Ghost Ship

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And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story. A little bonus content, a little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff right after the episode. In February 1948, a distress call was picked up by a ship passing through the Strait of Malacca off the island of Sumatra. This is the message the telegraph operator recorded.

We float. All officers, including the captain dead in jerk room and on the bridge. Probably whole crew dead. Disregard medical consultation. SOS. Urgent assistance. More ship. Morse code continued to pour through the radio, but now it was gibberish. And then two words followed by a terrible silence. I die. That was the last communication ever received from the Dutch vessel, the SS Orang Medan. The question of what happened to her and her crew has become an enduring mystery. You could call it an urban legend of the high seas. Some say she was involved in smuggling toxic chemicals. Some say she was brought down by a fire in the boiler system.

And some say she never even existed at all. And they got a small beam of light. If you think about how vast the Earth's oceans are, 71% of our planet is covered by water. A ship disappearing at sea doesn't seem all that unlikely. It's kind of a wonder that more ships don't. UNESCO estimates that there are more than three million wrecked ships still lying undiscovered on the ocean floor. The Global Maritime Wrecks Database lists over a quarter million sunken vessels in their records, and some of those have yet to be found. High as that number sounds, humans have been on the water for 50,000 years. Mistakes get made, accidents happen, all of that. The ocean is magnificent and terrifying and incomprehensibly huge. It's deep, it's dark, and it's cold. Without special equipment, a human can't dive any deeper than 60 feet. With specialized gear, a diver can get 130 feet below the surface. The Virginia-class Navy submarines can hit a max depth of 800 feet, and that's enough pressure to crush a cow like an aluminum beer can.

Now that's the deep part. As for the dark and the cold, sunlight can only penetrate so far. By the time you reach a depth of 13,100 feet, it's pitch dark and impenetrable, hostile darkness, like the void of space. That lack of sunlight also means cold water, and the deeper you go, the colder it gets. Humans just aren't built for that environment. We're soft and meat creatures who must breathe air that's at least 21% oxygen. Then there's the problem of pressure. The problem being, soft and squishy meat creatures can't handle much pressure at all.

The average pressure at sea level on earth is about 14.7 psi. The average pressure at average ocean depth, and that's not even the deepest of the deeps, is 380 times that. Meat creature, you just implode it into a bloody mist. And yet, for all that we have no business paddling out to sea, look at us doing it anyway. But no matter how seaworthy we make our boats, how experienced our sailors are, the ocean is a unpredictable environment for us, whether we're bobbing on top or diving beneath.

Ships can and do just that. Like the SS Warrada, a passenger ship so grand that they called her the Australian Titanic. She had elegant staterooms, a luxury music lounge, an apparatus for distilling fresh water from salt water, and an enormous system of cold chambers and refrigeration equipment. The Waratah was built for comfort, utility, and speed. Now weirdly, despite all of her state-of-the-art features, the SS Waratah was not equipped with a radio. Ships weren't required to be, not until the Wireless Ship Act of 1910, which didn't go into effect until July 1st, 1911.

So with that for a minute, just pile people and goods on board and hope for the best, I guess. Waratah steamed out of port in Sydney, Australia for only her second voyage in June 1909. The Waratah was cruising along the coast of what is now South Africa when she disappeared, taking her crew and 211 passengers with her. The position in which the Warrada was last known to be is one with many dangers. One could point to long lists of ships that have disappeared. No one knows where.

Then, on the other hand, we must remember that a very small fracture in the engine room will throw even a Leviathan helpless up onto waves. Many ships have been found again after being lost, and I'll hope most sincerely that the Warrada will be one of them. That optimism was increasingly strained as the days went on with no sign of the big ship.

There are still very many persons who believe that she is floating somewhere, disabled but safe. One of these, an officer who knows the Warrada from bow to stern, says that nothing will convince me that the steamer has sunk until a piece of her wreckage is shown me. A year later, in December 1910, with no trace of the Waratah, a formal inquiry was held.

The big question seemed to be whether or not a large passenger twin-screw steamship like the Waratah had ever completely disappeared in the history of the mercantile marine. The owner of the shipping line that built the SS Waratah stated that he had no idea what fate the ship might have certainly expect considerable wreckage to be found had the ship capsized.

He denied claims made by other witnesses that the ship was top-heavy, but he admitted that the plans for her construction were more like a general arrangement of plans, rough sketches. There was a lot of testimony regarding coal bunkers and water ballasts and something called stability, all very technical, all very procedural and a little bit controversial, what with a handful of witnesses testifying that the ship was in fact quite top-heavy and rolled to such a degree that passengers on her maiden voyage complained, not that any of it mattered, when the inquiry was complete, the SS Waratah was still missing. Family members of passengers clung to hope, calculated how much food the ship was carrying and insisted that it was entirely possible that the Waratah was adrift and any day now would be found.

In July 1999, it was announced that Waratah had been found 370 feet underwater, six and a half miles off the coast. The leader of that expedition, Emlyn Brown, had been searching for the ship for 18 years. Just two years later though, Emlyn Brown, head of the South Africa National Underwater and Marine Agency, NUMA, announced today that the remains he found in July 1999 and identified as the Warrata were not actually the remains of the elusive vessel. Although the submarine dive to the wreck was flawless, the wreck we thought was the Warrata is in fact not, repeat, not the Warrata.

A distressed Dr. Brown emailed to Clive Kessler, it is a cargo ship carrying military hardware, tanks, tires, trucks, etc. that we now know was sunk by a U-boat in 1942. I and all involved are stunned beyond belief and almost speechless at what was finally seen on the ocean floor. The SS Waratah, her cargo, her crew, and her 211 passengers are still missing.

116 years later, not even a scrap of wreckage from the ship has ever been found. All of those people, all of that cargo, gone. One theory is that the Waratah was capsized by a giant rogue wave sucking the ship and everyone and everything aboard to the bottom of the ocean. No debris ever surfaced because the crew had done such a tremendous job of tying it all down, of literally battening down the hatches. Another theory is that a fire started in the coal bunkers below deck causing an explosion in the Waratah's boiler room. Death for many would have been instant and for anyone unlucky enough to survive that initial blast, excruciating. Any evidence would have been completely burned up in the fire, which seems unlikely given our experience of similar disasters. But okay, for the sake of argument, we'll all agree it burnt to ash.

And yet another theory goes like this. The ship was gravely damaged in a sudden and severe storm off the coast of South Africa, adrift in the current and without a radio. Remember, the S.S. Waratah was pulled to Antarctica where every soul aboard soon died of starvation and exposure and the ship herself was eventually crushed into splinters by the relentless pressure of the sea ice. For years there would be claims of sightings of the S.S. Waratah appearing on the horizon and then vanishing like a mirage. By that point she was what we call a ghost ship and what the maritime world calls an ADV, Abandoned and Derelict Vessel. There are thousands and thousands of those in U.S. waterways alone. Turns out that sometimes the cheapest way to handle a boat that needs repairs is to dump it and run. As for the world's oceans, forget about it. Now that you know that no one even has a solid count of how many shipwrecks are there, much less how many abandoned ships are still out bobbing eerily on the surface, just waiting to sink beneath the waves.

But the vanishing of the Orang Medan is another kind of mystery altogether. Because this is one folks couldn't even agree had ever existed, which makes the news reports around her disappearance extra baffling. Like this story published on Friday, November 22, 1940. A rescue party that answered an S.O.S. and boarded the steamer Orang Medan off the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean found bodies of sailors lying about the deck. Bodies of sailors, but that wasn't even the worst of it. An American merchant ship called Silver Star was the first to arrive on the scene.

