Speaker 1: There's nothing quite like a secret, is there, especially when
that's been kept for centuries. It's like the ultimate puzzle,
it is.
Speaker 2: And we build these incredible stories around the gaps in
our knowledge exactly.
Speaker 1: You think of a figure locked away behind an iron mask,
or some impossible sound from the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 2: Or a ship just found floating completely empty. These things
challenge everything we think we know, and.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you have to wonder if the mystery itself is
better than the truth.
Speaker 2: That's the core question, isn't it. Legends are often more satisfying.
But what happens when that legend, something we've imagined for
generations is finally definitively stripped bare well.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads today. We've got a fascinating collection
of sources, forensic reports, historical deep dives, scientific papers, all
focused on those historical riddles that have pretty recently been solved.
Speaker 2: Our whole mission today is to get to that intersection point,
the moment where this persistent romantic legend slams into old,
hard modern confirmation.
Speaker 1: Right, We're going to unpack not just what the truth is,
but really dig into how it was finally uncovered.
Speaker 2: We'll be moving from sacred relics, getting carbon dated to
the sounds of the deep sea, and then into some
pretty high stakes royal intrigue.
Speaker 1: And we'll finish up with the absolute finality of DNA
testing on a lost dynasty. It's really a deep dive
into expectation versus.
Speaker 2: Evidence and realizing that sometimes the simplest explanation, well, it
takes the most complex science to actually prove.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into it, and we have to start
with an object that is I mean, it's the perfect
crossroads of faith, history and forensic.
Speaker 2: Science, the Shroud of Turin.
Speaker 1: The Shroud of Turin, so for anyone who needs a
quick catchup, this is a very large linen cloth and
it has this faint, almost ghostly image of a.
Speaker 2: Man, a bearded man who appears to have suffered injuries
consistent with a Roman crucifixion.
Speaker 1: And for centuries it's been venerated, especially by Catholics, as
the actual bar shroud of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: The devotion is incredible, but the historical paper trail is
let's say it's a little patchy. The first time it's
reliably documented is in the mid fourteenth century in Europe.
Speaker 1: Which right away is a huge problem, isn't it. I mean,
that's a gap of over thirteen hundred years between the
crucifixion and when this thing just sort of appears.
Speaker 2: It's a massive historical hurdle. And as one of our
sources points out, while historians can debate the written evidence forever,
the shroud itself is the real puzzle. It poses and
I'm quoting here intriguing issues that are not resolved by science.
Speaker 1: Right, regardless of the paper trail. You have this physical
object in front of you that demands an explanation.
Speaker 2: And what's so fascinating is the image itself. For centuries
people trying to debunk it as a medieval fake ran
into a huge problem.
Speaker 3: It's not paint.
Speaker 2: It's not paint. Yeah, it seems to be some kind
of superficial change to the actual fibers of the linen.
And here's the really crucial part.
Speaker 1: The negative image.
Speaker 2: The image has properties of a photographic negative. When you
take a picture of it and develop the negative, the
image inverts and looks like a positive.
Speaker 1: Photograph, which is just it's mind boggling. How do you
create a perfect photographic negative in the thirteen hundreds. But
it gets even weirder because the image is also three dimensional.
Speaker 2: Yes, the information is encoded in it. I saw that
same analysis. A computer program can read the variations in
the image's density as like topographical data.
Speaker 1: And it creates a three D model of a human
body from it, which you just don't get from a
simple painting or a contact print from a statue.
Speaker 2: We don't and there are no directional shadows. If you
scorched it or use some kind of vapor, you wouldn't
get that kind of fidelity. It's led to theories about
a flash of high energy radiation, some kind of intense
instantaneous event.
Speaker 1: And that's what keeps the debate alive, even for skeptics,
which of course brings us to nineteen eighty eight when
science tried to settle it once and for all the.
Speaker 2: Carbon dating tests. It was a huge moment. They took
samples from one corner of the cloth, split them up
and send them to three completely independent lambs, Oxford, Zurich,
and Arizona.
Speaker 1: And the science of carbon fourteen dating is pretty solid, right.
You measured the decay of this radioact of isotope in
organic material to see when it died.
Speaker 2: It's a robust methodology and the results. They were a.
Speaker 1: Bombshell, A definitive punch, is what it was.
