The Swimmers

Hey, true weirdos, we've got some bonus content for you at the end of the episode. Stick around if you want. Does it shock you to learn that humans have only explored 5% of the world's oceans? How about the Great Lakes? We've only mapped about 15% of those. In fact, we know more about the surface of Mars than we do the Great Lakes.

How about that? Water covers more than 70% of the Earth's surface. Do you know what lies beneath all that water? Do you want to know? Because not everyone who catches a glimpse of that most mysterious and unknown world lives to share what they've seen. And some of those who do survive come back with stories strange and fearful as a nightmare.

We will grow, we'll grow, we'll grow. I know you will. True Weird Stuff. The feeling of being watched. We've all experienced it. Like the slightest prickle on the back of your neck an awareness so sudden and sharp that you abruptly turn and meet the eyes of the watcher and then just as quickly look away. It happens everywhere to everyone.

School, work, public transit, parties, church services. It can happen in a crowd or a small group. Bright daylight darkens city street. It's an instinct humans possess one we explained away as a relic of our earliest days in the trees and the caves when we were just as much prey as predator. It turns out that the ability to sense the gaze of another upon us is even more fascinating than we know.

Our brains, those mysterious wrinkly blobs of gray goo get super busy with the information coming in through our eyes. Those visual signals get sent off to at least 10 specific areas of the brain including the amygdala. The amygdala is small but mighty responsible for the processing of emotion. That emotional processing also influences behavior and memory.

A really simplified way of thinking about it is this what you see in your environment is only a small fraction of the data your brain actually takes in and your brain is busily processing and analyzing that data all in the background so to speak because your attention is devoted more to not spilling your green tea matcha latte or waiting for the dog to make boom booms or navigating traffic.

Your amygdala looks at the incoming data and if necessary launches an emotional response to something you have not paid attention to. The watchful gaze of a stranger something that may represent a threat. The amygdala fires off the alarm and suddenly you get that feeling that feeling of being observed and you react. Outstanding!

All systems operational and hey, did you know that this is true even for people whose visual cortex is damaged or destroyed? It's called blind sight. It's fascinating stuff. Humans are truly the coolest of machines. Our story takes us to the largest, deepest, oldest freshwater lake in the world Lake Baikal in Siberia.

Its depth has been measured at 5,387 feet more than a mile deep and it's been dated at 25 to 30 million years old. The Great Lakes are babies in comparison at only 10,000 years old and here's a fact to blow your mind. Nearly a quarter of Earth's fresh surface water is contained in Lake Baikal. That's enough water that if all the other freshwater on the planet disappeared Lake Baikal could sustain the population of Earth for a couple of decades in theory anyway.

Let's hope we never have to test it. The lake is ringed by mountains and forests all of which are now protected as a national park. Despite its remoteness and the harshness of the climate in the region I mean a summer heatwave at Lake Baikal peaks in the high 50s Fahrenheit. The area has a long history of human population however meager in size.

Remains of a young human male discovered there were dated at 24,000 years old. It's forbidding spectacularly beautiful country a place where humans have very little room for error. In 1920 during the Russian Civil War roughly 30,000 members of the White Army tried to escape certain death at the hands of the Red Army by fleeing across frozen Lake Baikal with the fleeing White Armies where their families everything they could carry and the SARS gold.

There was nothing to block the frigid Arctic winds howling across the lake's icy surface. Many of the soldiers and their families were swiftly frozen to death their bodies remaining on the ice in a horrifying tableau until late spring. With the thaw the bodies and their possessions sank into the depths of Lake Baikal lost forever in those clear clean frigid waters.

In 1982 seven divers in the Russian Navy were deployed on a military exercise in Lake Baikal. They were working at a depth of 50 meters. That's 164 feet. If you're a land creature like me maybe that doesn't sound all that deep but 130 feet is about the max for human divers unless they're extremely well-trained and have the right gear.

It's a problem of pressure at 50 meters deep divers experience pressure six times greater than that on the surface and you can't just shoot up to the surface from that depth either without risking decompression sickness also known as the bends that whole nightmare is caused by nitrogen something you're breathing loads of on the surface with no problem but underwater that nitrogen dissolves in your blood and accumulates unlike oxygen which is consumed by the body's tissues try to ascend too rapidly and that dissolved nitrogen starts forming bubbles those bubbles can lead to joint pain.

