The Rightest Stuff

Hey, true weirdos at the end of this episode, stick around if you want for a little bonus content and conversation. The right stuff. You hear those three words and you know we're talking about the space race. We're talking about military test pilots and astronauts, the kind of people who stare down a challenge who find their limits and then push right past them.

Not just brave and brilliant, but something more something beyond what regular mortals are capable of. The right stuff means a kind of intelligence that's sharp and clear. It's a mind perfectly balanced on the edge of a blade. Only that kind of mind could survive a perilous voyage made entirely of unknowns journey flung into the void, the view out the tiny porthole of Earth itself. And you sitting in that tin can, like Bowie's Major Tom, far, far above the world. Earth, our Earth, but so small, so distant, so unreal, a lesser mind would break. Only the best of us have the right stuff. Only a handful of us have the right stuff. A few of the people who took that journey came back different. In time, they found a way to describe it, to say out loud something a lot of us don't want to hear and definitely don't want to believe. It's too much. It's too crazy. It's too possible. And yet, maybe we should be listening to the astronauts.

Back in 2019, kids in the US, the UK and China were surveyed to see how many of them wanted to be an astronaut when they grow up. And the results were not awesome. In the US and the UK, the majority of the kids said they wanted to be YouTubers. In China, more than half the kids in the survey wanted to be astronauts. Draw your own conclusions there. But to be fair, the majority of kids in all three countries believe that humans would eventually colonize other planets, and they themselves would like to go to space. For the Brits and the Americans, I guess they meant as passengers. But only the Chinese kids were interested in flying the ships. Being an astronaut is considered one of the top three hardest jobs in the world.

YouTuber doesn't even make the top 40 on that list. An astronaut job is stressful, demanding, and even a small mistake can cost you and your crew your lives. Astronauts are put through a hellish amount of training. They're assessed every which way for optimal fitness, from their eyesight to their mental health. Astronauts get cut no slack ever. A person has to be damn near perfect to qualify for the job. It starts with eliminating candidates with the wrong stuff. NASA subjects want to be astronauts to a whole battery of rigorous psychological evaluations, what they want, an easygoing disposition, the ability to work closely with others, and resiliency. What they don't want, psychiatric disorders and marital troubles.

Astronauts can't be irritable or impatient or egomaniacs. And the astronaut selection process is so intense that in 2013, out of 6000 applicants, only eight made the cut. And NASA knows from experience that the stakes are high. Some astronauts have returned from space suffering depression, anxiety, and difficulty adjusting to the lives they left behind here on Earth, which isn't hard to understand, right? Floating in the inky void, gazing at the itsy bitsy blue dot that is the freaking planet Earth. If any experience has the power to completely transform a person, it's got to be that.

If any human being can pull off what seems impossible, it's got to be an astronaut, an astronaut like Gordon Cooper. Go. ECS? Go. Sequence? Go. Electrical? Go. ASTS? Go. RCS? Go. Tom? Go. TM? Go. CO? Go. Flight? Go. Tony? I'm go. CO, I have your ready light. Roger. Paramed verify. Ready light. Paramed, boost your analog to go. Go. 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Roger, and liftoff and the clock is operating.

May 15, 1963, the launch of Project Mercury, the first human space program in history. Gordon Cooper, US Air Force pilot, aeronautical engineer, and the youngest of the seven original astronauts selected for NASA's Project Mercury. Gordon Cooper became the last American astronaut launched on an entirely solo orbital mission, but the first to spend a whole day in space, the first astronaut to ever sleep in space. And not just that, but Gordon Cooper had so much of the right stuff that he's the only astronaut to doze off on the launchpad during a countdown. That's the definition of chill.

There are loads of great Gordon Cooper stories, but here's one that shows you just how smart and resourceful the guy was. It's launch day. Cooper climbed into a spacecraft, the Faith 7, the last mission of the Mercury program. The plan was for Cooper to circle the Earth 22 times while performing experiments. During the 17th orbit, Cooper sent black and white slow scan television images back to Earth. It was the very first TV transmission from a crewed American spacecraft. But then on the 19th orbit, there was trouble. Something in the ship's wiring short circuited, knocking out the automatic stabilization and control systems. The cabin started heating up. It got up to 134 degrees Fahrenheit. CO2 levels began rising, both in the suit. He had no choice but to take manual control of the ship.

Using his knowledge of the star patterns and constellations, he positioned the Faith 7 correctly to exit orbit. And as the ship made its fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere, Gordon Cooper calculated the exact right moment to manually deploy the chutes that would stabilize the craft and slow it down. Then he manually deployed the landing pad just before he hit the water, less than five miles from the ship tasked with recovering him. So basically, brilliant, chill, a problem solving champ, right? With some serious credibility going for him, don't you think? Cooper's first UFO sighting happened in Germany in 1951. This is from a 1999 interview.

Some kind of craft flying overhead, pretty good altitude, flying the same kind of formation we fly in our fighter. Were they planes? I mean, what? Well, it turns out they didn't have wings, they were saucer shaped. And we never could get as high or as fast as they were. So to really positively identify them, but they were metallic looking and saucer in shape. And they can do a few maneuvers that we couldn't do in an airplane.

What, what maneuvers? Like just horizontal and displace themselves rapidly. And flying along just move over rapidly. And what, how fast were they moving? Well, faster than we could an F-860. They were, they were capable of accelerating very readily out, well past Mach one anyway. Then in 1963, Cooper wrote a letter to the United Nations regarding the UFO phenomenon.

Well, I felt that everybody around the world was busy out being contacted from time to time and having sightings and a few abductions and various things going on. It would be nice maybe to have a central gathering house for all this information. And somebody who was some organization that was kind of neutral ground, that wouldn't have a vested interest in country to country involved. And somebody who was some organization that was kind of neutral ground, that wouldn't have a vested interest in country to country involved. It seemed to me like the United Nations still would be the place to do a lot of this gathering.

Wait, did he say alien abductions? All the people were blacked out for a period of time and woke up and obviously had some time missing and, and down so far as a couple of poor fishermen in Pascagoula, Texas who were actually taking on board a spaceship, extraterrestrial spaceship. These types of things that whether you believe them or don't believe them or whether they're true or false, the information really ought to be brought together in one locale and properly investigated and properly correlated and properly stored.

Remember, this is astronaut Gordon Cooper, who also worked on secret military projects. In later years, after being in the final bit for a while and getting into aircraft development, testing research at Edwards, I certainly had decided that they were not building that type of vehicle here, certainly not in the United States, very likely not on this planet. So these vehicles almost of necessity have to come from somewhere else.