Speaker 2: All three labs came back with the same date range.
The cloth originated somewhere between twelve sixty and thirteen ninety eighty.
Speaker 1: Which puts it squarely in the medieval era, right before
it first shows up in the historical record.
Speaker 2: It seemed to confirm it was a spectacular but ultimately
medieval creation, not a first century artifact.
Speaker 3: But that didn't end the debate, did it not?
Speaker 2: At all? The controversy has raged ever since. Critics of
the test point to the sample selection. They say, look,
you only tested one corner. What if that corner was
a patch, a repair that was added centuries.
Speaker 1: Later, or contaminated from being handled for hundreds of years.
Speaker 2: Exactly, biofilm, smoke, all sorts of things could have interduce
newer carbon and skewed the results.
Speaker 1: I found the details about the actual burial process really compelling, though,
putting aside the dating for a second.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, the sources describe how a body would have
been prepared. You'd have to lift the corpse to an
almost ninety degree sitting position.
Speaker 1: To pull the long cloth underneath it. Before laying it
back down. It's such a practical, kind of gruesome detail
it is.
Speaker 2: It grounds the whole thing in a very physical, very
real process.
Speaker 1: So you have this paradox. The carbon dating says medieval fake,
but the image itself, the three D information says unexplainable anomaly.
Speaker 2: And that's where we are. Science sort of solved the
when the fourteenth century, but the how is still a
completely open question. How could a medieval artist have created this.
Speaker 1: It's like we traded one big mystery for a dozen smaller,
even more complex ones.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it's a great example of a mystery being solved,
but not resolved.
Speaker 1: Okay from a baffling piece of fabric.
Speaker 3: Let's head out to see.
Speaker 1: Because the ocean has always been, you know, the ultimate
keeper of secrets.
Speaker 2: And the perfect canvas for our deepest fears.
Speaker 1: We'll start with a sound, a single sound that for
years made people believe something truly monstrous was lurking.
Speaker 3: In the depths.
Speaker 2: The bloop, the bloop.
Speaker 1: This was back in nineteen ninety seven, and it's just
a brilliant case of modern tech accidentally triggering our most
ancient fears.
Speaker 2: The sound was recorded in a really remote part of
the Southern Pacific Ocean. And it wasn't just any microphone.
This was a network of deep sea hydrophones, right.
Speaker 1: This was the old SOSIS array, the Navy system for
tracking Soviet subs during the Cold War.
Speaker 2: By the nineties it had been repurposed for scientific use,
listening for things like underwater volcano seismic events, that kind
of thing.
Speaker 1: And then in ninety seven they picked up this this sound.
It was incredibly low frequency and very high amplitude.
Speaker 2: So for listeners, low frequency is like a deep bass rumble,
and those sounds travel a very long way in water.
High amplitude just means it was incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1: The scale of it was what was so terrifying.
Speaker 3: It was so loud.
Speaker 1: It was picked up by sensors over three thousand miles apart, which.
Speaker 2: Is roughly the distance from New York to London. For
a single noise to travel that far and still be
that strong, mm hmm, it had to come from something
absolutely colossal.
Speaker 1: I mean, far bigger than any known animal, even a.
Speaker 2: Blue whale, oh much bigger. Yeah, And that ambiguity, combined
with the raw power, is what lit the fuse. The
speculation just exploded. People were convinced it had to be
some unknown giant deep sea creature.
Speaker 1: The real life cracking, a real life Casulu.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the bloop became the smoking gun for cryptozoologists.
Speaker 1: I love that initial assessment from the scientists, though, what
the hell is it? I'll tell you what it's not.
It's not one of ours that just captures the feeling perfectly.
Speaker 2: It does. But by twenty twelve, after years of more
monitoring and analysis, they finally nailed it down and the
solution was an ice quake also known as a cryoceism, So.
Speaker 1: A glacier cracking.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, a massive glacier or iceberg fracturing and shifting
the sheer mass of the ice moving is what generates
that powerful low frequency sound wave that can travel across
an entire ocean. It was geology, not biology.
Speaker 1: And the sources point out the very real connection to
what's happening today with climate change in glaciers melting faster.
Speaker 2: We can expect more bluupes are sure to come. The
sound is natural, but we're creating the conditions for it
to happen more often.
