Devil’s Fire of Canneto Di Caronia - with Director Laura Moss (”Birth/Rebirth”) - A Study of Strange

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Connecticut coronial Sicily 2003.
A sudden fire that began with the Fuzebox of a family's home
sparked the beginningof a string of unexplained fires.
The tiny seaside town of small homes,tight families
and working class people becamethe source of international news
because strange fires soon began happeningall over town.

(00:22):
They seemed to occurwith electrical devices and appliances
like a TV,a ceiling fan, a hair dryer and more.
By June of the following year,dozens of fires had caused
damage to homes and businessesand the residents along the main street.
Weimar had to evacuatefor a period of time twice.
The first theory wasthat poor wiring was to blame.

(00:46):
But some of the fires beganwhen appliances weren't even plugged in,
leading some to say thatsomething more sinister could be at play.
Many scientists, electricians
and organizationsstudied Cornejo decorative for years.
Yet no one has ever figured out a causefor the mysterious fires.
This is a study of

(01:09):
strange.
Welcome to the.
Show. I'm Michael May.
And I'm joined by Laura moss, writer,director of Birth Rebirth,

(01:33):
a movie that's premiering at Sundance injust a matter of a few days.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
I'm so thrilled to have you on.
In birth Rebirth.
I've been following the moviefor a long time
because of our mutual partner in crime,Molly Elfman.
And so I'm just so excitedyou all not only finally get to make it,

(01:55):
but now you're premiering it at Sundance,of all places.
And Cannes.
Are you allowed to say what's goingto. Happen after Sundance?
Can you share any news?
Think that we are Shudderis distributing it with IFC Films.
And so I know that there is definitetalk of a theatrical release.
We have to see how it plays at festivalsto determine the breadth of that release,

(02:17):
But I'm hoping that you'll be ableto see it in a theater near you in 20,
20 years.
Yeah, and even if it does, I'msure it'll be on Shudder at some.
It will absolutely be on Saturday.
Yeah. Yeah.
Nice. Well, that's exciting.
Do you want to tell people about the movieat all?
Sure. Yeah.
I mean, it's a it's a Frankensteininspired

(02:39):
thriller starringJudy Reyes and Marin Ireland. And.
Yeah, it's sort of a modern daytake on the Frankenstein
myth starring women and incorporating
the female body into the creation process.
Yeah, it's.
Easier than it sounds.

(03:01):
It's a great. Way to visit.
You know, it's a great it'sa great project.
And again,I'm just so thrilled for you all
premiering it at Sundance and excited it'sgoing to make it out in the world.
And thank you so much for coming onthe show, too.
We are going to haveyeah, we're going to have some fun talking
about some weird thingsbecause this is one of the most
bizarre, strange phenomena,if you want to call it that.

(03:23):
Like stories that I've ever come across.
And it's a tale that takes placein the town of Netto de Corona in.
Sicily, Italy.
And not some great things happenedthere around 2004.
It was a lot of electrical firesand it's completely unexplained
because these electrical firesstarted without warning.

(03:45):
And you'll hear more
about some of the strangenessaround some of those fires in a second.
And it caused the whole small townof Connecticut
to evacuate for a period of time.
Twice, actually,they had to evacuate twice.
And then this repeated itselften years later in 2014.
But yeah, there's theoriesfrom every direction,
like there's religious theoriesbecause it's in Italy.

(04:08):
So of course, the devil is going to bea prominent figure in this story.
But there's mystical theories, there'scurses, there's potential arson science.
There's a variety of scientific theoriesaround like electromagnetism or
or underground sort of volcanic activityand stuff like that.
But there's all these theories,but no one knows for sure.

(04:29):
Still to this day, no one knows quitewhat happened and why it happened.
Laura, you shared the Devil Toaster video.
Oh, yeah.
You describe this a little bit to mebefore we came on the podcast,
and it immediately made methink of my brother used to pull clips.
He had this jobpulling clips for NBC Universal Archives,

(04:50):
and it really it really affected his moodbecause one week
it would be like puppies, and next weekit would be like 911 and you know, like
it was like always differentand he would save sort of the best,
weirdest stuff that he came across.
And he found thisthis clip of a woman being interviewed
whose toaster was satanic.
It shoots fire and it and it has sort ofhail Satan burned into the toast.

(05:14):
And then I don't want to spoil it.
Maybe you can put it in the shownotes, but.
Oh, well, yeah, that's a good idea.
Is is a real classic.
I really whenever I'm feeling sad,I watch that.
That clip.
Yeah, she.
I won't spoil iteither. Everybody should watch it.
And you might have even seen it.
I had seen that before,but it's been many years.
Maybe even because your brother found itand put it out on the news somewhere.

(05:37):
But no, the ending is just like
you could not write itany better than how that that ends.
Yeah. No.
Well, while I don't know.
What your beliefsare of the satanic toaster,
I don't believe that that was a satanictoaster.
I'm a skeptic.I'm going to say that that was.
It was fraudulently.
Impressed, though.
I mean, yeah, the etching, the burnin Hail Satan is really a firm commitment.

(06:01):
Yes. And not easy to do. So. Yeah.
No, I don't believe that at all.I'm not no.
I tend to be a skeptic ofof many unexplained for now. Yes.
Well that's good And where the skepticalhead today because I, I actually do
think this is a weird bizarre phenomenathat happened in the town of Cornetto
I and I'm always the one that's like no,this person made it up.

(06:22):
Now, this person might have you know, theymight have done this, blah, blah, blah.
I do think electricity is involvedsomehow.
And there'sthese are predominantly electrical fires.
And it it made me myself think about.
The. Electricity in generaland being like I wonder if most laymen,
most people that aren't aren't scientiststhat don't know about electricity.

(06:43):
It's electricity is.
Almost like magical.
It is weird.
And I don't fully understand it.
And it's dangerous.
So it is there in your house?
Yeah. In your house.
I'm definitely like an amateur house.
Home fixer upper.
And I don't f with electronics.
I don't know if on the podcast or not,but yeah, I don't like electronics at all.

