What's the largest snake that has ever existed?

Everyone loves a giant snake tale, but what's really the largest serpent on the planet? Hunt for the answer across space and time in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
where do you stand on giant snakes? Where do I
stand on? And not near the head? That's right, That's
that's the worst place to stand. Yeah, what about you? Um,

(00:25):
I've always loved him, um, you know, because I think
probably from like an early age seeing U Cob the
Snake and Jungle Book trying to eat mowgli. Um, you
can't help it be fascinated with the seductive power of
of any kind of serpent, right, and then the possibility
they can swallow you whole and it and just how

(00:45):
inhuman the creature is, no arms or legs, just slithering around.
That's funny you bring up a jungle Book because related Ricky, Ticky, Tavi,
Nag and nagaina some of my favorites in action there,
but also the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad from Kill Bill
Volumes One and two. Oh yes, which was more like

(01:08):
the human embodiment of snakes. Yeah, but yeah, certainly just
the symbolic power of snakes throughout human history can't be denied.
But because they end up representing so much, you have,
like your cosmic world serpents in so many different cultures,
the idea that there's some gigantic primal snake that plays

(01:28):
into the creation and or destruction of the world. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
which we we did an entire episode on which I'll
include a link to that on the landing page for
this episode. But but even in popular culture, um, modern
pop culture, we see giant snakes continue to pop up.
We we can't help but be fascinated by the uh

(01:50):
you know, the struggle between stay Conan the Barbarian and
a giant snake in in Bulsa Dooms Dungeon. That was
certainly when I was enjoyed watching up. That's only one
I always enjoyed watching as I was growing up. Um
Or then, of course there's Anaconda in which digested John
Voight falls out of the monster serpent. There's also Beetlejuice. Oh, yes,

(02:14):
with the the sand worming creatures. Well, actually Michael Keaton
turns into a snake, giant snake on the banister. But yes,
at the end of the movie or near the end,
he's consumed by the sandform. And I think Freddy Crueger
also turned into it like a big snake in eight
one of the victims in three or four I can't remember,

(02:35):
dream Warriors maybe. And in terms of mythology too, you'll
see that Groutslan is an Afrikaans word meaning great snake.
And by the way, this is from the Mental philost
article eleven Legendary Monsters of Africa and the monster of
that name grouts Lang lives in a cave called the
Wonder Hole and the area of South Africa. And the

(02:57):
story is that the original broots groots Long was found
to be too powerful, so the gods subdivided the animal
into two species, the elephant in the snake. Yeah, however,
Groups Long or two escaped in we'd have to have two, right,
and uh, they reproduced. So that's the idea of this,
and that this monster could grow up to sixty feet long.

(03:21):
And supposedly it's cave is full of diamonds, but nobody
knows for sure because Groups Long is guarding it. Yeah,
who's gonna the only way you're gonna wind up in
that cave? I guess you. You pass through the other
side of the snake. Well, And what I love about
this is that there's this idea that I have on
my mind, this romantic notion of back in the day,
everybody's sitting around the fire and talking about groots long,

(03:41):
this giant snake growing to sixty feet long, indeed so tall,
tales of of of what snakes can consist of and
how big they can get. Yeah, getting to the heart
of our question today. Yeah, indeed, what is the largest
snake that has ever existed? So obviously, by the way
we phrase this question, they are kind of two areas

(04:02):
where going to explore. The first question being what's the
largest snake alive today, which, as you'll explore, is a
little more complicated above a question than you might think.
And then what is the largest snake that has ever lived?
Taking into an account the the fossil record and what
we know about large serpents in prehistoric times. And you know,

(04:24):
what do you mean by large? Do you mean weight
or a link? That's right? So, uh, to that meet
this criteria, which you could call. The largest snakes in
the world presently living are the reticulated python and the
green anaconda. And in both the cases we are definitely
talking about the females of the species, because the females
are larger in both the reticulated python and the green anaconda.

