January 12, 2025 • 34 mins
Welcome back to another episode of Cryptid Cocktail Party! This week, Dave took the day off and left Sarge unattended. Hours later, covered in sweat, and his mind exploding with information, Sarge tells his best friend and long suffering neighbor, Maynerd, about the phenomenon of gangstalking.
If you or a family member suffers from symptoms associated with gangstalking, please check out these resources: https://www.samhsa.gov/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome
(00:28):
to Cryptid Cocktail Party.
I'm Sarge and with me unfortunately is not Dave.
He couldn't make it tonight, but I brought Maynard instead.
Hey.
Because he lives next door and he's good at this, gooder than I am.
Well I mean I'm good at setting up the stuff, but I think you're better at the talking part.
(00:48):
Well good for us because I'm going to be doing a lot of talking.
I did a lot of research and I got deep into it.
Before we get into that, welcome to Cryptid Cocktail Party.
This is a show where we share a few drinks, have a few laughs, and take a dive into the
unknown.
Maynard, how are you feeling?
I'm feeling pretty good.
I mean a little bit of the Sunday scaries tonight as usual for Sunday and all that.
(01:10):
Yeah, I know that feeling.
I hate Sundays.
But otherwise it was a nice sunny day and I can't complain.
Yeah.
I hate that I got to get up tomorrow.
Oh yeah, that's the scary part.
So annoying.
All right.
Well, we got a big show.
So I'm going to just jump right in.
Nice.
Let's go.
(01:31):
I'm not even going to lube it up.
There's going to be no foreplay.
Here we go.
Maynard, how familiar are you with the term gas lighting?
Very, actually.
I mean I think it's kind of an overused saying right now, but I'm familiar with the correct
usage of it.
Yes.
Yeah.
I think it was a brilliant analogy to make and then it got out of hand.
(01:54):
Yeah.
It just gets used if you say someone's lying.
It's like, oh, there's more to it than that.
Yeah.
So gas lighting is a term for the deliberate act of making people question their own reality.
So for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, the most common method is diminishing
someone's perception of an event by presenting a counter narrative in which the person's
(02:17):
perception is deemed inaccurate or even unreasonable.
Gas lighting often involves manipulation.
An example would be someone experiencing abuse by a domestic partner and that domestic partner
later denies the abuse ever occurred or even accuses the victim of lying to create drama.
The term gas lighting refers to a 1944 American movie called Gaslight, which itself is a remake
(02:39):
of a 1940 British film because we can't leave anything well enough alone.
And that British film was based on a play written in 1938.
The distinction is notable because the 1944 film had a massive budget, which helped add
a little bit more detail and to differentiate it from the source material.
So in the play and subsequent films, a husband tries to make his wife think she's crazy
(03:00):
in order to hide his criminal behavior.
One of the ways he does this is by making her think that she lost something and then
later hiding it in her purse so she finds it and feels like she's going crazy because
she checked her purse a bunch of times.
Another way is by causing the gas powered lamps in their home to flicker when he is
not around because this takes place in the 1800s, the movie.
(03:21):
So when he comes home, she tells him about it and he can just dismiss her experience
by saying, well, you know, you're just seeing things.
The lamps are fine.
So that's kind of the premise.
A few notable examples of gas lighting could be some examples.
You see media reports of a smaller than usual crowd in an event like, I don't know, like
a spitball in here, like a presidential inauguration, but later a man in a poorly fitting suit insists
(03:45):
the crowd was actually the biggest crowd in history.
Or perhaps a guy loses a competition, like say, I don't know, an election in 2020 or
something, but then insists that he actually won it.
Or maybe a guy with an absurdly stupid haircut and poorly executed spray tan says he's a
genius but has the vocabulary of a seven year old.
These are all great examples of gas lighting.
(04:08):
This behavior is not isolated to abusers and known felons with terrible spray tans.
During the Soviet era of East Germany, the secret police known as the Stasi had a practice
called zetsung.
Hopefully I pronounced that right.
Kind of sounds like what happens if you get like an electrical jolt through your testicles
for sexual pleasure.
And it sounded legit the way you said it.
(04:29):
So zetsung, I'm guessing is how it's said.
Where among other things, they would undermine perceived enemies by literally breaking into
their houses in the middle of the night and moving stuff around in order to make them
think that they were going crazy.
So some examples of the things that they actually did.
This is stuff they actually did.
Making alarm clocks go off at five in the morning instead of seven in the morning.
(04:53):
Or moving socks from one dresser drawer to another.
Have you seen the show Barry with Bill Hader?
Yeah.
There's a part in that when he's describing how he could go over to his girlfriend's,
no spoiler alert, go over to his girlfriend's friend's house that she doesn't like and slowly
add in like a smell.
(05:14):
Oh, right, right.
I remember this.
Yeah.
And she just looks at him like what?
You know, just to slowly make her think she's going crazy.
That's a fine example if you're a Barry fan.
Absolutely crazy behavior, but so silly when you think about it.
Oh, yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, obviously there were other things in play here.
They did other stuff, but that was kind of their weird version of harassment.
(05:37):
They would also make clicking noises on the phone lines when people were talking about
subjects to make it more notable that they were being listened to.
Now, what if I told you there was a group of people who believe they were being gaslit
and subject to stassy like tactics across the United States and the world, in fact,
(05:57):
right now?
Like, did they believe this on a daily basis?
Yep.
But are they really?
Oh, yeah.
They believe it.
They believe it.
Buckle up, buddy, because today we're going to be talking about gang stalking.
Are you familiar with the term?
I've heard the term, yes.
And you know, when you told me about it, I kind of looked it up and I'd heard it before.
(06:23):
But I'm not to the level of detail.
I feel like you're about to be stow upon me, though.
Yeah, I really wish I didn't do all this research because this is going to be stuck in my head
forever.
Now, I'm worried that I'm going to come down with it.
So gang stalking, a case of the gang stalking.
So gang stalking or group stalking is a term referring to the alleged coordinated harassment
(06:47):
of a victim known as a targeted individual or T.I.
This is done by a large group of perpetrators often assumed to be employed by the U.S. government,
but could also be part of public companies, secret organizations, other national governments,
or even in one case that I read about one particular religious organization.
(07:08):
So targeted individuals or T.I.s have an incredible list of experiences that they claim they are
subjected to.
Victims claim police harassment, such as police cars turning on their sirens, passing them
and then turning off their sirens.
Paid actors performing street theater or elaborately rehearsed interactions that seem normal while
(07:30):
they're surveilling the targeted individual.
They've also reported certain cars with dealership plates gathering in large groups to control
how fast the targeted individual can drive on the highway.
Wow.
Yeah.
And helicopter activity over their home and drones.
(07:51):
One man even claimed and this is without a doubt my favorite claim.
One man even claimed that someone shit in his bed.
But not him.
Nope.
Wasn't him.
And honestly, the interviewer had almost the same response.
Like he sure he sure wasn't you.
(08:14):
You didn't shit in your own bed.
So someone else did it and we don't know why.
So if you were thinking this is all just mundane activities and maybe a response to a bad night
of drinking activities that we might all witness at one time or another, you would be right.
And according to targeted individuals, that is the point.
