Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes for a second,
just for a second, and transport yourself to Pune in India.
You're standing on the banks of the Mutha River. It's
late afternoon, the light's starting to fade, and there's that
humidity in the air that just sticks to your skin.
Speaker 2: You can almost feel it exactly.
Speaker 1: And you look up. You're expecting to see, you know,
maybe some heavy monsoon clouds rolling in, or perhaps a
flock of birds heading home for the night. But instead,
the texture of the sky is just raw.
Speaker 2: It's not smooth. Yeah, it's grainy. It's shifting.
Speaker 1: It's shifting.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then you see them, these massive, dark, swirling columns.
They're stretching from the water surface all the way up
into the sky and they're twisting, pulsating, swaying.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you're standing there, your first instinct is not weather.
It's panic. It looks like the sky is physically tearing
itself apart, or maybe like smoke from some massive oil
fire is just choking the entire horizon.
Speaker 2: It's a really visceral image. I was looking at the
footage we have in the research deck, and if I
didn't have the content, my first thought would have been
a tornado, you know, a tornado that somehow lost its way, right,
a tornado.
Speaker 1: Or I don't know, some kind of weird magnetic anomaly
just dragging dust up into the stratosphere or something not normal.
Speaker 2: But you can't dodge this tornado because it's not wind. No,
it's life.
Speaker 1: It's a biological event masquerading as a meteorological one. What
you're looking at is millions, and I mean literally millions
of mosquitoes, the mosquito tornado.
Speaker 2: Just seeing those two words together in our show notes
today made me like, check the window screens in the studio.
It is the absolute stuff of nightmares.
Speaker 1: It certainly triggers a primal flight response, doesn't it. But
what's fascinating here, once you get past the skin crawling aspect,
is that while it looks like the apocalypse, it's actually
a display of swarm dynamics. Okay, what you're seeing is
a mating ritual on an industrial scale. These aren't just
random bugs buzzing around. It's a synchronized vertical column where
the males are clustering.
Speaker 2: Together to what put on a show.
Speaker 1: Essentially, yeah, to make themselves more visible to the females.
Against the contrast of the horizon.
Speaker 2: So the end of days is actually just a giant
singles bar for insects, A very loud, very biting singles bar. Yes,
But the density of it, I mean, the fact that
it's thick enough to block out the sun. That's the
part that tells us something is wrong with the ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Uh okay.
Speaker 2: It suggests a real lack of predators, you know, frogs, dragonflies, bats,
or maybe stagnant water conditions that allow the population to
just explode completely unchecked. It's a glitch in the ecological balance.
Speaker 1: And that is exactly what we're doing today. We are
looking for those glitches. We have this massive steck of
reports here, videos, papers, eyewitness accounts from all over the
world where the physical world just seems to break its
own rules.
Speaker 2: We're talking about those moments where your eyes tell you
one thing like that's a portal to another dimension, or
that forest is breathing like a mammal, or even that
river is bleeding and your brain has to just scramble
to catch up with the physics.
Speaker 1: We are going to decode the magic and find them underneath. Oh,
welcome to thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: Glad to be here, and I have to say, looking
at the docket for today, we're going to need to
keep a very open mind because some of these phenomena,
even when you know the science, they still feel impossible.
Speaker 1: I'm ready, I've got my skepticism on high alert, but
I'm also fully prepared to be terrified.
Speaker 2: All right, let's start with the sky, because we have
this like primal trust that the sky is a reliable backdrop. Right,
it's blue by day, it's black with stars by night.
Sun comes up, sun goes down. It's the one constant
you would hope.
Speaker 1: So yeah, but the atmosphere is a fluid and it's
full of lenses and mirrors if you know where to look.
Speaker 2: So let's look at this first case study, the sun candle.
Now I've seen photos of this before, usually from really
really cold places. To me, it doesn't look like a candle.
It looks like a port. Yeah. It's this vertical beam
of intense light shooting sort from the horizon disappearing into
the cloud.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely breathtaking. In meteorology we often call this a
or just a light pillar. And you're right. It almost
always comes from places like Scandinavia or northern Canada or Russia,
super cold places. It looks like the beam from the
Death Star, or like a sulfi tractor beam. If I
saw this while I was driving at two in the morning,
I'm not thinking weather. I'm thinking abduction.
Speaker 2: And you wouldn't be alone in that. Yeah, a significant
number of UFO reports actually trace back to this specific phenomenon.
But what you're seeing is essentially a massive floating mirror trick.
Speaker 1: A mirror trick.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It all comes down to the geometry of ice.
Speaker 1: Okay, but ice is just frozen water. Ice is messy,
it's chaotic. Why does it make a perfect straight geometric
beam of light.
Speaker 2: Because in the atmosphere, under very very specific conditions, ice
doesn't just freeze into random blobs or snowflakes. When the
air is very cold and very still, water vapor freezes
into these flat hexagonal.
Speaker 1: Plates sagonal plates.
Speaker 2: Yeah, think of them like tiny microscopic, six sided dinner
plates made of glass.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, so we have millions of tiny little dinner
plates just floating around in the air.
Speaker 2: Correct, And this is the key part. As they fall
through the air, aerodynamics takes over, just like a leaf
falling tends to drift with its flat side down. These
little ice plates orient themselves horizontally, so they all line
up precisely. So now you have the entire atmosphere filled
with millions of horizontal mirrors, all perfectly parallel to the ground.