Speaker 3: But the myth just won't die, will it?
Speaker 1: Even after the twenty twelve confirmation people are still out
there creating these quote increasingly horrifying monsters to represent the bloop.
Speaker 2: It illustrates that tension perfectly, the tension between a satisfying
romance and a mundane resolution.
Speaker 1: So is that frustrating for scientists to have a definitive
finding just ignored in favor of a monster story.
Speaker 2: I think it's a mix. Our sources kind of summarized
it as yes, sits a no. Of course, scientists want
their findings reported accurately, of course. But the monster narrative,
the idea that the deep ocean still holds secrets big
enough to dwarf us, that's just too powerful a storyline,
go of. We want there to be something huge and
unknown down there.
Speaker 1: We will always choose the giant squid over the kracking glacier.
Speaker 2: Every single time. The scale of the mystery seems to
demand a solution of equal scale.
Speaker 1: Okay, so from a sound that turned out to be geology,
let's pivot to a site that turned out to be well,
a tragic human error. The Merry Celeste, the Ultimate ghost ship.
Speaker 2: It really is found in the Atlantic in eighteen seventy two.
The whole mystery comes from the fact that it was
found abandoned, but it was still perfectly seaworthy.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: It had taken on some water after rough weather, but
it was still floating. It was well stocked with food
and water. But the entire crew was just gone.
Speaker 2: And the details were just so eerie. They fueled the
legend for over a century. An unfinished letter on a desk,
a meal of uneaten chicken, the.
Speaker 1: Captain's log just stopped a few days before. It was
like they left in a sudden, absolute panic, even though
the ship itself was fine.
Speaker 2: So the immediate sensational theories all focused on violence. Of course,
maritime life in the nineteenth century could be pretty brutal.
The idea that the crew got into the ship's cargo
a lot of industrial alcohol and murdered the captain and
his family in a drunken rage, that was the story
that's stuck.
Speaker 1: But I have to push back on that a little
because the crew that found the Mary Celeste, the guys
from the de Grazia, they were under a lot of
suspicion themselves during the salvage hearings.
Speaker 2: That's a crucial point. They had a financial interest in
a neat tidy explanation.
Speaker 1: Right, so why should we just accept the simple explanation
when there's a possibility of foul play that was maybe
covered up.
Speaker 2: It's a valid challenge and it highlights the bias and
the historical sources. But the consensus from modern maritime research
really leans away from violence.
Speaker 3: Why is that.
Speaker 2: Because there was zero physical evidence the ship was orderly,
There were no signs of a struggle, no blood, nothing.
A massacre is messy. This was leat too neat.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if it wasn't a mutiny, what could cause
that level of panic? Why abandon a perfectly good ship.
Speaker 2: The sources point to two very plausible related explanations, and
they're both rooted in fear. First, fear of the cargo itself.
Speaker 3: The industrial alcohol.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the ship was carrying a huge amount of it,
and if some of those barrels leak during a storm,
the alcohol could create a massive, potentially explosive vapor cloud
in the hold.
Speaker 3: Ah Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: A small spark a lantern and the whole ship goes.
Speaker 2: Up, or even just the fear of that, the captain
might have smelled the fumes, panicked and ordered everyone into
the lifeboat to wait for the vapors to clear get
a safe distance from the ticking time bomb.
Speaker 1: And the second theory is related to that.
Speaker 2: It is it's just simple miscalculation. The ship took on
water in the storm, that's certain, and sailors back then
often underestimated just how buoyant a big, well built ship was.
Speaker 1: So they saw the water in the hold, thought we're
sinking an abandoned ship too early.
Speaker 2: That's the idea. They get in the lifeboat, maybe tie
a line to the Mary Celeste to stay.
Speaker 1: With her, and then what the line snaps in the
storm or the.
Speaker 2: Ship, being empty and buoyant, just drifts away from them
faster than they can row. They're stranded in a tiny
boat in the middle of the Atlantic.
Speaker 1: To be swallowed up by the seas.
Speaker 2: Exactly so, the tragedy wasn't murder. It was a horrible
chain reaction of bad weather, fear, and a fatal misjudgment.
It's a story of human vulnerability, not human evil.
Speaker 1: That's somehow even more chilling. Okay, let's shift gears completely.
