Speaker 1: Okay, So the story we're diving into today, it honestly
sounds like something straight out of a sci fi movie. Seriously,
it really does. But it's tangled up with you know,
real science, real political intrigue, and a mystery that's still unsolved,
what nearly thirty years later.
Speaker 2: That's right, it's a cold case. But with these incredible
layers and the.
Speaker 1: Cool question, the hook here is pretty mind bending. What
if this world, everything around us, the ground, the air,
physics itself. What if it's not actually solid? What if
it's fundamentally just information code?
Speaker 2: Yeah, like a cosmic computer program exactly.
Speaker 1: And what if one scientist, a really dedicated, highly trained guy,
believed he was right on the verge of proving it.
Speaker 2: That scientist was Jacobo Grinberg, and he was calling the
world a matrix literally two decades before the movies made
it famous.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so his work sits at this really strained crossroads,
doesn't it Like serious brain science, psychophysiology.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, rigorous academics, but then also ancient shamanism quantum
physics ideas.
Speaker 3: It is a wild mix.
Speaker 1: So our job today, our mission is to kind of
unpack all of this. We've got sources covering his life,
his theories, which were definitely groundbreaking but also super controversial.
And then the really baffling part his disappearance.
Speaker 2: Right when he was about to launch this massive career
defining experiment. Yeah, poof gone.
Speaker 1: Vanished without a trace. So we need to look at
the evidence, the doubts people had, and you know, the
darker theories about what actually happened to the man who
thought he could tweak the source code of reality.
Speaker 2: To really get Grinberg, you almost have to start way
back with this defining tragedy in his childhood. Okay, when
he was just twelve his mother died brain tumor.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that young That must have hit him.
Speaker 2: Hard, immensely, And it didn't just you know, cause grief.
It totally shaped his path. He basically dedicated his life
from then on to understanding the brain, that ultimate mystery.
Speaker 1: But he started out completely mainstream, right like, purely within
Western science.
Speaker 2: Absolutely he was laser focused on cracking the code of consciousness,
but through the established scientific method degrees in psychology psychophysiology.
He got his PhD right, even set up his own
pretty sophisticated research lab in Mexico, spent years just looking
at you. Brain reactions to basic stimuli, very objective, measurable stuff.
Speaker 1: Oh, he was on track for a totally normal, respectable
academic career.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which makes the turning point in nineteen seventy five
just so dramatic. It wasn't like he slowly drifted towards
the weird stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it's like a sudden collision. His whole, carefully built
scientific worldview got smashed by this one invitation.
Speaker 1: An invitation where from from.
Speaker 2: Los Pinos, the Mexican presidential headquarters. Essentially, huh it came
from Margarita Lopez Portillo.
Speaker 1: The President's sister.
Speaker 3: That's the one.
Speaker 2: She was a big deal socially, but also crucially she
was really into supporting indigenous Mexican culture and traditions.
Speaker 1: Okay, I see the connections starting.
Speaker 2: It was Portillo who set up the meeting that changed
everything for Greenberg. She introduced him to this woman who
became his mentor and really the core of his later theories.
Speaker 3: Doing to put.
Speaker 1: Cheetah ta cheetah. Okay, and who was she?
Speaker 2: Officially officially records listener as a cabaret singer and a
lottery ticket seller. Pretty mundane, but unofficially. Unofficially, she was
a hugely famous Shawmanness, known all over Mexico for performing
these well paranormal procedures, healings that seemed impossible, like.
Speaker 1: What kind of things are we talking about?
Speaker 2: The stories were incredible, curing blindness, fixing chronic illnesses, making
women fertile who couldn't conceive, even supposedly bringing people back
from the brink of death.
Speaker 1: WHOA Okay, So Grienberg, mister PhD in psychophysiology, he must
have been super skeptical, right.
Speaker 3: You'd think so.