When a light source like the setting sun or even
a street lamp hits them, the light reflects off those
flat surfaces relative to your eye.
Speaker 1: So your brain just stecks them up.
Speaker 2: Your brain stacks those reflections vertically, creating the illusion of
a solid pillar of light.
Speaker 1: Wait. Wait, so the pillar isn't physically there. It's just
a reflection relative to.
Speaker 2: My position, exactly that if you walked a mile to
the left, the pillar would appear to move with you.
It's a subjective reality.
Speaker 1: It's even weirder.
Speaker 2: It's a personal light show generated by the interaction between
your retina, the light source, and those floating ice plates.
Speaker 1: That actually makes it trippier. Feels solid, but it's a.
Speaker 2: Ghost it is, and that creates a sense of unease.
I think we aren't used to seeing giant structures in
the sky that move when we move.
Speaker 1: Speaking of structures that shouldn't be there, let's move to Canada.
We have a report here of a similar thing happening,
but at night with artificial light.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, the end Times pillars. I remember this one, right.
Speaker 1: This guy is out for a walk late at night,
the ground is covered in snow, and suddenly the sky
just lights up. But not like an aurora. It's these
insanely bright, multi colored vertical pillars shooting up from the
ground into the black sky.
Speaker 2: It really looks like the rapture is happening.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. The reaction from the locals was panic, and honestly,
I get it. We're wired to fear sudden dramatic changes
in the sky, of course.
Speaker 2: But again, this is our friend, the hexagonal ice plate
at work.
Speaker 1: But these were all different colors. They weren't just.
Speaker 2: White light because the light sources on the ground were multicolored.
You had sodium street lights giving off these orange pillars,
maybe some led car headlights creating blue white pillars, a
neon sign creating a red one. The ice crystals people
often call it diamond dust. When it's this load to
the ground, they're just reflecting whatever light is below them.
Speaker 1: So the city was effectively projecting itself into the sky.
Speaker 2: That's a beautiful way to put it. Actually, it's a
mirror image of the city lights just stretched vertically by
the optics of the ice. It's light pollution turned into
accidental art.
Speaker 1: It really highlights how much our brain tries to make
sense of things. We see a pillar, we assume it's
a solid structure. We don't assume millions of tiny floating mirrors.
Speaker 2: Our brains aren't wired for atmospheric optics. They're wired for
solids and liquids and things we can touch. When the
atmosphere starts mimicking a solid structure, we get a glitch
in our perception.
Speaker 1: Talk about glitches, Let's look at this footage of the
dual sun. This one messed with me the most.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: We look out the window and there are two distinct
suns in the sky, not a reflection on water, but
two glowing orbs in the One is bright and one
is slightly dimmer right above it.
Speaker 2: This is where the glitch in the simulation. Comments really
take over the Internet.
Speaker 1: Well, can you blame them? It looks like the rendering
engine accidentally loaded the sun asset twice, like whoops, forgot
to delete the placeholder.
Speaker 2: It absolutely does, but this is usually a specific type
of mirage or a refraction event. It happens when sunlight
passes through unmatched layers of atmosphere that have different densities.
Speaker 1: Explain that density layers, What does that mean?
Speaker 2: Okay, So imagine you have a layer of really cold
dense air sitting right next to a layer of warm,
less dense air. Light actually travels at different speeds through
those different densities, so when it hits the boundary between them, it.
Speaker 1: Bends refraction like one of straw looks bent in a
glass of water.
Speaker 2: Exactly that, but on a planetary scale, the atmosphere is
bending the light path so significantly that your eye is
actually seeing the Sun in two different places. At the
same time. You're seeing the real sun and then you're
seeing a ghost image projected by the bet light.
Speaker 1: So we are definitely not seeing a second star entering
our solar system.
Speaker 2: If another star entered our solar system, we would have
much much bigger problems than a weird Instagram video. Right,
gravity would have let us know by now loudly fairpoint.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's try this one. The brock inspector. This sounds
like a Robert Ludlum novel or maybe a heavy metal band.
Speaker 2: It does have a very dramatic name. It's named after
the Brocken Peak in the Hearts Mountains in Germany. But
this specific report we're looking at comes from the English
Lake district Saint John's in the Veil.
Speaker 1: So a hiker is up there alone on a ridge
and they look down into the mist and see a giant,
shadowy figure and it's not just a shadow. It's surrounded
by this perfect rainbow halo. It looks like a divine
being descending from the heavens.
Speaker 2: This phenomenon has spooked mountaineers for centuries. It's actually the
origin of a lot of local ghost stories and mountain folklore.
I mean, if you're exhausted, you're at high altitude, maybe
a bit dehydrated, and you see a giant shadow man
with a rainbow aura.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have a spiritual experience.
Speaker 2: They're definitely gonna have a spiritual experience.
Speaker 1: I would absolutely run if I'm alone on a mountain
and I see a shadow giant, I am leaving. That's
it for me.
Speaker 2: But if you ran, the shadow would run with you,
because the shadow is you.
Speaker 1: Wait, I'm the giant, You're the giant.
Speaker 2: The brock inspect happens when the sun is directly behind
you and you are looking down into mist or fog.
Your shadow gets cast onto the water droplets of the mist.
And because the mist is at a specific distance and
there are no other reference points like trees or rocks
nearby to give you a sense of scale, your brain
misinterprets the size.
