The US Marshalls got hacked. Mexican President Obrador believes in cryptids -- and tweets about it. NASA confirms success in the earlier DART attempt to knock asteroids off course. All this and more in this week's Strange News.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My
(00:26):
name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben.
We're joined as always with our superproducer Alexis codenamed Doc
Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. There is so much stuff happening in the world.
I can't remember when which episode is coming out, but
(00:49):
there were several other trained derailments quite recently and they
did not make the news, So we're keeping an eye
on that. There's a mystery fleet that's expanding across the globe,
legally moving Russian oil. Warhawks are saying Iran is twelve
days away from making material for a nuclear bomb, if
(01:10):
so they choose, And we're not talking about any of
that this time. We are exploring. We're exploring some strange
stories that also, like so many other things, occur below
the fold and need more attention. There is hope for
combating asteroids in outer space. This is true. The President
(01:33):
of Mexico turns out to be kind of a fan
of cryptids. And before we get to any of that,
it turns out that the US Marshall Service got hacked.
Now you might say, I'm not a US marshal, that
doesn't matter to me, but maybe wait, wait for a second.
(01:55):
This is where you found this one met Yeah, yeah,
and we're talking about in just a second. I think
it's important. And we mentioned a couple of things about
the train derailments before we jump into this, because we
saw we saw in Florida an example of what happens
when a train full of in this case propane, extremely
flammable materials derails, and it's really dangerous. It's a very
(02:17):
very dangerous situation. But we've seen the reaction to it,
in the response to it in the way that we
have mentioned and maybe hoped to have seen in East Palestine,
because that train, the materials were siphoned out of the
derailed train and they were removed out of there. The
train was either removed or put back on the tracks,
the depending on which ones you're talking about, like individual
(02:39):
rail cars, and everybody was safe. No huge fires, no
huge explosions, anything like that It's a little different in
East Palestine because there was fire right already involved in
the situation. But they carefully removed the materials. I mean
they removed a lot of them. Well, there was no lead,
(03:00):
there was no propanelea, at least Florida. I thought you
were talking about East Palestine. Okay, No, No, in East Palestine. Debacle,
horrible situation in Florida. Good job, guys. Then the thing
in Grease where where dozens of people were killed because
a passenger train and a freight train were on the
same dang track and just ran smack dab into each other,
(03:23):
which is pretty horrifying. Hey, I just wanted to bring
those two things up. It's worth your time to at
least look at them, see what happens, and learn a
little bit more, maybe on your own, just about how
frequent this stuff occurs. Derailments were so frequent, almost two
thousand a year in the US alone, and across the
world numbers much higher. Also in retrospect, I was pretty
(03:46):
lucky not to get detained, slash arrested when I got
that wild hair. But but yeah, in other countries they
are far less reticent about about taking reporters out and
making them, making them not past go and not collect
two hundred dollars or whatever. But be safe out there.
(04:08):
And one of the big things to remember is that
in many of these situations, the people who are actually
running the rails, people are running the trains, They are
not the problem. They are not the issue. And we
hope that if you haven't listened to our episode East
Palestine and Beyond, you do tune in and please let
us know. As we said, they're more about the attacks
(04:32):
on infrastructure that are occurring on a regular basis and
are often somewhat ignored by the news, and ask yourself
why they get ignored. And infrastructure, Matt, as we'll see,
is is not limited to physical things. I think we
could say it's fair to say right that nowadays intangible
(04:54):
infrastructure is just as vital. Right we're talking about records
stored in the cloud, We're talking about the Internet. This
is as vital a piece of modern infrastructure as as
a waterway would have been in times of old, and
sadly just as vulnerable. Oh yes, especially individual servers. So
(05:18):
like an individual system that is somewhat separated from the
larger infrastructure network of an organization, so that's what we're
talking about today, kind of a separated system or computer
system within the US Marshals Service. So the first thing
you may ask yourself is US Marshals. That sounds really familiar,
(05:38):
But what is that? I'm gonna give you the mission
statement according to a a movie, literally a movie called US Marshals.
I think Emmy Lee Jones, Well, they sounded like I
think it's either a sequel or I think it's obsequel
to the fugitive because it was the US Marshals that
were chasing that that old fugitive. Are support that scamp? Oh? Yes,
So watch the movie and this is their mission statement.
(06:02):
The mission of the US Marshal Service is to enforce
federal laws and provide support to virtually all elements of
the federal justice system by providing for the security of
federal court facilities and the safety of judges and other
court personnel, apprehending criminals, exercising custody of federal prisoners, and
providing for their security and transportation to correctional facilities. There's
(06:24):
a little more almost done, executing federal court orders, seizing
assets gained by illegal means, and providing for the custody
management and disposal of forfeited assets and assuring the safety
of endangered government witnesses and their families wit SEC. Also,
I love the idea. Something about this story made me
(06:48):
go into a brief rabbit hole. Man, I was licking
up the YouTube clips of like reporters and law enforcement
figures the world the world around who have confiscated usually
big amounts of cannabis and their solution is to burn
it in a bonfire. Yeah, breaths are always a man. Yes,
(07:13):
But which SEC? You know, we should also we're talking
about this briefly off air, we should also do an
actual episode on which SEC on Witness Security or you know,
most people know it as the Witness Protection Program. It's
a very real thing, uh, and some of the people
involved in it might be listening to the show today.
(07:34):
We promise we won't say your other name. Also, I
mean you mentioned transporting prisoners and any one of us
have possibly been on a flight where there's you know,
an air marshal um, you know, present member of it's
a special designation, but that's a member of the US
Marshals Service, right. It's good that they're there, um, And
(07:56):
you know, the idea is to blend in like a
plain clothes, but you can tell if you if you
know they to look for, you could tell. You know,
it's like an agent provocateur at a at a protest,
You're like, huh, those are general issue boots, you know. Yeah,
So next time you're boarding a plane and you're walking
(08:19):
down the aisle, if you're in one of those last groups,
just keep your eyes out and make sure to find
them and then give them a good wink, maybe a
little touch of the nose. It'll just walk by it
under your breath. Go nice. I'm joking. Don't go for
the gun. That was a dumb, dumb joke. Do not
(08:40):
quote me on that. Do not take that out of
context the internet. Don't do any of the things we
just said. We're completely joking. We're being silly. Uh, okay.
So that's what marshals are. That's what they do. Um.
They're very, very important to the justice system, and they
are the I think guys, correct me if I'm wrong here.
I believe the US Marshals are the oldest law enforcement
(09:03):
organization within the US. Isn't it That may or may
not be true like federal organization. Yeah, you think about
Marshals in terms of the Old West. They always call
them Marshall though I wonder if that's got anything to
do with them. Yeah, they go back to the seventeen hundreds,
like shortly after the foundation of the country. Oh yes,
(09:24):
So what happened. They were the targets of a ransomware attack.
So this is an attack where the word hackers comes up.
Hackers some people who are very good at using computer
programs to infiltrate other networks. They targeted, probably targeted the
US Marshall Service. And we just have to breed from
(09:47):
one of these articles. You can find basically a four
to six paragraph right up on this in every major
news outlet, but it has the same information. I highly
recommend heading over to NPR dot org and reading Jenna
McLaughlin's article titled hackers steal sensitive law enforcement data in
a breach of the US Marshals Service because this article
(10:10):
has a little more breadth than a lot of the
other reporting. So we're going to read a little bit
of this just so we get an understanding. The US
Marshals Service revealed it was the victim of one of
these cyber attacks last week. This is published on the
twenty eighth of February. By the way, according to a
spokesperson of the US Marshals, it was a major incident
(10:32):
which impacted a standalone computer system that contained records about
targets of ongoing investigations and employee personal data, as well
as internal processes of the US Marshal Service. That's not good. Well,
one thing we've learned over the years here, what is
one of the major things the CIA protects of their
(10:55):
operations their processes. Yeah, it's the methods used, the methods
which according to this reporting and all the other reporting,
we don't know if that's that's essentially what was captured there, right,
What are the procedures to get things done, to make
things happen? Was it just information about employees? Was it?