We're moving from the open ocean into the claustrophobic halls
of European palaces and prisons.
Speaker 2: Where secrets could topple dynasties, and.
Speaker 1: We have to start with a mystery that became a
household name for concealment itself. The Man in the Iron Mask.
Speaker 2: A prisoner in France during the long reign of King
Louis the fourteenth, the son King, and he was held
for decades.
Speaker 1: The part that captured everyone's imagination was, of course the mask.
It was probably cloth, but legend turned it into this
brutal iron thing.
Speaker 2: And the whole reason for the mask was the foundation
of all the speculation. This person's face had to be
so important, so recognizable, that no one could ever be
allowed to see it right.
Speaker 1: Which led to the most dramatic theory of all that
he was the King's own twin.
Speaker 2: Brother, the ultimate royal secret, whisked away at birth to
prevent a challenge to the throne. It's pure opera, pure
Alexander Dumah.
Speaker 1: It's a great story, but historians have for the most
part settled on a candidate who is well less royal
but maybe even more scandalous.
Speaker 2: Jujita Cavoy tell us about him. Jujita Cavoy fits the timeline.
He was moved between the same prisons as the mass prisoner,
and it wasn't royalty. He was a valet to the
king's powerful finance minister.
Speaker 1: So this shifts the secret from being about bloodline to
being about political cover.
Speaker 2: Up, a massive political cover up. Our sources linked Duja
to several huge court scandals. He was apparently involved in
circles that practiced devil worship, and even more dangerously, he
was linked to supplying poisons.
Speaker 1: The famous affair of the poisons that rocked the French
court the very same.
Speaker 2: So if you're the valet to the finance minister, you
know all the state's dirty financial secrets, and if you're
supplying poisons to high ranking nobles, you know who's trying
to kill who. This man was a walking, talking liability.
Speaker 1: So the mask wasn't to hide a royal face. It
was to ensure this man could never speak or be
identified by anyone he knew exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a much darker, more cynical secret, not about a
lost twin, but about the deep, pervasive corruption at the
heart of the court. His silence was a political.
Speaker 1: Necessity that turns it from a romance into a really
chilling piece of real politic.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's cross the English channel for another royal mystery,
The Princes in the Tower, England's great unsolved royal murder.
Speaker 1: It's the ghost story that has haunted the monarchy for
over five hundred years. It all goes back to the
War of the Roses. King Edward Fourth dies suddenly and his.
Speaker 2: Two young sons, the new twelve year old King Edward
the Fifth and his little brother Richard, are put in
the Tower of London for safekeeping by their uncle and regent, Richard,
Duke of Gloucester, who would very soon become King Richard iid.
The boys go into the tower and they are never
seen again.
Speaker 1: And the motive and opportunity here are just screamingly.
Speaker 2: Obvious, crystal clear. The moment the boys vanish, Richard takes
the throne, he had every reason in the world to
get rid of them to secure his claim. He's been
the prime suspect for.
Speaker 1: Centuries, cemented by Tudor propaganda, especially Shakespeare's play, which.
Speaker 2: Painted him as this monstrous, hunchbacked villain. Now, there have
always been theories that the boys survived, that they were
smuggled away.
Speaker 1: But the circumstantial evidence that's been found over the years
is pretty damning.
Speaker 2: Very damning. Our sources highlight two key pieces. First, back
in sixteen seventy four, workers doing renovations in the tower
found a wooden box containing the skeletons of two small children.
Speaker 1: And those were later interred in Westminster Abbey.
Speaker 2: They were Then there's the second piece, this intriguing detail
about the older Prince's property.
Speaker 3: His goal chain of office.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's a will that documents this chain being given
to a family called the Cables, and the person who
gave it to them was Sir James Tyrell.
Speaker 1: Who is the man alleged to have actually carried out
the murders on Richard's orders, the alleged assassin.
Speaker 2: So you have the lost prince's most valuable possession in
the hands of his supposed killer.
Speaker 1: So you put it all together, the motive, the timing,
the discovery of children's bones in the right place, the
victim's property, ending up with the killer.
Speaker 2: It leads to the conclusion that Richard almost definitely had
them killed.
Speaker 1: But that word almost is doing a lot of work there.