(08:34):
So imagine going to the police and suggesting that the poopies that you found in your bed
this morning and not your own.
Imagine trying to explain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, these days, I mean, you could probably do a DNA test or something, right?
Right.
Seriously.
Well, unfortunately, if you're that much into it, you know.
But unfortunately, this person reported this in 2017.
(08:57):
Okay.
So I'm like, just pay for a DNA test.
Like get a get one of those.
They make the test.
You can test your own poop.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Find out who belongs to where did this poop come from?
Yeah, exactly.
Who's poop?
Imagine you're trying to explain that that traffic on the highway was actually orchestrated
(09:19):
specifically to fuck with you.
How do you convey that people seemingly going about their daily activities are actually
executing an intricately staged tableau in order to convince you that they are in fact
not watching you?
I don't know.
But Boston traffic, I might kind of be on their side.
It is a form of abuse.
I will agree with that.
(09:39):
So it could be very easy to dismiss these claims as crazy.
Well, not a DSM recognized mental illness diagnosis by itself, a number of mental illnesses
and disorders are linked to targeted individuals in 2015, a research paper on the phenomenon
and the only academic paper available on the subject at the moment called complaints of
(10:01):
group stalking parentheses, gang stalking and exploratory study of the nature of the
impact on complainants, which is one hell of a title.
It's a real zinger published in the journal, forensic psychiatry and psychology.
Doctors, Lorraine Sheridan and David James conducted a blind interview of 1040 self-identified
(10:21):
victims of stalking.
Of those interviewed 128 of the self-identified victims purported to be victims of gang stalking.
Of this group, Sheridan and James concluded that 100% were exhibiting signs of delusional
thinking based on three criteria.
The first one is the sheer improbability of the behaviors they were reporting such as
large scale coordination of multiple surveillance agencies, civilian actors and media organizations.
(10:46):
Then we have the impossibility of some behaviors.
So those would include reports of voice to skull technology, mind control and witchcraft.
And finally, impossible and bizarre such as the family dog being replaced with an exact
double, but the double has a foul temper or remote enlargement of bodily organs.
(11:10):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I feel for these people, but that's, that's a tough one.
That's like, that's really difficult to.
Yeah.
You just want, you wonder if it's, I mean, you talk about the family dog, like what if
the dog just was just having a bad day, right?
Well the dog got old and started to, you know, I'm not making fun of this.
(11:33):
I'm serious.
I'm gonna say like dog dementia or something.
And the dog doesn't act like it used to because it's older and it's exactly, exactly.
Any number of factors could have contributed.
Maybe the dog's sick.
Right.
Right.
So in comparison, only a little more than 10% of the traditional stalking victims were
deemed to be suffering from some kind of delusion.
(11:54):
So that's like, it was like 900 people.
So only it was like 117.
So a little more than 10%.
Hmm.
All right.
And the way the study was done is they, they kind of opened up a website and had people
report into it whatever they experienced, whatever their experiences were from a list
of experiences.
(12:16):
And so that's kind of how they figured out who, you know, was gang stalking and who wasn't.
There was a bunch of other differences too that I'll get into here in a minute.
But in addition, these alleged targeted individuals suffered from depression, mistrust, anxiety
and aggression more than the respondents who are victims of the more traditionally understood
instances of stalking.
Okay.
(12:37):
I know that that kind of makes sense.
Women actually surprisingly suffered largely far more than males when it came to gang stalking.
Okay.
So women, they made up 75% of the 128.
That's a pretty stark contrast.
(13:00):
So I watched a few documentaries and videos on gang stalking available on YouTube and
a number of targeted individuals reported diagnoses of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
And they were diagnosed with this either before or during their ordeal.
So I would recommend two videos made by vice and one made by Dr. Todd Grande.
If you just go into YouTube, type in gang stalking.
(13:23):
These are the ones that I would recommend watching because they're really fascinating.
Now there are a number of treatments available for people who suffer from these symptoms.
An article on gang stalking by MIT's technology review titled, Am I going crazy or am I being
stalked inside the disturbing online world of gang stalking?
Author Amelia Tate cites former targeted individuals reporting total relief from gang stalking
(13:47):
symptoms after being given therapeutic treatments, including psychiatric drugs.
Unfortunately, this is where the true tragedy of being a targeted individual unfolds.
Targeted individuals insist they are not suffering from mental illness, thus making it practically
impossible for them to get the treatment that they could benefit from.
Yeah, no, that sounds like the worst case of it.
(14:10):
Yeah.
Now this denial of the need for treatment has alienated targeted individuals from their
friends and family, which would make sense, right?
Right.
You're trying to get somebody help, you know that they're saying things that don't sound
right, things that are delusional, and they're aggressive and they're pushing back on you.
So you have to push them away.
One targeted individual identified only as Jenny became so hostile to her brother and
(14:31):
his son that he had to take out a restraining order on her.
Jesus.
But without treatment and trusted people in their lives, targeted individuals find comfort
in community in the worst possible place.
Social media.
Oh God, yeah.
Yeah, it's bad.
We didn't even talk about that yet.
No, man, it gets real bad.
So groups of targeted individuals are congregating across multiple platforms such as Twitter,
(14:54):
Facebook, and Reddit.
Here alleged victims share stories and encouragement.
However, these communities have a host of problems all their own.
One Facebook group has 22,000 users, which goes a long way to convince an increasingly
isolated person that they're not alone.
These groups often come together to dissuade members from seeking treatment.
Worst of all, members of these groups regularly encourage other members to confront those
(15:18):
that are targeting them.
And how is that done?
They literally go up and they start yelling at them.
They threaten them.
So this guy, he was an interesting case.
So he was reporting an instance of cause stalking, which is an offshoot of gang stalking where
he was being gang stalked for his political views.
He was just a very active person in the gay community.
(15:40):
And he had assumed he was the guy mentioned who believed he was being targeted by a religious
organization.
So this gentleman, he was in the traffic situation that I talked about and he was pepper spraying
and spray painting cars on the highway.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Little out of control.
Another thing that they were telling him to do, this sometimes resulted in police officers
(16:02):
being followed by targeted individuals.
Might not end well.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, no.
Chasing cops around and stuff.
Probably not going to go well for you.
Social media is not the only place where targeted individuals find strength.
Some are also prolific on video sharing sites like YouTube.
One user's vlog showed dust on his car and claimed it was nanotechnology employed to track
(16:27):
his movements.
Another dedicates his channel to finding hidden clues that reveal our reptilian overlords
via screenshot of news segments in action scenes from films like the Matrix.
So what he was doing is he was watching video scenes of the Matrix and then, you know, you're
watching, what is it?
(16:47):
Like 20 frames per second for something on YouTube, like a video.
Most of the time.
Yeah.
30.
So he was catching where the frames were blurring movement and then insisting that they were
transforming into like reptilians when really it was just the frames not catching up.
(17:11):
And so there was blur.
Is this how we kind of arrived at this conspiracy theory type, conspiracy theory-esque, I don't
know what the word I'm looking for is, but how that's more prevalent in kind of today's
society.
Everything's about conspiracy theories.
Well that's because information is more readily available.
(17:32):
So there's more ideas out there.
You know, you get some 20 year old kid who thinks they might be experiencing, you know,
they're a little paranoid.
