Creepypasta 3: The SCP Foundation

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff
works dot com. Mankind in its present state has been
around for a quarter of a million years, yet only
the last four thousand have been of any significance. So
what did we do? For nearly two hundred and fifty

(00:23):
thousand years? We huddled in cades and around small fires,
fearful of things that we didn't understand. It was more
than explaining why the sun came up. It was the
mystery of enormous birds with heads of men and rocks
that came to life. So we called them gods and demons,
begged them to spare us, and prayed for salvation. In time,
their numbers dwindled in ours rose. The world began to

(00:46):
make more sense when there were fewer things to fear.
Yet the unexplained can never truly go away, as if
the universe demands the absurd and impossible. Mankind must not
go back to hiding in fear. No one else will
protect us, and we must stand up for ourselves. While
the rest of mankind dwells in the light, we must

(01:08):
stand in the darkness to fight it, contain it, and
shield it from the eyes of the public, so that
others may live in a sane and normal world. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Bloil Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I am Christian Sager, and we are
on our third episode about creepy pastas. This uh, I

(01:32):
want to say it was this time last year that
we did the first one and people really liked it,
so we did a second one, and then I would say,
especially this time of year, we get about an email
or two a week suggesting different creepy pastas that we
read and possibly do on the show. And the one
that we have been hearing about the most is called SCP,

(01:55):
and we looked into it and it fit the show perfectly.
It's almost like they designed it just for us. So
I hope that the creators of SCP, the writers of
these various creepy pastas, are out there listening. We love
what you're doing. Yeah, SCP Foundation. SCP stands for Special
Containment Procedures. Uh. It's uh. And you can find this

(02:18):
by the way at SCP slash wiki dot wiki dot
dot com, or just do a web search for u
SEP Foundation or will also include a link to it
on the landing bach for this episode of Stuff to
Blow Your mind dot com. It's a fabulous uh, just
a catalog encyclopedia of all these weird specimens that are
presented presented as if they are under scientific scrutiny. Is

(02:41):
if these specimens are being uh investigated very cautiously by
by by individuals who have scientific curiosity about the specimens
but also the best interests of mankind and its sanity
at heart. Yeah, they pitched it as being kind of
like that TV show Warehouse thirteen, but what I thought
more of was spoilers Cabin in the Woods, uh, and

(03:04):
and what's going on behind the scenes in that movie. Um. So, okay,
maybe you have never heard one of our Creepy Pasta
episodes before, so we're gonna give you a real quick
intro to it, although I recommend that you go check
out the ones that we've done previously. Creepy Pastas are
viral copy and paste text in the form of horror stories.
They evolved from copy pasta, which is another sort of

(03:27):
viral copy and paste text thing. They take the shape
of urban legends, mainly appearing as if there's something that
actually happened, uh, and they mimic first person accounts, especially
scientific ones, which is why we're attracted to them because
we like to on these episodes take the scientific ones
and kind of extrapolate out what's actually going on here

(03:48):
science wise. Uh. So we have a penchant for this genre.
The most popular one that you've probably heard of is
slender Man. Then the genre really seems to have hit
its peak into one ten, but it is still chugging
along as SCP is total evidence. Oh yeah, there's a
new television series that's right. Yeah. In fact, Robert and

(04:09):
I jested an interview with Playboy magazine of all places,
about this upcoming sci fi TV show, Channel zero that's
all about different creepy pastas, and I guess the first
one that they're gonna do is Candle Cove. They're basically
gonna take some of these creepypastas and adapt them for television. Yeah.
I haven't seen it myself yet, but I've heard great things.
Yeah me neither. Um. But back to SCP. So, the

(04:30):
basic idea here is that it's a foundation that is
trying to contain and protect us from all these various
entities that are sort of weird horror abstractions. Right, it's
not fair, Yeah, and it's I think it's kind of
I see SCP Foundation is kind of an evolution of
the form because the more classic examples of pasta and

(04:53):
creepy pasta, they're they're such I mean, they straddle fiction
and reality in such a way to supposed to misinterpret them.
Like it's the kind of thing where someone is pasting
it onto a message board, like an individual saying, hey,
has anyone ever had a bad experience with this medication?
And then someone pace as in copy and paste pasta,
they paste this this, uh, this ridiculous story of something

(05:15):
that happened to somebody, and then you're supposed to potentially
think it's real. Whereas SCP STP Foundation, it's not so
much they're not really pushing the these this is real,
this really happened angle but they're playing with the genre.
There's still I believe anonymous entries. I think so yeah. Uh,
they basically are cataloging all of these creatures, entities, whatever

(05:39):
they are, as if they're all in containment. And so
the guidelines for writing one of these is that the
articles should have an interesting idea, a reasonable containment procedure
for whatever it is it's being contained, and a clear
description of each entry They also operate on a rating system,
which was really nice for us to be able to
get like a good dive in UM. If the page

(06:02):
is low rated, they're deleted from the site if they
receive a negative nine rating or lower UM. So these
people are very focused on quality, more so than a
lot of the creepy pasta sites that we've been to before.
There's also a spinoff game. I haven't had a chance
to play it yet, but it's called Containment Breach, where
you play a disposable human guinea pig that's stuck in

(06:22):
the facility and the it undergoes a containment breach, so
you're alone with all the escaped entities. I I just
really liked a lot of these. They play to the
weirdness of horror rather than to the gore of some
of the creepy pastas, and I that appealed to me. Yeah,
I mean I. I I also love the emphasis on humor
and absurdity. There's still plenty of unsettling aspects to the

(06:43):
various specimens, but more often than not, the entries put
a smile on my face or even elect a giggle. UM. Plus,
there's a fair amount of a variety in the style.
Most of the top entries retain that case report format,
but but there are tones shifts here and there, and uh,
and some rely on visuals more so than others. There's
even one entry at least STP that's entirely it's told

(07:09):
entirely through visuals, through the sequential use of like industrial
hazard signs to tell the story of a deadly but
perhaps loving shadow entity that creeps in and and terrifies
and potentially consumes one of the researchers. Yeah, I really
love the creativity on this site. Definitely recommend that you
go visit it. So our mission today and on this

(07:32):
episode is we each took three of our favorite specimens
and then we extrapolated out scientific lessons that we can
learn from them. Yeah, so view it as a celebration
of step foundation materials, but also using different examples from
SEP as a as a stepping stone to then discuss

(07:52):
some equally fascinating and weird science, real world science behind
the fiction. Okay, so we're gonna start off with one
of Roberts and this one is called the Sculpture. Yeah,
this one's pretty cool because it not only is the
idea interesting, it's also the original specimen. This was the
first CP Foundation specimen to have a ride up. And

(08:13):
I'm just gonna read from the description quote move to
site nineteen. Origin is of yet unknown. It is constructed
from concrete and rebar with faces of Crylon brand spray paint.
SEP one seventy three. Is an is animate and extremely hostile.
The object cannot move while within a direct line of sight.

(08:36):
Line of sight must not be broken at any time.
With SCP one seventy three, personnel assigned to inter container
are instructed to alert one other before blinking object is
reported to attack by snapping the neck at the base
of the skull or by strangulation. In the event of
an attack, personnel are to observe Class four hazardous object
containment procedures. So uh. A lot of these remind me

(09:00):
of like the premises for Doctor Who episodes, and this
one immediately made me think of the weeping Angels, which
are sort of a favorite on the newer Doctor Who episodes. Yeah, indeed,
like this is the trope, right, the the entity that
cannot move as long as you're looking at it, but
if you look away, it's going to creep in with
alarming speed. Another big example of this are the hedge

(09:21):
creatures from Stephen King's novel The Shine. Oh yeah, that's right.
But one of the things The Shining movie is my
favorite movie of all time. But that is the one
thing from the novel I really wish had made it
in there. That's right, because in the in the in
the movie, the original Kubrick film, we we got this hedgemazed,
and certainly that works very well within the the you know,

(09:42):
the that adaptation. But in the original novel, they're these
hedge animals and if you look away, then you look back,
and they moved closer, and they get closer and closer.
And I haven't seen it yet, but you know, Stephen
King made his own adaptation of it, and I believe
the hedge creatures are in that. I think so. I
think they kept it, but I've not seen one of
these days, I'll get to it now. SCP One three,

(10:03):
as the picture seems to illustrate, is kind of this
giant space baby from a Young smunk Meyer film. At
the image is pretty crazy. Yeah, it's it's like it's
it's a little bit bad, but it's also it's it's
creepy to look at because you're trying to imagine this
thing moving when your eyes are adverted. And they believe
this is also the most popular one, right or one

(10:24):
of the most pop's. It's right up there on the
top of the list, if not the most popular, and
certainly it's been around the longest, and it is a
good it's a really good like template for other U
imagine for anyone creating one of these now. In addition
to the head creatures from Stephen King's The Shining and
the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, which which, as you
pointed out, these are these on the show where ancient