Fast forward eight years to Apollo 14. Guidance alert, the guidance system now going internal. 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, ignition, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, release. Liftoff. Liftoff. Clock start. Be alert. Clock start. Clear the tower. Tower clear. Rolling pitch start. Meet astronaut Edgar Mitchell, an officer in the US Navy, a test pilot and aeronautical engineer.

Mitchell served as the lunar module pilot on the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. Apollo 14 was NASA's eighth crewed mission and the third to set down on the moon. It was a mission that was delayed almost a whole year after the near disaster of Apollo 13. Like that mission, Apollo 14 had some bad luck. Weather delays at launch nearly caused the mission to be canceled. I'm sorry, scrubbed is how we say it in NASA speak.

Then there was a serious problem with the docking mechanism that joined the command and lunar modules. It took a couple of hours for the crew and mission control to figure that out. But they did because, you know, the right stuff. Then, just when they'd safely made it into lunar orbit, a switch failed and began giving false abort signals.

Give the panel next to the switch a little thump, suggested mission control. I wish I was kidding. I guess turn the lunar module off and then back on again wasn't an option. But the thump fix didn't hold. It turned out that the trouble was in the code and the software involved could not be updated or changed from the ground.

It's all you, Edgar Mitchell, mission control said. And you know what Mitchell did? He entered the changes to the code manually with literal seconds to spare. Mitchell's next challenge involved navigation. The terrain where Apollo 14 landed didn't match the maps back home. As Mitchell and Alan Shepard labored in their bulky suits on ground that was far more uneven and rugged than the flat plane they'd expected, mission control could only listen to their heavy breathing, could only watch the biometric readouts of their heart rate and pulse.

The clock was their enemy. Their suits had limited oxygen and water. Still, even with all those challenges and the fatigue, there was enough right stuff on the moon that day to enable Alan Shepard to famously hit a couple of golf balls and Edgar Mitchell to chuck the handle of one of their lunar scoop collection tools like a javelin.

Houston, while you're looking at it up, you might recognize what I have in my hand is the handle for the contingency sample return. It just so happens to have a genuine six iron on the bottom of it. On my left hand, I have a little white pellet that's familiar to millions of Americans. I drop it down. Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can't do this with two hands, but I could try a little sand cast shot here.

Edgar Mitchell spent a total of nine hours strolling the moon surface, only the sixth human being ever to walk on the moon. And as Apollo 14 made its return journey to Earth, Mitchell had an experience that changed his life. As he told television reporter George Knapp in 1996, Ed Mitchell conducted experiments even his crew didn't know about. Psychic projections made to cohorts on Earth.

It worked. Such that probability, that chance could have repeated that experiments only one out of 3000 times. Mitchell didn't see a conflict between science and religion. It was more like a gulf that only needed to be bridged. The psychic experience religion has said, Western religion, I'm referring to here, of course, has said, it's real, but it's either satanic or divine.

It's supernatural. And scientists said it doesn't exist. The reality is it does exist. And it is natural. And Mitchell said that although he and the other astronauts to date had not had a sighting in space, he believed that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, whether that was ever acknowledged officially or not.

And we probably, I believe, have smoking gun evidence in the classified domain, which isn't available to the public. And my pitch has been is that information not all be opened up to the public, that whatever is there, we don't know about it. Mitchell believed so much so that in 1973, he found that the Institute of Noetic Science, or IONS, in Palo Alto, California to research consciousness and other related phenomena.

In 1982, he was a featured speaker at the Festival for Mind Body Spirit, the 17th annual Adventure in World Synergy. He shared billing with J. Alan Hynek, scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force on their three UFO initiatives, Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book. In 1997, Edgar Mitchell appeared in a documentary called Visitors from Outer Space, declaring that UFOs are real.

And the only question left was, where are they from? In October 1998, Mitchell spoke at a conference in Connecticut, saying that he was 90% certain that many of the thousands and thousands of recorded UFO sightings dating back to the 1940s were visitors from other planets. That while some sightings could be attributed to natural remained unexplained.

This suggests that there are humanoids manning the craft, which have characteristics not in the arsenal of any nation on Earth. That is very alarming. Mitchell added that it was witnesses from the American military and intelligence agencies that had convinced him that the U.S. government had been covering up the truth about UFOs for at least 50 years.

Many of these folks are under high security clearances. They took oaths and they feel they cannot talk without some form of immunity. It takes a brave person to come out on something like this. Mitchell, with his doctorate from MIT, his Presidential Medal of Freedom and his Distinguished Service Medal from NASA, knew very well that he would be judged for aligning himself with the UFO crazies.

He knew his reputation and credibility were at risk. Wasn't it enough that he was a paid consultant on the TV show The X-Files? I was very cautious. Mitchell did draw some hard lines between what he saw as legitimate scientific inquiry and total BS. The notion that there are structures on Mars or the moon is bonkers. I can attest to the latter.

I've been there. We saw no structures at the landing site and none was reflected on my helmet, as has been alleged. Bonkers stuff aside, Mitchell was convinced, though, that humanity was not alone in the universe. There is sufficient circumstantial evidence to warrant a scientific investigation of this area, Mitchell told the journalist John Earls. My training at NASA only allows me to look at things scientifically, even if I hadn't been shown evidence of alien landings on Earth.

The assumption must be that somewhere in the universe is capable of supporting alien life. If you're starting to think that walking on the moon addled my brain and that I'll believe any old crank theory about UFOs, think again. I would describe myself as a cynic. I wasn't convinced about the existence of aliens until I started talking to military old timers who were there at the time of Roswell. The more government documentation on aliens I was told about, the more convinced I became.

The military people I spoke to are tired of the secrecy surrounding Roswell and similar cases, particularly as the information is being leaked. If proof of E.T. is finally made public, nobody would be happier than me. Edgar Mitchell came by his fixation on the alleged 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Honestly, he'd grown up in the nearby town of Artesia.

We knew many of the people, including those who lived on the ranch where this was discovered. And in spite of all the security oaths, et cetera, the talk in the community was that it was an alien craft. The disinformation has been successful, but it's gone on for so long now the general public has come to realize that the misinformation, the disinformation is all bull and that it is a strict cover up.