(11:18):
You know, what do those internal processes mean? Basically? But
also just records on targets of ongoing investigations. If that
information gets into the wrong hands, people who are currently
under federal investigation could know about it, and that would
be really bad. Yeah, because you want to keep that
you want to keep that information hidden until you have
(11:39):
something solid. I would imagine not to mention the identity
of all those air marshals we're talking about, Yeah, that'll
undercover or the marshals who are let's say, keeping watch
over people in the Witness Protection program, right, So if
you can, if you can locate the marshals, then and
(12:00):
you can triangulate maybe like it's a little scary and
it's probably really scary actually for people who are involved
in that program. Here is the next thing which is
important though. According to that same spokesperson from the Marshal Service,
the system that was breached did not include personal details
about people in wit SEC, so in the federal Witness
(12:21):
Protection Program. M Yeah, from my understanding, Matt, this included,
like you said, personally identifiable information to subjects of investigation
and to some employees. But then there's the nebulous third
parties clause. They also got something on third parties. And
(12:41):
it makes me wonder what a lot of people don't
understand when they're script kitties, which is a derogatory term
in the in the hacking community. When they're script kitties
and they're just like cutting and pasting code or exploits,
I don't think a lot of them are aware that
some of these systems are designed to bite back so
(13:03):
that such that you might feel you have successfully infiltrated something,
but now it's that system has learned more about you
and identified you. So it seems pretty ballsy to go
against the Marshall's system. And that makes me wonder would
this be like a foreign power? Would it be organized crime?
(13:26):
I mean, do we know anything about the possible perpetrator
right now? We know nothing. We know that government agencies
like this and especially you know, intelligence agencies are ripe
targets for foreign actors, right these are pretty nice targets
for them, and it is a ransomware attack, but we
(13:48):
don't have a ton of details about what actually happened.
Like we've seen here that information was being siphoned off
of that server at the Marshall Service, and then we
don't know if the com was locked, if all the
files were just encrypted within that server, don't We don't
know a bunch of specifics, and they're not giving a
bunch of specifics to be honest. At least, this was
(14:11):
basically something that was put out to Reuter's, NBC News
ran with it, and everybody else picked up on it.
It's literally not known if a ransom was demanded, right
we're calling it ransomware, because it appears to have the
same types of things happening that a ransomware attack would,
and do we know much about potential next steps that
(14:36):
the US marshals have maybe communicated it. It feels to
me like a lot of the aftermath of this is
not going to be public for a minute, right, No,
it's a forensic investigation, right, like computer forensics investigation. That's
going to be complicated and probably take a while. The
biggest thing is securing other parts of the network that
(14:58):
weren't connected but are similar. Right. If you imagine somebody
got in, somebody broke into a cottage that's on some
big property, right, but the cottage is a little further away.
It's isolated and separated from the main house or whatever
it is. If you're really bougie like that. People they
broke into that cottage, they got accessed everything in there.
(15:21):
It's still on the property, but it's not connected, So
we got to make sure the main house is secure.
I think that's probably what's happening right now. I mean
that's better than the alternative, right, which is, you know,
the worst gay scenario for the protective side the subject
of the hack, the worst gay scenario is to not
(15:42):
know that a hack has occurred while someone has keys
to your house. Yes, so they know that part. They
know that someone got in. They're not saying publicly who
it was, but they are. They're probably going to have
to reevaluate or even escal a lot of operations at
this point because you could sell that data. Oh, I
(16:05):
can't believe. I didn't think about that until just now
to the highest bidder. I mean, it's essentially like it's
government secrets. That's what it is like in Maddie. Both ends,
we come to deal with immense respect and a little
tip about friends in the Marshall's Service. You might want
to keep an eye on those on those trucks selling
(16:27):
lose cigarettes. I don't know why that's like. I've got
a hypothetical for us before we leave. What if you
wanted to capture people who were enemies of the Marshal Service,
If you wanted to capture people in a net who
wanted to do harm to people in the Witness Protection program,
(16:49):
what if you put out a story about a bunch
of information being taken from your own servers. Right, we
have all this information. It was it was stolen. It's
all this valuable stuff, and then you go on the
dark web and you set a trap honeypot, and you
and you say, hey, we're selling this information, and you
(17:13):
see who bites. And from that, from that point forward,
you actually use it against people. It could be counterintelligence.
I'm just saying you could use it and not even
like snag them right away, you know, just use it
to keep tabs, give them some false info maybe info.
I'm just I don't think that's actually what's happening here.
That feels too complicated. But it's a fun idea, a
(17:37):
fun idea, it's a good idea. Can I just add
before we we this, I was just thinking about hackers.
I was just going down a rabbit hole of like
silly hacker names, and I found a giant list. I
just wanted to read some of my favorites. We've got
let's see Capslock Holmes, Babe Root, We've got Baby Underscore,
(17:58):
got dot back, this is a file structure joke. And
then we've got Barista, Creepshot, Barren snow Crasher, Bash Cassidy
and Beyonce Nuls. I don't know if any of these
are real, but they're fun. They are very fun. So
(18:18):
right now, we're gonna take a break, but we'll be
right back and hear more about this weird picture that
a really important person posted. Oh come on, come on,
it's proof, all right, whatever adds? Okay, So imagine this.
(18:40):
I want to set the stage here, folks. Let's say
you live in the United States and you know that
these are very divided times, and everybody has a Twitter account,
And one day President Biden came onto Twitter and said, hey, guys,
I know there's a lot going on. Hang on, let
me put my glasses on for a Biden impression. I
(19:03):
know there's a lot going on these days, but has
anybody seen this picture of the chooper cup? Just look
at it. Everything is magical. That's exactly what happened not
too long ago in Mexico. Current Mexican President andre's Manuel
Lopez Obrador tweeted the followed and I would like to
(19:26):
share this tweet. I'd like to read this to you all.
He tweeted two photos and one one is a picture
of some ruins and that's totally in line, like these
are ancient Mayan ruins. And the other photo on the left.
(19:47):
I don't know if you guys have seen this yet
it appears to be a creature of some arboreal bent
who is kind of hustled up, clinging to the trunk
of a tree, kind of high up in the tree,
and said, our boreal ent bent. Oh okay, sorry, isn't
an end like a type of Tolkien universe? Yeah? So
(20:10):
that I heard our boreal and that's what made my
brain go to that. But sorry, please cons totally so
the this creature, if we're being honest, I just wanted
to use the word ar boreal. This this creature looks
like it has a little bit of a hood and
it has two dark, beady eyes. Let me let me
(20:31):
share a picture here. I want to see if we
can get a good look at this together. Okay, so
I've shared the picture with us. Have you guys seen
this photo before you send it to our group? Text threatened?
That's right. It looked like one of those kind of
you know, what do you call a ring camera kind
of creepy pasta kind of deals um, a little bit
(20:53):
of the old night vision vibes um, but a little
more palpably something than most of those, wouldn't you say? Yeah,
it reminds me, you know, those little guys in the
Star Wars universe. Jawa's yeah, Jawa's just so. It looks
like a Jawa that got up a tree. Get that.
(21:13):
Get that fella down from there. Call the fire department.
Has your Jawa been stuck in a tree? Call us
one eight three three std WYTK where we're getting. You know,
it's tough economic times, so we're doing Jawa removal in
addition to podcasts. Now, those guys are fierce, they're vicious.
They'll be in here with one of those spear staff
(21:34):
Shelailey things they carry. Leave it to the professionals. Folks,
we're here for you, and we're here for the President
of Mexico. In this respect, he's okay. This tweet went viral.
Most people thought he was joking, but he seems to
genuinely believe that he is sharing a photo that was
(21:56):
taken a few days before he posted. It's it's from
an engineer, and he says it appears to be an
alu or almost like a duende, a mischievous woodland elf
like spirit in Maya folklore. What is it? Call ben? Sorry,
I didn't hear aluche o hard my pronunciation a lu
(22:18):
x or a luxe and this this is like the
kind of spirit you see present in so many other
types of folklore across the world, you know, like there's
the story of the Brownie in parts of Europe, there's
the idea of the hidden folk. All kinds of spirits
right populate belief systems of the world in ancient times
(22:40):
to today. But we did not know, mister President, that
you were a cryptozoologist. So if you look at the
tweet the English translation, he's essentially said, I'm sharing two
photos of our supervision of the Mayan train works. One
taken by an engineer three days ago apparently shows and
(23:02):
a luke cha, another by Diego Prieto of a splendid
pre Hispanic sculpture and eck balam. Everything is mystical and illuminated,
or we could do a different read like everything is mystical.
He's having this weird kind of McConaughey Harrelson moment, Bud,
(23:25):
he's soft at my guy, and he's and he's he's
serious about it. But people have already started asking some questions.
I guess we should say the Maya train is a
railway that's going to be about a thousand miles long,
and it's been pitched as a way to spark local
(23:45):
economic development where it's being constructed. Is he using this
as an argument against this project? I don't know. It
reminded me of the stories from Iceland wherein construction companies
will build roads around what they say see as as
the home of spirits, right, trolls even. Yeah, And so
(24:06):
this thing goes viral. Everybody thinks he's joking. He emphatically
is not, And and then people start looking into the
actual photo he posted, which you can see online Twitter wherever.