Speaker 1: It just defaults too huge.
Speaker 2: It projects the shadow as being huge and far away.
Speaker 1: So I'm scaring myself with my own projection.
Speaker 2: That's deep essentially, yes. Yeah. And the rainbow halo. That's
an effect called a glory. It's caused by the diffraction
of light back towards the source, which is you, by
the water droplets. It's a personal rainbow just for you
framing your giant shadow.
Speaker 1: That is actually kind of poetic. You are the giant ghost.
It creates a real main character moment, for sure.
Speaker 2: It creates a sense of grandeur absolutely, and maybe a
little bit of terror.
Speaker 1: Okay, that one is beautiful, This next one not so much.
Let's talk about Zushan, China. The Crimson Sky.
Speaker 2: Oh, this footage looked apocalyptic.
Speaker 1: The entire sky turned a deep blood red color. It
was glowing, and you could just feel the panic. People
thought the city was on fire. They thought they were
under attack. There was speculation about chemical leaks. It looks
like the sky is bleeding.
Speaker 2: It creates an immediate danger response. Red is the color
of fire, of blood, of warning signs. But the twist
here is that this wasn't nature acting alone. It was
a collaboration between nature and human technology. How so it
turned out to be lights from fishing boats.
Speaker 1: Fishing boats, no way, How could fishing boats create a
blood red sky over a whole city.
Speaker 2: Yes, specifically boats that were fishing for a fish called
the Pacific saary. This is a fish that is very
attracted to bright light. So these massive commercial vessels use
a rays of hundreds of high intensity red led lights
to draw the shoals to the surface.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I've seen boat lights. They don't turn the
whole scale red.
Speaker 2: They do if the atmosphere conditions are perfect, and that
night they were. There's a layer of very low hanging
clouds and thick fog. The water droplets in the air
were dense enough to catch that intense red light from
the boats and scatter it everywhere.
Speaker 1: So the light is just bouncing around inside the fog exactly.
Speaker 2: And because red light has a long wavelength. It scatters
very effectively through fog and clouds, filling the entire cloud layer.
Speaker 1: So the city was essentially sitting inside a giant red
lamp shade.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect description. The clouds acted as the shade,
diffusing the light from the boats far below. It really
shows how light pollution can mess with our heads. When
the weather conditions align just right.
Speaker 1: We are so disconnected from the sources of things. We
see a red sky, we think fire or apocalypse. I
don't think fishing industry.
Speaker 2: It's a reminder that we are constantly altering our environment,
sometimes in ways we don't expect.
Speaker 1: And sometimes in ways that absolutely terrify us. Definitely, speaking
of light messing with us, there was one more atmospheric
oddity I wanted to touch on in Alberta, Canada. The
upward snow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one confused the Internet for a solid week.
Speaker 1: It's freezing way below zero. There's a light on the
ground pointing straight up and the snow falling through. It
looks like it's moving wrong. It's swirling upwards. It looks
like it's defying gravity.
Speaker 2: This is a great example of relative motion and the
stroboscopic effect of certain lights. The snow is likely being
blown in turbulent eddies by the wind, which is normal.
But because the light source is directed up and the
background is pitch black, your brain loses all its reference points.
Speaker 1: You can't tell which way is up or down exactly.
Speaker 2: You have no frame of reference. Yeah, and if the
shutter speed of the camera or the frequency of the
light happens to sync up with the movement of the flakes,
it can make them look like they're floating still or
even rising. It's an illusion created by turbulence.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the sky is full of mirrors, prisms and
fishing boat lights. Let's come back down to the ground,
because if the sky is that tricky, surely the earth
is solid, right, I need the floor to be the floor.
Speaker 2: Well, I have some bad news for you regarding section
two of our discussion. Oh no, no, the earth is
a lot more mobile that we give it credit for.
Speaker 1: That's a nice ominous segue to the breathing forest in Mugdock, Scotland.
I watched this clip three times and I still don't
quite believe it.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly unsettling to watch.
Speaker 1: So a guy is just walking his dog. It's right
after a storm bahbed. He's on a path he's walked
hundreds of times, and suddenly he stops because the forest floor,
the actual ground covered in moss and pine needles, is
literally rising and falling.
Speaker 2: Like a chest heaving. It's rhythmic.
Speaker 1: Yes, it looks exactly like there is a giant monster
sleeping underground. Taking these deep, slow breaths, the ground lifts
up a foot maybe two, then sinks back down.
Speaker 2: If you didn't know the mechanics, you would absolutely assume
you were standing on the back of a sleeping giant.
It triggers that uncanny valley feeling because the earth isn't
supposed to have a respiratory rate.
Speaker 1: Please tell me there isn't a giant underground.
Speaker 2: There is not. The explanation is actually rooted in botany
and physics. To understand this, you have to look at
the architecture of the trees. These are likely spruce or
pine trees growing in soil that is either very rocky
or water logged.
Speaker 1: And what does that do to the roots of the tree.
Speaker 2: When trees can't send a main tap root deep down
because of rock or water, they spread their roots wide
and shallow, like.
Speaker 1: A flat plate just under the surface exactly like a plate.
Speaker 2: They weave together with the roots of the neighboring trees,
the soil, the moss, and everything to form this cohesive mat.
It's like a rug laid over a hardwood floor.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the rug is the entire forest floor.