It took an entire day and not just because of the 210 nautical miles between the vessels. For whatever reason, the Orang Medan was 50 miles or more off course. Even as the Silver Star raced to the last known location of the Orang Medan, they tried over and over again to make contact with the ship, but they were met with only silence. Finally, the rescuers sighted the Orang Medan. There was no smoke pouring from her chimney and no people visible. The Silver Star drew closer, circling at a distance of several hundred meters. The Silver Star repeatedly sounded her horn, but got no response. It was all very strange. The Orang Medan showed no obvious damage, just the slightest list of starboard, but the crew of Silver Star agreed that could be a result of improperly loaded cargo. A megaphone was fetched and the crew hailed the Orang Medan, but again, no response. The decision was made to board the stricken vessel, and so a party of 10 left Silver Star to investigate. One of the officers in the rescue party reported the following.

We could find no sign of a wound on any of them. Death seemed to have taken them by surprise at their posts. It was terrifying. Dead at their posts, unwounded, their features fixed in a Even the ship's dog was lying dead on the deck, body stiff, eyes wide, mouth frozen mid-snarl. The bodies of the dead crew members were oddly contorted, almost as though each man died, warding off a terrible blow. The sailor who'd sent that frantic SOS was found dead at his post, earphones still clamped to his head, one lifeless hand resting on the telegraph key.

There was no sign of the ship's log, not in the captain's quarters and not on the bridge, where more horrors awaited, and a strange and unpleasant odor permeated the Orang Medan. The air was thick with it. On the captain's bridge, we found the body of the second officer. We counted 12 bodies, three of them deck officers. We decided to search the captain's quarters, but at that moment, we heard an explosion on the ship.

We abandoned ship immediately and rowed back to our own. The explosions were repeated. Soon, there was nothing left of the Orang Medan but a blazing hulk. The next day, the fire burned itself out and the steamer went under, taking her secret with her. One lifeboat was missing. At least one member of her crew got away. Look about for that missing lifeboat. Scan the blazing surface in all directions. No sign of it. According to the rescue party that witnessed the fiery end of the Orang Medan, there was something peculiar about that SOS call. The first message was an urgent call for a doctor. When a nearby ship responded, SOS received medical help coming. The telegraph operator on the Orang Medan immediately replied, cancel doctor, send warship. In the Malay tongue, Orang Medan means man of Medan. It is bad luck to give a vessel a name denoting the masculine gender. A ship is always a woman. Keep that in mind. The Orang Medan was a 5,000 ton single funnel cargo steamer.

She was about 40 years old at the time of her disappearance and had a murky ownership history. The ship changed hands and names at least a dozen times. She was grimy, flaked with rust, a shady lady who had a way of slipping in and out of ports under cover of darkness, evasive about what she was carrying and where she was headed next.

As the captain of Silver Star watched the ship burn, listening to the periodic explosions booming from deep inside her hull, he puzzled over the thick, acrid smell that it choked his men when they boarded the Orang Medan. He noted in the log of Silver Star, his suspicions that the Orang Medan was carrying a cargo of chemicals and ammunition and or possibly explosives.

The burnt hulk of the ship eventually sank beneath the waves. The Silver Star's captain carefully noted that the depth of the sea at that position was approximately 5,000 meters. That's more than 16,000 feet. It was about three weeks later in June 1947 that a lifeboat washed up on the shore of Taongi Island, which is part of the Marshall Islands chain in the Central Pacific. Six dead bodies were lying curled in the raft. A seventh passenger was barely alive. The badly dehydrated and sunsick man said that his name was Jerry Rabbit.

Occupation, second officer of a steamship called Orang Medan. A missionary living on the island took Jerry Rabbit into his care. Eventually, the man was able to tell his story. He said that he'd been hired on in Shanghai, that the captain of the Orang Medan didn't want to see any papers, just come aboard and get to work. That struck Rabbit as strange. Once out of port though, Rabbit began to realize that a significant number of the crew had been recruited in just the same way. Jerry Rabbit couldn't say what cargo the Orang Medan had been carrying, though he suspected contraband. He claimed that 7,000 boxes of unknown materials were loaded aboard the ship before it left port in Shanghai. Said that the Orang Medan pulled into a small harbor less than 100 nautical miles south of Shanghai to take on additional cargo, 8,000 boxes this time. The ship's ultimate destination, Rabbit was told, was Costa Rica. There, off the coast, the Orang Medan would rendezvous with another ship, which would take delivery of those 15,000 boxes. Rabbit did not question the captain as to why the Orang Medan skirted the usual shipping lanes. Except for the odd navigation, the voyage was business as usual, completely unremarkable, until the 10th day. The first crew members to get sick were in the boiler room, the stokers. These were the men who spent their days shoveling coal into the steamship's boilers. The boiler room was poorly ventilated and sweltering hot, and the noise was a constant deafening roar. Stokers spent their days drenched in sweat, covered in coal dust, and breathing that dust in. They had to have superhuman strength and stamina, and even though stokers were at the bottom of a ship's hierarchy, they were vital to its operation. It was their labor that helped power the ship. First, one stoker fell ill, and then the next, and the next. One collapsed and died.

The captain declared the cause of death to be heat stroke. Unfortunate, but not unheard of. Temperatures in the boiler room hovered between 120 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Each stoker had more than one furnace to attend to, as many as four furnaces per stoker. The pace was intense, and the risk of being burned was a constant threat. So when the captain of the Orang Madan declared the cause of the stoker's death to be heat stroke, it was plausible. What it didn't explain was why every stoker aboard was dropping with the same mystery illness. And then that sickness jumped from the boiler room to the engine room. The entire machine crew fell sick. The men were doubled over in pain with violent stomach cramps. Second officer Jerry Rabbit set out to investigate. Was there something on the ship that might be causing this strange sickness? Rabbit combed through the ship's log and manifests. It took digging, but he found it. Those 15,000 boxes piled high in the hold contained cyanide and sulfuric acid. There were 20 canisters of nitroglycerin. It seemed likely to Rabbit that some of the seals on those boxes had failed. Were toxic fumes the cause of this mysterious shipboard plague? Rabbit took his theory to the captain, who was offended by his second officer daring to second guess his authority. The captain refused to declare an emergency, refused to change course. So Jerry Rabbit, fearing and suspecting that worse was to come, gathered six like-minded crewmates and departed the Orang Madan in a lifeboat. As they rode away from the steamer, they heard her engines fall silent. With no stokers to feed the furnaces, to make the steam that powered her engines, she was now at the mercy of the currents.

Rabbit and his fellow sailors had been in such a rush to escape the ship and the terrible sickness ravaging her crew that they failed to stop the lifeboat with any provisions. No food, no water. They had no cover at all, no protection from the relentless scorching sun. As Rabbit watched in at one floating grave for another. And even second officer Jerry Rabbit, who against all odds, managed to survive more than a week at sea, ultimately wasn't spared. He made it as far as Tongi. But after just a few days on the island, Rabbit died. The ordeal had been too for his body to recover. That's one version of the story. Another version is similar, except instead of the Silver Star racing to answer the distress call sent by the Orang Madan, it was a Greek carrier called Andressa that raced to the scene. Of all the vessels that heard the message, only one, the Andressa, was able to get both the latitude and longitude of the position.

Captain Nikolaos Dimas ordered full speed ahead. He did not know in what condition he would find her. When the Orang Madan was finally sighted, it seemed something of an anticlimax. There seemed nothing wrong with the vessel, except that she was motionless and silent. Like the tale reported by the crew of Silver Star, a boat was launched. First officer Konstantin Davakis, accompanied by four crew members, chugged the short distance to the rusted Orang Madan and scrambled up its sides.