Speaker 2: It is because we are only almost definite. Those skeletons
have never been scientifically identified. Richard. The third still has
supporters today who argue he was framed.
Speaker 1: And this is where modern science could step in, but
it hasn't been allowed to correct.
Speaker 2: The bones are entombed in Westminster Abbey, and the Crown
in the church have so far denied requests to exhume
them for analysis.
Speaker 3: What could they find out? If they did.
Speaker 2: Everything carbon fourteen dating to confirm there from the fourteen eighties,
and crucially, mitochondrial DNA, they could trace the maternal line
and see if it matches the plantagenets.
Speaker 1: Our sources even mentioned. They could look for evidence on
the bones themselves.
Speaker 2: A potential bloodstain from a blow to the face, matching
some historical accounts of how they were killed. The final
proof is right there, waiting in an urn locked away
by tradition.
Speaker 1: It's amazing we can pull DNA from Neanderthals, but a
five hundred year old murder mystery remains unsolved because of
protocol it does.
Speaker 2: Let's move on to a different kind of legend, the
kind that springs not from history but from fiction and fear.
Speaker 1: These are cases where we embrace a dramatic story so
completely that we ignore the much simpler truth, and wartime
is the perfect breeding ground for this.
Speaker 2: Fear patriotism, chaos. It's a perfect storm for mythology, which
brings us to the Pearl Arbor ghost plane.
Speaker 1: This rumor started circulating about a year after the attack
in nineteen forty two.
Speaker 2: The story goes that an American P forty fighter plane,
all shot up and damaged, was seen flying erratically out
of the Pacific from the direction of Japan.
Speaker 1: And the pilots who saw it said the pilot inside
gave them away just before the plane crashed into the sea,
and of course no wreckage or body was ever recovered.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect wartime ghost story, the lone hero wounded
but flying his final mission home, one last human gesture
before disappearing. It's a powerful mythic image.
Speaker 3: It sounds like a movie.
Speaker 2: Well there's a good reason for that. The entire persistent
ghost story is completely made up. It comes from a
work of fiction.
Speaker 3: A short story called ghost.
Speaker 2: Ship, written by Brigadier General Robert Lee Scott Junior, a
very famous military figure and author.
Speaker 1: And the best part is he later came out and said, hey, everyone,
it's just a story I wrote.
Speaker 2: He shot down the rumors himself, but it was too late.
The story was too good. The emotional need for that
kind of heroic sacrifice was too strong. It lodged itself
in the collective memory as a real event for decades.
Speaker 1: It's a perfect example of how much we prefer a
good narrative over simple.
Speaker 2: Facts from a manufactured ghost. We now go to a
very real, very terrifying creature, or what was believed to
be a creature.
Speaker 1: The Beast of je Valdan were.
Speaker 2: Eighteenth century France, the remote southern province of Jevodon, and
over a few years in the seventeen sixties, a wave
of terrifying animal attacks swept the region.
Speaker 1: We're talking over two hundred reported attacks, and the local people,
absolutely gripped by fear, became convinced they were all the
work of a single monstrous creature, the beast, and.
Speaker 2: The descriptions they gave were designed to make it clear
this was no ordinary wolf. They said it had a
striped coat, a long, tough tail, and was much bigger
than a wolf.
Speaker 1: Some of the descriptions got even weirder, right more human
they did.
Speaker 2: Witnesses claimed the beast would put its paw up to
its chest before running off, that kind of anthropomorphism.
Speaker 1: Which immediately pushes the explanation into the supernatural.
Speaker 2: Or at least the exotic. People started theorizing it was
a hyena or a lion, maybe a bear that escaped
from a traveling menagerie. The panic was so great that
King Louis the fifteenth sent his own royal hunters to
kill it.
Speaker 1: But modern history, o orians and animal experts have come
to a much more logical, though still terrifying conclusion.
Speaker 2: It was just a wolf or a pack of wolves.
That's it. That's the most likely answer. You have to
remember the context. Wolf attacks were tragically common in rural
eighteenth century Europe, and the description, once you strip away
the hysteria, sounds a lot like a large subspecies like
the Italian wolf, which is found in that part of France.
Speaker 1: So where did the stripes and the weird gestures come from?
