Speaker 1: I want to take you back to a very specific
moment in time. It's December nineteen eighty eight. We are
in Maryland inside some nondescript government building. The heating is
probably rattling, the coffee is likely terrible, definitely terrible. But
the tension in the room is absolute. This is the
height of the late Cold.
Speaker 2: War, right, And just to set the stakes here, at
this point, the US intelligence community is genuinely terrified of
what they call the sy Gap, the psy gap. Yeah,
they believe the Soviets were winning the war on psychic espionage.
They thought that Kremlin had these people who could stop hearts.
Speaker 1: With their minds, curiously stop hearts.
Speaker 2: Or you know, read President Reagan's diary from an office
in Moscow. It sounds completely wild.
Speaker 1: To us now, it sounds ludicrous, But they were pouring
millions of dollars into this.
Speaker 2: Millions and in this room in Maryland, which was part
of the secret operation called Project Sunstreak, you have these
CIA handlers, okay, and they're sitting across from a man
known in the files only as Viewer.
Speaker 1: Thirty two, so not his real name, I'm guessing not
even close.
Speaker 2: And they aren't asking him to look at a Soviet
submarine silo. They aren't asking for the location of a
hostage or a mole.
Speaker 1: No, the target is something else entirely.
Speaker 2: It's biblical. They hand him a sealed envelope or maybe
a set of coordinates, and they tell him the target is.
Speaker 1: The Ark of the Covenant, the actual arc, the box
from the Old Testament with the Ten Commandments inside, the.
Speaker 2: Face melting Power of God from Raiders.
Speaker 1: Of the Lost Art at exact one.
Speaker 2: The very same. And what's just fascinating is the transcript
of this session. I mean, if you read it, it
plays out like a movie scene.
Speaker 1: So what does he see?
Speaker 2: Remote Viewer thirty two goes into this trans state. He
starts describing a location somewhere in the Middle East. He
talks about a feeling a heaviness in the air, and
then he describes a damp underground tunnel system. He says
he can hear voices speaking a dialect of Arabic.
Speaker 1: And this is where it gets really cinematic, right, because
he doesn't just describe the place, he describes the container.
Speaker 2: He does. He describes a chest made of wood and
it's overlaid with gold and silver, and he specifically I
mean specifically mentions winged figures on the lid, the cherubim,
the cherubim. It aligns terrifyingly well with the descriptions in
the Book of Exodus. He says it's hidden deep within
a chamber, protected by what he calls watchers.
Speaker 1: Okay, we have to pause here because if you're listening
to this, you're probably thinking, wait a second, did the
CIA find the arc? Is it in a warehouse next
to the Roswell saucer?
Speaker 2: Right, and we have to be the buzz kills immediately.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, yes, no distinct location was ever really pinned down,
and certainly nothing was excavated based on this.
Speaker 2: And in fact, Joe mcmonagall, who was remote viewer zero
zero one, I mean, this guy, was the legend of
the program. He later said that remote viewing has this
one fatal flaw, which is you can describe a thing,
you can see it in your mind's eye with incredible detail,
but you can't always describe where it is on a map.
Speaker 1: So you can see the needle, but you have no
idea which heyck it's in precisely.
Speaker 2: And even more importantly, he said, you can't always distinguish
between a real physical object and what he called a
thought form.
Speaker 1: A thought form, what does that even mean.
Speaker 2: It's like a psychic echo the collective imagination of humanity.
Speaker 1: So he might have just been viewing the idea of
the arc because millions of people have been thinking about
it and praying about it for thousands of years exactly.
Speaker 2: It's like the image of it is so strong in
the collective unconscious that it leaves a psychic residue. But
the fact remains. And this is the key point. The
United States government, an entity of hard power of satellites
and spies and real world assets, was desperate enough to
burn its budget hunting for a magical relic.
Speaker 1: And that desperation, that willingness to try anything during the
Cold War to find an edge, even a paranormal one,
that really sets the stage for what we are doing
here today.
Speaker 2: It absolutely does.
Speaker 1: Because if the government was willing to bet on psychics
to find the arc, what else is out there? What
other impossible things are sitting in the or maybe worse,
sitting in a box in a museum basement somewhere.
Speaker 2: That is the question of the hour.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today we are pulling on the
loose ends of history to see what unravels, and.
Speaker 2: We have a massive stack of sources. Today we're going
to be looking at the most dangerous, the most mysterious,
and frankly, the most controversial artifacts ever found.
Speaker 1: We're going to be separating the hoaxes from the history.
We have items that could rewrite the timeline of human civilization,
and we.
Speaker 2: Have items that quite literally might kill you if you
touch them.