Coming up shortly on the one minute mark, we're now 70 seconds and counting. Second stage tanks are pressurized as our countdown continues. Mark T minus 60 seconds and counting on Apollo 15, the astronauts are go, launch vehicle and spacecraft components all go as our countdown proceeds. Apollo 15 launched on July 26, 1971, and splashed back down on Earth 11 days later on August 6th.

It was NASA's ninth crewed mission and its fourth to put humans on the moon. The astronauts assigned were David Scott and James Irwin and Al Worden. As pilot of the command module called Endeavor, Al Worden would remain behind in lunar orbit as two crewmates headed down to the moon's surface. But when the team arrived in lunar orbit, and Scott and Irwin climbed into the Falcon, the vehicle that would take them to the moon's surface, it was a big, Oh, Houston, we have a problem moment.

The mechanism that was supposed to separate the two ships failed. Not to worry. Al Worden had so much of the right stuff that it oozed through his pores. Worden unbuckled himself, zoomed into the docking tunnel and by God separated the Falcon from the Endeavor with his two badass astronaut hands. You can find astronaut Al Worden in the Guinness Book of World Records under the heading the most isolated human being in the world.

And here's why. For three days, Al Worden tumbled around the moon in perfect solitude. He piloted the ship, operated scientific instruments designed to probe the moon and took hundreds of photographs. Then he successfully maneuvered the Endeavor to rendezvous with the Falcon. Only the second time that this had ever been accomplished.

Then, as if he hadn't already done enough, Worden suited up for a spacewalk. As the Endeavor barreled toward Earth, Worden casually retrieved the film that was inside the cameras located on the outside of the ship. He had to go in and out of Endeavor three times to get it done. And to this day holds the record for having performed a spacewalk the furthest distance from Earth.

It was pretty unusual to be outside the spacecraft a couple of hundred thousand miles from Earth, too. It's dark out there. The sun was shining off the spacecraft and that's the only light I had, the reflected light. So it was different. You're sort of floating out there in a vast nothingness. And the only thing you can see and touch and grab hold of is the spacecraft.

But I wasn't going anywhere. I was tethered to the spacecraft, so I knew I wasn't going to float away. So I just did what I had to do, went hand over hand down the handrails, grabbed the film cartridges and brought them back and went back out again and just stood up and looked around. And that's when I could see both the Earth and the moon.

All that time alone in orbit, 39 hours and 45 minutes, to be exact. Al Worden later said that he didn't use many of his rest periods for sleep. Instead, he gazed out the portholes. He studied the moon, the stars, the Earth. He thought about the world. Our world and his own place in it. He contemplated the vastness of space and wondered what it all meant. And he came to a conclusion.

There was simply no way humanity was alone in the universe. I curved around the moon to where no sunlight or Earth shine could reach me. The moon was a deep, solid circle of blackness, and I could only tell where it began by where the stars cut off. In the dark and quiet, I felt like a bird of the night, silently gliding and falling around the moon, never touching.

I turned the cabin lights off. There was no end to the stars. I could see tens, perhaps hundreds of times more stars than the clearest, darkest night on Earth. With no atmosphere to blur their light, I could see them all to the limits of my eyesight. There were so many I could no longer find constellations. My vision was filled with a blaze of starlight.

Unlike some of the other astronauts who had time for only hurried glances, I had many hours spread over many days to look at this awe-inspiring view and think about what it meant. There was more to the universe than I had ever imagined. That's from the book Worden published in 2011 called Falling to Earth, an Apollo 15 Astronaut's Journey to the Moon.

He made the rounds being interviewed by magazines and websites and TV shows like Good Morning Britain. And do you think there's extraterrestrials out there, Al, as well? You know, I've been asked that question hundreds of times. Do you believe in aliens? And I say, yeah. Have you ever seen one? I say, yeah, I have. Well, how have you seen them?

I said, I look in the mirror every morning because that's what we are. We are the aliens, but we just think they're somebody else. But we're the ones who came from somewhere else because somebody else had to survive, and they got in a little spacecraft, and came here, and they landed, and they started civilization here.

That's what I believe. And if you don't believe me, go get books on the ancient Sumerians and see what they had to say. That's a whole different discussion. They'll tell you right up front. You've blown that right open. Yeah, yeah. Wow, wow. Sadly, we can't get into that. That's why we're so tuned on the Dark Side of this.

The ancient Sumerians, trailblazers in agriculture, in law, and in the written word. The Sumerian civilization, which existed 4,500 to 4,000 BCE, had a startlingly advanced understanding of our solar system. They not only identified 10 planets, including Pluto and our moon, they also figured out lunar cycles and divided the year into 12 months, something we're still using.

Pretty amazing whether extraterrestrials were involved or not. But here's Al Worden, U.S. Air Force pilot, NASA engineer, and astronaut telling you the very same thing you've seen on the TV show Ancient Aliens. We come from the stars, and we're not alone. Astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded both the Gemini 7 and Apollo 8 missions, apparently had a strange sighting in December 1965 while in orbit.

It happened during the Gemini 7 mission. Borman radioed mission control about a bogey, and after some back and forth, it was established that Borman could see both the rocket booster and the object at the same time. Objects, to be more accurate. Say again, 7. 7. We have several, looks like, actual sightings. Do you have more information, estimated distance or size?

We also have the booster in sight. Understand you also have the booster in sight, roger. Looks like hundreds of little particles going by from the left out about three or four miles. Understand you have many small particles going by on the left at what distance? Looks like, roger. Understand they're about three or four miles away.

They're past now. They're in, they're in a polar orbit, roger. And understand they are about three to four miles away. That's what it appeared like or further, roger. There's probably nothing, though. Probably just some swamp gas or a weather balloon or the reflection of the headlights of the Gemini 7. About the flight itself, the thing I remember most is the view of planet Earth from a great distance.

Tiny, very shiny, blue and white, bright, beautiful, serene and fragile. That's astronaut Michael Collins in 2013 describing what it felt like to see Earth from space. In 2019, Collins hosted an ask me anything on his Twitter. It didn't take long for the big question to hit. Do you believe in life outside of Earth? It took even less time for Collins to reply.

The answer was a simple yes. The Twitter net went wild because this wasn't just anyone. This was a space hero. Michael Collins had the very big and very lonely job of piloting Apollo 11 as his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Collins made 30 orbits around the moon, moving in and out of radio contact with NASA Mission Control back on Earth.

In fact, for 48 minutes of each orbit as the Apollo 11 passed over the far side of the moon, Collins was as alone as any human being ever had been. He said he wasn't afraid at all. He was filled with exultation. He said it was relaxing. He even took a nap. Well, that is, he took a nap after dealing with an unexpected issue with the spacecraft's cooling system.