(04:49):
Now it's worth noting that on March six of this year,
the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the reticulated python
and the green anaconda as two of four injury US
Wildlife pieces and will prohibit import of the snakes into
the US and its territories, as well as transport across
state lines. Uh this is because not only are these

(05:11):
these two snakes some of the largest living snakes, they
are also traded commercially as pets. And what that means
is that sometimes these really powerful snakes have been intentionally
released into the wild, while others will escape enclosures. And
so if you look at Florida, for instance, where you've
seen the Burmese python taking over parts of Florida, you'll

(05:33):
see that the native wildlife is really at risk because
these snakes, their sides and their strength they make they
make them apex predators in the environments that they're already
indigenous too. But put them in one where there are
lesser predators around, you can see how they would run
rampant and to just give you an idea of the

(05:54):
kind of strength that they're sporting. Here, I mean to
turn to this account by Todd Mexico, writing for an
multiversity dot Org, he says, um, with reticulated pythons, if
the antlers, because they go after unculates, are small enough,
they are simply ingested and digested. However, if the antlers

(06:15):
are too large on the animals trying to take down,
the snake can actually break them back to lie alongside
the body and then consume them. Um. Then he says
that sometimes, very rarely, that the snake that particulated python
actually swallows the hind quarters and then when it works
its way to the antlers, it stops and it allows

(06:36):
its digestive acids to break down the animals flesh until
the antlers actually become weak and drop off, essentially decapitating
the creature with your own digestive fluids. I love that
this is such a wonderful, grotesque ou thing that I mean,
that's the reason. Uh, you know, you can't help but
but love these giant serpents, you know, particularly the constrictors. Yeah,

(06:59):
it's grizzly stuff, and and yes you're attracted, but also
repulsed by them. Yeah, I'm even when you go to
the pet store, it's like you don't really want to
see the cute little mouse eaten by the snake, but
you can't look away, and yet you probably don't look away.
All right, So let's uh, let's look at these two
species and a little more detail. Uh. First, we have

(07:21):
the Asian reticulated python, Python reticulatis, so called for the
geometric color pattern on its body. They thrive and steamy
tropical rainforest throughout Southeast Asia. Uh. They need water, and
they need tropical environments with temperatures in the range of
eight degrees fahrenheit, so they're like it hot. Uh. They're

(07:42):
non social, solitary creatures. They ambush their prey frequently waiting
in trees. And that's gonna be key when we start
talking about their their their length and weight, because obviously
the creature has to crawl up into the into the trees.
It's not gonna be just super heavy. It has to
have a certain amount of lightness on its inside. They
tend to feed on birds and mammals, and as far

(08:03):
as the mammals go, the smaller ones, the younger ones
are gonna eat mostly rats, but as they grow, and
they grow throughout their life, they're gonna shift to larger mammals,
so porcupines, monkeys, wild pigs, mouse, deer uh. And Now,
like all reptiles, they have a low metabolic rate, which
allows them to go without food for a long period
of time. So it's not a situation where they're having

(08:24):
to eat a monkey every day, but they score a
monkey every once in a while. They're good. Right. Um. Again,
the females grow the largest, and they usually lay twenty
five to eighty or so eggs. Uh. And they also
they they provide a certain amount of care and protection
for the eggs until they hatch, and then once they hatch,
there on their own. Now, as far as how big

(08:47):
these uh, these these gals get. Field measurements in survey
averaged a little under twelve feet or three point two
meters in the jungles of southern Sumatra, maxing out at
just shy of twenty eight six point one. Um. You'll
find less reputable accounts they hit the thirty three and
forty mark, but we'll get to those shortly. For the

(09:08):
most part, however, you're going to find the longer reported
measurements with the reticulated Now in the other corner here
of the ring, we have unixte miranus, that is the
green anaconda, and though it's not as long as reticulated python,

(09:29):
it is the uncontested heavyweight champion of the snake world
according to the National Zoo. In captivity, they can grow
to twenty nine ft long, they can weigh more than
five fifty pounds, and they can have a diameter of
more than twelve inches. Now, most documented instances of anaconda's

(09:49):
weights are more in the two hundred to four hundred
range and grow to about twenty feet in length. So well,
we can say that this long and fifty is at
the outer limits of its morphology. Now they're a member
of the Boa family and they can be found in swamps,
marshes and slow moving streams in Trinidad, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil,

(10:12):
northern Bolivia, northeastern Peru, and French Guiana. And no surprise here.
The anaconda is a great swimmer, super stealthy in the water,
and part of that is because its weight is being
held up by the buoyancy of the water, right which
it allows it to go much faster and it can
remain underwater for up to ten minutes at a time.