That's where the name the bends comes from heart attack stroke and death and if you really have to get out of the water fast you better hope there's a decompression chamber nearby which brings us right back to our seven Russian Navy divers in Lake Baikal. It was a routine exercise the kind of thing each diver had done many many times before the weather was clear matching the famously clear waters of Baikal and the depth wasn't all that unusual for trained Navy divers like these and then it happened the feeling that sensation of being watched but here of all places 50 meters down in the icy waters of remote Lake Baikal what those seven Russian Navy divers reported defies belief and yet the men surface as swiftly as they could which given their depth probably took somewhere north of six or seven minutes they were not alone in the water they said there was something else down there something observing them the divers described humanoid creatures at least nine feet in length silvery silhouettes of the water transparent spheres on their heads spheres the divers explained that looked like opened umbrellas held aloft their commanding officer was like quiet but as we know from Sean Connery's unforgettable performance as a big hearted Russian submarine captain with a Scottish accent in the movie Hunt for Red October your Russian naval officers are willing to at least entertain some crazy ideas re-verify our range to target one ping only captain I just give me a ping for Chile one ping only please I kept that day on the shores of Lake Baikal the officer puzzled over what his divers were saying it made no sense but these were the best of the best highly trained experienced rational pragmatic men he gave the order go back down and capture one or more of whatever these creatures are and bring it to shore seven divers dutifully re-entered the water they sank deeper and deeper plunging to the depth where they had encountered the creatures what happened next must have been a terrifying blur the divers did not succeed in capturing a single entity those mysterious deepwater swimmers whatever they were were having none of it before the men could even process what was happening the swimmer creatures forcibly propelled all seven divers to the surface and ascent far too rapid for their depth even divers at their level of training could not withstand the impact that ascent had on their bodies with only four decompression chambers waiting on shore three of the men died it was a disaster and a tragedy and of course a secret the Russian Navy could not be seen to be so incompetent and poorly equipped that they lost nearly half their crew in a calm freshwater lake and there was no way that what the divers claimed they saw would ever make it to the public nine foot long humanoids of the deep with giant spheres undulating around their heads are you kidding?

No the KGB put the swift kibosh on that story the story of what happened that day to those seven Navy divers was suppressed the Lake Baikal was still teeming with mysteries in the 1990s a local fisherman named Nikolai Kriv was out on the water at night Lake Baikal is home to over 2,000 different animals many of them unique to the place there were several species of fish in the water that were as prized as the sturgeon if less well-known like the gallo-miyanka living at a thousand or more feet below the surface and completely blind the animal has been described as a backbone encased in fat if a gallo-miyanka washes ashore it basically melts into an oily puddle rich in vitamin A it's a food fish and one used as medicine by the Buryat a Mongol people of Eastern Siberia and then there's the omel fish a delicacy that is apparently at its peak of tasty glory when it's been allowed to ferment to the point that you might call rotten you know if a horrible stench and flesh falling off the bones signals rotten to you anywho fisherman Nikolai Kriv was bobbing along lines in the water alone with his thoughts the moonlight playing over the lake to a shock and near paralyzing fear large silver human-shaped creatures suddenly broke the surface leaping from the water like flying fish Kriv said later you know how in some horror movies there's always this one jabroni who sees the unspeakable and is like what and wants to challenge it yeah that's not Nikolai Kriv he only needed to see about a second's worth of flying silver humanoids to yank up his lines and nets and row in terror for the shore and then he never ever ever fished on Lake Baikal again I can hear you screaming he's Russian he's blotto from slugging vodka such a cliche but then I don't know no one subjected the poor man to a blood alcohol test it was enough that he never again dropped a line into that lake to convince those who knew him that something had happened to Nikolai Kriv that night something frightening enough to change his entire life and there are other stories about Lake Baikal ancient stories the kinds of stories we call myths folk tales stories we tell but don't really believe stories we dismiss as the interpretations of mundane events filtered through the ignorance and superstitions of our ancestors stories like this one in the beginning of days in fact the very first day that the sun rose over the earth and bathed it in light for the very first time a golden chariot descended from the heavens the chariot carried a powerful fire dragon who as he stepped out slapped the earth with his mighty tail the mountains cleaved in two the next thunderous blow of the dragon's tail caused the glaciers to melt filling that new cleft in the land with clear pure water a third slap of the tail covered the land in abundant vegetation making a home for all the living things that will come to inhabit it then the dragon slipped beneath the surface of what is now Lake Baikal emerging every 120 years to receive the sacrifices and adulation of the people the sons of the fire dragon but as time went on the people grew lazy and unappreciative and forgetful of their great benefactor