Speaker 2: Trauma, memory distortion, and the need to make sense of
a tragedy. If you can convince yourself in your community
that you were attacked by a one of a kind monster,
a beast, that's somehow easier to process than the reality.
Speaker 3: What's the reality that.
Speaker 2: You live among common predators that are simply large, hungry,
and very dangerous. The fear magnified the details. A patchy
coat becomes stripes, a defensive posture becomes a human like gesture.
Speaker 1: So the real mystery wasn't the animal, it was the
psychology of the people.
Speaker 2: It terrorized exactly. They created a monster to make their
fear manageable.
Speaker 1: Okay, For our next section, we move into the final
dramatic days of Tsarist Russia, a time of revolution, mysticism,
and ultimately a mystery solved by DNA.
Speaker 2: And we have to start with the man at the
center of the court's mystical obsession, Gregory.
Speaker 1: Resputant, the mad Monk, a faith healer who had this
incredible influence over the Czar and Czarina, mostly because they
believed he could heal their son Alexey's hemophilia.
Speaker 2: He was a larger than life figure and so the
story of his death had to be equally spectacular.
Speaker 1: The legend of his assassination in nineteen sixteen is one
of the most famous in history. It makes him seem
almost unkillable.
Speaker 2: The story everyone knows is that his assassins first fed
him cakes and wine laced with enough cyanide to kill
a dozen men, and nothing happened right, So.
Speaker 1: Then they shot him.
Speaker 2: Multiple times and he still wouldn't die, so finally they
had to club him and throw his body into the
freezing Neva River, where he finally drowned.
Speaker 1: It's an epic struggle, but the clinical reality from autopsy
reports and his daughter's own account is much less dramatic.
Speaker 2: It paints a very different picture. First, his daughter said
he hated sweet, so the cyanide cake story is probably
nonsense right from the start.
Speaker 3: And the autopsy.
Speaker 2: The autopsy found no signs of drowning or poisons. The
actual cause of death was a single point plank bullet
wound to the head.
Speaker 1: So it was just a straightforward brutal execution.
Speaker 2: A swift and effective one, not some operatic battle. But
you can see why the legend persisted, can't you.
Speaker 1: Absolutely When someone that big dies, people expect the death
to match the life. The myth of his invincibility had
to be served, even if the facts didn't support it, and.
Speaker 2: That move from legend to brutal fact really sets the
stage for solving the other great Romanov.
Speaker 3: Mystery, the fate of Anastasia.
Speaker 2: The youngest daughter of Nicholas's second after the family was
executed by the Bolsheviks. In nineteen eighteen. Rumors persisted for
decades that she somehow had escaped.
Speaker 1: It was such a hopeful, romantic story to dozens of impostors, books.
Speaker 2: Plays, and that famous animated movie. Anastasia became this symbol
of lost royalty, the idea that one piece of that
world had survived the massacre.
Speaker 1: But science eventually provided the final heartbreaking answer.
Speaker 2: It did. The first mass grave of the family was
found in nineteen ninety one, but they were missing two bodies, Alexi,
the son, and one of the daughters, which just fueled
the Anastasia theories.
Speaker 1: Even more until they found the second great.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and seven. A second, smaller burial site
was found nearby with the remains of the last two children.
And this is where mitochondrial DNA became absolutely crucial.
Speaker 1: So explain that for us. Why was mitochondrial DNA or
mt DNA the key?
Speaker 2: Okay, So, unlike regular nuclear DNA, which is a mix
from both your parents, you inherit mitochondrial DNA only from
your mother. It's passed down the maternal line almost unchanged.
Speaker 1: So you could trace the Romanov children's EMPTYDNA directly back
through their mother. The Czarina Alexandra all the way back.
Speaker 2: To her grandmother, Queen Victoria of England.
Speaker 1: So all they needed was a DNA sample from a
living relative on that maternal line.
Speaker 2: Precisely, they used a sample from Prince Philip, the Duke
of Edinburgh, who was a great nephew of the Zarina,
and when they compared the DNA for the bones to
his the match was perfect.
Speaker 3: It was a definitive confirmation.
Speaker 2: It confirmed that all seven Romanov remains were accounted for.
The two bodies in the second grave were Alexei and Anastasia.
The science was indisputable.
Speaker 1: So the hope of the surviving princess was finally traded
for the certainty of tragedy. She died with her family
in that cellar.