(10:45):
alien predators who resemble winged humans and they make use
of time paradoxes. They move swiftly, but only if nothing
is looking at them, and apparently if two weeping angels
look at each other at the same time, they get
trapped in their stone forms. But then, on top of
these sational examples, there's Ninja Cat from YouTube. It's exactly

(11:05):
the same premise. It's it's uh, somebody pointing their camera
at this cat is peeking around a corner at them
down the hall, and then the camera moves away for
a second, moves back, and the cat is peeking around
a closer corner, and they move away, and then when
they come back, the cat is even closer. But just
like the hedge creatures of the Weeping Angels or this

(11:26):
particular SEP specimen, you never actually see it move. It
just gets closer and closer and closer to much right
on you. No, I haven't seen that one, but that
sounds like it would be very amusing. Yeah, it is,
it's it's it's wonderful. But this last example, ninja cat. Uh,
given that it's a natural world predator as opposed to
another worldly when it raises, the question, does direct line

(11:48):
of sight, direct eyesight even protect a prey animal such
as a human from a predator such as a tiger
or a jumping angel or a hedge monster. Yeah, it's
a it's a wonderful question. And uh, and indeed we
have some answers to that. So eye contact is of
course something that creepily transcends species. And and I mean

(12:12):
it's creepy enough with with humans, right, it's weird to
humans lot gazes and there's this sense of connection, sense
of openness for an attempt to dominate. Numerous studies have
revealed that that it that it has various influences over
trust persuasion. A two thousand eleven study even show that
eye contact can serve as an invitation to mimicry, which

(12:35):
which has an impact on the way we learn, but
also potentially on how people with autism struggle to grasp
when they're expected to copy the actions of another person.
Oh yeah, yeah, certainly. I mainly think of the sort
of quote science of eye contact because I used to
teach public speaking, and it's a big part of that,
like how much eye contact should you have with your audience? Um,

(12:57):
where should you be moving your eyes through the audience?
Would you just stare at one person? Obviously not. So
there's a lot of there's a lot of rules to
it to be an effective public speaker, right. But but
related to that, there's there's also this mix of a
continuing study into how uh, direct eye contact influences are
are speaking abilities, but also there's a fair amount of

(13:20):
sort of folk mythology about yeah. Well, for instance, the
whole idea that you should make direct eye contact when
trying to convince somebody of something you see it in
a speech or whatever. There was actually a two thousand
thirteen University of Freiburg study that found that direct eye
contact makes skeptical listeners less likely to change their minds.
I believe it. So it's just it's like, oh, you're

(13:40):
you're boring into me with your with your ideas and
your creepy eyes. I'm just gonna shut you out. I remember,
I don't have them in the notes here, but I
remember reading studies that like have quantified the exact amount
of seconds that human beings can look at each other
in the eyes before it becomes so uncomfortable that they
just immediately shut down. Yeah. But the crazy part though, right,

(14:01):
is that that if you've ever made eye contact with
a dog or a cat or a zoo animal, then
you felt that inner species connection as well. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I look, that's funny that you you bring that up,
because you know, I have two dogs. I hang out
with them all the time, and uh look them in
the eyes all the time, a lot longer than a
human and I would be able to look each other

(14:22):
in the eyes. But I think it's because the dogs
are connecting differently, but it still means something to them. Yeah.
I have the same experience with our cat, who like
who I know, you know, I do not this cat, especially,
I do not anthropomorphizes too much, like she's she's a
monster who attacks my feet, and uh, it just came
around at the long wrong point in our lives. I mean,

(14:43):
I love her, she's wonderful, but she's kind of kind
of right. Both my cats are similar, but you make
eye contact with them and it's like, oh, it's like,
I know that we have totally different minds and totally
different brains, totally different views of the world, and yet
right now we're sharing this profound activity. You're staring into
eyes and you have no word for eyes. All right,

(15:04):
you can just go down the rabbit hole on it.
But at at the basic right, like the bedrock here,
is that when you when two creatures make eye contact,
there's this idea that one has been seen, that one
is being seen, that one is your you're know, not
hiding from that other creature, the other creature is aware.
And then what comes next. So there are two main

(15:24):
distinctions in what should come next? First matching up the
with with the idea of the weeping angels and uh
and topiary animals and sep one. See, there's this reality
that certain creatures depend on stealth to acquire their prey.
And if if they know that you see them, that
is going to take away their advantage. They they are

(15:46):
stealth hunters, they are surprised um predators, and if they
don't have that surprise, then they may back off. And
I can't help but think of these attacks in um
an x COOM terms video games. That was I was
immediately thinking of video game. Different video game. But yeah,
when you're trying to sneak up on somebody, Yeah, or

(16:07):
d n D as well, where you have a bonus. Uh,
there's a damage bonus or an attack bonus to a
sneak attack, like in video games. Like Yeah, if it's
a video games role playing, if the stakes are high enough,
that surprise attack can make all the difference. Uh. But
but but you know, within the game it's still a game, right, Well,
for predators it's uh, it's even more important because first

(16:29):
of all, nothing beats a sure thing, right or even
a near sure thing. If an attack, but if an
attack does not go as exactly planned, a number of
consequences can occur. So the prey might get away, in
which case you've lost energy, you've lost time. Other prey
in the area might be alerted to your presence and
they're frightened away, We're still an alert prey animal could

(16:50):
have the chance to counterattack and inflict damage, and that
kind of injury can prove deadly. Cheatahs, for instance, rarely
go after larger prey like an austria. There are some
very interesting examples where they do develop strategies to to
do that, but for the most part they don't because
while to pay off for catching that off striach is
wonderful if you get if they get injured, it basically

(17:11):
can mean starvation because they are a high speed predator
and a limping cheetah is not going to eat. Yeah.
This reminds me of a video that I shot here
for work a couple of weeks ago about killer whales
and humpback whales. There's a similar thing going on, and
that killer whales trying to sneak up and take out
humpback whale calves. But now humpback whales have started to

(17:35):
fight back. Uh, to the point that humpback whales will
actually interfere with killer whale attacks on other animals, like
they're saving seals from killer whale attacks. Uh, and go
watch the video. But there's a lot of science to it,
trying to figure out what's going on there exactly to
this point. The killer whales are expending all this energy

(17:56):
and then the humpbacks just basically pummel them down to
make sure that they stay away, and they're basically teaching
them a lesson like don't go after our children. Yeah,
and certainly I have a hard time sympathizing with the
mammal eating killer whales. They got to eat somehow. But
but then you have the fish eating killer whales where

(18:19):
in my household, my four year old is very is
very into into nature right now, and he likes killer whales,
but he's very firm that he only likes fish eating. Yeah,
despite the fact that the there's a particular to tie
back into viewing prey killer whales that that prey on
seals will do this thing called spy hopping, and my

(18:40):
son's very intrigued by that. And this is where they
will they'll they'll they're they'll poke their heads out of
the water kind of like peek over the top and
see what their prey is up to. Well, maybe if
that seal just made direct eye contact with the killer whale,
it would swim away. Yeah, that's right. Now, that's one possibility, right,
if you know, if you know that the predators after

(19:01):
you just make eye contact with it at all times,
it's great, but you're that's going to be quite a
resource drain. You can't constantly be on the lookout for predators.
So the next best tactic, of perhaps the better tactic,
is to fool your enemies into thinking someone's watching you
all the time. And we actually see countless examples of
this uh in the evolution of eye spots across various species.

