan of the show. We hope there
are enough interesting ideas to to keep you on the

(01:08):
hook through this whole discussion. So, uh, if you want
to go back and check out that first episode first,
we recommend that. If not, and you're here and you
just want to listen, feel free to continue because we're
gonna roll on in. We've got We're gonna talk about
bugs and insects and the X Files. We're gonna talk
about how hypnosis, which I know is one of Joe's
favorite topics, and the X Files, and we're gonna talk

(01:30):
about the possibility of alien hybrids. Right. Yeah, So just
to revisit the impetus for doing this episode. We're doing
it because the X Files are coming back, and I
believe it's Sunday, January. They're coming back to television and
we're going to get a new X Files mini series
with Jillian Anderson, with David Duchovny, all the gangs, getting
all that together. Mitch Pleggy, I hope so playing Skinner.

(01:53):
Oh he's there. He's got a big old beard. I
can't wait. Is he bringing his muscles? He's probably been
working out for the last six month. I love Mitch
peleggy Um. And we want to mention also the top
one more thing about how we brought in a bunch
of sources on our research this time. But but our
primary resource over this past couple of episodes has been
a cool book called The Science of the X Files

(02:15):
by Gene Cavelos, who is an astrophysicist and mathematician now
a science and science fiction writer. So this is a
really fun book. It's been a lot of help to us.
It was written in so we we've had to check
on a bunch of things and and and see what
needs a little bit of updating. But but that's been
a big help, And I think we should get right
into it because I am just jones in to talk

(02:37):
about bugs. Yeah, I mean, insects are clearly a big
theme in the X Files. They show up all over
the place. We've got classics from the first season with
Darkness Falls were the copper Phages, which is one of
my favorite episodes, which is all about cockroaches invading us
well Town and uh. And then of course the general

(02:57):
myth arc of the show has been easy galore. These
feature pretty prominently in the movie too, write So I
really wanted to talk about darkness falls. But unfortunately, I
don't know if there's all that much great to say
about the science behind it. So the basic idea of
the episode is that Mulder Scully and some tag alongs

(03:18):
go into the woods where there have been some people disappearing,
and they get assaulted by photophobic wood mites that kill
people by cocoon ing them in the forest. I believe
Tightus Wellover, the actor Titus Wellover is one of the
one of the tag along's. I don't know who that is. Oh,
he was in like dead Wood. He's in a bunch
of stuff. He was in Transformers Age of Extinction. Oh, well,

(03:39):
I remember that one. Who did he play in that?
He was like the bad FBI agent who wanted to
be mean to Optimus Prime. I don't remember. If you
saw him, you'd know him in a minute. He's a
character actor that's been a ton of stuff. Did he
get killed by the wood mites? Yeah? Okay, so yeah, Well,
we eventually find out that these that these attackers are
some sort of might or something grows in the trees

(04:01):
and they are allergic to light. So you can protect
yourself by surrounding yourself in light. But of course a
lot of the plot of the episode hinges on the
fact that Molder and Scully have a generator that's running out,
and can they keep the lights on long enough to
survive through the night. But these things kill their victims.
I don't know if they kill them by cocoon ing

(04:21):
them or just they kill them and then cocoon them.
But there's there's I think there's a part where live
people are pulled out of a cocoon, so it seems
a cocooning process that kills. I got the impression that like,
once they're cocoon to, their bodies get desiccated somehow by
these by these bugs. So I wanted to find out
if there were any really cool, real science facts about

(04:42):
bugs that kill by cocoon ing. And there are no
real killer wood mites that I know of. But one
interesting thing I did find was not about an insect,
but about a spider that kills insects with cocoons. So
this was This was a July two blog post found
by a science writer named Ed Young, who's a writer
I like. I follow him, and he he talks about

(05:05):
this group of spiders called the ellbrids, which use their
silk line and these are his words, as a murderous
garbage compactor. Okay, alright, so I'm kind of imagining that
does this. Does the silk from their their web kind
of cut through the enemies as its as it constricts,
it crushes, crushes them to death. So most spiders kill

(05:27):
with venom, and those that spin webs they use their
webs for like locomotion dropping down from something, or for
traps to catch insects in. But a scientist named William
Epperhard from the University of Costa Rica noticed that the
librids spend more than an hour wrapping their prey in
more than eighty meters of silk. So they catch an

(05:49):
insect and then they just started wrapping and they just
keep going and wrapping it, Yeah, wrapping it and wrapping it.
One species in particular, called philippin Ella vicina, uses so
much silk at such great compression that it crushes the
insect inside, making quote its legs break and its eyes

(06:10):
buckle inwards. So this sounds like some kind of like
medieval torture device like that that would be used to
get people to talk somehow. Yeah, it's the spider version
of the scavengers daughter. Yeah, exactly Scavenger's daughter was what
I was thinking of. So okay, so darkness falls. Maybe
these are like we never I don't think see what
these insects actually look like other than just like a

(06:30):
haze of green. Yeah, they just kind of show up
as dots and a lot. But but maybe they're tiny,
tiny green spiders that we've very strong cocoons that squeeze
the life out of their victims. I don't think it's
very plausible, but but imagine if I mean, one thing
that's certainly true is that spider webbing is spider silk

(06:51):
is incredibly strong for its size, you know, it's it's
very fine. But for for how fine it is, it
has amazing tentsile drength. And so maybe if you've got
a whole whole bunch of arachnids working in tandem to
cocoon a person like this with super high compression, I
don't know, could that cause injury? Maybe I'd like to

(07:12):
I'd like to imagine it could. Yeah, maybe that's where
they're going to the episode. But they just didn't have
the budget to quite show the incredible eighty meters silk
per victim. Then again, I don't know if if the
cocoon ing in the episode really compresses the victim all
that hard, it seems like that. I think you're right,
they get dried out or something like that. Yeah. But
another episode that has some really really great bug science

(07:35):
in it is War of the copper Phages. Yeah, where
the copper Phages is written by one of our favorite
X Files writers, Darren Morgan. He only wrote like four
or five episodes, but they're like all my favorite episode. Yeah. Yeah.
And in this one, you know, general premises, Molder goes
to a small town in which cockroaches are swarming all
over people and killing them, and he's coming up with

(07:56):
all these various ways that he thinks that the cockroaches
are doing, usually supernatural or or or fantastics in some way.
So one of the things we should mention in the
title is, well, what is the term copper phage means? Well,
a copper phage it means one who feeds on excrement,
because cockroaches eat their own and other species. Yeah, yeah,

(08:16):
it's it's a lovely term. So cockroaches aren't the only
copper phages, but they are. They are a type of
copper fage. I've I've heard that some of our coworkers
here at How Stuff Works are copper phages. That is inappropriate.
I've got a great insult for somebody next next time.
Somebody's got a got a really obnoxious grin that this
will get past the sensors. So you could you tell

(08:37):
them they have a copper phaging grin. That's great? So okay,
So this episode basically, you know, they run around trying
to come up with all these ways, and it's everything
from like the copper phages that cockroaches are aliens to
their tiny little robots, right, and and Scully basically debunks

(08:57):
every single thing he comes up with over the over
the phone. It's great. Yeah, Scully in the episode, molders
exploring this town and doing all chasing down all the leads,
and I think scullies at home eating ice cream quick, right,
she just she talks to Molder on the phone and
debunks all of his theories over the over the lines. Yeah.
So here's what we do know about cockroaches though, in

(09:20):
the possibility of them swarming all over us and killing us, right,
cockroaches breed very quickly. We know that we know anybody
who's encountered a cockroach in their home is going to
be aware of this stuff. They run very fast, especially
for their their size. And we know that they carry
bacteria easily because the bacteria in their feces, which let's
remember they eat, remains viable for a long period of time. Uh.