the day came when the dragon emerged from the lake to find no one no pageantry no worship not a single sacrifice left on the abandoned altar the dragon was furious beyond measure his rage caused a terrible shaking and then the land was submerged under the waters and the sons of the fire dragon perished from this earth and the dragon returned to the bottom of the lake in such a vengeful snit that all the tribes who followed were denied the gift of the sacred knowledge of the heavens listen if there's one thing we can take away from nearly every ancient legend, it's this you do not want to piss off a dragon talk about holding a grudge now legends of dragons and all that are easy to dismiss right except the Boreot people were still gamely trying to appease the dragon of Lake Baikal well into the 17th century entire villages would be massacred their corpses dumped into the lake boats filled with treasure would be set adrift in the water and as recently as the 1980s surveys of the lakes bottom using echolocation technology found evidence of a large moving object and when I say large I'm talking 30 meters that's more than 98 feet long of course, there's no documented physical evidence of a sulking and mortal dragon in Lake Baikal but to this day the story persists you could say it's Lake Baikal's version of Scotland's Loch Ness Monster but there are details in these stories that ring a very modern bell chariots descending from the stars godlike creatures taking up residence beneath the waves and humans punished over and over again by global cataclysm by great floods that scrubbed the earth of our foul presence by cosmic resets that strip us of all prior knowledge gifted to us by the gods what did those seven Russian Navy divers see what was that 98 foot long object captured moving rapidly at the bottom of the lake over a period of several days in July 2019 at least five US Navy warships based in San Diego were swarmed by drone like objects of unknown origin one of those ships the USS Omaha was on maneuvers more than 100 miles directly west of San Diego and beyond the Channel Islands one of the Omaha's central missions is surveillance so it's packed with cutting-edge technology and sensors but it appears the Omaha was itself under surveillance this video was recorded inside the Omaha's command center just before 11 p.m. on July 15th the image on the screen shows a six foot in diameter sphere that traveled alongside the Omaha for about an hour it was pitch black outside so the image was obtained via a thermal sensor personnel in the command center made multiple recordings of what was on the screen at precisely 11 p.m.

the unidentified sphere seemingly vanished into the ocean we're sure living in interesting times that was journalist George Knapp reporting on video shot by the US Navy in 2019 a UFO or UAP as we now call them disappearing at high speed into the ocean we call that a USO unidentified submerged object and according to the US Naval Institute it's USO's not UFO's that pose the greatest hazard to the fleet unidentified means just that not every weird thing called bumping or whizzing around underwater has an exotic origin but it's these transmedium phenomena that stop you in your tracks transmedium as in it's flying at jaw-dropping speeds performing maneuvers that divide both our technology and our physics and then plunging into the sea and streaking away at speeds more than five times what a nuclear submarine is capable of which makes you look at a tail of a chariot descending from the heavens and taking up residence more than a mile below the surface of Lake Baikal in a whole new way the Russian Navy divers who encountered whatever that was in Lake Baikal in 1982 paid dearly for the experience three paid with their lives so how exactly did the Russian Navy explain it all away?