Speaker 2: I mean, his whole training was about objective, proof, replicable results. Yeah,
but something about his drive to understand the brain, all
aspects of it, pushed him. Maybe he thought, even and
if it sounds crazy, if it's happening, it's part of
reality and need studying. He had this openness despite the
scientific rigor.
Speaker 1: So he went in with an open mind, but still
as a scientist.
Speaker 2: Initially, yes, but what he claimed to have witnessed with
Pacheetah it seemed to push him way beyond just objective observation.
Speaker 1: So Pacheetah becomes his mentor his main research focus.
Speaker 2: Basically, right, he starts observing her work really closely, especially
these infamous spirit surgeries.
Speaker 1: Spirit surgeries, what does that even mean?
Speaker 2: Well, according to Greenberg's own writings, which are quite something,
very clinical but also just full of astonishment, he said
she was quote capable of materializing and dematerializing objects, organs
and tissue.
Speaker 1: Wait, materializing organs, like creating them out of nothing.
Speaker 2: That's what he claimed to see. Things that just completely
violate basic physics, you know, conservation of mass and energy.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's yeah. How did he even try to explain
that scientifically? He couldn't just say magic.
Speaker 2: Now, The scientist in him needed a mechanism. He theorized
she was somehow achieving the manipulation of organic structures, like
getting down to the fundamental building blocks of reality and
rearranging them.
Speaker 1: And she used a tool for this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, reportedly this old family knife, an heirloom, and but
she'da wrapped it up in this whole story about her ancestry.
Speaker 1: Let me guess something impressive.
Speaker 2: Very she claims she was the niece of Maktezuma and
the sister of the Aztec emperor Kotamac.
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, that's a big claim. Did anyone verify that?
Speaker 2: Highly disputed and This is where the criticism of Grinberg
really started to bite. How So, his academic peers basically said, look,
he stopped being objective. He's not questioning these wild claims,
whether it's the miracle healings or this incredibly grand ancestry.
Speaker 3: He just seems to be accepting at all.
Speaker 1: Like he was more of a fan than a scientist
at that point.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it looked like he wanted to believe so badly,
maybe to fit his developing theories, that he wasn't pushing back.
He was letting her narrative shape his science, not the
other way.
Speaker 1: He'd crossed a line in their view.
Speaker 2: Definitely, he started taking her word for things. And if
you take her word for things, then maybe the most
significant thing she did, setting a precedent for Greenberg himself,
was her vanishing act.
Speaker 1: She vanished, like Greenberg later did multiple times.
Speaker 2: Apparently, she had this long history of clashes with the
Mexican government that kept trying to arrest her for practicing voodoo.
Speaker 1: Rights basically, but then they got close, she'd just.
Speaker 2: Disappear, utterly, vanish off the face of.
Speaker 1: The air, and they couldn't find her.
Speaker 2: The government never then, sometimes years later she'd just reappear,
and the story says she looked like she had an
age today.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's creepy, and suggests what she found a way out.
Speaker 2: That's what it implied, right, that maybe she'd figured out
how to actually temporarily at least exit our shared reality.
Speaker 1: And Grenberg must have been fascinated by that.
Speaker 2: Absolutely you can see how that idea disappearing as an
escape would stick with him. He spent years trying to
syntheize everything he saw with Pacheta, all these observations into
his own framework.
Speaker 1: Which led to his big publication, Yeah, in.
Speaker 2: Nineteen eighty seven, The Shamans of Mexico. It was huge,
six volumes, over twelve hundred pages. Wow, And apparently he
wrote it incredibly fast, like this intense burst, a stream
of consciousness. Almost.
Speaker 1: What was the main argument in it beyond just Pacheetah,
it was broader.
Speaker 3: It was this cultural critique. Really.
Speaker 2: He argued that Mexico, because of centuries of colonization and
Western influence, had basically dismissed its own deep shamanic traditions,
ignored them in favor of this purely materialistic view of
the world. Greenberg wanted to use science, his science, not
to debunk shamanism, but to actually explain it, to give
it a scientific footing, and that attempt led him to
his most radical idea, the centergic theory, often called the
curic theory.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is the big one, the curic theory.