How much of the right stuff did Michael Collins have after being told by Mission Control that he would now have to take manual control of Apollo 11 and initiate Environmental Control System Malfunction Procedure 17? Astronaut Collins simply flipped the switch to manual, waited a few seconds and then flipped it back to automatic, which solved the problem, making Michael Collins possibly the very first human being ever to fix a computer issue by turning the machine off and then back on.

It was Collins' job to retrieve Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from the moon and get them back to Earth, which he did. What's shocking is how few people paid any real attention to Collins. It's why he's sometimes called the forgotten astronaut. Even then, President Richard Nixon didn't mention Collins when he sent his very best wishes to the moon's first human visitors, Armstrong and Aldrin.

Did I have the best seat on Apollo 11? No. Was I happy with the seat I did have? Yes, I really was. And to be any small part of that suited me very, very well. And besides, I was their ticket home. They couldn't get home without me. That's Michael Collins speaking to 60 Minutes Australia in June 2019. Part of the reason that people went so crazy for Collins' simple one-word acknowledgement of his belief in extraterrestrial life is because this wasn't the first time aliens and UFOs had made an appearance in the Apollo 11 story.

There was a puzzling transmission between the astronauts and mission control. It was day three of the Apollo 11 mission when Neil Armstrong spotted something unexpected. As their spacecraft zoomed toward the moon, there was something else in that sky with them moving on a parallel course. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins watched the object, wondering if maybe what they were seeing was the third stage of the mammoth Saturn V rocket that had flung them past gravity and into orbit.

It was strange enough to make Armstrong radio mission control who told the astronauts that the third stage of their Saturn V rocket was about 6,000 nautical miles from their present position. After 12 long seconds, Armstrong replied, Okay, thank you. If the crew of Apollo 11 was satisfied with that answer for mission control, conspiracy theorists weren't so much.

Collins' affirmation of his belief in aliens on Twitter 50 years later reminded folks that the Apollo 11 mission might have brought a few very big secrets back along with those boxes of moon rocks. In 2023, a House Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing on the subject of UFOs. Former military and intelligence officials testified that the government knows more, far more about the subject than it's letting on to the public.

Michael Collins, former Apollo crewmate, and the second person to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, was one of the witnesses who appeared before the committee. And after, he appeared on NBC's Meet the Press. I asked Mike Collins about life somewhere else in the universe. He said, absolutely. Do you agree with that? I agree.

You do? I agree that I don't know that we can make it absolutely. Intelligent life, you know, we're a unique species here on There's a lot of life here, but we're the intelligent ones. He thought this would be above Earth ones. Well, it could be. If we find out they exist, then it's because of their communication to us.

But they're going to be a long ways away. Space is enormous. Even the closest star could take a lifetime for a crew going from here to there or vice versa. By the time Congress got around to that hearing, there was already a whole lot of UFO buzz around astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who brought it on himself, kind of. Back in 2014, Aldrin hosted an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, and one user asked, Do you believe in aliens?

And what are the sightings you saw aboard Apollo 11? You know, the one where you described seeing a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside? Buzz Aldrin responded, There were many explanations of what that could be other than another spacecraft from another country or another world. It was either the rocket we had separated from or the four panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket, and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft.

After returning to Earth, we debriefed and explained exactly what we'd observed and learned it was the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Didn't matter how much Buzz Aldrin explained or denied. Even he knew that there were a lot of people who were angry and disappointed that when Aldrin had the chance, he didn't tell the truth, didn't tell the public.

The public had every right to know. It didn't help that this communication between Apollo 11 and mission control was not conducted on the open or public channel. Wait, said Aldrin. I can explain. We were concerned that our comments might be misinterpreted. And Aldrin was right to worry because those comments ignited a firestorm.

In part because Aldrin's insistence on mistaking glare from the sun for UFO didn't match his earlier claims and comments. Like the interview he gave the Science Channel back in 2005. He said the crew of Apollo 11 saw a UFO on their way to the moon. Aldrin had backup, too, from senior Apollo scientist Dr. David Baker. Baker didn't bother to dispute the claim that the crew had seen, well, something.

And according to Dr. Baker, NASA knew it. Hard as Aldrin tried to walk it back, it was his own words that kept making him look like a liar. I saw this illumination that was moving with respect to the We were smart enough to not say, Houston, there's a light out there that's following us. So technically, it becomes an unidentified flying object.

And the hole he dug for himself only got deeper. We should go boldly where man has not gone before. Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of There's a monolith there, a very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in seven hours. When people find out about that, they're going to say, who put that there?

Who put that there? Well, the universe put it there. If you choose, God put it there. Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell, Al Worden, Buzz Aldrin, all astronauts, all shiny examples of the right stuff with one more thing in common. Ex-NASA astronauts pass UFO lie detector test. Four ex-NASA legends have passed lie detector tests examining historical accounts of their encounters with UFOs.

Yep, all four passed lie detector tests proving that they were telling the truth about what plenty of people considered to be wild claims. But that might be the biggest lie of all, because the so-called lie detector tests weren't anything like the ones you've seen on Dateline or in movies. The tests were conducted by a non-profit organization in Albany, Ohio, called the Institute of Bioacoustic Biology and Sound Health.

They allegedly used their top secret technology to scan recordings of the four astronauts voices, which sounds so bogus that even we're giving it the side eye. Still, if you're going to make a bet, it'd be smart to put your where the right stuff is, you know, keep an open mind like NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. We are looking for signs of life, past and present.

And it's in our DNA to explore and to ask why things are the way they are. Next time on True Weird Stuff, the grave, your final, eternal resting place, unless it isn't. Cemeteries might seem like forever, but that isn't always true. It's a creepy thought, the idea of digging up graves and moving bodies. It's not a horror movie.

It's real. Rest in peace, weirdos, on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents, Don Morgan and Kary "Doc" Bowser. Sherry, this is one of the most fascinating episodes since we started doing this. Oh, well, you're an astronaut fiend, too. I am. We're so into this. But you know, what's funny about it is, aside from here, people don't talk about this anymore.

And it is fascinating. And actually, this episode, you answered a question that I wondered about. You remember in the previous episode, we talked a little bit afterwards about the scientists said the sun was so bright they couldn't see stars. But yeah, so it answered the question. When you do go to the dark side of the moon, you do see the stars.