Well, they didn't even bother they just covered it up but others have tried and there are three leading theories we'll start with the Baikal seal aka the Nerpa seal it's the world's only exclusively freshwater seal earless and found only in Lake Baikal it's cousin to the Arctic ring seal but science has no explanation for how the animal found its way to this enormous freshwater lake in Siberia and when I say no explanation I mean they literally have no idea just guesses the magnitude of mystery about this planet we call home is enough to keep you awake at night and a cold sweat okay the population of these Nerpa seals in Lake Baikal is estimated to be somewhere between 80 and 100,000 animals so sightings aren't rare at all the Nerpa seals have been there for about 2 million years so they're well established and when the lake ice melts they tend to hug the shoreline they're cute as buttons and completely familiar to every inhabitant of the region also they're not very big and that's an important detail the largest Nerpa seal recorded topped out at about five and a half feet in length and just under 300 pounds in weight Nerpa seals are more typically three and a half to four and a half feet long and only 154 pounds in weight their coats are gray think the color of steel with a yellowish tint to their abdomens why am I describing this Nerpa seal with this much detail because the theory goes that the divers were being watched by seals that accounts for the depth these seals can dive up to 1,300 feet and stay underwater for about 40 minutes although that's atypical for the animal and their steel colored coats might pass for silver in the right light but remember the divers reported humanoid shapes nine feet in length with umbrella like spheres for heads Nerpa seals do not fit that description they just don't I'm sorry also there was little light at that depth and certainly not enough to turn the seals into a light silver color do you really accept that trained Navy divers had never before seen a seal underwater that trained Navy divers would confuse a Nerpa seal for a giant humanoid and before you go maybe their air supply was whack and they were hallucinating okay, thank you for that but all seven of them sharing the same vivid hallucination the next theory argues for the many species of interesting fish found only in Baikal Lake the water in the lake has extraordinarily high levels of dissolved oxygen a phenomenon that can fuel gigantism there are sturgeon in the lake that achieve massive size more than 400 pounds even no wonder the Russians have a thing for caviar a single giant sturgeon can yield like 20 pounds of the pricey fish eggs and there's the Baikal oilfish it can reach up to 8 feet in length with a body so translucent they say you can read a book through it now it doesn't look even remotely humanoid and nothing about its head suggests a sphere much less an unfurled umbrella but maybe seven highly trained Navy divers saw a school of them and freaked out it's not impossible I guess even if it does feel a little bit insulting to the divers the third theory is for me the least probable of all it goes like this these seven divers who were in the Navy for God's sakes got down to their target depth

and were suddenly afraid of the dark that's basically it they descend it it got darker and darker they got scared and panicked and in their rush to the surface gave themselves the bends further muddling their thinking I'm sorry, but this just feels like the underwater version of the old swamp gas weather balloon cover story that the US Air Force still likes to dust off and trot out anytime there's a good UAP sighting did the then Soviet government deny everything including the three deaths you bet they did hello it's the Soviet Union in the early 1980s Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was not about to admit to any weakness and his successor Yuri Andropov only had two years on the job and had been the chairman of the KGB before that so please the only transparency to be found here was that creepy Baikal oil fish but I'll tell you this just two years after this very strange and tragic naval exercise the Soviet government established a special base in the town of Severobaikalsk on the northern end of Lake Baikal probably just a coincidence though like how the enemies of current Russian president Vladimir Putin keep falling out of high windows just you know coincidence nothing to see here a former Russian naval officer turned ufologist named Vladimir Azhazha he's famous in the UFO community worldwide is blunt 50% of UFO encounters are connected with oceans 15 more with lakes so UFOs tend to stick to the water before we go on let's be clear again that UFO or UAP means unidentified something doesn't mean aliens it could be unknown technology of human origin or it could be something weird beyond our comprehension crypto terrestrials interdimensional beings time travelers from our own future it gets so deeply unsettling the more you dig into it that honestly you start wishing it is as simple as visitors from another planet when you hear the phrase non-human intelligence this is what that's all about and if you think the phrase non-human intelligence lives only on some far quirky corner of the internet you might want to sit down in July 2023 a bipartisan group of six senators led by New York's Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that strongly suggests that the U.S. is in possession of recovered craft of non-human origin just for starters the bill known as the Schumer amendment includes mind-blowing statements like the term legacy program means all federal state and local government commercial industry academic and private sector endeavors to collect exploit or reverse engineer technologies of unknown origin or examine biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence that predates the date of the enactment of this act and the term non-human intelligence means any sentient intelligent non-human life form regardless of nature or ultimate origin that may be presumed responsible for unidentified anomalous phenomena or of which the federal government has become aware and the term technologies of unknown origin means any materials or metamaterials ejecta crash debris mechanisms machinery equipment assemblies or sub-assemblies engineering models or processes damaged or intact aerospace vehicles

and damaged or intact ocean surface and undersea craft associated with unidentified anomalous phenomena or incorporating science and technology that lacks prosaic attribution or known means of human manufacture. Okay, then looks like the cat alien interdimensional from the future who even knows out of the bag now kids declassified Russian Navy documents detail the work of a group led by Deputy Navy Commander Admiral Nikolai Smirnov into these strange encounters in the water.

There are multiple reports of unexplained incidents connected to UAPs and USOs Vladimir Zaza points to one baffling report of a Soviet nuclear submarine on a routine mission in the South Pacific that detected six unknown objects in the water. The submarine crew tried invasive maneuvers tried to outrun the objects all to no avail.