And the image does not have metadata, so we don't
really know. We can't really prove who took it or
(24:28):
when it was taken. And this is interesting because the
photo itself might be older than the President appears to believe.
In fact, it's nearly identical to another photo from twenty
twenty one, which is why it was a little trick
question when I asked, have you guys seen this photo before? Yeah,
(24:48):
but it wasn't described as that creature. It was described
as a witch. Yes, yeah, it's a bit. It strikes
a bit of a witchy figure. I'm not gonna lie.
I mean the outline, the glowing eye also reminds me
of a Thaie film called Uncle Boone Me who can
recall his past lives. Oh yeah, so kind of Yeah,
it's neat has some kind of woodland time traveling spirit
(25:12):
type things that are like almost looked like the way
shadow people are depicted in terms of those like kind
of waking nightmare situations that we've discussed to sleep sleep paralysis,
and we're going to talk about some of our favorite
horror movies later in the week. I believe Matt, you
found something, and I know you were. You were looking
(25:32):
in the Mexican news sources as well, So you've found
something that talks about how this photograph is probably older
than the President of Mexico believes, or at least believed
in his tweet. Yes, and as you said, it was
from twenty twenty one, and I mean it's on debate
(25:53):
dot com dot MX and it it was posted on
it looks like February tenth, twenty twenty one. I think
that's how the date is written. Yeah, and it's saying
that this was an alleged witch that was caught up
in a tree at a very specific place, General Tehran
Nuevo Leon And this does remind me very much of
(26:17):
our One Day episode from a while back, if you remember,
what we have to realize is that there's an interesting
parallel of double think in many cultures, wherein someone will say,
I consider myself a pretty skeptical person, give me the facts.
But then also traditionally there are some things that I'm
(26:38):
just going to I'm just going to say, hey, maybe
maybe they're out there. It's kind of the way Iceland
treats their cultures belief in the supernatural. That's how a
lot of different countries will treat belief in ghosts or spirits,
you know. And the question here for a lot of
the experts, including folklorists, the question is why did the president,
(27:02):
the President of Mexico, why why is he why is
he coming out in support of the existence of these
creatures who are kind of they're often described as like
tiny and short and hairy. You know, they're little scamps too.
They won't like poison your well or kill your firstborn,
but they're going to open up the gate and let
(27:23):
the goats out, you know. Are they're gonna like shoes
in different places? Remember the Yule Lads been in I
believe is that Icelandic culture oh, the yule Lads. I
don't know. I mean, I'm okay with I'm okay with
us naming hackers on air, but I don't want to
mess with the ul Ads. Sausage sniffer, Yeah, they all
say sniffer m yeahs they do weird stuff. Yeah, they
(27:50):
all have their little moves. That's Iceland. Yes, and they
used to you're right, and they used to be much
more dangerous back in the day, or regarded as such,
which happens a lot with folklore. With this, I don't know,
it's strange because you can see it's reported in New
York Times, it's in the Guardian, and a lot of
folks are saying, or a lot of folks are conjecturing
(28:13):
that this was like a tongue in cheek human interest
move on the part of the president. It worked. I'm
not sure did it worked. We're talking about it, you know,
And this is where we're keeping this one short because
I'm gearing up for some more paranormal stuff. We got
to get back to it, so we don't want to
say everything about this. But I did want to end
(28:35):
on a question for a fellow conspiracy realist, which is this,
do you live in a part of the world where
belief in the supernatural is still, to a degree prevalent.
If so, what are what are the spirits or the
creatures that people talk about? And equally as important, do
you think the actual again, the actual president of Mexico,
(28:58):
do you think that he j uinely believes in creatures
like this the Aluches or the Luxe's spelled a l
u x e S. Would love to know your thoughts.
You can hit us up and any variety of means
or platforms or just you know, tell your favorite mysterious
tree elf to travel our way in Atlanta, Georgia, and
(29:21):
we'll speak to them directly. It'd be cool if we
had them on air, you know. Dream Big Matt's like, yeah, sure,
sure buddy. Okay. So, like I said, we're we've got
a lot of stuff in the mix in the next
few weeks. There was some big things happening. So we're
gonna keep this one a little bit shorter. We're gonna
pause for a word from our sponsors, and we're gonna
(29:42):
end with some potentially good news for the future. And
we're back and gentlemen, have you seen the film Armageddon
or perhaps Deep Impact any number of the asteroid related
disaster films. Disasteroid films so many times deep intact. Yeah, yeah,
(30:09):
for sure, there's there's others. It's definitely a genre. Um.
I think probably Armageddon is the one that we think
of the most. Don't know if that one got a
criterion release. I think that The Rock definitely did. But
Armageddon is also a oh gosh, what's the guy's name,
Bruckheimer's that his name? One of those big, blustery blockbuster
(30:30):
movies about a ragtag band of of every men and
some scientists that go to outer space to land on
a doomsday asteroid that's that's careening towards planet Earth. But
Michael Bay confused Bruckheimer and Bay Bay is the Transformers guy,
but they're both. Yeah, they're similar. He's known for his
(30:51):
subtle plot construction very much. So. Yeah, so this, this
asteroid depicted in the film Armageddon would potentially breach Earth's
atmosphere and cause all kinds of hellish chaos, you know, um,
potentially if it hit in the ocean, you know, it
caused tidal waves and all that kind of stuff. There's
truth to that, I mean there, you know, if if
(31:12):
a large body were to collide and it were big enough.
You know, we've always heard about oh, it'll burn up.
Anyone that hits will probably burn up in the atmosphere
before it hits Earth. If they were sufficiently large, like
planet sized or something, that would be bad because we
wouldn't entirely burn up. Probably. Um. And you hope that
that Uncle sam Uh and his government are considering this,
(31:36):
coming up with some kind of you know plan uh
And and yes, this is very true. They have been
doing that. Um. Of course, we've got the Space Force,
which is not directly tied to this. We also have
a program that NASA has been working on for some
time now called DART. I think we've discussed DART at
some point, Yes we have. Yeah, it's it's part of
(31:58):
NASA's planetary strategy and it stands for double Asteroid Redirection Test.
And JOHNS. Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland were
also involved. And the idea is to send essentially a
small spacecraft on a collision course with an asteroid that
(32:23):
could potentially be bad news for planet Earth. And they
did that thing and to have NASA describe it after
ten months flying in space NASA's double Asteroid Redirection Test,
the world's first planetary defense technology demonstration, successfully impacted it's
asteroid target on Monday, the agency's first attempt to move
(32:44):
an asteroid in space. So this is interesting. This is
very an interesting distinction on in the movie arm at
get In that we've been talking about, the goal was
to put explosives into the thing, drill down in it.
They have like one guy, I think Bruce will character
is like a drilling expert, and that's a big part
of it. Why they have to have him. It's got
(33:04):
to be him, um, and you know, fill the thing
with with with dynamiter some equivalent and blow it up
into much smaller pieces, which seems like it would also
cause multiple problems. But this is not their goal. Their
goal is to move it, to alter its course. And
if you theoretically moved it enough, you know it's far
enough away, just a little bit of movement, even in
(33:26):
the time it would take for such a you know,
asteroid to reach Earth, probably would steer clear of it entirely.
That's the dream, and that's we were talking about. Dart
back in twenty twenty two, right when they first when
they first gave this a go, and it's really impressive too.
I mean, I think it's easy to sit on planet
Earth and say, well I saw Armageddon and I think
(33:49):
you all could do better. But but they're doing massive science,
making more of a show. You know, whatever happened a showmanship? Um,
But no, this is the smart move. The really cool
thing about this is the reason why they even targeted
this asteroid, which was actually two asteroids, a larger one
and a smaller one, and they targeted the small one
(34:10):
and had that impact hit the small one because it
has a smaller mass, which increased increases the probability that
they're actually going to make an impact, a deep impact
on the on the orbit of that thing. The smaller
one around the larger asteroid right right, that would be
dia MorphOS is the small one, and the chalker is
(34:31):
Diddy most there you go, Yeah, who was now short
his name, but just Diddy. It's a rebranding for the
moving forward. I'll learned a new word today that makes sense.
It's easy to put this on the end of most things.
But a moonlight, that's what diamorphos is. It's an asteroid moonlight.
And when we say small, it's still a big old fellow,
(34:52):
but one hundred and sixty meters in diameter, whereas the
larger buddy is seven hundred and eighty meters in amateur. Yeah.