The other thing that was interesting about this, Michael Collins always he was kind of left out because he didn't walk on the moon. But people used to call him the loneliest guy and that sort of thing. And he was kind of like, no, I just kind of did my job. It was no big deal. But, you know, we've heard about the other astronauts that walked on the moon, but we rarely talk about the other guys who were the third guy who were up there orbiting the moon, waiting for the other two guys that were down on the moon to come back to them.

And it was a fascinating story, truly fascinating. And I think one of the things that impressed me the most was the idea he's the one astronaut who is looking at the moon and the earth at the same time. How cool is that? Can you imagine? Yeah. Can you imagine? I mean, so I have such I'm in such awe of astronauts. And when you think about out of 6000 candidates, only eight made the cut.

I'm no good at math. I couldn't. I missed my family moves so much. I missed the section where we learn percentages. But eight out of 6000 is a micro fraction. What kind of a person you have to be? What kind of a mind you have to have to be able to do what these astronauts did? And one of the things that one of the stories I really wanted to tell are all these crisis moments that you didn't know about.

Like maybe a lot of us weren't alive, you know, when like Gemini seven, we weren't even born. And and the news coverage, you know, once Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, that was all anybody talked about. Nobody talked about Michael Collins and what he had to do in order to get Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon and then get them back.

Like you think about these, these are spacecraft and they look like iffy pop bags. I mean, I agree they look sketchy as hell, but these are spacecraft that are engaging and disengaging in the void of space. And and it's just human beings. It's just people up there doing these extraordinary things. And we, you know, we know about Apollo 13.

Thanks to Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. Most people know what happened with Apollo 13. But what did you know about what Al Worden went through? What did you know about what Edgar Mitchell had to do or what Michael Collins really did? What what do we know about any of this? It's mind blowing. And the fact that these four astronauts all came back and reported something is compelling.

Now, there are people right now. There's a journalist who's very active on Twitter. We talked about him once before on True Word Stuff. His name is Ashton Forbes. He he believes that he has solved the missing Malaysian flight MH370. Right. He also claims that not only did the U.S. military use top secret antigravity plasma technology to teleport that aircraft to the Diego Garcia military base.

He maintains that most of what we think of as UAPs or UFOs are actually human made, in some cases, American made technology that is so deeply concealed under layer after layer after layer of black budget projects. For one simple reason, this technology uses something called zero point energy, free energy, zero point energy.

And the reason that this has been suppressed and this knowledge has been withheld from the public is because if we know about this, it will completely collapse the fossil fuels industry. And all of our politicians are so beholden to fossil fuels and the petrochemical industries for keeping them in office and fattening their and making them the oligarchs that they're rapidly becoming.

So it's it's fascinating to look at that hypothesis and then to look back at what these legacy astronauts are saying. And I just don't know. I just don't know which is true. And maybe it's a combination of both. But I can't discount what these human beings who made the cut to go to space, I can't discount what they say or what they saw, because they're about they're about as high a caliber human being as our species is capable of What do you think?

Well, you know, the Gordon Cooper story, when you were writing this, I believe you floated this to me. Do you know who Gordon Cooper is? Do you know what Gordon Cooper did? The idea that he had to calculate, I'm guessing in his head, how to deploy those chutes, because I'm guessing he didn't take out a handheld calculator.

They didn't exist then and figured out how to safely get to the ground. When you think about this and all the things that could have gone wrong, it is it is an amazing feat that they did it with the technology that now is like over 60 years old when he was up there. It's so amazing what because the first thing Gordon Cooper had to do was he had to use his knowledge of stars and constellations and calculate a route and he did it with a grease pencil on the plexiglass window of the spacecraft.

So a couple of things about that, I just want to put out there. You do know that like the constellations look one way when you're standing on the ground, they're going to look different when you're looking at them from the perspective of space. And you've just been told that if you can't get this right, dot, dot, dot, you're going to die.

Like you're not you're going to die and it's going to be probably a pretty horrific, terrified, terrible death, right? Yeah. But Gordon Cooper, because he has so much of the right stuff, he's like, OK, all right, we've got we've got a short circuit and I'll remind you that it was 134 degrees inside the cabin and CO2 levels were rising.

And when people get too much CO2, they can't think clearly, right? It can knock you out eventually, but it really muddies your thinking. So here we have a guy who's roasting in a spacesuit, who's not getting enough oxygen, who is now looking out that crap tiny window of the Gemini. I'm sorry, the Faith seven. Right. And and doing math with a wax pencil.

And then he's got to figure out how to safely get into the back into the Earth's Then he's got to deploy the chutes and the landing pad. And the fact that he did all of that and land it within five miles of the drop zone, please, please. If Gordon Cooper told me that when I go to sleep at night, my cats drive my car, I would have to go, man, it's kind of hard to believe, Gordon.

But all right, I'm going to take your word for it. You're Gordon Cooper. Where is our like where is our self-respect as a species that we we can't celebrate this? I also love the story that you told when they landed on the moon, one of the later missions that the the ground and the map didn't match. Oh, how perfectly human is that?

Right. Right. In fact, there's a there's a book that both of you both of us like where a psychiatrist talks about that people come in and they, you know, when they when they come into the psychiatrist, well, it's not the way it's supposed to be. He said it reminded me of when I was in Vietnam that they would land somewhere, the map and the ground, the the map and the reality of the situation didn't match.

And that that certainly happened to them in this circumstance. And somehow they adapted to whatever was going on there to be able to complete the mission. It makes you want to shout out whatever the screening process and screening team at NASA is that selects these astronauts. Those people have never gotten a round of applause from the general public.

But you understand that these astronauts don't just show up one day and fit the costume like so many human beings. We have no self-respect. We have no self-esteem anymore as a species. So many human beings had to put their creativity and their ingenuity and their intelligence to work to make any of this happen. The other thing that's truly amazing is that they went through all of this training and you have to figure that if you if if there was a manual on how to fly a jet, you could read it.

But until you sat there and felt the controls and felt what it feels like, you could have all the knowledge in the world, but you're not going to know how to adjust to that, even though they had training. I'm sure there was somewhat of a disconnect when you start piloting these different kinds of lunar landers and all that sort of stuff.

And the fact that they were able to adapt on the fly. I've told the story before, but we had Buzz Aldrin on the show, and I need to go back and listen to that interview because we still have it. He talked about the fact that their spacesuits were big and bulky when they were in that lunar lander and the one of the spacesuit hit a button and broke it.