In a report on the accident, Konstantin Davakis wrote, when we went into the chart room adjoining the bridge, we found five officers sitting around the table. They were all dead. They seemed to have died within seconds of each other, their eyes rolling in horror and their bodies locked in rigor mortis. In the crew's quarters, there were ten dead men. The cook was dead in his galley.

In the radio room, we found the operator dead at his transmitter. The set was still switched on and operational. In the engine room, we found that both main engines and several auxiliary power units had all been switched off. The three engineers were all dead. The captain was in his bed. But the last entry was of a routine nature concerning speed, weather, and the state of fuel.

So far, pretty much the same story, right down to the ship's dog. The captain's dog was dead too. An elderly fox terrier. It lay on the carpet, legs in the air, teeth bared in a silent snarl, ready to attack whatever was to kill it. But it just didn't have time. And pretty much the same bewildering assessment of the grim findings aboard the Orang Medan. There was no sign of violence. But here's where the story abruptly shifts. And no presence of poisonous fumes or fire which could have been responsible for the deaths. But wait, wasn't it some sort of noxious fumes that sent the boarding crew of the Silver Star into a panic? The Andressa's ship physician, Dr. Paul Moreau, examined six of the dead sailors on the Orang Medan and reported that he could find no signs of disease, poisoning, or asphyxiation. None had wounds or discernible injuries. All appeared to have died at the same time. Like the crew of Silver Star though, Dr. Moreau and his shipmates all agreed that the faces of the dead on the Orang Medan were the faces of men whose last moments were spent in a state of absolute terror. Horror even. Every corpse with eyes wide and bulging, mouths forever frozen mid-screen. But the Andressa's description of events differs from Silver Star's in one very critical way. The absence of any explosion. In the Andressa's version, the listing hulk of the Orang Medan was towed to Jakarta and immediately placed under quarantine. Health investigators rigorously inspected the vessel but could find nothing to explain why her entire crew was dead. An official inquiry was conducted but with little evidence and no survivors to offer three days. The crew of Orang Medan had died by misadventure. With that declaration, the ship was sold to a Panamanian company. After five years applying trade routes in the Middle East, the steamer was docked in Karachi and dismantled for scrap. In this version of the story, there's no lifeboat, no second officer Jerry Rabbit, no talk of cyanide or sulfuric acid or nitroglycerin.

And in this version, the Orang Medan didn't sink. This is the only version of the tale where the Orang Medan didn't sink. There were a lot of ships in the Strait of Malacca in June 1947, including a U.S. Navy vessel. That ship intercepted the same peculiar distress call that Silver Star and Andressa had responded to. We were about 200 miles southwest of the Solomon Islands when we intercepted the following signal. SOS from the steamship Orang Medan. Beg ships with shortwave wireless. Get touch doctor. Urgent. Again, this isn't some random fishing boat. This was the United States Navy. With our shortwave set, we relayed the call for help. Medical stations in Germany, Rome, and France replied. We informed the Orang Medan and asked her to transmit her request. The Orang Medan replied with its auxiliary transmitter. Probable second officer dead. Other members crew also killed.

Disregard medical consultation. SOS urgent assistant warship. The description this officer gave of the doomed steamship will sound familiar. At the end of the 16 hours, we sighted a big ship on the horizon. It flew no flag, was listing slightly to the starboard, and the propeller motionless. From our bridge, we could see it was the Orang Medan. We launched two lifeboats with eight men in each and rode across to the Orang Medan and boarded her. Bodies of sailors were lying about on the deck. We could find no sign of a wound on any of them. Death seemed to have taken them by surprise at their posts. On the captain's bridge, we found the body of a second officer. We counted 12 bodies, three of them of deck officers, but we reckon the Orang Medan should have had a crew of about 40. Here's the thing about the Orang Medan. The question all these years later isn't did she or didn't she sink? The question isn't even what could possibly have killed her entire crew in such a frightening and yet completely unknown way? No. The question about the Orang Medan is did she ever even exist at all? Wait, how's that even up for debate? Look how many ships reported hearing that distress call. Look how many ships rushed to her last known location.

How many people boarded her only to discover her entire crew deceased? How in the world can a story like this be nothing more than a tall tale, a legend, or a hoax? If second officer Jerry Rabbit's suspicions were correct, and I guess we'd have to first agree that Jerry Rabbit himself actually once existed, then the Orang Medan was in the smuggling business, which would explain the ship's puzzling absence from the usual registries. Lloyd's of London, for example. Smuggling what and for who? Maybe the answer is Unit 731. Japan's Imperial Army launched its biological weapons program in the 1930s. The official name was Manchu Detachment 731. We're talking biological and chemical warfare on a massive scale. It was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II. A vast project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera, and a dozen other pathogens. Unit 731 conducted research by experimenting on humans and by field testing plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start plague outbreaks. Spoiler alert, they sure could. But the politest way to describe how that went is to call it counterproductive. In 1942, germ warfare specialists distributed dysentery, cholera, and typhoid in Zhejiang province in China. But Japanese soldiers themselves became ill and 1,700 died of the diseases. You could almost call that karma, except for the fact that it's always the soldiers who pay with their bodies and lives for decisions made by people who end up with only metaphorical blood on their hands. The most staggering death counts that Unit 731 racked up were innocent civilians. More than 200,000 Chinese were killed in germ warfare field experiments. Historian Sheldon Harris says that plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused outbreaks of the plague that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 through 1948. Unit 731 was so secretive that it wasn't until 1995 when a senior Japanese military officer prepared an 18-page report for American intelligence officials that the full scope of the atrocities committed by Unit 731 were even known.

Dozens of categories describing research conducted on human subjects and much of that research sounds like torture. It is unclear what the prisoners had to endure for studies of burn scar or study of bullets lodged in the brains. It's all nightmarish. Two Chinese men were brought in, stripped naked, and given general anesthetic. Then, a medic in the Japanese army began practicing various kinds of surgery. First, an appendectomy, then an amputation of an arm, and finally a tracheotomy. After 90 minutes, they were finished. So, they killed the patient with an injection.

If all of this seems long ago and far away, you might be interested in knowing that in 1944, the Japanese army launched bomb-carrying balloons intended to ride the prevailing winds all the way to the United States. The U.S. government censored the bejeebers out of news reports at the time, but about 200 of those balloons managed to land in the western United States, killing a woman in Montana and six people in Oregon, which is terrible, but it could have been worse. Some Japanese generals wanted to load those balloons with biological pathogens, the kind that kill people and wipe out herds of cattle. It was Japanese General Tojo Hideki who rejected that idea, which didn't help him much with the Americans, who still hanged him for war crimes on December 23, 1948.

Was the Orang Medan pressed into smuggling cyanide, sulfuric acid, and nitroglycerin for Unit 731? It's a possibility that can't really be dismissed, and in many ways, a smuggling operation gone wrong makes a whole lot more sense than a wild fiction about a ship that never existed can coctypy, well, who? The answer to that might be a reporter named Silvio Scherli. Remember that missionary on Island who cared for the doomed second officer, Jerry Rabbit? He told his story to a reporter who published it in 1948 in the Dutch-Indonesian newspaper, The Locomotief. Okay, nothing suspicious about that, right? Except the events that brought down the Orang Medan happened in 1947. Yet weirdly, there was another report of the same events happening in the same way on the same ship that was filed in Trieste in 1940, which is where and when Silvio Scherli, the journalist, happened to be based. And look here, it made the news, like this story published on November 22, 1940. A rescue party that answered an SOS and boarded the steamer Orang Medan in the Pacific Ocean found bodies of sailors lying around the deck. Death seemed to have taken them by surprise at their posts. It was terrifying. We decided to search the captain's but at that moment, we heard an explosion in the ship. We abandoned the ship immediately.