(07:05):
I like can't rewire a lamp.
I mean, I could,but I'm afraid I will burn the house down.
So kill yourself. Yeah. No.
And so that is part of this is like,is this strange?
Just because electricity is involved,
because electricity is so bizarrein its own nature of itself.
Like so there is there is this there'sa lot of layers to the mystery of this.

(07:27):
And one of them might just be electricity.
So weird. Electricity is weird.
So that's one of the other thing isthat, you know,
I've already said this once,but in Sicily it's predominantly Catholic.
So there is this layer of cultural,religious and and history that kind of
just colors this tell tale a little bitmore than just, oh,
some weird stuff happen.

(07:48):
Like there'ssome really interesting layers
thinking about almost like a screenplay,
like we're making some colorfor the story.
And I'm going to quote
from a New York Timespiece in 2004 by a writer named Al Baker.
He says
there are many ways for evil to arrive,but perhaps only one way to get rid of it.
Exorcism.
That about sums up the collective psycheof this stone filled village perched

(08:11):
above the sea After a series of puzzlingelectrical shorts, unexplained fires
and smoky outbursts that struck in ninehouses, displacing 17 families.
Wow. So, yeah, and that was before.
Like the numbers of that are actually far
greater in terms of the peoplethat were displaced for a period of time.
But you do see from that quote how the

(08:33):
the events are in2400 as a five and thereabouts are
not just sort of a scientific mystery,
but also dealing with potentially evildepending on your beliefs.
Or just.
Pubescent energy. I mean, that's.
There you go.
Phenomenon, right? Yeah, that's right.
Wow. That's a game that.

(08:54):
So can Neto more precisely as a village
and civil parishin the Italian municipality of Corona
and when I say it's a small townit is a very tiny town.
I was able to look at the populationin not exactly when this happened,
but like a few years laterand it was 150 people.
Oh, wow.
And it's kind of have you ever driven upthe Pacific Coast Highway in California?

(09:18):
Oh, yeah. It's terrifying.
Oh, it is.
But do you know.
How, like, the highway will passthrough little, little towns where, like,
some of the houses are down by the coastand others are up above the highway,
That is very much what Canada is like.
It's a small townwith a highway that runs through
and there's homes down by the coast.
It is very beautiful.
It is, you know, stone streetsand it's Italy and it's

(09:40):
you know, it's gorgeous,
but it's just little homes with littletiny streets that I'm sure are two ways
because it's Italy,but only one car can kind of fit.
DENHAMAnd yeah, the highway runs above it.
And there are some homes in the hillsabove and everybody knows everybody.
It's a lot of the same families.
So a lot of like if you live in one house,
your grandmother might live next doorand your uncle lives on the other side.

(10:01):
So it's a lot of families are there.
And even though it's on the coast andit's beautiful, it is not a rich place.
It is These are not like $3 million homes.
This is a working class communitywhere predominantly people
are farmers and other sort of working,working class folk.
And just I'll just say this too,because I like to be precise,
but if people outthere are not geographically aware,

(10:24):
because there's a lot of peoplethat just don't
they don't get geography,I don't know how you are with geography.
I love maps.
I love maps.
So I like I always visualize maps.
But Sicily is the islandthat the boot of Italy is kicking.
That's where how most people know it.
Historically, they were not always Italianand a lot of them
still feel different than than Italian.

(10:47):
So there's there's a lot of interestinghistory there that that you can look into.
Did you see the White Lotus this season?
Oh, yeah.
Oh yeah. Oh, that's right.That was in Sicily. Sicily?
Yeah. Oh, like I didn'teven put that together. Yeah.
They're a very differentSicily it sounds like. Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know. Actually. We'll find. Out.
There's a, there's some interesting peoplewe will talk about.

(11:11):
Yeah. I'm so glad. What's her face one?
I know that's not important for the pilot.
Yeah, you just made.
A great speech, and I've just alwaysthought she was brilliant.
I was so happy in season one to whereit's like she finally has this platform
to really show what she can do.
So I'm so excited for now.
I did play around on GoogleMaps with this town

(11:31):
and it it's if anybody doestake an interest to this story,
I urge you to go look at itand you can see how tight everything is.
So and that's fire is dangerousand it spreads.
And when you have homes that are very old,homes that are all connected via walls,
you can see why people were very worriedabout a lot of fires.

(11:53):
That were happening.
So, yeah,let me get into the actual fire story.
So on December 23rd, 2003,
two days before Christmas, town resident
Antonio Pacino, who goes by the nameNino, was at home
and he was having dinner with his familywhen a fire started in the wall.

(12:13):
And this is actuallywhere our scene comes in.
Laura So we're going to do a little scene,a dramatization of
Nino telling a news crew
about what happened to himwhen these fires started.
Do you have that in front of you?
I do have it in front of me. Okay.
So I'll read the like descriptorsand descriptors.
I don't know why I call it that,but there you go.

(12:35):
Why don't you read Ninoand I'll read the news reporters that.
All right.
That's all right.
So we're going no Italian accent on this.
It is. It's up to you.
I'm not going to do itbecause I know I'm going to be terrible.
So I'm just going to I'm goingto sound like me.
So it's up to you.
Very ready.
All right, let's go.
The interior of Nina'sNina's home at night.

(12:56):
And Nina Pacino is leading a TV news crew
through his house and speaks to a reporterasking him.
Now follow me. Down this hallway.
Nino gestures for the cameramanto follow him into a living room.
The most serious occurrence happenedin this room while we were eating.
He points to a fuze box on the wall.

(13:17):
The electrical fuze box. Here.
The whole thing burned.
The curtains here were on fire,as were a lot of these things nearby.
What did you do?
I put out the fire.
Then we had the whole electoral systemchanged, you know.
But things kept catching fire.
And it didn't stop there, did it?
No fires beganbreaking out in the whole village.