Speaker 2: Right now, you introduce storm babet. You have these massive
wind gusts hitting the canopy. The top of the tree,
which is sixty maybe eighty feet in the air. That
tree acts as a giant liver.
Speaker 1: Physics one oh one. A long lever arm means a
lot of force at the full crumb, and the.
Speaker 2: Full crumb is the base of the trunk. So the
wind pulls the top of the tree and the base
of the trunk lifts up. But because the roots are
a woven rug and not a deep anchor, the whole
floor lifts with it.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: The inhale you see is the gust pulling the tree.
The exhale is gravity pulling the tree back down as
the wind lulls.
Speaker 1: For a second plus a ground isn't breathing. The trees
are just doing a tug of war with the wind
and we're standing on the rope.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy, but it's a very dangerous
place to be if you're standing on that chest. When
the roofs finally snap or the tree topples over, you
fall into the pit and the heavy root ball slams
back down right on top of you.
Speaker 1: That's a mechanism for being buried alive. Note to self,
do not stand on the heaving forest floor ever.
Speaker 2: Good note to have.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of ground that stops acting like ground, let's
talk about japan liquefaction.
Speaker 2: This is a phenomenon often associated with earthquakes, and for
civil engineers it is the absolute ultimate nightmare.
Speaker 1: The video shows a quake happening and then suddenly the
solid pavement, the dirt, everything just turns into this slushy,
liquid mess. Manholes start floating up like quirks, Cars sync
up to their axles. It honestly looks like the ground
is melting.
Speaker 2: It's terrifying because it violates our most basic trust in
the solid earth. Liquefaction happens when loose water saturated soil
loses all its strength and responds to strong shaking.
Speaker 1: How does solid dirt turn into a liquid? Is it
actually melting?
Speaker 2: It's not melting like ice melts with heat it's all
about pressure. Imagine you have a jar filled with sand
and water. If it's just sitting still, the sand grains
are touching each other, they have friction, they can support weight.
Speaker 1: Okay, solid structure.
Speaker 2: Now shake that jar violently. The water tracked between the
sand grains, what's called the poor water, gets pressurized. If
the shaking is fast enough and strong enough, the water
pressure actually pushes the sand grains apart. They lose contact
with each other.
Speaker 1: So the friction disappears instantly.
Speaker 2: The soil loses what's called its sheer strength. It stops
behaving like a solid and starts behaving like a dense fluid.
Speaker 1: And that's why heavy things sink and light things flood up.
The physics rules literally switch from statics to fluid dynamics
in a matter.
Speaker 2: Of seconds exactly. And the really scary part is once
the shaking stops, the water drains out, the sand settles again,
and it becomes solid. Whatever sank is now encased in
what's basically concrete, hard earth that.
Speaker 1: Is deeply unsettling. From melting ground to flowing rivers, but
not rivers of water. Let's talk about the Arabian Peninsula,
the river of oil.
Speaker 2: This video is so striking just visually.
Speaker 1: It shows these guys driving through the desert, pristine yellow sand,
bright blue sky, and cutting right through It is a river,
but it's black, it's viscous. It's crude oil flowing like
a stream.
Speaker 2: It's such a bizarre, surreal contrast. We're used to seeing
oil in barrels or in pipes, not flowing naturally through
a landscape.
Speaker 1: The report says it might be a natural lea or
maybe a pipeline burst, but it really drives home the
reality of that region.
Speaker 2: It does. It's a visual representation of wealth, yes, but
also of environmental strangeness. If it's a natural seep, it's
a powerful reminder that this substance is just sitting there
right under the crust, pressurized and just waiting to come out.
Speaker 1: It's wealth and toxicity flowing side by side, precisely. And
speaking of stuff bubbling up from the ground, let's go
to the tab And Wildlife Reserve in Sabah. The mud volcano.
Speaker 2: Now, this isn't your typical run for your life lava volcano,
not at all.
Speaker 1: No, it looks like a giant science experiment. It's this
thick gray mud just mubbling and oozing, it just goes
blue boop. It's oddly satisfying to watch.
Speaker 2: It's actually quite cool. Literally. Mud volcanoes are often cold
to the touch. They're caused by pressurized gases, mostly methane,
pushing mud and water up some deep.
Speaker 1: Underground like a planetary z.
Speaker 2: It a big gross but yeah, yeah, pretty accurate. It
shows that the pressure on our feet needs release veils,
even if there isn't any magma involved.
Speaker 1: Okay, From gray mud to red water. The red river
in Peru, the Ryak River.
Speaker 2: The footage shows this river turning a bright, almost unnatural
blood red, and of course the locals fear it's a curse.
I mean, if my local river turned to blood, I'd
be checking the ancient texts too.
Speaker 1: It evokes all that biblical imagery, but the cause is
likely just mineral.
Speaker 2: Yes, in mountainous reasons like the Andes in Peru, you
have soil that's incredibly rich in iron oxide and other minerals.
When you get heavy seasonal rains, all that soil washes
into the river. The blood is essentially rust colored mud.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating how often blood in nature turns out to
be just.
Speaker 2: Rust, iron oxide is a very dramatic pigment. Nature uses
it to paint things red all the time. It's the
same exact reason Mars as the red planet.
Speaker 1: Before we leave the ground, we have to talk about gravity,
or maybe the lack thereof. There's a spot in Maharashtra,
India with a reverse waterfall.
