January 12, 2023 • 62 mins
It's a tale that dates back centuries -- a bizarre, spherical ship washes ashore in Japan, containing a single passenger. Visibly female and humanoid, but clothed in strange garments, with unusual hair and skin. Fast forward to the modern day -- experts still aren't sure what exactly happened. What was Utsuro Bune? Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they delve into the mystery.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Folks, We've got a heck of a classic episode for
you today. If you are a long time fellow conspiracy realists,
then you know that we love all things UFOs. We
also love a little bit of hidden history, and today
we're coming to you with a story about UFOs from
ancient Japan Utsuro Brune. Yeah, it's easy to think the
(00:24):
UFO phenomenon is like sort of an American thing, you know,
with the area fifty one and all of that. And
and that's partially because you know, we live in the
United States, so maybe I'm speaking from within that very bubble.
But in fact, there are other places around the world
that have very similar reports of UFO sightings, and today
is about one of those stories that you might not
(00:44):
know about. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Ye, hello,
(01:10):
and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt
Noel is with us in spirit and they call me Ben.
We are joined by our super producer Tristan. Of course
you are you, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Never fear our compatriot will be
returning physically as well as one would presume is spiritually.
(01:31):
In a later episode, Matt, We've got something pretty interesting
for you today. Oh yes, yeah, everybody out there listening.
This is something that I am just learning about. Ben.
I think you had seen this before in whispers on
the internet and in books, but it's it's a fascinating
(01:53):
happening that occurs way back in the eight hundreds, that
maybe an encounter with an another species, another civilization, right,
you've heard of this before. We have often over the
course of the show explored aliens and inexplicable history. We
found numerous examples of just weird, weird stuff, allegations of
(02:18):
lost technology, entire loss civilizations, and of course, at some point,
what's that guy's named George Slucos close the ancient aliens
at some point aliens, extraterrestrials or allegations thereof. We do
want to point out that we and the world at
large has found no universally agreed solid proof of any
(02:40):
sort of alien encounter. Begrudgingly true, but we have seen
some incredibly strange stuff. Nonetheless, and as much as it
may irk humanity to admit this, we may well never
know the full story behind some historical accounts and events.
It's true a lot of times it's written down once
(03:00):
by one person, and we can find that. But that's
all we have to go on. And we do know
that at various times, quote unquote, historical accounts have been anecdotal,
heavily biased, written with some sort of strange agenda in mind,
or entirely made up and passed off as the real thing.
(03:22):
You have to make make the whims of some king
or some you know. Could be a monarchy, it could
be just a government. It could be a single influential person. Hey,
increasingly it could be a corporation. Right, what happens when
they write the textbooks? I know? An episode perhaps for
another day, But we point this out because we want
(03:46):
to thank all of the historians in the audience who
are probably, as we speak, going nuts over figuring out
some detail that other people have overlooked, us interpreted, or
even purposefully uh mischaracterized, or even you armchair historians out
(04:06):
there who are just scouring the web on your own time.
The work you do is important and you know nobody
else is doing it, So thank you, right and history
our understanding of history is nowhere near as clear cut
and uh concrete as some people would have us believe.
(04:26):
And then also, you know, this sort of confusion persists
in the modern day. We're not so different from the
earlier examples of our species. So today we're looking at
one such account of strange historical account. We'll call it
the legend of the Utsuru Bune. And before we dive
in here, we want to be crystal clear with this.
(04:51):
Uh you don't speak Japanese, I am unaware if I do, okay,
and I will also be surprised if I start speaking
to happening. We're saying this because, um, we do want
to be respectful to different cultures. And if there are
any mispronunciations or mischaracterized Americanisms that sweep in in regards
(05:13):
to our accents, then we hope that it's still close
enough to get the gist. Yeah, and let us know
if we do make any mistakes like that, you can
reach us Jonathan dot Strickland at how stuff works dot com.
We have we welcome all feedback. Our complaint department is
open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
So we're diving in, or better yet, we're floating ashore
(05:36):
to Japan and the dawn of the nineteen century. Our
story is called we set it at the top with
suro bune, but you may also see it online somewhere
assuro fun a with an f or uro bun, a
kind of putting them together, and it refers to this
object a ship of sorts that allegedly washed ashore in
(05:59):
eighteen zero three eighteen o three uh in Hitachi Province
on that that's on the eastern coast of Japan, and
it's located near where modern day Tokyo is, not quite
but near there, which will we will explore that part
of the story in a little bit further depth. Accounts
of this tale appear in multiple texts. Three of the
(06:20):
most popular examples are also from the early to mid
nineteen century. So there's one called the Towan show Setsu,
which translates to Tales from the Rabbit Garden, published in
eighteen twenty five. This has the most detailed account or
detailed anecdote, and there are similar stories similar enough that
(06:42):
we we pretty much know their retellings of the same
thing from a work called Diaries and Stories of Castaways
in eighteen thirty five and dust of the Apricot in
eighteen forty four. So what happens, Well, well, immediately right
here we have to point out at the top, as
we've been talking about history and things being written down,
we're twenty two years they're the recording of this is
(07:05):
twenty two years after the alleged event, which is already
a little suspect, but perhaps it was um it was
more of a story told by word of mouth. That
kind of thing wasn't necessarily recorded in any history this happening,
But just keep that in mind as we go through here. Right, So,
(07:26):
according to the legend of utsuro Bune, there was this
young woman, she was attractive. She arrived on a beach
aboard this thing that they referred to as a hollow
ship because they had no words to describe it, this thing. Yeah,
and there were there were local fishermen who who brought
(07:47):
her inland. They wanted to know what the what the
heck is going on here, and they found that she
was unable to communicate with these guys because she spoke
some other language that they were unfamiliar with. And and
the fishermen ended up returning her to this ship, this
hollow ship that they found her in and then they
pushed her back out to sea, and according to the legend,
(08:09):
it drifted away. That's the gist, and it sounds like
they are a couple of Yeah, there's some styling on it. Yes,
excellent summation, Matt. We can already tell it sounds like
there are a few things that have been glossed over
in this story. Oh for sure. That's definitely the crib
notes version. When you see it written down like that,
(08:31):
and we have some images here of the ship. Do
you want to get into that now where we can
come back to that later. Let's yeah, we can. We
can go into it now. So, as we said February three,
that's when these local fishermen see this ship drift in
the water, they tow it to land and they take
(08:52):
measurements of it. So they find that it is almost
eleven feet high three point three meters and almost eighteen
feet wide five point four or five meters, and to
be more exact, it's ten point eight three feet high
and seventeen point eight eight feet wide. That's kind of weird.
(09:14):
Why do we have such apparently specific measurements? Were there
is because the these measurements and meters and feet are
conversions from the measurement system that the Japanese community was
using at the time. So what may have been a
more rounded number or approximation in their original measurement system,
(09:35):
when converted to the measurement systems we use today, it's
gonna come out. It's gonna come out wonky. Was like,
the important part of this description is not that they
were measuring in feet and meters. You know, they weren't.
They weren't going. Okay, that's seventeen point eight seven. Somebody
(09:56):
put your thumb. Somebody put your thumb on the on
the tape, hold it, hold it down. And now the
shape of this thing specifically reminded a lot of the
witnesses of something that they knew of that they saw
in their everyday lives as part of ritual um and
it was an incense burner, a type of incense burn
(10:18):
This specific rounded shape of the boat. Yeah, that's the
other thing. This this is not a box. It has
like a it has a dome top to it sorts.
It's a little bit wider at the top than it
is at the base, almost like similar to a cupcake shape.
That's you know, that's kind of what I'm seeing too,
(10:38):
but the bottom is almost more pointed in this weird
way like a ship would be, where the weight is
meant to be at the center of it, right, and
then water displacement occurs as you moved to the outer edges. Right. Yeah,
So it seems like it could have been meant to
float like an actual boat, and from the surface this
(10:59):
would have looked like a floating disc or a bubble
like floating on the surface of the water, which has
led many people more on the fringe conjecture side of
stuff to ask themselves if this was a U s
oh perhaps, which is something you turned me onto a
(11:20):
long time ago unidentified sub merged object. But in this
case it would be a U. It would be a UFO,
but it would be a floating right right right right, uh,
And as long as it's not a sinking object. And
just because there are some artist depictions of this that
you can find online if you take a look at them.
(11:40):
In my mind, just when I glance at it, it
looks like some kind of escape capsule or maybe from
an early spaceship or an early rocket that let's say
NASA would have sent up um the module that comes
down and returns to Earth. That's what it looks like
(12:01):
to make some sort of re entry exactly. Well, we
do know a little bit more about the craft itself
or the ship. The upper part of the vessel appeared
to be made of a red coated rosewood, while the
lower part was covered with plates, brazen plates that people
conjectured were meant to protect it from sharp edged rocks
(12:23):
so it wouldn't pierce the ship and compromise its ability
to function, because it didn't seem to have any kind
of control system, like it's just kind of floating there
in the ocean and you never know what you're gonna
run into. And the upper part allegedly had several windows
made of glass or crystal, covered with bars and clogged
(12:43):
with an unidentified resin that they believe came from a tree.
The windows, however, were completely transparent, and this is important
because the fishermen looked through the windows and that's when
they saw not only the occupant of the vessel, which
will will get to in a moment, but also they
saw texts written in an unknown language decorating the interior
(13:08):
of the ship. And there's so many questions that go
through my mind when you start thinking about why would
there be texts inside the vehicle, and we will get
into that a little later as well. But they also
found other stuff in there. There were bed sheets, so
apparently the occupant was, you know, sleeping in this thing,
or at least would have been sleeping in this thing.
(13:31):
There was a bottle with some water in it, quite
a lot of according to legend, it was three point
six leaders. And we get back into that the whole measurement. Um,
there was even some cake and some meat that was prepared.
So we know that these we know that these witnesses
were able to identify items of sustenance, right food and water.
(13:55):
And then also betting on the woman that they saw
inside the ship. They supposed that she was eighteen to
twenty years old. She was said to be about a
little bit less than five ft tall four point nine
two ft or one point five. She had red hair
(14:16):
and red eyebrows, which was very unusual. Right, her hair
was elongated by artificial white extensions. So let me check
with you guys that this doesn't that seem a little
weird because all of a sudden we've makes an appearance
in this Yeah three, um, you know, I can't say
(14:38):
that I'm any kind of experts on the hairstylings of
the eighteen hundreds, not a hair story, and no, not
a hair story. But that does seem a bit odd,
especially considering they were trying to figure out what they
were made out of in the stories, and it was
written down that perhaps they were made out of some
kind of fur um or some kind of powdered textile,
(15:01):
like just some strange substance that was elongating her hair.