(13:39):
Right?
I don't know why. I don't understand it.
No one does.
That was brilliant. Good.
I mean, you know, it's great infusion.
Yeah. Really? Italian. Yeah. Yeah,that was great.
A little infusion was very nice.
I think Nino.
Would be proud.

(14:00):
So as you can tell, I.
I mean, obviously I wrote the sceneand it's a made up scene
as I do on the show,but I did based that off of an actual
news crew that came inbecause news started to spread that
there were some weird firesstarting in this town,
and he showed everybodywhere the fire started.
Later on, like a day or so later,Nino's TV

(14:21):
exploded, apparently just poppedand was on fire.
And when you typically read about thiscase,
most people say that'swhen the fire started.
His TV caught fire.
That that actually came a little later.
It started with the fuze box.
So if that was me, I'd be like,oh, fuze box electricity.
I'm not going to think anything crazy.

(14:42):
I'm not going to thank the devil.
I'm not going to think some weirdsomething's going on.
I'm just going to be like,Something's wrong with the wiring.
And and that's exactlywhat everybody else thought.
So we had the electric, some sort ofelectrician come in and do some work.
But the
strangeness didn't end there, LauraIt did not.
In the following.
Weeks, a series of unexplained phenomenabegan to happen around town,

(15:05):
all along the main street of of Canada,which is called Weimar.
And by June, others of the following year.
By June,the small town was affected by many,
many, many mini fires
and residents were basically sayingthat it was normally appliances
that were catching fire.
It was like a ceiling fan, a hairdryer,vacuum cleaner, kitchen appliances.

(15:26):
That's where these things are happening.
So it's not like a wall just burst fire,
but it's alwayssome sort of electrical thing.
Now where it gets really weird
is some people are reporting thatthe appliances aren't even plugged in.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Now we're talking aboutdevil toasters at that point.
So when it first started,
Nino had called up the mayorand his name was Pedro Binotto.

(15:50):
And I know it may sound weirdto like call up the mayor
when you have likeyour own personal fire in your house.
But it's a small town.Everybody knows everybody.
They know each other,they'll know each other.
And he needs Nino needs help because thepower company I don't know how to say it.
It's Ian is the acronym.
I think it's the now possibly
an L was not very helpful.
They were like, Oh, you rewire the house,that's all you need to do.

(16:12):
Nothing's wrong.And they like, wouldn't really respond.
Even though these fires kept startingand and going on and which honestly
just makes me think of the powerdepartment here I deal with.
Yeah, that's Con Ed in New York.
Yeah.
Look. Yeah.
It's no differentin a small town in Italy.
So, Bernardo, the mayor came over,he started looking at Nino's house.

(16:34):
He's talking to the neighbors,and he's like,
All right, yes, we got to do something.
This is really bad for the village again,
real close together,everybody could catch on fire.
And more and more fires started.
So spun Otto out of desperation callsand now the power company
and told them to shut downpower to the whole town
because that's how potentially dangerousthis could be.

(16:56):
And they did.
And now I'm going to quote from an articleby Ariel REM Chardonnay.
REM to Danny. Yeah.
REM to die.I love that name is a beautiful name.
And she did it.
She will have links to thisin the show notes.
She had an amazing article abouteverything that happened in Connecticut.
So she says on February9th, two houses burned.
One of Pacino's neighborsrushed to the local police station

(17:18):
with the bottom of his pantsburned and his shoes on fire.
An article in a national newspaperreported that he said
the devil was burning behind him,
and then he thrust his shoesinto the hands of a police officer.
His daughter's bedroom had burned,charred black.
He and his wife were afraidto leave the children alone in the house.
They felt fear, anger, desperation.

(17:39):
His wife would tell the unexplained files,which is a like documentary series
like Discovery show type thing, with herarms crossed in front of her chest.
When you lose everything,you become desperate.
That day, Mares Binotto orderedthe residents of Weimar to evacuate.
Pacino,who was evacuated to a nearby apartment,
hated being away from his homein his yard in Connecticut.
He kept tortoises and dogs, including SirNico Della Etna, and butchered that word.

(18:05):
I apologize.
Applied bronze Sicilian hunting dog.
And he says,I was born here. I always lived here.
The evacuation, herecalled, seemed like a prison sentence.
So yeah. So people are evacuated.
It's not.
As. Dramatic as it sounds as aas a as an evacuation, because people
went to nearby apartments or a hotel,which is right at the top of town.

(18:28):
So they're still in town.
Yeah.
They're not like evacuatedacross the island of Sicily.
They're still in town,
but there's they can't be at home,which is never fun and never comfortable.
And on March, oh, by the end of March,
92 fires had been reported.

(18:49):
Now there's a documentaryI saw that said 50 Fires around this time.
There's other articles that say 17.
There's just a lot.
I think everybody's different numbersbecause not everybody's 100% sure.
Like there's that many firesthat it's like
if you have two fires in your house,they may only report that as one, but.
Turn. Two.
So that's why there's all thesediffering accounts of numbers of stories.

(19:11):
And it seems likeyou said there's an arson theory there.
It's unbelievableto think that someone could be
like Santa Claus all around townwith starting fires, but.
Especially with electrical fires.
Like that'swhere the arson thing is really odd to me.
But keep that

(19:31):
in the back of your head because we willwe will revisit that a little bit more
as we move along.
But it's a really good pointbecause I do not think
these initial fires are arson.
There's there's two weird copycats.
Return may may be maintained.
So there's binotto desperatefor help called.

(19:53):
And I, I just want to pause for a second
because there are like four helicopterscircling my neighborhood right now.
So I don't think my microphone'staking those up.
But if anybody's annoyed by a weirdbackground, okay, good.
It might be okay, thoughit is a little disconcerting to be like,
Oh, those have been out therethe whole time we've been recording.
This is weird.
So anyway, MaresFernando called the government,

(20:16):
he called the civil defense,
he called the Italian equivalentof the National Guard.
He literally called every agencyyou could think of
because no one's helping,no one's solving anything.
He's had to evacuate town.
He just needs somebody to do something.
And authoritiessoon began investigate waiting,
but they initially thought it's arson,Like you said, like that was
the first thing is it's like,okay, fires around town.