(10:34):
So anacondas like crocodiles, have eyes and nostrils that are
designed to poke above the surface of the water, and
that really helps them to strike very quickly and efficiently.
So on land they're not so elegant and stealthy, but
they can sidewine and they use these large j shaped

(10:56):
coils to pull themselves along, which I think really speaks
to how incredibly muscular they are. Now they are non
venomous constrictors. They coil those those muscular bodies around captured
prey and they squeeze until the animals phyxiates. They can
unhinge their jaws to stretch their mouths around the prey,
eating the carcass whole, and they have four rows of

(11:19):
backwards facing teeth on their upper jaws to help grab
prey really fastened and swallow it whole. They dine on
wild pigs, dear birds, turtles, caymans, even jaguars, and on occasion,
white tailed deer, which can grow to be about a
hundred and fifty pounds or more in the wild, which

(11:40):
makes you go, oh, a hundred fifty pounds, and that
that's kind of on par with humans, So would they
go after a human? And despite the premise of the
show Eating Alive, in which naturalist Paul Rosalie offers himself
to be swallowed whole by an anaconda, there are no
verified reports of anaconda's ingesting a human being. Yeah. I mean,

(12:04):
it's just it's gonna be a harder kill to make, write,
a harder ambush to pull off. And are there a
lot of humans around in their immediate environment? Um? Now,
when it comes to maximum sizes for both of these species,
you might think it would be easy to just find
a good ballpark figure about how big these these these
gals can get. Uh. But but you'd be wrong. And

(12:26):
I found this out when I was putting together an
article for for How Stuff Works. Um It. It quickly
becomes a game of like whose figures do you trust?
And whose whose figures are they trusting? Um And if
you want to really thorough breakdown of the different accounts
of maximum size of both the reticulated python and the
green anaconda, UM, I would recommend you check out John C.

(12:49):
Murphy's website on record snake Sizes on clue to link
to that on the page for this episode. UM, because
you basically, when it comes to these these reports of
giant snakes, which themselves are rare occurrences in remote locations,
often tended to by untrained individuals, you see local hearsay

(13:10):
at times, you see second and third hand accounts. You
see mere sightings where someone just saw the snake and
they're giving you an estimation on how long they think
it was. Um. Certainly just exaggerated accounts, just sort of
like the I cotta fish this big situation, and it
grows with the telling right questionable measurement techniques. In some cases,
they'll be questions about, well did you measure it from

(13:31):
you know, the from snout to tail or are you
dealing with the with the decapitated body? Is this the
hide and it is the hide? Are you stretching it
out when you're measuring it? And how are you measuring it?
Are you just walking alongside it and doing paces? Are
you using rods? Are using measurement tape? Um? All these
questions end up coming into play. And I would imagine
too that it's not like going to your vent and

(13:53):
just dropping your dog on the scale. Right. If you're
trying to weigh a snake. There's a lot more to it,
I mean in terms of going to get a handle
on this and then accurately weigh it. And again, these
are encounters that are occurring often in remote locations, again
with with untrained individuals. UM. I'm gonna just roll through
a couple of encounters that Murphy outlines on his website.