This is his explanation for everything for Pecheetah, materializing organs
pretty much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he needed a scientific sound mechanism, right. He proposed
that Pacheetah, by radically altering her state of consciousness, could
tap into this fundamental level of reality, a state of
pure energy where everything was alterable.
Speaker 1: Like accessing the universe's operating system.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. She wasn't just
observing reality, she was, in his view, interacting with its
underlying structure.
Speaker 1: And that evolved into the formal cuic theory.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which basically frames reality as well as an informational construct,
a simulation if you like. It's his attempt to unify
consciousness and the physical world.
Speaker 1: Let's break that down. What are the parts?
Speaker 2: Okay, So first you have the matrix, that's his term
for the source code, this vast universal information field. Some
might call it the lattice or the unified field. It
holds all the potential information for everything that could possibly exist. Right,
the potential then you have consciousness or individual awareness. Grimberg
saw consciousness as the code reader. It interacts with that
universal field, and by observing or interacting, it collapses the
potential information into the specific reality we experience.
Speaker 1: So my experience right now talking to you, seeing this room,
that by consciousness running the code from the matrix.
Speaker 2: According to the theory, yes, our shared experience is built
from consciousness processing that universal information.
Speaker 1: Okay, So where do shamans like Pacheetah fit in?
Speaker 2: This is the crucial bit. Grinberg believed that certain individuals,
through intense training or inateability, could shift their consciousness. They
could go from just being a passive code reader to
becoming an active code.
Speaker 1: Writer, so they could edit the matrix.
Speaker 3: That's the idea.
Speaker 2: By merging their awareness back into that collective field, they
could supposedly manipulate the information itself, manifest an organ heal
and illness, or maybe even you know, remove themselves from
the manifest reality.
Speaker 3: Vanish Wow.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have to admit it's an incredibly ambitious theory.
It tries to explain everything from normal physics to the paranormal,
all in one frame.
Speaker 2: It's intellectually audacious, for sure, is internal logic.
Speaker 1: But how did the scientific community react. I can't imagine
they loved it.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: Immediate brutal ridicule.
Speaker 3: He was basically ostracized.
Speaker 1: Was it just too weird?
Speaker 2: The main criticism wasn't even necessarily that it was wrong,
It was that it was quote impossible to test. How
do you design an experiment to prove or disprove that
reality is a simulation being edited by shamans. It was
just too far outside the bounds of standard, measurable, replicable
science for most people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can see that. But was he completely alone
in thinking along these lines about reality being information consciousness
playing a role?
Speaker 3: Not at all.
Speaker 2: And this is where it gets really interesting. If you
look at theoretical physics around the same time, and even before,
similar ideas were bubbling up, like what well think about
John Wheeler, giant in twentieth century physics, coined terms like black.
Speaker 3: Hole, wormhole.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, Wheeler proposed something called the partition disipating anthropic principle,
basically the idea that the universe in a way requires
observers to come into being. His concept was it from
bit that the physical reality the it arises from information.
Speaker 1: The bit that sounds remarkably similar to Grimberg's matrix and
consciousness being the reader.
Speaker 2: It's a striking parallel, isn't it The idea that reality
isn't just out there independent of us, but that our observation,
our consciousness, is somehow fundamental to its existence. Without an observer,
maybe the universe just stays as pure potential, pure information.
Speaker 1: And there's some physical basis for seeing reality as information.
Speaker 2: Well, think about it. Atoms, right, the supposed building blocks
of matter. They're ninety nine point nine to nine percent
empty space, and the universe itself is overwhelmingly empty space.
What we perceive is solid is actually this incredibly sparse
arrangement of something maybe information points activated by consciousness.
Speaker 1: So Grimberg, down in Mexico in the eighties working with Shamans,
was kind of landing on the same conceptual territory as
high level quantum physicists.