They might be experiencing something.
Let's say, you know, they're walking through school and a kid bumps into them and doesn't
say anything.
Or you know, maybe they trip over their shoelace, but they didn't notice that their shoe was
untied.
(17:53):
They might start thinking they might have delusions that somebody deliberately untied
their shoe and that kid bumped into them on purpose to mess with them.
Before you might just kind of ruminate for a little while and then be like, you know
what, I'm probably wrong.
But now you can go online and type in these kinds of symptoms and you've got a community
across platforms that is there to support and encourage you and tell you not to believe
(18:21):
what other people are telling you and that you are being gang stalked.
Another one of the vice documentaries, there was a gentleman who believed that he had been
magnetized and so he would take a magnet and stick it to his skin and because skin can
sometimes hold a little moisture when it's warmer out, the magnet stuck to him.
(18:44):
The reporter took the magnet and stuck it to his own skin and instead of the man starting
to question his theory that he was magnetized, he started to believe that the reporter was
also a targeted individual.
Well, yeah, of course.
Yeah.
So, so the internet's effect on people suffering from persecutory delusional ideations is like
(19:04):
pouring gasoline on a fire.
One mental health professional explained that delusions as defined are thoughts that are
outside of social norms.
So he went on to ask, how can you convince someone that they're suffering from delusions
when they're part of a community that's 22,000 people strong and they all held the same or
similar beliefs?
Yeah.
(19:25):
Yeah.
It's challenging.
I mean, how do you tell somebody that what they're doing is not right when everyone else
is telling them that they are right?
Especially like one person fighting against this giant crowd and this community has become
so insular and cult-like.
One solid example of this is a shared language adopted by targeted individuals.
Some examples of their exclusive vocabulary include voice to skull technology.
(19:46):
That's when, when someone's voice is implanted directly in your skull so you can hear them
talking in your head.
Okay.
Energy weapons.
No definition there.
Electromagnetic radiation, apparently this is directional radiation.
So it's like aimed at you, but only you specifically.
(20:07):
And then microwave technology, again, not a ton of followup as to what that really means.
What I'm finding is that a lot of these things like energy weapons, electromagnetic radiation
and microwave technology, they're just reasons applied to random symptoms like nausea and
stuff.
And I mean, there's a lot of people who, you know, call it the tinfoil hat crowd who believe
(20:35):
all this sort of stuff to may not necessarily be targeted individuals.
I mean, it's kind of funny that you mentioned tinfoil because in the vice documentary that
they did in England, the woman pulled out tinfoil, made a joke about tinfoil hats and
then said that it does help her temporarily, but it's not a long-term solution.
(20:55):
It's really sad.
I mean, it's funny, but it's also, you know, it's also a little sad.
Like it's this poor person is wearing a tinfoil hat because they believe they're being targeted
by stuff when really it could just be psychos.
It could be anything.
Yeah.
Some of the other, some of the other afflictions attributed to these folks are nausea, hearing
(21:16):
voices, hearing messages communicated through the television and the radio, sometimes hearing
horn honks after certain words are said on the radio and they believe that that is highlighting
that that word in the radio is important.
Becoming magnetized, as I mentioned, hearing clicks on the phone line, which coincide with
certain topics being mentioned in instance of street theater, in instances of street
(21:37):
theater to name a few.
So these are just a few symptoms.
And the sufferers of this phenomenon are clearly unprepared and unwilling to understand the
situation.
I certainly can't judge them or their perception of reality, but I can and will judge the fuck
out of assholes who say who kind of yes and the situation for their own benefit.
Yeah.
Which is perennial shit whistle.
Alex Jones.
He's on a number of occasions signalling his support for this community in his various
(22:00):
rantings.
Another less conspicuous dickhole fed into this delusion by way of anonymous shit posting
this steaming pile of nonsense was a post titled confessions of a gang stalker.
Just as a title suggests some fucking nitwit gleefully described how he goes about gang
stalking people, which only reassures the already rampant confirmation bias in this
(22:22):
space.
Yeah.
And of course it is a well fit for everyone.
That's probably more than just him too.
Yeah.
And you know, it's some 4chan nerd who has never left his house and he's just like, oh
man, I'm totally going to go viral with this.
Yeah.
And he's just writing gang stalker fiction.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
It's just fan fiction.
Um, another, and other charlatans inadvertently charlatans inadvertently feed the flames when
(22:48):
they promote bullshit like vaccine denial, chem trails, the dangers of fluoride in the
water supply, reptilians, and of course 5g.
So once you're willing to believe that someone else shit in your bed, it's not a far leap
to believe that your cell phone caused COVID.
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.
(23:08):
Yeah.
It might be easy to dismiss, dismiss gang stalking as a sad yet quirky corner of the
conspiracy theory community.
However, the darkness doesn't stop at the alienation, delusion, and shouting at cops.
A small portion of targeted individuals have taken far more drastic action.
Jenny, who I mentioned before, did seek and receive treatment.
So for about six years, she actually turned her life around and even became a board member
(23:30):
for the national organization for women while also working for the national association
of mental illness.
Sadly, her recovery did not last and she took her own life in 2017.
Others chose to attack those who they perceived were targeting them.
In 2013, Aaron Alexis killed 12 people in the Washington Navy yard and wounded another
three.
(23:51):
He had written messages consistent with gang stalking vocabulary on the butt of a shotgun.
Myron May, a Texas tech educated lawyer, wounded three people in a university library because
he was being targeted by supposed energy weapons.
And then Gavin Long ambushed and killed three police officers in response to the Alton Brown
shooting but long also identified as a targeted individual.
(24:13):
So I know this is all depressing, but it's not all that I saved the good news for the
end.
Okay.
There's little we can do to address the issue caused by the prevalence of gang stalking.
There is hope.
There's a growing community of people who have sought and received effective treatment
for gang stalking.
These people are regularly posting about their recovery in gang stalking groups on Reddit,
(24:35):
Facebook and Twitter.
While many members publicly deride their effort as yet another form of harassment by the various
establishment boogeyman, privately those in recovery are receiving private messages from
TIs requesting resources.
Now we can help in these efforts as well by simply calling out misinformation when we
(24:56):
see it.
And if you know what's called bullshit on post from chuckle fucks like Elon Musk and
RFK Jr.
Maybe one day a T I will discover a tightly coiled dookie in his bed and seek the medical
attention he so desperately needs.
Yeah.
That's gang stalking.
Wow.
I think there's a lot of that stuff in there that I never would have associated with gang
(25:19):
stalking.
Yeah.
You kind of in the way in the real world every day.
So I mean, that's what's so insidious about it.
It's literally just regular shit that happens to all of us.
But they're seeing it as a symbol or a symptom of a larger problem.
There was so much in the documentaries that I watched.
(25:39):
And it in the paper that I read that MIT article was fascinating.
One of the things I also found encouraging is when I when I did a Google search for gang
stalking, none of those forums showed up.
It was all articles and commentaries and videos on on what it is and why it's bad.
So I mean, that's that's a bit of a relief.
(26:03):
You didn't visit any of the Reddit communities.
No, I didn't.
And they actually really discourage people from going into those communities.