And then they go on to say, and you'll read
this and multiple accounts and other videos on the subject
that you can find out there on the net, this
hairstyle cannot be found in any literature. Whatever that means.
I don't think that's I'm not so amazed by that,
(15:23):
you know what I mean, Because it's a big world.
There's a lot of different hairstyles that don't show up
in magazines or are you know, have illustrations from the
eighteen hundreds. The lady's skin was a very pale, pink shade.
She wore long, smooth clothes of unknown fabrics, Okay, unknown fabrics. No,
(15:44):
And and here's where we would start asking, were we,
like investigative lawyers, were this a trial. This would be
the part where the defendants story breaks down. The witnesses
say that the woman began speak, no one understood her.
She did not seem to understand the fisherman either, so
(16:05):
no one could ask about her origin. Although she appeared
friendly and courteous, she acted strange and she was always
holding a pale box a little bit less than two
inches in size. She would not allow anyone to touch
the box. The fisherman disassembled, apparently disassembled the ship, and
(16:27):
then they started conjecturing, and they started asking themselves, who
is this person? What is this person doing? Is this
a person? And will explore that as well right now
in this episode after a word from our sponsor, and
(16:58):
we're back, then I have to go. Let's I'm doing
the minus ten seconds thing on my I've pad right now,
going back. So I want to get to a group
of local fishermen on the coast of Japan meeting someone
who they can't understand the language, and there's no immediate
(17:19):
translator there for whatever language is being spoke. Doesn't it
seem like maybe it could be a traveler from any
number of other places, Burbank, I don't know so much
from Burbank gotnership. Well, that would be that would end up,
of course being a time travelers. Well, you have to
imagine there are a lot there are a lot of
(17:40):
places that someone floating in a ship that doesn't have
any kind of controls could be coming from. However, it
seems like it would have had to be a short
journey in order to survive in that thing, unless it
was packed full of food and water. Anyway. We can
get into more of that later, but I just I'm
just imagining a bunch of local fishermen not being able
(18:02):
to understand many languages. I know if I was one
of those fishermen and I only spoke Japanese. Mm hmm,
that's it. I can't understand anything you're saying to me.
I'm sorry. Sure, yeah, But there's also a situation where
you would think through hand gestures, right or or drawing,
(18:25):
some communications should be possible to to, yeah, have some
sort of two way communication. I don't know, have you
ever been in a situation where you're talking to someone
who doesn't have a common language with you? Absolutely? Yeah, yeah,
And a lot of it, you're right, can be solved
(18:45):
in those ways. I I wonder if there was any
kind of panic going on because of the somewhat mysterious
situation everybody was in. Maybe that led to even less
communication being available. When so that's a I mean, that's
a really that's a really good point. And we are
(19:07):
probably never going to know what this person was saying.
I'm pretty sure they're not from Burbank. But other than that,
we don't we don't know what they said. We do, however,
have in these accounts, we have people who claimed to
be eye witnesses. One was an older man from the
local village, and he thought he didn't think this is
(19:30):
some strange alien or extraterrestrial. He thought that this passenger
who was a princess, perhaps of a foreign realm, and
that she married in her homeland. But and this this
guy is, he's clearly got a future as a screenwriter.
It's going full back story, Yeah, full backstory. He says,
(19:52):
she's probably princess from fore in realm, and she married
in her homeland. But when she had an affair with
a townsman after the marriage, it caused scandal and the
lover was executed and the princess was banned from home.
I just have him. I just had this idea of
him doing it like a TV pitch. Sure, and the
princess right was banned from home, so she, uh, she
(20:14):
had to go, but they couldn't kill her because everybody
liked her and then she had a lot of sympathy
and she liked this big fan club, so they said, okay,
we're not gonna we're not gonna kill you. Um getting
this weird boat. Yeah, he was working, he was working
on script for a play that he was gonna be
putting on and man, he just went full on. So
(20:35):
under his account, if this were correct, then that box
would contain the head of her deceased lover. And here's
something else. So in the past, this wasn't the first
time this kind of trope turned up in the past,
(20:57):
a very similar object with a woman apparently washed ashore
on a close by beach, and this time there was
a not a box, but there was a small board
with a head pinned to it. Geez. So then again,
this person's conjecture is that the box would probably be
the same and that's why she protected it so fervently.
(21:19):
And there are other legends in Japan that have to
do is something kind of similar where there's a a
box that's given to a character, and the characters still
never to open the box. Right, And I'm sorry, I'm
not giving specifics because this is just from cursory reading,
but inside the box is something very special you're not
(21:41):
allowed to show anybody. When the character returns to his home,
he realizes that nobody around that he knows is there anymore,
and turns out it's been three hundred years since he
was last in his hometown, even though he doesn't think
it's been three hundred years, and he proceeds to open
the box, and inside the box was actually his age,
(22:03):
like his all the time that she saves him. Yeah,
that this god has saved him was actually inside the
box and he became an old man when he opened it. Right, Okay,
that's a new one to me. Another similar anecdote from
the folklore perspective of the forbidden access concept would be
(22:26):
the famous story was a Blackbeard? It was? It was
blue Beard, a pirate captain who would marry somebody or
who married a lady. And then he said, everything you
want is yours, just don't go in this one room ever,
And of course she goes in, and that's where he
(22:47):
has killed all the other women he married because he
told them not to go into the room. He's kind
of creating his own problem. I think in that pretty
sure that's what's happening. Yeah, but you know, I I
don't talk about in personal life too much, but I've
never been in a situation where I had a dead
body room that I wouldn't let that. I just feel like,
(23:12):
if you have a room you don't want people to
go into, then you should just lock it and you
shouldn't point it out all the time, or I mean
clean up after yourself. That's only you know, that's a
good point. But this was also a different period in history.
You know, they didn't have like plastic tarps and yeah,
yeah soaked would wooden planks. But before we go too
(23:37):
far into folklore, let's take let's take a look at
the rest of the story. So, so the fisher folks
say it would take a lot of effort, essentially for
us to investigate this woman and figure out what's up
with their boat. We have a lot of fishing to do.
You know, they thought maybe this was just a true issue,
(24:00):
that's some other group of people practiced. So they said, okay,
we'll just put this craft back together. We won't mess
with your stuff, So we'll leave your water, we'll leave
your food, leave and will help push this thing back
out to the ocean and travels late view to your destiny.
(24:22):
And then the older man who's giving this account has
a great quotation here. From human sight, it might be cruel,
but it seems to be her predetermined destiny. That's a
that's kind of cold, but you know, I get it.
(24:43):
Maybe this is what she's meant to do, float around
until she finds the rightful place. So February eighteen o
three this happens, and eighteen oh three is not that
long ago. It's a little over two years, which in
the span of time is just like that, right. So
(25:03):
that's why you will sometimes hear people describe this as
the first quote unquote modern UFO citing let's look at
the analysis, all right, folklore folkloric similarities, um as. As
you know, I extensively mess around with folklore, and um
(25:27):
folks a lot, a lot of a lot of you
listening now also do extensive folklore research. Right. This stuff
is fascinating and it's great and one of the things
that we find in any kind of investigation of anecdotes
or legends. Is that aspects of stories are contagious and
(25:49):
they mixed together, right, especially when they cross cultures, Especially
when they cross cultures, and then they start to exist
in a different framework. We men and before the stories
of fay or fairy abductions, right where they would take
a kid, a human child, a human jacket and replace
it with a change lean sort of like a sick baby.
(26:13):
This was this was kind of the d n A
of what would later become alien abduction stories. And of
course we're not saying that people who believe they have
been abducted by some kind of extraterrestrial entity or a
government agency or extra dimensional thing. We're not saying they
don't believe it. We're saying that the two types of
(26:35):
stories culturally have a lot in common. Yeah, there's a
precedent to the belief of being taken a lot, taken
away by something unknown or unseen, and then return. I
always wanted to long as a kid. One of my
favorite folklore stories was Rip van Winkle, Oh Sure, where
he falls asleep, time passes and he's playing these bowling
(26:58):
with the he he gets wasted one night. Any play
he goes bowling with it changes. Sometimes elves, sometimes their gnome.
Sometimes they're just sketchy mountain folk. They're like carneys, short
corner carneys, bowling with carneys that I it sounds like
(27:19):
something I would watch, read or listen to. I I
don't you know. I'm not that great at bowling. It's
a curse. So you you might get tricked into betting
a little bit and then a little more. You know.
Oh wow, is that I I don't know. So that's
a that's a fascinating story. And that's what I was
thinking when you brought up the idea of someone losing
(27:42):
time finding their age. And those two stories most likely exist,
and we're created independently, sure, I mean they may have
mortality is a heck of a motivator, so that probably
separately inspired the authors of the stories. But for the
(28:04):
purposes of this exploration, what that means is that there
may be elements of the Utsuru Buni story that either
come from another earlier story or were later transmitted to something.
And then there's also we will be remiss if we
(28:24):
didn't say the UFO USO angle, right shore floating object,
flying objects, submerged object, UH pros and cons for it
being one of those types of objects. Okay, well, let's
start off with the ship being made largely out of wood. Yes,
(28:44):
that you know, traditionally not a space faring material, or
at least not a ideal space faring material. Okay, so
that's a con. I'll do some devil's advocacy here and
say a pro would be that they had never seen
this type of craft before. Okay, yeah, that's that is
(29:06):
definitely up there. I know that the type of boat
was similar to something that they would be familiar with
with them rounded the no, the rounded bottom was a
boat shape that they would be used to, but the
top part was like completely out of the out of
the element, Like why would that be there? Um. Another
(29:28):
pro is the unusual appearance of the occupant, which to
them in this period would have probably would have been alien,
I mean not a not even alien extraterrestrial sense, just
a very very strange liking person. And if we want
to bridge kind of the folklore aspect and the UFO
(29:50):
USO aspect, we we look to some stuff having to
do with the Dragon, god of the sea reusion um.