The USOs were reaching speeds up to 230 knots that's over 260 miles an hour in comparison the fastest Soviet sub the K-22 had a peak speed of only 44 knots 51 miles an hour outmatched the submariners were forced to surface and were stunned to see the objects pursuing them underwater follow them to the surface and then shoot into the sky and disappear.

Another Soviet sub commander Yuri Bekatov recounted experiencing similar events in the Bermuda Triangle malfunctioning instruments bogeys in the water clocking incredible speeds he noted speeding so fast is a challenge even on the surface but water resistance is much higher it was like the objects defied the laws of physics there's only one explanation the creatures who built them far surpass us in development a veteran in US Naval Intelligence one Captain I Barkley commented ocean UFOs often show up wherever our NATO fleets concentrate near Bahamas, Bermudas, Puerto Rico they are most often seen in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean in the southern part of the Bermuda Triangle and also in the Caribbean Sea in July 2023 retired Navy commander David Fravor the former commanding officer of the Navy's Black Aces Squadron testified to Congress under oath about some of what he has seen in the skies and in the ocean all four of us because we were in F-18F so we had pilots and Wizzow in the back seat looked down a small solid white tic-tac object with a longitudinal axis pointing north-south and moving very abruptly over the water like a ping-pong ball there were no rotors no rotor wash or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings as we started clockwise towards the object my Wizzow and I decided to go down and take a closer look at the other aircraft staying in high cover to observe both us and the tic-tac we proceeded around the circle about 90 degrees from the start of our descent and the object suddenly shifted its longitudinal axis aligned it with my aircraft and began to climb we continued down another 270 degrees nose low where the tic-tac or we consumed 270 degrees and we went nose low to where the tic-tac would have been our altitude at this point was about 15,000 feet and the tic-tac was about 12,000 as we pulled nose onto the object within about a half mile of it it rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared our wingmen roughly 8,000 feet above us lost contact also we immediately turned back to see where the white water was at and it was gone also if nothing else the days of dismissing witnesses as back road hayseeds or kooks or crazies or attention seekers looks to be over there is a mountain of unknowns things we may never know never resolve like what those seven Russian Navy divers really saw and experienced in Lake Baikal in 1982 like the origin of the so-called tic-tac the commander Fravor pursued that day in November 2004 we may never get the answers we seek the certainty we crave and if we did can we handle it?

Are we ready for it? Or are we still at the point in our own journey as a species where seals and weather balloons and swamp gas and tricks of the light make it easier for us to sleep at night secure we think in the knowledge that we are at the top of this planet's food chain remember back in July 2022 when the Department of Defense established ARO the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office ARO is designed to collect reports and investigate unidentified phenomena in the air the water you name it although it's already under fire for many who see it as the kind of BS sop to the public that was the Air Force's Project Blue Book here's something to chew on in one six-month period in 2022 ARO received hundreds of reports of UAPs and USOs from US military personnel you really going to tell me that every one of those individuals serving in our military are attention-seeking kooks really?

It's one thing to be skeptical it's another thing to be willfully obstinately blind to what may be not just the story of your lifetime but the story of humanity itself we have no idea what happened in Baikal Lake no idea what those naval aviators witnessed over the Pacific no way of explaining these declassified reports from the Russian Navy and on and on and on we just don't know anything Vladimir Azazan might just have nailed it when he said this about the underwater aspect of this phenomenon skepticism is the easiest way believe nothing do nothing people rarely visit the great depths so it's very important to analyze what they encounter there and maybe maybe we'd all better hope that if we find something it really is just a harmless little seal next time on true weird stuff imagine attending a funeral service where the casket had a glass top and the body didn't have a head and the body parts were just stuffed into a suit and your ancestors were savage don't lose your head on the next true weird stuff this one was such a fascinating story to explore I've kind of been obsessed with the story of those seven missing or three of them deceased Russian Navy divers for a long time because it's one of those things where all the people that are trying to push back on it and debunk it you keep going but but these were like seals these were Navy divers these were elite yeah I mean and even like a lot of people are like well they're Russian Navy divers as though that kind of jingoism somehow makes its own argument right but here's the thing you do not get to be a Navy diver in any country's Navy if you're afraid of the dark in the water these these divers had so many hours of experience the idea that they were like oh it's dark I'm freaking out and then they bolted to the surface and died of the bends come on I mean no seriously come on and they all saw the same thing yeah which brings me to the well they all hallucinated that's one hell of a hallucination I think if me and six people did ayahuasca together we're not going to all have the same experience right like you know come on I'm not saying that there were some sort of aliens or interdimensional beings or a lost crypto terrestrial race in that water with those seven divers I'm just saying I don't know what it was but I don't believe for a second that those experienced military divers were afraid of the dark or mistook a fish or a seal for what they claimed they saw what about you the thing that you were there you had mentioned somewhere and they were about nine feet tall and then you said they had heads like umbrellas and when I heard nine feet tall what's the first thing I think of Bigfoot yeah because that's about isn't that about the height that they always say that Bigfoot is witness this yeah they always say that so you wonder if there's some sort of a connection somewhere in there because I believe that Bigfoot's not of this planet that's my personal belief about it or not of this dimension right and I know that people are like oh here we go but here's the thing and I've talked about this in other episodes of true weird stuff what you what your senses can take in perceive analyze and comprehend is but a fraction tip of the iceberg of what's out there there are animals