(14:16):
One is an alleged thirty three foot reticulated python UH
that was mentioned in the ninety Natural History magazine story
and the story itself was about a nineteen twelve siding
and UH. As Murphy points out this, this stat, this
thirty three foot stat continues to pop up in articles
on giant snakes, despite his continued efforts to try and

(14:38):
uh and kill it. Um. Here is what the author
of the original piece, Harry c Raven, wrote, and you
can tell us how reputable it sounds. He says, I
left the schooner and went inland a short distance to
camp on the mountains, which were covered with virgin jungle.
The white men at the mind told me of a
huge python one of their relatives that killed a few

(14:59):
days before of my arrival, and showed me a very
poor photograph of it. Taken after it had been killed
and dragged a camp. Though the print was dull, you
could see a man standing on the huge body, which
was about a foot thick. A civil engineer told me
that it was just ten meters long. I asked him
if he had had I asked him if he had
taste off its length, but he said no, he had
measured it with the surveying tape. So here you see

(15:22):
a number of factors. Right, it was witnessed by other
people killed before he arrived. And as Murphy points out
on his website, where do you get a photo to
alot that quickly? In nineteen twelve, Sulawesi okay, so photograph, hearsay,
I'm not sure if the methods entirely Yeah, what could

(15:42):
go wrong with that? I know? And still, as he
points out, you still see that's that that that length
of that record length showing up in various articles and
wiki pages. Another record length that continued to pop up
throughout the later twentieth century came from the Done Lehman
record of a green anaconda. So the way this one

(16:03):
broke down is in nineteen forty four, herpetologist immit Ray
Read Done published an article on the reptiles of Columbia,
and it included a statement from his friend and geologist
Robert Lehman, who was working in the area for an
oil company. Lehman claimed to have killed and measured an
eleven point five meter anaconda in eastern Colombia. Raymond Gilmore

(16:24):
of the US Fish and Wildlife Service later investigated this
record in nineteen fifty four, and the results were less encouraging.
Lehman later stated in a in a letter about his
encounter with the snake. He says, if memory serves me right,
it required almost three lengths of the rod to obtain
the dimensions. But I could not swear to this in
that it may have just been almost two lengths of

(16:44):
the rod. So again you see somebody's sort of faint
recollection of how it went down in in a remote location, uh,
dealing with the un endeavor outside of his field of
expertise using a rod as a measurement, Yeah, for a
dead snake. So so hopefully this helps to illustrate just
a little bit of the problems you get into when

(17:05):
you're dealing with these these often old accounts of particularly
large specimens. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break
and we get back. We're going to venture into the
sarajn rainforest. Alright, we're back. Alright, Julie, let's jump into

(17:28):
the time machine, take us back to the hopefully safely,
to the Sarah Jean Rainforest. Well, the Sarah Hone Rainforest
once hosted the largest snake that ever existed, or that
we know about so far. And the reason why we
know that is because sixty million year old fossils of

(17:48):
the titan Boa sajus were discovered in a Colombian coal
mine by a paleontologists led by Jonathan Block of the
University of Florida and Carlo Sierramo of the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute. So, what we're talking about here, and we
won't go into too many specifics right now, but we're

(18:08):
talking about a snake that was longer than a great
white and bigger than a hippo. Now, the Titan Boa
was sustained by a neotropical rainforest that would have come
into existence in the Paleocene epoch, shortly after the extinction
of dinosaurs. But according to Scott Wing, a paleontologist from

(18:30):
the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the rainforest had
a really low plant diversity, and he chalks this up
to well, it could either be because of a new
type of plant community that still hadn't had time to diversify,
or it was still recovering from the events that caused
the mass extinction of dinosaurs sixty five million years ago. Uh.

(18:51):
But of course, even though this was a huge creature,
that does not mean that it didn't have competition, because
in two thousand and eleven, University of Florida researchers discovered
the fossils of a twenty foot extinct species in that
same Colombian coal mine. And this is a freshwater relative
to modern crocodiles. It is the first known land animal

(19:13):
from Palatine New World tropics specialized for eating fish, meaning
that it competed with titan boa for food. And it's
the second crocodila form that was found in the same cave.
But of course the the other one was the diet
was more generalized, so it wouldn't have been competing with
the titan boa. So although this twenty ft long relative

(19:35):
to the croc would have been really formidable, uh, it's
it's a much smaller and more vulnerable offspring. Probably would
have shown up on Titan BoA's dinner plate. Yeah, they
were kind of co apex predators in this uh this
really steamy, dangerous world, tropical environment full of car size