And this is there's this place called the Dragon Palace Castle,
which is a translation, of course, that is at the
bottom of the sea where this god lives and he
has servants or the god has servants. There are let's see,
(30:15):
it's built out of solid crystal, which might bring in
you know what, they believed the windows to be created
out of um. And there are a lot of legends
about this place, and one of the legends has to
do with the inhabitants who had guess what, red hair
and pink skin. So it feels like maybe if you
(30:37):
see this and you know about these legends, you're aware
of Reugion and the denizens or excuse me, the inhabitants
of the palace under the sea, you may think, well,
maybe that's what this is. Maybe this is an emissary
from that realm, from that area, or you know, someone
trying to escape. Yeah, you know, and that that to
(31:00):
a great point because we know that having some pre
existing information, even if you're not, even if it's not
at the front of your mind, right, we know that
it it can be a very powerful priming influence. Yeah,
it's a lens that you end up seeing it or
even though you don't realize the lenses there Other ethnologists
and historians also took a look at this case um
(31:24):
often before it became kind of known in the West,
because you won't find a whole lot of information on
it in English. There are a lot of blogs. So
if you do speak Japanese speaking read Japanese, and you
have some Japanese sources that you would like to hit
(31:46):
us to, then please cinem our way um, give me
what you think the best translations are. I would love
to learn more about this. Here's what we have now
in various in various decades after this event February three,
uh other experts or scholars investigated this, and one fellow
(32:11):
named Yanagita Kunio really went deep. He went hard on
the painting, and he emerged a little more skeptical. So
he points out that the circular boat shapes as as
you said, Matt, we're not unusual in Japan. They've been
around for a while. And he said that the really
(32:31):
weird stuff for people at this time would have been
windows made of glass and those brazen protective plates, so
they would make it look um sort of exotic to
the people. Would be like seeing a modern car in
the time when you know the model t is the
thing that you see rolling down the street, you know,
with with all of the glass products and other things,
(32:54):
and it would just be strange. You couldn't really understand
what you're looking at. Yeah, exactly exactly, and it would
be kind of a It would be close enough that
you would say that's some sort of car, and now
they're like, that's some sort of boat. He also points
out that the oldest versions of this, not necessarily the
(33:20):
most popular, but the oldest versions, according to Yanagita, describe humble, circular,
open log boats without any dome, and he argues that
these details, these plates, and these windows and stuff were
added afterwards because people would inevitably ask, how did this
(33:48):
logboat make it across the open sea? Oh, that's a
great question, especially an open logboat like that, susceptible to
any kind of weather, to waves. It's just it's going down.
But if it's enclosed, I guess it makes a lot
of sense. So in this way, it's almost like adding
on details, not necessarily to a lie, but to a story.
(34:10):
You know that you're making up as you go, and
you add more details to make it seem more credible.
Embellishing the high seas could be a dangerous place, and
some of that may hinge on the shape of the boat,
because if you're imagining, you know, something more like a
lifeboat or a canoe, that would be that would probably
(34:31):
have a better chance because it's it's slightly better shape.
But no, this is just um a thing that's spherical
at the top and rounded at the bottom and bobbing along,
just moving where the ocean takes it. It's like bait
and tackle, you know. Strange. So Yanagita also points out
(34:52):
that most legends similar to that of the suro Bune
sound alike. Someone finds a strange person, almost always a
girl or young woman, inside a circular boat and either
rescues them or sends them back to the ocean. Huh
tails oldest time this time? Oh? I was going to
(35:13):
break into song there, Um yeah, I mean there are
so many legends about that kind of thing, and you
can imagine the stories that mostly male sailors would make
up while out on the high season. You're probably familiar
with a lot of them, you know. I'm glad you
brought that up, Matt, because it reminds me of one
(35:34):
of the strangest what are the strangest cases of sailors
stories that are found out about is it safe for work? Yeah,
it is, Well, we'll tell this safe for work version.
For a long time, since people were sailing the oceans, right, Uh,
(35:55):
there were always legends of sea monsters and of aquatic
creatures that were very close to people. Essentially Mr Folk
mermaids and sailors would talk about seeing mermaids from a
distance on the shore. I mean this goes back to
like Greco Roman stuff with sirens singing. Um. And then
(36:18):
the best guess that a couple of people have is
that they were manatees. That doesn't you know. That's the
thing that gets me. It's I keep thinking, how long
did these guys have to be out there on the
ocean to to think, uh, to mistake humanity for a person?
(36:40):
And this this misidentification, whether it was through you know,
seeing a seal or manity or another creature that would
kind of like lounge out. I mean, I guess maybe
a walrus, but the tusk would probably make it hard
to mistake. I guess it depends on the distance. But um,
(37:02):
you know, in a way, if these people were hoping
to see a human of some sort, that they were
always kind of primed to see it. And if people
were familiar with these sorts of legends, then they would
end up in the in the telling, especially if it's
(37:23):
oral recounting memories so treacherous, they might end up accidentally
adding details and somebody else misunderstands that add up into
something else. There were, Or if it's a great story
that you're retelling at a tavern somewhere, I mean, why
would you just say, oh, no, it was just a walrus.
That's no fun. I'm just saying, all of a sudden,
(37:48):
all of a sudden, it was a it was a
beautiful mermaid, and the person you found a drift in
this boat had hair extensions. I'm not discounting stories of
mr Folk. I'm just saying it's unlikely. That's all. The
ocean is a big place, and from our previous episodes,
we know that if there are any large undiscovered creatures today,
(38:10):
they have the odds are highest that they would exist
in the ocean. Right, so maybe they're there. I don't
want to I don't want to ruin that for anybody,
you know, but I do have to say they definitely
weren't um discovered by a certain channel on television in
a series called Mermaids can confirm that they absolutely were not.
(38:31):
And I would never play play ball with that notion. Um.
But I'm not going to act like I'm not gonna
go see aqua man. I'll check it out for sure.
I've diverted us. The The point here is that there
were other scholars who are taking vigorous looks at this.
One is named Dr Kazu Tanaka. Yes, this is a
(38:54):
professor for computer and electronics engineering at a university in Tokyo.
He investigated the original texts, the three texts that are
you can find now. They actually exist in real life
right now in museums. You can go and pick them up. Um.
And this he did this research and he's considering he's
(39:18):
really looking at the popular versions of UFO sightings, the
more modern ones that we can think about, and then
comparing those to the two Bune event, let's say, or
the retelling of it. And he he points out that
these legends of bun a it never, it never flies,
(39:39):
It never you know, drives, like we said, it has
no control mechanisms, at least it's not recorded. It doesn't
show any signs of technology besides being a boat and
maybe having some windows like extraordinary technology. Yeah, nothing beyond
what could be GPS, No lasers. No, Uh, what's that
thing in star Trek where it will just create any
(40:02):
food or beverage you desire? Oh, the it's the food machine.
I don't know what it's called. Or tricorder. They didn't,
she didn't have a tricorder with it, right, that's a
good example. It just I mean this, this ship just drift.
It just drifted across the water. It drifted to the fisherman,
or that it didn't even drift to them. They had
to go get it and reel it in and so uh.
(40:24):
Tanaka concluded that this tale was a mix of folklore
and imagination. He also based his assumptions on Yanagita's earlier work.
He had one more Uh, he had a couple more
holes to poke in this story to will examine after
(40:45):
a word from our sponsor, and we're back that there's
one big problem with this story. And it's a really
big problem that as somebody from the United States just
(41:08):
learning about this, I wouldn't have thought about unless somebody
like Dr Tanaka went through and actually examined it. And
that's the location of where this event purportedly happened. Yes,
According to Dr Tanaka, locations that have been referenced in
various accounts of this are in fact fictitious. Uh. He
(41:33):
specifically points out Haa, Tona, Hama, and Hawa Yadori to
make the anecdote sound credible. He believes the author designated
the beaches as personal acreages of a local landowner named
Ogasawa Nagashigi uh. And this this character did. This is
(41:54):
a real person who did live during the Edo period,
but his land was in the heartland, away from the water, right,
and so it seems pretty definite, at least according Dr Tanaka,
that this fellow never had any contact with the fishermen
on the Pacific coast. Uh. The Ogasawari clan served the
(42:15):
Tokugawa dynasty and they had power over most of northeastern
Japan until eighteen sixty eight, and that's a long time
after this occurred, right right, and there Um, their mainland
holdings were in the Hitashi province, and geographically that's very
(42:36):
close to Eastern beaches, and so Dr Tanaka found it
very odd that such a strange incident could have occurred,
and it wasn't commented upon in any official documents. Right,
you'd think so if something this strange and seemingly important
occurred to an individual who's that close and aximity to
(43:00):
power occurred, you think it would be written down somewhere.
Somebody somewhere is being told this, and they would go, Okay,
this strange thing happened. Perhaps there's some kind of invaders
going on with this. It's at least worth documentary, right Yeah.
And let's also keep in mind that this was during
(43:20):
a period of isolation, national insolation, right where in Japan
really limited um really limited a lot of international interactions,
so nearly all foreigners were barred from entering except in
a very specific circumstances. The common resident of Japan, like
(43:43):
the normal you know, Jane or John Doe of Japan
like you and I, had very little chance of ever
leaving the country. So this would have been beyond unusual,
right uh. And there is a remarkable incident that is
documented that Dr Tanaka found and it happened in eighteen
(44:06):
twenty four when a British whaler was stranded on the
northeastern coast of the Hitachi district. Before you ask, no,
he did not show up in a weird cupcake looking ship. Uh.
Tanaka also found out that during the rulership of the
Tokugawa clan, uh the Ogasawara family and the Tokugawa started
mapping their territories. And this is important because the names
(44:32):
of both of the beaches mentioned in the text are missing,
and they also do not appear on the maps of
the whole of Japan, which came out in nineteen o seven.
If the name of a village, a city, or a
place had changed in history, this would have been noted, right.
So because of this, Dr Tanaka thinks thinks that this
(44:58):
is probably just alleged and folklore, similar to um similar
to the stories in modern urban legends, right, you know
the nine one one trace the call, and the phone
call was coming from inside the house, and it wasn't
at this town, and it wasn't my first cousin, but
(45:18):
it's someone that knows my first cousin and they live
a few towns over. And there was a hook sticking
out of the side of the driver window. Yeah, and
I'm pretty sure it was a Pontiac. We the Pontiacs
not around anymore. This happened to someone's older brother who
went to a school a couple of districts away they think, yeah,
(45:39):
there were a few grades above us. It's always just
a little bit, a little bit too far to reach,
and it's tantalizing lee possible. And let's go back into
this account of the British whaler who got stranded. Uh.
The first accounting of this is recorded the next year
(45:59):
in the first the first one, what was it called
um Tales of the Rabbit Garden is when that is
officially written. So perhaps there's a little styling going on
there of something an actual occurrence, and then you bring
some folklore into it. I mean, that's as at least
a great tale to put into your book called Tales
(46:20):
from the Rabbit Garden. That's a good point. So we
know there's an isolation is placed where this sort of
incident would have been reported immediately, right. And also these uh,
ethnologists and historians who look back at this later in
the modern day, they they pointed out something that really
(46:40):
caught me, which is that originally aliens UFOs were not
part of the conversation. Okay, there was there wasn't like
a term for flying saucer, right, um so or extraterrestrial
I guess there might be a term, but it wouldn't
be applied the same way we use it today. A
(47:01):
visitor of sorts but not like that. So they're saying
that over time, the UFO thing got retro fitted onto it,
you know what I mean. The particularly European appearance of
the woman right uh, shades skin, red hair, uh, the
(47:23):
upper part of the utsu bune, and the unknown writing
right the language that the fisherman could not identify, lead
both Tanaka and Yanagita to the conclusion that the entire
story was based on this historical circumstance. Um people, if
the of the period, were totally insulated from the outside world,
(47:46):
so that this was more a tale reflecting xenophobic cultural attitudes,
sort of the same way again that modern urban legends
reflect fears that are already in popular culture, right like
in the nineties, the Satanic Panic, late eighties Satanic Panic
(48:07):
thing gripped the nation, and these people, every um, every
region had some sort of tale of a secret occult
thing going on. And in some cases I'll go on
record saying it, Yeah, in some cases they were probably true.