(09:44):
And yes, some people like myself are allergic to cockroaches. Yeah,
especially if they're exposed more often to them. So now
is that allergy like allergic to their bites, are allergic
to I don't know, some kind of particle dispersed in
the air. Yeah. I believe that it's remnants of their exoskeleton.
So how do I expand this? I had an allergy

(10:06):
test done last year where they basically do that thing
where they line up your arm and they shoot little
uh injections of particles into your your skin to find
out what you're what's your allergic little allergens exactly? Skin
wheel responses, Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And they do it
on my well, at least in my case, they did
it on my arm and on my back, and cockroaches

(10:27):
were one of the like forty things. Uh and it
and it welled up. So I don't know, I haven't
been exposed to that many cockroaches. So I don't know
where this particular trait came from, But what what use
are you supposed to make of that information? It's like, well,
don't get in the bathtub full of cockroaches. I think
it's like more along the lines of this is an
allergen that if you if you live in a place

(10:50):
where there are known to be a lot of cockroaches
and there's just no way that you're going to get
rid of them, should move you, should or take medicine
or you know, um, one of the things they pitched
me there with that therapy. I don't know if you've
heard of this, the allergen therapy where they slowly expose
you more and more to the thing that you're allergic to.
Way they like inject you with it with injections with cockroaches. Well,

(11:13):
I mean it's particulate matter. Yeah, yeah, I don't know that.
They have like a bag of cockroaches in the back
and they're just like grinding them up with a mortar
past they put them in there and put a little
in the syringe. Oh man, well, I can only imagine,
given all the things that I was found to be
allergic to, how disgusting that that mixed bag. But anyways, yeah,

(11:36):
so people are allergic to them. But here's the thing.
Cockroaches don't usually swarm, right. We don't find like hundreds
of cockroaches swarming on a live person and just devouring
them like they seems like. They don't usually move towards
you either. You flip the lights on and they almost
a yeah. Usually what it is if you see a
large group of them moving at one time, Usually what

(11:58):
that is is that they've found a suitable home, like
let's say a sewage plant, right, Uh. And the cockroaches,
an individual cockroach can release a pheromone that will alert
other roaches to its location and to say like, hey,
look we've got this whole hotel we can move into now, right. Um.
So there's that. And I also want to mention something

(12:21):
else that we've talked about. Uh. I know you've talked
about on Forward Thinking, one of our other shows here.
It's a show that Joe does with Jonathan Strickland and
Lauren Vogel Bomb about future science. Um. And I talked
about it on a on another one of our shows
called Stuff of Genius, which is that you can actually
control cockroaches by putting backpacks on them, these little tiny

(12:44):
backpacks that have electrodes that connect to their brain. And uh,
there's a there. There actually was a kickstarter uh two
years ago that would allow you to use your phone
once you've hooked up a cockroach in such a way
in order to basically drive the cock roach around right right. Uh.
And this technology was actually developed by a guy named

(13:05):
Dr Isao Shimu Yama at the University of Tokyo. But
the kickstarter was basically coming up with a way to
to make this sort of a do it yourself science
kit for kids, I guess, although I'd be terrified at
the idea of kids just like trying to stick electrical
probes into a cockroach's head. Uh. Anyways, it's totally possible

(13:26):
to do this. And one of the reasons why is
because we're theorizing that cockroach bodies are actually one of
the best ways that we might have to explore space.
So a robot cockroach or a cockroach that you're controlling
with a little iPhone backpack might be an ideal way.

(13:46):
And Molder even in this episode says something like he
thinks the cockroaches have been sent from some alien civilization
to to explore Earth, right right, Um, so we've already
built cockroach esque robots to explore volcanoes. Uh. They dispose
of minds and clean them up, and they also clean
out nuclear power plants. Yeah. I've actually heard about the

(14:09):
idea of using roach like robots to uh to search
in rubble after earthquakes for surviving. That seems like a
good idea as well, right yeah, yeah, So well, the
reason why is because there are multiple legs in the
way that they're you know, nervous system is set up,
they offer both stability and mobility. Uh. And they also

(14:29):
have centralized and decentralized control systems. So the central controls
of their legs, you know, it governs all their legs,
their whole body's movement, but they also have de central
control on each leg, allowing it to act independently. So
I can see now why like malder you know, if
malder knew this, I don't know if he was familiar
with the that doctor's research at the time, but that

(14:52):
he would think, oh, yeah, maybe this is like a
little uh probe for an alien civilization or something like that.
Maybe that's how will probe other civilizations in the future
will send spaceships full of robot cockroaches. That makes a
good point, and that actually ties into something I know
I've said on this show before, and it's an opinion
I've held for a while now that when we encounter

(15:14):
an alien civilization, I don't think we're going to meet them.
I think we're going to meet their technology. Right, whatever
they send, they're much more likely, I mean much more likely,
like I actually know. But my my gut feeling is
that what would be more probable is that they would
send feelers out throughout the galaxy, that there would be

(15:35):
sort of unmanned probes, so weaponized bees I think is
our best transition next, right, Yeah, this has been a
recurring theme in the show. That's a lot of fun. Actually,
it's it's in the movie. It's in some classic myth
Arc episodes like Herren Vulcan, Zero Sum, and Uh. The
bees appear sometimes as vectors for the intentional spread of

(15:58):
a disease like smallpoxox is a big theme in the
X Files. Yeah, but they also sometimes appear as what
appears to be just a direct attack weapons, stinging people
to death. So they you know, they float into town
and sting the enemies of the conspiracy to death like
this mobile cloud assassin, which is a decent idea. They're multifunctional,

(16:18):
and I wanted to look into the possibility of using
bees like this as a weapon in the ways envisioned
in the X file. And this has actually come up.
You reminded me before we came in here. This has
come up on stuff to blow your mind before. When
we were talking about wolfsbane and aconite. I guess I
theorized that you could have a bee pollinate an aconite

(16:39):
flower and and then potentially sting to somebody and spread
the aconite. And we actually had a listener right in
and say that that is absolutely not possible, with a
good explanation of why they did, and we addressed it
in a listener mail episode. But yeah, so, yeah, there
there are many diseases that are spread by insects. That's
fairly obvious. Virus is spread by arthur pods or often

(17:00):
known as arbor viruses, and these they tend to be
spread by blood sucking insects that bite or puncture the
host animals skin like mosquito or fleas or lice or ticks. Yeah, uh,
and not by stinging insects like bees. So I would
say that in principle, it doesn't seem impossible to engineer

(17:22):
bees that deliver a virus via their sting. But I
couldn't find any examples of anything like this in the
real world. And uh, and I couldn't really imagine also
why this would be done, because just let me back
up and get into it a little bit here, Okay,
I'm with you. So spreading smallpox is a good way
to kill lots of people if that's your goal, as

(17:44):
as the cigarette smoking man or some other conspiracy commanding figure,
if you want to cause terror havoc can kill millions,
you could You could use a bioweapon. You could spread
a very deadly germ like small box, the small boxes,
the very ola virus. It's highly contagious and and it
and it kills lots of people. I remember reading a
stat that it kills like one in four people who

(18:06):
get it. So what does Cavelos have to say about
bees and smallpox in her book, Well, she says, you know,
she's thinking about the question, could be be engineered to
inject a virus like smallpox in its sting? And she
speaks to a doctor w K y'all click and y'all
click says, basically, scientists can never rule out anything. It's

(18:28):
kind of a vague answer just through the whole thousands
of years worth of research right out the window. But
I guess that's that's an appropriate point with this topic,
because there's nothing. There's nothing that says it would be
impossible to get a virus into the venom gland be
But it just doesn't seem like it doesn't seem probable. Yeah,

(18:50):
it doesn't seem like the best way to go about
it either. So Cavela speculates the bees and the X
Files are the species APIs smell of Fera scuta lata,
which is the African honey bee, often sometimes known in
the alarmist press as the killer bees. Yeah, and this
was right at the height of the X Files. This
was I think when the hysteria about killer bees man

(19:11):
America was really can you remember this in the at
least the news stories killer bees. Yeah, they're gonna they're
gonna come and they're gonna I believe they were supposed
to come up from the South, right, and they're gonna
kill everybody in Texas first or something. Yeah, I think
the the idea is that they were introduced to South
America from Africa, they became an invasive species when they
got loose and they spread up from the south over

(19:33):
the continent, and that they were they were super dangerous.
I think that was overstated. They can be dangerous in
that situation. Uh, what I've read is that their venom
isn't any more dangerous than that of other bees, but
they are reportedly more aggressive in their swarming and stinging behavior.
So they're just more likely to get really worked up
and keep chasing you in attacking. And that that lines