Speaker 2: Really seems that way he was essentially describing what later
got called the simulation hypothesis ideas pushed by people like
Frank Tipler in ninety four, Nick Bostrom in the two thousands.
Greenberg was trying to use his shamanic data as the
empirical bridge decades early.
Speaker 1: But being ahead of the curve meant.
Speaker 2: Total academic isolation pretty much.
Speaker 1: Okay, so Greenberg has got this grand theory, but the
academics aren't buying it because it's untestable. He needs proof, right,
hard data exactly.
Speaker 2: He realized philosophical arguments weren't cutting it. He needed to
demonstrate at least one piece of the puzzle empirically, specifically,
that universal field connecting all minds. If the matrix is real,
maybe telepathy or entanglement between minds could be shown in
the lab.
Speaker 1: So he designed an experiment.
Speaker 2: He did his famous telepathy experiment. The setup was actually
quite clever, simple but aiming for something profound.
Speaker 1: How did it work.
Speaker 2: He'd get two participants, wire them up with EG electrodes
to read their brain waves. Then he'd have them meditate
together try to consciously connect it. Okay, Once they felt
that connection, he'd separate them, put them in different rooms
totally isolated, no sound, no light leakage between them.
Speaker 1: Got it shielded room right.
Speaker 2: Then the key part, only one participant, the receiver, would
be hit with stimuli like bright flashes of light, loud noises.
The other participant, the isolated one, just sat there in silence.
Speaker 1: And darkness, and he was measuring both their brain waves simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Yes, and he wasn't just looking for any brain activity.
He was looking for very specific signals called visually evoked
potentials veps. These are well known measurable electrical responses in
the brain that happen specifically when you see a visual
stimulus like a flash of light. Also looking for patterns
of coherence between brain areas.
Speaker 1: So if the isolated person showed a VP at the
exact same time the receiver saw the flash.
Speaker 2: That would be extraordinary. It would imply their brain was
reacting as if it saw the flash, even though it
objectively didn't.
Speaker 1: And did he find that well?
Speaker 2: The results he reported were pretty startling. He claimed that
in about twenty five percent of the trials, nearly one
in four, the brain waves of both participants showed those
identical simultaneous reactions, the veps, the coherence patterns, everything matched up.
Speaker 1: WHOA, So the isolated person's brain acted like it was
seeing the light or hearing the sounds.
Speaker 2: That's what his data suggested for Greenberg.
Speaker 3: This was it.
Speaker 2: This was the smoking gun, proof of telepathic entanglement, proof
of that underlying universal fuel connecting them the matrix.
Speaker 1: Okay, but twenty five percent isn't one hundred percent? And
how did other scientists react to this? Surely this was
more testable.
Speaker 2: More testable, yes, but still met with huge skepticism. The
critics jumped all over the methodology. How so, they argued,
it was just too easy to get false positives? Was
the shielding really perfect? Could there have been some subtle
environmental queue, maybe an electrical surge in the building affecting
both sets of equipment simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Right, confounding variables exactly.
Speaker 2: The core principle extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And for
the mainstream Grenberg replicating this in his own lab with
his own team it just wasn't enough. It needed independent
replication under extremely rigorous.
Speaker 1: Conditions, which didn't happen.
Speaker 3: I'm guessing not widely.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: But here's the twist.
Speaker 2: While the academic world was mostly scoffing ye, someone else
was paying very close attention.
Speaker 3: The CIA.
Speaker 1: The CIA, seriously, why would they care about telepathy experiments
in Mexico because.
Speaker 2: They had been running their own secret program for nearly
twenty years called Stargate.
Speaker 1: Project Stargate like the movie.
Speaker 2: Kind of yeah, but this was real. It was a
massive classified effort looking into psychic phenomena, remote viewing, telepathy, psychokinesis.
They were exploring it all for potential intelligence and military applications,
psychic warfare essentially.
Speaker 1: Okay, wow, So the US government was spending millions trying
to weaponize psychic powers.
Speaker 2: For two decades. Yes, it sounds wild, but it's document it.