Not that like dark magic worked or anything, but there
were people who conducted ritual murders. Yeah, and it may
(48:29):
not have had anything to do with satan or anything
like that. Right, it made it, But that stuff happened,
it just didn't happen near as often, north widespread as
people thought it did. But there's often a seed of
truth in these sorts of stories. And if we look
at it from a structural perspective, the construction of the story,
(48:54):
it's ultimately like a lot of other legends itself explaining
the woman disappeared, No one in what she said, the
boxes goes with her. Yeah, there's no artifact, there's no ship, nothing.
And another thing which was new information to us is
that the people of the period here apparently had great
(49:17):
interest in paranormal things. Loved ghost stories, monster stories, bizarre events.
So it wouldn't be surprising to find these stories of
the strange and inexplicable in these books. Yeah, those are
the best stories in my opinion. That's I think one
of the big reasons why you and I and Nol
(49:38):
and Trystan are interested in these things, because it's so
other and outside of anything we experience that you get
to you live in that world where monsters exist and ghosts,
you know, remain after the physical body leaves. I think
we're going to have to differ here, Matt, you don't
(49:58):
want to live in though monsters do exist, I think,
But like krakens, or are we talking about human monsters?
What kind of monsters are we talking about? Where wolves?
So when we bring it all back together, what areur conclusions?
(50:20):
Could this be nothing more than a popular legend recited
over and over, changing a bit each time. It's pretty
clear that in the years following the initial reports, a
large portion of the population except that this is fact
believed something came ashore. But does that mean it actually happened?
I mean, the fictitious locations are real obstacle here yea.
(50:43):
And as far as Dr Tanaka looked into it, it
seems that those locations are Indeed, it's much more likely
that those locations were fictitious rather than renamed. Yeah. For me,
it's more and more feeling like a version or a
retelling of an older story that had some new details
(51:07):
put into it. And I really, I really think you're
well their analysis and then our going over the idea
that perhaps it was a morphing. It was a morphing
of these these folklore tales dealing with the isolationism in
the area at the time in the eighteen when the
(51:28):
story was written, and then later on kind of doing
the same thing, except for in more modern times in
the nineteen nineties, tales of alien spacecraft that were very
popular then get morphed like this thing gets or they
get pulled into this thing, right, So then it's just
kind of just been changing over time little by little.
(51:51):
But there there's some other questions, and I think we
can end on some questions here. How seaworthy would a
vessel like this actually be? As we said, no sales,
no steering equipment, no oars, etcetera. Where did it come from?
Could it have come from Russia? Perhaps? If you look
at some of the ocean currents around here, not around
(52:13):
here we're not right now, but around the land mass
of Japan. You see here on the coast there's a
current that goes from sort of southwest to northeast along
the bottom and then later sort of the eastern part
of Japan. But at the top there's a current in
(52:33):
the northeast, there's a current that goes the exact opposite direction.
So as these if you if you look at the
way these currents well swarm around, it looks like it's
possible that something with no steering could have drifted down.
But you know the best way to find that out
(52:56):
is to build one of these ships and put it
out the water and see what happens. What are you
what are you doing? What are you doing this summer?
I'm building around ship that has some brazen sides and
a couple of windows. But you know, the one last
thing we have to get into is is it possible
(53:18):
that there's something even crazier like the here's where it's
get it gets crazy moment? Like could this have been
a person that was pulled out of time, perhaps out
of some other dimension, out of some other you know,
maybe a time when ships did look like that, or
an alternate dimension. I know, that's you're getting into the weirdness.
(53:41):
I mean, probably not right, I especially because there's meat
and water, like some kind of container, water bedding, recognizable stuff. Yeah,
and oh yeah, and the language could have just been
cyrillic Russian. Sure, you know. And if there's nicely his policy,
then the chances of people knowing or even without like
(54:07):
speaking reading, just recognizing another written language and being able
to say, oh that's Russian, Oh that's French or something.
Those chances are pretty low. And the very last question,
the one that stuck with me. I don't know about you, Matt,
but the one that stuck with me, the one that
(54:28):
has our producer shrugging in uh, infuming and frustration. What
happened to the lady in the ship? What happened to
the woman on the ship. Well, she went back down
to the dragon palace and you know she got she
took a bunch of notes. She wrote them inside her ship.
That's what she was doing. That's why there's all the
writing there. And they were like, did you remember the box?
(54:51):
And she said definitely. The question is what was its function?
What was it doing? Maybe it was some kind of
sound recording device or a camera maybe yeah, maybe yeah,
maybe it was an a NES classic. If people are
getting doing weird stuff to you those that is that
(55:12):
how Nintendo? It was a brilliant marketing campaign that started
centuries ago, I know, for video games. I just found
out that they are making you know, cards in the
eight hundreds, which is pretty awesome. Nintendo, Good on you
for making that switch. Oh yeah, I didn't even expect
that one until it was nice. That's nice, and we
(55:35):
would like to hear your opinion about this, And additionally,
we would like to hear other historical anomalies that you
have found, because whether this is entirely a legend, whether
it's based in truth, whether it's something even weirder than
the various theories we explored today, we'd like to hear
about it. Yeah, and you're part of the world. Did
(55:57):
a ship like this show up in a little bit
later in eighteen o two, eighteen o three, Maybe this,
you know, matches up somewhere else in the world where
it just floated to. Did your parents, grandparents or ancestors
meet when one of them washed ashore the mysterious craft?
If so, have you taken a DNA test, we'd love
to hear about it, or just send us some d
(56:19):
n A and you know we'll take care of it.
Or you can write an email which reminds me it's
time for our chat at Corners. Our first shout out
comes from Sydney. Sidney says, Hi, guys, I was listening
to both episodes of your Serial Killers series. Loved them.
(56:41):
You said you might do a third one. I was
going to suggest maybe the West Mesa murders from Albuquerque,
New Mexico. I live here and people are still talking
about them pretty often. I don't know, check it out
if you want. Thanks for reading. Oh all right, Sydney,
I don't know much about that, Ben, are you aware
of these at all? This was absolutely news to me,
(57:02):
and I think we should do a third episode or
the installment of that series. So let us know if
we would like Matt Nolan I to uh to investigate
this in a future episode and send us just take
a page out of Sydney's book and send us your suggestions. Awesome,
Thank you for writing, Sydney. I'm glad that enjoy is
(57:24):
not the right word to use. I think we talked
about it in that episode. But there's something compelling and fascinating,
especially when you consider how many of these crimes occur
with relatively little fanfare outside of their region. I mean,
the Highway of Tears was an active hunting ground for
how long decades And just to add a little bit
(57:49):
of mystery here to the end of it, I just
looked it up. Ben. In two thousand nine, the remains
of eleven women were found buried in the desert of
West Mesa, and no suspects have been arrested, and a
serial killer is believed to be responsible. All right, we're
on the case. Our next our next shout out is
a little bit unusual. It's something that we we haven't
(58:12):
always done, ln It's something I'd like your help with, folks.
So I went on Twitter recently for a tangentially related
thing to ask a question, because I spent part of
an afternoon trying to figure out the proper plural of bigfoot?
Is it just big foot like sheep? Yeah, there are
(58:35):
there are several big foot and there are some sheep um?
Or is it big foots? Three big foots were on
the road that day? Or is it big feet? Man?
I don't even know how many big feet I was
here and walking around. These are great examples, Matt, this
is this is a gift. So we went on Twitter.
(58:56):
We asked about it, and we we got a lot
of responses. We're just read if you here. Oh man,
Yawn has a great one. This is my favorite. All right,
what is it? John says, I believe it's like surgeons
and attorneys general bigg's foot um? All right? Uh? And
(59:16):
then Stephen Even says one big foot, more big foot
and big foot ist definitely. Kyle Sherman says, I wonder
if you can call a group of Bigfoot a trample
a trample of big foot? You can, now, but then
what do you You've gotta still say something for a
trample of big Foot's See, here's the thing, Okay, I
(59:37):
was thinking, I spent way too much time thinking about this.
You wouldn't say teeth brushes if you had two tooth brushes.
That's very true. So also, yeah, you're never brushing a
single tooth. Well, I guess sometimes you are due to circumstances.
But it's a teeth brush. It's a teeth brush. So
(01:00:01):
we also had a buddy friend of the show, Josh Clark,
chime in. Do you Clark? I know that guy. He
and I talked about the issues, the important issues at hand.
He voted for bigfoots really, which is sort of what
David Bakara I feel like David Bakara from our earlier
Bigfoot interview. He the ploys used was Bigfoot's. Well, do
(01:00:24):
right in and let us know. Because I still can't
let this go and it seems like there's not really
a consensus. We have time for one more shoutout Jeff
from Ontario, shout out to you, Jeff says, hey, guys,
I just listened to the Pyramids episode. I listened to
the whole thing wondering if you were going to mention
the pyramids on Mars. By the way, that is pyramids
(01:00:47):
on Mars. I'm kind of glad you didn't go there.
It would have cheapened the sincerity of the subject. We
did mention something that actually I kind of need to correct.
I said a monolith on one of the moons of Jupiter.
That is incorrect. It's on one of the more moons
of Mars. But we did mention that. Let's get back
(01:01:08):
in here. Jeff also writes you were right about skaed
dooch proceeding Kung Fu Panda by quite a bit. I'm
a big Jabels fan and user of skadooche as sort
of an exclamation point, enough so that it was one
of my niece and nephew's first words, well, congratulations. It
brought them a ton of joy, and it was super
(01:01:28):
cute to see their smiles peek out as they struggle
to say it through their pacifiers. Thanks for the great show, Jeff, Well,
thank you, Jeff. You know, I think pyramids on any
other planet is just an awesome topic because if it
if we did find that, I mean the implications ben
(01:01:48):
right right. But again, going back to that episode, is
that a pyramid or is it just sort of a
pointy mountain? It's probably pointy rock, just like the one
that they've discovered. And yeah, and then also and this
will warm nles heart, will warm our colleagues heart to
(01:02:12):
hear your information about schedoos chaff. So thank you so
much writing. This concludes our gosh and that's the end
of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or
questions about this episode, you can get into contact with
us in a number of different ways. One of the
(01:02:32):
best is to give us a call. Our number is
one eight three three std w y t K. If
you don't want to do that, you can send us
a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i
heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to
know is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
(01:02:53):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Folks, We've got a heck of a classic episode for
you today. If you are a long time fellow conspiracy realists,
then you know that we love all things UFOs. We
also love a little bit of hidden history, and today
we're coming to you with a story about UFOs from
ancient Japan Utsuro Brune. Yeah, it's easy to think the
(00:24):
UFO phenomenon is like sort of an American thing, you know,
with the area fifty one and all of that. And
and that's partially because you know, we live in the
United States, so maybe I'm speaking from within that very bubble.