(19:55):
up with what we see of like the be attacks
in X files pretty much like like I think I remember,
like somebody walks into a room full of them and
they just all immediately attack with this person, right, And
so what happens when a bee stings you, Well, there's
one particular type of bee in the colony that stings you.
It's it's not going to be the male drone or

(20:16):
the queen that's usually stinging you, but the female worker
bee and her stinger is a modified ovipositor. So it's
the same organ that in a queen becomes the the
egg laying organ. But in these in these sterile sisters,
in the in the sterile worker bees, it turns into
these barbed needles that stab you as the bee furiously

(20:37):
pumps in venom. And then usually the worker bee dies
after this within a couple of hours, So it's literally
the tiny death. So yeah, you can you can imagine
why it would seem appealing as a as a sort
of infectious agent delivery system because it's literally injecting you
kind of like a hypodermic needle if somebody wanted to
inject you with smallpox. Yeah, but bees don't get smallpox,

(21:02):
and even if they did, it probably wouldn't infect you
for a sting because it's not delivering. It's not just
designed to do that. It delivers the venom. I believe
this was what the our listener who wrote in about
the aconite. It's just along the same lines of reasoning
that even if it digested it, it's it's not the
like organ isn't even connected to the rest of its

(21:23):
uh system. Yeah, so bees are not a good candidate
for delivering smallpox. But that does not mean you can't
use bees as weapons. In fact, there is a fascinating
history of humans doing this very thing. I checked out
this book called Six Legged Soldiers Using Insects as Weapons
of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, and this book is

(21:46):
really interesting so far. I look forward to reading the
rest of it. Lockwood chronicles many historical claims of insect warfare,
or to give it an academically respectable name, entomological warfare
e W. And generally. Lockwood mentions that there there are
three basic ways you can use insects to attack people
and and cause havoc. One is what we've been talking about,

(22:09):
the transmission of pathogenic microbes. Throwing bodies with plague ridden
fleas over the walls of a city or something like
that would be an example there. Or you can use
them for the destruction of crops and livestock, and that's
a big one and a lot of people don't think
about it. Or you can use them methods of destruction.
You can use them for a way they show up
in in the X files. Also just direct attacks on humans,

(22:31):
you know, sick um bees. And he he notes that
in this last in this last item, just direct attacks
on humans, bees are pretty good soldiers because when you
think about other war animals like dogs and elephants and horses.
They all, as higher mammals, have a self preservation drive
that makes them, in Lockwood's words, quote, prone to desertion

(22:54):
in the midst of combat. Yeah, it's the survival instinct. Yeah,
But a swarm of attacking worker bees does not have
that preservation instinct, and they've evolved in a very different
way from mammals with teeth and claws. Worker bees are sterile.
They don't reproduce, so they don't particularly value their own survival,
but they viciously attack in defense of the one among

(23:17):
them who can reproduce, the queen. So if something bad
happens to the nest, they will self sacrificially fly out
and attack to protect the queen. So this is interesting
because I just got done working on a piece for
How Stuff Works about how you can epo genetically control ants,
and when I was talking to the lead researcher on this,
she was telling me that they're also looking into research

(23:40):
with bees in similar ways. And by using the royal
jelly that's fed to the queen bees, you can sometimes
you know, potentially manipulate the bees into thinking they're protecting
the queen when they're protecting somebody else maybe maybe that's
the science behind this. Wow, So this really you really
could to be army in this way. Theoretically, this is

(24:03):
I don't want to the Well, the researcher I spoke
to hadn't done this, but she was hypothesizing. It's fun
to dream. Okay. So Lockwood speculates that people throughout prehistory
possibly used bees as weapons and and he gives the
example that early human combat might have sometimes involved hurling

(24:25):
bees nests or wasps nests at a group of enemies.
So this is like before we figured out fire, it
was like maybe not fire, but before we had But
I'm just imagining, like, how are we gonna attack them?
Just grab that pile of bees and throw it at him. Well,
he has some interesting suggestions. So he says this would
be an effective way of say, you have a bunch

(24:47):
of enemies, an enemy tribe that's hiding inside a cave
or a hut or some enclosure, and you know it's
risky to run in there at them, but what if
you could drive them out by hurling a bees nest
grenade out. Lockwood notes that there's not much physical evidence
of this, so it remains mostly speculation. Though an interesting
one to think about what what weapons would have been

(25:08):
available to people in prehistory, And so he's thinking through
this and he's like, well, you know, with the technology
available to them at the time, they could have probably
done this by say, harvesting a bee or wasp nest
at night. If they approachiate during the nighttime, the insects
are slowed down by cooler temperatures, or if it's people
who have mastered fire, they can use smoke to calm

(25:32):
the bees, and then they could insert the bees into
a woven basket or sack and then just kind of
like throw it open inside the enemy's cave exactly. Or
you could plug the openings up with mud or grass. Okay, wow,
that probably wouldn't kill the people that you're attacking, but

(25:52):
it would be well maybe unless there are these pekiller
bees that were speaking about earlier, but well maybe, But
a lot of times the point of using bees as
direct attack is not to kill the enemy because election
but yeah, it's sort of it's a terrorizing or terrifying idea.
You know, it depresses the enemy, it causes fear, panic,

(26:14):
and and it causes bad tactical maneuvers. I'll get into
that in just a second. I believe that this is
something that you can do in that video game BioShock. Yes,
I'm pretty sure, right, yeah, you can throw bees at
your enemy and then they all start panicking. So once
historians start making records of ancient warfare into mo logical
warfare definitely appears on the scene, including bees and wasps.

(26:36):
For example, Lockwood says that the Tiv people of Nigeria
developed what he refers to as a bee canon. So
this was bees loaded into a large hollow horn which
could be pointed facing the enemy in battle and then
shake into release swarms in the opposing forces direction. And
according to a book I found called World History of

(26:57):
Bee Keeping and Honey Hunting by Ava Rain, it's also
suggested that if if the enemies were close enough, the
Tiv soldiers would try to pour sweet smelling powder on
their enemies, and the idea was that this would attract
the bees. Okay, Another really interesting ancient use of this
is that Lockwood mentions that in the Mayan sacred text

(27:20):
popel Vu, it tells of a Mayan battle strategy that
involved building a fake warrior dummy with a head made
out of a hollow gourd covered with a head dress,
and when the enemy rushed in and smashed the heads
of these dummies, they would discover not only that they
were not real people, they were traps. The hollow gourd
heads were filled with stinging insects, either wasps or bees,

(27:43):
and then they just angrily swarm out an attack. This
would cause a chaotic retreat, and during the route the
Mayan warriors would run in and fall upon the fleeing
enemy and destroy them. So a cigarette smoking man, a
student of history, this is where he proposed the great
usage of bees for the alien invasion. Well, you know,
the X Files is one of the earliest examples I

(28:05):
can think of of people talking uh tying government conspiracies
into the the end of the Mayan long Calendar, you know,
which they supposedly said it was in two thousand twelve. Yeah. Yeah,
And we've talked about bees before on on the show
Brain Stuff that you and I both write for. There
was an episode that our colleague Lauren Vogelbaum did that

(28:25):
was about colony collapse disorder, and I'd be curious how
you might people to incorporate that into X Files conspiracy mythos.
Uh Yeah, I'm sure I bet it will show up
in the new series. Maybe what do you want to
be let's put money to Well, we'll find out if
it does. We'll find out in two weeks, right, So

(28:46):
a couple more interesting facts about bees in the ancient world.
The ancient Greek military writer a Neus Tacticus wrote in
an influential work in the fourth century b c. Called
How to Survive under Siege, which sounds like a good read.
That's a that's a surviving watching that Stephen Sagal movie. Touche.