(20:39):
We got to look into arson.
I don't know ifthey're necessarily just like
they don't want to look at anything else.
I think it's just that's the natural thingto be like, okay, well, we got a cross
go down the checklist and be like,could it be arson?
And that'swhat we're going to investigate. Sure.
Other organizations and peopleand individuals came in to the National

(20:59):
Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology,the Committee for the Investigations
of Claims of Pseudo Sciences,which is apparently a saying.
Yeah, that's just the what's thewhat's the X-Files division?
And that's just them. I think that's them.
It is. It's so fascinating.
And then a bunch of like TV news crewsand TV investigators, which I have been

(21:24):
for a vast majority of my lastfive or so years in the business.
So I know you don't fully trust TVinvestigators.
I've been one of them,
but they're there as well,trying to figure out what's going on.
And the National Research Council,which if I'm understanding
all of the weird councils and thingsthat are involved, that the Research
Council put together a very specifictask force to look into this.

(21:47):
And now I'm going to quotefrom another article on how to be central.
In April 2005, the Italian governmentcreated a special task force
of high ranking army officers, engineers,architects, geologists and physicists
to investigate the situationIn the sleepy little village.
The group conductedan extensively thorough analysis,
aerial photo, remote sensing, assessmentof geophysical and geochemical data

(22:08):
detection of magnet, magneticmetric and electromagnetic fields,
radio electric spectrummonitoring and more.
The results, however, were inconclusive.
So they're doing. All this stuff.
And they're not getting any answers.
I mean, I'mvery interested in the volcanologists
because that was my sort ofI feel very ignorant.

(22:32):
I am an artist from childhoodand stop taking math
and scienceat the earliest possible opportunity.
So I feel out of my depth here.
But yeah, the island is a volcano. Yes.
If it's not a volcano,there's volcanoes around it.
And nearby.
Like, yeah.
There's like active volcanoesaround this place.

(22:52):
And yes, I can't imagine that like that.
I mean, I can imagine that that wouldmaybe affect sort of pulses of energy.
Yeah, you know that.
Yeah, they do. Have some impact.
I mean, there's literally lavaflowing around and under this place.
Yeah.
And you're you're very smartbecause I did not thinking

(23:13):
I did not start thinking of thatright away.
I had to read very smart peoplesaying those things for me to.
Go, Oh yeah.
So you're, you're picking up a good thing.
I'll get into it in a little bit.
But I will mention one of thelike nicknames for right off the coast
where people there's like a scuba divingplace or popular place for scuba diving
and they call it like the Stinky Zone.

(23:35):
And it's because of all the methaneleaking up from underground
in the ocean there.
And there's also two fault lines,which comes into a theory
that someone proposes,
which we get to as well, that runkind of nearby or through the area.
So, yeah, you're you're on to something.
And my personal theory is that there'ssomething about the energy of that.
Like what?

(23:55):
And I'm not smart enough either.
I'm out of I'm way over my head as well.
But understanding sort of electromagnetismand and all of that kind of stuff.
But it seems to me
that they're all kind of connectedand there's some kind of energy
that's creating something,even if it's just
for a short period of time,which is kind of what happened.
Yeah, that's that's really.
Astute in this region.

(24:16):
So this task force, they had never
investigate, had anything like thisbefore, as you can imagine.
So that doesn't help themkind of figure out
even what to do, because they're allthey're all rookies at this.
And they did notice from time to time
that car alarms would go off randomly.
Sometimes electric gates would open orclose without someone hitting the clicker.

(24:40):
And according to a documentaryI saw on TV, there was a magnetic element
where, like metal objectsmay move slightly, just slightly,
or compasses would get you know,they wouldn't quite point do north.
I cannot not corroborate
a lot of those reports in the documentarybut it is interesting to note
talking about these interestingpowers of the earth

(25:02):
and allegedly according to that same doc,
there would be pulsesof strong electromagnetic forces
up to 15 gigawatts, which is strongerthan when the space shuttle lifts off.
Wow. Yeah.
And there was suspicionthat because it was so strong,
some people on these on
this task force and other organizationsthought it was manmade.

(25:25):
Like this isn't Mother Nature.
Someone some man had to create somethingor human had to create something
to create this kind of levelof of electromagnetic forces.
And they couldn'ttell where they were coming from.
And one of the theoriesis that they were coming from out at sea.
So this is where we getto one of the big theories of this,

(25:46):
which is there's some kind of cover upbecause the military is testing
new weaponor new technology off the coast of Sicily.
And of course, a lot of them
think that it's the US governmentbecause we do have a presence. In.
Earlier military conspiracies.
I don't I don't follow.
But yeah, this.
Sounds like something that we would do.

(26:06):
Absolutely.
No, me too. Ityeah, it makes sense to me too.
And there are look, we have a majorpresence in the Mediterranean Sea.
We do have a lot of, I'm sure,military deals, whatever, whatever
the word is with the Italian government,those kind of things.
It kind of kind of fits.
I'm not saying I fully believe that,but it definitely it kind of fits.
Yeah.
And before we kind of go completely downthe conspiracy rabbit hole,

(26:31):
none of that has been verified.
This is 2004 and 2005.
They're investigating this.
And of course, nothing has really come outwhich if you believe
there's a cover up, of course, that'swhy we're not learning anything else.
You say the height of thiswas a march to April 2004.
It is.
It's kind of it's.
Just 111 kind of time period.
So it started late 2003.