And last year, somebody who's who's suffered from gang stalking kind of found your way
out.
Yeah.
Because they really do believe that it's kind of a contagious thing.
So if you are if you are already a paranoid person, you're only going to become more paranoid
(26:25):
by going into a community where everyone else is just as paranoid as you are.
Yeah.
And you're sitting there just going down the rabbit hole and reading everybody's stories
and going, oh, my God, maybe that's happening.
Maybe that's what's happening to me.
Exactly.
That's exactly what I flipped me off today.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, I I actually one of the things that I read about that I didn't touch
(26:50):
on too much, I talked about surgical implants.
Yeah.
Some of these folks believe that they're having they have surgical implants.
I was in our local grocery store.
You know the one.
Yeah.
And while I was in the grocery store, there was a woman this was a couple of years ago.
There was a woman who had plastic bags on her feet.
This is pre covid like 2019.
(27:11):
And she was wearing rubber gloves.
And other than that, she was completely she seemed completely normal.
Like I didn't notice the plastic bags on her feet and a lot of people when they go grocery
shopping, they wear rubber gloves because they were just weird about germs.
And that's fine.
You know, a lot of people are uncomfortable with germs.
But as she's standing there, she starts moving her feet.
(27:34):
And then I hear the crinkling of the plastic bags and I just kind of glanced down because
I thought maybe she was stepping on one and she's, you know, wearing them on her feet.
And she apologized to me immediately and then said it was the nanotechnology.
She's like, it's it's the nanotechnology.
And I was like, oh, I was polite.
You know, I didn't.
But I could I could tell something was wrong.
(27:54):
Now, I didn't apply that to gang stalking because it just wasn't, you know, well versed
on it at the time.
I had heard of it, but I didn't know much about it.
But yeah, I mean, think of how many homeless people because you can't maintain a job when
you have an illness like this.
Right.
And so think of how many homeless people are probably only homeless because they they suffer
(28:17):
from these delusions.
And maybe they're spending the only money they have on a cell phone so they can keep
in touch with that one community that's keeping them going.
Because one thing I will say about the gang stalking community, as bad as the sort of
group think around it is these folks are helping each other at least avoid taking their own
lives.
(28:38):
They're really encouraging people not to do that.
And there's a there's a lot of respect shown when someone loses their life.
Unfortunately, the anger is not on an untreated illness in a country where 60 percent of counties
don't have any sort of psychological treatment.
Instead, the anger is towards the government, but for the wrong reasons.
(29:01):
Are the communities trying to help each other not be violent towards other people, too?
Or are they?
No, that's the downside.
They're really encouraging.
They're not encouraging violence, but they're encouraging aggression.
And I mean, that's only going to escalate, you know.
But they do make sure to encourage people not to hurt themselves.
(29:21):
It's kind of like a don't give up.
Don't let the bastards win, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
So it's it's a really it's really a mixed bag.
I was going into this thinking it was going to be some like crazy wackadoo thing like
flat earth where you can just make fun of everybody.
But I was immediately dissuaded from that.
In fact, I there was one woman she was really the one that stood out to me the most and
(29:44):
kind of changed my whole approach to this thing.
She doesn't tell anyone that she's being gang stalked because she knows it's crazy.
Oh, but she doesn't know that it's because of delusions.
She knows it's happening.
She just doesn't know how to articulate what's happening to her.
Wow.
Now, it's estimated that about 13, 12 to 13 percent of people suffer from it.
(30:10):
Now, the tough part is these are people who are self reporting.
And this could also be people who, you know, could be making it up.
Same problem with flat earth.
You know, we have people that just say they believe it because that's funny to them.
Right.
But the study that was done.
Now, very small sample size of one thousand forty people is pretty consistent with the
(30:33):
other reporting that they were that they're seeing in other sources.
Yeah.
Which is between 12 and 13 percent.
So there's probably people we know right now in our lives that are suffering from this,
but they probably just keep it well hidden because they're not too far along yet.
Yeah.
Well, they don't really know what it is.
And they're just.
Yeah.
(30:54):
That's exactly it.
They don't know what it is and they might be a part of that community, but they also
realize that, like, you know, you got to have your job.
Right.
And these people do claim to have pretty debilitating illnesses.
One final thing that I'll leave you with and then we can move off this unbelievably depressing
topic is there was one guy who had he had an X-ray with a little anomaly on it and he
(31:16):
had he was convinced that that anomaly was something implanted in his body.
He says that his dentist did the X-ray and his dentist said it was also an implant.
However, this guy also was sectioned for two months for yelling at the sky and digging
in a park in London.
Oh.
And he says he wasn't doing that.
(31:38):
So it's very hard to kind of take what he's saying is reality.
Right.
And I'll tell you why that's even more of a problem, why his version of reality might
be a little out of control.
He provided a letter that his doctor had given him and they read the letter all the way through.
And essentially, the doctor said, you know, I'm afraid you might be suffering from mental
(31:59):
illness.
Of course, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
And then later in the letter, he said, you know, I'm just not convinced that you have
an implant in you.
And the guy basically did a Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber and was like, so you say and I
can convince you.
And that's what he took away from the whole thing.
(32:21):
So it was really sad.
It's really sad because it's just it's really hard to get them out.
But I think the only people who are really going to be effective at getting them out
are very well trained professionals, but also people who are in the community who have gotten
out and sought treatment and are living a much better, healthier life anyway.
Yeah.
Now that that horribly depressing thing is out of the way, sorry to drop that nuke on
(32:43):
you.
If you are experiencing gang stalking, please reach out to a mental health professional,
even if you don't believe me, even if you think that they're on the side of the bad
guys, hear them out.
Listen to their arguments.
Maybe they know what they're talking about.
Yeah, it's the only thing you can do.
All right.
Mayda, do you have anything you want to plug?
(33:06):
You can check out the Citizen's Guide to the Super Normal podcast.
Yeah, we just released an episode last month.
Yeah, it's 2025.
Should there be some more fun stuff to talk about over there?
We are looking to pump out some shenanigans for sure.
Yes.
Especially now that I have this gorgeous microphone.
Yes.
Yes.
(33:26):
I am ready and it will plug into our soundboard, which will be really helpful because my other
microphone was just USB-C.
Wow.
I mean, look at this.
2020.
We're moving up in the world.
I'm portable now.
I'm ready to go.
I have a feeling this year is going to generate a whole bunch of weird stuff to talk about.
We'll have plenty to talk about.
All right.
So if you like the show, if you like us, Google Cryptid Cocktail Party.
(33:50):
You can find us on Instagram, on Blue Sky.
We have a Twitter, but I mean, everyone's given up on that by now.
You can also find my link to all my stuff through the Cryptid Cocktail Party Instagram.
And if you like coloring books, I made one.
It was kind of a thing I only expected to last a couple of months, but then a bunch
(34:11):
of morons elected a known felon.
So you can just keep buying that coloring book because it's still relevant.
That'll be 9.99 at SagesSuperNormal.com.
So there's two S's right next to each other.
SagesSuperNormal.com.
Coloring books, 9.99.
Take your right to the Amazon page.
You can do some activities like crossword puzzles or you can just roll it up and beat
(34:37):
your neighbor with it.
I don't care anymore.
It's a picture of me and you can color too.