(29:09):
Uh No, No, he gives this cool tactics. So he says,
if you're in a city this under siege and the
army outside is digging tunnels under your walls to get
into the city, you should you should meet the tunnels
and chuck some bees and wasps down into the tunnels
with the enemy soldiers. These guys just have bees like
at the ready. Though it seems like like they've just
got like pockets full of bees. Well they did it

(29:31):
first because another thing that Lockwood points out in his
book is that the Romans used bee hives as a
common catapult payload. So they put beehives in a catapult
and then throw it at enemy fortifications, and he says
that they did it so much that it might have
contributed to a documented decline in the number of bee
hives found in the Roman Empire towards the end the

(29:53):
late period in the Empire. Well, you can't say they
weren't creative. But to bring it back to smallpox, if
we're talking about warfare today, just using bees as direct
attack weapons is not going to be especially powerful compared
to lots of other things you could do. A violent,
terrorizing attack you can do with bullets, bombs, poison gas,

(30:13):
and other chemical weapons. The only reason I can imagine
a modern conspiracy would want to use bees as a
direct attack weapon is maybe just for effect, because it's
like a weird and frightening image to hurt enemy morale. Yeah, well,
I mean I think in the X Files, the idea
was that it was something that you just wouldn't even
suspect was a weapon, Right, that's kind of part of it. Uh,

(30:35):
they're all around us man, Yeah exactly. Or that you'd
already been stung and infected with the smallpox virus and
you didn't even know it. Uh, yeah, I don't know. Uh,
it sounds to me, like, based on what you've what
you've said that it would have been far more effective
for them to just use mosquitoes exactly right, Yeah, I
think it would be much more effective if they were
going to try to engineer an insect delivered weapon against

(30:57):
the people of Earth. It would make much more to
use mosquitoes or fleas as a disease vector, or to
introduce a crop destroying pest like you know, locusts or
med flies or something to just ruin all of our
food crops. And so if you're the cigarette smoking man,
that is the more fruitful pun intended avenue of attack. Okay, well,

(31:22):
why don't we take this opportunity to take a break,
and when we come back, we're going to talk about
one of the one of the most disturbing episodes of
The X Files that I've ever seen and I think
happened in the show's history. Okay, we're back. So we

(31:46):
are going to talk about very briefly, the episode of
The X Files called Home. Now, if you haven't seen
this one, it's I would say it's the darkest episode
of The X Files I've ever seen. Oh, it was
so disturbing. I mean, there are parts of it that
are kind of funny in retrospect, but when you're actually
watching it, it is messed up. It is like, it's

(32:09):
like they let the Texas Chainsaw Massacre uncensored onto network television. Well,
one of the things I love about about this episode
is that, yeah, it's definitely influenced by Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
which is too bad Robert doesn't hear with us because
we know that's one of his favorite movies. But also
that you don't actually see any of the violence. It's
all implied, it's all off camera, but it is. It

(32:31):
just it is shot in such a way that it
sticks in your head and your imagination fills in the blanks.
I think Fox actually apologized for this episode, right, Yeah,
I didn't like it was so disturbing that after they
aired it, they were like, are bad, We're never going
to do that again. Well, so, the essential premise of
Home is that I don't even remember where they are

(32:51):
what stayed there, and I guess it doesn't matter. But
there's this uh family that lives off sort of in
the middle of nowhere in this small town, and and
it turns out that they are all the children of
closely related parents who have a high incident of genetic disease. Right,
so they're all kind of like, uh, well, they're all

(33:11):
ancestral relatives, but they're also sort of crazy and it's
unclear like how they're all related in some ways. Right, Yeah,
I think this is playing on the old trope that
if you know, if closely related relatives reproduced together, that
their offspring will will be messed up in one way
or another. Well so, yeah, so Cavelos actually like took

(33:34):
a look at this because Home is one of those
pretty I would say it's like one of those up
there popular best of episodes of the X Files. Whenever
you look at those lists of like top ten, top
twenty episodes, I think a lot of people just enjoy
the perversity of the idea that an episode like this
was aired on Fox in the I I have to
say that I really enjoyed it, you know, recently watching it,

(33:57):
I think it holds up to any of our model
in horror movies, even you know, twenty years later. But
um so Cavelos looks at this and she finds that, yeah,
when you have related couples, each of them carry the
same negative recessive traits, right, which makes the chance that
their child will inherit two copies of those traits even higher. Right. So,

(34:21):
at the time this was in when Cavelos wrote the book,
eleven point seven percent of offspring from first cousin marriages
have a physical defect or had a physical defect, whereas
eight point five percent of unre related couples, people who
you know, were not cousins or brothers, sister u had

(34:42):
these similar physical defects. Okay, so that seems like the
difference isn't actually all that huge, yeah, exactly. But she
goes on twenty percent of children that are born from incest,
so father daughter relationships or brothers sister relationships die in childhood,
and thirty three percent suffered disabilities. So it seems somewhere

(35:04):
along there that there's a there's a discrepancy between the
definition of a physical defect and disability, right, because the
percentages are a little different. Those are probably not the
terms that we would use today to be sensitive about.
I agree, Yeah, that's what's used in the literature of
the time, exactly. And and too she calls out too,
in particular Mechel Gruber and new Lexova syndrome, and they're

(35:27):
both mentioned in the episode. I believe there's a scene
where they find this is gruesome. In the episode, they
find a dead baby I think, right, and Scully is
like testing it and she just finds that it's got
all of these UH diseases, all these genetic diseases inside
and just say something like it's got like every every
every inherited disease you can have or something. Um. So,

(35:49):
both of those mechel Gruber and new Lexova are caused
by recessive genetic traits and this you know, the traits.
Traits that go along with this include small malformed heads
and actually missing parts of the brain or spinal cord.
And there are even some cases where there's a skin
covered sack on the back of the head that has
a malformed portion of the brain in it, along with

(36:11):
deformed limbs. And that kind of lines up with what
we saw of the little the baby monster that they find,
and that's dug up right, the actual UH. I guess
family and home are human looking, right, Well. I wanted
to take a look into this and see how it
lined up with today's numbers. And there's a great article

(36:33):
over on Ion nine that's called why in breeding really
isn't as bad as you think it is. I gotta
love Ionine with those headlines types that's clicking. Yeah, um,
so they said, and this was relatively recently. I want
to say, in the last two or three years, cousins
breeding go from a point one percent chance to a
twenty chance of a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis. So

(36:58):
I think that this is what cystic fibrosis is probably
what Cavellos was referring to back in the nineties as
quote physical defect right, um, and that's very different from
the numbers above. Uh. They also cite in that piece
that there's a guy named Alan Biddles at Australia's Murdock
University and he specifically studies incestual birth defects. He studied

(37:20):
it for thirty years. Can you imagine that that's your
line of study. You go to work every morning and
you're looking at that. He says, he's the expert on this.
He says, there's a two percent risk of birth defects
in the general population, okay, but there's a four percent
chance in first cousin relationships, so you automatically say two

(37:41):
for okay, So there's double the risk of birth defects, right, Well,
or you could look at it the other way, is
what they say in this ion Ion article that there's
only a nineties six percent chance that these children are
born healthy. Right, So maybe it depends on how you
look at It's like a cup half empty, half full
kind of thing, right. Um, So of children born from

(38:02):
first cousin relationships are just fine. But biddles found that
only one point two percent of them suffered from an
increase in infant mortality rates. So that's significantly lower than
what Cavellos was reporting back in the nineties. Huh yeah, um,
And this is a good opportunity for us to bring
up what a chimera is. Be familiar with this from mythology,

(38:26):
the chimera. The chimera, well, I mean the chimera I
believe combines different types of animals into the same animal. Yeah,
it's a good D and D monster. It's a part lion,
park goat, and part dragon. But in the scientific sense,
it's a it's a genetic condition, right, the exactly you've
you've incorporated the genome of multiple different individuals into one body.