The explosions were repeated. Soon nothing was left of the Orang Medan but a blazing hulk. The next day, the fire burned out and the steamer went under taking her secret with her. Same ship, same story, same details. But somehow, seven years before the incident that brought the Silver Star, the Andressa, and the U.S. Navy racing to help? I guess that's possible if we're going with, you know, time traveling ghost ship theory. And if we're not, we might just have to accept that the tale of the Orang Medan is a ripping good yarn. A sailor's story with just enough detail to make it convincing and just enough truth to make it stick. Because all sorts of truths are bobbing in that water with the Orang Medan. A ship sinking during World War II under mysterious circumstances? That's plausible. A ship smuggling chemicals for Unit 731? Very plausible.

A military smuggling operation that went wrong and ended up attracting way too much attention from the world press? That's plausible too. And it's plausible that a reporter just completely fabricated the entire thing. For what? Attention? A laugh? Just because he could? Just don't say fame and fortune, because as usual, neither of those bothered to show up.

The best lies and the best legends are the ones that have just enough truth to go down nice and easy. Enough truth to be believable. Enough truth that even the loudest skeptics can get shouted right down. The tale of the Orang Medan might be the story of an unscrupulous journalist who didn't give a damn about facts versus fiction. Or it might be a cover for a secret military operation run by the Japanese Imperial Army. Or it might be the story of some monstrous, maybe even supernatural horror, rising from the deep, descending upon the deck of the Orang Medan, and swallowing the souls of every man aboard.

The chances we'll ever really know the whole truth about the ghost ship Orang Medan, that's about as likely as finding one single tear in all of the vast salty sea. We cling to the ocean's surface in our little boats. The depths we're even physically able to explore are, let's be honest, not very deep at all. The sea calls to us. Yet more humans have been to the moon than to the deepest part of our own planet's oceans. Depths that form the largest habitat on our world. Dark and cold. Forbidding and alien. A graveyard for countless shipwrecks.

The inspiration for countless stories and tall tales. Which is all this is, right? Just a ripping good tall tale. I guess the CIA thought so, too. A sanitized letter written by a man named C.H. Marck Jr., assistant to the director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, to an unknown was dated December 5th, 1959. On May 29th, 1958, I sent you a letter concerning crews disappearing from ships on the high seas, or ships which have disappeared without a trace.

Well, I've just read a weird story concerning the Dutch vessel SS Orang Medan. I'll be indeed grateful for your opinion of this story. Also, do you think something from the unknown is involved? Something from the unknown? I feel sure the SS Orang Medan tragedy holds the answer to many of these airplane accidents and unsolved mysteries of the sea. Also, I have often thought about the sightings of huge fiery spheres rising out of the sea, or disappearing into the sea, by ships, captains, and crews of the 18th and 19th centuries. There are alarming passages in old English chronicles, written in medieval Latin, and in books printed before the year 1500 AD, which suggest that these fiery spheres caused destruction, and that they come from within our planet. For instance, in 216 BC, quote, things like ships were seen in the sky over Italy. In Sardinia, a knight was making his rounds, inspecting the posts guarding the rampart, when a stick in his burst into flames. The same thing happened to Roman soldiers in Sicily, who saw their javelins flame and burn in their hands. At Arpi, a round shield was seen in the sky. Also, in AD 1067, people saw a fire that flamed up and burned fiercely in the sky. It came near the earth, and for a little time, brilliantly lit it up. Afterwards, it revolved, ascending on high, then descending into the sea.

In several places, it burned woods and plains. The Cold War CIA, everybody! What didn't they get into? Yes, the enchanting sea. What terrifying secret does it hold? I feel sure that the S.S. Orang Madan tragedy also holds the answer to this secret. Sincerely yours, C.H. Mark. Well, how about that? Next time on True Weird Stuff, she did it, and did it, and did it.

We're bringing you a marathon of some really shady ladies. Women who love you to pieces, until you get on their nerves. Women who love babies and children, especially when they can sell them for a profit. Women who have your back, because they just stuck a knife in it. Sugar and spice, and ain't nothing nice. Not on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Erin Cox, Sam Moore, Kary "Doc" Bowser, and Don Morgan. You and I both have a fascination with things that are abandoned, right? Like abandoned farmhouses, abandoned houses, buildings, whatever it is. But I have to tell you that I think there is nothing more haunting or creepy than an abandoned ship. A ship that's just floating out there in the ocean, whether there's bodies in it or not. Because there's a mystery that's happened there, and the sea is a dangerous place. And here is this hull of what was a ship, just bobbing on the ocean. And there are, here's the mind blower, there are so many out there right now. That was what was shocking when you said that.

Because I figured, well, there might be a couple, but there's a lot of them out there. And they're just, they're just meandering around. And they can for years, I suppose, as long as the vessel, the integrity of the vessel stays intact. They call them, I mean, you learn a lot doing this podcast, but they call them abandoned and derelict vehicles. And there are so many.

I mean, America's waterways are choked with it. And it was a funny little bit of synchronicity. So my husband had the news on, and they had a report from a coastal river where a bunch of volunteers were pulling derelict boats. And we're talking like little Boston whalers and John boats and stuff. I mean, this isn't a coastal waterway. This isn't, you know, the high seas. But there were, there were hundreds of derelict boats that they were pulling out of these, the water up and down the East coast. Boats are like, if a boat breaks down, like in the middle of the ocean, it's not like you're towing it somewhere.

You can't paddle it somewhere. I suppose you could, but probably not going to be doing that. When it just, it's shocking. It's shocking how many are out there. And then you said that we had lost through the course of time, since we started going out on the high seas, 3 million ships, 3 million is a lot. But you have to remember, you have to remember that people have been like, we're only very recently a technological species. And unfortunately, our technology has outpaced our biology and we are completely out of control. Like we no longer, we may not have hit the singularity yet, folks, but technology runs you not the other way around, but we're all, do you not feel that way? That we are all at the mercy of technology.

So people have been out on the seas for 50,000 years. Now, in the early days, they were going out in like boats made of reeds. Good luck to you if a storm kicks up on the ocean and you're in a boat made of reeds. I mean, hell, good luck to you in a bad storm on a container ship today. So there are staggering numbers of shipwrecks.

Look how long they searched for Titanic. Look how long Ballard searched for Titanic. And they knew where it was. Oh yeah. Roughly. Close enough, right? Right. And look how long it took. And it's two miles down. I mean, you just, as we learned with the Ocean Gate tragedy, you've got no business down there. We really can't spend any significant time at those deaths. We're not built for it. So the chances of us finding even a reasonable percentage of these wrecks, I think it's pretty remote. And are you not haunted by that passenger, Australia's Titanic, that passenger liner, Warrada, that just vanished?

They've never found anything. And it had no radio on it. Were you a little surprised by how late in the game the Shipboard Radio Act was passed? Yeah, I was. What are we doing? What are we doing sending out a passenger liner with 200 plus people on it and no radio? Can I tell you? It's so funny to me. So you would obviously want a radio, if for no other reason, in case you were in distress, wouldn't you? But some guys go on, no, sir, not going to make me have a radio. I've got my section here and I'm going to be able to go by the stars. I mean, you know, it's shocking, but you know that there was somebody that felt like we don't want this newfangled technology on our ship. And we don't want to spend a nickel.

I mean, we don't want we're not going to have enough lifeboats. We're not going to be able to radio for help. I mean, that on the one hand, you go the arrogance, but on the other hand, you go, oh, the innocence. I just thought everything could be like what could go wrong. The thing about that haunts me are, you know, the loved ones left behind, who never had any definitive answer or closure about what happened to the people they lost on that ship. The way they clung to the magical thinking that the ship was just adrift, but that everybody was alive and okay, they were they were going to eat the food on board and then they could go fishing, right?