But in fact, there are other places around the world
that have very similar reports of UFO sightings, and today
is about one of those stories that you might not
(00:44):
know about. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Ye, hello,
(01:10):
and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt
Noel is with us in spirit and they call me Ben.
We are joined by our super producer Tristan. Of course
you are you, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Never fear our compatriot will be
returning physically as well as one would presume is spiritually.
(01:31):
In a later episode, Matt, We've got something pretty interesting
for you today. Oh yes, yeah, everybody out there listening.
This is something that I am just learning about. Ben.
I think you had seen this before in whispers on
the internet and in books, but it's it's a fascinating
(01:53):
happening that occurs way back in the eight hundreds, that
maybe an encounter with an another species, another civilization, right,
you've heard of this before. We have often over the
course of the show explored aliens and inexplicable history. We
found numerous examples of just weird, weird stuff, allegations of
(02:18):
lost technology, entire loss civilizations, and of course, at some point,
what's that guy's named George Slucos close the ancient aliens
at some point aliens, extraterrestrials or allegations thereof. We do
want to point out that we and the world at
large has found no universally agreed solid proof of any
(02:40):
sort of alien encounter. Begrudgingly true, but we have seen
some incredibly strange stuff. Nonetheless, and as much as it
may irk humanity to admit this, we may well never
know the full story behind some historical accounts and events.
It's true a lot of times it's written down once
(03:00):
by one person, and we can find that. But that's
all we have to go on. And we do know
that at various times, quote unquote, historical accounts have been anecdotal,
heavily biased, written with some sort of strange agenda in mind,
or entirely made up and passed off as the real thing.
(03:22):
You have to make make the whims of some king
or some you know. Could be a monarchy, it could
be just a government. It could be a single influential person. Hey,
increasingly it could be a corporation. Right, what happens when
they write the textbooks? I know? An episode perhaps for
another day, But we point this out because we want
(03:46):
to thank all of the historians in the audience who
are probably, as we speak, going nuts over figuring out
some detail that other people have overlooked, us interpreted, or
even purposefully uh mischaracterized, or even you armchair historians out
(04:06):
there who are just scouring the web on your own time.
The work you do is important and you know nobody
else is doing it, So thank you, right and history
our understanding of history is nowhere near as clear cut
and uh concrete as some people would have us believe.
(04:26):
And then also, you know, this sort of confusion persists
in the modern day. We're not so different from the
earlier examples of our species. So today we're looking at
one such account of strange historical account. We'll call it
the legend of the Utsuru Bune. And before we dive
in here, we want to be crystal clear with this.
(04:51):
Uh you don't speak Japanese, I am unaware if I do, okay,
and I will also be surprised if I start speaking
to happening. We're saying this because, um, we do want
to be respectful to different cultures. And if there are
any mispronunciations or mischaracterized Americanisms that sweep in in regards
(05:13):
to our accents, then we hope that it's still close
enough to get the gist. Yeah, and let us know
if we do make any mistakes like that, you can
reach us Jonathan dot Strickland at how stuff works dot com.
We have we welcome all feedback. Our complaint department is
open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
So we're diving in, or better yet, we're floating ashore
(05:36):
to Japan and the dawn of the nineteen century. Our
story is called we set it at the top with
suro bune, but you may also see it online somewhere
assuro fun a with an f or uro bun, a
kind of putting them together, and it refers to this
object a ship of sorts that allegedly washed ashore in
(05:59):
eighteen zero three eighteen o three uh in Hitachi Province
on that that's on the eastern coast of Japan, and
it's located near where modern day Tokyo is, not quite
but near there, which will we will explore that part
of the story in a little bit further depth. Accounts
of this tale appear in multiple texts. Three of the
(06:20):
most popular examples are also from the early to mid
nineteen century. So there's one called the Towan show Setsu,
which translates to Tales from the Rabbit Garden, published in
eighteen twenty five. This has the most detailed account or
detailed anecdote, and there are similar stories similar enough that
(06:42):
we we pretty much know their retellings of the same
thing from a work called Diaries and Stories of Castaways
in eighteen thirty five and dust of the Apricot in
eighteen forty four. So what happens, Well, well, immediately right
here we have to point out at the top, as
we've been talking about history and things being written down,
we're twenty two years they're the recording of this is
(07:05):
twenty two years after the alleged event, which is already
a little suspect, but perhaps it was um it was
more of a story told by word of mouth. That
kind of thing wasn't necessarily recorded in any history this happening,
But just keep that in mind as we go through here. Right, So,
(07:26):
according to the legend of utsuro Bune, there was this
young woman, she was attractive. She arrived on a beach
aboard this thing that they referred to as a hollow
ship because they had no words to describe it, this thing. Yeah,
and there were there were local fishermen who who brought
(07:47):
her inland. They wanted to know what the what the
heck is going on here, and they found that she
was unable to communicate with these guys because she spoke
some other language that they were unfamiliar with. And and
the fishermen ended up returning her to this ship, this
hollow ship that they found her in and then they
pushed her back out to sea, and according to the legend,
(08:09):
it drifted away. That's the gist, and it sounds like
they are a couple of Yeah, there's some styling on it. Yes,
excellent summation, Matt. We can already tell it sounds like
there are a few things that have been glossed over
in this story. Oh for sure. That's definitely the crib
notes version. When you see it written down like that,
(08:31):
and we have some images here of the ship. Do
you want to get into that now where we can
come back to that later. Let's yeah, we can. We
can go into it now. So, as we said February three,
that's when these local fishermen see this ship drift in
the water, they tow it to land and they take
(08:52):
measurements of it. So they find that it is almost
eleven feet high three point three meters and almost eighteen
feet wide five point four or five meters, and to
be more exact, it's ten point eight three feet high
and seventeen point eight eight feet wide. That's kind of weird.
(09:14):
Why do we have such apparently specific measurements? Were there
is because the these measurements and meters and feet are
conversions from the measurement system that the Japanese community was
using at the time. So what may have been a
more rounded number or approximation in their original measurement system,
(09:35):
when converted to the measurement systems we use today, it's
gonna come out. It's gonna come out wonky. Was like,
the important part of this description is not that they
were measuring in feet and meters. You know, they weren't.
They weren't going. Okay, that's seventeen point eight seven. Somebody
(09:56):
put your thumb. Somebody put your thumb on the on
the tape, hold it, hold it down. And now the
shape of this thing specifically reminded a lot of the
witnesses of something that they knew of that they saw
in their everyday lives as part of ritual um and
it was an incense burner, a type of incense burn
(10:18):
This specific rounded shape of the boat. Yeah, that's the
other thing. This this is not a box. It has
like a it has a dome top to it sorts.
It's a little bit wider at the top than it
is at the base, almost like similar to a cupcake shape.
That's you know, that's kind of what I'm seeing too,
(10:38):
but the bottom is almost more pointed in this weird
way like a ship would be, where the weight is
meant to be at the center of it, right, and
then water displacement occurs as you moved to the outer edges. Right. Yeah,
So it seems like it could have been meant to
float like an actual boat, and from the surface this
(10:59):
would have looked like a floating disc or a bubble
like floating on the surface of the water, which has
led many people more on the fringe conjecture side of
stuff to ask themselves if this was a U s
oh perhaps, which is something you turned me onto a
(11:20):
long time ago unidentified sub merged object. But in this
case it would be a U. It would be a UFO,
but it would be a floating right right right right, uh,
And as long as it's not a sinking object. And
just because there are some artist depictions of this that
you can find online if you take a look at them.
(11:40):
In my mind, just when I glance at it, it
looks like some kind of escape capsule or maybe from
an early spaceship or an early rocket that let's say
NASA would have sent up um the module that comes
down and returns to Earth. That's what it looks like
(12:01):
to make some sort of re entry exactly. Well, we
do know a little bit more about the craft itself
or the ship. The upper part of the vessel appeared
to be made of a red coated rosewood, while the
lower part was covered with plates, brazen plates that people
conjectured were meant to protect it from sharp edged rocks
(12:23):
so it wouldn't pierce the ship and compromise its ability
to function, because it didn't seem to have any kind
of control system, like it's just kind of floating there
in the ocean and you never know what you're gonna
run into. And the upper part allegedly had several windows
made of glass or crystal, covered with bars and clogged
(12:43):
with an unidentified resin that they believe came from a tree.
The windows, however, were completely transparent, and this is important
because the fishermen looked through the windows and that's when
they saw not only the occupant of the vessel, which
will will get to in a moment, but also they
saw texts written in an unknown language decorating the interior
(13:08):
of the ship. And there's so many questions that go
through my mind when you start thinking about why would
there be texts inside the vehicle, and we will get
into that a little later as well. But they also
found other stuff in there. There were bed sheets, so
apparently the occupant was, you know, sleeping in this thing,
or at least would have been sleeping in this thing.
(13:31):
There was a bottle with some water in it, quite
a lot of according to legend, it was three point
six leaders. And we get back into that the whole measurement. Um,
there was even some cake and some meat that was prepared.
So we know that these we know that these witnesses
were able to identify items of sustenance, right food and water.
(13:55):
And then also betting on the woman that they saw
inside the ship. They supposed that she was eighteen to
twenty years old. She was said to be about a
little bit less than five ft tall four point nine
two ft or one point five. She had red hair
(14:16):
and red eyebrows, which was very unusual. Right, her hair
was elongated by artificial white extensions. So let me check
with you guys that this doesn't that seem a little
weird because all of a sudden we've makes an appearance
in this Yeah three, um, you know, I can't say
(14:38):
that I'm any kind of experts on the hairstylings of
the eighteen hundreds, not a hair story, and no, not
a hair story. But that does seem a bit odd,
especially considering they were trying to figure out what they
were made out of in the stories, and it was
written down that perhaps they were made out of some
kind of fur um or some kind of powdered textile,
(15:01):
like just some strange substance that was elongating her hair.
And then they go on to say, and you'll read
this and multiple accounts and other videos on the subject
that you can find out there on the net, this
hairstyle cannot be found in any literature. Whatever that means.
I don't think that's I'm not so amazed by that,
(15:23):
you know what I mean, Because it's a big world.