So for them, a scientist potentially proving telepathic entanglement in
a lab that wasn't just academic curiosity. That was potentially
a major breakthrough with serious national security implications.
Speaker 1: So they took Greenberg's work seriously, even if universities didn't.
Speaker 2: It certainly appears that way his work, whether he knew
it or not, was touching on things the Intelligence Committee
considered strategically vital.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, Greenberg himself, was he aware of the CIA interest
or was he just focused on convincing the scientific world.
Speaker 2: His focus seemed entirely on the science. He knew the
small lab results weren't convincing the skeptics. He needed something bigger,
something undeniable.
Speaker 1: The final experiment.
Speaker 2: The final experiment he planned, as he apparently put it,
to shut up the skeptics once and for all by
replicating the entanglement experiment on a massive scale internationally. He
told his daughter as Kusha, he was heading to kathmun Du.
Speaker 1: Nepal, Nepal. Why so far.
Speaker 2: The plan was to test meditators simultaneously on different continents.
Imagine subjects into Pall maybe others in Mexico or the US,
all wired up. If he could show those synchronized brain potentials,
those VIPs appearing at the exact same moments across thousands
of miles.
Speaker 1: That would be impossible to explain away as a lab
error or faulty wiring exactly.
Speaker 2: He would require multiple independent teams, observers, standardized equipment. He'll
be global, verifiable proof of that universal connection, his ultimate vindication.
Speaker 1: But he never got to run that experiment.
Speaker 3: Never happened.
Speaker 2: December eighth, nineteen ninety four. Jacobo Grenenberg just vanished.
Speaker 1: Wow, Like what were the circumstances.
Speaker 2: No note, no farewells, nothing, just gone.
Speaker 1: And people didn't realize immediately.
Speaker 2: Well, initially there was confusion. Did he just decide to
leave take off somewhere, but he was apparently very close
to his family, very dedicated to his work. Then four
days later, he missed his own birthday party.
Speaker 1: Ah, that's when they knew.
Speaker 2: That's when the alarm bells really went off. His family
knew something was deeply.
Speaker 1: Wrong, so they reported him missing.
Speaker 2: Yes, and his daughter as Stucia. She was actually the
lead singer in a band called Heaven and Earth. Reasonably
well known. She used her platform, went on American TV
offered a cash reward for information that help any leads.
It generated a flood of calls. Tips poured in, but
the problem was almost none of them checked out. People
claiming they saw him couldn't actually describe him properly when pressed.
It was overwhelming, but ultimately fruitless.
Speaker 4: So the police investigation who handled that the cold case
eventually landed with a Mexican police commander named Clemente Padia,
apparently a really sharp, dedicated investigator, got a reputation for
closing every.
Speaker 3: Case he took on until this one.
Speaker 2: This became the one black mark on his record, the
only case he couldn't solve.
Speaker 1: What did Padea find?
Speaker 2: Initially, first the basics, he checked passport control airports, no
record of Greenberg officially leaving Mexico, so he didn't fly out,
didn't fly out, and despite telling his daughter he was
going to Kathermine Doo. Padilla found zero credible sightings there.
Nothing panned out, which meant which this meant the focus
had to be Mexico or maybe neighboring countries reachable by road.
If he didn't fly, he was likely still relatively local
or had driven.
Speaker 1: Okay, did Padea find any sightings that did seem credible?
Speaker 2: Just one, but it was a big one in Bolder, Colorado?
Speaker 1: Bolder? Why there?
Speaker 2: This woman contacted Padia. She was apparently a reader of
Scientific American, recognized Grenberg's picture from an article. Said she
saw him plain a day walking down the street in.
Speaker 1: Boulder, Okay. Was he alone?
Speaker 2: No, And this is the crucial detail. She said, he
was being followed quite closely by two men.
Speaker 1: In suits, suits like government type.
Speaker 3: That was the implication.
Speaker 2: But the weirdest part, she said, Greenberg seemed totally aware
they were there. He wasn't hiding, wasn't trying to get away.