Oh, there are a couple of pictures of Maynard down there.
He is looking snazzy as fuck, I might say.
So Maynard, did you want to say goodbye and I love you to the audience?
Goodbye and I love you.
Welcome
(00:28):
to Cryptid Cocktail Party.
I'm Sarge and with me unfortunately is not Dave.
He couldn't make it tonight, but I brought Maynard instead.
Hey.
Because he lives next door and he's good at this, gooder than I am.
Well I mean I'm good at setting up the stuff, but I think you're better at the talking part.
(00:48):
Well good for us because I'm going to be doing a lot of talking.
I did a lot of research and I got deep into it.
Before we get into that, welcome to Cryptid Cocktail Party.
This is a show where we share a few drinks, have a few laughs, and take a dive into the
unknown.
Maynard, how are you feeling?
I'm feeling pretty good.
I mean a little bit of the Sunday scaries tonight as usual for Sunday and all that.
(01:10):
Yeah, I know that feeling.
I hate Sundays.
But otherwise it was a nice sunny day and I can't complain.
Yeah.
I hate that I got to get up tomorrow.
Oh yeah, that's the scary part.
So annoying.
All right.
Well, we got a big show.
So I'm going to just jump right in.
Nice.
Let's go.
(01:31):
I'm not even going to lube it up.
There's going to be no foreplay.
Here we go.
Maynard, how familiar are you with the term gas lighting?
Very, actually.
I mean I think it's kind of an overused saying right now, but I'm familiar with the correct
usage of it.
Yes.
Yeah.
I think it was a brilliant analogy to make and then it got out of hand.
(01:54):
Yeah.
It just gets used if you say someone's lying.
It's like, oh, there's more to it than that.
Yeah.
So gas lighting is a term for the deliberate act of making people question their own reality.
So for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, the most common method is diminishing
someone's perception of an event by presenting a counter narrative in which the person's
(02:17):
perception is deemed inaccurate or even unreasonable.
Gas lighting often involves manipulation.
An example would be someone experiencing abuse by a domestic partner and that domestic partner
later denies the abuse ever occurred or even accuses the victim of lying to create drama.
The term gas lighting refers to a 1944 American movie called Gaslight, which itself is a remake
(02:39):
of a 1940 British film because we can't leave anything well enough alone.
And that British film was based on a play written in 1938.
The distinction is notable because the 1944 film had a massive budget, which helped add
a little bit more detail and to differentiate it from the source material.
So in the play and subsequent films, a husband tries to make his wife think she's crazy
(03:00):
in order to hide his criminal behavior.
One of the ways he does this is by making her think that she lost something and then
later hiding it in her purse so she finds it and feels like she's going crazy because
she checked her purse a bunch of times.
Another way is by causing the gas powered lamps in their home to flicker when he is
not around because this takes place in the 1800s, the movie.
(03:21):
So when he comes home, she tells him about it and he can just dismiss her experience
by saying, well, you know, you're just seeing things.
The lamps are fine.
So that's kind of the premise.
A few notable examples of gas lighting could be some examples.
You see media reports of a smaller than usual crowd in an event like, I don't know, like
a spitball in here, like a presidential inauguration, but later a man in a poorly fitting suit insists
(03:45):
the crowd was actually the biggest crowd in history.
Or perhaps a guy loses a competition, like say, I don't know, an election in 2020 or
something, but then insists that he actually won it.
Or maybe a guy with an absurdly stupid haircut and poorly executed spray tan says he's a
genius but has the vocabulary of a seven year old.
These are all great examples of gas lighting.
(04:08):
This behavior is not isolated to abusers and known felons with terrible spray tans.
During the Soviet era of East Germany, the secret police known as the Stasi had a practice
called zetsung.
Hopefully I pronounced that right.
Kind of sounds like what happens if you get like an electrical jolt through your testicles
for sexual pleasure.
And it sounded legit the way you said it.
(04:29):
So zetsung, I'm guessing is how it's said.
Where among other things, they would undermine perceived enemies by literally breaking into
their houses in the middle of the night and moving stuff around in order to make them
think that they were going crazy.
So some examples of the things that they actually did.
This is stuff they actually did.
Making alarm clocks go off at five in the morning instead of seven in the morning.
(04:53):
Or moving socks from one dresser drawer to another.
Have you seen the show Barry with Bill Hader?
Yeah.
There's a part in that when he's describing how he could go over to his girlfriend's,
no spoiler alert, go over to his girlfriend's friend's house that she doesn't like and slowly
add in like a smell.
(05:14):
Oh, right, right.
I remember this.
Yeah.
And she just looks at him like what?
You know, just to slowly make her think she's going crazy.
That's a fine example if you're a Barry fan.
Absolutely crazy behavior, but so silly when you think about it.
Oh, yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, obviously there were other things in play here.
They did other stuff, but that was kind of their weird version of harassment.
(05:37):
They would also make clicking noises on the phone lines when people were talking about
subjects to make it more notable that they were being listened to.
Now, what if I told you there was a group of people who believe they were being gaslit
and subject to stassy like tactics across the United States and the world, in fact,
(05:57):
right now?
Like, did they believe this on a daily basis?
Yep.
But are they really?
Oh, yeah.
They believe it.
They believe it.
Buckle up, buddy, because today we're going to be talking about gang stalking.
Are you familiar with the term?
I've heard the term, yes.
And you know, when you told me about it, I kind of looked it up and I'd heard it before.
(06:23):
But I'm not to the level of detail.
I feel like you're about to be stow upon me, though.
Yeah, I really wish I didn't do all this research because this is going to be stuck in my head
forever.
Now, I'm worried that I'm going to come down with it.
So gang stalking, a case of the gang stalking.
So gang stalking or group stalking is a term referring to the alleged coordinated harassment
(06:47):
of a victim known as a targeted individual or T.I.
This is done by a large group of perpetrators often assumed to be employed by the U.S. government,
but could also be part of public companies, secret organizations, other national governments,
or even in one case that I read about one particular religious organization.
(07:08):
So targeted individuals or T.I.s have an incredible list of experiences that they claim they are
subjected to.
Victims claim police harassment, such as police cars turning on their sirens, passing them
and then turning off their sirens.
Paid actors performing street theater or elaborately rehearsed interactions that seem normal while
(07:30):
they're surveilling the targeted individual.
They've also reported certain cars with dealership plates gathering in large groups to control
how fast the targeted individual can drive on the highway.
Wow.
Yeah.
And helicopter activity over their home and drones.
(07:51):
One man even claimed and this is without a doubt my favorite claim.
One man even claimed that someone shit in his bed.
But not him.
Nope.
Wasn't him.
And honestly, the interviewer had almost the same response.
Like he sure he sure wasn't you.
(08:14):
You didn't shit in your own bed.
So someone else did it and we don't know why.
So if you were thinking this is all just mundane activities and maybe a response to a bad night
of drinking activities that we might all witness at one time or another, you would be right.
And according to targeted individuals, that is the point.
(08:34):
So imagine going to the police and suggesting that the poopies that you found in your bed
this morning and not your own.
Imagine trying to explain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, these days, I mean, you could probably do a DNA test or something, right?
Right.
Seriously.