There's a lot of different hairstyles that don't show up
in magazines or are you know, have illustrations from the
eighteen hundreds. The lady's skin was a very pale, pink shade.
She wore long, smooth clothes of unknown fabrics, Okay, unknown fabrics. No,
(15:44):
And and here's where we would start asking, were we,
like investigative lawyers, were this a trial. This would be
the part where the defendants story breaks down. The witnesses
say that the woman began speak, no one understood her.
She did not seem to understand the fisherman either, so
(16:05):
no one could ask about her origin. Although she appeared
friendly and courteous, she acted strange and she was always
holding a pale box a little bit less than two
inches in size. She would not allow anyone to touch
the box. The fisherman disassembled, apparently disassembled the ship, and
(16:27):
then they started conjecturing, and they started asking themselves, who
is this person? What is this person doing? Is this
a person? And will explore that as well right now
in this episode after a word from our sponsor, and
(16:58):
we're back, then I have to go. Let's I'm doing
the minus ten seconds thing on my I've pad right now,
going back. So I want to get to a group
of local fishermen on the coast of Japan meeting someone
who they can't understand the language, and there's no immediate
(17:19):
translator there for whatever language is being spoke. Doesn't it
seem like maybe it could be a traveler from any
number of other places, Burbank, I don't know so much
from Burbank gotnership. Well, that would be that would end up,
of course being a time travelers. Well, you have to
imagine there are a lot there are a lot of
(17:40):
places that someone floating in a ship that doesn't have
any kind of controls could be coming from. However, it
seems like it would have had to be a short
journey in order to survive in that thing, unless it
was packed full of food and water. Anyway. We can
get into more of that later, but I just I'm
just imagining a bunch of local fishermen not being able
(18:02):
to understand many languages. I know if I was one
of those fishermen and I only spoke Japanese. Mm hmm,
that's it. I can't understand anything you're saying to me.
I'm sorry. Sure, yeah, But there's also a situation where
you would think through hand gestures, right or or drawing,
(18:25):
some communications should be possible to to, yeah, have some
sort of two way communication. I don't know, have you
ever been in a situation where you're talking to someone
who doesn't have a common language with you? Absolutely? Yeah, yeah,
And a lot of it, you're right, can be solved
(18:45):
in those ways. I I wonder if there was any
kind of panic going on because of the somewhat mysterious
situation everybody was in. Maybe that led to even less
communication being available. When so that's a I mean, that's
a really that's a really good point. And we are
(19:07):
probably never going to know what this person was saying.
I'm pretty sure they're not from Burbank. But other than that,
we don't we don't know what they said. We do, however,
have in these accounts, we have people who claimed to
be eye witnesses. One was an older man from the
local village, and he thought he didn't think this is
(19:30):
some strange alien or extraterrestrial. He thought that this passenger
who was a princess, perhaps of a foreign realm, and
that she married in her homeland. But and this this
guy is, he's clearly got a future as a screenwriter.
It's going full back story, Yeah, full backstory. He says,
(19:52):
she's probably princess from fore in realm, and she married
in her homeland. But when she had an affair with
a townsman after the marriage, it caused scandal and the
lover was executed and the princess was banned from home.
I just have him. I just had this idea of
him doing it like a TV pitch. Sure, and the
princess right was banned from home, so she, uh, she
(20:14):
had to go, but they couldn't kill her because everybody
liked her and then she had a lot of sympathy
and she liked this big fan club, so they said, okay,
we're not gonna we're not gonna kill you. Um getting
this weird boat. Yeah, he was working, he was working
on script for a play that he was gonna be
putting on and man, he just went full on. So
(20:35):
under his account, if this were correct, then that box
would contain the head of her deceased lover. And here's
something else. So in the past, this wasn't the first
time this kind of trope turned up in the past,
(20:57):
a very similar object with a woman apparently washed ashore
on a close by beach, and this time there was
a not a box, but there was a small board
with a head pinned to it. Geez. So then again,
this person's conjecture is that the box would probably be
the same and that's why she protected it so fervently.
(21:19):
And there are other legends in Japan that have to
do is something kind of similar where there's a a
box that's given to a character, and the characters still
never to open the box. Right, And I'm sorry, I'm
not giving specifics because this is just from cursory reading,
but inside the box is something very special you're not
(21:41):
allowed to show anybody. When the character returns to his home,
he realizes that nobody around that he knows is there anymore,
and turns out it's been three hundred years since he
was last in his hometown, even though he doesn't think
it's been three hundred years, and he proceeds to open
the box, and inside the box was actually his age,
(22:03):
like his all the time that she saves him. Yeah,
that this god has saved him was actually inside the
box and he became an old man when he opened it. Right, Okay,
that's a new one to me. Another similar anecdote from
the folklore perspective of the forbidden access concept would be
(22:26):
the famous story was a Blackbeard? It was? It was
blue Beard, a pirate captain who would marry somebody or
who married a lady. And then he said, everything you
want is yours, just don't go in this one room ever,
And of course she goes in, and that's where he
(22:47):
has killed all the other women he married because he
told them not to go into the room. He's kind
of creating his own problem. I think in that pretty
sure that's what's happening. Yeah, but you know, I I
don't talk about in personal life too much, but I've
never been in a situation where I had a dead
body room that I wouldn't let that. I just feel like,
(23:12):
if you have a room you don't want people to
go into, then you should just lock it and you
shouldn't point it out all the time, or I mean
clean up after yourself. That's only you know, that's a
good point. But this was also a different period in history.
You know, they didn't have like plastic tarps and yeah,
yeah soaked would wooden planks. But before we go too
(23:37):
far into folklore, let's take let's take a look at
the rest of the story. So, so the fisher folks
say it would take a lot of effort, essentially for
us to investigate this woman and figure out what's up
with their boat. We have a lot of fishing to do.
You know, they thought maybe this was just a true issue,
(24:00):
that's some other group of people practiced. So they said, okay,
we'll just put this craft back together. We won't mess
with your stuff, So we'll leave your water, we'll leave
your food, leave and will help push this thing back
out to the ocean and travels late view to your destiny.
(24:22):
And then the older man who's giving this account has
a great quotation here. From human sight, it might be cruel,
but it seems to be her predetermined destiny. That's a
that's kind of cold, but you know, I get it.
(24:43):
Maybe this is what she's meant to do, float around
until she finds the rightful place. So February eighteen o
three this happens, and eighteen oh three is not that
long ago. It's a little over two years, which in
the span of time is just like that, right. So
(25:03):
that's why you will sometimes hear people describe this as
the first quote unquote modern UFO citing let's look at
the analysis, all right, folklore folkloric similarities, um as. As
you know, I extensively mess around with folklore, and um
(25:27):
folks a lot, a lot of a lot of you
listening now also do extensive folklore research. Right. This stuff
is fascinating and it's great and one of the things
that we find in any kind of investigation of anecdotes
or legends. Is that aspects of stories are contagious and
(25:49):
they mixed together, right, especially when they cross cultures, Especially
when they cross cultures, and then they start to exist
in a different framework. We men and before the stories
of fay or fairy abductions, right where they would take
a kid, a human child, a human jacket and replace
it with a change lean sort of like a sick baby.
(26:13):
This was this was kind of the d n A
of what would later become alien abduction stories. And of
course we're not saying that people who believe they have
been abducted by some kind of extraterrestrial entity or a
government agency or extra dimensional thing. We're not saying they
don't believe it. We're saying that the two types of
(26:35):
stories culturally have a lot in common. Yeah, there's a
precedent to the belief of being taken a lot, taken
away by something unknown or unseen, and then return. I
always wanted to long as a kid. One of my
favorite folklore stories was Rip van Winkle, Oh Sure, where
he falls asleep, time passes and he's playing these bowling
(26:58):
with the he he gets wasted one night. Any play
he goes bowling with it changes. Sometimes elves, sometimes their gnome.
Sometimes they're just sketchy mountain folk. They're like carneys, short
corner carneys, bowling with carneys that I it sounds like
(27:19):
something I would watch, read or listen to. I I
don't you know. I'm not that great at bowling. It's
a curse. So you you might get tricked into betting
a little bit and then a little more. You know.
Oh wow, is that I I don't know. So that's
a that's a fascinating story. And that's what I was
thinking when you brought up the idea of someone losing
(27:42):
time finding their age. And those two stories most likely exist,
and we're created independently, sure, I mean they may have
mortality is a heck of a motivator, so that probably
separately inspired the authors of the stories. But for the
(28:04):
purposes of this exploration, what that means is that there
may be elements of the Utsuru Buni story that either
come from another earlier story or were later transmitted to something.
And then there's also we will be remiss if we
(28:24):
didn't say the UFO USO angle, right shore floating object,
flying objects, submerged object, UH pros and cons for it
being one of those types of objects. Okay, well, let's
start off with the ship being made largely out of wood. Yes,
(28:44):
that you know, traditionally not a space faring material, or
at least not a ideal space faring material. Okay, so
that's a con. I'll do some devil's advocacy here and
say a pro would be that they had never seen
this type of craft before. Okay, yeah, that's that is
(29:06):
definitely up there. I know that the type of boat
was similar to something that they would be familiar with
with them rounded the no, the rounded bottom was a
boat shape that they would be used to, but the
top part was like completely out of the out of
the element, Like why would that be there? Um. Another
(29:28):
pro is the unusual appearance of the occupant, which to
them in this period would have probably would have been alien,
I mean not a not even alien extraterrestrial sense, just
a very very strange liking person. And if we want
to bridge kind of the folklore aspect and the UFO
(29:50):
USO aspect, we we look to some stuff having to
do with the Dragon, god of the sea reusion um.