Speaker 2: The book was finally closed.
Speaker 1: For our final solved mystery, We're heading into the frazen
North for a maritime disaster that confirmed the darkest and
most horrific theories about.
Speaker 2: Its victim, The Lost Franklin Expedition.
Speaker 1: This was the absolute peak of Victorian ambition and arrogance really.
Launched in eighteen forty five, Sir John Franklin took two
cutting edge ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror into
the Canadian Arctic to finally chart the North Thus passage.
Speaker 2: They had years of provisions, hundreds of men, the full
backing of the British Admiralty. They were completely confident, and
then they vanished.
Speaker 1: They got trapped in the polarized and were never heard
from again, and.
Speaker 2: Their disappearance became this massive national obsession in Britain for
the next one hundred and fifty years, Expedition after expedition
went looking for them. The only clues were a few
scattered notes left in Stone.
Speaker 1: Cairns and the testimony of local Inuit hunters, which was
largely dismissed at the time right.
Speaker 2: But the big breakthrough came very very recently. The wreck
of the Erebus was found in twenty fourteen, and then
the Terror was found in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: Both of them incredibly well preserved by the freezing water.
Speaker 2: They were like time capsules yea. And the forensic analysis
of the remains and artifacts finally allowed us to piece
together what happened, and.
Speaker 3: It confirmed the Grimace theories.
Speaker 2: It did the men died from a combination of exposure, hypothermia, starvation,
and likely lead poisoning from their tinned food.
Speaker 1: But it also confirmed the most terrible rumor of all,
the one the British is lablishment had denied for over
a century.
Speaker 2: Cannibalism. Yes, the forensic evidence, specifically cut marks on the
bones that were recovered from the crew's desperate march south,
confirmed that the last survivors had resorted to eating their
dead comrades to stay alive.
Speaker 1: And this is exactly what the Inuit hunters had reported
seeing decades earlier, isn't.
Speaker 2: It It is They told the Victorian search parties they
had found the remains of white men with these strange marks,
and their accounts were dismissed as barbaric or unreliable. Finding
the ships didn't just solve the mystery, it corrected a
century of colonial denial.
Speaker 1: So the discovery is about more than just finding the ships.
Speaker 2: Oh much more, because the terror especially was found almost
perfectly intact. There are maps still on tables, doors are closed.
For the first time, researchers can learn in detail how
they found themselves trapped in the ice, and how they
endured months, even years in the Arctic.
Speaker 1: So we're moving past just where are they to what
was daily life like for two years trapped on a
freezing ship exactly.
Speaker 2: The mystery is over. Now the slow, detailed work of
historical reconstruction can begin.
Speaker 1: Well, as we wrap up this edition of Thrilling Threads,
It's pretty clear, isn't it. The journey from a compelling
legend to a confirmed fact is. It's a long one.
Speaker 2: It's immense. It can take centuries of searching or the
invention of incredible new technologies like DNA testing or deep
sea sonar.
Speaker 1: And that final solution a cracking glacier, a pack of wolves,
a corrupt valet, the grim reality of starvation. It's almost
always less traumatic, less romantic than the myth it replaces.
Speaker 2: It is, but that confirmation gives us clarity. It gives
us a much more stable, grounded way of understanding our
own past.
Speaker 1: I think what these solve mysteries really tell us about
is well us about human nature.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we want to believe in the lost twin brother,
the giant sea monster, the princess who escaped. We invent
these incredible stories to fill in the.
Speaker 1: Blanks, and those stories say more about our own hopes
and fears than they do about what actually happened.
Speaker 2: The facts might strip away the romance, but they leave
us with genuine, hard won knowledge, and that's a much
stronger foundation, I think.
Speaker 1: So we want to leave you with a final thought
to ponder, based on everything we've looked at today.
Speaker 2: Here it is. If you had the choice between an
astonishing unsolved historical mystery, say the man in the iron
mask really is the King's twin.
Speaker 1: Or a definitively scientifically proven but mundane or tragic or
even ugly truth, which would you prefer history to deliver.
Are some secrets better left in the shadows for the
sake of a good story, or is absolute knowledge always
the goal?
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear what you think about that tension
between romance and resolution. Let us know what makes history
truly thrilling for you.