(19:57):
turtles on one hand, and then twenty ft uh hell
crocks on the other. And I say hell crocks because
they named the species after one of the rivers and
Dante's inferno. Um. But then the Titana Boa itself uh
palon tagists estimate it's tip tip to tail length came
in into whopping forty two ft or thirteen meters, and

(20:18):
it weighed more than a ton um. It would have
looked something like a modern day Boa constrictor, but it
would have behaved more like the water dwelling anaconda that
we described in in the first half of this episode.
So again, it's it's massive weight is is is supported
by the buoyssey of the water, and it's using that
as a means to ambush its prey. Now, palont Is

(20:40):
really kind of hit the jackpot in actually discovering fossil
evidence of the Titana Boa because for one thing, you,
as we've discussed before, the whole fossil game is kind
of a game of chance in some respects, you know,
are the conditions going to be just right for the
preservation of the fossils so that we can actually get

(21:00):
a glimpse of what what kind of skeletons these creatures
and primordial age had. Well, in this case, they got
really fortunate because they found an entire skull, which is
which is almost unheard of, an entire snake skull, The
entire Titanoboa skull uh not broken into pieces, but just
completely contained. They're preserved in the shale mud of this environment.

(21:22):
And then they were able to collect some vertebrae as well.
And then by comparing the size of the preserved vertebrae
fossils with the vertebrae of existing large snakes, they were
able to extrapolate just how large it would have been.
So again, forty two ft long, more than a ton.
Virtually the king and or queen of the of the environment.

(21:45):
They're unrivaled. Once it reached its adult form, yeah, and
consider this an order to eat its prey whole. Titan
Boa had jaw bones that snapped apart and flexible ligaments
for opening its mouth almost one hundred and eighty degrees,
which led some very clever people at the Smithsonian Channel

(22:07):
to wonder because, by the way, the Smithsonian Channel has
a documentary on the Titan Boa, but it made them
wonder t Rex versus Titan Boa, who would come out
on top? And that's because the t Rex this we know,
has a ferocious bite, a bite force that's twice um
of a great white m guess. I mean it comes

(22:27):
down to who has a home turiff, I guess, and
which one is using the time machine obviously right because
they didn't exist at the same time. But it's it's
kind of fun to think about. Yeah. I think it
goes down in a like a B movie kind of
way where time travelers go back to check out the
Titana Boa, they get eaten. Titana Boa clowns into the
time machine, accidentally knocks the controls, and then it travels

(22:48):
through time battling various creatures. That sounds oddly like the
next alien movie in the franchise, perhaps, yeah, I say,
bring it on. Yeah, alright, so how could it have
gotten so big? We don't know exactly, of course, And
by the way, prehistoric largess is not exclusive to the
Titan Boa. For instance, the plant eating Argentina Saurus is

(23:10):
thought to have measured more than one hundred feet long
and weighed over one hundred tons, and the ground sloth
was the size of today's elephant. Can you imagine? I
I love to imagine it. We have a one of
those giant sloth replicas at the local Firm Bank Museum
here in Atlanta, and every time I get to look
at it, I'm just like, what would it be like

(23:30):
to smell this creature in her life? And I always
think of like, it looks like a rejected Muppet character
for me, and I love it. It's got that what
looks to be a smile alright. So one idea for
the largess is that when the ice ages occurred, warm
blooded animals increased in size to retain heat. Cold blooded
ones favored large bodies in warmer climates to better insulate

(23:54):
them from overheating, and as we see with the Titan Boa,
it was living in a neotropical rainforest, so that would
have made sense. Another theory requires that we look to
the dinosaurs living in the Cretaceous period. Carbon dioxide was
a lot more prevalent than today, and as a result,
the temperature was much higher and in some areas of
the world were carpeted by vegetation. So what does this mean.