(19:27):
So these are just you know, dots on a creature
that look like eyes. Now, to be clear, not all
eye spots are there to mimic watching eyes. Sometimes they're
there to fool a predator and attacking a less vulnerable
part of the animal. You know, don't attack my head,
attack my rump, or they play into mate selection. But
in some cases, yes, eye spots definitely serve as anti

(19:48):
predator adaptations. And we also see examples of the strategy's
effectiveness outside of natural adaptation. For instance, in India, you
have individuals who happen to live and work in Bengal
Ti tiger country and they've long reported success with these
wooden human masks that they wear in the back of
their heads with wide open eyes. That the idea here

(20:10):
is that the tiger will try and self attack them,
but it sees this face staring back at them, and
so they realize, oh, well, my percentage, my percentage to
hit is less, I'm not going to take the risk. Um.
And and you know, various animal species have evolved eye
spots that in many cases they serve to protect them
from creeping predators, as I already mentioned. Uh. Currently there's

(20:31):
this really cool project Australian conservation biologist Dr Neil Jordan's
is experimenting with the use of painted on eye spots
painted and then just black paint into grazing cattle. And
the idea here is to protect them from lion attacks,
because lions end up attacking cattle uh. And then the
humans counterattack at least all this violence, and then the

(20:52):
lions are already endangered anyway. It's a bad situation for everyone.
But so far he has reported a fair out of
success with this. Say he holds a position with the
Botswana Predator Conservation Trust and he recently held a ten
week trial of the strategy painting eyes on one third
of the sixty two cattle herd, three unpainted cows wild

(21:14):
wound up as lion chow, but none of the eye
cows fell to bradation. So, uh, correct me if I'm wrong,
But didn't we do it? Now we do? And this
was it? You? Who? Yeah? So why it's in your mind? Yeah,
I remember this from a couple of weeks ago. So yeah,
we have a small video out there that you can
go check out at how stuff works. Now they're going

(21:35):
to do a follow up on it. Hopefully we'll see
the results of that in the the weeks and months ahead.
But uh, you know they're gonna use GPS, cattle trackers,
etcetera to really see how effective this, uh, this strategy is.
But it does drive on the fact that, yes, there
are predatory creatures where they know that you're watching, they
will back they will back off where they will they
will they will hold off their attack. However, that doesn't

(21:58):
mean the direct icon atack with your specimen is always
a good thing. There are also plenty of examples where
it will force violent actions out of the other species.
I mean, essentially, you're making eye contact with another animal
if they are if if if they might see you
as prey, they're going to hold off their attack. But
if they think that you were the predator, they think

(22:21):
you might be the aggressor, they may just go ahead
and counter attack. So dogs, for instance, they key into
human eye movements. Have been a number of studies about this.
They're able to track our eye movements and infer intent.
And this has also been documented in in other species primates, goats, dolphins, seals,
even some tortoises. But of course dogs that are that

(22:42):
feel especially threatened can actually be provoked into attacking the
eye contact. UM and I imagine anyone who's ever spent
a lot of time around dogs, especially around a dog
that is nervous, is already feels threatened. Like you most adults,
I think, no not to just go and like get
in its face and stare at it. However, according to
a two thousand seven New Zealand Medical Journal report, UM

(23:05):
this I have. This actually can also be one of
the reasons that the young children are the ones who
are often victims of dog attacks. When you have one
of these threatened animals. I mean, on one hand, yes,
the child is going to be smaller more on the
dog's scale. There's more of a possibility for for for
more grievous injuries because of the attack. But also they

(23:25):
say that a child is going to be less likely
to avert their gates. So this is like the Kujo
lesson of science, right, Like Kujo is a different situation.
But I can't remember back to that book or the
movie if there's points where they just make direct eye
contact with it. Yeah. Now, but there's a kid, right,
it's the mom and the kid. Yeah, they're like stuck

(23:47):
in a car. I think I never read or saw it,
so I can't. I can't comment too much on Kujo. However,
I did see the movie Congo, in which they're a
number of human guerrilla interactions, and that's of course in
a well known case as well, like if you encounter
a guerrilla in the wild, don't make direct eye contact
with it because you're going to enrage it. And uh,
and this is this is actually you know, pretty well

(24:09):
proven in fact back in two thousand seven, Uh, the
Rotterdam Zoo engage in a wonderful reversal of the aforementioned
tiger fooling masks. They they gave all these these visitors
to the zoo shades like little paper shades that look
like averted eyes, so they're they're super goofy looking because

(24:29):
oh yeah, there's pictures here that notes wow. Okay, so
it looks like you're looking the other direction, but you're
looking straight at the gorilla, so that the gorilla doesn't
want like run towards the because because people were you know,
you're there to see the gorilla. You stare at the
gorilla and at the stair guerrilla stares back sees you staring.
Then then it's gonna enrage the gorilla. It's gonna upset

(24:50):
the animal, et cetera. Uh So, even discounting actual human
guerrilla physical interaction, you don't want these creatures to be
disrupted more than than they already are artificial environment. Yeah,
especially in the wake of the whole Harambe incident, this
seems like something that would make a lot of sense
for most suits to implement. Yeah, but I will to

(25:11):
go back to SCP one seventy three would not make sense,
I think, to where these in the presence of that specimen,
because that would mean even though you are making direct
eye contact with it, it thinks you are not, and
it might attack and strangle you. Yeah, it seems like
what you should do with SCP one seventy three is
paint your body or your clothes with eyeballs all over

(25:31):
it that's pointing directly forward, so just in case you blink,
it still thinks that you're looking at it. Yeah, I would.
I would imagine that would be a decent addition to
the containment procedures procedures. Yeah cool, all right. Well, the
first one that I have is SCP eight seven, and

(25:51):
it is also referred to as the stairwell. The entity
itself is just a platform staircase of thirteen steps that
has a platform in the middle that rotates a hundred
and eighty degrees to another staircase. Right, So it's two
staircases like we we know from the apartment buildings, but
the bottom one just leads into total darkness, and after

(26:15):
one point five flights of stairs, the staircase limits your
visual range. Even if you bring a light source with you,
it won't always work. In fact, any light source that's
over seventy five watts has its excess light absorbed by
the stairwell. Subjects have reported hearing distressed children uh when

(26:37):
they're on the stairs below the initial platform and on
into the darkness, and the staircases depth seems to be
unmeasurable and infinite, so it reminds me of House of Leaves.
I was just thinking, Uh, sometimes however, explorers who have gone,
you know, very far down the stairs, they all of

(26:57):
a sudden run into a face with no pupil, no nostrils,
and no mouth. So it just kind of pops up.
It's like the jump scare of this of the stairwell.
Um doesn't seem to hurt people. It just goes and
then it sounds like something he would encounter the Miyazaki films. Yeah, yeah,
it does. It looks like it too. Yeah. They have
a little image on the on the Sep. Eight seven page.

(27:19):
So all right, this one fascinated me and made me
think about light absorbtion and want to understand a little
bit more about how it worked, so I could try
to extrapolate out maybe what's going on with a staircase,
because again, it is a staircase that goes to a
lightless darkness that may be haunted and possibly inhabited by

(27:40):
a weird Miyazaki exactly. Yeah, yeah, so what's the deal.
How is light absorbed? Well, Uh, the way that light
is absorbed can be used to identify different types of
gas in space because atoms and molecules absorb it at
specific wavelengths. So how the spectra of light is absorbed
can tell us a lot about the energy levels of

(28:02):
the atoms and molecules that were observing, or about the
number that are present. So perhaps this staircase has a
some unique attributes regarding its atomic structure. Let's consider atoms
for a second to try to figure this out. They've
got a positively charged nucleus that's made up of protons
and neutrons, and they're orbited by negatively charged electrons. Usually

(28:25):
the number of protons and electrons are equal, so the
atom has a neutral charge. Now I'm going to skip
a lot of physics here. Okay, there was a lot
to read about this, and I think it's it's over
my head and I don't want to bore our audience.
But if an atom has energy added to it, that
can excite it by removing an electron, This is a

(28:48):
process called ionization, and excitation is temporary though. When the
atom drops back to its ground state, it gives off
excess energy, which is usually like Okay, so this is
how light can be generated. Each atom emits a unique
fingerprint on the light spectrum, and so that's how we're

(29:09):
able to identify these different gases based on their atomic
structure what elements they might be. Now, visible light is
a type of electromagnetic radiation. Light is composed of photons,
and photons are just packets of energy that move at
the speed of light. But if they're stopped, they cease
to exist. So if a photon strikes an atom, it

(29:29):
can give up its energy under the right circumstances, and
in this process, the photon ceases to exist and the
electron gets excited. This is absorption. This is when light
gets absorbed. Okay, absorption occurs at specific energies in specific wavelengths,
and this is how we identify these gases that light

(29:49):
is passing through in space. Depending on what they are,
certain wavelengths will be removed from the light, which results
in dark lines. That's what they're referred to within the spectrum.
So let's apply this to s c P seven. Again,
this feels like a doctor who episode to me, like
like this creeping darkness and they're trying to figure out
how to get past it. So I looked into the

(30:10):
math of figuring out how many photons are admitted per
second by a seventy five watt bulb. It's possible to
figure this out as a chemistry problem. That's beyond our
scope here. I'm not gonna walk all the way through
the math, but I found someone else who did the
answer for us, and I think it's three point one
one four eight six e plus nineteen photons per second. So,

(30:31):
based on what we know about light absorption on the
atomic level, it sounds like the stairwell has some kind
of element and it maybe it's a gas that absorbs photons.
Above that level of three point one one four eight
six e plus nineteen, then something changes about the stairwells
atoms so they no longer absorb light and they create

(30:55):
dark lines in the spectrum. Maybe the electrons in this
darkness area are just returning to their ground state, or
is there something altering the wavelength of light as it's
entering this area. So another possibility is the Doppler effect.
This is the phenomenon of a shift in the frequency
or wavelength of light caused by motion at its source right,