Everything will be fine. They had if you remember one of the things on the Rarada was a facility that could turn seawater into freshwater. And that fed the delusion that someday their loved ones would come home because they would say they have the thing you need most is water. They have water. All they need to do is catch fish. And of course, you know, 116 years later, we're still waiting for a glimpse of this passenger liner. Yeah, that one is haunting.

But that one's haunting, you know, somebody on board would go what fish again? Oh, you Yeah, this there'd be some there'd be someone going, we paid for the VIP. First. So, yeah, the ocean is like our world is mostly water. When you the picture that we have of Earth is just the one angle that's continent heavy. If you flip, if you flip the globe around and take a look at the Pacific Ocean covering like the world, you realize that this is a water world. And, and isn't it interesting that on this water world, we who consider ourselves apex predators, top food chain predators, we can't survive in that habitat. And there's all sorts of we'll get to the CIA in a hot minute here, but you didn't expect them to make an appearance in this story.

So what did you think, Max, the, the orang madan? It, it's an unsolved mystery. I lean toward the fact that the journalist made it up just because of the discrepancy in the dates. But, you know, it's difficult to say I, I don't, you know, unless the person took some sort of verse joy in making up this story, as you said, what, what was to be gained by making up this story? So I suppose that that is that is possible. But when you were talking about the story, and you were talking about some of the things that happened, I've heard of this unit 731 before with the Japanese and some of the horrors that happened with that.

And the fact that they did set balloons off into the into the United States, and that the government to not panic people acted like it wasn't happening, because there really weren't. There are a lot of them, but not enough that it was causing people to, you know, compare notes on what's happening where I thought that this had to have been cargo that they had on the ship that was poisonous. But then I thought to myself, but why would it be that everyone was suspended at their station on the ship all at the same time? So that was the only part of that that didn't make sense.

And the way the consistency in the description of how the soldiers, not the soldiers, the sailors were found, their eyes open, their mouths wide and a frozen scream. Like, think of, you know, that was pretty consistent. And I suppose if the poison were fast and terrible enough, maybe. But that one, that one doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? It was kind of Yeah, it's kind of tricky. But then we go to something that we've explored a few times here on True Weird Stuff.

It's this whole business of, well, there's a bunch of stuff in the sea we don't know about. And people have witnessed all kinds of things. And they think they think they see, you know, vehicles diving into the ocean and coming out of there and causing these big light shows in the sky and that sort of thing. So that's another possibility. And I think you have to I think you have to consider that because that's another while it seems like a bit of a farfetched explanation, it's a it certainly would explain a lot, wouldn't it?

Well, that was the I mean, that, you know, now we're jumping ahead to the CIA. That was, that was the question. Basically, let's, we'll get there. We'll get there. Because that CIA letter written in 1959 sounds awfully similar to what the sailors aboard the USS Nimitz testified to Congress in the summer of July of 2023. About the so called tic tac UAP vehicles.

So, so one thing, let me say, and this is why you have to be really careful with information that you source online. This is why people are constantly editing and updating like Wikipedia, for example, you have to be super careful with AI because it's so laced with inaccuracies. Because all AI is doing is pulling content that human beings have put out. And if we make a mistake, then that mistake goes into chachi PT, right? So one of the things that you see over and over and over again, are these weird can in a lot of stories, not just the orangutan, these these conflicting dates and conflicting reports. And sometimes I'll read already 10 stories about the same event. And in those 10 stories about the same event, the story will be told five different ways. Somebody will somebody's name will change a date will change right? And you think well that that's pretty harmless, except that stuff then becomes what we call the historic record, right? And it's an act, it's like messed up, it's inaccurate. And the orangutan is a great example of that. Because the papers in 1947 48 were all around the world, people were talking about this strange event on this Dutch sailing ship, this Dutch steamship. But the same exact story minus some of the details like the address and silver star in the Navy appeared in papers in 1940. So you could say, well, what the hell, and here's what I think ends up happening.

Journalism, if you're disappointed in the press today, and I am so I'm with you. I cannot tell you what a carnival. It was 150 years ago, 100 years ago, 5060 70 years ago. A paper, some some cities had like a half a dozen or more newspapers. They had morning, afternoon and evening editions in New York City. For example, you had papers that printed morning, afternoon and evening editions.

If you think putting content on your social media feed is exhausting. Now do that seven days a week, three newspapers a day. I think that sometimes I think they just ripped it off the wire and published it. I don't think they fact checked it. I don't think they proofread it based on a lot of what I've seen. What do you think? Yeah, I think that that's right. And it was it was very helter skelter back then. And I think for a lot of them, they were in such a rush to get the get any kind of information out. They weren't fact checking it because it's like, it's important to be out there. It's important to be first because the competition between the newspapers was really crazy back then about who had the story first. And, you know, we didn't kind of back then.

They weren't as troubled by ethics and accuracy as we used to be. Things were a little looser. And there are a couple of there are a couple of points about the Orang Madan that I think are valid. One of them is, is that you can't find the ship on any of the big maritime registries. And that, you know, that's troubling, right? But the answer to that can also be, well, because it was re flagged and was running dark as a smuggling ship.

You think the Japanese Imperial Army is going to is going to let Lloyd's of London know they're smuggling biochemical warfare ingredients around around the world? No, no. And that's another thing that makes like a legend like this so sticky and enduring is that you can throw these objections out, but then you can meet them. You go, well, that's why it wasn't right. I wasn't registered.

That's the whole reason. Let's talk about Second Officer Jerry Rabbit. Present in some accounts, completely absent from others. The missionary on Taongi Island and the marshals who tried to save his life, who nursed him as best he could. An Italian missionary who seemingly can't be found. But let me counter that. No one gave a damn about some random island missionary in 1948.

Nobody was like, let's get a pull quote from the missionary. Nobody cared. He wasn't the story. The ship was the story. So that's that's why this one, you know, continues to have life in it, because all of the ways you can shoot it down, you can pull it back up. This is the thing that's fascinating about this story that's fascinating about a couple of stories that you've done, and that is this this enduring mystery. There's still a great curiosity about it, despite the fact that it's been so long ago and you have any number of explanations, but people are still fascinated by it. That's that's very cool. There's so much that you can point to and go, yeah, but I think, you know, the fact that the Japanese army was the Imperial Army and of course, that thing was wiped off the face of the earth after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Emperor, unconditional surrender, all of that, you know, was just sort of over, except except unit 731 apparently continued chugging right along for a good long time.

And I thought it was super interesting that American intelligence officials found out about it in the mid 1990s. When that Japanese officer disclosed everything, weren't you intrigued by Yeah, I was. Yeah, because I have read some things about this. And it's surprising that it wasn't talked about more before then until that, I guess that officer, I guess, there were a lot of people keeping that a secret, right? Well, I mean, you think about military discipline. You think about patriotism. Like, I get I get that you would keep that on the on the down low. Yeah, I get that.

And I mean, the the war crimes connected to it are unspeakable. I mean, the story that you told about, you know, alright, fine, we're gonna do some we're gonna do operations and randomly take body parts off this guy and then kill him by injection. Max, the discipline that I mean, I had to smack myself a couple of times because I could have gone off on such as unit 731 atrocities tangent. And maybe I will in a future episode, I'll do a whole thing on unit 731. But what they did, not just what they plan to do or wanted to do or daydream of doing what they did is absolutely unspeakable. I mean, they, they succeeded in unleashing plague bombs and plagues. And most of the people that died were not military. They were just farmers and peasants and just civilians. You know, yeah, so the the bomb, the balloon bombs that made it to the United States. I mean, we hang the guy who said, Oh, let's don't. Let's don't send anthrax and bubonic plague over in a balloon. Let's don't do that. He's almost a humanitarian. And yet, you know, where he was hanged for war crimes, not that much after that.