(26:52):
And then it's kind of slowly sprinkles.
And by June 24,
they had been I think that's the monththey were evacuated.
But they kind of.
Interesting because we had a family event
in April of 2004, right before a passeda family Passover Seder.
Our driver started shooting flamesand my brother heroically ran to put out

(27:16):
the fire with our fire extinguisher,which none of us knew we had.
But we call that the great dryer,the great Passover dryer fire of 2004.
Oh, my God. And where were you?
Where were you living?
Little offshoot.
What was that?New York. New York. New York. All right.
No, no, not at all.
But that is interesting.

(27:37):
Did it actually in my mind, there's like,huge flames shooting out of it.
Literally. Yeah.It was like shooting out of the dryer.
There was like the the wall across fromthe dryer was burned.
It was like a very scary event there.
And that gives you like direct experienceof what a lot of these people were
were going through in Canada.
I have to say, we only assumedthat it was an electrical problem

(28:00):
and not Satan, but it only happened once.
I think maybe if there were others. Yeah.
Do you know, did the I mean obviouslyyou replaced that that appliance.
Yeah. But did they.
Did they work on anything in the house.
Did they like rewire the room, the outletor do you remember.
I was home from college.
I don't remember. Yeah.
I hope they did because we actually livedin a in a landmark

(28:22):
building, like an old, old apartmentbuilding in New York City.
So I think it's very feasiblethat we have electrical issues.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. And look, it's feasible.
They have electrical issuesin Connecticut.
This is an old town with old homes
that were probably initially builtbefore electricity was was a thing.
So that Yeah, thatis that's a huge thing to think about.

(28:42):
That's that's amazing.
Thank you for sharing that.
Now there is a there is a different theoryfrom a telecom expert named Sergio Conti
that said thehe noticed that the fibers the wires,
they were burnt on the outsidebut not the inside.
So he didn't suspect it was anelectrical problem because of that,
because it would have been burnedthe other way around if it was.

(29:05):
And he actually suspectedhuman involvement.
I don't know what he means by that.
I don't know if he means arsonor if he means
military shootingsand weird waves in our direction.
And one detailthat has been looked into involves nearby
train tracks, so muchlike the PCH that I talked about earlier.
There's the train.
The surf liner goes up the coast ofCalifornia right along that highway route.

(29:28):
So there's trains that kind ofrun nearby and they're going
where are they going in Sicily?
They're going, Oh, I didn't write it down.
Yeah, I thought I did. Oh, I did.
So that these train tracksare going from Palermo to Messina
and some people in the winter of 2004and into early 2005, some residents
noticed the fires would occurwhen the train was going by.

(29:52):
So there is this theorythat, like the train tracks are over,
potentially some of the wiresare underneath some of the power lines,
and it's creating some kind of force fieldthat's shooting them
or overheating or sending a surgeof electricity or something like that.
Some of the organizationsthat investigated
this looked into that and couldn'tfind any validity to that theory.
But it is an interesting to noteand like I mentioned

(30:16):
earlier, religious beliefs,
there is a Catholic priest in Romeat the time named Gabriela Amorth.
Who had the best.
Title I've heard in a long time.
He was the president of theInternational Association of Exorcists.
And yeah.
And he believed this was all the cause of

(30:39):
of magic and implied a connection to Satan
and that he I honestly think he is
the beside some of the localsjust being like, Oh, it's the devil.
I don't think they were necessarilyreally believing
this is the devilthat starting a fire in my toaster.
I actually think when this priest saidthis because he's in Rome,

(31:00):
it made the the press, the mediamore attentive to the story of Cornetto
because now you have the headline, whichI'm probably going to even create a title
for this episodethat involves Satan or the devil in it.
But it's like it's
that headline of The Devil is StartingFires, the Devil's in Town or whatever.
So. So as much as
it is fun to talk about Satanbeing included in theories,

(31:23):
I actually don't thinkmany people ever believed it.
I think writers always included itbecause of that.
The click ability. Yeah, yeah.
And the president has a vested interest inin blaming Satan.
I am, of course.
Of course. Yeah. You got it.
You got to do that.
Even the local there was a local priestthat disagreed with the Satan aspect.
He was just more like, Now

(31:44):
there's something going onthat we just don't understand.
But it's not the devil.
And I.
Would speculate.
Yeah, I mean, I've already kind of saidthat some repeating myself, but
I'm just thinking like a powerful priestin Rome claiming it's magic and Satan.
If he doesn't say that, I don't know thatreally this story gets out
or anyone kind of latches on to it,but I'm sure it would get it out.

(32:06):
But gotten outbut not as prominently as the story is.
So there's an engineer namedFrancisco Valente
who is actually hired by the localsbecause they're not happy
that none of these organization,
all these people are investigating this
and no one'sactually coming up with any conclusions.
So the locals hirethis guy, Francisco Valente
And he concluded that the fireswere caused by roaming electrical charges.

(32:31):
And there's some sciencethat I do not understand about this,
but we've already kind of beentalking about that.
Like it just it makes sense in my head.
I don't understand it,but it makes sense in my head.
And in typical
bureaucratic fashion, Valenti said,You need to rewire the whole town.
That'll solve everything.
Not just rewire,but change the shapes of like,

(32:52):
all the wires are coming inover here in this angle.
But they shouldn't be at that angle.
This wire should come from this wayand this wires come from that way.
It's actually putting some scienceand knowledge to the test to,
you know, this is how are we going to doit and everybody's going to be safe.
But the authorities didn't listenand they didn't rewire the town
in that exact fashion.
And so

(33:13):
fires continued in that
same time frame of 24 and 25.
In June of 2004, residentsdid move back into their homes.
But then later that year, firesstarted up again more prominently
and they kind of they got evacuated againin the middle of 2005,
I don't think, for very long.
But they were, at least for a shortperiod of time, were evacuated again.