(38:48):
It's an organism that has two different sets of DNA
usually originating from the fusion of different zygoats or eggs. Yeah,
that's basically how you defined it. And and it's important
to denote here a chimera in a human chimera is
not to be mistaken for a mosaic. A mosaic is
when an organism contains different populations of cells from a

(39:12):
single zygot or egg. It's also not a hybrid. And
this is important because we're gonna talk a lot about
hybrids later and chimeras will come up again. Hybrids contain
genetically identical cells from two different species. Okay, So the
reason I bring this up is Cavelos talks about the possibility,
well maybe, uh, maybe all of this ancestual relationship in

(39:34):
the family and home led to them being chimeras. So
they have the tissues of multiple genotypes. Uh. And and
so there's this idea that they've got the DNA of
two different people. Uh. And it's possible that a fertilized
twin egg was absorbed by its sibling uh And that
these can then incorporate twins of different sexes. Right, So

(39:54):
you could be a male twin of a female twin.
You could absorb your female twin and Cavelas actually talks
about instances where this has happened and the person grows
up and they find part like reproductive organs and weird
places inside their bodies from a totally different gender than
what they they were born to. H Yeah, so who knows,

(40:17):
maybe that's something that was going on with the home
people in there. They're crazy Texas Chainsaw Masca Ranch. Okay,
now I think it's time for us to take a
quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when we
come back, we will be going into the depths of
the human mind. You know, there's one great resolution you

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We don't spell it differently here that's stamps dot com
enter stuff. Okay, we're back. So Joe, I gotta ask you,

(41:50):
after going over home and the science behind incest and
birth defects, is there any way that I can just
scrub my mind clean of this? Is? Can I forget,
just push this out of my head? Nope? Probably not really.
But if if you're I've seen this many times on
the TV show are you Are you sure? This is
one of my favorite things that happens on the TV show. Okay,

(42:11):
So imagine somebody wakes up in a field and they've
got this field where lay no, the field where you died?
O the fielder I died? Yeah, that was really bad
X files joke. They wake up in center field on
on a baseball stadium. Uh. And they wake up and
they've got some missing time. They've got a problem. Oh no,
some time disappeared from my life and I and I

(42:34):
can't figure out what happened. I have no memory of it.
What is Mulder recommend? Well, I'm gonna go with the
regression hypnosis. That's right, Thank god, I have deeper regression hypnosis.
I'm still only catching up. I'm up to the beginning
of the fifth season and he's already done this four times. Uh,
and that's per Those are four episodes, I want to say.

(42:54):
In jose Chunks from Outer Space, it's at least three
times in that episode he does it. Yeah. And jose Chungs,
which is probably my favorite episode, hose Chungs from Outer Space,
he does it to the same girl at least three times.
And so what what is the idea of regression hypnosis? Well,
as depicted in the episodes, and we're going to distinguish
between what happens on the X Files and what might

(43:16):
happen in real life. On the episodes, you've got a
hypnotist or some kind of therapist who practices hypnotism, who
puts somebody into a hypnotized state, so they'll tell them
to relax and and say some kind of like patterns
of words that put them into an altered state of consciousness,
and then the person gets kind of dreamy and starts

(43:40):
remembering things. Wait a minute, they in the hypnotist says
where are you now? And the person under hypnosis says,
I'm being lifted up above the ground and I'm floating
through walls in a spacecraft and I'm laying there while
the aliens do experiments on me. And this is what
happens in the show pre Beviously, this person had no

(44:01):
memory of an event, and then suddenly, by being hypnotized,
they have access to memories that weren't available to them
consciously before. Yeah. This is um connected to the Satanic
panic that was happening around the eighties as well as
the same kind of thing. Robert and I talked about
it in the episode we did on Satanic Panic. I
believe the book that popularized this was called Michelle Remembers, Yeah,

(44:24):
and it very much the same idea, except for instead
of aliens, it was demon worshippers. Nice. So, in the
early nineteen nineties, when Chris Carter was first developing the
idea of the X files. He got into the work
of the Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mac, And Johnny Mac
was deep into the study of alien abductee experiences at

(44:47):
the time. I think he got into it in the
nineteen eighties. So Mac worked personally with more than two
hundred different people who claimed to have experiences of alien abductions.
He interviewed them and he tried to understand with their
experiences and the effect of abduction experiences on personality, consciousness,
and worldview. And the interesting thing is altruistic, I guess. So. Uh.

(45:11):
Mac was a respected academic and psychiatrist before he embarked
on this alien abduction research. So he wasn't. He wasn't
somebody people thought of as a kuk, at least not
before this. But his work drew a lot of controversy.
He was even investigated by the Harvard medical faculty at
one point, who were afraid that he was causing harm
to his patients by confirming the reality of their delusions.

(45:37):
So so what was his attitude really too? Yeah, yeah
it was. It was he just like a shyster or no,
I don't get that since at all, But he but
he also it's hard to pin down exactly to what
extent he believed in the reality of the alien abductions.
For example, he gave a quote to the BBC where

(45:57):
he it sounds like he's trying to avoid the hurance
of having gone full Molder, so he he says, he says,
I would never say, yes, there are aliens talking to people,
but I would say there's a compelling, powerful phenomenon here
that I can't account for in any other way. That's mysterious.
Yet I can't know what it is, but it seems

(46:18):
to me that it invites deeper, further inquiry. So I mean,
that's a respectable point of view. I guess you're just saying, like, well,
here's an interesting phenomenon. Lots of people claim to have
experienced something I don't really understand, and I don't know.
I've said this before in the Satanic Panic episode and
other episodes where we talk about people having kind of
out of body experiences as such. Uh that it's not

(46:40):
that I don't believe, but I do believe that they believe.
You know, in a lot of situations, it's so real
for them it doesn't matter whether it was real or
not it's it's affecting them regardless. But despite that quote,
I've read in other places, and I've seen videos of
Mac talking like on on TV interviews and IT conferences

(47:00):
where he kind of comes off as committing a little
more to the reality of alien abductions than that quote
would lead you to believe. So it seems like he
he was sort of presenting maybe some different kind of
levels of confidence in the reality of alien abductions at
different times. So back to Chris Carter. Chris Carter, of course,
I don't know if we established he created the X Files. Yeah,

(47:25):
And so Carter claims that in the early nineties, Mac
invited him to sit in on a regression hypnosis session
with somebody who claimed to have had an alien abduction experience,
and Carter found this experience very disturbing. It really stuck
with him what he saw, and I'm sure inspired a
lot of these things and the X Files where we
see people undergo regression hypnosis. But but what was regression

(47:49):
hypnosis really as practiced by Mac and the people who
endorsed it. Well, Mac wrote a book. It was called
Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, and in max own words,
it quote describes a clinical map of the abduction territory.
And I read through some parts of the book to
see what mac had to say about the experiences, and

(48:10):
he sort of describes typical features of his interviews with
adductees or experiencers as he likes to call them. And
while I think he maintained that the majority of his
research was based on sort of standard face to face conversation,
just talking to people, interviews, conscious memories, he did employ
the use of regression hypnosis to get new details. He

(48:32):
liked to call it instead of hypnosis, he called them
relaxation exercises. So he describes that this was like where
he'd he'd go through a series of patterns where he
encouraged the subject to focus on breathing and relax all
the parts of the body and visualize a safe space,
and then have the subject mentally returned to that safe
space periodically. Sounds like yoga. That sounds like shivasana, what

(48:56):
I do after I cool down after a yoga session.
You know, I've noticed before some some mimilarities between what
people describe from the experience of hypnosis and what people
describe experiences of yoga or meditation, And so there seemed
to be some similarities there, and maybe in introducing very
mildly altered states of consciousness just by intentional relaxation of

(49:18):
the body and the mind. Yeah, and so anyway back
to mac during the session, once he got people into
these relaxation exercises, he would attempt to help the patient regress,
to go back into memories that have been repressed by
the conscious mind and recover new details, like what what
are we recovering here? Because I keep thinking about this.

(49:41):
Are you familiar with the comedian Kyle Kanane. No, well,
I've heard the name. He's one of my favorite comedians
that he is. His latest album, he has this bit
where he talks about repressed memories and using hypnosis to
bring them back, and he jokes because he's like, I
wish I could repress memories. He says something on the
lines of, oh you can repress memories. Tell me how, wizard?
So I want to I want to know what are they?

(50:03):
What are they bringing back up? Other than well, I mean,
the idea of repressed memories goes way back in in psychology.
I mean, Freud talked about repression of of memories. You
know that you would you would hide memories of traumatic
childhood experiences that really influenced who you are. But I
think you didn't have to be like a strict Freudy
and to believe in repressed memories. I'm not sure how

(50:25):
much science there is behind the idea of a repressed
memory now. I think that's highly debated. But anyway, what
Max said he would do is that he claimed the
value of regression and hypnosis is not necessarily to get
people to recall like whole experiences that they never otherwise remembered,
but to sort of flesh out the details have already

(50:46):
established memories, and also for therapeutic purpose. We've seen this
on plenty of television shows before, Like you were in
a bank when it was robbed, but you couldn't at
the time, you didn't necessarily pay attention to all the
details of what certain people were wearing. But if we
use hypnosis, we can make you go back to the
president of that event exactly. And that's what he advocates.