So they had to use a pen that they had in the module in order to move that the right way so that they could land the craft on the moon. I mean, just little things like this. We never heard about at the time. Nobody said anything like that. The achievement of being on the moon was so overwhelming that there was no time to even process like all of the little minor crises that came up on the way.

And that's like that's like when Al Worden, when Endeavor and Falcon didn't separate and Al Worden was like, oh, gosh, I got it. Oh, God, do everything around here. And he goes back and does it with his hands and those big bulky gloves while falling endlessly in the void of space. So come on. Not only was he man enough to do that, but he had the kind of depth as a person that he could take in a situation, look at it from a perspective that he knows that very few people who have been on this earth have been able to have and be able to see his place in this and what the world really is and all of that.

Those of us that are stuck on the earth and gravity and our mundane lives and what's for dinner and I'm going to get up on time for work and everything else don't seem to have enough time for you. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that was a fascinating part of this as well. I mean, it really was. His book, Falling to Earth, is so beautifully written.

The section that we put in the episode where he says, my eyes, my vision was filled with a blaze of starlight, like he was able to express it. Here's someone who trained military, trained engineer, very analytical, very much, you know, I'm sorry, the astronauts, and there haven't been that many of them, you know, really, the astronauts are the best of us.

I went to Kennedy Space Center and I was so excited. You know, I'm such a space nerd, but I've always wanted to go to Kennedy Space Center, always, always, and we go and the number of times that I had to step aside so I could cry, it was almost embarrassing. There's a wall, there's one of the buildings and you go in and it's the astronaut's wall of fame, I guess, and you walk past every one of these pictures and descriptions and some of these astronauts died in the service to their country, you know, the crew of Columbia, the crew of Space Shuttle Challenger.

Apollo 1. Apollo 1 and so on and I, you know, I'm walking through there and I'm like, the astronauts who died and then, you know, about two hours later, I come to the Space Shuttle Atlantis and started to cry again because I was so close to the Space Shuttle Atlantis, I could almost touch it and the Space Shuttles were far more sophisticated looking than those foil spider-legged things that we put on the moon the first time.

But when you're up close to the Space Shuttle, you see that it's a very humble thing made of materials that it's hard to imagine you could send that into the void of space and bring it home safely. I mean, we got to the part where the Saturn V rocket was and I'm crying again because the Saturn V rocket was originally designed to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, nukes, but in order to break Earth's gravity, which is such an incredibly powerful force, we pretty much needed a rocket like that.

And so, when you see the Saturn rocket in person with your own eyes, Max, I cannot tell you how massive it is and the idea of being strapped to that, your little human self strapped to that in your teeny tiny module and launched into freaking space, like, wow, you know, humanity has done some pretty amazeballs things in our brief time on this planet.

But I think getting off this planet and what it took to do that, the brilliance and the other thing that we only have a name for it. We say it's the right stuff. It's that other thing that so few of us have. It's transcendent. It's amazing. And so, you'll forgive me if I'm not quite as impressed by a famous social media influencer, you know, as I am by Gordon Cooper.

And I think we lost something. We don't really have much of a shared reality anymore. Our reality is so fragmented based on what platforms we watch, what social media and digital sites we consume news on. We don't have a shared reality the way we once did. And I think that's going to be the undoing of us. Because if we did have a shared reality and we could look at each other and say, man, I do not have the right stuff.

But how thrilling that some of us do and look at what we can accomplish when we bring to bear our innate curiosity and ingenuity and this endless hunger that the human animal has to explore and go just a little bit further next time. Like if we could have a shared experience of comprehending and celebrating that, it would be a better world.

It does make you stand in wonder of what can be done and what is possible when a goal is put out there and humans get to work on it. You know, and I still think that it is. I will stand at night and look up at the moon and go. Men walked on there with technology that was long ago, that with computers that filled rooms that might the phone that I have in my hand has more capacity for computing.

Now to the question of UFOs and extraterrestrials. And if you're skeptical, I'm just I just have to tell you, just take a deep breath. There have just been too many anomalous sightings from the beginning of the space program to the present day on the International Space Station. And there's there's a lot of unfortunate coincidences with NASA, one of them being NASA broadcast.

You can watch NASA 24 hours a day. You can watch the space shuttle or not the space shuttle, the space station. There's an open public broadcast channel. And people here on Earth have gone, wait, what was that? And it's weird how something anomalous will show up and then the feed suddenly gets cut. It's crazy to me. What a coincidence.

And what is what an unfortunate coincidence that every time there's an anomalous object or thing, NASA's speed goes down. Oh, my God, Max, what are the odds? So there's that. This has been ongoing for decades and decades now. And then the other thing is, thanks to the James Webb Deep Space Telescope, we're now seeing further into the universe and with more detail than we ever have.

Then even these astronauts could maybe have ever imagined. And we're learning that our ideas about how the universe is constructed, are everything that we think we know is being called into question. And not in a way that, you know, I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's a big video game, although we do have an episode coming up about that, about realities of simulation.

Some of what the James Webb Telescope is sending back has physicists rethinking physics. And here's why. So and we have an upcoming episode where we'll go into more detail on this. But what have you always been told about the Big Bang and our universe? Can you remember, go back to like middle school science. What is the one thing you remember that happens after the Big Bang with our universe?

I don't know. It's expanding. Oh, right. It is constantly in motion. Right, right, right. It's constantly in motion. Right. At one point in time, and we actually can date it using background radiation and stuff that, you know, we can detect. At one point, there was an infinitesimally small, infinitesimally hot particle and it exploded.

And when it exploded, it began rapidly expanding. And that is our universe. That's the basic idea behind the Big Bang. Very basic idea. So an expanding universe is going to behave in certain mathematically predictable ways, according to physicists, right? We're going to be able to measure some of the rate of that expansion.

And one terrifying thing that has been proposed, I think it's terrifying, although it won't happen in our lifetime. The way that the universe is expanding, eventually, you'll look up at the sky and you won't see any stars. That is one of the theories or hypotheses or whatever about an expanding universe. So an expanding universe is going to behave in certain predictable ways.

But what the James Webb telescope is showing us is that there are bubbles where there shouldn't be. And what are those bubbles? What are those bubbles in spacetime? Are those bubble universes, which immediately brings the multiverse into the room? And there are physicists who are going, listen, thanks to this data, it's starting to look pretty good for the multiverse, which doesn't mean you'll ever visit it or I'll ever visit it.