So there's just Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot to this story. And that's how you make a make believe story. That's how you get people to believe it was real and have them talking about it 100 years after you're, you're gone. But if that's the case with this journalist, and it could be, and, but the idea that they were smuggling something that they were going under the radar, seems like the best explanation on this. I mean, it really does. I mean, there's all kinds of things that go on. There's all kinds of things our own government are doing that are that are off the books, you know, so. So you you lean toward it was real. And it was covert military. Yeah, that's what I'm leaning towards. Even though the discrepancies in the date, like are we time traveling? Orang Madan? So you're not troubled by the discrepancies in the date? That doesn't? That doesn't stop you? No, it doesn't. I think that we're there could be mistakes made along the way. I mean, there could be, there could be parts of this story, obviously, that we don't know that would have caused that to happen, too. But that's the, that's the part of it. I do believe that it was real. I do. I do believe that.

One thing that I thought about was it. Let's say it's real. Let's go with your theory. Let's say it's real. But it didn't happen in 1947. It happened in 1940. When Silvio Scherli published the original story. And that the the so as he as he said it, it happened exactly as he wrote it in 1940. And then some starving editor somewhere, seven years later, heard tell of this in a bar and decided to republish it and didn't and thought, you know, nobody wants old news.

We'll just act like it happened right now. Who can prove it? Who can prove it different? Because in 1940, World War Two had started, but the United States was not involved with it. The I think Pearl Harbor was bombed in December of 1941. So so, you know, that was at the height of Japanese power in the, you know, in the Pacific was 1940 thereabouts. And you're right, I think that it is possible somebody said, Oh, this is a good story. Let's publish this on, I guess, seven years after after the fact. Yeah. And we'll just and we'll just kind of like low key the original date. And this will sell copies. I mean, what were they?

What were they? You've seen old movies, extra, extra, trying to sell newspapers, which is how so much misinformation, as I said before, so much misinformation got out because it was important that you had you had credibility. If you were the first to have the information, you kind of went, yeah, even if the information is sketch, but you see that today. I mean, there's some sort of some something happening. I was thinking about the. Oh, any one of a number of things that have Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bombing. Remember, they were looking initially, they were looking for Timothy and a guy who was in the rental car place to who had a hat on.

Well, it turned out that guy was just he wasn't with Timothy McVeigh. He just happened to be in there. But all of a sudden he became a suspect at that point. There's always this fluid information that surrounds all of that stuff. And even today with TV news. So not surprising we find it here. And that and I you know, that was one of the things like sometimes I'll be I have a I always have a notebook next to me and I'll write the date and then I'll go back and look. That's not right.

That's seven years to seven years off here. So then you got to dig down deeper. And I did find the original Silvio Scherli story from 1940. And and and by the way, oh, he wanted to be rich and you heard of Silvio? No. You know, it's not like he's a household name. Even in journalism, we're in media. I'm we don't know who the guy is. So yeah, interesting. I think it's plausible that part of the world. You know, the coming out of the ports in Shanghai, there was smuggling was a thing. And if you look at what officer second officer Jerry Rabbit said, their their their destination was the coastal waters off Costa Rica, where they would rendezvous with another ship.

Sounds like a classic smuggling operation, right? It does. And sometimes I look at these things and people go, that's just all made up. And I'm like, yeah, whoever did this really missed their true calling in life, they should have written fiction. Because it's, you know, it's just pretty good fiction. It is pretty, pretty exciting. Yeah, pretty exciting story aboard the ship.

So now I told you, when we talked about this episode, last week, I was like, I think we'll solve it in the story. Because those dates, date discrepancies make it look like it was a lie, unless you say it happened in 1940. And the lie came in 1947. That the truth that the story was true. But that unscrupulous newspaper editors changed the dates. Now we have a lot of ships racing to assist we have the Silver Star, which there was a real ship called the Silver Star, I was able to find it. What the hell it was doing off of Sumatra answering distress calls for I can't say but there was a real ship. The Andressa was a real ship. The United States Navy is a real thing. Right? Yeah. So they this story, you know, a lot of details.

You can't prove that, that the Silver Star that I found is the same Silver Star in here, but there was a ship. What got me, and I'll tell you, it came as such a shock. So I'm working my way through the story. And I'm trying to find, I'm trying to find anything that really legitimately connects the Japanese Army to this, you know, finding the naval officer talking about this ship that was fun. You know that that's, you know, you don't usually see people just making that stuff up, right? So I'm looking like there's got there's a missing piece here, there's a missing piece, and I can't find it. And so it's like, does the US What about the United States government? What did we know about the Orang Medan? Because two of our American flag ships responded to the distress call, the Silver Star, allegedly, and the United States Navy vessel, allegedly. So is there any documentation in our archives? So I go looking for that.

And I'll be damned if I don't come upon this declassified CIA file. Yeah, where ch mark, who was the assistant to the director of the CIA, is speculating about what happened to Orang Medan. And now it's 1959. And he's talking about, you know, we're having these ships that disappear without a trace. Look at this Dutch vessel, the SS Orang Medan.

What do you think? Could that be the answer? Listen to what this assistant director of the CIA said. He said, airplane accidents, unsolved mysteries of the sea, huge fiery spheres coming from the ocean or disappearing back into the sea. ships, captains and crews going back centuries reporting these things. Medieval Latin books printed in the year 1500 AD, describing fiery spheres coming in out of the water that cause destruction that come from, quote, within our planet, which brings us to the whole set aside over here, the interdimensional question that is very buzzy right now.

Listen to what else that letter said. He talked about things like ships that were seen in the preach that yes, yes, ma'am. The wheel of the flaming wheel of Ezekiel or what have you, right? Listen to him talking about how in AD 1067, people saw fire that flamed and burned in the sky and revolved and ascend it and then descend it into the sea. And Mark ends that letter with what secret does the sea hold? And why does the Orang Medan have the answer?

Now, didn't you find that like, whoa? Yes, the CIA stick in their face and it's almost as if the CIA goes. Yeah, we all know that there's aliens. We all know that there's, you know, whatever it is. So they kind of act like it's common knowledge. Well, it's going back through years. They're not trying to dispel it, which a lot of times they try to dispel it. Well, if you remember, this particular exchange was classified for decades. This wasn't, C.H. Mark didn't write that letter for the public or for you or me. That was internal eyes only secret stuff.

So let's talk about because it's very, very kooky and people's eyes roll right out of their heads. But a lot of the debunking around the idea of UFOs and UAPs comes from the very real problems of physics and interstellar travel. The distances are just so vast. And the kind of crafts that people report seeing going all the way back to, you know, before Jesus. So the descriptions that people give, debunkers say, and I think correctly, there's no way that thing came from some distant other galaxy. There's no, there's no way, right? No way. And you can, I think, I think they make a good argument about it's just the interstellar thing is just incomprehensibly hard. But what people are really wigged out by, and more and more, this is in the disclosure discourse, is this idea that, well, that's because they're not traveling vast distances in the universe.

It's a dimensional thing. And the minute you start talking about dimensional travel, now it's, we're in kooky time. And you lose people that might have entertained the possibility of a spaceship landing on the White House lawn. But that's what, listen to what C.H. Mark in 1959, listen to what the CIA said. These things come, these fiery spheres that cause destruction come from within our planet. Yeah. Within our oceans there, whatever it is, it's already here. It lives here in the sea. Now they're talking about that in 1959. You know what this reminds me of? And some of these same things are being floated. Remember the Malaysian airliner that vanished over the Pacific? There's a lot of similarities between theories about this and theories about that jetliner, which is kind of interesting. And that's another, when you first started to talk about this, I remember thinking to myself, well, you know, we, this might've happened in 1940, but we're still having things, unknown mysteries of things that are missing and the ocean swallows up their secrets. And that one had all kinds of theories that are similar to this.