(33:36):
And then after 2005, the fires sort of.
Stopped. Like that.
It just it.
Just stopped.
Without a lot of work being done,without a lot of rewiring.
They just yeah, everybody's better.
People move back home.
And there are some articles I came acrossthat are like, fires kept going,
but it's like, I can't confirm that.
And it seems like that

(33:57):
the more trustworthy sources are likenow they kind of stopped.
What are we about to say?
Oh, just like their fires happenedin life, Maybe it was not the volume.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, I think so.
Now, one of the research groupsnoticed that there was grass near town
because that oh, they,
I should clarify, they kept investigatingeven after the fires stopped
and some of thesesome of these organizations kept studying

(34:20):
and they noticed like grass
near town was burnt, but it seemed likeit was burnt from underground,
which does suggest, again,this thermodynamic volcanic something.
Is also like ebbing and flowing. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, it's, it's this weird amalgamnation of all these different
theories you we have we have the Satan onewhich I've already kind of explained.

(34:43):
I don't, I don't,I personally wouldn't believe that anyway.
But I also don't think many people did.
Outside of media you have this
volcanic or geologic or thermodynamicsomething.
You have electromagnetism comingfrom somewhere potentially out at sea.
But these burst of of electromagneticmagnetic pulses, arson, obviously,
one of the theories which it doesn't seemlike we believe that one for these

(35:08):
weapons testing, there's also UFO theories
and yeah, and
this it's a funone as UFOs are always fun.
But I've watched some videos,I read some things.
I think Canada even been includedin some of those documentary series
that are like hunting for UFOsand those kind of things.

(35:30):
It's they've gone to that to Canadaor they've at least looked into it.
And all the video footageI've seen with like strange
lights out at seaor articles about this kind of thing too.
It's never from locals,
and I can't confirm that the video footageis actually from Canada.
So I kind of think that's more of just TVshows and documentary
and then people think that that's realbecause these people still exist.

(35:53):
2004 is that long ago?
They're still talking to news media today.
They're still being interviewed.
None of the locals are talking about UFOs.
Yeah, you'd think that that wouldthat would be a thing. Yeah.
And then also, I feel like the UFO theory,I mean, this is true
across the board, the UFO theoryand the secret military operation.
Theories are always.Always connected. Yeah.
And that's I wrote a little note herethat was like some combination

(36:15):
of all of the theories,because they do there is
there is some tie in it with at leastsome of them, like weapons testing.
Could be electromagneticUFOs could be tied to military
because they might be flyingsomething off the coast or whatever else.
So there is there's something's going on.
Something near is is definitely going on.
One of the strongest voicesin the military testing

(36:39):
theory is a guy named Verano,and he was the guy
in charge of that research task forceI mentioned earlier.
And whenever he was studying the area,he noticed that there were no fires.
Whenever his task force was around,they studied kind of late, like they said
a few years later, too.
So that kind of makes sense.
But it it's that just stood out to meas interesting like that is interesting

(37:02):
that nothing's going on when he's.
So, like the WB frogit just just plays DEADLINE.
Your thoughts I mean sure sure.
But that I think that task forcemay think a lot of itself
if they think the militaryis truly paying attention to their.
Work.
Yeah that's a good pointand I do think he's predominantly
the one that's likeit's the U.S. government.

(37:22):
I think he's the guythat's like the big spearheaded like U.S.
is doing this.
So that that is it.That is interesting that you say that.
So I read this thingabout electromagnetic waves.
So one of the people that doesn't thinkit's electromagnetic waves
who is a scientist andI stupidly did not read it down his name.
I'm sure he's in one of the many links.
I will include in my show notes.

(37:44):
But he said electromagnetism is kind ofa not a great idea
when you're trying to figure out exactly
what's going on,because it's a very broad term
and it includes, as he says, everythingand nothing.
So it's not very specific.
So you're not really going to get answerswhen you start
just being is electromagnetism.
And the point of saying all of this

(38:05):
and rambling on about all these thingsis that there's no leading theory.
Like even to this day,almost 20 years later, it's truly
an unexplained eventin this small town in Sicily.
But, you know, I think
what keeps coming to mindwhen you say this is
and it's it's unrelated,but I think I think tangentially related.

(38:28):
I used to live in the Middle East.
I lived in Jerusalemand the West Bank for a while.
And I remember coming to this place and,you know,
I am a culturally Jewish atheist,
coming to this place
and being really struck by thislike human energy, that this was like
this focus for these three religionsand you could feel it.

(38:51):
It was very palpable like this.
And it was magnetic.
It was sort of like I remembergoing with my friend who is Jewish
to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,where Christ was supposedly crucified.
And there's Golgotha where people come andthey put their foreheads to this stone.
And we both feltit. We both felt this like
pull to go do that thing.

(39:13):
And it was really uncanny.
And I've never you know,
I think I've been to other placesthat have different energies, but
I don't know as a skeptic,I think what I tend to believe is like
on a long enough timeline,I think most things can be
explained scientifically,but we are not there.
There are so many things that weso many phenomena that we experience

(39:34):
that we can't explain, which doesn't meanthat they're supernatural.
It just means that wethey may be entirely natural.
We just don't know how to talkabout them yet.
Yeah, and I.
Completely 100% agree with you.
And one of the things I justI love stories.
I love mysteries.
That's why I'm doing a show like this.
And and it really I'mreally more honed into it now

(39:56):
that I've gotten older and realized like,Oh, I've always loved this stuff.
Let me try to incorporate it.
And in things that I do in my life.
And one of the things that's alwaysstood out to me because I am a skeptic,
I don't usually believe the conspiraciesor the aliens or anything like that.
I love the stories,but I don't always believe it.
But where I get a little weirdis that we don't understand everything.

(40:20):
And even my previous episode,which as we're recording this,
it hasn't come out yet, but it comes outtomorrow as we're recording this.
But I do one about a time slip,this experience of like time
travel and a brief moment,and I don't know a lot about it.
I haven't I'm not one of those peoplethat reads a ton of time travel
articles and news and stuff.
So it was a way for meto kind of learn about it.