(31:17):
So this can shift the spectrum towards blue or red ends,
creating different hues within light. It doesn't seem likely to
me that this is the case, because it would mean,
first of all, that there's something in the stairwell that
would be moving the light source. You'd think you'd be
aware of that. Maybe it's maybe it's the distressed children
or the Miyazaki monster, but but you don't seem to

(31:37):
see it at that point. The other reason is, even
if blue and red war shifted, you'd still have visible
light from the remaining photons. This seems to create total darkness.
So so, based on what you've said so far, it
sounds like the best case here is some sort of
gas combined with maybe some sort of meta material that's
coding the just the structures it's themselves. I think so, yeah,

(32:01):
I think that's my best guess that was at what
is going on here with the stairwell now, regarding the
weird face and the sound of the distress child and
the infinite stairwell, I'm I'm at a total loss. My
My best guest there is maybe because the stairwell is infinite,
the generated photons from the light source can't reach its

(32:21):
end even at light speed because it's infinite. But I'm
not sure My best guess though, is what you just
said that there's there's something going on with the amount
of photons that are generated per second, uh, and how
much can be absorbed by whatever material is in there.
So the stairwell is is generating something a field, some
kind of gas. Okay, Robert's got another one here. And

(32:44):
if you have also listened to our Frankenstein episode that's
been released this week, this will be familiar. It is
the homunculous, yes, and I'm gonna try not to repeat
myself on the two episodes too much here, So if
you have any questions from any about Homunculi, tune into
our Frankenstein episode as well. So this is SEP thirty

(33:06):
and here's the description. Sep thirty appears as a hairless, genderless,
grave toned humans, seventy one centimeter in height and weighing
twelve to British stones in antiquated measure. It's solid blue eyes,
lacked discernible irises or pupils, and remember and resemble small
cut sapphires. SEP thirty possesses an androgynous voice with a

(33:29):
pronounced English accident, not currently identifiable as specific to any
modern region. It is able to converse, read, and write
in Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, as
well as two additional languages that have not yet been identified,
despite SEP thirties insistence that they should be quote common knowledge.
STP thirty also demonstrated knowledge of physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics,

(33:52):
and horticulture roughly equivalent to that of a seventeenth century academic.
In addition, SEP thirty has demonstrated knowledge of these topics
along research lines that do not appear in the historical record.
These alternative or entirely unknown approaches to research in the
natural sciences are one source of SEP thirties utility and consultation. Okay,

(34:12):
so this immediately reminds me. You know the hell Boy
universe right? Oh? Yes, what Norman Roger Roger. Yeah, it
immediately makes me think of Roger the homunculus. Uh uh.
If anybody out there is not familiar with hell Boy.
In that universe, there's the bpr D, which is very
much like the SCP actually uh and uh. Roger is

(34:35):
one of their discoveries, but he's also an agent. Uh.
And he's he's a homunculous yeah, and that's that is Uh,
that's what we have here in Sep. Thirty an ammunculus homunculus. Uh,
that does seem to have a level intellivigence and alchemical
understanding that surpasses what typically passes for an amunculus in

(34:57):
most texts. Again more in common with with rod Or,
who is very much an intelligent individual. Well, I like
the idea that these things are built and then they're
effectively immortal, so they're hanging around for a long time.
They're just absorbing knowledge like a sponge. So of course
they'd be smart. Yeah, if you let one one live
long enough. So homuncular are one of my favorite subjects.

(35:20):
They're mean, creepy, weird little goblinoids that are made by wizards.
I mean, what's not to love. Um, it's an artificial
humanoid created through alchemy, which again is that sixte through
eighteen century hodgepodge of occultist lower superstition and pre scientific chemistry.
So it's not quite a human. Uh, the creature is
a rational animal as it as it often was described.

(35:42):
And uh, you know, another fictional page and humanity's dream
of mastering life and death. But one of the cool
things is that you when you start getting into the text.
Of course, you get into any alchemical text, and there's
all sorts of weirdness and absurdity um and as well
as stuff that seems to be code for for other secrets.
It gets, you know, very byzantine. But the one one

(36:05):
that I was looking at in particular is the liberal
of the Libra of a cad the Book of the Cow,
and it lays out some rather grotesque and confusing instructions
in the art of do it yourself, homuncula brewing and
m Makey van der Gluck's Abominable Mixtures, the liber Vock
in the Medieval West, or the Dangers and Attractions of

(36:26):
Natural Magic really lays out some excellent commentary on what
it all means. That sounds like the kind of book
that you would find at Hogwarts Academy in the library. Indeed,
So I'm just gonna briefly roll through, uh the recipe
that is presented for the creation of a moncula. Do
not attempt this at home. You can, but you're gonna
reach the point where the ingredients do not exist, so

(36:49):
good luck with it. Uh So, yeah, you're gonna create
one homunculi. You're gonna need a magicians semen. Okay, you're
gonna need animal blood. You're gonna need need a cow,
you can need us. You need some sulfur, a magnet.
But here's where it starts getting complicated. First, a large
glass or lead vessel, all right, it's gonna be a
little expensive. Then you're gonna need green tutuia tutilla, which

(37:11):
is a sulfite of iron. Right, you're gonna hunt around
for that. And oh yeah, you're gonna need the sunstone,
which is a mystical phosphorescent elicks sir. This is always
the case with alchemists, Right, It's like, here's a bunch
of like stuff that you put in this casserole. And
then oh yeah, you need this magical item that nobody
knows where it is yet, like a philosopher's by the way,

(37:33):
you're gonna need the Philosopher's stone, or you know what,
or some other magical album that doesn't quite exist. Right.
See it mixed the semen in the sunstone, and you
inseminate a cow. You carefully plug the animal up with
the sunstone, You smear the animal with with the blood
of another animal. You place the artificially inseminated animal. Then

(37:53):
inside a dark house where the sun never shines. Makes sense.
Then you feed the cow exclusively on the blood of
another animal. Then you prepare a powder of the ground sunstone,
sulfur magnet, and green tutilla, and then you stir with
the sap of a wide willow. Now at this point
the text indicates that the cow should give birth and
resulting unformed substance should be placed in the powder that

(38:17):
you just prepared, which will cause the amorphous blob to
grow human skin. And then you have a newborn humunculus
and a large glass or lead container, depending on which
one you used, and the creature will become crazy hungry
in this time. So you need to feed the blood
of its decapitated mother for seven days, and in this
time it should develop into a fully grown, tiny, grotesque

(38:38):
humanoid with some fragment of a human soul. All right,
I think I think I just got the idea for
a season five of Monster Science. How Dr Anton Jessup
can introduce the homunculous. You gotta do it like a
cooking show. It's like as if a Guy Fieri is
making a homunculous. Oh, I bet he has. I bet
he has made one before. Uh. The crazy thing though,

(39:00):
is that, you know, we get wrapped up in these
ideas of the creation of life, you know, the Frankenstein
myth that we uh we we discussed at length in
our in our other episode this week. But the creation
of the homunculi is not necessarily a means, you know,
it's not necessarily the end product. The idea then, is
that now that you have this homunculi, you're gonna use

(39:20):
it to create other things. So you're essentially going to
render it down and and use it in other recipes.
So in the in the text that I mentioned earlier,
they say, quote, if it is placed on a white
cloth with a mirror in its hands, uh and uh,
and suffumigated with a mixture of human blood and other ingredients,
the moon will appear to be full on the last

(39:42):
day of the month if you need to get around
at night, like maybe you need that for another spell.
I don't know. If it is decapitated and it's blood
is given to a man to drink, the man will
assume the form of a bovine or a sheep. But
if he is anointed with it, he will have the
form of an ape. So this is like some searcy
one oh one stuff right here. Now, this is where

(40:03):
it starts getting potentially useful. If the homunculus is fed
for forty days in a dark house on a diet
of blood and milk, and then it's guts are extracted
from its belly and rubbed onto someone's hands and feet,
he may walk on water or travel around the world.
And the winking of an eye kept alive for a
year and then placed in a bath of milk and rainwater,
the homunculi will tell things that happened far away. Now

(40:26):
that that's your Homunculi horror movie right there, Like you
base it around that premise, and then somebody stumbles across
the dark house and they mess up this experiment. It
does create an even more horrific view of alchemy, like
not only are they creating horrible little abominations, but then
you're tormenting the abomination to pull off various other sorceress schemes.