(51:08):
So in one sense, I would say the kinds of
regression hypnosis we see on the X files are probably
not even an accurate portrayal of what the advocates of
regression hypnosis would say they do, so it's it's not
even accurately showing what the people who think it works
would say. Even though Chris Carter participated in this, well,
I don't know what participated. You watch she sat there,

(51:30):
But but you bring up a good point. Is there
any reason to think it's a good way to get
accurate information about what happened in the past, and if
only details, I couldn't find any reason to think that
this is a good way. Mac gave some defenses, so
I'm gonna I'm gonna give some of his defenses of
of regression hypnosis. In Appendix A of the book I

(51:51):
mentioned earlier, the one about his clinical work with the
people who claim to have had abduction experiences, he defends
the quality of the memories brought back through regression hypnosis
by saying they met three criteria. Number one, he said
that the memories that that were brought out through regression
were usually against self interest, meaning that they were like

(52:12):
more embarrassing or more damaging to self regard of the patient.
Thus this he's sort of arguing for this, I think
that they wouldn't have a motivation to fabricate these memories.
It's kind of like flattering to the person, kind of
like when you've got that roommate in college who drank
too much of the night before and did something really bad, right,

(52:33):
and then they say, oh, I blacked out. I don't
remember any of that. Oh, I guess it could be
kind of like that, But it would be like saying
if you didn't believe what he was saying until he
started saying things that were really not flattering to his
self in right, and then you can be like, oh,
this probably did happen to ted, because you know, he's

(52:53):
admitting that he pooped in his pants. Okay, yeah. Yeah.
The second criterion is that he said that the memory
is recovered through aggression are more consistent with independent reports
of other abductees. So once he do a regression on people,
they started giving details that sounded a lot more like
what all of the other people reported in their abduction stories.

(53:15):
This was similar with the satanic panic stuff as well. Yeah. Yeah.
And then the third criterion he gives is that memories
brought up through regression tend to cause a much stronger
emotional affect and bodily reaction in the subject. People really
see seemed to be having strong feelings about what was
going on in the memories recovered through their regressions, and

(53:36):
so I think that bait. Even despite these defenses, I
would have a persistent concern about the idea that hypnosis
or any similar like relaxation exercise is going to recover
accurate information that was not previously available to you if
you didn't already remember it. Why is this exercise bringing

(53:57):
these memories back? And why don't we have or physical
evidence that these memories are better than the memories you
consciously remembered at first? Look? Okay, but what would you
say to using regression hypnosis to recollecting one of your
past lives? This comes up in an episode of The
X Files. I mean, this is all this episode I

(54:18):
was joking about them. Yeah, exactly the field where I
died where I But I think Mulder remembers being what
somebody's in a Civil war soldier or something like that,
and some other women who who they're currently like pursuing
that's part of like a terrorist seller or something like that.
Is was his wife. I believe Sully was like his general. Well, yeah,
this is where some of these accounts get way fishier

(54:41):
than the ones I've already talked about For example, there
is a writer named Alexa Clay and she grew up
with John Mack. He was her mother's partner. And she
had an interesting article on mac that I read, and
I want to read a quote from her article, she says,
I remember one summer evening at a beach house on
Martha's vineyard, when I was about eleven. We all watched

(55:03):
as John regressed my aunt back into a past life.
She lay on the couch recalling an incident in which
she was a forest ranger who witnessed the death of
a few people during some kind of avalanche. My aunt
later told me she was fully conscious of the experience,
but couldn't control what she was saying. It was like
she was watching herself tell a story. John later tried

(55:25):
to hypnotize my brother so that he wouldn't be afraid
of spiders. It seems like two very different things. They're
recollecting your past life as a ranger and not being
afraid of spiders. Yeah, and so I gotta say, um,
you know again. Just we end up working on a
lot of different things here at how stuff works on
brain stuff Ben bowl in our colleague, from stuff they

(55:46):
don't want you to know did an episode on hypnosis
and how it works and whether it works, and and
you know there is some legitimacy to hypnosis. I don't wanna. Um, yeah,
I think say that that you know it doesn't work
at all. You should go watch that episode. It's a nice,
like little three four minute summary of of how it works.
And we've even had some hypnosis experts come on and

(56:08):
say that they're really happy that, you know, we broke
down the actual science of it. But in this case,
I think this is a little bit beyond what it's
capable of. Yeah, I think this is a common thing.
I mean, based on my understanding, I think hypnosis is
capable kind of like meditation or yoga or something of
introducing a mildly altered state of consciousness where your your

(56:29):
brain is just kind of working a little bit different
than it normally normally would. But I don't really see
much evidence that it really has these these dramatically powerful
effects of people like this would claim. Um, So you
think like maybe Mac was kind of a figure I'm
thinking of Philip Symore Hoffman and the Master. No, No,

(56:50):
I don't get that feeling, because in his writing end
to Speech, Max seemed to me like he was an
extremely smart, thoughtful, even a wise person. But I read
his reasoning for accepting a lot of the subduction testimony
and it just doesn't sound very convincing to me. It
seems like he was a smart, thoughtful, good natured guy

(57:12):
who wanted to believe. Do you think though? And you
just hit on the prime X Files slogan he wants
to believe. I want to believe. Do you think though?
That he would have believed in alien human hybrids if
one of his patients pulled that memory up. Well, a
lot of patients did talk about things like that, did

(57:34):
they really? Yeah, this is a common feature of alien
abduction reports, especially at the time. I don't I don't know.
It seems like alien abduction reports have sort of dropped
off in in recent years as far as I can tell.
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but maybe it's just that
there's not as much coverage on them because the media
landscapes changed too. Yeah, it could be. But at the

(57:54):
time Mac talks about working with a lot of people
who would say that the alien would say, take uh,
sperm samples from them, or take eggs from them, or
implant them with with eggs or in some way have
some kind of reproductive interaction with the person. Well, that
is a perfect segue for us to talk about our

(58:15):
last and I think probably one of the things that
The X Files is known most for topic wise, which
is the alien hybrid conspiracy, right, mixing aliens and human
beings together in some way or another. Yes, this is
one of the biggest overarching plot points in the whole series,
is that, oh man, it gets so convoluted by the end,

(58:37):
who knows what's actually going on? But without spoiling too
much for the people who haven't actually seen the series yet,
basically there's there's a running theme of aliens wanting to
hybridize or create some kind of some kind of blended
offspring with Homo sapiens on planet Earth, or to maybe
go somewhere else, or to maybe take over the Earth,

(58:58):
or who knows what. So alien human hybrids. Is there
any reason to to track with the science on this
that's offered by the show? Is there anything to it? So?
Here's the thing about the show is that, I mean
it was on for nine seasons, right, and over the course,
they had so many different rationale and scientific explanations for

(59:19):
what was going on with the hybridization that it was
all over the place. I completely lost track of it. Yeah,
if you try to add it all up, it doesn't
really make sense in terms even of the fictional construct
of the show. Right, But um, Cavelos takes all these
ways and she breaks them down one by one, and
there is some viability to some of these ideas, although

(59:41):
obviously we don't have alien DNA that we can be
experimenting with, so she's working along the lines of what
we know about genetics in general. Okay, Um, so she
has five ways the show proposes that you can make
a hybrid and alien human hybrid. Let's try to go
through these and not get too bogged down. Sorry, one
quick question before we breathe through these. Uh, this does

(01:00:03):
have to assume, right that the aliens would be DNA based. Yeah, sure, yeah,
you really just there's no way you could hybridize with
an alien species that wasn't DNA based. Yeah, that's absolutely
an assumption that they make here. Alright. So the premise
essentially of the show, the overall premise for these hybrids,
is that grays, which are you know, the generic aliens

(01:00:25):
that we're all used to seeing with the big eyes
in the big gray heads, Right, they're the ones in
the sketch artist interpretation of exactly. Yeah. Uh, those are
in fact hybrids of humans and aliens. Those aren't actually
aliens in and of themselves. Uh. And there it seems
to be that the reason why they're making these hybrids

(01:00:46):
is so that there's a specific immunity to biological threats
that might exist on Earth, to the aliens that are
trying to colonize the planet. Okay, that's as much as
I think makes sense of the of that part um.
So okay, yes, some viruses can attack particular species, right, So,