Speaker 2: This is a fun one. I love these. You see
water pouring off a mountain cliff, but instead of falling down,
it sprays up.
Speaker 1: It completely defies physics. It looks like the water is
afraid of the ground.
Speaker 2: It's actually just surrendering to a stronger force than gravity
in that moment.
Speaker 1: And that force is the wind. The wind strong enough
to push water up.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. In certain cliff formations you get these incredibly
intense updrafts. The wind hits the cliff face and has
nowhere to go but straight up. If that wind is
stronger than gravity's pull on the individual water droplets, the
waterfall goes up. It's simple vector addition. The upward force
beats the downward force.
Speaker 1: So it's a waterfall that falls up a waterfly.
Speaker 2: Just stick with averse waterfall fair enough.
Speaker 1: And then we have the anti gravity hill at Mount Macedon.
This is a classic tourist mystery.
Speaker 2: Now these are everywhere. Spookale magnetic hill, there's one in
almost every country.
Speaker 1: Girl puts a bottle on the road and you watch
it roll up hill, or so it seems. So is
it magnetic? Is it a gravity vortex? What's the deal?
Speaker 2: It is a powerful optical illusion.
Speaker 1: You're breaking my heart. I want it to be magic.
Speaker 2: I know, I know. These gravity hills are all just
tricks to the landscape. Usually the horizon line is obscured
or it's deceptive. The trees might be growing at an
odd angle, or the surrounding hills slope in a way
that just fools your vestibular system.
Speaker 1: So my eyes are telling me uphill, but my inner
ear and you know, the bottle are saying downhill exactly.
Speaker 2: The bottle is rolling downhill as gravity demands, but the
land around it tricks you into thinking down is up.
It's a total disconnect between your visual system and your
innate sense of balance.
Speaker 1: Nature the ultimate gas lighter in this case, Yes it
is Okay. We've done the sky, we've done the earth.
Now we have to do the part I've been dreading.
Section three nightmare fuel, The creepy crawlers.
Speaker 2: The world of invertrates always a fan favorite.
Speaker 1: Why does it always have to be spiders. Let's talk
about Brazil spider rain.
Speaker 2: A phenomenon that would send a lot of people into
hiding for a very long time.
Speaker 1: The video shows hundreds, maybe thousands of spiders just hanging
in the sky. It looks like they are falling from
the clouds. It looks like it is literally raining erachnands.
Speaker 2: But thankfully for everyone's sanity, spiders cannot fly in the
traditional sense.
Speaker 1: So what is happening. Are they paratrooping? I've heard of ballooning,
where baby spiders use a strand of silk to catch
the wind.
Speaker 2: That's a real thing, but this looks different. This is
likely a community of social spiders, something like Analossumus exzemius,
that build massive, interconnected communal webs.
Speaker 1: Massive webs.
Speaker 2: We're talking webs that can span between trees, between telephone poles,
extending for huge distances. The silk itself is incredibly thin,
so when the light hits it a certain way, or
if it's an overcast day, the silk can become completely
invisible to the camera and the human.
Speaker 1: Eye, so we just see the spiders floating exactly.
Speaker 2: They're sitting on a giant invisible ceiling in the sky.
They aren't falling, they are hunting.
Speaker 1: That is only slightly better than them raining from the sky,
but it's still terrifying. It means you could walk into
a giant invisible.
Speaker 2: Web wallbsolutely could imagine walking down the street and suddenly
hitting a wall of silk and hundreds of spiders.
Speaker 1: I would prefer not to imagine that, thank you. But
looking at the next report, sometimes the webs aren't invisible.
Sometimes they are very very visible. The spider ghost trees.
Speaker 2: This happens after major floods. We saw this in Pakistan
and parts of Australia recently.
Speaker 1: The water rises and the spiders need to escape, so
they go up.
Speaker 2: They head for the high ground, which in this case
is the trees.
Speaker 1: The images show entire trees just wrapped in the thick
white silk. It looks like a Hallween decoration gone horribly wrong.
It looks like a giant cocoon.
Speaker 2: It's a survival mechanism. You have thousands of spiders congregating
on a single tree, all spinning silk to move around
and catch prey. That's also trying to escape the water.
It's a ghostly sight, but it shows just how adaptable
these creatures are.
Speaker 1: It's nature's way of saying, do not touch this tree.
Speaker 2: I would definitely heed that warning.
Speaker 1: Moving from spiders to giant lice, the report calls them
giant Seaslater is that the Cape.
Speaker 2: Of Good Hope giant isopods, basically massive armored woodlights that
live in the deep ocean.
Speaker 1: A family parks their car near the beach, goes for
a walk, and they come back to find their car
covered in these things. Dozens of them, crawling all over
the tires, the doors. They're the size of your hand.
Speaker 2: Just imagine the sound of them skittering on the metal.
That click clicks in I'd rather not.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate nope moment. The report says the car
needed a few washes after that, I think the car
needed to be burned. Why were they even there?
Speaker 2: They were likely just exploring or seeking warmth or maybe shade.
But because they look so prehistoric, they look exactly like trilobites.
It triggers this primal disgust response in us. It's an
invasion of our personal space by something that belongs in
the deep.
Speaker 1: Speaking of invasions moths. We have reports from both Manitoba
and France.
Speaker 2: This is a classic case of a population boom meets
light pollution.
Speaker 1: In Manitoba, every single light source was swarmed. You step
outside and you just get a face full of moths.