(40:50):
Oh yeah, well it gets back to what we talked
about in the Frankenstein episode, the ethics of creating life
from nothing. So yeah, it is we've discussed in that
Like we have this base the idea, you know, the
basic human ability to to imbue on living things with life.
You know, you paint a picture and then that picture
becomes the thing to a certain extent. So we kind

(41:11):
of create communcula every day, but it takes something like
the true mythic communculus or SCP thirty to drive home
just how weird that really is. All right, So my
next one is a far step from a homunculi, although
well we just don't know, because this is SCP fifty one,
which is cataloged as unknown because no one knows what

(41:35):
it is, and in fact, no one can remember that
it even exists. Half the time, no one can describe
what it is or its appearance. Somehow it erases any
memory of itself from a subject's mind. They can't describe it.
Even those who try to sketch a copy of a
photograph are unable to remember what it looks like. Watching

(41:57):
it on closed circuit cameras causes amnesia, and it's basically
called the self keeping secret. No one remembers how it
was brought to SCP or who built its containment room.
There's a lot in the in the file on it
on the containment unit in the very particular ways it
has to be contained. But the most important thing is

(42:18):
that all personnel have to stay at least fifty meters
from the center of the room. Otherwise they just forget
that it exists. Oh I, I love this. It's very
It sounds like something Borhees would have come up. You know,
it's like it's a paradox. It's the thought experiment. Even
those who talk about it, just the act of talking
about it seemed to forget that it existed shortly thereafter. Okay,

(42:40):
so what's the possible scientific tieing. Well, we can look
at amnesia or how to erase memories, and there are
a lot of ways to erase human memories, and in fact,
we're making a lot of headway with it right now
in modern science. But let's do a quick look at amnesia.
What is it. Well, it's a loss of memory from
physical or psychological conditions. Usually we're talking about a head trauma,

(43:04):
but sometimes disease or emotional trauma contributes to it as well. Now,
given the circumstances of SCP fifty five, I'm assuming it
has to do with emotional trauma, Like it's so emotionally
traumatizing to look at it or even talk about it
or think about it that your brain just just erases it.
But I don't know, UM, or could also be reaching

(43:27):
in with spores or something. They don't mention any traces
of physical signs, but that is possible as well. It
could be a disease, or maybe it's some kind of
physical manifestation that's localized to a fifty meteor radius. I
don't know, UM, But SCP fifty five doesn't seem to
be causing what's known as anterior grade amnesia because people

(43:51):
can form new memories. People with anterior grade amnesia cannot
form new memories. Retrograde amnesia seems to be what's going
on here. That's when you're impeded from retrieving your previous memories.
If it's any kind of psychogenic amnesia, then it could
be dissociative or it could be like a fugue state,
possibly as a result of post traumatic stress disorder. So

(44:14):
I'm thinking again, it's causing such emotional stress that people
just completely forget about it. The reported symptoms, however, don't
seem to indicate that the creation of a dissociative identity
is going on here, So it's not like you go
in and you see it, and you create an entire
identity while you're seeing it, and then you're unable to
recall the memories of your identity that interacts with SCP

(44:38):
fifty five. It's probably not ahead trauma like I was saying,
because we think there would be Yeah, there'd be evidence
unless it's electric. But even electro convulsive treatments usually lead
to interrograde amnesia and not retrograde. So okay, you could
possibly treat this as memory loss with drugs that use

(44:58):
active neuroep and nephron, But would the subject recall immediately
shut down their memories? Again, I don't know what if
they took the drugs though. What if they took drugs
that limited their perception skills while they were in contact
with SCPT, so maybe then they'd be able to remember it.
I'm not sure. Um. I looked to an article called

(45:22):
wiping the slate? Is playing with memory humane or is
it just wrong? From psychology today? And it's it covers
the the broad spectrum of ways in which we're able
to start erasing memories. Today, scientists have been using behavioral
conditioning and drugs that alter memory consolidation on the molecular
level to erase memories. They can delete memories and rats,

(45:45):
but we haven't really figured out how to target specific
memories yet. And there's three ways that they're doing it.
Propran and All is a beta blocker that they use,
and it can weaken the link between the facts of
a memory and its emotional impact by blocking adrenaline and
other substances that ignite our fear response. Another possibility is

(46:06):
zeta inhibitor peptides. So what happens with these is they
inhibit our p k M zeta enzymes so that they
can't maintain or strengthen long term memories in our brains. So,
for instance, rats that are injected with this will walk
right into shock rigged obstacles that they've previously learned to avoid. Uh.

(46:27):
The last one is that our amygdala's seem to be
able to be overwritten by genetically disarmed herpes. UH. It
infiltrates and cripples the neural networks and a human brain,
but the current human application seems very far fetched to
be able to like isolate specific memories such as SCPT.

(46:49):
Could be an alien with some sort of space herpes maybe,
or or maybe it's just emitting propaninal or zeta inhibitors.
Who knows. Uh, let's look a little bit more at us.
We've talked about this on the show before, especially with
relation to PTSD and the use of m d m
A to treat it. Because PTSD memories remain horribly intense,

(47:12):
they're considered a disease of how memory works and in
the sense that they can't be forgotten. So PTSD subjects
are actually often counseled to share their memories to try
to help in the act of forgetting. But this actually
rarely seems to help. However, I will acknowledge through our
m d m A episodes that does seem to help
them if they take m d M A and then

(47:32):
they go through counseling. Uh, because the m d m
A helps them forget by associating those memories with trust
and a lack of fear. As we've talked about in
that if you haven't listened to it, I highly recommended
our our two parter on m d M A and
the science behind it. This would you know thinking of it?
Of of this entity the specimen SPC fifty five as
an as a potential alien creature that emits some sort

(47:55):
of psychoactive substance. Yeah, like clearly it's it's not emitting
m D M A. But that would be a wonderful
set out for some sort of science fiction. And maybe
it's before and alien just to be in its presence
without like a containment suit used to know, pure euphoria
and bliss. Right. Well, yeah, it automatic, it's like a
like like using pharama. Oh you know what it's like.

(48:15):
It's like um, David Tennant's character on Jessica Jones. It
creates trust and yeah, the Purple Man, I believe Killgrave.
Uh yeah, it's like he's emitting uh something that makes
you trust him and have a lack of fear, total
lack of fear. But I don't know if that's what's
going on with that. CP fifty five could be uh,

(48:36):
memories themselves. Let's remember this. No, I didn't mean to
do that as a pun. They're not packets of data,
they're not constant. The very act of remembering changes a
memory itself. This model has been shown at a molecular
level by neuroscientists, so therefore, memories can be altered by
other chemicals, specifically that those that inhibit proteins sin the cysts.

(49:00):
So if new proteins can't be created during the act
of remembering, the original memory ceases to exist. So maybe
a SCP fifty five is suppressing protein creation. This would
make sense because based on what I've covered in the
past on potential memory erasure, like memories become susceptible to

(49:22):
to tweaking, to treating, or erasure when they are recalled.
Like if everyone I always think of memories is like
a clay sculpture. It's in a drawer, and anytime you
get it out, that's when you end up changing the
shape with your hands just by remembering it, and then
you put it back in the drawer. If it's in
the drawer, it's harder to get to. But if you
retrieve it, if you're retrieving the memory, if you're engaged
with the memory, then it's susceptible. Well, the thing about

(49:45):
SCP fifty five that makes it difficult to quantify this
way is it somehow mimetic, because even the very mention
of it like that somehow passes on this possible protein
inhibition to other people, so they forget it too, Like
if you've never even encountered it and I tell you
about it, you'll forget about it. Uh So, perhaps the

(50:07):
act of speaking about it somehow is passing along the
protein suppression. I don't know, like you get infected with
this protein suppression and then speaking passes that along to
another person. Not sure what's going on. If you couple
the drugs mentioned that I mentioned above U with what's
known as reconsolidation memory therapy, you can get very specific

(50:30):
about which memories you want to erase. In fact, if
you inject a protein synthesis inhibitor in rats before they're
exposed to reconsolidation, they can be trained to forget all
their fear associations with something. So maybe what's going on
is SCP fifty five reconsolidates your memories about it while

(50:51):
it's also emitting either protein inhibitors or one of these chemicals.
It's basically providing you with therapy about it while you're
interacting with it. And depending on the ultimate nature of it,
maybe this is a beneficial thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Like
it's like, I know I'm horrible and you can't really
comprehend me without going mad. So I'm gonna meet you

(51:12):
halfway here, right here, I'll give you some drugs, and
I'll also talk you through it. Uh. There's a study
where a team at Ricken m i t S. Center
for Neural Circuit Genetics. They were able to alter bad
memories in mice using something called optogenetics. They inserted genetically
encoded light responsive proteins into cells so they could pinpoint

(51:35):
where in the mouse's brain a negative memory was formed.
Then they used lasers to manipulate the neurons in the
mouse brain so it forgot that memory completely. Another team
in ten use xenon gas as an anesthetic on mice
to modify their memory consolidation, and that inhibited their n

(51:57):
m d A receptor brain activity in their brains, again
reducing fear reactions. So this is something that science is
playing around with a lot right now. And every article
I wrote read about it was like, yeah, it's not
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, YadA, YadA YadA, But
it seems like lasers, drugs, protein inhibitors, zenon gas, you