Or people or some version of you or me or Doc, you know, that's out there is ever going to encounter us. This is not the TV show fringe. But as our science expands, our knowledge expands, and as our knowledge expands, some of the things that we have believed come into question. And so when you listen to these astronauts who say, like Al Worden, I had hours, I didn't sleep.

My eyes were filled with starlight. And I knew I knew then that the universe is too, too, too big and vast for us to be alone. You have to at least open your mind to the possibility that are we are tiny, mostly bald monkey people who have only been out of the trees for a relatively short amount of time and have only had a grasp of astronomy and physics for a relatively short amount of time and only got off the planet a hot minute ago, you know, when the space program started.

Maybe, maybe we're not quite as knowledgeable as we think. Maybe we're not as right about what we believe as we think. It's kind of a lot. It's overwhelming, isn't it? Well, I mean, I think you always have to be open to the fact that we only know what we know right now. It's like we haven't reached the limit of that. And, you know, there was a time that people thought we were the center of the universe.

Oh, and that wasn't that long ago. That was not that long ago. And, you know, and why and why wouldn't they? Because they'd have no other. They didn't seem to have any other perspective, you know, I mean, they just have what was there. So in one of our we have a we have a pair of kind of sciencey episodes coming up. And in the one that we're going to do on the multiverse, we talk about the the Earth being the center of the universe.

And when that was challenged, it was the Catholic Church that shut that down because it went against what the church taught and believed and wanted people to believe. And so our journey toward knowledge is never unobstructed or pure. All of the control mechanisms on planet Earth, governments, religion, and these are things I am not condemning government or religion, but we have to understand that they exist in part for social control.

And back in the day, Galileo spent was banished and spent most of his life in house arrest. And it was it was the pope, you know, it was the pope that was like, listen up, Galileo, that's some bullshit. And you're you know, you're a heretic. So it the path is not smooth and it's not linear. It twists and it turns and it doubles back on itself.

But slowly, slowly, slowly, we inch forward bit by bit by bit. And I don't know why you would want to be alone in the universe. I don't know why you would want that. Because if we're alone, then we are one hell of a wacky freak accident. And I know people are going, well, you're a Dutch. I believe in God. Yeah, I do, too.

I do, too. But if God is all powerful and omniscient, I give God a lot of credit, man. If God if God is everything that I say he got, he or she is, and I was taught he or she is, then God can certainly create an expanding universe with multiple bubble universes in it as well. Right. Like anything is possible. Anything is possible.

But the idea that whatever this universe is, and sometimes late at night, like if I can't sleep, I like to think about the universe and break out in a cold sweat and then be up all night. That's fun. Whatever this universe is, and this extraordinary vastness with all those stars, we're it. We're it. Can you imagine to be able to have that to be able to look at in your mind's eye from when you went around the dark side of the moon to be able to see all those stars that way?

A way that you never will be able to see on Earth, that that's the only time you're going to have that experience. Do you think that you could do it? I'm afraid I my mind would break. I'm afraid I couldn't. And I love space and astronauts and rockets and all that stuff. I don't I don't have the right stuff. I don't think that I do either.

No, I don't think so. Because you have to be you have to be many things. You have to be a scientist. You have to be an engineer. You have to have understandings of all those kinds of things. That's not something they can teach you in astronaut school. You have to come in with a working knowledge of that stuff before you ever come in to being an astronaut.

Then you have to have the physical capabilities that you have to. And it's not just having the knowledge. Then you have to have the fortitude. You have to have the whatever that heart, whatever that is, that's going to allow you to be able to make decisions and not freak out. I'd freak out. I would, too. I don't think like I'm not insane.

Don't get me wrong. That's a bold statement. I know. Sorry, how about you give yourself a little more credit? I am not. Well, look, Siri, Siri just said, sorry, I don't understand. Girl, me neither. I can't help you. The bar is low today. Well, the bar is very not insane. Yeah, like I'm not insane. And I'm not I'm I'm I think I'm you know me as well as anybody.

Honestly, I am an enthusiastic person. And I'm a person with a very deep and dark imagination. I don't think I'm emotionally unhinged. But I also don't believe that I have the necessary stability to look through a window at the planet Earth. Not just looking, not not looking through a window at the planet Earth, but doing it from afar, because these are the only ones who've kind of gone out of the orbit and gone out there.

So, I mean, yeah, you've had other people gone up there who are brave, who have had to do things and stuff, but none of them have looked at it the way none of them have had the experience of being able to see the moon and the Earth at the same time. That to me, I know I said it before. That, to me, is the part of this where I went, whoa, it would I feel like it might break my brain and maybe it wouldn't, you know, maybe it wouldn't.

But I'm just being real. Like, I admire, I don't know that anybody could admire the astronauts more without thinking that they themselves could be one. Like, I just don't. Sherry, I think what it would do is you're not only having the physical perspective of that, but you're getting the internal perspective of that. And I think that's the thing that you would enjoy.

I do. Because how could you not have that? If you are a, you know, if you're a thinking, caring person full of heart. The spiritual dimension of it for me. And, you know, one thing that almost everyone who has gone into space, whether they've space walked or landed on the moon or whatever, almost everyone that has left Earth's atmosphere and orbited the Earth has come back, including, I do believe Jeff Bezos has come back and said, we're so special and so fragile.

There we are. We're just, we're so small and everything we ever were or could ever be is on that little tiny speck. The whole of humanity, the whole of the history, dinosaurs, Jesus, Ozzy Osbourne, Froot Loops, everything, everything is there. And it's so fragile. And it gives people who've been to space always come home with this perspective that is just completely changed.

I think William Shatner, remember what Shatner's reaction was? He was so emotional at the prospect of seeing Earth. And we are, we talked about this in another episode. We are a water world. We are just mostly water, which is a very precious and rare thing. Certainly our solar system. And yet down here on Earth, we don't have that perspective.

Down here on Earth, we have people threatening to kill meteorologists for doing weather forecasts that they didn't agree with. We are, if you've seen 2001 A Space Odyssey, we're the apes hitting the monolith with bones. We don't appreciate the glory and the gift that this life on this watery rock is. And so when I think about what these astronauts experienced and what they shared when they came back, it's consistent across the board, whether it's Gordon Cooper or Neil Armstrong or any one of the shuttle crew or captains, William Shatner, Jeff Bezos, they all come back with this changed perspective.

That would be amazing. I think the astronaut that talked about the fact that science and spirituality were not opposed to each other, but rather there was a bridge between the two. And that was the thing that I loved hearing because I don't believe that they are separate. I believe that they are completely interlinked.