It looked like he was being escorted or maybe watched,
but wasn't resisting it.
Speaker 1: That's bizarre. What did Padia do with that?
Speaker 3: He realized this is huge.
Speaker 2: He uses own contacts, reached out to the CIA liaison
in Mexico. He described sighting the men in suits.
Speaker 1: And the CIA knew them.
Speaker 2: The agent Padilla spoke to reportedly recognized the description immediately
said something like, oh yeah, sounds like my colleagues, and
he named them Rick Howard and Marina of Alaska, CIA agents.
Speaker 1: Whoa so confirmation. CIA agents were with Greenberg in Colorado
after he vanished from Mexico.
Speaker 2: Exactly for Padia, this felt like the case was cracked.
He had names, affiliation, location. He figured you just needed
to go through official channels back in Mexico through the PGR.
Speaker 1: PGR that's the Tree General's off right.
Speaker 2: The Procuratory at General de Laripublica, the top federal investigators.
Badia went to them with the CIA names the Boulder siding,
expecting them to formally request info from the US and
did they No. The complete opposite happened, immediate stonewalling, obstruction.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't pursue the CIA lead.
Speaker 2: Worse, Padilla was abruptly pulled off the case. No real
explanation given, just shut down.
Speaker 1: Just like that, after identifying US agents.
Speaker 3: Just like that.
Speaker 2: He was so frustrated seeing his best lead ignored. He
apparently resigned from the force over it. And then shortly
after Greenberg's official case file at the PGR it was
declared lost lost convenient, extremely convenient. The whole official investigation
just stopped dead in its tracks, which of course just
adds another layer of mystery to the whole thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the official investigation gets shut down, the file disappears.
That just screams cover up, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It definitely feels speculation. And given what Greenberg was working on,
this intersection of consciousness, physics, maybe even psychic abilities, the
theories get pretty wild.
Speaker 1: All right, Let's break them down. He said they are
about five main ones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if five, they keep coming up. Let's start with
the most obvious, given the Boulder sighting theory one the CIA, Yeah,
either a cover up or maybe protection.
Speaker 1: Okay, the cover up angle first, why would they silence him?
Speaker 2: Well, we know they were interested. Stargate project proves that
documents mention him. Then you have the agents identified in Boulder,
the motive maybe that final caf Bund experiment. If Grienberg
was about to publicly prove that all human minds are
potentially linked in this universal field. That's knowledge with huge implications.
Could it be weaponized? Did they see it as a
national security threat that needed to be contained by removing the.
Speaker 1: Source stop the proof from getting out.
Speaker 2: Possibly, But there's a counter argument. It is, if you
want to suppress an idea, pragmatically making the guy vanish
in a huge mystery is maybe.
Speaker 3: The worst way to do it.
Speaker 2: It just amplified his notoriety, spread his theories like wildfire
because of the intrigue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the streisand effect almost exactly.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't it been easier to just discredit him, cut off funding,
sabotage the experiment quietly. A dramatic disappearance seems counterproductive if
suppression was the only goal.
Speaker 1: So the other CIA angle is protection, like witness protection.
Speaker 3: That's floated too.
Speaker 2: Maybe he knew something dangerous, or maybe they thought his
research was too dangerous for him, so they extracted him,
put him somewhere safe.
Speaker 1: But would Grinberg agree to that? Didn't you say he
was kind of anti Western establishment.
Speaker 2: That's the sticking point. It seems completely out of character
for him to voluntarily go under the wing of the CIA,
the very symbol of the materialistic power structure he seemed
to critique.
Speaker 3: It doesn't quite fit his profile.
Speaker 1: Okay, so CIA is theory one. What's next?
Speaker 2: Theory two? The Mexican government. This focuses more on Padia
getting shut down, the PGR.
Speaker 1: File vanishing local politics.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Remember, Greenberg had connections right to the top via the
president's sister, Margherita Lopez Portillo, and his mentor. Pachittah had
her own complicated history with the authorities being pursued for voodoo.