(01:01:08):
for instance, smallpox, which comes up in the show all
the time, only attacks human beings. Uh. And here's a
direct quote from Kevelus his book. A virus can only
enter a cell if the proteins projecting from the surface
of its envelope find matching receptors on the cell. So
this is important to consider as we go forward with
all of these things. It's a lot like in the
last episode on The X Files when we were talking

(01:01:29):
about the parasites and how parasites are very specific about
what other species that they they're parasitic of. Right there,
they're not like the face huggers that can apparently just
get on any old animal that has a mouth. Yeah, exactly,
And likewise we're going to find that this is the
case with a lot of these biological threats or genetic
manipulations that are being purported on the show. Uh So,

(01:01:51):
I guess the premise here is that these aliens would
are trying not to be susceptible to our diseases because
they're not from here. But again, so why that wouldn't
make sense? Right, if they're not from Earth, why would
they be susceptible to a disease like smallpox which hasn't
evolved to be tailored to their anatomy. Yeah, Earth based
diseases don't typically affect every species on Earth that they're

(01:02:13):
very often aimed at one species, So even even more
so the difference between alien life forms and Earth life forms,
and even hybrids however you know they're made, would probably
be susceptible to the same disease as the human beings
are susceptible to, right, or or that the aliens were
susceptible to so changing the receptors on ourselves, you know,
they would prevent the necessary processes from regular life happening

(01:02:37):
to you know, manipulations on this scale. It messes up
everything is a domino effect. Umvelos also reminds us of
one other thing before we get into these five theories.
She says, it wasn't until the nineteen eighties when genes
were first transferred successfully from one species to another. So
that might be one of the reasons why this was

(01:02:57):
such a kind of popular idea on the show at
the time, right that it was just being pioneered and
it was sort of like it was like science fiction
coming to life. Well, there were a lot of gene
thrillers in the nineties. It was an era of Jurassic
Jurassic Park in the nineties was you know, the as
far as I know, the first real cloning based science
fiction movie that was a big success. There might have

(01:03:20):
been one before that, I can't remember, but that was
like the thing that brought that to the public's attention,
and that's the era of the X Files. Yeah, absolutely,
all right, So our first way to create a hybrid
what what would you imagine easiest way to create a
hybrid Make two different animals of different species have sex
and see if they get pregnant. You did it. Yeah, breeding,

(01:03:40):
it's that simple, right, But it's not that simple because, uh,
the whole idea of the words species means that it's
reproductively isolated. So I think there are a lot of
reasons that our concept of a species is sometimes kind
of fuzzy. But yeah, that that's the most common definition
is these animals won't naturally in the wild and probably

(01:04:03):
can't breed with each other and produce viable offspring, especially
not producing offspring that can breed through to the next generation. Exactly. Yeah,
Because and I was about to get to that, is
that almost all of the species, or rather the offspring
that are created from any mixed species interactions, are sterile,
so it doesn't lead to a lot. So a mule,

(01:04:24):
for is like our best example, right, when a male
donkey and a female horse get together, they have a mule,
but those mules are usually sterile. We've done combinations of
horses and zebras, We've had lions and tigers, camels and llamas. Yes,
those are all possible, but their offspring are almost always sterile.
And humans can't produce offspring with any other species, even chimpanzees.

(01:04:48):
Now chimpanzee shares ninety nine point five percent of our DNA,
And there has been some speculation there is something out
there called the human z. This is a popular urban legend. Yeah,
that is, uh, some somewhere along the line, somebody figured
it out. There's both. There's there's speculation that it was
done in Russia and in China, but that human zes

(01:05:10):
were created in labs somewhere the combination of those two species.
This hasn't never been proven. There's reports, but there's no evidence. Um.
So that's number one breading. Okay, number two. Do you
remember that episode Red Museum on X Files? And then
there's also the episodes seven thirty one. Basically the idea
here is that a doctor injects children with alien substances

(01:05:35):
and says, oh that these are just vitamins, just giving
you vitamins, but they're really trying to make them into
hybrids where they flint stone vitamins. Yeah, they tasted their
chewy and sugary. So it's a serum in these episodes,
and I guess the fictional science and the show says, well,
the serum contains antibodies that are mixed with quote synthetic corticosteroids.

(01:05:58):
Corticosteroids how you say, well, I don't know. I mean,
I have no idea of steroids and co cortico. Yeah, sure,
let's go with it costco steroids. Anyways, so the show says,
uh that these children are rather not the show, But
Cavela says, this wouldn't make the children hybrids, but just
injecting them, right, Yeah, all you're doing is you're mixing

(01:06:22):
alien and human molecules together, right in a in a
similar system. So theoretically, the different antibodies that are in
this serum, they may help fight off a range of diseases,
but they're not. Again, they're probably not going to fight
off any range of diseases that are on Earth because
they're gonna be the alien antibodies are going to be
adapted for diseases from wherever they're from. Yeah, okay. The

(01:06:44):
other thing is that our human bodies would probably react
to alien antibodies as if they were invaders, right, so
our immune system would try to destroy them. So this
doesn't go a long way towards helping the hybrid possibilities either. No,
I mean, our our immune system often reject sent attacks
donated human tissue. If somebody wants to give you an
organ that it very likely could be a problem that

(01:07:06):
your immune system will not like that organ being in there, right,
so aliens are probably out. Although Cavelis has she she
actually brings back the cote coasteroids that we mentioned earlier.
She says that maybe that's what helped. Maybe maybe one
of these X files writers did some research and thought
this would work out. So Cota coasteroids are hormones, and
they helped to control our metabolism, mineral balance in our

(01:07:29):
inflammatory processes. Okay, they're injected specifically to decrease our immune responses.
So there's some idea here that maybe you would inject
those those would lower the immune responses, which would then
allow the alien antibodies to somehow coexist without being attacked
by our immune system to do magic, and yeah, the

(01:07:51):
magic would happen. They also, the cota steroids also elevate
our moods, they stimulate our appetites. They also have pretty
bad long term effects, most muscle wasting, mood swings, slow healing,
weakened bones, and the formation of fatty deposits on the
surface of our skin. So you know, it doesn't sound
like an ideal way to go about making a hybrid. No,

(01:08:13):
not at all. So you said, are there a couple more? Ways?
There are three more, all right, the Erlan Meyer Flask.
Do you remember that episode in the first classic Mythos
episodes of The X Files. It was back when the
myth Arc episodes were exciting. As the series goes on,
the Monster of the Week episodes, sometimes they're still good,
but the myth Arc episodes become more and more disappointing. Yeah,

(01:08:35):
I mean, I tend to agree with you. It's funny
because I go back now and almost all my favorite
episodes or Monster of the Week stuff. But anyways, in
the Earlan Meyer Flask, the premise there for the hybridization
was that they were cloning alien bacteria that also contained
an alien virus, and they were taking the genes from

(01:08:56):
that virus and inserting them into terminally ill human beings.
And this is where we get these the original hybrids.
You remember on the show that we're like, they looked
like people, but they had green blood and in human
street wouldn't have the poison blood. Like if they started bleeding,
people around them would get burning on their eyes and
start choking. Yeah. Yeah, and they were like strong and

(01:09:16):
they could like I think one guy like could breathe
underwater or something like that. So there are all these
weird abilities. So all right, Cavellas helps us break this
down again again. And alien virus probably wouldn't be made
of the same DNA building blocks as those of us
in human beings, right, so they would be incompatible genetic

(01:09:37):
let's call them languages. But they mentioned that this alien
DNA contains this is in the episode, they contained two
additional nucleotides or basses. And there actually are possible other
nucleotides that exist on Earth than the ones that are
in human DNA. Right, but they're not used in the
DNA of any organism that we know of. But if

(01:09:59):
you use these in some way, it would be sort
of like taking the alphabet. Let's stick with this alphabet
analogy and giving it two more letters, right, so you
add uh just to make believe or brand new letters
to the alphabet. One day, all of a sudden, you
have all these new possible combinations, right, all these combinations
or even ways in which you could shorten other things

(01:10:20):
because of these added extra elements to the language. Well,
they hypothesized. Cavella's hypothesizes that one of these might be
used as an infectious virus. Right, so one of these
different combinations of the alphabet of DNA is used to
create an infectious virus that leads to this hybridization. Just

(01:10:43):
getting complicated, is it's complicated? Right? Uh so, all right,
there's still compatibility problem. Like no matter how you do it,
it's like if you're trying to play like an Xbox
game on a PlayStation, right, it's at first we put
the PlayStation game in the case of a Nintendo we game,
or if you blow on it, it still doesn't work. Um.