(52:20):
name it. There are a lot of ways to biologically
alter our brains so we forget things. So SCP fifty
five could be any combination of things. Uh that you
could either use chemicals or lasers or whatever. I'm gonna
go though with that, it causes such emotional trauma that
you don't remember it. The big question is how is

(52:42):
it transmittable? Like, how does anybody out there? I'd love
to know, how could something like this be a transmittable
um memory erasure? How about this? Maybe it's not so
much transmitted. What if this is this entity you is
is something that has already been experienced by everyone, and

(53:03):
therefore it's not so much that you're introducing me to
the idea of it, but you're reintroducing it. And and
any reintroduction to the specimen either it's it's actually now
you're either an actual encounter or just discussion of it
of course ends up self deleting. So like what if
it you know, what if it's God and you see
this God right before you're born and then then you

(53:25):
enter this world, so everyone has a as a as
an existing memory, or maybe if you want to go
even more fanciful and psychedelic, like everyone has like a
race memory of this entity. Right, yeah, yeah, that would
make sense as well. Well, it's currently under containment, although
probably thirty seconds after Robert and I uh finished talking

(53:47):
about this We'll completely forget about SCP fifty five. We're
going to talk about SCP to five eight four. Yes,
SCP to five eight four. And this one, like like
the last specimen we looked at, it's interesting because it
represents a paradox. Here's the description. SCP to five eight
four is a species of snake that has been classified

(54:09):
oxy Uranus or a boris. SCP four has no head
or tail, as its body forms a continuous closed loop. Otherwise,
SCP fours tissue and anatomy is completely normal, safe for
its circular spine, circulatory system, and digestive track. SCPO S
four is able to achieve locomotion, but has no brain

(54:31):
sense of sight, hearing, taste, or smell, and thus is
only capable of reflective movements to flee from danger after
injury or move towards warmer areas. Otherwise, instances tend to
remain still or spin in place. So I'm just imagining
it's a circular snake body with no head, no tail,

(54:54):
but when it moves it is just kind of rolling
around like a hula hoop on the ground. Basically, yeah,
imagine a snake who hoop, Yeah, and that's what this
thing is. So the description goes into state that it
doesn't it doesn't breathe, It depends on an unknown energy source. Again,
it has no brain. Yeah, and uh, the detective it's

(55:14):
digestive tracks seems to cycle the same matter continuously, but
it's somehow able to gain metabolic energy with each cycle
without without expending any of the nutrients. And it reproduces
via as osmosis into two hoops. So, uh, what we
have here is they've actually got a room full of

(55:35):
these things. It's not just one, I guess, or at
least they have, you know, and given point, I don't
know if they sell them in the SEP gifts. Maybe
the SEP employees use them as hula hoops for their kids.
They only keep one in the containment solid a time
because they're kind of like troubles right in that sense.
They seem to have no they lack the necessary openings,

(55:55):
right Yeah. Yeah, there's no obvious reproductive capabilities. Yeah. So
so what we have here, and one of this is
I think interesting, is that you basically have an imaginative
sci Fi send up of the mythical or a boris
the tail consuming serpent, which has been a potent symbol
since ancient times. I mean, you see examples of it
from you know, neolithic cultures, you see it in ancient Egypt. Um.

(56:21):
It kind of it basically emerged in ancient times as
basically a symbol or a motif, and then as human
culture advances, we end up applying all sorts of different
reads to what it might mean. Uh. Plutarch, for instance,
when when it came around his time, he described it
as like this, he said, quote it feeds upon its
own body. Even so all things spring from God and

(56:44):
will be resolved into the Deity. Again, so interpretations vary,
they get increasingly more complex and spiritual. UM in Hinduism
or a boras symbolism is sometimes ties in to Kundalini
energy with the Kundalini serpent um. You see it in

(57:05):
South American art um. You see it in the a
Gnostic beliefs. The aura borus is the soul of the world.
It's um. So it goes from just being this idea,
almost this kind of primitive childlike idea of like what
if a snake bit its own tail, where the snake
try to eat its own tail, and then it evolves
into this paradoxical idea of something without beginning or end. Yeah,

(57:29):
it's um. I've always thought of it as being both
like a symbol of the circle of life, which I
guess you could see SCP two five eight four is
being a perfect representation of. But but it's also like
representative of just like the quixotic nature of doing things
over and over again and expecting different results. Yeah, that's true.
It kind of depends what your your take on infinity

(57:52):
is because you can look at the oora borus, Oh,
that poor snake, it's constantly being eaten eaten, or you
can say, oh, that's snake, he's really got it made.
It always has a meals never hungry, because it also
never the glass half full kind of situation. Because I
guess you can look at it too and say that
the ara borus never vanishes in the araborus doesn't blink
out of existence because it cannot digest itself. Fun fact

(58:16):
from our X Files episode Agent Scully has one tattoo
and it is the Ora boros. Oh where does she
have the tattoo. It's on the back of her neck,
I think, And there's some implication that she may be
immortal because she has it. Really well that that again
there are ties to undying nature. Uh, as we saw

(58:37):
in that Plutarch quote. Um. You you also see other
sort of mythical and folklore creatures that coming from time
to time. There's the hoop snake, which was a creature
from the lumberjack folklore of Wisconsin and Minnesota during the
nineteenth and twentieth century, the centuries the fearsome critters as
they were called, and this was a snake that would

(58:58):
bite its own tail and roll around on ground like
a like a who um. But we also see some
interesting scientific examples, so you'll you'll obviously you'll occasionally run
across tails of auto cannibalism and snakes of snakes actually
biting or trying to eat their tail, particularly when you're
dealing with snakes in captivity. But you but you also

(59:18):
have a few animals that engage in or a boris
like actions. So there's the South African armadillo girdled lizard
that actually bites its own tail, curls up and uses
the bite to keep hold of its tail. So it's
a beautiful little creature. It doesn't roll around like this,

(59:39):
but it just uses its way to protect itself. But
bite onto its own tail, like maximizes its defensive capabilities. Yeah,
and then you'll find other lizards and animals that curl
up and sometimes even roll, but don't actually bite under
their tail. For instance, mount Lyle salamanders, they'll curl up
and roll downhill, but there's no biting or But back

(01:00:00):
to the specimen here. So it becomes difficult to try
and imagine how this creature could actually exist because it's
um it's an impossibility. It's a self sustaining system, a
perpetual motion a machine. Uh, And of course perpetual motion
design machines cannot exist because of friction and energy dissipation.

(01:00:21):
Like you can't make a machine that will work forever
without having some energy input coming along and and charging
it back up again. Likewise, even if you took out
breathing concerns lack of a brain, if you just had
this hoop snake creature like this specimen, and it had
a meal in its belly going round and round like how,

(01:00:41):
you couldn't draw on that meal forever. I mean, even
if it were an everlasting god stopper, right, it would
could not sustain itself unless the meal and its belly
was like a wormhole opening up to a like a
food world. But no, these are similar questions, like you
can't have the same meal digestive eternally it's right, and
they're diminishing returns and uh. And likewise, spur if it

(01:01:07):
just says that one thing and it's belly, it's not,
I mean, how would that possibly work? Yeah, some kind
of food is being teleported into its belly from somewhere. Yeah. Yeah,
we're faced with maybe another SCP is responsible for there
you go. If there's some sort of an SCP mouse
that is eternally regenerating, perhaps through a wormhole, then this

(01:01:29):
creature eats it at some point. But then how does
how does it eat? It doesn't have a mouth it
would have. That's the wonderful nature of it. Is just
a complete paradox. Yeah yeah, um, well, it's certainly worth
thinking about as an exercise and understanding anatomy, and and
definitely energy consumption to that's for sure. I guess the
only the only answer I can get for SP eight

(01:01:53):
four is that it might be God to go back
to polutar. This might be a manifestation of the mystery
of the divine. Mmmm. That is worth chewing on literally.
I wonder what SCP for tastes like chicken. Probably probably Yeah. Well,

(01:02:13):
speaking of the ethics of science, that leads us to
our last s CP specimen to thirty one, which is
referred to as Special Personnel Requirements. I really like this
one because it leads us to talking about the Millgrim
experiment and a lot about the ethics and sort of

(01:02:36):
point of scientific experimentation. Here's the description of SCP two
thirty one. It's a it's a girl, possibly a baby,
that has to be subjected to something called the mon
Talk procedure. Now we're never told what the details of
this are, but it sounds awful. Uh. Most of the
detail in the description goes into the requirements for the

(01:02:57):
personnel that are attending to s C. They have to
undergo heavy psychological testing. They have to be unmarried, have
no children, and express total loyalty to the SCP, and
if they express any sympathy to the subject, they're immediately
transferred off the project. When they're on site, they wear