And this is there's this place called the Dragon Palace Castle,
which is a translation, of course, that is at the
bottom of the sea where this god lives and he
has servants or the god has servants. There are let's see,
(30:15):
it's built out of solid crystal, which might bring in
you know what, they believed the windows to be created
out of um. And there are a lot of legends
about this place, and one of the legends has to
do with the inhabitants who had guess what, red hair
and pink skin. So it feels like maybe if you
(30:37):
see this and you know about these legends, you're aware
of Reugion and the denizens or excuse me, the inhabitants
of the palace under the sea, you may think, well,
maybe that's what this is. Maybe this is an emissary
from that realm, from that area, or you know, someone
trying to escape. Yeah, you know, and that that to
(31:00):
a great point because we know that having some pre
existing information, even if you're not, even if it's not
at the front of your mind, right, we know that
it it can be a very powerful priming influence. Yeah,
it's a lens that you end up seeing it or
even though you don't realize the lenses there Other ethnologists
and historians also took a look at this case um
(31:24):
often before it became kind of known in the West,
because you won't find a whole lot of information on
it in English. There are a lot of blogs. So
if you do speak Japanese speaking read Japanese, and you
have some Japanese sources that you would like to hit
(31:46):
us to, then please cinem our way um, give me
what you think the best translations are. I would love
to learn more about this. Here's what we have now
in various in various decades after this event February three,
uh other experts or scholars investigated this, and one fellow
(32:11):
named Yanagita Kunio really went deep. He went hard on
the painting, and he emerged a little more skeptical. So
he points out that the circular boat shapes as as
you said, Matt, we're not unusual in Japan. They've been
around for a while. And he said that the really
(32:31):
weird stuff for people at this time would have been
windows made of glass and those brazen protective plates, so
they would make it look um sort of exotic to
the people. Would be like seeing a modern car in
the time when you know the model t is the
thing that you see rolling down the street, you know,
with with all of the glass products and other things,
(32:54):
and it would just be strange. You couldn't really understand
what you're looking at. Yeah, exactly exactly, and it would
be kind of a It would be close enough that
you would say that's some sort of car, and now
they're like, that's some sort of boat. He also points
out that the oldest versions of this, not necessarily the
(33:20):
most popular, but the oldest versions, according to Yanagita, describe humble, circular,
open log boats without any dome, and he argues that
these details, these plates, and these windows and stuff were
added afterwards because people would inevitably ask, how did this
(33:48):
logboat make it across the open sea? Oh, that's a
great question, especially an open logboat like that, susceptible to
any kind of weather, to waves. It's just it's going down.
But if it's enclosed, I guess it makes a lot
of sense. So in this way, it's almost like adding
on details, not necessarily to a lie, but to a story.
(34:10):
You know that you're making up as you go, and
you add more details to make it seem more credible.
Embellishing the high seas could be a dangerous place, and
some of that may hinge on the shape of the boat,
because if you're imagining, you know, something more like a
lifeboat or a canoe, that would be that would probably
(34:31):
have a better chance because it's it's slightly better shape.
But no, this is just um a thing that's spherical
at the top and rounded at the bottom and bobbing along,
just moving where the ocean takes it. It's like bait
and tackle, you know. Strange. So Yanagita also points out
(34:52):
that most legends similar to that of the suro Bune
sound alike. Someone finds a strange person, almost always a
girl or young woman, inside a circular boat and either
rescues them or sends them back to the ocean. Huh
tails oldest time this time? Oh? I was going to
(35:13):
break into song there, Um yeah, I mean there are
so many legends about that kind of thing, and you
can imagine the stories that mostly male sailors would make
up while out on the high season. You're probably familiar
with a lot of them, you know. I'm glad you
brought that up, Matt, because it reminds me of one
(35:34):
of the strangest what are the strangest cases of sailors
stories that are found out about is it safe for work? Yeah,
it is, Well, we'll tell this safe for work version.
For a long time, since people were sailing the oceans, right, Uh,
(35:55):
there were always legends of sea monsters and of aquatic
creatures that were very close to people. Essentially Mr Folk
mermaids and sailors would talk about seeing mermaids from a
distance on the shore. I mean this goes back to
like Greco Roman stuff with sirens singing. Um. And then
(36:18):
the best guess that a couple of people have is
that they were manatees. That doesn't you know. That's the
thing that gets me. It's I keep thinking, how long
did these guys have to be out there on the
ocean to to think, uh, to mistake humanity for a person?
(36:40):
And this this misidentification, whether it was through you know,
seeing a seal or manity or another creature that would
kind of like lounge out. I mean, I guess maybe
a walrus, but the tusk would probably make it hard
to mistake. I guess it depends on the distance. But um,
(37:02):
you know, in a way, if these people were hoping
to see a human of some sort, that they were
always kind of primed to see it. And if people
were familiar with these sorts of legends, then they would
end up in the in the telling, especially if it's
(37:23):
oral recounting memories so treacherous, they might end up accidentally
adding details and somebody else misunderstands that add up into
something else. There were, Or if it's a great story
that you're retelling at a tavern somewhere, I mean, why
would you just say, oh, no, it was just a walrus.
That's no fun. I'm just saying, all of a sudden,
(37:48):
all of a sudden, it was a it was a
beautiful mermaid, and the person you found a drift in
this boat had hair extensions. I'm not discounting stories of
mr Folk. I'm just saying it's unlikely. That's all. The
ocean is a big place, and from our previous episodes,
we know that if there are any large undiscovered creatures today,
(38:10):
they have the odds are highest that they would exist
in the ocean. Right, so maybe they're there. I don't
want to I don't want to ruin that for anybody,
you know, but I do have to say they definitely
weren't um discovered by a certain channel on television in
a series called Mermaids can confirm that they absolutely were not.
(38:31):
And I would never play play ball with that notion. Um.
But I'm not going to act like I'm not gonna
go see aqua man. I'll check it out for sure.
I've diverted us. The The point here is that there
were other scholars who are taking vigorous looks at this.
One is named Dr Kazu Tanaka. Yes, this is a
(38:54):
professor for computer and electronics engineering at a university in Tokyo.
He investigated the original texts, the three texts that are
you can find now. They actually exist in real life
right now in museums. You can go and pick them up. Um.
And this he did this research and he's considering he's
(39:18):
really looking at the popular versions of UFO sightings, the
more modern ones that we can think about, and then
comparing those to the two Bune event, let's say, or
the retelling of it. And he he points out that
these legends of bun a it never, it never flies,
(39:39):
It never you know, drives, like we said, it has
no control mechanisms, at least it's not recorded. It doesn't
show any signs of technology besides being a boat and
maybe having some windows like extraordinary technology. Yeah, nothing beyond
what could be GPS, No lasers. No, Uh, what's that
thing in star Trek where it will just create any
(40:02):
food or beverage you desire? Oh, the it's the food machine.
I don't know what it's called. Or tricorder. They didn't,
she didn't have a tricorder with it, right, that's a
good example. It just I mean this, this ship just drift.
It just drifted across the water. It drifted to the fisherman,
or that it didn't even drift to them. They had
to go get it and reel it in and so uh.
(40:24):
Tanaka concluded that this tale was a mix of folklore
and imagination. He also based his assumptions on Yanagita's earlier work.
He had one more Uh, he had a couple more
holes to poke in this story to will examine after
(40:45):
a word from our sponsor, and we're back that there's
one big problem with this story. And it's a really
big problem that as somebody from the United States just
(41:08):
learning about this, I wouldn't have thought about unless somebody
like Dr Tanaka went through and actually examined it. And
that's the location of where this event purportedly happened. Yes,
According to Dr Tanaka, locations that have been referenced in
various accounts of this are in fact fictitious. Uh. He
(41:33):
specifically points out Haa, Tona, Hama, and Hawa Yadori to
make the anecdote sound credible. He believes the author designated
the beaches as personal acreages of a local landowner named
Ogasawa Nagashigi uh. And this this character did. This is
(41:54):
a real person who did live during the Edo period,
but his land was in the heartland, away from the water, right,
and so it seems pretty definite, at least according Dr Tanaka,
that this fellow never had any contact with the fishermen
on the Pacific coast. Uh. The Ogasawari clan served the
(42:15):
Tokugawa dynasty and they had power over most of northeastern
Japan until eighteen sixty eight, and that's a long time
after this occurred, right right, and there Um, their mainland
holdings were in the Hitashi province, and geographically that's very
(42:36):
close to Eastern beaches, and so Dr Tanaka found it
very odd that such a strange incident could have occurred,
and it wasn't commented upon in any official documents. Right,
you'd think so if something this strange and seemingly important
occurred to an individual who's that close and aximity to
(43:00):
power occurred, you think it would be written down somewhere.
Somebody somewhere is being told this, and they would go, Okay,
this strange thing happened. Perhaps there's some kind of invaders
going on with this. It's at least worth documentary, right Yeah.
And let's also keep in mind that this was during
(43:20):
a period of isolation, national insolation, right where in Japan
really limited um really limited a lot of international interactions,
so nearly all foreigners were barred from entering except in
a very specific circumstances. The common resident of Japan, like
(43:43):
the normal you know, Jane or John Doe of Japan
like you and I, had very little chance of ever
leaving the country. So this would have been beyond unusual,
right uh. And there is a remarkable incident that is
documented that Dr Tanaka found and it happened in eighteen
(44:06):
twenty four when a British whaler was stranded on the
northeastern coast of the Hitachi district. Before you ask, no,
he did not show up in a weird cupcake looking ship. Uh.
Tanaka also found out that during the rulership of the
Tokugawa clan, uh the Ogasawara family and the Tokugawa started
mapping their territories. And this is important because the names
(44:32):
of both of the beaches mentioned in the text are missing,
and they also do not appear on the maps of
the whole of Japan, which came out in nineteen o seven.
If the name of a village, a city, or a
place had changed in history, this would have been noted, right.
So because of this, Dr Tanaka thinks thinks that this
(44:58):
is probably just alleged and folklore, similar to um similar
to the stories in modern urban legends, right, you know
the nine one one trace the call, and the phone
call was coming from inside the house, and it wasn't
at this town, and it wasn't my first cousin, but
(45:18):
it's someone that knows my first cousin and they live
a few towns over. And there was a hook sticking
out of the side of the driver window. Yeah, and
I'm pretty sure it was a Pontiac. We the Pontiacs
not around anymore. This happened to someone's older brother who
went to a school a couple of districts away they think, yeah,
(45:39):
there were a few grades above us. It's always just
a little bit, a little bit too far to reach,
and it's tantalizing lee possible. And let's go back into
this account of the British whaler who got stranded. Uh.
The first accounting of this is recorded the next year
(45:59):
in the first the first one, what was it called
um Tales of the Rabbit Garden is when that is
officially written. So perhaps there's a little styling going on
there of something an actual occurrence, and then you bring
some folklore into it. I mean, that's as at least
a great tale to put into your book called Tales
(46:20):
from the Rabbit Garden. That's a good point. So we
know there's an isolation is placed where this sort of
incident would have been reported immediately, right. And also these uh,
ethnologists and historians who look back at this later in
the modern day, they they pointed out something that really
(46:40):
caught me, which is that originally aliens UFOs were not
part of the conversation. Okay, there was there wasn't like
a term for flying saucer, right, um so or extraterrestrial
I guess there might be a term, but it wouldn't
be applied the same way we use it today. A
(47:01):
visitor of sorts but not like that. So they're saying
that over time, the UFO thing got retro fitted onto it,
you know what I mean. The particularly European appearance of
the woman right uh, shades skin, red hair, uh, the
(47:23):
upper part of the utsu bune, and the unknown writing
right the language that the fisherman could not identify, lead
both Tanaka and Yanagita to the conclusion that the entire
story was based on this historical circumstance. Um people, if
the of the period, were totally insulated from the outside world,
(47:46):
so that this was more a tale reflecting xenophobic cultural attitudes,
sort of the same way again that modern urban legends
reflect fears that are already in popular culture, right like
in the nineties, the Satanic Panic, late eighties Satanic Panic
(48:07):
thing gripped the nation, and these people, every um, every
region had some sort of tale of a secret occult
thing going on. And in some cases I'll go on
record saying it, Yeah, in some cases they were probably true.