But the cool thing to me, guys, is it the
whole reason they targeted is so they could measure the
orbit of the small one around the big one, to
measure the change to see if it actually did enough
or you had enough of an impact that we could
(35:14):
use that same idea and target of just a single
asteroid that was headed towards Earth and make enough of
a change where it just misses us and then hopefully
for the next however many hundred years would continue to
miss us. Proof of concept. Yeah, and it was. It
did work. Yeah. The quote this is by the way,
directly from the NASA press release about this, and the
(35:36):
quote comes from Thomas Zerbuchan. Zerbuchan seems like a German
name Associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA
headquarters in Washington. Breath and he said, this planetary defense
is a globally unifying effort that affects everyone living on Earth.
Now we know we can aim a spacecraft with the
precision needed to impact even a small body, because again
(35:58):
that's the test, right, easier to do it with a
larger body. And then I guess he's got to take
into calculation in the mass and build your spacecraft accordingly.
One wouldn't imagine because you got to match it. One
would think to make a move. And I want to
talk more about that in the second too. But he
goes on, now he can aim a space crack with
the precision needed to impact even a small body in space.
(36:18):
Just a small change in its speed is all we
need to make a significant difference in the path and
asteroid travels. Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure, there's a little
bit of math involved, as you might as you might assume,
but I also want to posit just for the good
folks at NASA a possible money saving measure. This could
hit two problems with one figurative non asteroid stone Superman.
(36:43):
I was gonna say super pigs really close, but like
they're so good at ruining environment. What if we just
have like a whole passle of super pigs and just
shoot them on mass into the asteroid. Then it's like
that cobra problem, Ben, you know, or the rat problem
where you deploy all these these these creatures to solve
(37:03):
a problem. And then now we have Ferrell Space, pigs,
Ferrell Space. I know, man, I'm just like roll the
dice at this point with all the problems of the world,
you know, And I love, I love when we talk
about space. You guys know that. And I'm just I'm
bringing up the pigs because it feels like you gotta
find something to do with them. It's still fresh, and
(37:24):
we're gonna talk more about that, I think in our
next episode in this week's listener, Maile episode M. But
we can't talk about space, by the way without dropping
some absolutely bonkers acronyms. Oh please, Yeah. We already have DART,
which is the double by the way, double asteroid. It's
like a double fantasy, you know, double asteroid redirection tests.
(37:45):
And we also have some some tech, some cutting edge
tech that was associated with this mission. One of them
is called DRACO and this is the spacecraft's only instruments
measurement instrument, and that stands for the Diddymos Reconnaissance. It's
an asteroid camera for optical navigation, beautiful navigations. Extra but
why not just have it be Drake Kahn. I always
(38:08):
wonder about that when they have an extra word that
isn't part of the acronym, it's just implied. I don't
care for that. Drake Kahn sounds cooler than drake koe
even but maybe not. I don't know. No, I think
you're making a really, really solid point. All three of
us have seen some pretty awkward acronyms, and you know,
it's no secret that on this show, it's a mystery
(38:28):
to us as to how those acronyms get chosen. Whose
job is it the Is it considered, you know, kind
of a crap job that an intern gets, or is
it the privilege of the people at the top who
are saying, like I have spent decades at NASA, it's
my turn to come up with a name. And do
you like work backwards from the cool, buzzy sounding word,
(38:50):
you know, to get what the actual letters stand for,
because these are all pretty scidency words. But I guess
may be part of that is deciding whether or not
to leave one out so that you can make the
cool right. I bet it's some combination of the two.
The next one is smart nav nav of course is navigation,
but you can't put an inn after smart because then
(39:10):
how do you say that smarten smart could, but it
would be it doesn't really read very well. So smart
nav and the smart stands for small body. They've chosen
to hyphenate that, which I guess is grammatically correct small
body maneuvering autonomous real time navigation smart NAV. That was
another tool control system. So are we are we saying, first,
(39:32):
thank you brilliant, brilliant space experts for making some real
progress in trying to save the world, but also sharpen
up your acronyms. Is that what we're saying? No question
always always a two for there one thing I'm trying
to find this in the release. One would presume that,
(39:54):
I mean that is a one way mission. I mean
the spacecraft is lost right like, it's smashed at this point,
it's not coming back. Things like that. I think that
would be a whole other level of complexity, a whole
other bag of space badgers to make something that could
boomerang successfully. But it's not out of the realm of possibility. No,
(40:14):
it's not. And one thing I don't typically I guess
put in these kinds of press releases is how much
the thing costs. But one would presume, knowing what we
know about like intercontinental ballistic missiles and even things like that.
Something with this level of tech probably not cheap. So
a test like this damn well better been successful. And
it was. But we do have a good news, a
(40:37):
bit of good news to leave off with on this.
We are not expected to be in danger of an impact,
a deep impact by any planetary body you know or
whatever you know, asteroid for at least a hundred years,
because you got to remember, it took the spacecraft ten
months to even reach this destination to do the thing
(41:01):
to make that impact. So we're probably okay for the
time being, but it's good, good to be prepared, better
to have it and do the one test, then just
have them in reserve for when the time does come,
if we still even have technology and infrastructure by then,
if the Internet hasn't been erased by solar coronal mass
ejections or whatever we talked about this last time. But
(41:22):
the first thing humanity has to do is see these
things before they hit us. And we're kind of we're
doing better. We're not there yet, yeah, say, we've been
slacking off a little bit on watching the sky, making progress,
making progress from doomed to in a terrible situation. They
(41:42):
there you go. I was saying, nobody who is doing
that work is slacking off. It's just there's a lot
of sky. Yeah. I certainly was not throwing shade at
any individual skywatcher. I just mean, probably there's not enough
eyeballs over all, whether they be virtual or otherwise. But
(42:02):
why can't that stuff be I mean, I'm surely there
are systems in place that would set off some kind
of clason like in the movies, you know, if one
of these things is cited. But again we're talking far
far away, and I guess it could be fragments that
are new that then if they're smaller, they travel faster.
I'm not sure. I mean, it could be the atmosphere
(42:25):
is very good at eating things, but when they when
they enter. But also there are problems beyond asteroids that
that potentially compose a much more difficult threat to address.
I'm thinking of gamma rays, gamma wave burst in particular.
These things can travel so fast that you kind of
(42:48):
have a moment to know what's going to happen, and
then you're gone. Shout out to our pal Josh Clark
with his fascinating podcast from Fears Back called The End
of the World, where I think he talks about the
gamma burst issue, but one problem at a time. I mean,
this is awesome science, and this is good news. This
is good news, and this research has to continue. It's vital.
(43:11):
It's like the infrastructure problem. People don't know how important
it is until something goes wrong, you know what I mean? Yeah, no,
for sure. And I've got to wrap this up with
a shout out to somebody else, Comedian John Daley, who
y'all probably are familiar with. He's on Comedy Bang Bangalat
and your mention of gamma rays reminded me of a
hilarious red Hot Chili Pepper's parody song that he created
(43:34):
called Abra Cadabra La Foreigna, and it is just absolutely
spot on. But there's a really great lyric when he
starts rapping like Anthony Ketas, he says, I drink an
Alabama Slamma with your sexy ass Grandma. The Hulk turns
green when the rays get gamma. I didn't think that
is brilliant wordplay, if bars beautiful. I also just a
(43:57):
reminder here before you end at Noel, there was a
meteor that's a very small one about a meter in diameter,
a meter meteor it a meteor a meteor meter diameter meteorite.
It back. It was in mid February when it's just
(44:22):
this tiny little meteor. It struck Earth, burned up in
the atmosphere. As Ben said, the atmosphere ate it. But
it was only discovered like an hour or two just
before it hit. So basically we had enough time to go, oh, crap,
and then it burned up, but it was small enough
to where it didn't cause any damage. But that kind
of thing is happening all the time, right, So if
(44:45):
ever you have a relaxing afternoon and you're not worried
about something, just imagine, just look up at the sky
and imagine all the stuff that's out there. We are
so funny. By the way, that was that was the
seventh time a me has been seen just before it
made impact, seventh times in history. Like train derailments, these
(45:07):
are like cosmic train derailments. They happen way more often
than you think. And with that, you know, maybe we
should maybe we should consult the President of Mexico. Maybe
he has some hot tips on our elves could come
into play. He seems like he'd be fun at parties.
Maybe we can, maybe we can find out, maybe we
can officially invite him on the show. In the meantime,
(45:32):
we would love for you to be part of the show. Folks.
Let us know your thoughts. We cannot wait to hear
from you, especially if you have experience in what sec
in particular, I think we're all getting caught on that one.
Or if you work for the Mexican government, or if
you are on the front lines of protecting Earth from
(45:54):
cosmic threats, any of that bonus points. If you've got
leads for another episode of a few, our best episodes
come from you. Specifically, if you have one burning in
your mind right now and you need to tell us immediately, well,
we're here to help you out. We try to be
easy to find online. Boy do we ever so easy.