And in oion X, France, the boxwood moths completely took
over the town.
Speaker 2: The images are gross. Streetlights are just fuzzy balls of
fluttering wings. Windows are plastered with them.
Speaker 1: It disrupts daily life. You can't open a door, you
can't breathe without inhaling a moth.
Speaker 2: It's a reminder of how quickly insects can multiply if
the conditions are just right. Nature is usually kept in
check by predators in weather, but if you get a
mild winter and a lack of bats, boom, population explosion.
Speaker 1: But moths are just annoying. Locusts. Locusts are destructive. We
have a report from southern Russia from twenty nineteen. This
was biblical, truly a giant swarm of locusts. They ate everything, crops, fields,
The sky literally turned dark with them.
Speaker 2: The farmers tried everything nets, sprays, banging pots and pans.
Nothing worked.
Speaker 1: The report says they own the place.
Speaker 2: Locust swarms are a genuine force of nature. They are
a biomass consuming machine. When they reach that critical population density,
they undergo a physiological change. They actually change color and
become more aggressive, and they just strip the land bear.
It's total economic devastation.
Speaker 1: It's a humbling reminder that despite all our technology, a
billion hungry bugs can still wipe us out.
Speaker 2: They have the numbers. We are just guests in their world.
Speaker 1: Really, okay, let's move away from the chaotic swarms and
look at something a bit more ritualistic. Section four. The
mystery of the circle.
Speaker 2: Animal behavior is often strange, but when it becomes geometric,
it gets really eerie.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the reindeer cyclone in Murmansk, Russia. The
drone footage of this is absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2: It is stunning. It looks like a piece of performance art.
Speaker 1: It's a herd of reindeer running in a perfect spinning circle.
It looks like a furry tornado.
Speaker 2: It does. And while it looks like some mysterious ritual,
it's actually a brilliant defensive.
Speaker 1: Strategy defense against what predators.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wolves, bears, or in the case of this particular video,
probably a veterinarian trying to administer vaccines.
Speaker 1: Ah the needle the ultimate predator.
Speaker 2: By running in that tight circle, the reindeer creates a
moving wall. It's impossible for a predator to target a
single individual. It's just visual overload. Yeah, and guess who's
safe in the center of the cyclone.
Speaker 1: The babies, the vulnerable ones.
Speaker 2: The calves, and the females. The big bucks run on
the outside flank. It's a fortress made of antlers in speed.
Speaker 1: That is incredibly smart, and it's like fluid dynamics applied
to biology.
Speaker 2: It is. It's a perfect example of herd intelligence.
Speaker 1: Now contrast that with the turkey ritual. This one went
viral a while back.
Speaker 2: Yes, the turkeys circling the dead cat, or in this case,
a dead turkey.
Speaker 1: Right, a dead turkey lies in the middle of the
road and a group of live turkeys is walking in
a perfect circle around it.
Speaker 2: The internet screamed cult it looks.
Speaker 1: Like a seance. They're trying to resurrect their fallen brother
a rise Chicken Arise.
Speaker 2: It looks terrifyingly ritualistic to watch, but biologists think it's
just a weird mix of cure curiosity, and instinct. They
are inspecting the dead bird, but they're also wary, so
they keep moving. They end up just following each other's tails,
and suddenly you have a circle.
Speaker 1: So it's less black magic and more follow the leader
gone wrong.
Speaker 2: Most likely birds can get stuck in these strange behavioral loops.
Speaker 1: Speaking of loops, the sheep circle in China. This was
a huge mystery just recently.
Speaker 2: Yes, the sheep that walked in a circle for twelve
straight days.
Speaker 1: Twelve days, that's insane. And it was hundreds of them.
Speaker 2: It started with just a few and then more and
more joined in. People thought it was hypnosis or a
magnetic anomaly affecting them.
Speaker 1: Was it a disease.
Speaker 2: There is a disease called listeriosis that causes circling. It's
often called silogie, but usually the animals die within twenty
four to forty eight hours. For them to do it
for twelve days, that points more towards a behavioral glitch.
Speaker 1: A herd mentality glitch exactly.
Speaker 2: Sheep are extreme followers. If the lead sheep starts circling,
maybe because of a week pen structure or stress, the
others will follow, and if the leader then locks onto
the tail of the last sheep in the line.
Speaker 1: The loops and they're stuck, and they.
Speaker 2: Just keep going. It's a really stark example of the
power of conformity.
Speaker 1: Which leads us to the darkest version of this phenomenon,
the ant mel the death spiral, the march to nowhere.
This is honestly the most disturbing thing on the entire
list for me.
Speaker 2: Army ants are blind. They don't navigate by sight. They
navigate by smell. Specifically, they follow the pheromone scent trail
of the ant directly in front of them.
Speaker 1: I think I know where this is going, and I
don't like it.
Speaker 2: If the leader of the column accidentally turns inward and
crosses its own pass, it starts following its own scent.
Speaker 1: And every ant behind.
Speaker 2: It just follows, and they form a spiral, a death spiral.
They will walk in that circle, following the ant in
front until they die of exhaustion.
Speaker 1: That is horrifying. It's a system bug, a literal bug.
Speaker 2: It is. It's a fatal flaw in their programming. They
have no override command. They have no common sense to say, hey, wait,
we've been here before. They just follow the one rule,
follow the scent.