I agree, and if you spend any time banging your poor meaty head against quantum physics and particle physics, like trust me, unless you're super duper brilliant, you'll understand just like a spoonful of it. But one thing you'll be struck by, and we'll do this in one of our upcoming multiverse episodes, the subatomic world, the way you can describe the subatomic world sounds an awful lot like the book of Genesis in our Bible.

It's possible, you know, for science and religion to not just coexist, but to be so tightly braided together that they can't be separated. And I think one of our weaknesses as a species is how black and white our thinking is. If I believe this, then I can't believe that. If this is true, then that can't be true. We're very binary that way.

When in reality, and it's so funny to me because some of the people that like to argue with me about this stuff, they begin and end their arguments. I'm a Christian and I believe in God. Well, what kind of weak sauce God are you seeing every Sunday? Because I believe in God, too, and my capital G God made the universe.

And no matter how far, and this is what's fascinating, this is what's happening at CERN in Switzerland with the Large Hadron Collider. We are discovering that we can't get to the bottom of it. That as soon as we think we've found the smallest building block of our universe, our reality, it turns out it can be divided and it can be smaller and smaller and smaller still.

If you believe in God, then you're over here going, see, I told you God's amazing. Look what God can do, right? That is mind blowing to me that people think that you can't believe in both. When even like Einstein, like the greatest minds that have ever been birthed in our species are like, yeah, God's some stuff. What's wrong with us, Max?

I'd forgotten this, but we last Christmas on the radio show, you played what Frank Borman and Jim Lovell and Bill Anders read when they were in Apollo 8. And that happened at Christmas time. And I remember because I was a kid and I remember they came around the moon. And of course, when you go around the moon, you go into radio silence.

You can't make any transmission and you come around then the other side. So there was this holding breath moment where they had no contact with anybody. And then, of course, they read these verses from Genesis. And I'm not trying to be religious about it. But when those words were read in the situation they were in and we replayed that last year.

Oh, my God, I was weepy from it. I think we should make that part of our holiday tradition. I was a little hesitant to do that last year for two reasons. One, not everyone we work with is interested in the space program or anything. And two, some people get really personally inflamed and very defended when religion enters the chat.

Right. But maybe we should make that an annual tradition for as long as we're still doing that. Because it was so, you're right, it was so profound. And they beamed that back to Earth. Right. And millions and millions of people around the world experienced that message. Right. Yeah, I know. I mean, I feel like I should get a T-shirt that says, ask me about the astronauts.

Because I bear it like, I don't know, fight with Logan Paul. He's whatever. But, dude, you're no Al Worden. You're no Gordon Cooper. Like, we are capable of so much. And we worship the wrong things, I think. As humans, we've always worshipped the wrong things. We are. But here is inspiration and a shining light from those things that we have accomplished, that have been good and positive and worthwhile.

And we don't teach this. We don't teach this to our kids. Like, my kids, living with me is very difficult, as you can imagine. But, you know, my kids are like, they'll listen. They'll be like, oh, that's so good, mom. We know you love outer space. But I'm not, no, no, I'm not trying to talk to you about outer space. I'm not trying to talk to you about the greys or the reptiles or the Nordics.

I'm trying to talk to you about a human being from Oklahoma who did something extraordinary and astounding. That when I tell you the story, it sounds like I've got it wrong, or I'm making it up, or I'm exaggerating. That's us. We did that. Like, we were capable of that. You've inspired me with this episode. I am going to go to the Air and Space Museum that they have near Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. My parents both passed away last year, and the assisted care facility where they were living was like two miles from the museum.

And every time I'd visit them, and I visited them frequently, every time I'd visit them, I would pass there and go, next time I want to go to that. But there was never enough time. There never is. There was, I would have had to have made time. But in sitting here, I went, you know, I need to go and see this. And because I went to the one when they had it in Washington as part of the Smithsonian there, and that was fascinating enough because you could see capsules and that sort of thing.

This is a much larger space where you can see all kinds of things that are there. It's very humbling. And I'll say this before we wrap up. To all the people who are moon hoaxers and space deniers and assholes, like whichever one you feel you fall into, right? You say that, look at that. Look at that. There's no way that flew in space.

Look at that. There's no way that flimsy thing landed on the moon. Oh, you're telling me that you could leave Earth's atmosphere and come back in and that. Let me remind you that humanity's first exploring was done on wooden ships on the seas navigating by the stars. No engines, right? No satellite navigation. No Coast Guard.

Human beings walked off the land, boarded what, honestly, if you've ever seen even a replica of some of the original wooden ships. Dude, the ships that they send in, like the Erebus and the Terror that they send into the Arctic, I'm not sure you'd want to go around the lake in one of those, okay? We did that. We did that.

And it seems incredibly unlikely. And a lot of people died and a lot of ships sank. But eventually, we got around the world, you know? We did that. And it's crazy to think about it now. And in the future, if we have one, people will look at our current technology and they'll go, how in the hell did that thing fly? In the same way that we look at these galleons and go, how in the hell did that thing sail?

And here's how it sailed and here's how it flew. Because standing at the wheel or the controls or the helm, we're people. Because we're capable of so much more than we generally manage to deliver. Because we're warring and aggressive and territorial and greedy and jealous and petty. But man, those of us in this species who have the rightest of right stuff, they take us around the world into the stars.

And wouldn't it be a better feeling to celebrate that than to walk around all the time, pissing and moaning about what we can't do and all the lies we've been fed? That's all. And coming up soon, getting to the moon is going to be the least of your worries because we're going to blow your whole human mind with the multiverse.

And with what's happening far beneath the ground in South Dakota right now as we speak. But because it's spooky season for all of our true weirdos who listen to the shows when they drop in real time, our next episode, we're going to go to the cemetery. And we're going to dig some stuff up and we're going to learn some things that are pretty surprising.

But at the end of that episode, we're going to feel a whole lot better about the fact that none of us are immortal. How's that for a promise? Wow. We've got body parts. We've got ghoulishness. We have a city of the dead. And a little message for each and every one of us who will someday cross into that frontier. Thank you for listening to this episode of True Weird Stuff.

Once again, we sit in on a wing and a prayer. And we can tell you that we'll be here next week. Well, everything after that. Yeah, we hope so. Everything after that. Who can even say? Thank you again to all of our voice talents and and of course to Max for doing an outstanding job playing astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Good job, Max.

Good job. We'll see you next week on True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, 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 TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. 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 Axelan. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024. Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.