It's fascinating, right? Like I know there are a lot of people who want to live in a very simple and simplistic world because all this complexity is scary and blows your mind. Like, isn't it just simpler to think that when a man and woman love each other very much, they lie down together and then a baby comes, right? And you know, everything that we can see is all there is to see. And the earth is 10 minutes old. And when we die, we go to a heaven that looks weirdly like a country club. I get why people want the world to be simple, because you want the world to make sense. A story like this, that declassified letter in the CIA's archives, that doesn't make so much sense. When we're talking about ancient phenomenon coming from within our planet, and you like to think, if you're a skeptic, you like to think that this kind of stuff belongs to weirdos like Max and me. And that, you know, there are sober-minded, very, very smart people in charge of things who do not entertain this. Well, think again, for starters. There's nothing weirder than the American Central Intelligence Agency.

It's beginning right through the early 2000s. I don't know what the hell's going on over there now, but there's nothing weirder than that, Pax Fuchs. Terry, I can't imagine it's much different now. I'm going to try to give them the benefit if I have some kind of doubt. Yeah. So something super interesting. And I was having this conversation on Instagram DMs with one of our listeners. And so back in the spring, I don't know how many of you listened to the Weaponized podcast, Jeremy Corbell's podcast. Jeremy Corbell is the documentary filmmaker who kind of broke the Nimitz tic-tac story. Right, right.

Back in the spring, you know, on Corbell's podcast, he was like, you know, pay attention. Late summer, meaning this summer, right now, the one 2025, you're going to start seeing stories in your newsfeed about a mysterious, maybe it's an alien ship coming through our solar system. First, we thought it was a comet, but it isn't. Yesterday in my newsfeed, object in space giving off its own light. Scientists say no comet can do that, right?

He said, back in the spring, long before these stories populate at your feed, he said, that's the story that's going to be presented. But it's not the truth. It's the cover for the truth. They're already here. But before we can tell you they're already here, we need them to land. In quotes, right? Because how do you like I live with someone who when I say to him, I think it might be interdimensional, possible, you know, maybe multiverse, maybe string theory. He looks at me like, I will pay you to stop talking. Like, people just don't want to hear it. It just sounds crazy. It does. But at the same time, it explains an awful lot.

What if, like, listen up little meat creature, you precious little meaty thing just want to squeeze your face. What if everything is weird, that we couldn't even begin to wrap our little brains around it. And that's okay. Because you were somewhere before you were here. And you're going to go somewhere after you leave here because, you know, energy can only be transformed, not destroyed. Maybe it's none of your business how this world works. Because we couldn't comprehend it anyway. And maybe that's why we should just pet puppies and eat ice cream and try not to be such dickheads. Because we're never going to get it.

Sure, I come to accept there's an awful lot of things that I'm never going to, never going to be able to figure out. I mean, your mind. It's how we're built to try to figure out what is the answer to this. And once you said about it, the mind, if you're kind of a little obsessive, like I can be, your mind just continues going on it. But it could be this, it could be this, it could be this, it could be Yeah. When people go, well, that's just, you know, blah, that's just bullshit. Well, can you explain like, can you explain the universe? Because on the one hand, everything you learned in school about the Big Bang might not be correct. Because now that we have some technology that lets us look back in time at the early days of the universe, turns out that things are not adding up. You know, the, the expanding universe, you know, we talked recently in an episode about cosmic inflation, you know, that as the universe, as the universe was created, it spawned countless other infinite universes.

And, you know, that's the multiverse theory. What do you know? What do I know? I don't know. I'm mostly I'm concerned about, you know, inflation, inflation. So, yeah. And that's hard. And by the way, what can you do about that? Yeah, you can't do anything about that. What are you doing about, you know, the expanding cosmic inflation, bubbling multiverse situation? Not a damn thing, right? So, yeah. What are we has lost its mind and credibility? Who would even believe it? If what what news outlet could could tap the mic and say, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet Zorg from a neighboring dimension.

People will be like, that's AI. That's not real. Because you know, you know, if they're from another from another planet, their name is not going to be Kevin, you know? Oh, wouldn't it be funny, though, if it was? I'm I'm Kevin. This is my dude, Austin, and my lady, Mackenzie. We're from Alpha Centauri or whatever. Yeah. Who even who even knows? There's a really interesting physics experiment that I was reading about. It might have been in your newsfeed, too.

And I think that these stories are popping up sort of, God, I'm gonna sound like such a kook, kind of intentionally. Did you read about the physics experiment that indicates that making a decision today changes what happened in the past. So the past changes to reflect the present decision. It's about it's on and it's all about, you know, particles, like particles, doing, you know, wacky light particle stuff. But it's about causality. Like we think of the fat the past has fixed, right? It's unchangeable. The past is the past what's done is done. But in this experiment, this physics experiment, it turns out that maybe not. Maybe the past is not quite so fixed, and unchangeable. And maybe the butterfly effect works in both directions. Now, this is really super, super esoteric, and doesn't have much to do with what you should eat for dinner tonight. But it's interesting, isn't it? Because what is physics by the rules and laws of the universe and the reality of the physical world that we live in. So to see that kind of experiment, I mean, people in the physics community, people in science were like, Oh, this is the coolest.

My brother, he's wired for all that stuff. And he could he, when you start talking about that, something that we're doing today could change the past, he'd be right on it. Sometimes, it isn't that I'm close minded to it, but it just makes my head hurt. And I hate when that happens. Well, I just don't, I try so so so hard, like I make flashcards. There's a lot that I just can't understand. And I think that's appropriate. Because if I were a quantum physicist, and some kooky podcast or radio lady could understand my work just by reading it, I would feel that I'd wasted some time in school. I think I'm not supposed to be able to understand it.

But if you if you look in your newsfeed, when we wrap up here, I think you'll probably see that story. Okay, they're going isn't that fascinating? Oh, maybe maybe causality isn't what we thought it was. Anyway, what's on TV? Well, this fun, whatever this spacecraft is coming towards us, we should know something in the next 100 days. And then what they said, so this is this podcast is dropping on the 22nd of August 2025. So it should be interesting to see if something happens in the next 100 days. And my, you know, I'm trying to set myself up for not disappointment. Because I'm watching the way things are now that we're in this bizarre alternate timeline. I think that this story could just fizzle. And in six months, we'll be going, Hey, remember when there was like a weird giant ship coming toward us, whatever happened with that? I think people will not go, they'll not go, hey, what? They're not going to say to the And now you're telling us nothing to worry about.

I think if we were in a different decade, that would be the reaction. But none of us are getting none of us have a shared reality in terms of news and information. We're getting it from a gazillion different places. And the algorithm knows us. So my algorithm is heavy on this kind of stuff, physics and science and all of that. Because my phone can hear me talking to you about it. So my phone's like, Oh, kooky, lady, lady, enjoy this. Right. But someone else's newsfeed is full of like this time of the year, my husband's newsfeed is college football.

Yeah, so we're not all getting we're not all sharing this reality together. And there are a lot of people. So you know, that story, we talked about it on our radio show, the virus, the it's a papilloma virus, that is causing Frank, they're calling them Frankenstein bunnies, right, right. They're in like Fort Collins, Colorado, which coincidentally is where my youngest school, so I'm super delighted. They look like something these bunny rabbits look like something from Stranger Things. This is this is a real story. These are real images that's been documented by real wildlife experts in science. It's been broadcast on what we used to consider credible news outlets. And we shared the Franken bunny story to one of our social media feeds.