Speaker 1: It shows that this complex colony behavior isn't intelligent in
the way we think of it. It's emergent, and sometimes
it emerges into a death trap.
Speaker 2: Nature could be incredibly cruel and indifferent.
Speaker 1: Speaking of crul Let's talk about the monkey brawl in Lutbury, Thailand.
Speaker 2: This was shocking to see the sheer scale of it.
Speaker 1: Huge gangs of monkeys fighting in the middle of the street,
and it was over a single pot of yogurt.
Speaker 2: This was right in the middle of the COVID nineteen lockdown.
Speaker 1: Right, So there were no tourists.
Speaker 2: No tourists means no people feeding them bananas and snacks
all day their primary food, soorts vanished overnight.
Speaker 1: So the social order just completely collapsed instantly.
Speaker 2: You had rival gangs who usually stick to their own
territories clashing in the streets over scraps.
Speaker 1: It's such a stark reminder of how fragile civilization is,
even monkey civilization. You remove the resources and it turns
into a street brawl for yogurt.
Speaker 2: It's a very potent lesson in resource dependency.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's look up at the sky again. We've talked
about snow and light, but what about when it rains
things that are not water. Section five precipitation mysteries.
Speaker 2: This is a classic category of high strangeness. It goes
back centuries.
Speaker 1: And the classic example fish rain.
Speaker 2: This is one of those things that sounds like a
complete myth until you see the video.
Speaker 1: People are walking in the rain and fish live fetch
are flopping onto the pavement.
Speaker 2: Around that, and people are just collecting them for dinner.
Speaker 1: It's free seafood delivery from the sky. But how how
do fish get into the clouds water spouts?
Speaker 2: Imagine a tornado that forms over water. It acts like
a giant, powerful vacuum cleaner.
Speaker 1: It sucks up the water and the fish that are
in it exactly.
Speaker 2: It sucks up the surface water, frogs, fish, crabs, whatever
is small enough. It flings them high up into the
atmosphere into the storm clouds. Then the wind carries them inland,
and when.
Speaker 1: The wind finally dies down.
Speaker 2: Gravity takes over and the fish fall out of the sky.
Speaker 1: That is just wild. Imagine you're getting hit in the
head by a mackerel on your way to work.
Speaker 2: It's rare, but it definitely happens.
Speaker 1: What about blood rain in Iran on Horrmuo's Island.
Speaker 2: The beach in the waves literally look like they're made
of blood. It's this vibrant red.
Speaker 1: It looks like a crime scene on a massive scale.
Speaker 2: But again it's all about geology. Horrmon's Island has soil
that is incredibly rich in red ochre, which is just
iron oxide.
Speaker 1: Ah, our old friend, iron oxide. Again.
Speaker 2: Yes, when it rains heavily, that red soil washes into
the sea, it stains the water. It's incredibly dramatic, but
it's completely harmless.
Speaker 1: And then we have this one Texas blue rain.
Speaker 2: This one is still a bit of a mystery.
Speaker 1: Puddles in Texas turning bright blue, not sky reflection blue
like gatorade blue.
Speaker 2: The reports say there's no solid explanation for it yet.
Some suspect chemical reactions in the soil. Others suspect pollution
or maybe runoff from industrial sites.
Speaker 1: See that's the scary part. Red rain is just iron.
Fish rain is just wind. Blue rain might be chemicals.
Speaker 2: It's an anomaly that definitely needs some serious testing.
Speaker 1: Let's stay with water for section six. Aquatic mysteries.
Speaker 2: The ocean is still full of so many mysteries.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the whales stranding at King Island, Tasmania.
This is just tragic.
Speaker 2: It was nearly two hundred pilot whales beach themselves.
Speaker 1: Why do they do this? Why does a whole podge
drive itself onto the sand.
Speaker 2: Pilot whales are what we call gregarious. They are incredibly
tight knit social animals.
Speaker 1: They have a leader, and if the leader makes a mistake.
Speaker 2: If the leader gets sick or confused by man made sonar,
or just disoriented in shallow water and heads to shore,
the others follow.
Speaker 1: They follow them to their deck.
Speaker 2: Their social loyalty overrides their individual survival instinct. It's absolutely
heartbreaking to watch. The locals tried to save them, pushing
them back out to see, but many of them kept
swimming back to the beach to be with their pod.
Speaker 1: It's that herd mentality again, but this time in the ocean.
Speaker 2: A very similar thing happened with the sardine beaching in
northern Japan.
Speaker 1: A kilometer of beach was just covered in dead sardines,
thousands and thousands of them.
Speaker 2: The theories here vary. They could have been chased by
predators like tuna or yellowtail and driven into the shallow water,
where they ran out of oxygen.
Speaker 1: Or they hit a cold pocket of water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, rapid temperature changes can stunfish and kill them in
huge numbers.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Either way, it's a mass casualty event that looks apocalyptic
when it washes up on the shore.
Speaker 1: It's a reminder that nature produces so much life and
sometimes it just dumps it on the beach.
Speaker 2: It's a brutal cycle.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about something a bit lighter. Tree fountains.
Speaker 2: This is a fun anomaly.
Speaker 1: There's a video of water gushing out of a cut
tree stump and another one of water just pouring out
of a knothole in a living tree in Southeast Europe.
Speaker 2: It looks like someone turned on a faucet inside the tree.
Speaker 1: The guys in the video are drinking it, which.