You can find us as Conspiracy Stuff on Twitter, YouTube,
(46:16):
and Facebook, or we have our conspiracy group. Here's where
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(46:39):
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(47:21):
don't want you to know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My
(00:26):
name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben.
We're joined as always with our superproducer Alexis codenamed Doc
Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
to know. There is so much stuff happening in the world.
I can't remember when which episode is coming out, but
(00:49):
there were several other trained derailments quite recently and they
did not make the news, So we're keeping an eye
on that. There's a mystery fleet that's expanding across the globe,
legally moving Russian oil. Warhawks are saying Iran is twelve
days away from making material for a nuclear bomb, if
(01:10):
so they choose, And we're not talking about any of
that this time. We are exploring. We're exploring some strange
stories that also, like so many other things, occur below
the fold and need more attention. There is hope for
combating asteroids in outer space. This is true. The President
(01:33):
of Mexico turns out to be kind of a fan
of cryptids. And before we get to any of that,
it turns out that the US Marshall Service got hacked.
Now you might say, I'm not a US marshal, that
doesn't matter to me, but maybe wait, wait for a second.
(01:55):
This is where you found this one met Yeah, yeah,
and we're talking about in just a second. I think
it's important. And we mentioned a couple of things about
the train derailments before we jump into this, because we
saw we saw in Florida an example of what happens
when a train full of in this case propane, extremely
flammable materials derails, and it's really dangerous. It's a very
(02:17):
very dangerous situation. But we've seen the reaction to it,
in the response to it in the way that we
have mentioned and maybe hoped to have seen in East Palestine,
because that train, the materials were siphoned out of the
derailed train and they were removed out of there. The
train was either removed or put back on the tracks,
the depending on which ones you're talking about, like individual
(02:39):
rail cars, and everybody was safe. No huge fires, no
huge explosions, anything like that It's a little different in
East Palestine because there was fire right already involved in
the situation. But they carefully removed the materials. I mean
they removed a lot of them. Well, there was no lead,
(03:00):
there was no propanelea, at least Florida. I thought you
were talking about East Palestine. Okay, No, No, in East Palestine. Debacle,
horrible situation in Florida. Good job, guys. Then the thing
in Grease where where dozens of people were killed because
a passenger train and a freight train were on the
same dang track and just ran smack dab into each other,
(03:23):
which is pretty horrifying. Hey, I just wanted to bring
those two things up. It's worth your time to at
least look at them, see what happens, and learn a
little bit more, maybe on your own, just about how
frequent this stuff occurs. Derailments were so frequent, almost two
thousand a year in the US alone, and across the
world numbers much higher. Also in retrospect, I was pretty
(03:46):
lucky not to get detained, slash arrested when I got
that wild hair. But but yeah, in other countries they
are far less reticent about about taking reporters out and
making them, making them not past go and not collect
two hundred dollars or whatever. But be safe out there.
(04:08):
And one of the big things to remember is that
in many of these situations, the people who are actually
running the rails, people are running the trains, They are
not the problem. They are not the issue. And we
hope that if you haven't listened to our episode East
Palestine and Beyond, you do tune in and please let
us know. As we said, they're more about the attacks
(04:32):
on infrastructure that are occurring on a regular basis and
are often somewhat ignored by the news, and ask yourself
why they get ignored. And infrastructure, Matt, as we'll see,
is is not limited to physical things. I think we
could say it's fair to say right that nowadays intangible
(04:54):
infrastructure is just as vital. Right we're talking about records
stored in the cloud, We're talking about the Internet. This
is as vital a piece of modern infrastructure as as
a waterway would have been in times of old, and
sadly just as vulnerable. Oh yes, especially individual servers. So
(05:18):
like an individual system that is somewhat separated from the
larger infrastructure network of an organization, so that's what we're
talking about today, kind of a separated system or computer
system within the US Marshals Service. So the first thing
you may ask yourself is US Marshals. That sounds really familiar,
(05:38):
But what is that? I'm gonna give you the mission
statement according to a a movie, literally a movie called US Marshals.
I think Emmy Lee Jones, Well, they sounded like I
think it's either a sequel or I think it's obsequel
to the fugitive because it was the US Marshals that
were chasing that that old fugitive. Are support that scamp? Oh? Yes,
So watch the movie and this is their mission statement.
(06:02):
The mission of the US Marshal Service is to enforce
federal laws and provide support to virtually all elements of
the federal justice system by providing for the security of
federal court facilities and the safety of judges and other
court personnel, apprehending criminals, exercising custody of federal prisoners, and
providing for their security and transportation to correctional facilities. There's
(06:24):
a little more almost done, executing federal court orders, seizing
assets gained by illegal means, and providing for the custody
management and disposal of forfeited assets and assuring the safety
of endangered government witnesses and their families wit SEC. Also,
I love the idea. Something about this story made me
(06:48):
go into a brief rabbit hole. Man, I was licking
up the YouTube clips of like reporters and law enforcement
figures the world the world around who have confiscated usually
big amounts of cannabis and their solution is to burn
it in a bonfire. Yeah, breaths are always a man. Yes,
(07:13):
But which SEC? You know, we should also we're talking
about this briefly off air, we should also do an
actual episode on which SEC on Witness Security or you know,
most people know it as the Witness Protection Program. It's
a very real thing, uh, and some of the people
involved in it might be listening to the show today.
(07:34):
We promise we won't say your other name. Also, I
mean you mentioned transporting prisoners and any one of us
have possibly been on a flight where there's you know,
an air marshal um, you know, present member of it's
a special designation, but that's a member of the US
Marshals Service, right. It's good that they're there, um, And
(07:56):
you know, the idea is to blend in like a
plain clothes, but you can tell if you if you
know they to look for, you could tell. You know,
it's like an agent provocateur at a at a protest,
You're like, huh, those are general issue boots, you know. Yeah,
So next time you're boarding a plane and you're walking
(08:19):
down the aisle, if you're in one of those last groups,
just keep your eyes out and make sure to find
them and then give them a good wink, maybe a
little touch of the nose. It'll just walk by it
under your breath. Go nice. I'm joking. Don't go for
the gun. That was a dumb, dumb joke. Do not
(08:40):
quote me on that. Do not take that out of
context the internet. Don't do any of the things we
just said. We're completely joking. We're being silly. Uh, okay.
So that's what marshals are. That's what they do. Um.
They're very, very important to the justice system, and they
are the I think guys, correct me if I'm wrong here.
I believe the US Marshals are the oldest law enforcement
(09:03):
organization within the US. Isn't it That may or may
not be true like federal organization. Yeah, you think about
Marshals in terms of the Old West. They always call
them Marshall though I wonder if that's got anything to
do with them. Yeah, they go back to the seventeen hundreds,
like shortly after the foundation of the country. Oh yes,
(09:24):
So what happened. They were the targets of a ransomware attack.
So this is an attack where the word hackers comes up.
Hackers some people who are very good at using computer
programs to infiltrate other networks. They targeted, probably targeted the
US Marshall Service. And we just have to breed from
(09:47):
one of these articles. You can find basically a four
to six paragraph right up on this in every major
news outlet, but it has the same information. I highly
recommend heading over to NPR dot org and reading Jenna
McLaughlin's article titled hackers steal sensitive law enforcement data in
a breach of the US Marshals Service because this article
(10:10):
has a little more breadth than a lot of the
other reporting. So we're going to read a little bit
of this just so we get an understanding. The US
Marshals Service revealed it was the victim of one of
these cyber attacks last week. This is published on the
twenty eighth of February. By the way, according to a
spokesperson of the US Marshals, it was a major incident
(10:32):
which impacted a standalone computer system that contained records about
targets of ongoing investigations and employee personal data, as well
as internal processes of the US Marshal Service. That's not good. Well,
one thing we've learned over the years here, what is
one of the major things the CIA protects of their
(10:55):
operations their processes. Yeah, it's the methods used, the methods
which according to this reporting and all the other reporting,
we don't know if that's that's essentially what was captured there, right,
What are the procedures to get things done, to make
things happen? Was it just information about employees? Was it?