and insects who are much more designed to take in light that's not on the visible spectrum for us infrared ultraviolet I mean there are animals that can hear look at your dog and your dog knows when a storm is coming right they can hear frequencies we can't hear so we have to one of the first things we have to do is humble ourselves and acknowledge that we are not the greatest most supreme machines ever created you know we're kind of held hostage by the limitations of our own senses now do I does that mean that I I think I know what was going on a mile below the surface at Lake Baikal all these years no I have no idea and it freaks me out to think about it my husband always says you think everything's the aliens and I'm like you know I'm at a point now where the aliens would be the easiest to swallow yeah and I think the point that you make you know we have the theory about what could happen with time travel we don't know if these any of these phenomena or are something from the future that have come back to visit us from that dimension we just don't know that but we do know that the theory says you know this is possible well and when you when you think about and I love like I love the word problem that these sort of unknowable theories present we have explored five percent of the world's oceans we know more about Mars than we do about Lake Superior but pop off sis and tell me about like all that all the things that you know are an absolute certainty we don't know and in fact the the undersea environment when you when you stop and think that the maximum depth for human beings to dive unless they are incredibly trained and well equipped is 130 feet really 130 feet what is that max five school buses yeah I mean come on come on people I'm not asking you to believe in little green men or Bigfoot or crypto terrestrials or a coming global cataclysm that's going to be a cosmic reset that only the elites in the seed bank will survive I'm not asking you to believe that but you might want to look at it there's some there's so much there's so much the TV show where if the if they drain the oceans I mean there are all these ravines and whatnot that are in the ocean that we haven't explored there's all kinds of things that we just have never been able to see because we don't have the capacity to be able to see those things because of the pressure of the water and all kinds of things but you're right there's an awful lot of this planet that's really unexplored undersea mountain ranges right I mean I was on this summer I made my annual pilgrimage to the West for a little bit of desert time and you know you can find fossils of ancient sea life on the ground in Nevada like we're we're not built to comprehend deep time our brains aren't built to absorb some or even all or all of these mysteries but I think it's important to ask the questions and one one thing that I'm always up against is people go oh well you know that's just a legend that's just a myth that's just a story that people tell but you know the anthropologist in me the thwarted frustrated anthropologist in me reminds you that your ancestors spun these tales to help make sense of the world and to transmit information to the next generation so they may not have understood what a volcano was to them it was an angry fire God who occasionally belched forth from the mountain but they did what they could in the same way that we do what they could which brings me to a fascinating