(24:17):
It means that it's a kind of all you can
eat buffet um and the limits of morphology at that
time could have been expanding because it's no longer a
game of okay over time and evolutionary terms, the morphology
of these creatures has to shrink so that they require

(24:38):
less food and less energy. Nope, there's plenty of it
for everyone. It's a buffet. Indeed, when we're looking at
the size of Titana boah or the green anaconda or
the reticulated python, the maximum size has everything to do
with ambient environmental temperature, metabolic rate, and how much stuff
is there for them to eat. And if you travel

(24:58):
back to a steamy your time with a little more
biomass around, you're gonna get bigger snakes. Apparently a steamier time.
That sounds like um romance, Boustier bus star. Oh yeah, well, hey,
you know the Adam eve snake. That's all there, right, yeah,
and snake charmers. Yeah, this doesn't have to do with
the world's largest snake, but we thought we would roll

(25:20):
this up for you. If you live in you know,
South Asia and your snake charmer, you want a king cobra.
So although they can hear, they're actually deaf to ambient
noises that the flute would make. Right, So when you
see them responding to the snake charmer, it is really
just to the flute, to the movement to the flute,

(25:40):
and if the snake charmer is actually keeping a beat
with his foot on the ground, and so they're also
using those cues to move around. So it has nothing
really to do with the music of the flute, just
the shape of the flute, movement of the flute, and
the sound of the thumping on the ground. Yeah, that
music isn't that enthralling? All right? You know, we got
a few minutes here, Let's call over the robot and

(26:03):
do a little listener mail. All right. We received a
great bit of listener mail from a listener, Steffen, who
is a certified neurological music therapist. But he had an
interesting account of of sleep paralysis to share it with,
which is we've discussed in the past of sleep paralysis
is you know when you're you're you're waking up and

(26:25):
your body still on lockdown from dreaming and you're kind
of been. You're in the state in between that's really
prone to hallucination. Uh, he says. Periodically, since I was eighteen,
I've experienced sleep paralysis, which you mentioned on the podcast. However,
I've come to learn how to control it. I have
had many different hallucinatory experiences, including door swinging open, evil presences,

(26:48):
strong winds entering the bedroom, etcetera, but none compared to
the tipping point in the summer of two thousand six.
I returned home in the summer after my sleep paralysis
reutal freshman year at college. I was taking a nap
with my girlfriend when I when I became conscious and
could not move. Here we go, I thought to myself,
as the hallucinatory experience began completely, black demons with glowing

(27:10):
yellow eyes entered the room and surrounded the bed. I
threw myself out of the bed, only to be lifted
into the air by invisible forces and thrown back into
the bed like an apple core being tossed out of
a car window on the freeway. The demons began sinking
me into the bed as I was forced to suffocate
my own girlfriend. At the same time, I began shouting
wake up, wake up to my girlfriend, hoping that she

(27:31):
could wake up and stop the nightmare. I threw myself
out of the bed several more times, only to float
higher above the bed and sink deeper. When thrown back down,
I came within what felt like inches to death as
I sunk deeper and deeper into the mattress. Eventually I
closed my eyes and awoke from my nightmare. I asked
my girlfriend if she had heard me screaming or moving
or anything, and she told me no. At this point,

(27:54):
knowing nothing of sleep paralysis, I actually thought I was possessed. Immediately,
I went to the computer, began researching, and quickly found
out that I was experiencing sleep paralysis, typically induced in
periods of transition in life, stress moving to college being one.
Of course, I was comforted. I've been fascinated with possession
in high school and had many debates with my religious
friends on the concepts of demons and exorcism, so this

(28:16):
experience was already hiding somewhere in my subconscious. Therefore, when
I woke up and couldn't move, I became frightened and uh.
And because I was frightened still in rim sleep, my
hallucinatory experiences were frightening in nature. As time went on,
I continued to experience sleep paralysis, but I was no
longer scared of the experience, and I learned how to
control my hallucinations. Thank you for reading, and hopefully this

(28:38):
story will help someone who may be experiencing the terror
that is sleep paralysis have a wonderful weekend. Yeah, thank
you for sharing that. I just terrifying. Have you had
it before? I have not had it, but I've I've
read enough accounts of it, and certainly Oliver Sacks goes
into it at depth in his book Hallucinations. And yet
even if you only experience one k to it in

(29:00):
your life, and uh, statistics very I think goes high
as of people have experienced at least one case. Yeah,
I've had it throughout my life pretty sparsely, um in
the last ten years. But my husband has been a
little bit freaked out before because he said that I
was completely still once, but I was going I wasn't

(29:24):
opening my mouth or anything, but he could hear sound
being made inside my mouth, and in my dream I
was full on screaming with my mouth open. But yeah,
it can it can be a little unsettling, all right.
We have another listener email here from Brent. He says, Hello,
I'm a very big fan. You guys do a wonderful
job explaining the topic you take on in your podcast.