(11:18):
You know, what do those internal processes mean? Basically? But
also just records on targets of ongoing investigations. If that
information gets into the wrong hands, people who are currently
under federal investigation could know about it, and that would
be really bad. Yeah, because you want to keep that
you want to keep that information hidden until you have
(11:39):
something solid. I would imagine not to mention the identity
of all those air marshals we're talking about, Yeah, that'll
undercover or the marshals who are let's say, keeping watch
over people in the Witness Protection program, right, So if
you can, if you can locate the marshals, then and
(12:00):
you can triangulate maybe like it's a little scary and
it's probably really scary actually for people who are involved
in that program. Here is the next thing which is
important though. According to that same spokesperson from the Marshal Service,
the system that was breached did not include personal details
about people in wit SEC, so in the federal Witness
(12:21):
Protection Program. M Yeah, from my understanding, Matt, this included,
like you said, personally identifiable information to subjects of investigation
and to some employees. But then there's the nebulous third
parties clause. They also got something on third parties. And
(12:41):
it makes me wonder what a lot of people don't
understand when they're script kitties, which is a derogatory term
in the in the hacking community. When they're script kitties
and they're just like cutting and pasting code or exploits,
I don't think a lot of them are aware that
some of these systems are designed to bite back so
(13:03):
that such that you might feel you have successfully infiltrated something,
but now it's that system has learned more about you
and identified you. So it seems pretty ballsy to go
against the Marshall's system. And that makes me wonder would
this be like a foreign power? Would it be organized crime?
(13:26):
I mean, do we know anything about the possible perpetrator
right now? We know nothing. We know that government agencies
like this and especially you know, intelligence agencies are ripe
targets for foreign actors, right these are pretty nice targets
for them, and it is a ransomware attack, but we
(13:48):
don't have a ton of details about what actually happened.
Like we've seen here that information was being siphoned off
of that server at the Marshall Service, and then we
don't know if the com was locked, if all the
files were just encrypted within that server, don't We don't
know a bunch of specifics, and they're not giving a
bunch of specifics to be honest. At least, this was
(14:11):
basically something that was put out to Reuter's, NBC News
ran with it, and everybody else picked up on it.
It's literally not known if a ransom was demanded, right
we're calling it ransomware, because it appears to have the
same types of things happening that a ransomware attack would,
and do we know much about potential next steps that
(14:36):
the US marshals have maybe communicated it. It feels to
me like a lot of the aftermath of this is
not going to be public for a minute, right, No,
it's a forensic investigation, right, like computer forensics investigation. That's
going to be complicated and probably take a while. The
biggest thing is securing other parts of the network that
(14:58):
weren't connected but are similar. Right. If you imagine somebody
got in, somebody broke into a cottage that's on some
big property, right, but the cottage is a little further away.
It's isolated and separated from the main house or whatever
it is. If you're really bougie like that. People they
broke into that cottage, they got accessed everything in there.
(15:21):
It's still on the property, but it's not connected, So
we got to make sure the main house is secure.
I think that's probably what's happening right now. I mean
that's better than the alternative, right, which is, you know,
the worst gay scenario for the protective side the subject
of the hack, the worst gay scenario is to not
(15:42):
know that a hack has occurred while someone has keys
to your house. Yes, so they know that part. They
know that someone got in. They're not saying publicly who
it was, but they are. They're probably going to have
to reevaluate or even escal a lot of operations at
this point because you could sell that data. Oh, I
(16:05):
can't believe. I didn't think about that until just now
to the highest bidder. I mean, it's essentially like it's
government secrets. That's what it is like in Maddie. Both ends,
we come to deal with immense respect and a little
tip about friends in the Marshall's Service. You might want
to keep an eye on those on those trucks selling
(16:27):
lose cigarettes. I don't know why that's like. I've got
a hypothetical for us before we leave. What if you
wanted to capture people who were enemies of the Marshal Service,
If you wanted to capture people in a net who
wanted to do harm to people in the Witness Protection program,
(16:49):
what if you put out a story about a bunch
of information being taken from your own servers. Right, we
have all this information. It was it was stolen. It's
all this valuable stuff, and then you go on the
dark web and you set a trap honeypot, and you
and you say, hey, we're selling this information, and you
(17:13):
see who bites. And from that, from that point forward,
you actually use it against people. It could be counterintelligence.
I'm just saying you could use it and not even
like snag them right away, you know, just use it
to keep tabs, give them some false info maybe info.
I'm just I don't think that's actually what's happening here.
That feels too complicated. But it's a fun idea, a
(17:37):
fun idea, it's a good idea. Can I just add
before we we this, I was just thinking about hackers.
I was just going down a rabbit hole of like
silly hacker names, and I found a giant list. I
just wanted to read some of my favorites. We've got
let's see Capslock Holmes, Babe Root, We've got Baby Underscore,
(17:58):
got dot back, this is a file structure joke. And
then we've got Barista, Creepshot, Barren snow Crasher, Bash Cassidy
and Beyonce Nuls. I don't know if any of these
are real, but they're fun. They are very fun. So
(18:18):
right now, we're gonna take a break, but we'll be
right back and hear more about this weird picture that
a really important person posted. Oh come on, come on,
it's proof, all right, whatever adds? Okay, So imagine this.
(18:40):
I want to set the stage here, folks. Let's say
you live in the United States and you know that
these are very divided times, and everybody has a Twitter account,
And one day President Biden came onto Twitter and said, hey, guys,
I know there's a lot going on. Hang on, let
me put my glasses on for a Biden impression. I
(19:03):
know there's a lot going on these days, but has
anybody seen this picture of the chooper cup? Just look
at it. Everything is magical. That's exactly what happened not
too long ago in Mexico. Current Mexican President andre's Manuel
Lopez Obrador tweeted the followed and I would like to
(19:26):
share this tweet. I'd like to read this to you all.
He tweeted two photos and one one is a picture
of some ruins and that's totally in line, like these
are ancient Mayan ruins. And the other photo on the left.
(19:47):
I don't know if you guys have seen this yet
it appears to be a creature of some arboreal bent
who is kind of hustled up, clinging to the trunk
of a tree, kind of high up in the tree,
and said, our boreal ent bent. Oh okay, sorry, isn't
an end like a type of Tolkien universe? Yeah? So
(20:10):
that I heard our boreal and that's what made my
brain go to that. But sorry, please cons totally so
the this creature, if we're being honest, I just wanted
to use the word ar boreal. This this creature looks
like it has a little bit of a hood and
it has two dark, beady eyes. Let me let me
(20:31):
share a picture here. I want to see if we
can get a good look at this together. Okay, so
I've shared the picture with us. Have you guys seen
this photo before you send it to our group? Text threatened?
That's right. It looked like one of those kind of
you know, what do you call a ring camera kind
of creepy pasta kind of deals um, a little bit
(20:53):
of the old night vision vibes um, but a little
more palpably something than most of those, wouldn't you say? Yeah,
it reminds me, you know, those little guys in the
Star Wars universe. Jawa's yeah, Jawa's just so. It looks
like a Jawa that got up a tree. Get that.
(21:13):
Get that fella down from there. Call the fire department.
Has your Jawa been stuck in a tree? Call us
one eight three three std WYTK where we're getting. You know,
it's tough economic times, so we're doing Jawa removal in
addition to podcasts. Now, those guys are fierce, they're vicious.
They'll be in here with one of those spear staff
(21:34):
Shelailey things they carry. Leave it to the professionals. Folks,
we're here for you, and we're here for the President
of Mexico. In this respect, he's okay. This tweet went viral.
Most people thought he was joking, but he seems to
genuinely believe that he is sharing a photo that was
(21:56):
taken a few days before he posted. It's it's from
an engineer, and he says it appears to be an
alu or almost like a duende, a mischievous woodland elf
like spirit in Maya folklore. What is it? Call ben? Sorry,
I didn't hear aluche o hard my pronunciation a lu
(22:18):
x or a luxe and this this is like the
kind of spirit you see present in so many other
types of folklore across the world, you know, like there's
the story of the Brownie in parts of Europe, there's
the idea of the hidden folk. All kinds of spirits
right populate belief systems of the world in ancient times
(22:40):
to today. But we did not know, mister President, that
you were a cryptozoologist. So if you look at the
tweet the English translation, he's essentially said, I'm sharing two
photos of our supervision of the Mayan train works. One
taken by an engineer three days ago apparently shows and
(23:02):
a luke cha, another by Diego Prieto of a splendid
pre Hispanic sculpture and eck balam. Everything is mystical and illuminated,
or we could do a different read like everything is mystical.
He's having this weird kind of McConaughey Harrelson moment, Bud,
(23:25):
he's soft at my guy, and he's and he's he's
serious about it. But people have already started asking some questions.
I guess we should say the Maya train is a
railway that's going to be about a thousand miles long,
and it's been pitched as a way to spark local
(23:45):
economic development where it's being constructed. Is he using this
as an argument against this project? I don't know. It
reminded me of the stories from Iceland wherein construction companies
will build roads around what they say see as as
the home of spirits, right, trolls even. Yeah, And so
(24:06):
this thing goes viral. Everybody thinks he's joking. He emphatically
is not, And and then people start looking into the
actual photo he posted, which you can see online Twitter wherever.
And the image does not have metadata, so we don't
really know. We can't really prove who took it or
(24:28):
when it was taken. And this is interesting because the
photo itself might be older than the President appears to believe.