(40:40):
And the thing that stands out to meis our understanding of time
keeps changing very dramatically,especially now,
where all these amazing scientificdiscoveries are going on
and all these different levels of physicsand and at the quantum level
and all these kind of thingsthat are over my head.
But our understanding of timeis so infantile.
That it's.
Like I do thinksome of these strange things that happens,

(41:04):
they may not be mystical by any means,
they might be scientific,but we don't understand them yet.
We're experiencing was mysticaluntil a later date. Yes.
Yeah.
Which is true with the historyof human kind, You know. So,
yeah,I just completely agree with you now.
No, I was going to say, butit could definitely be the US government.

(41:26):
I mean, let's be real.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.They they. Do.
They do. And especially, you know,what is there.
I, I think there's been updates on itbut the Havana syndrome.
Do you know what that is. That I.
Know. Has there been updates on it?I think there was.
So I don't know what it is.
I'm I can tell you the update,but I think I saw something
that was like, oh,we now have an explanation of what this.

(41:47):
Claim is, that that. Was very scary.
Yeah, that's very scary.
But that that makes me
think of this story of Cornejo,because if there is some sort of
like some kind of electricalor whatever force that's going out
that could be coming from a specific placeor direction or manmade, you know,
it makes me think of Havana syndromebecause it's
these people being affected by some forcethat we can't see or sense or whatever.

(42:10):
So, yeah, yeah, military.
There you go.
Now, 2014.
So ten years after,like the height of these fires
and life had been returned to normalfor the most part.
But the fire started again in 2014.
And a police officerwho was working locally,
Kapitan Giuseppe Deveny,he was brand new to the force.

(42:32):
He wasn't around back in the initial firesand he decided
that he wantedto basically watch the town.
And so he put up cameras,but he didn't want people to know
he was putting up cameras.
So it's a bit like a mission impossible
for a smaller Italian police forceto like hide cameras around town.
But they were able to do it.
All the cameras caught fire.
Oh, that would be amazing. You

(42:55):
know.
When we produce a TV seriesbased off that.
So they will do that.
So. No, no, no, he didn't.
They didn't catch fire.
But fires did startand they were able to see them
on some of the cameras,like they're a series of cars,
a shed and some other things,even like a box of clothes,
which is totally non electrical caughtfire and was really weird.
And so the policeare reviewing the footage and

(43:20):
this is where things get interestingthis time.
Do you remember thethe Nino who you played?
Antonio Pacino.
Oh, yeah. We played in the scene.
So he it was his housewhere the fires first started.
Well, when police reviewed the footageof town with these new fires,
specifically on September
14th of 2014, Pacino Nino

(43:42):
is walking with his son, Giuseppe,who is in his early twenties at the time.
And they walk past a vehicle.
They leave frame from the camera.
They return moments laterand find that the car is smoking.
Two days later, the two are seen again.
Nino is talking with a group of menas Giuseppe
kind of disappearsand he takes something towards the shed

(44:02):
and then moments later,the shed is on fire.
So similar things happen
with a fight car and an Alfa Romeo.
And police documented 40 potential fires.
All seem to start with GiuseppeNinos, son.
And so, yeah, the thinking is herethat because this is recorded

(44:24):
and they also recorded conversationson Nino's phone where he's talking
about money and needing people to come inand make money and wanting attention.
So it seems like the fireswere being started by this family,
more specifically Giuseppe the son, andbecause it would be great for business.
And so in 2015, Giuseppe is arrested.

(44:47):
Nino, the father, was implicatedto a lesser degree.
I don't know if he was ever arrested,
but something he got punishedin some fashion that I can't specify.
I could not find the details of.
But Giuseppe was definitely arrestedtoday.
I can't find specifics on Giuseppe's case.
Like, I don't know if he went to jailor anything like that,
but I do know that he was guilty.

(45:08):
They he admitted to fires.
Even his dad is like,Oh, he started some of the fires.
Yeah, some of the fires.
Some of the fires.
And but that that's the questionjust from just from the way I said that
if you think about the initial fires,do you like
the question is did Giuseppestart all the fires. No.

(45:28):
My theory is like Munchausen syndrome,
basically like the fire start.
They get a lot of attention.
The kid gets used to attention.
He he embraces this phenomenaand then takes over.
I would I would guess thatthey're that they're married that way.
Yeah.
And I don't.
Know, because there is this conversationwith Nino, the father,

(45:50):
saying something about money.
And it's not he's nothe doesn't implicate himself
brilliantly, like in a moviewhere he's like, listen, sound,
you should start those firesbecause it's good for business.
But he is saying stuff about like,no, no, no fires and and money.
This town money.
And like, it's not 100%because Nino does claim his own innocence.
He's like, I wasn't part of the fires.

(46:10):
Giuseppe Yes,it looks like he definitely started fires,
but he's my son and I love himand he shouldn't be punished that hard.
He was,you know, just kid getting in trouble.
But I agree.And that's that's even locals.
A lot of the locals believe that Giuseppedidn't start the initial
the initial round of firesthat began around 2004.
They believed that it was justthe later fires, as do I, for the reasons

(46:31):
that you just laid out.
And also, again,they seem to be more electrical initially.
And and there are videosthat you will find on on YouTube.
I don't believeall of them are from Canada.
Like, there's there's one where I sawa hairdryer Ignite unplugged,
but I couldn't find that at anyof the news of because the news like news
crews got footage and stuff of townthat wasn't in any of that fire footage.

(46:56):
So you can't trust all of the fire footageyou see from the initial thing.
But it does seem likethey're all electrical.
And yeah,the second fires do not seem to be.
That seems to be fires and cars and.
Bugs, as most.
Tourism is.
Today are telling us.
Come visit comes to the hotel The.
Fine hotel is totally finestay in the pool

(47:17):
look over the city as it catches fire.
Yeah yeah yeah It's really interesting
And you said or Nino, I should say,is in the insurance business.
So there is some theories of like aI wonder if there is like he was going
to try to do some sort of insurancefraud around the fires
and that kind of stuff,but none of that's quite confirmed.
But yeah, I believe the initial fireswere some kind of strange event.