(01:03:18):
helmets to conceal their identity and voice, and basically STP
two thirte whatever it is, is strapped down all the
time except for when they're subjected to this horrible procedure
once every twenty four hours. The subject doesn't actually seem
to be that important to the entry. The story goes

(01:03:39):
that they're the seventh child born out of some kind
of cult organization, that the first six subjects were its siblings,
and they were killed in various results from this procedure
or the containment this mon Tauk procedure. The personnel that
work on this are told that if they don't subject
SCP two one to this horrible mont talk procedure, it

(01:04:01):
will result in the end of the world. So some
of the personnel also have their memory is altered, maybe
by SCP fift We're not sure. Uh, but they basically
forget that they ever performed their duties in relation to
this project. This pop culture wise, immediately made me think
of Stranger Things. Now. I don't want to I don't

(01:04:23):
want to spoil Stranger Things at all, but uh, you know,
the original title for the show was montalk Um, So
I wonder I don't know which came first, s CP
to thirty one or the TV show, or maybe they're
somehow connected, like maybe the anonymous author is one of
the people behind Stranger things. But um, yeah, the show
was originally called Montalk and Uh, the idea of this

(01:04:46):
secret project that's working, you know, doing terrible unethical things
to a girl, it's interesting. It brings us right around
to the Millgrim experiment. The reason why is one of
the things they say about this SCP is that all
of the personnel have to pass the Milgram experiment, meaning
that they have to take it all the way. Uh.

(01:05:07):
If you are unfamiliar with the Milgram experiment, it is
one of the most controversial and highly publicized psychological studies
ever conducted. I would say, yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely
up there. We've we've touched on it in past episodes before. Um,
it's anytime you see a list of like the the
most the weirdest, most unethical experiments, it tends to show

(01:05:29):
upright at the top. Yeah. So if you've never heard
of it, this is how it goes. It was performed
in nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty two, and it
was designed to measure the extent to which ordinary people
would inflict pain on other people when they are instructed
to do so by an authoritative figure. It was very
controversial because the people were putting these situations without informed consent,

(01:05:54):
and it was influenced by accounts Milgram heard of Nazi atrocities.
He wanted to measure how willing the average person would
be to obey institutionalized authority, and he actually received a
grant from the National Science Foundation to do this. Conducted
the experiments at Yale from sixty one to sixty two.
Now you may have heard of this in relation to

(01:06:15):
the phrase the banality of evil. It's often attributed to
this study, but it was actually coined by Hannah Arrant
in her book Aikman in Jerusalem. She was reporting on
Adolph Aikman's trial in nineteen sixty one. Aikman was a
Nazi commander who helped orchestrate the Holocaust. Now, Arrant's theory
was that Aikman was an associopath. He was just an

(01:06:37):
average person following orders. Milgram speaks to these ideas in
his book Obedience to Authority, which is sort of the
publication of his his results, but he published it much later,
I let's say, like ten years later. So basically, the
question raised by the experiment is could basically any office
uh be a part of some atrocity chain who were

(01:06:58):
just in the in the position to to receive those
orders exactly. And this is how the experiment worked. There
were three people in each situation, a supervisor, a learner,
and a teacher. However, the only subject that was actually
under scrutiny was the teacher. The other two people were
just actors. The teacher was uninformed about the true nature

(01:07:19):
of the experiment, and the supervisor would tell them that
what they were doing was determining whether punishment in the
form of electric shocks would promote learning. So usually the
person playing the role of the learner was in another
room and the teacher was seated in front of an
apparatus that would pretend to shock the learner with somewhere
between fifteen and four hundred and fifty volts. The teacher

(01:07:40):
was then instructed to give a long multiple choice test
to the learner, and every time they had an incorrect answer,
the teacher was supposed to administer the shock, upping the
voltage fifteen volts each time. No one was actually shocked
in this experiment. The learner just pretended that they were
being shocked until it reached three fifteen volts. They would

(01:08:01):
scream and you know, pretend like they're in agony at
volts though, they would just stop making sounds like presumably
they passed out or something. And I think a lot
of these instances they were in a separate room and
they couldn't see each other if they refused. If the
if the learner refused, the experiments stopped, but the supervisor

(01:08:23):
usually would direct them to just keep continuing. Otherwise they
would keep going until they reached four hundred and fifty volts. Uh. Now,
let's be clear, the truth was always revealed to the
teacher afterwards. They always told them what was actually going
on um And the results were as such, sixty five
of the participants kept going all the way to four

(01:08:45):
hundred and fifty volts. None of them insisted on stopping
before three hundred volts. Whether or not Milgram used women
or men in this experiment did not change the results.
But when the physical proximity increase, the obedience factor decreased slightly,
meaning when the teacher and the learner were closer to
each other, they were less likely to go all the

(01:09:07):
way with the shocks. This one is where it gets
really scary. When a teacher was joined by actors posing
as other teachers, their conformity rose all the way to
n So. Okay, the reason why we all know about
this experiment is it's been highly criticized for its ethics,
specifically that it did not supply the subjects with informed

(01:09:31):
consent and it exposed them to overly stressful and embarrassing situations. Milgram, however,
defended it, and he said, look, we've got this survey.
It's an exit survey that we do with with everybody
that's done it, of those people were glad to have participated.
Some of them even said by doing the experiment it
made them more ethically sensitive. Now, we talked about this

(01:09:55):
in the Frankenstein episode. We were sort of pretending what
if Frankenstein had to apply for an i RB. This
is one of those studies that led to the Belmont
Report and having to have IRB approval before you do
any kind of scientific experiment in an institutional stucause, you
don't want to conduct an experiment that is putting people
through the emotional ringer. Yeah, unless that mean, unless there's

(01:10:18):
full uh you know, knowledge of it going in, which
which is part of the experiment is that they did
not have that noted exactly. Uh. This is why the
American Psychological Association formulated its principles for research with humans.
This is why it requires all research to receive approval
by RBS. UH. In fact, uh an I RB did

(01:10:38):
approve social psychologist Jerry M. Berger to obtain permission to
partially replicate the experiment, but he stopped at a hundred
and fifty volts when the actor began to scream. However,
his results up until that point were similar to millgrooms.
So this is something that's worth considering. And in fact,
I want, once upon a time pitched a show here

(01:10:59):
at out stuff works that would would be entirely about
studies like this. This study could never be done legally today,
and that's that's a good thing. I think we can
all agree on that. And yet it is incredibly influential
on our understanding of human psychology. Our overall knowledge of
things has has uh improved, I think you could say

(01:11:21):
based on this study. So what other lessons have we
learned from unethical science? And what lessons are we missing?
And then let's get back to this SCP, like, what
is it ultimately about? I don't think it's about the girl.
It's more about the personnel, right, It's about the horror
that is this great social significance of what human beings

(01:11:44):
are capable of. Well, and supposedly they're saving the world. Yeah, exactly,
that's what they're told. Yeah, and that's where it gets
really interesting. There's there's a couple of studies here I
want to get into. Uh. I have two studies I
want to talk about that are related to Millgram that
have recently been published. The first is called why People Kill,
and it was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Uh.

(01:12:06):
It reminds us as well of another infamous case, the
Stanford Prison Experiment. In nineteen Yeah, if you're unfamiliar with that,
one psychologist Philip G. S Embardo randomly assigned Stanford University
students to play roles as prisoners and guards. Within days,
the people who are playing guards were abusing the prisoners.
The prisoners themselves became passive. The study actually had to

(01:12:28):
be called off. There's another study as well that I
was unfamiliar with. Its referenced in here Muzafar Sheriff's nineteen
fifty four study on how competition can escalate into conflict.
He divided adolescent boys into two teams, and he pitted
them against each other at certain tasks. Uh, it also
had to be called off because violence started between the boys.
So what's going on here? Why are we circling around

(01:12:51):
back to these projects? Because it feels like this, and
this is the argument of this paper, it feels like
we're at a time where we're very concerned about violence
and the possibility that good people will do bad things. Right, So,
think of the presidential election right now, and like the
rhetoric that's being tossed around about what people are capable
of and how we have to defend ourselves against them.