Speaker 2: I would not recommend unless you know the source. But
in this case, it's likely just hydrostatic pressure at work.
Pressure how heavy rains can completely saturate the ground. The
pressure builds up in the root system of the tree.
If there's a hollow trunk or a cut pipe, which
is the vascular system of the tree, the water has.
Speaker 1: To go somewhere, so it shoots up the tree and
out whatever hole it can find exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a natural plumbing blowout.
Speaker 1: I love that. A tree that doubles as a water cooler.
Speaker 2: Just don't expect it to be chilled.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're in the home stretch now. Section seven Miscellaneous Anomalies,
the grab bag of weirdness. Let's do it the best
for last descending clouds. A cloud floating right on the
ground in a.
Speaker 2: Forest and the witness tries to catch it, which is great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not just fog. You can see it's a distinct, puffy,
little cloud just drifting between the trees.
Speaker 2: Well, technically fog is a cloud on the ground, but
sometimes you get these isolated pockets of cold air that
keep a small cloud formation distinct and low to the ground.
It looks like a piece of the sky just fell down.
Speaker 1: It looks like a glitch. I would try to eat it.
It looks like cotton candy.
Speaker 2: It would tastes like damp air.
Speaker 1: Very disappointing. What about the eternal flame at Shale Creek.
Speaker 2: This is beautiful, a waterfall with a fire burning behind the.
Speaker 1: Water, fire and water living together in harmony.
Speaker 2: It's a natural gas leak from the rock.
Speaker 1: Face, and who lit it.
Speaker 2: Probably hikers many years ago, or if you believe the
lore for spirits. But once it's lit, the steady flow
of gas keeps it burning, even with the water falling
over it.
Speaker 1: It's a real life fantasy element, a magical item it is.
Speaker 2: It's a perpetual campfire.
Speaker 1: Then we have the Bloodwood tree, another bleeding phenomenon. You
cut this tree and this thick red liquid just pours
out its.
Speaker 2: Sap, specifically its sap that's incredibly rich in tannin. It
looks gruesome, but it's actually for healing. The sap seals
the wound and protects the tree from infection. It's a
sophisticated immune response that just happens to look like a
horror movie special effect.
Speaker 1: And finally, the birds birds free fall in Mexico.
Speaker 2: This video was everywhere for a while, a flog of
yellow headed blackbirds.
Speaker 1: Flying in a tight formation, and then suddenly hundreds of
them just drop out of the sky smash into the ground.
Some managed to fly away, but many of them died
on impact.
Speaker 2: People immediately thought it was five G or toxic fumes,
or electrocution from power.
Speaker 1: Lines, but the most likely guess is.
Speaker 2: A predator, a falcon or a hawk diving into the
flock from above.
Speaker 1: And the birds just panicked.
Speaker 2: When a flock panics, they dive to escape. They move
as one. If they are flying too low to the
ground or the mass is too tight, they miscalculate. They
drive themselves into the ground to escape the predator above.
Speaker 1: It's a crash landing caused by pure fear.
Speaker 2: Exactly tragic.
Speaker 1: And one last bird story the cruise ship invasion.
Speaker 2: Imagine being on luxury crews sipping a drink and suddenly
the deck is covered in.
Speaker 1: Birds, hundreds of them. The captain gets on the intercom
and announces it as a shelter situation.
Speaker 2: They are escaping a massive storm out at sea. The
ship was the only solid ground for miles, the only
safe place to land, so they just the party the
hitchhike to safety. It shows that even wild animals need
a port in a storm sometimes.
Speaker 1: Okay, we have covered a lot of ground today, or
sky or water.
Speaker 2: We certainly have. My head is spinning a bit.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this. What does all of this mean?
We've seen mosquito tornadoes, portal skies, breathing forests, and ant
death spirals.
Speaker 2: The common thread here for me is the gap between
our perception and reality.
Speaker 1: Right, we see a portal to another dimension. Nature sees
ice crystals. We see a monster breathing underground. Nature sees
wind and tree roots.
Speaker 2: Nature is dynamic. It's messy, It glitches, but almost every
single time there is a physical mechanism behind it. The
world isn't broken. It's just infinitely more complex than our
eyes can process at a glance.
Speaker 1: But I love that human instinct to scream aliens or
it's the end of the world.
Speaker 2: First, It keeps life exciting. It shows we still have
a sense of awe about our planet. We haven't explained
all the magic away.
Speaker 1: So here's my question to you, the listener. We've given
you a list of absolute madness today.
Speaker 2: From the beautiful to the truly terrifying.
Speaker 1: If you walked out your door tomorrow and saw the
spider rain, thousands of spiders floating in the sky, or
the blood sky, the whole world glowing red, would you
film it or would you run?
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate question. Isn't it curiosity or survival?
Speaker 1: Which of these phenomena would be your breaking point? The
point where you just say, okay, I'm done with Earth today.
Beat me up.
Speaker 2: I think mine is the liquefaction. I really need the
ground to stay solid. That one gets me.
Speaker 1: Mine is definitely the mosquito tornado. Absolutely not. I'm out.
Speaker 2: We want to hear from you. Leave a comment wherever
you're listening. Tell us your nope moment.
Speaker 1: This has been thrilling threads. Keep looking up, but maybe
check for falling fish first.
Speaker 2: I watch out for the spiders.
Speaker 1: See you next time.