(47:40):
And then the second round waswas Giuseppe.
And locals still want want answerslike they're still talking.
Nino's been interviewed recently,
like they're still talking to peopleand they still want answers.
They don't think the government did enoughto to a, protect them, but also,
B, figure out what was wrong with the townand Canada would.
Coroneos remains.

(48:01):
A place of of mystery.
And currently not on fire.
Currently, Currently not on fire.Not on fire.
From what I can tell,it is not on fire now.
If I am in Sicily, I want to go there.
I would love.
Yeah, and it is beautiful.
I would love to go to Canada.
I think it looks eventhe hotel looks nice.
The hotel's like looks outover everything.

(48:22):
Like I would absolutely stay there. Yeah.
Do you have any final thoughts on this?
Oh, my. No, This has been a wild ride.
Yeah, I.
I would.
I, too, would love to visitCanada one day.
I think. This. Place sounds charming.
Yeah.
Yeah, it really is.
And even the people sound charming.

(48:43):
There's.
There's great little anecdotes of peoplestaying in the hotel,
and some of them had never stayed innice hotels,
and they're like, I don't know what to dowith myself in here.
Like, breakfast is in the dining room.
This is weird.
Yeah, it's a it's a fantastic story.
But again,it's just it's an unexplained story.
And because I am a dumb dumbabout science and electricity, I just.

(49:04):
I don't. I do not have a good theory.
My theory is that some kind ofcombination, some weird energy.
I may lean a little more towardsthe geothermal
volcanic route than I wouldsome military kind of testing something.
Also because of the location.
I mean, it'snot that we're active there, but it's not.

(49:26):
Yeah, I would be curious to explainwhat they would actually be doing.
Right. And also, like, what's the point?
And also they always are targetingbecause with military test stuff
and my understanding and I I'm notin the military, so it could be wrong.
They're not going to like use
the same weapon in the same placeover and over and over again.
Oh, well,
you know, it's funny,we didn't explicitly say this,

(49:46):
but I never thoughtthat this was their weapon.
Oh, see, that's a good point.
Yeah. Fallout of something else.
Something else?
Yeah, but my point would still be, whyis it always directed in the same place?
Unless, I guess if it's fallout ofsomething, they could be doing something.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And not realize that some kind ofwhatever, some kind of spill or.

(50:10):
Whatever is happening in.
Conspiracies, I'm always sort ofon the side of incompetence.
Like, you know, I, it's not that I don'tfeel that they would do evil things.
It's I just don't knowthat we're very competent.
And yeah, we're not.I mean, look, we're all human.
And one of the reasonsI'm not a big conspiracy
theoristsis because I believe in human nature.

(50:30):
And we're all kind of idiots.
And people like to talkand people make mistakes.
And some of the conspiracies out there,like you're you're relying on people
being really smartand a bunch of people working together,
keeping secrets and not making mistakesabout their overall plans.
And that'sjust that's not how humans work.
So including the military.

(50:50):
No. Yeah, that'sthat's a really good point
about kind of fallout from something else
that makes more sense to methan like a weapon that we're shooting at
because no one caresabout a tiny village in Sicily,
which is what some people think.
But yeah,the geothermal thing is really interesting
because I do think there's
we don't understand everythingabout the energy and types
of electromagnetism and stuff like thatthat can be created

(51:12):
through these,you know, through geothermal activity.
So that's where where my mind goes.
But again, happy to be proven wrong.
So if listeners out there,if you have your own theories
or have updates about this, email meat a study of Strange at gmail.com.
I would love to hear about it.
Well,thank you again, Laura, for doing this.

(51:32):
I do want to tell people,are you a social media person?
Do you want to tell people where to findyou or find information on birth rebirth?
Sure. Yeah.
You know, on InstagramI have a personal account,
but my my company, at retrospect, our film
is probably the best placeto get news about birth rebirth.

(51:53):
And I'm hoping there is lots of newscoming shortly.
Yeah. Yeah.And we'll have fun in Sundance.
Say helloto those that I know that you'll see.
And yeah, I wish It's going to be fine.
Yeah, me too. I haven't been to Sundancein like eight years.
I used to go every yearfor like six or seven years, just for.
And it was my

(52:13):
it started my year offbecause I could get to network
and meet people and start my year off.
But luckily I've been busy recently.
Not this year.
This yearI'm just not going because I'm not going.
But it's called it's cold and cold.
It it's. Expensive.
I don't do well in crowds anymore.
So yeah, that would make sense.
But now I think you're going to havea blast.
And congratulations again and thank you.

(52:36):
Thanks for having me.
So that'll do it for the show.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you again to the wonderfulLaura moss.
Check out their movie BirthRebirth, premiering at Sundance
this week as of this recording,and it will be soon followed
by theatrical and Shudderand probably some other places as well.
I cannot recommend their movie enough.

(52:56):
Check it out.
Follow us on Instagram,a study of strange for updates and things.
And as always, feel free to emailme ideas, thoughts, things.
I miss, things I got wrong.
Shoot me a message, a study of strangeall one word
at gmail.com talking about email as well.
If you've listenedto the show in the past.
You know that I have made a.

(53:16):
Few calls for personal UFO or UAPexperiences for an upcoming episode.
I still am compiling stories for thatand probably will be for a while
because some of the ones I've received,they don't want me to share on the air.
So yeah, reach out.
If you've had an experience
OR you know someone that has,I would love to hear from you again.
A study of strange at gmail.com.

(53:37):
I think that does it.You know all the usual stuff.
Check out our website, our Patriot.
We have new content there all the time,including unedited episodes going up
and that'll do it.
Thank you againfor listening and goodnight.

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Devil’s Fire of Canneto Di Caronia - with Director Laura Moss (”Birth/Rebirth”)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Devil’s Fire of Canneto Di Caronia - with Director Laura Moss (”Birth/Rebirth”)