Not that like dark magic worked or anything, but there
were people who conducted ritual murders. Yeah, and it may
(48:29):
not have had anything to do with satan or anything
like that. Right, it made it, But that stuff happened,
it just didn't happen near as often, north widespread as
people thought it did. But there's often a seed of
truth in these sorts of stories. And if we look
at it from a structural perspective, the construction of the story,
(48:54):
it's ultimately like a lot of other legends itself explaining
the woman disappeared, No one in what she said, the
boxes goes with her. Yeah, there's no artifact, there's no ship, nothing.
And another thing which was new information to us is
that the people of the period here apparently had great
(49:17):
interest in paranormal things. Loved ghost stories, monster stories, bizarre events.
So it wouldn't be surprising to find these stories of
the strange and inexplicable in these books. Yeah, those are
the best stories in my opinion. That's I think one
of the big reasons why you and I and Nol
(49:38):
and Trystan are interested in these things, because it's so
other and outside of anything we experience that you get
to you live in that world where monsters exist and ghosts,
you know, remain after the physical body leaves. I think
we're going to have to differ here, Matt, you don't
(49:58):
want to live in though monsters do exist, I think,
But like krakens, or are we talking about human monsters?
What kind of monsters are we talking about? Where wolves?
So when we bring it all back together, what areur conclusions?
(50:20):
Could this be nothing more than a popular legend recited
over and over, changing a bit each time. It's pretty
clear that in the years following the initial reports, a
large portion of the population except that this is fact
believed something came ashore. But does that mean it actually happened?
I mean, the fictitious locations are real obstacle here yea.
(50:43):
And as far as Dr Tanaka looked into it, it
seems that those locations are Indeed, it's much more likely
that those locations were fictitious rather than renamed. Yeah. For me,
it's more and more feeling like a version or a
retelling of an older story that had some new details
(51:07):
put into it. And I really, I really think you're
well their analysis and then our going over the idea
that perhaps it was a morphing. It was a morphing
of these these folklore tales dealing with the isolationism in
the area at the time in the eighteen when the
(51:28):
story was written, and then later on kind of doing
the same thing, except for in more modern times in
the nineteen nineties, tales of alien spacecraft that were very
popular then get morphed like this thing gets or they
get pulled into this thing, right, So then it's just
kind of just been changing over time little by little.
(51:51):
But there there's some other questions, and I think we
can end on some questions here. How seaworthy would a
vessel like this actually be? As we said, no sales,
no steering equipment, no oars, etcetera. Where did it come from?
Could it have come from Russia? Perhaps? If you look
at some of the ocean currents around here, not around
(52:13):
here we're not right now, but around the land mass
of Japan. You see here on the coast there's a
current that goes from sort of southwest to northeast along
the bottom and then later sort of the eastern part
of Japan. But at the top there's a current in
(52:33):
the northeast, there's a current that goes the exact opposite direction.
So as these if you if you look at the
way these currents well swarm around, it looks like it's
possible that something with no steering could have drifted down.
But you know the best way to find that out
(52:56):
is to build one of these ships and put it
out the water and see what happens. What are you
what are you doing? What are you doing this summer?
I'm building around ship that has some brazen sides and
a couple of windows. But you know, the one last
thing we have to get into is is it possible
(53:18):
that there's something even crazier like the here's where it's
get it gets crazy moment? Like could this have been
a person that was pulled out of time, perhaps out
of some other dimension, out of some other you know,
maybe a time when ships did look like that, or
an alternate dimension. I know, that's you're getting into the weirdness.
(53:41):
I mean, probably not right, I especially because there's meat
and water, like some kind of container, water bedding, recognizable stuff. Yeah,
and oh yeah, and the language could have just been
cyrillic Russian. Sure, you know. And if there's nicely his policy,
then the chances of people knowing or even without like
(54:07):
speaking reading, just recognizing another written language and being able
to say, oh that's Russian, Oh that's French or something.
Those chances are pretty low. And the very last question,
the one that stuck with me. I don't know about you, Matt,
but the one that stuck with me, the one that
(54:28):
has our producer shrugging in uh, infuming and frustration. What
happened to the lady in the ship? What happened to
the woman on the ship. Well, she went back down
to the dragon palace and you know she got she
took a bunch of notes. She wrote them inside her ship.
That's what she was doing. That's why there's all the
writing there. And they were like, did you remember the box?
(54:51):
And she said definitely. The question is what was its function?
What was it doing? Maybe it was some kind of
sound recording device or a camera maybe yeah, maybe yeah,
maybe it was an a NES classic. If people are
getting doing weird stuff to you those that is that
(55:12):
how Nintendo? It was a brilliant marketing campaign that started
centuries ago, I know, for video games. I just found
out that they are making you know, cards in the
eight hundreds, which is pretty awesome. Nintendo, Good on you
for making that switch. Oh yeah, I didn't even expect
that one until it was nice. That's nice, and we
(55:35):
would like to hear your opinion about this, And additionally,
we would like to hear other historical anomalies that you
have found, because whether this is entirely a legend, whether
it's based in truth, whether it's something even weirder than
the various theories we explored today, we'd like to hear
about it. Yeah, and you're part of the world. Did
(55:57):
a ship like this show up in a little bit
later in eighteen o two, eighteen o three, Maybe this,
you know, matches up somewhere else in the world where
it just floated to. Did your parents, grandparents or ancestors
meet when one of them washed ashore the mysterious craft?
If so, have you taken a DNA test, we'd love
to hear about it, or just send us some d
(56:19):
n A and you know we'll take care of it.
Or you can write an email which reminds me it's
time for our chat at Corners. Our first shout out
comes from Sydney. Sidney says, Hi, guys, I was listening
to both episodes of your Serial Killers series. Loved them.
(56:41):
You said you might do a third one. I was
going to suggest maybe the West Mesa murders from Albuquerque,
New Mexico. I live here and people are still talking
about them pretty often. I don't know, check it out
if you want. Thanks for reading. Oh all right, Sydney,
I don't know much about that, Ben, are you aware
of these at all? This was absolutely news to me,
(57:02):
and I think we should do a third episode or
the installment of that series. So let us know if
we would like Matt Nolan I to uh to investigate
this in a future episode and send us just take
a page out of Sydney's book and send us your suggestions. Awesome,
Thank you for writing, Sydney. I'm glad that enjoy is
(57:24):
not the right word to use. I think we talked
about it in that episode. But there's something compelling and fascinating,
especially when you consider how many of these crimes occur
with relatively little fanfare outside of their region. I mean,
the Highway of Tears was an active hunting ground for
how long decades And just to add a little bit
(57:49):
of mystery here to the end of it, I just
looked it up. Ben. In two thousand nine, the remains
of eleven women were found buried in the desert of
West Mesa, and no suspects have been arrested, and a
serial killer is believed to be responsible. All right, we're
on the case. Our next our next shout out is
a little bit unusual. It's something that we we haven't
(58:12):
always done, ln It's something I'd like your help with, folks.
So I went on Twitter recently for a tangentially related
thing to ask a question, because I spent part of
an afternoon trying to figure out the proper plural of bigfoot?
Is it just big foot like sheep? Yeah, there are
(58:35):
there are several big foot and there are some sheep um?
Or is it big foots? Three big foots were on
the road that day? Or is it big feet? Man?
I don't even know how many big feet I was
here and walking around. These are great examples, Matt, this
is this is a gift. So we went on Twitter.
(58:56):
We asked about it, and we we got a lot
of responses. We're just read if you here. Oh man,
Yawn has a great one. This is my favorite. All right,
what is it? John says, I believe it's like surgeons
and attorneys general bigg's foot um? All right? Uh? And
(59:16):
then Stephen Even says one big foot, more big foot
and big foot ist definitely. Kyle Sherman says, I wonder
if you can call a group of Bigfoot a trample
a trample of big foot? You can, now, but then
what do you You've gotta still say something for a
trample of big Foot's See, here's the thing, Okay, I
(59:37):
was thinking, I spent way too much time thinking about this.
You wouldn't say teeth brushes if you had two tooth brushes.
That's very true. So also, yeah, you're never brushing a
single tooth. Well, I guess sometimes you are due to circumstances.
But it's a teeth brush. It's a teeth brush. So
(01:00:01):
we also had a buddy friend of the show, Josh Clark,
chime in. Do you Clark? I know that guy. He
and I talked about the issues, the important issues at hand.
He voted for bigfoots really, which is sort of what
David Bakara I feel like David Bakara from our earlier
Bigfoot interview. He the ploys used was Bigfoot's. Well, do
(01:00:24):
right in and let us know. Because I still can't
let this go and it seems like there's not really
a consensus. We have time for one more shoutout Jeff
from Ontario, shout out to you, Jeff says, hey, guys,
I just listened to the Pyramids episode. I listened to
the whole thing wondering if you were going to mention
the pyramids on Mars. By the way, that is pyramids
(01:00:47):
on Mars. I'm kind of glad you didn't go there.
It would have cheapened the sincerity of the subject. We
did mention something that actually I kind of need to correct.
I said a monolith on one of the moons of Jupiter.
That is incorrect. It's on one of the more moons
of Mars. But we did mention that. Let's get back
(01:01:08):
in here. Jeff also writes you were right about skaed
dooch proceeding Kung Fu Panda by quite a bit. I'm
a big Jabels fan and user of skadooche as sort
of an exclamation point, enough so that it was one
of my niece and nephew's first words, well, congratulations. It
brought them a ton of joy, and it was super
(01:01:28):
cute to see their smiles peek out as they struggle
to say it through their pacifiers. Thanks for the great show, Jeff, Well,
thank you, Jeff. You know, I think pyramids on any
other planet is just an awesome topic because if it
if we did find that, I mean the implications ben
(01:01:48):
right right. But again, going back to that episode, is
that a pyramid or is it just sort of a
pointy mountain? It's probably pointy rock, just like the one
that they've discovered. And yeah, and then also and this
will warm nles heart, will warm our colleagues heart to
(01:02:12):
hear your information about schedoos chaff. So thank you so
much writing. This concludes our gosh and that's the end
of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or
questions about this episode, you can get into contact with
us in a number of different ways. One of the
(01:02:32):
best is to give us a call. Our number is
one eight three three std w y t K. If
you don't want to do that, you can send us
a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i
heart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to
know is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
(01:02:53):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com