(29:47):
I was listening to a podcast on hallucinations. My family
suffered from sleepwalking. As far back as I have been
able to track, my family, particularly the males, have had
sleepwalking issues. As I have aged now sixty, my sleepwalking
frequently has decreased a very seldom, but my son, who
has thirty, still sleepwalks every night. I've had episodes of

(30:07):
sleepwalking that I remember struggling with what I was seeing
and what my mind is telling me I should be seeing.
When I'm sleepwalking, I see everything and everyone that I
would if I was awake, except my mind creates more
images and or smells, textures, and sounds. I could write
a book about my sleepwalking experiences. My understanding is the

(30:28):
mind is lost between normal sleeping mode and awake mode,
allowing the brain to create the show normally done when asleep,
but allowing the person to talk and respond to people
and things around them. The person's eyes are open and
can carry on conversation with people. Would like to hear
what you can tell me about this, and I've gotten
my queue and it's been in there for a while.

(30:50):
I need to get to it. I believe it's called
Sleepwalk with Me, And this is the account of the
guy who has had some like extreme sleep walking um
situations throughout his life where he actually has to sleep
to h zip himself up into a sleeping bag to
try to prevent him from escaping. Yeah, that's that's some

(31:11):
extreme parasomnia for sure. All right, let's do one last
listener mail. This comes to us from Benjamin. Benjamin says, Hi,
I stuff to blow your mind crew. I'm a relatively
new listener coming to your podcast from Other House Stuff
Works podcast, and I love it already. I recently listened
to your episode could You Outrun a Fireball, which was
great as always, but covered the possibility about running wildfire
or explosion. I will admit reading the title, I had

(31:33):
imagined a slightly different subject, rather than explosions or wildfire,
outrunning an actual ball of fire or more precisely, plasma.
Early in my life I worked as an electronics technician
aboard a warship in the U. S. Navy. In the
course of my work, I periodically had to work in
the vicinity of energized gear live bus bars carrying extremely
high voltage and high current since operation. Since operation is

(31:56):
key for a worship worship, we do not always have
the luxury of turning off the power to conduct repairs
or maintenance. My crew always took ample precautions for this,
But Navy ghost stories were common about the dreaded plasma ball.
As the story goes, a worker near one of these
high voltage panels accidentally dropped a larger wrench, which touched
two of the bus bars and caused a short. At

(32:16):
voltages this high, the arc vaporized the middle of the
two inch thick steel wrench and created a cloud of
superheated metal particles of plasma ball. Not only are these
things extraordinarily dangerous, as they are in order of magnitude
hotter than any normal fire. As the story goes, it
chased a man as he ran for his life. The
explanation they give is that when you run, it creates

(32:37):
an eddy current or an area of lower pressure behind
you that the floating ball of plasma is drawn into.
Though this coutionary tale has a rather gruesome end, I
thought it would make for a great follow up topic
about fireballs. I cannot vouch for the scientific accuracy of
the claim, as it is just a story passed around,
but the exclamation seems plausible to me. I would love

(32:57):
to hear your take on it. Thanks, and keep up
a great show. Been from Virginia. Well, that sounds fascinating.
I would love to look into the into into the
possible existence of of plasma balls about aboard navy vessels.
Plasma balls I mean chasing down unfortunate sailors and burning
them the embers. I love it. You love the idea

(33:20):
of the not a lot, but I love the idea,
the idea of the plasma ball. All right, Hey, in
the meantime, we've you want to see what other episodes
we've covered, blog post videos, links out of social media?
What have you head on? Over stuff to Blow your
mind dot com? That is the mothership. That is uh
that's the homepage. And if you have thoughts we want

(33:42):
to hear them. You can send them to us by
emailing us at blow the Mind at house to works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot Com