legend around Lake Baikal that we did not include in the episode just for time so this is a good one because it's not the only time that this has happened in the world but if you've only grown up in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition you may never have heard some of these stories of Jesus Christ visiting indigenous peoples in the Americas or in this case the indigenous peoples of Siberia there's a legend around Lake Baikal and the people who live there and it is a hard hard place to live the hottest it ever gets is about even in this era of warming the hottest it ever gets is in the high 50s winter winter time is brutal it's just I mean there's that first of all Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake in the entire world and when it's in Siberia which you've heard of as being rather chilly when the Arctic winds come across the surface of that frozen lake there is nothing to break that wind it's a very difficult hardscrabble place to live but there was a traveler who came through the Lake Baikal region and the whole area now is protected national forest mountains the woods all of it is protected and I think for two reasons one because it is an earthly treasure and two because there's a lot in that part of the world that the Russian government would prefer you didn't have access to but anyway a man by the name of T.W. Atkinson spent time in the Lake Baikal region back in the 19th century and he learned the language and he spent time collecting the stories and tales of the people who lived there and one of the stories they had it they don't just talk about it it's gospel they believe it the people say that the Christ visited this particular part of Asia and climbed to the summit over Lake Baikal and look down on all of the land around bless the country to the north and then the Christ turned toward the south and he said beyond here there is nothing which is how they account for this vast region of land in this part of Siberia where they said nothing will grow like corn won't grow nothing will grow and so this remote group of people the descendants of these ancient Mongol nomadic tribes have and hold this legend of the Christ coming to them in the same way that indigenous peoples in the Americas have stories of the Christ and in India and other parts of Asia stories of the Christ which if you are a person of the Christian faith is really super powerful right yeah the savior of men and if you're a person who doesn't really believe in that and you think that you know we were genetically manipulated by extraterrestrials it also is awesome for you because you're like yes the the they descend it from the heavens and golden chariots and gave us sacred knowledge and boosted our genetics everybody wins in these stories but it's interesting and Max I'm curious to know what your thoughts on this as a former seminary student are well let me be clear when I say seminary student it was two years in a high school seminary but the story that you're telling about a Christ figure in Asia is a story that I have heard before the ones with Native Americans I hadn't heard that before but this is a story that I've heard before and if you think about it it's not too far out of the realm of possibility to think well why would he only appear

in this one place you know communication wasn't very good then perhaps he would appear in other places as well so I'm I think that there is credence to this story I do I think it's it's one of those things that you like to ponder and puzzle over and it reminds me when I was a little kid my mom got a copy of a book called Chariots of the Gods by Eric Von Doneker and I read it and as a child my mom just let me read whatever you know whatever she had I was allowed to read which I'm telling you when you're nine the metamorphosis and the happy hooker are a tough tough read but I didn't have you ever heard of a book oh yeah I've heard of it my dad's sister came and spent a summer with us in Wyoming and she brought with her a stack of Cosmo magazines a hard paperback copy of the happy hooker and a few cartons of smokes and when she left all of that stayed behind and the happy hooker I didn't even know what a hooker was I didn't even understand what I was reading and the metamorphosis when you're nine is terrifying you're like because you know like I knew I was growing up in a family where if I turned into a giant cockroach they would leave me to die just like his family did just like Gregor's family we read a lot of the same things when we were kids it's crazy I also read another book called Future Shock which was about what was going to happen in the future I remember that too Alvin Toffler yeah so I read chariots of the gods when I was nine or ten and thought it was fascinating you didn't understand it reread it not even I read it for like the third time not that long ago and it's interesting because when you look at humanity and our myths and our legends even our religion our major religions have have more in common than they have in opposition to each other they do we have these shared origin stories and you could say well that's the collective unconscious or you could say that's God descending from the heavens or you can say it's the aliens and and the beautiful thing is you don't know some of it you take on faith some of it you you take with a grain of salt and you don't know but the tonnage on these reports of strange lights vehicles encounters underwater the sheer tonnage of it makes you sit up and go well maybe we ought to have a look at this what do you think and I think that we shouldn't be frightened of new information even if it goes against something we may have been taught when we were younger because I don't think that it diminishes what we've learned I think that we just always have to be open-minded about what it is that's possible with this it's kind of like this the truth is the truth whether you open your eyes and see it or not for example I have no idea what I weigh I just never weigh myself if my clothes fit I think that's you know probably fine right I have no idea what I weigh but my ignorance of that number doesn't change the reality of it correct that's right well that's a great analogy so you can you can close your eyes and your ears and say this is demon stuff or bullshit or stupid or whatever and you can turn away from it but whatever is true is true whether you choose to see it or not and I think it's a high time and and past time that we started asking more questions about what our military not just here in the U.S. but around the world these folks are experiencing encountering and reporting things that they don't understand that we don't understand and if we're too afraid to ask the questions my gosh what are we going to do

with the answers and can we get together on this at least and agree that we need to share information a little bit more you would think so whatever else I hope from this episode you took away the knowledge that there is this beautiful pristine ancient body of crystal clear fresh water waiting for us in Siberia should the people of Earth ever desperately need a drink and have no other place to turn nature is some kind of amazing with or without nine foot long humanoid creatures with giant umbrella heads thanks for joining us for this episode of True Weird Stuff we sure appreciate you listening we'll see you next time and if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts hit the plus button in the top right corner 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 and Twitter true weird stuff is a Now! Media production our executive producer is Anthony Garcia this 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 copyright 2023 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remembered