(01:13:13):
So this kind of stuff is in the air. People
are thinking about it a lot. There's very apocalyptic thoughts
in people's minds about what we're all capable of doing
to one another. I mean, I would say that that
is generally more of the like the standard human experience,
and we in this country and in other countries, we've

(01:13:33):
just been lucky to not have that being unconscious us.
I think, I think you're probably right. Yeah, it's only
now that we're we're having to come to grips with
this reality. Um, the studies themselves presume that people aren't
born bad necessarily, but that we're all coerced or seduced,
or otherwise lead into violent behavior. Now, the author of

(01:13:56):
this article, not Milgram, but the author of this one.
He argues this is out of date thinking as well
as the idea of any kind of pure nature oriented view.
So that's worth thinking about. In conjunction with this SCP,
I want to give you a Millgrim quote though, to
to pause and sort of think about here. Milgrim himself said,
ordinary people simply doing their jobs and without any particular

(01:14:18):
hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible
destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their
work become patently clear and they are asked to carry
out actions incompatible with the fundamental standards of morality, relatively
few people have the resources needed to resist authority. That's

(01:14:41):
really interesting to think about. I mean think about it,
not not just from this level of like Nazis committing atrocities,
but like your jobs, like think about the like hierarchical
structure in a job, workplace or whatever. Because it's one
thing to imagine Nazis and have your your idea colored
by all these story worry about portrayals of Nazis, and

(01:15:01):
you can easily think oh, I would stand up for that.
I would be one of the good people. But but yeah,
I think of all the smaller, mundane actions of authority. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's really worth thinking about. And that brought me
to um. This article called just Obeying Orders out of
New Scientists. It was published in and they took the point,

(01:15:24):
they said. Milgram later developed his idea of a mundane
inclination to obey orders of authority into something he called
a gentic state theory. This was in his nineteen seventy
four book Obedience to Authority, the same one where he
talks about Hannah Aaron's finality of evil. And according to Milgram,
the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a
person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying

(01:15:47):
out another person's wishes, and they therefore no longer see
themselves as responsible for their actions. Once this critical shift
of viewpoint has occurred in a person, all of the
essential features of obedience follow. So when you go back
to this SCP, right, we've got this I don't know
cultist child strapped down to a gurney and she has

(01:16:09):
to be tortured with the Montauk experiment once a day
basically gets back to it that the reason why is
because the personnel are all willing to shift viewpoints like
this right now. The authors of this article and new scientists,
they argue against Milgram's theory actually, and they cite recent
historical studies that question Errant's interpretation of Aikman as well

(01:16:33):
as Milgram's claim that human beings are programmed to obey authority.
I just want to pause here for I never took
that to be his claim. I always thought, um that
the fact that they recognize that he saw these as
studies as disobedience as much as obedience, his argument to
me doesn't seem to be deterministic about human nature, right that.

(01:16:55):
I mean, he makes the point like at least ten
percent of people, even when there's these actors involved, are
going to disobey authority. Right, So it's not necessarily like
he's saying this is this is it, this is exactly
what humanity is. No. Yeah, he's saying that, I mean,
there's it is a silver lining, and that a certain
percentage of individuals would seemingly always stand up to some

(01:17:17):
sort of injustice like this. Yeah, I guess the the
depressing part is when you have to ask, well, is
that percentage high enough to make a difference? And even
a very democratic process much less you know the inner
workings of a shadowy organization that tends to weird alien Exactly, Yeah, exactly,
And that's why I love this one. It's like, you know,

(01:17:38):
when you really think about it, beyond just like you know,
the idea of this mysterious cultists, uh, with a experiment
performed against their will every twenty four hours, there's like
a lot of meat on the bone, like ethically thematically
going on with just the short, little creepy pasta yeah,
and and asking basic ethical questions, does like this is

(01:18:01):
saving the world worth this? This one individual injustice? Does
we do do the rights of all outweigh the rights
of one? Well, let's factor this in because I think
this is where it gets even more complicated. Uh. Has
Leam and Rich are the authors of this study from
They argue, what's really going on is a balance between

(01:18:23):
obedience and disobedience that's based on whether or not the
person in the teacher role prioritizes the voice of the
supervisor over the voice of the learner. And to them,
this reflects whether the person identifies with the cause of
science or more with the plight of the ordinary citizens.

(01:18:44):
So this is really interesting to me. It's like it
puts them in in one of two camps, right that
the in this case with the SCP, that this science
is going to save the world, right at least that's
what they're told, or the plight of this ordinary girl
who is being tortured by the Montauk experiment, in which case,

(01:19:04):
if that's it, the order's position the experiment as being
a worthy cause that must be pursued. So the level
of identification between the supervisor and the learner is really important,
but so too is how much they identify with the
cause of capital s science. It's very interesting, especially like
I think from our our shows sort of viewpoint. Yeah, yeah,

(01:19:28):
I mean what what ultimately is driving the research and
the researchers this idea that that science is this thing
beyond us and then we're just near vessels for its
inquisitive nature, or are we individuals engaging in a collective
effort to better the human experience and human knowledge? Absolutely, yeah,

(01:19:49):
it makes I think that this is one of those
things that like we can pull out and it's applicable
to almost every episode we've done, right, Like, what, what's
the goal of this project? What's the what's the reason
are we doing this for sciences? SACA? It brings us
back to cargo cult science, right or is it you know,
is it somehow affecting the ordinary man somehow? So to

(01:20:11):
this end, these authors did three studies and one they
used virtual reality to replicate millgram set up, and another
they asked people to describe groups of other people using
pejorative terms, and this range from the KKK to a
family walking in the park. In their final study, they
had actors perform all of Milgram's set up, so even
the teacher role was performed by an actor. When they

(01:20:33):
recorded the reactions as if the actors were inhabiting these characters,
and they found, once again, Milgram's results were almost exactly
reproduced with these actors. So they basically found an increase
in identification with science leads people to persist longer in
these unpleasant tasks. Uh. And the last thing I want

(01:20:55):
to say about this, there's a researcher named Matthew Hollander,
and he took the audio tapes from Milgram's study and
he researched all He listened to the whole thing, like
a year and a half worth of these studies, and
he identified six types of resistance that were shown by
the people involved with them, three of which were implicit

(01:21:15):
and three were explicit. The implicit ones were silence or hesitation, imprecations,
or laughter. And some people who have listened to these
tapes they interpret the laughter as being sadism, but he said, no,
the laughter is just this like uncomfortablelity of obeying the orders.
The explicit ones were when they addressed the learner and
they would say things like are you sure you want

(01:21:37):
me to continue with this? Or when they prompted the
supervisor and would say is it really necessary for me
to continue doing this? Uh? And the last one was
when they would just stop and they'd say, look, I'm
not going to continue doing this. I'm done. Here's the
really interesting thing from his study. Those who participated all
the way to the end, the four fifty volts, they

(01:21:57):
all used the implicit strategy is the silence, laughter, etcetera.
The participants who actually addressed the learners and tried to
have a dialogue with them, they were the only people
who stopped in Milgram's experiment, So that speaks something to
our again the identification do you identify with the person
or do you identify with the cause? Right? Yeah? And

(01:22:19):
to what degree is there going to be any kind
of back and forth communication over any of this? Is
it just becoming a vessel for the orders? So this
is to wrap it up, my one of my favorite
creepy pastas I've ever looked at. Whoever out there wrote
it anonymously, bravo. Uh it really made me think pretty
deeply about the ethics of what what the goals of

(01:22:41):
science are, not just in terms of like, you know,
the fact based stuff of like well I got to
fill out this i RB protocol, you know, but more
along the lines of like what's the point and what
are we willing to do to get to it? Yeah?
And I think in this this is another example of
how SEP foundation entries are kind of enough relation evolution
of the form. Uh So instead of them just being

(01:23:04):
like individual creepy bits of you know, semi wicky type material,
they are little thought experiments, little paradoxes um that are
flavored with sci fi intrigue. And so I would I
would definitely recommend anyone who who found these interesting to
check out That website will include links on the landing

(01:23:25):
page for this episode of Stuff to About Your Mind
dot Com to the individual entries that we profiled here.
So check those out, explore some more and if you
find some then and you think to yourself, oh well
these are these are perfect. If you guys do another
STP episode, you should do these. You should let us
know about that. Yeah, definitely keep the messages coming about
Creepy Pasta's we you know, if you keep wanting to

(01:23:48):
hear them, we'll keep doing them. Uh So, let us know.
Maybe it's an STP, maybe it's another creepy Pasta, but
point out stuff to us and we'll look into it
and maybe Creepy Pasta for the Revenge will be coming
up down the road. Uh So, if you want to
reach out to us, well some of the best ways
or to just go to stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's where we've got all our articles, our

(01:24:10):
videos or podcasts, as well as links to all of
our social media. Yeah, and if you're listening to your
in Halloween, we also have the new episodes of Monster
Science there for you. Explorations of the connections between fictional
monsters and real world Science. Yeah, absolutely, I highly recommend
Monster Science. My favorite thing that we do here at

(01:24:30):
how Stuff Works. It's uh this is a treat to me.
This is my Christmas. Uh So, if you want to
write us the old fashioned way, though, and you want
to tell us about creepy pastas, maybe praise Robert for
his performance and Monster Science, or you've got some experiments
that you'd like us to conduct, you can always write
to us at blow the Mind at how stuff works
dot com. Well more on this and thousands of other topics.

(01:25:01):
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