(01:11:03):
So the compatibility problem basically comes down to the protein
envelopes that contain DNA, right, And in this case it
would contain alien DNA. It probably wouldn't enter our cells,
but they do come up with cavelus. Again, she's always
like going the extra mile, trying to help the show
out to get there. She says, what if the alien

(01:11:24):
DNA was placed into the protein envelope of an earth
virus like smallpox? So maybe that's what this whole smallpox
thing is about. It's not they're using the protein envelope
of it to deliver alien DNA. That's her hypothesis. It
could potentially get the virus into our human cells. But again,
the DNA would have to be like our own human

(01:11:45):
DNA for it to do anything more than just physically
get there. Okay, okay, but what about all this green
toxic blood? I mean, why why would the blood turn green?
And is that even possible through hybridization? Well, believe it
or not, not through hybridization, but yeah, it is possible
to use transgenics in order to give species green blood

(01:12:06):
that don't have them. That has been done. Um so
in this particular instance, it's done. It's been done on fish.
There's a green fluorescent protein uh in jellyfish. And if
you take that gene and you insert it into fish,
you know, I make I make it sound like it's
that easy, you just insert it. Obviously there's a lot
more to it than that. But yeah, they their blood

(01:12:28):
turns green. So this is these are like glow stick fish. Yeah,
I mean I think you break them in half and
then you dance with them in a brave I wouldn't
break it in but I think what the reasoning was
was that they were doing this to these fish that
so that they could like under a microscope, see things
better than they could with its regular hue. And I'm
not quite sure how that works, but yeah, so there

(01:12:50):
was like an actual reason. It wasn't just like, hey,
can we make this green? You know, like they were
they were they were seeing like what kind of benefits
they could get out of it. This also goes along
with the breathing under water thing. Okay, so there's this
episode It might be in the Erlan Meyer flask where
like one of these hybrid guys like because there's horrible
heart car chase and he crashes his car off of
like a pier and lands in the water and they

(01:13:12):
can't find his body. And then it turns out like
he's been for two days, he's just been sitting at
the bottom of this uh bay uh. And they explain, well,
it's because he's an alien hybrid. He can breathe underwater.
Why didn't he swim somewhere? Well, I think I think
he was injured or something like that. I don't remember
the details there. But so, all right, we can't change

(01:13:33):
our respiratory system with transgenics, right, But Calas hypothesizes another
way that this could be explained. All right, so crocodiles,
you know that how crocodiles can survive for long periods
of time underwater. Well, the way that they do that
is the ions in them bind to hemoglobin in a
different way than they do in human beings, and this

(01:13:54):
releases oxygen even when they're underwater and they're not bringing
in oxygen. Cavelos hypothesizes that if you inserted a crocodile
gene into humans, we may be able to do the
same thing. So it wouldn't change our respiratory process. It
would just change the way that hemoglobin and ions in
our body react together. It wouldn't trade lungs for gills exactly. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:14:18):
So that's number three, this kind of transgenics, I guess,
is how we could encapsulate that again. You know, I
don't think that you could like hybridize an alien and
a human together, but you might be able to make
your blood green. Things that aren't exactly like superpowers. The
fourth way, you remember back in home we were talking

(01:14:40):
about chimeras, right, Well, what if we had alien human chimeras?
So remember, a chimera is an organism that has two
different sets of DNA and they usually originate from the
fusion of two different zygotes or eggs, right, So what
if we had an alien egg and human egg and
we fuse those together. They're nice, So maybe then we've

(01:15:02):
got this alien hybrid. Okay, let's see where Kevels goes
with this. She says, uh, well, right now, that we
can make from cells of the space same species or
from different ones chimeric cells. Right, We've done this with
mice before. We've made a mouse that is a chimera
of two different species of mouse, and that was created

(01:15:23):
back in the nineteen sixty one, so this has been
going on for a while now. Chimeras, however, are not
usually like fifty fifty blends of species, right, It's not
like one half of you as mouse and the other
half of you is shark, right, like you're you're you're.
It's a little different from that. So like they've they've
made goat sheep chimeras before, and those look like sheep,

(01:15:46):
but they've got like the same briskly fur of goats. Okay,
so it's not like it's not like I guess we're
imagining like you'd have a blend of perfect features. So yeah,
she says, it's possible you could use the same chimeric
techniques that you use to make these goat sheep or
these these weird mice, uh, to make a human female

(01:16:08):
carry an alien human human hybrid to term. But look
this the science that she throws down in there. This
is why I think the book is really good, but
it doesn't translate well for this medium on a podcast.
It's way too complicated to get into here. I think
we could do a whole episode just on the idea
of chimeric fertilization and like getting a chimeric baby to term. Well,

(01:16:35):
maybe we should. Sometimes it sounds very stuff to blow
your mind, so it's possible. We got one more. This
is the last one, and this is what she calls
the fully integrated hybrid, which is in the TV show.
It's along the lines of like when we see um
like clones of people, right, there's like multiple like there's

(01:16:56):
multiple Joes. There's like twelve different Joes and they all
look exactly like you, but they're all alien human hybrids.
And she hypothesizes that this is because every cell contains
DNA from both of the organisms. Okay, so that's kind
of hard to imagine, but yeah, yeah, I agree, it
seems like it would be pretty difficult. The idea that

(01:17:18):
she's pitching here is that you would create a single
transgenic or hybrid cell, right, and then from there you
would use that with what we have as like modern
cloning technique. So think of like Dolly the Sheep um.
So we know we can clone an animal from an
embryo cell by taking its nucleus out and transferring DNA

(01:17:39):
into from it into an open right. That's how it's
sort of how Dolly the Sheep worked. Right, There's a
transplantation of a cell's nucleus into an ovum with its
own nucleus removed. So this is her pitch for this
is that we would do something similar. We'd we'd have
an alien hybrid cell and then we would clone a
being based off of that cell. But it's more difficult.

(01:18:03):
Uh So, for instance, like with Dollars sheep, it was
particularly difficult because it was adult cells. They've already differentiated.
There's all different kinds of ways that you can get
DNA into a cell though, and again like this this
could be a whole hour long episode of stuff to
blow your mind. But we can do things like using
high voltage electricity to allow DNA to enter into a cell,

(01:18:27):
or we micro inject these directly into cells with tnc
tiny little needles, or this one sounds like my favorite,
this has been done shooting cells with high velocity microscopic
DNA bullets the gene gun. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So she
pitches like, those are all ways that we could potentially

(01:18:49):
have these alien human hybrids. But let me go back
to the beginning and say on the show, it doesn't
add up, right, they don't. They don't stick to one
of these and follow it all the way through. It's
just kind of a mishmash of all of these things.
Uh so, maybe the aliens themselves and the X Files
really haven't ironed this out yet. There, that would be

(01:19:09):
a wonderful thing that I don't know, have we ever
seen that in science fiction where there's just a completely
disorganized attempt to attack and take over the Earth. It's
just like the aliens really can't get it together. I
don't know, I don't know. Independence day, No, they're so
highly coordinated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I want to see

(01:19:30):
that maybe Plan nine from outer space that seems like
an attempt to take over the Earth that is kind
of thrown together at the last minute. Although I think
you blame that on Edwood more than you could on
the Aliens. Yea, I guess so. So there you have it,
the Science of the X Files. We've got two episodes
and I think we're looking at almost three hours worth
of science of the X Files. Goodness here for you.

(01:19:53):
If you have any questions or comments for us, If
you want to let us know some of your hypotheses
on ways in which science modern science could apply to
X Files episodes. Some of the science we're talking about here,
alien hybridization, the be weaponization, whatever it is, let us know.
Worry everywhere, right, Yeah, you can check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,

(01:20:16):
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(01:20:38):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}X-Files Science Part II: Bugs, Hybrids and Hypnosis