And and here comes someone that's not real. That's AI. That's not true. Hmm. Well, in this case, I'm sorry, because it's horrifying, but it is true. It is real. So we already are in a place where we can't even agree on what's real. And that's only going to get worse. Yeah. As as AI proliferate proliferates and improves.

Um, that's only getting worse. So a giant, mysterious, interstellar object rocketing its way toward the planet Earth, behaving like it's under some sort of intelligent control and emitting lights, like some sort of a mechanical object. What the hell does that thing have to do to get somebody on Facebook, to not accuse it of being a fake fake news AI story?

Where does that thing have? Does it have to hover over the Super Bowl? You know, and even then somebody to go, Oh, look, Budweiser is doing a promotion. The giant kid. Yeah. There are lots of there are lots of things that are an existential threat to our species. Lots of things go a global cataclysm, like the one we talked about in our episode called Adam and Eve in the CIA. Right. Right.

A worldwide epidemic that would make COVID look like, you know, sneezes. Oh, yeah. That I mean, the world has been plagues have decimated the world's population. There are so many things that represent an existential threat, nuclear annihilation, flooding and fires and all of the impacts that come with the climate changing. But you know what else is an existential threat?

The fact that none of us can seem to agree on what's real. Because once once a people, once a civilization, once a species, loses the ability to have any agreement on what's up and down and what's real, then what? Where does it go from there? Sure, I don't I don't know. Don't be scared. Don't be scared. You're we're we're creatures. I don't know, Max, we're we're creatures of light where something else will happen. And by the way, have you really enjoyed being this? I don't know. I don't know. I love I'm a lot of we're afraid of a lot of things. And then on the other hand, let's be optimistic.

I mean, be like, be so real with me cone of safety. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of good stuff in your life. But honestly, has this been the greatest party you've ever been invited to? Being being this version of your eternal soul? No, sure. That'd be that'd be no. Yeah. Sorry, sure. I just read an article that said, if you believe that you have a past life that you're probably suffering from mental illness. And I went great.

Oh, well, we relate to that. I know. I know. We're all nuts. Here's one thing I can tell you. You're not going to live forever. You've only been here a minute. You were fine before you got here, you're gonna be fine with whatever comes next. You have no you don't get a vote. You don't get a vote. Just hang on for dear life. And when your time's up, your time's up and you get flung off into whatever, whatever, right.

But that might come sooner for all of us, because we no longer agree on what reality is. And because we don't agree on what reality is, that frees up really terrible people to do really terrible things. Because they're doing them in plain sight while we argue about whether or not they're doing them. You follow? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you and I are arguing about whether or not that guy standing in front of us is kicking you in the face, if that's what we're focused on, then that guy is going to kick you in the face till you got no face.

And then I could be like an episode of true weird stuff. Charlie no face. We'll find you I will do an episode called it'll be like where in the world is Carmen San Diego? Where in the time where the time space continue on this back? I mean, not like not to be fatalistic. You know, I got I have a lot going on. Um, I might, you know, I don't want to check out before I need to.

But rather, there's something really jacked up and squirrely. Some days I stand in my driveway, and I'm like, the light isn't even right. Have you noticed that? I don't know what you mean by that. The quality of daylight, there's something off about the temperature, the color tone, there's just something off about things feel weird. Things feel weird. I dragged my husband out of the house. I was like, come outside. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. Look at this light.

This is like four o'clock in November. There's something wrong is the planet tilted weird. And the way that man cannot get away from me fast. It is not easy. I'm gonna start to go fund me for Kevin's piece because it's not easy living in this house with me. But something's just off. Something's off. You feel it. Even you skeptical? Yes. Yes. Something's off. Look at look at me, Chad. Look at me.

You feel it too. You do. And the only reason you listen to this is so you can argue with me. But you know, you feel it. They felt it that day on the deck of the orang madone. Something was off. And there they were. Water everywhere. No hope of rescue. They asked for medical help first. And then they canceled that. And they asked for warships. Did that not get your attention at all? Yeah. That if they were afflicted by a sudden sickness, why suddenly did they not want a doctor? Why did they want cannons and guns for that sudden sickness is why I think it was 1940 during the beginning of World War Two. Yeah, that I do believe.

Something was off. There was some crack, some fissure in the fabric of the world that day on the orang madone. And we will never know. We will never be able to definitively answer what happened. Just like we don't know what happened to that passenger ship from Australia, the Lurata. We just don't know. And we don't know now. We don't know what that thing in space is that's coming toward us. And and if it makes you feel better to say it's fake news and bullshit and AI, if that helps you sleep at night, then absolutely, you do whatever you have to do to have a little bit of peace. Because I think that if we all really wrapped our heads around how bizarre everything is. I mean, it's hard enough to get up and go to work, isn't it?

Sherry, what's on the next episode of True Weird Stuff? Well, we have some fun stuff coming. I'm trying to help here. Next week. Next week, we're going to stay closer to the reality you think is real. And that's the that's the more gritty murder and mayhem. We're going to do a marathon of very bad girls. They're very bad. They've done some very, very bad things. They didn't start off to be bad. It's just that you, you know, worked on their nerves. And what choice did you leave them? Really? If you wanted to live, you would have shot up or been faithful.

Kind of like that. I'm not crazy. You made me crazy. So I had to do something. Yeah, yeah. She did it. It's really your fault. And you know that, you know, you brought it on yourself. And in a future episode, we're going to take you we're going to take you to an attic, where a family kept their daughter captive for decades. Because they didn't like the they didn't like the I mean, we have some really, really, well, weird stories coming up.

So listen, don't worry about reality. It is what it is. You've got no control over it anyway. And who knows, maybe on December 1, some giant talking octopuses will land and we'll have a whole new set of problems. I'd welcome in I'm bored with the old ones. Y'all, thank you so much for being true listeners. Yes. We so appreciate you and things up a lot.

We do. And if you could, if you listen to us, like an Apple podcast or something, if you could rate us and leave a review, it helps us in getting discovered. And that that's really very helpful. And we're going to try. We're going to try to hang on and keep doing this until the giant talking octopus throw us into the hold of their ship to experiment on our puny monkey. We're coming up on three years with this. That's hard to believe.

Yes, this will be three years at the end of this year. Do we know when parole is an option in the sentence? I don't know. Since the pandemic, I've been in this windowless room. Max said to me, was it last week? I think it was last week. Max said to me, you know, I heard on this podcast that they were taking the summer off.

There's a couple of them that I listen to. They go, yeah, we're taking the summer off, but we'll be back with new episodes in September. And I'm like, oh, you share a chance so we can take the summer off. I was like, you got taken the summer off money. I sounded like your mom for a minute. And imagine how we're going to disappoint everybody if we do that. So.

Yeah, no, we we look at what we do, look at our day jobs. We were unaware that you could take time off to have your appendix out. Sure. I went to a doctor one time when I had pneumonia and she says, now I'll give you a note for work. And I said, what note? She says, you know, to get off work. And I said, oh, remember when when I had pneumonia and I would come in, do the show, then drive over to the doctor's office and get put on a machine. It's true. And I breathe these chemicals for a while. Go home, go to bed, come back. I literally I mean, I stopped just sort of having my baby in the bathroom at the radio station and I would have had my baby in the bathroom. But Al Gardner from our news talk station was in the ladies room and so I'd go to a hospital. But I was back on the air like five days, six days later. It was crazy like that.

Yeah, we didn't this taking the summer off. Who knew that was a thing you could do. But when the giant talking octopus come back, we'll all be taking the summer off so you can look forward to that. All right. See, there is relief coming. Look at that class. I love you. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website, true weird stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it. And bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff dot com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash.

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