In fact, it's nearly identical to another photo from twenty
twenty one, which is why it was a little trick
question when I asked, have you guys seen this photo before? Yeah,
(24:48):
but it wasn't described as that creature. It was described
as a witch. Yes, yeah, it's a bit. It strikes
a bit of a witchy figure. I'm not gonna lie.
I mean the outline, the glowing eye also reminds me
of a Thaie film called Uncle Boone Me who can
recall his past lives. Oh yeah, so kind of Yeah,
it's neat has some kind of woodland time traveling spirit
(25:12):
type things that are like almost looked like the way
shadow people are depicted in terms of those like kind
of waking nightmare situations that we've discussed to sleep sleep paralysis,
and we're going to talk about some of our favorite
horror movies later in the week. I believe Matt, you
found something, and I know you were. You were looking
(25:32):
in the Mexican news sources as well, So you've found
something that talks about how this photograph is probably older
than the President of Mexico believes, or at least believed
in his tweet. Yes, and as you said, it was
from twenty twenty one, and I mean it's on debate
(25:53):
dot com dot MX and it it was posted on
it looks like February tenth, twenty twenty one. I think
that's how the date is written. Yeah, and it's saying
that this was an alleged witch that was caught up
in a tree at a very specific place, General Tehran
Nuevo Leon And this does remind me very much of
(26:17):
our One Day episode from a while back, if you remember,
what we have to realize is that there's an interesting
parallel of double think in many cultures, wherein someone will say,
I consider myself a pretty skeptical person, give me the facts.
But then also traditionally there are some things that I'm
(26:38):
just going to I'm just going to say, hey, maybe
maybe they're out there. It's kind of the way Iceland
treats their cultures belief in the supernatural. That's how a
lot of different countries will treat belief in ghosts or spirits,
you know. And the question here for a lot of
the experts, including folklorists, the question is why did the president,
(27:02):
the President of Mexico, why why is he why is
he coming out in support of the existence of these
creatures who are kind of they're often described as like
tiny and short and hairy. You know, they're little scamps too.
They won't like poison your well or kill your firstborn,
but they're going to open up the gate and let
(27:23):
the goats out, you know. Are they're gonna like shoes
in different places? Remember the Yule Lads been in I
believe is that Icelandic culture oh, the yule Lads. I
don't know. I mean, I'm okay with I'm okay with
us naming hackers on air, but I don't want to
mess with the ul Ads. Sausage sniffer, Yeah, they all
say sniffer m yeahs they do weird stuff. Yeah, they
(27:50):
all have their little moves. That's Iceland. Yes, and they
used to you're right, and they used to be much
more dangerous back in the day, or regarded as such,
which happens a lot with folklore. With this, I don't know,
it's strange because you can see it's reported in New
York Times, it's in the Guardian, and a lot of
folks are saying, or a lot of folks are conjecturing
(28:13):
that this was like a tongue in cheek human interest
move on the part of the president. It worked. I'm
not sure did it worked. We're talking about it, you know,
And this is where we're keeping this one short because
I'm gearing up for some more paranormal stuff. We got
to get back to it, so we don't want to
say everything about this. But I did want to end
(28:35):
on a question for a fellow conspiracy realist, which is this,
do you live in a part of the world where
belief in the supernatural is still, to a degree prevalent.
If so, what are what are the spirits or the
creatures that people talk about? And equally as important, do
you think the actual again, the actual president of Mexico,
(28:58):
do you think that he j uinely believes in creatures
like this the Aluches or the Luxe's spelled a l
u x e S. Would love to know your thoughts.
You can hit us up and any variety of means
or platforms or just you know, tell your favorite mysterious
tree elf to travel our way in Atlanta, Georgia, and
(29:21):
we'll speak to them directly. It'd be cool if we
had them on air, you know. Dream Big Matt's like, yeah, sure,
sure buddy. Okay. So, like I said, we're we've got
a lot of stuff in the mix in the next
few weeks. There was some big things happening. So we're
gonna keep this one a little bit shorter. We're gonna
pause for a word from our sponsors, and we're gonna
(29:42):
end with some potentially good news for the future. And
we're back and gentlemen, have you seen the film Armageddon
or perhaps Deep Impact any number of the asteroid related
disaster films. Disasteroid films so many times deep intact. Yeah, yeah,
(30:09):
for sure, there's there's others. It's definitely a genre. Um.
I think probably Armageddon is the one that we think
of the most. Don't know if that one got a
criterion release. I think that The Rock definitely did. But
Armageddon is also a oh gosh, what's the guy's name,
Bruckheimer's that his name? One of those big, blustery blockbuster
(30:30):
movies about a ragtag band of of every men and
some scientists that go to outer space to land on
a doomsday asteroid that's that's careening towards planet Earth. But
Michael Bay confused Bruckheimer and Bay Bay is the Transformers guy,
but they're both. Yeah, they're similar. He's known for his
(30:51):
subtle plot construction very much. So. Yeah, so this, this
asteroid depicted in the film Armageddon would potentially breach Earth's
atmosphere and cause all kinds of hellish chaos, you know, um,
potentially if it hit in the ocean, you know, it
caused tidal waves and all that kind of stuff. There's
truth to that, I mean there, you know, if if
(31:12):
a large body were to collide and it were big enough.
You know, we've always heard about oh, it'll burn up.
Anyone that hits will probably burn up in the atmosphere
before it hits Earth. If they were sufficiently large, like
planet sized or something, that would be bad because we
wouldn't entirely burn up. Probably. Um. And you hope that
that Uncle sam Uh and his government are considering this,
(31:36):
coming up with some kind of you know plan uh
And and yes, this is very true. They have been
doing that. Um. Of course, we've got the Space Force,
which is not directly tied to this. We also have
a program that NASA has been working on for some
time now called DART. I think we've discussed DART at
some point, Yes we have. Yeah, it's it's part of
(31:58):
NASA's planetary strategy and it stands for double Asteroid Redirection Test.
And JOHNS. Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland were
also involved. And the idea is to send essentially a
small spacecraft on a collision course with an asteroid that
(32:23):
could potentially be bad news for planet Earth. And they
did that thing and to have NASA describe it after
ten months flying in space NASA's double Asteroid Redirection Test,
the world's first planetary defense technology demonstration, successfully impacted it's
asteroid target on Monday, the agency's first attempt to move
(32:44):
an asteroid in space. So this is interesting. This is
very an interesting distinction on in the movie arm at
get In that we've been talking about, the goal was
to put explosives into the thing, drill down in it.
They have like one guy, I think Bruce will character
is like a drilling expert, and that's a big part
of it. Why they have to have him. It's got
(33:04):
to be him, um, and you know, fill the thing
with with with dynamiter some equivalent and blow it up
into much smaller pieces, which seems like it would also
cause multiple problems. But this is not their goal. Their
goal is to move it, to alter its course. And
if you theoretically moved it enough, you know it's far
enough away, just a little bit of movement, even in
(33:26):
the time it would take for such a you know,
asteroid to reach Earth, probably would steer clear of it entirely.
That's the dream, and that's we were talking about. Dart
back in twenty twenty two, right when they first when
they first gave this a go, and it's really impressive too.
I mean, I think it's easy to sit on planet
Earth and say, well I saw Armageddon and I think
(33:49):
you all could do better. But but they're doing massive science,
making more of a show. You know, whatever happened a showmanship? Um,
But no, this is the smart move. The really cool
thing about this is the reason why they even targeted
this asteroid, which was actually two asteroids, a larger one
and a smaller one, and they targeted the small one
(34:10):
and had that impact hit the small one because it
has a smaller mass, which increased increases the probability that
they're actually going to make an impact, a deep impact
on the on the orbit of that thing. The smaller
one around the larger asteroid right right, that would be
dia MorphOS is the small one, and the chalker is
(34:31):
Diddy most there you go, Yeah, who was now short
his name, but just Diddy. It's a rebranding for the
moving forward. I'll learned a new word today that makes sense.
It's easy to put this on the end of most things.
But a moonlight, that's what diamorphos is. It's an asteroid moonlight.
And when we say small, it's still a big old fellow,
(34:52):
but one hundred and sixty meters in diameter, whereas the
larger buddy is seven hundred and eighty meters in amateur. Yeah.
But the cool thing to me, guys, is it the
whole reason they targeted is so they could measure the
orbit of the small one around the big one, to
measure the change to see if it actually did enough
or you had enough of an impact that we could
(35:14):
use that same idea and target of just a single
asteroid that was headed towards Earth and make enough of
a change where it just misses us and then hopefully
for the next however many hundred years would continue to
miss us. Proof of concept. Yeah, and it was. It
did work. Yeah. The quote this is by the way,
directly from the NASA press release about this, and the
(35:36):
quote comes from Thomas Zerbuchan. Zerbuchan seems like a German
name Associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA
headquarters in Washington. Breath and he said, this planetary defense
is a globally unifying effort that affects everyone living on Earth.