Well, unfortunately, if you're that much into it, you know.
But unfortunately, this person reported this in 2017.
(08:57):
Okay.
So I'm like, just pay for a DNA test.
Like get a get one of those.
They make the test.
You can test your own poop.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Find out who belongs to where did this poop come from?
Yeah, exactly.
Who's poop?
Imagine you're trying to explain that that traffic on the highway was actually orchestrated
(09:19):
specifically to fuck with you.
How do you convey that people seemingly going about their daily activities are actually
executing an intricately staged tableau in order to convince you that they are in fact
not watching you?
I don't know.
But Boston traffic, I might kind of be on their side.
It is a form of abuse.
I will agree with that.
(09:39):
So it could be very easy to dismiss these claims as crazy.
Well, not a DSM recognized mental illness diagnosis by itself, a number of mental illnesses
and disorders are linked to targeted individuals in 2015, a research paper on the phenomenon
and the only academic paper available on the subject at the moment called complaints of
(10:01):
group stalking parentheses, gang stalking and exploratory study of the nature of the
impact on complainants, which is one hell of a title.
It's a real zinger published in the journal, forensic psychiatry and psychology.
Doctors, Lorraine Sheridan and David James conducted a blind interview of 1040 self-identified
(10:21):
victims of stalking.
Of those interviewed 128 of the self-identified victims purported to be victims of gang stalking.
Of this group, Sheridan and James concluded that 100% were exhibiting signs of delusional
thinking based on three criteria.
The first one is the sheer improbability of the behaviors they were reporting such as
large scale coordination of multiple surveillance agencies, civilian actors and media organizations.
(10:46):
Then we have the impossibility of some behaviors.
So those would include reports of voice to skull technology, mind control and witchcraft.
And finally, impossible and bizarre such as the family dog being replaced with an exact
double, but the double has a foul temper or remote enlargement of bodily organs.
(11:10):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I feel for these people, but that's, that's a tough one.
That's like, that's really difficult to.
Yeah.
You just want, you wonder if it's, I mean, you talk about the family dog, like what if
the dog just was just having a bad day, right?
Well the dog got old and started to, you know, I'm not making fun of this.
(11:33):
I'm serious.
I'm gonna say like dog dementia or something.
And the dog doesn't act like it used to because it's older and it's exactly, exactly.
Any number of factors could have contributed.
Maybe the dog's sick.
Right.
Right.
So in comparison, only a little more than 10% of the traditional stalking victims were
deemed to be suffering from some kind of delusion.
(11:54):
So that's like, it was like 900 people.
So only it was like 117.
So a little more than 10%.
Hmm.
All right.
And the way the study was done is they, they kind of opened up a website and had people
report into it whatever they experienced, whatever their experiences were from a list
of experiences.
(12:16):
And so that's kind of how they figured out who, you know, was gang stalking and who wasn't.
There was a bunch of other differences too that I'll get into here in a minute.
But in addition, these alleged targeted individuals suffered from depression, mistrust, anxiety
and aggression more than the respondents who are victims of the more traditionally understood
instances of stalking.
Okay.
(12:37):
I know that that kind of makes sense.
Women actually surprisingly suffered largely far more than males when it came to gang stalking.
Okay.
So women, they made up 75% of the 128.
That's a pretty stark contrast.
(13:00):
So I watched a few documentaries and videos on gang stalking available on YouTube and
a number of targeted individuals reported diagnoses of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
And they were diagnosed with this either before or during their ordeal.
So I would recommend two videos made by vice and one made by Dr. Todd Grande.
If you just go into YouTube, type in gang stalking.
(13:23):
These are the ones that I would recommend watching because they're really fascinating.
Now there are a number of treatments available for people who suffer from these symptoms.
An article on gang stalking by MIT's technology review titled, Am I going crazy or am I being
stalked inside the disturbing online world of gang stalking?
Author Amelia Tate cites former targeted individuals reporting total relief from gang stalking
(13:47):
symptoms after being given therapeutic treatments, including psychiatric drugs.
Unfortunately, this is where the true tragedy of being a targeted individual unfolds.
Targeted individuals insist they are not suffering from mental illness, thus making it practically
impossible for them to get the treatment that they could benefit from.
Yeah, no, that sounds like the worst case of it.
(14:10):
Yeah.
Now this denial of the need for treatment has alienated targeted individuals from their
friends and family, which would make sense, right?
Right.
You're trying to get somebody help, you know that they're saying things that don't sound
right, things that are delusional, and they're aggressive and they're pushing back on you.
So you have to push them away.
One targeted individual identified only as Jenny became so hostile to her brother and
(14:31):
his son that he had to take out a restraining order on her.
Jesus.
But without treatment and trusted people in their lives, targeted individuals find comfort
in community in the worst possible place.
Social media.
Oh God, yeah.
Yeah, it's bad.
We didn't even talk about that yet.
No, man, it gets real bad.
So groups of targeted individuals are congregating across multiple platforms such as Twitter,
(14:54):
Facebook, and Reddit.
Here alleged victims share stories and encouragement.
However, these communities have a host of problems all their own.
One Facebook group has 22,000 users, which goes a long way to convince an increasingly
isolated person that they're not alone.
These groups often come together to dissuade members from seeking treatment.
Worst of all, members of these groups regularly encourage other members to confront those
(15:18):
that are targeting them.
And how is that done?
They literally go up and they start yelling at them.
They threaten them.
So this guy, he was an interesting case.
So he was reporting an instance of cause stalking, which is an offshoot of gang stalking where
he was being gang stalked for his political views.
He was just a very active person in the gay community.
(15:40):
And he had assumed he was the guy mentioned who believed he was being targeted by a religious
organization.
So this gentleman, he was in the traffic situation that I talked about and he was pepper spraying
and spray painting cars on the highway.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Little out of control.
Another thing that they were telling him to do, this sometimes resulted in police officers
(16:02):
being followed by targeted individuals.
Might not end well.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, no.
Chasing cops around and stuff.
Probably not going to go well for you.
Social media is not the only place where targeted individuals find strength.
Some are also prolific on video sharing sites like YouTube.
One user's vlog showed dust on his car and claimed it was nanotechnology employed to track
(16:27):
his movements.
Another dedicates his channel to finding hidden clues that reveal our reptilian overlords
via screenshot of news segments in action scenes from films like the Matrix.
So what he was doing is he was watching video scenes of the Matrix and then, you know, you're
watching, what is it?
(16:47):
Like 20 frames per second for something on YouTube, like a video.
Most of the time.
Yeah.
30.
So he was catching where the frames were blurring movement and then insisting that they were
transforming into like reptilians when really it was just the frames not catching up.
(17:11):
And so there was blur.
Is this how we kind of arrived at this conspiracy theory type, conspiracy theory-esque, I don't
know what the word I'm looking for is, but how that's more prevalent in kind of today's
society.
Everything's about conspiracy theories.
Well that's because information is more readily available.
(17:32):
So there's more ideas out there.
You know, you get some 20 year old kid who thinks they might be experiencing, you know,
they're a little paranoid.
They might be experiencing something.
Let's say, you know, they're walking through school and a kid bumps into them and doesn't
say anything.
Or you know, maybe they trip over their shoelace, but they didn't notice that their shoe was
untied.