Speaker 1: So maybe talking about shamanism, especially linked to powerful figures,
was still sensitive.
Speaker 2: It could be maybe Padia uncovering US agents operating in
relation to Greenberg was something the Mexican government wanted buried,
either to avoid diplomatic issues or to purt their own
secrets or narratives around figures like Pacheetah. Removing Padilla stops
that line of inquiry.
Speaker 1: Cold makes sense, But what's the argument against this one time?
Speaker 3: Manly?
Speaker 2: Mexico's government has changed leadership multiple times since nineteen ninety four,
different parties, different.
Speaker 3: People in power.
Speaker 2: You'd think if it was purely a domestic political cover
up from that era, someone somewhere would have leaked something
by now a whistleblower, a deaf dead confession, but there's
been silence.
Speaker 1: Okay. Theory three.
Speaker 3: Theory three, he.
Speaker 2: Just walked away voluntary retirement combined with unintentional myth making.
Speaker 1: Meaning he chose to disappear for privacy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe he was tired of the controversy, tired of
the pressure, and just wanted out and vanishing it kind
of achieved two things of one, what we see and
his ideas explode. The mystery itself lends credibility. If people
think powerful agencies had to silence him, that his theories
about reality being malleable must have seemed way more plausible,
more dangerous, right, his absence becomes the ultimate proof in
a weird way.
Speaker 1: He gets peace and his legacy gets supercharged.
Speaker 2: It's a neat if cynical logic, but it comes at
a huge cost emotionally. You mean, yeah, you have to
see Greenberg as well. Frankly extremely selfish to do that,
to just abandon his daughter, his siblings, everyone who cared
about him, leaving them with decades of uncertainty and grief.
His family insists that wasn't him. It contradicts everything they
say about his character right.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to theory number four, the one medea
the investigator apparently took seriously.
Speaker 2: Yes, theory four, the Teresa theory. It revolves around his
second wife, Teresa.
Speaker 1: Okay, what's the story there?
Speaker 2: Their relationship, by all accounts, was incredibly toxic in the
months before he vanished. People in his inner circle, his family,
his first wife, They were deeply suspicious of her. Why
Greenberg himself left these desperate voicemails for family, saying Teresa
was mentally torturing him. She was apparently bipolar, intensely jealous.
Speaker 1: Of his work, and the suspicion went deeper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, his family started digging into her background, found out
she'd married him without even telling her own family. Her
academic credentials seemed questionable, maybe fake.
Speaker 3: This fueled this.
Speaker 2: Theory that she wasn't who she seemed, that maybe she
was planted, planted by who could be anyone interested in
controlling him, the CIA, another agency, someone who wanted access
to or control over his research.
Speaker 3: The secret agent theory.
Speaker 1: Wow, and how bad did things get between them?
Speaker 2: So bad that Grinberg, in his final months was apparently
sleeping in his car sleeping in.
Speaker 1: His car, the guy trying to unlock the secrets of
the universe yep.
Speaker 2: Felt safer or less tormented sleeping in his car than
in his own home with her. That paints a pretty
grim picture.
Speaker 1: Definitely, is there any actual evidence linking her to the
disappearance beyond the bad relationship.
Speaker 2: It's all circumstantial, but it adds up. She cashed a
one thousand dollars check from his account right after he disappeared.
Motive pay off okay. Phone records showed she was making
regular calls to a night watchman at a local school,
a guy known to have a paramilitary background. Very suspicious contact.
Her stories about where Jacobo went were contradictory. She told
a stepmother they were flying to nepall together. She told
the night watchmen he flew to a city within Mexico.
Can't both be true?
Speaker 1: Red flags everywhere?
Speaker 2: And then when she went to pick up her dog
and clothes from their place later, she wasn't alone. She
was seen with another woman described as a blonde handler type,
like she was being managed escorted.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is sounding less like a domestic dispute and
more like something else.