Now we know we can aim a spacecraft with the
precision needed to impact even a small body, because again
(35:58):
that's the test, right, easier to do it with a
larger body. And then I guess he's got to take
into calculation in the mass and build your spacecraft accordingly.
One wouldn't imagine because you got to match it. One
would think to make a move. And I want to
talk more about that in the second too. But he
goes on, now he can aim a space crack with
the precision needed to impact even a small body in space.
(36:18):
Just a small change in its speed is all we
need to make a significant difference in the path and
asteroid travels. Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure, there's a little
bit of math involved, as you might as you might assume,
but I also want to posit just for the good
folks at NASA a possible money saving measure. This could
hit two problems with one figurative non asteroid stone Superman.
(36:43):
I was gonna say super pigs really close, but like
they're so good at ruining environment. What if we just
have like a whole passle of super pigs and just
shoot them on mass into the asteroid. Then it's like
that cobra problem, Ben, you know, or the rat problem
where you deploy all these these these creatures to solve
(37:03):
a problem. And then now we have Ferrell Space, pigs,
Ferrell Space. I know, man, I'm just like roll the
dice at this point with all the problems of the world,
you know, And I love, I love when we talk
about space. You guys know that. And I'm just I'm
bringing up the pigs because it feels like you gotta
find something to do with them. It's still fresh, and
(37:24):
we're gonna talk more about that, I think in our
next episode in this week's listener, Maile episode M. But
we can't talk about space, by the way without dropping
some absolutely bonkers acronyms. Oh please, Yeah. We already have DART,
which is the double by the way, double asteroid. It's
like a double fantasy, you know, double asteroid redirection tests.
(37:45):
And we also have some some tech, some cutting edge
tech that was associated with this mission. One of them
is called DRACO and this is the spacecraft's only instruments
measurement instrument, and that stands for the Diddymos Reconnaissance. It's
an asteroid camera for optical navigation, beautiful navigations. Extra but
why not just have it be Drake Kahn. I always
(38:08):
wonder about that when they have an extra word that
isn't part of the acronym, it's just implied. I don't
care for that. Drake Kahn sounds cooler than drake koe
even but maybe not. I don't know. No, I think
you're making a really, really solid point. All three of
us have seen some pretty awkward acronyms, and you know,
it's no secret that on this show, it's a mystery
(38:28):
to us as to how those acronyms get chosen. Whose
job is it the Is it considered, you know, kind
of a crap job that an intern gets, or is
it the privilege of the people at the top who
are saying, like I have spent decades at NASA, it's
my turn to come up with a name. And do
you like work backwards from the cool, buzzy sounding word,
(38:50):
you know, to get what the actual letters stand for,
because these are all pretty scidency words. But I guess
may be part of that is deciding whether or not
to leave one out so that you can make the
cool right. I bet it's some combination of the two.
The next one is smart nav nav of course is navigation,
but you can't put an inn after smart because then
(39:10):
how do you say that smarten smart could, but it
would be it doesn't really read very well. So smart
nav and the smart stands for small body. They've chosen
to hyphenate that, which I guess is grammatically correct small
body maneuvering autonomous real time navigation smart NAV. That was
another tool control system. So are we are we saying, first,
(39:32):
thank you brilliant, brilliant space experts for making some real
progress in trying to save the world, but also sharpen
up your acronyms. Is that what we're saying? No question
always always a two for there one thing I'm trying
to find this in the release. One would presume that,
(39:54):
I mean that is a one way mission. I mean
the spacecraft is lost right like, it's smashed at this point,
it's not coming back. Things like that. I think that
would be a whole other level of complexity, a whole
other bag of space badgers to make something that could
boomerang successfully. But it's not out of the realm of possibility. No,
(40:14):
it's not. And one thing I don't typically I guess
put in these kinds of press releases is how much
the thing costs. But one would presume, knowing what we
know about like intercontinental ballistic missiles and even things like that.
Something with this level of tech probably not cheap. So
a test like this damn well better been successful. And
it was. But we do have a good news, a
(40:37):
bit of good news to leave off with on this.
We are not expected to be in danger of an impact,
a deep impact by any planetary body you know or
whatever you know, asteroid for at least a hundred years,
because you got to remember, it took the spacecraft ten
months to even reach this destination to do the thing
(41:01):
to make that impact. So we're probably okay for the
time being, but it's good, good to be prepared, better
to have it and do the one test, then just
have them in reserve for when the time does come,
if we still even have technology and infrastructure by then,
if the Internet hasn't been erased by solar coronal mass
ejections or whatever we talked about this last time. But
(41:22):
the first thing humanity has to do is see these
things before they hit us. And we're kind of we're
doing better. We're not there yet, yeah, say, we've been
slacking off a little bit on watching the sky, making progress,
making progress from doomed to in a terrible situation. They
(41:42):
there you go. I was saying, nobody who is doing
that work is slacking off. It's just there's a lot
of sky. Yeah. I certainly was not throwing shade at
any individual skywatcher. I just mean, probably there's not enough
eyeballs over all, whether they be virtual or otherwise. But
(42:02):
why can't that stuff be I mean, I'm surely there
are systems in place that would set off some kind
of clason like in the movies, you know, if one
of these things is cited. But again we're talking far
far away, and I guess it could be fragments that
are new that then if they're smaller, they travel faster.
I'm not sure. I mean, it could be the atmosphere
(42:25):
is very good at eating things, but when they when
they enter. But also there are problems beyond asteroids that
that potentially compose a much more difficult threat to address.
I'm thinking of gamma rays, gamma wave burst in particular.
These things can travel so fast that you kind of
(42:48):
have a moment to know what's going to happen, and
then you're gone. Shout out to our pal Josh Clark
with his fascinating podcast from Fears Back called The End
of the World, where I think he talks about the
gamma burst issue, but one problem at a time. I mean,
this is awesome science, and this is good news. This
is good news, and this research has to continue. It's vital.
(43:11):
It's like the infrastructure problem. People don't know how important
it is until something goes wrong, you know what I mean? Yeah, no,
for sure. And I've got to wrap this up with
a shout out to somebody else, Comedian John Daley, who
y'all probably are familiar with. He's on Comedy Bang Bangalat
and your mention of gamma rays reminded me of a
hilarious red Hot Chili Pepper's parody song that he created
(43:34):
called Abra Cadabra La Foreigna, and it is just absolutely
spot on. But there's a really great lyric when he
starts rapping like Anthony Ketas, he says, I drink an
Alabama Slamma with your sexy ass Grandma. The Hulk turns
green when the rays get gamma. I didn't think that
is brilliant wordplay, if bars beautiful. I also just a
(43:57):
reminder here before you end at Noel, there was a
meteor that's a very small one about a meter in diameter,
a meter meteor it a meteor a meteor meter diameter meteorite.
It back. It was in mid February when it's just
(44:22):
this tiny little meteor. It struck Earth, burned up in
the atmosphere. As Ben said, the atmosphere ate it. But
it was only discovered like an hour or two just
before it hit. So basically we had enough time to go, oh, crap,
and then it burned up, but it was small enough
to where it didn't cause any damage. But that kind
of thing is happening all the time, right, So if
(44:45):
ever you have a relaxing afternoon and you're not worried
about something, just imagine, just look up at the sky
and imagine all the stuff that's out there. We are
so funny. By the way, that was that was the
seventh time a me has been seen just before it
made impact, seventh times in history. Like train derailments, these
(45:07):
are like cosmic train derailments. They happen way more often
than you think. And with that, you know, maybe we
should maybe we should consult the President of Mexico. Maybe
he has some hot tips on our elves could come
into play. He seems like he'd be fun at parties.
Maybe we can, maybe we can find out, maybe we
can officially invite him on the show. In the meantime,
(45:32):
we would love for you to be part of the show. Folks.
Let us know your thoughts. We cannot wait to hear
from you, especially if you have experience in what sec
in particular, I think we're all getting caught on that one.
Or if you work for the Mexican government, or if
you are on the front lines of protecting Earth from
(45:54):
cosmic threats, any of that bonus points. If you've got
leads for another episode of a few, our best episodes
come from you. Specifically, if you have one burning in
your mind right now and you need to tell us immediately, well,
we're here to help you out. We try to be
easy to find online. Boy do we ever so easy.
You can find us as Conspiracy Stuff on Twitter, YouTube,
(46:16):
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(46:39):
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