(17:53):
They might start thinking they might have delusions that somebody deliberately untied
their shoe and that kid bumped into them on purpose to mess with them.
Before you might just kind of ruminate for a little while and then be like, you know
what, I'm probably wrong.
But now you can go online and type in these kinds of symptoms and you've got a community
across platforms that is there to support and encourage you and tell you not to believe
(18:21):
what other people are telling you and that you are being gang stalked.
Another one of the vice documentaries, there was a gentleman who believed that he had been
magnetized and so he would take a magnet and stick it to his skin and because skin can
sometimes hold a little moisture when it's warmer out, the magnet stuck to him.
(18:44):
The reporter took the magnet and stuck it to his own skin and instead of the man starting
to question his theory that he was magnetized, he started to believe that the reporter was
also a targeted individual.
Well, yeah, of course.
Yeah.
So, so the internet's effect on people suffering from persecutory delusional ideations is like
(19:04):
pouring gasoline on a fire.
One mental health professional explained that delusions as defined are thoughts that are
outside of social norms.
So he went on to ask, how can you convince someone that they're suffering from delusions
when they're part of a community that's 22,000 people strong and they all held the same or
similar beliefs?
Yeah.
(19:25):
Yeah.
It's challenging.
I mean, how do you tell somebody that what they're doing is not right when everyone else
is telling them that they are right?
Especially like one person fighting against this giant crowd and this community has become
so insular and cult-like.
One solid example of this is a shared language adopted by targeted individuals.
Some examples of their exclusive vocabulary include voice to skull technology.
(19:46):
That's when, when someone's voice is implanted directly in your skull so you can hear them
talking in your head.
Okay.
Energy weapons.
No definition there.
Electromagnetic radiation, apparently this is directional radiation.
So it's like aimed at you, but only you specifically.
(20:07):
And then microwave technology, again, not a ton of followup as to what that really means.
What I'm finding is that a lot of these things like energy weapons, electromagnetic radiation
and microwave technology, they're just reasons applied to random symptoms like nausea and
stuff.
And I mean, there's a lot of people who, you know, call it the tinfoil hat crowd who believe
(20:35):
all this sort of stuff to may not necessarily be targeted individuals.
I mean, it's kind of funny that you mentioned tinfoil because in the vice documentary that
they did in England, the woman pulled out tinfoil, made a joke about tinfoil hats and
then said that it does help her temporarily, but it's not a long-term solution.
(20:55):
It's really sad.
I mean, it's funny, but it's also, you know, it's also a little sad.
Like it's this poor person is wearing a tinfoil hat because they believe they're being targeted
by stuff when really it could just be psychos.
It could be anything.
Yeah.
Some of the other, some of the other afflictions attributed to these folks are nausea, hearing
(21:16):
voices, hearing messages communicated through the television and the radio, sometimes hearing
horn honks after certain words are said on the radio and they believe that that is highlighting
that that word in the radio is important.
Becoming magnetized, as I mentioned, hearing clicks on the phone line, which coincide with
certain topics being mentioned in instance of street theater, in instances of street
(21:37):
theater to name a few.
So these are just a few symptoms.
And the sufferers of this phenomenon are clearly unprepared and unwilling to understand the
situation.
I certainly can't judge them or their perception of reality, but I can and will judge the fuck
out of assholes who say who kind of yes and the situation for their own benefit.
Yeah.
Which is perennial shit whistle.
Alex Jones.
He's on a number of occasions signalling his support for this community in his various
(22:00):
rantings.
Another less conspicuous dickhole fed into this delusion by way of anonymous shit posting
this steaming pile of nonsense was a post titled confessions of a gang stalker.
Just as a title suggests some fucking nitwit gleefully described how he goes about gang
stalking people, which only reassures the already rampant confirmation bias in this
(22:22):
space.
Yeah.
And of course it is a well fit for everyone.
That's probably more than just him too.
Yeah.
And you know, it's some 4chan nerd who has never left his house and he's just like, oh
man, I'm totally going to go viral with this.
Yeah.
And he's just writing gang stalker fiction.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
It's just fan fiction.
Um, another, and other charlatans inadvertently charlatans inadvertently feed the flames when
(22:48):
they promote bullshit like vaccine denial, chem trails, the dangers of fluoride in the
water supply, reptilians, and of course 5g.
So once you're willing to believe that someone else shit in your bed, it's not a far leap
to believe that your cell phone caused COVID.
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.
(23:08):
Yeah.
It might be easy to dismiss, dismiss gang stalking as a sad yet quirky corner of the
conspiracy theory community.
However, the darkness doesn't stop at the alienation, delusion, and shouting at cops.
A small portion of targeted individuals have taken far more drastic action.
Jenny, who I mentioned before, did seek and receive treatment.
So for about six years, she actually turned her life around and even became a board member
(23:30):
for the national organization for women while also working for the national association
of mental illness.
Sadly, her recovery did not last and she took her own life in 2017.
Others chose to attack those who they perceived were targeting them.
In 2013, Aaron Alexis killed 12 people in the Washington Navy yard and wounded another
three.
(23:51):
He had written messages consistent with gang stalking vocabulary on the butt of a shotgun.
Myron May, a Texas tech educated lawyer, wounded three people in a university library because
he was being targeted by supposed energy weapons.
And then Gavin Long ambushed and killed three police officers in response to the Alton Brown
shooting but long also identified as a targeted individual.
(24:13):
So I know this is all depressing, but it's not all that I saved the good news for the
end.
Okay.
There's little we can do to address the issue caused by the prevalence of gang stalking.
There is hope.
There's a growing community of people who have sought and received effective treatment
for gang stalking.
These people are regularly posting about their recovery in gang stalking groups on Reddit,
(24:35):
Facebook and Twitter.
While many members publicly deride their effort as yet another form of harassment by the various
establishment boogeyman, privately those in recovery are receiving private messages from
TIs requesting resources.
Now we can help in these efforts as well by simply calling out misinformation when we
(24:56):
see it.
And if you know what's called bullshit on post from chuckle fucks like Elon Musk and
RFK Jr.
Maybe one day a T I will discover a tightly coiled dookie in his bed and seek the medical
attention he so desperately needs.
Yeah.
That's gang stalking.
Wow.
I think there's a lot of that stuff in there that I never would have associated with gang
(25:19):
stalking.
Yeah.
You kind of in the way in the real world every day.
So I mean, that's what's so insidious about it.
It's literally just regular shit that happens to all of us.
But they're seeing it as a symbol or a symptom of a larger problem.
There was so much in the documentaries that I watched.
(25:39):
And it in the paper that I read that MIT article was fascinating.
One of the things I also found encouraging is when I when I did a Google search for gang
stalking, none of those forums showed up.
It was all articles and commentaries and videos on on what it is and why it's bad.
So I mean, that's that's a bit of a relief.
(26:03):
You didn't visit any of the Reddit communities.
No, I didn't.
And they actually really discourage people from going into those communities.
And last year, somebody who's who's suffered from gang stalking kind of found your way
out.
Yeah.
Because they really do believe that it's kind of a contagious thing.
So if you are if you are already a paranoid person, you're only going to become more paranoid
(26:25):
by going into a community where everyone else is just as paranoid as you are.