Speaker 2: Right, right, But here's the final piece that makes this
theory so compelling and chilling.
Speaker 1: What's that?
Speaker 2: Exactly one year after Jacobo vanished December nineteen ninety five,
Teresa vanished too.
Speaker 1: Teresa disappeared completely, never seen or heard from again. Wow.
So if she was involved, maybe as part of an operation.
Once her role was done, she.
Speaker 3: Was move from the board too.
Speaker 2: It ties things up in a very neat, very dark way.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's four theories. What's the last one? You said
it was the wildest?
Speaker 2: Yeah, theory five. He exited the matrix.
Speaker 1: Literally, he used his own theory to leave.
Speaker 2: That's the idea. It loops right back to Pachetah, his mentor.
Remember her vanishing act. Yeah, how she'd disappeared when the
authorities closed in. The theory is, what if she didn't
just teach him about manipulating reality? What if she taught
him how to do it, how to consciously depart from
our reality if things got too dangerous.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't taken, He wasn't hiding. He just stepped
sideways out of existence.
Speaker 2: Following his mentor's footsteps, using the very principles he was researching.
It's poetically perfect in a way.
Speaker 1: But to believe that You first have to believe the
Cuic theory is real, and you have to believe Pachita
could actually do what Grinberg claimed exactly.
Speaker 2: And that requires a critical look at Pachitta's own credibility.
Speaker 1: Right, was there any independent proof of her powers?
Speaker 2: Well, there's this famous story about the jazz legend Charles Mingus.
Speaker 1: Mingus the musician.
Speaker 2: The very same He was suffering terribly from als Lugarrig's disease.
He went down to Mexico sought out Pachetah for one
of her spirit surgeries.
Speaker 1: Did she cure him?
Speaker 2: She performed her ritual with the knife. Mingus came out
absolutely convinced he was cured. He apparently said something amazing
like she knows how to cut just between the pores
from God to Pachetah.
Speaker 3: He believed.
Speaker 1: But was he actually cured?
Speaker 2: His wife, Sue Graham, was there. She was skeptical. While
Mingus was resting, she carefully peeled back the bandage Patchetta
had put on him.
Speaker 1: Was there a scar, surgery marks.
Speaker 2: Nothing, no cut, no blood, no physical evidence of any
surgery at all. Oh, Sue kept up the pretense for
Charles's sake, didn't want to crush his hope, but sadly
he passed away from the als just months later.
Speaker 1: So that suggests Pachitta's real power wasn't materializing organs.
Speaker 2: But maybe an incredible power of suggestion, the ability to
make people believe she had altered reality, perhaps altering their
subjective ex experience so profoundly they felt healed, even if
the underlying biology wasn't changed.
Speaker 1: Which throws cold water on the idea she could teach
Greenberg how to physically exit the matrix.
Speaker 3: It does.
Speaker 2: It makes that final most exotic theory rests more on
faith in Greenberg's interpretation than on verifiable evidence of Pacheeta's abilities.
Speaker 1: So we're left with what a brilliant mind, a radical theory,
and a disappearance shrouded in conflicting evidence and intrigue.
Speaker 2: Pretty much, that's the legacy, isn't it. He made this
incredibly bold attempt to bridge science and spirit, using psychophysiology
to explore indigenous wisdom. But his ultimate proof, his big experiments,
they vanished with him. Scientists haven't replicated the entanglement results convincingly.
Speaker 1: The man, the data, it's all gone.
Speaker 3: It's gone.
Speaker 2: But the disappearance itself, as we said, becomes this strange
echoing statement, Maybe just because you can't find something, whether
it's a missing person and a lost government file or
a proof of a universal consciousness field, doesn't automatic mean
it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: That leaves us with a final thought, doesn't it a
question for everyone listening if grin Broke was onto something,
even partially, If our consciousness does play a role in
shaping the reality we experience running that code, then what
kind of responsibility do we all have for the code
we're collectively generating right now? What kind of reality are
we choosing to observe into existence?