Yeah.
And you're sitting there just going down the rabbit hole and reading everybody's stories
and going, oh, my God, maybe that's happening.
Maybe that's what's happening to me.
Exactly.
That's exactly what I flipped me off today.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, I I actually one of the things that I read about that I didn't touch
(26:50):
on too much, I talked about surgical implants.
Yeah.
Some of these folks believe that they're having they have surgical implants.
I was in our local grocery store.
You know the one.
Yeah.
And while I was in the grocery store, there was a woman this was a couple of years ago.
There was a woman who had plastic bags on her feet.
This is pre covid like 2019.
(27:11):
And she was wearing rubber gloves.
And other than that, she was completely she seemed completely normal.
Like I didn't notice the plastic bags on her feet and a lot of people when they go grocery
shopping, they wear rubber gloves because they were just weird about germs.
And that's fine.
You know, a lot of people are uncomfortable with germs.
But as she's standing there, she starts moving her feet.
(27:34):
And then I hear the crinkling of the plastic bags and I just kind of glanced down because
I thought maybe she was stepping on one and she's, you know, wearing them on her feet.
And she apologized to me immediately and then said it was the nanotechnology.
She's like, it's it's the nanotechnology.
And I was like, oh, I was polite.
You know, I didn't.
But I could I could tell something was wrong.
(27:54):
Now, I didn't apply that to gang stalking because it just wasn't, you know, well versed
on it at the time.
I had heard of it, but I didn't know much about it.
But yeah, I mean, think of how many homeless people because you can't maintain a job when
you have an illness like this.
Right.
And so think of how many homeless people are probably only homeless because they they suffer
(28:17):
from these delusions.
And maybe they're spending the only money they have on a cell phone so they can keep
in touch with that one community that's keeping them going.
Because one thing I will say about the gang stalking community, as bad as the sort of
group think around it is these folks are helping each other at least avoid taking their own
lives.
(28:38):
They're really encouraging people not to do that.
And there's a there's a lot of respect shown when someone loses their life.
Unfortunately, the anger is not on an untreated illness in a country where 60 percent of counties
don't have any sort of psychological treatment.
Instead, the anger is towards the government, but for the wrong reasons.
(29:01):
Are the communities trying to help each other not be violent towards other people, too?
Or are they?
No, that's the downside.
They're really encouraging.
They're not encouraging violence, but they're encouraging aggression.
And I mean, that's only going to escalate, you know.
But they do make sure to encourage people not to hurt themselves.
(29:21):
It's kind of like a don't give up.
Don't let the bastards win, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
So it's it's a really it's really a mixed bag.
I was going into this thinking it was going to be some like crazy wackadoo thing like
flat earth where you can just make fun of everybody.
But I was immediately dissuaded from that.
In fact, I there was one woman she was really the one that stood out to me the most and
(29:44):
kind of changed my whole approach to this thing.
She doesn't tell anyone that she's being gang stalked because she knows it's crazy.
Oh, but she doesn't know that it's because of delusions.
She knows it's happening.
She just doesn't know how to articulate what's happening to her.
Wow.
Now, it's estimated that about 13, 12 to 13 percent of people suffer from it.
(30:10):
Now, the tough part is these are people who are self reporting.
And this could also be people who, you know, could be making it up.
Same problem with flat earth.
You know, we have people that just say they believe it because that's funny to them.
Right.
But the study that was done.
Now, very small sample size of one thousand forty people is pretty consistent with the
(30:33):
other reporting that they were that they're seeing in other sources.
Yeah.
Which is between 12 and 13 percent.
So there's probably people we know right now in our lives that are suffering from this,
but they probably just keep it well hidden because they're not too far along yet.
Yeah.
Well, they don't really know what it is.
And they're just.
Yeah.
(30:54):
That's exactly it.
They don't know what it is and they might be a part of that community, but they also
realize that, like, you know, you got to have your job.
Right.
And these people do claim to have pretty debilitating illnesses.
One final thing that I'll leave you with and then we can move off this unbelievably depressing
topic is there was one guy who had he had an X-ray with a little anomaly on it and he
(31:16):
had he was convinced that that anomaly was something implanted in his body.
He says that his dentist did the X-ray and his dentist said it was also an implant.
However, this guy also was sectioned for two months for yelling at the sky and digging
in a park in London.
Oh.
And he says he wasn't doing that.
(31:38):
So it's very hard to kind of take what he's saying is reality.
Right.
And I'll tell you why that's even more of a problem, why his version of reality might
be a little out of control.
He provided a letter that his doctor had given him and they read the letter all the way through.
And essentially, the doctor said, you know, I'm afraid you might be suffering from mental
(31:59):
illness.
Of course, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
And then later in the letter, he said, you know, I'm just not convinced that you have
an implant in you.
And the guy basically did a Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber and was like, so you say and I
can convince you.
And that's what he took away from the whole thing.
(32:21):
So it was really sad.
It's really sad because it's just it's really hard to get them out.
But I think the only people who are really going to be effective at getting them out
are very well trained professionals, but also people who are in the community who have gotten
out and sought treatment and are living a much better, healthier life anyway.
Yeah.
Now that that horribly depressing thing is out of the way, sorry to drop that nuke on
(32:43):
you.
If you are experiencing gang stalking, please reach out to a mental health professional,
even if you don't believe me, even if you think that they're on the side of the bad
guys, hear them out.
Listen to their arguments.
Maybe they know what they're talking about.
Yeah, it's the only thing you can do.
All right.
Mayda, do you have anything you want to plug?
(33:06):
You can check out the Citizen's Guide to the Super Normal podcast.
Yeah, we just released an episode last month.
Yeah, it's 2025.
Should there be some more fun stuff to talk about over there?
We are looking to pump out some shenanigans for sure.
Yes.
Especially now that I have this gorgeous microphone.
Yes.
Yes.
(33:26):
I am ready and it will plug into our soundboard, which will be really helpful because my other
microphone was just USB-C.
Wow.
I mean, look at this.
2020.
We're moving up in the world.
I'm portable now.
I'm ready to go.
I have a feeling this year is going to generate a whole bunch of weird stuff to talk about.
We'll have plenty to talk about.
All right.
So if you like the show, if you like us, Google Cryptid Cocktail Party.
(33:50):
You can find us on Instagram, on Blue Sky.
We have a Twitter, but I mean, everyone's given up on that by now.
You can also find my link to all my stuff through the Cryptid Cocktail Party Instagram.
And if you like coloring books, I made one.
It was kind of a thing I only expected to last a couple of months, but then a bunch
(34:11):
of morons elected a known felon.
So you can just keep buying that coloring book because it's still relevant.
That'll be 9.99 at SagesSuperNormal.com.
So there's two S's right next to each other.
SagesSuperNormal.com.
Coloring books, 9.99.
Take your right to the Amazon page.
You can do some activities like crossword puzzles or you can just roll it up and beat
(34:37):
your neighbor with it.
I don't care anymore.
It's a picture of me and you can color too.
Oh, there are a couple of pictures of Maynard down there.
He is looking snazzy as fuck, I might say.
So Maynard, did you want to say goodbye and I love you to the audience?
Goodbye and I love you.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.