Speaker 1: We're talking ancient curses, out of place, artifacts that scream aliens,
lost cities found by lasers from the sky, and foreskins.
Speaker 2: Yes you heard that right, multiple foreskins.
Speaker 1: You'll have to stick around for that.
Speaker 2: It is going to be a very journey, to say
the least.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this. Our first thread today is all
about the conspiracy of silence, because sometimes the mystery isn't
that we can't find an artifact.
Speaker 2: No, the mystery is that a handful of people did
find it and then they refuse to let anyone else
see it.
Speaker 1: This is a recurring and infuriating theme and archaeology, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It really is? And there is no better, or maybe
I should say worse example than the Dead Sea scrolls ah.
Speaker 1: The classic discovery story. Everybody knows this one. Nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 2: A Bedouin shepherd, he's wandering near the Dead Sea. He
tosses a rock into a cave. Maybe he was bored,
maybe looking for a lost goat, who knows.
Speaker 1: And he hears a crash, he hears pottery.
Speaker 2: Breaking, and inside that broken jar were scrolls, ancient scrolls
wrapped in linen Biblical manuscripts over two thousand years old.
Speaker 1: And you really have to put this in perspective for
the listener. Before this discovery, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible
manuscripts we had they dated to the Middle Ages.
Speaker 2: Right around one thousand and eighty. That was our baseline.
Speaker 1: And then suddenly we had texts from one hundred or
two hundred BC. We jumped back a millennium.
Speaker 2: One thousand years of history just opened up in a
single afternoon. It was arguably the most significant archaeological fire
of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: It promised to revolutionize our understanding of early Judaism, the
roots of Christianity, everything. But then what happened, Well.
Speaker 2: Then came the silence, a whole lot of nothing for
the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: And this is why it's a scandal, not just a delay.
You have to understand the sheer magnitude of the hoarding
that went on here.
Speaker 2: It was unbelievable. The Jordanian government appointed a man, a
Dominican priest named father Roland de Vaux, to head up
the international team.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he's the guy in charge.
Speaker 2: He's the guy, and he assembles his dream team of scholars. Yeah,
and his dream team consisted of eight people.
Speaker 1: Eight eight guys to translate tens of thousands of fragments
of ancient texts. That seems understaffed, a little understaffed, yeah, woefully.
Speaker 2: But they did something unprecedented. They established a rule of secrecy,
which meant what exactly it meant. They refused to let
any other scholars see the fragments until they themselves had
officially published their translations and analysis.
Speaker 1: So they created a monopoly.
Speaker 2: A complete monopoly. They decided who could see the text,
what got published, and more importantly, what remained a secret.
And they were let's just say not fast.
Speaker 1: That is infuriating. I mean, imagine being a historian in
the nineteen sixties or seventies. You know, this revolutionary information
is just sitting there, but you can't see it because
you aren't in the cool kids club.
Speaker 2: It was worse than just a club. By nineteen eighty nine,
more than forty years after the discovery, less than half
the scrolls had been published. Forty years researchers, respected scholars
were requesting access and just getting turned down with zero explanation.
There's a famous story of a scholar who finally managed
to get into the scrollery, the room at the Rockefeller
Museum where they worked, and what did he see? He
saw them smoking cigarettes over the fragments, no drinking wine,
taping fragile two thousand year old pieces of parchment together
with scotch tape.
Speaker 1: Scotch tap on the Dead Sea scrolls. That is archaeological sacrilege.
Speaker 2: It was a different time, preservation wise, it's still this monopoly,
this secrecy. It just fueled massive conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: Of course it did. People started whispering, what are they
hiding in there?
Speaker 2: Exactly? Does the scroll say Jesus never existed? Does it
mention aliens? Is the Vatican actively suppressing something that would
destroy Christianity?
Speaker 1: Because when you hide things, people naturally assume the worst.
Speaker 2: The Biblical Archaeology Review magazine, they weren't shy about it.
They flat out called it a scandal. It got so
bad that it took an outside intervention in nineteen ninety
one to finally break the dam.
Speaker 1: And that was the Huntington Library in California. Right.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Huntington had a backup set of safety negatives,
basically microfilm copies of the scrolls, and their director decided,
you know what, enough is enough. This knowledge belongs to.
Speaker 1: The world, and they just released the foot They.
Speaker 2: Released everything, and overnight the monopoly was shattered. Scholars all
over the world finally had access computers started reconstructing the
text from the fragments.
Speaker 1: But that the damage was done in a.
Speaker 2: Way, it really was, an entire generation of brilliant scholars
lived and died without ever getting to study the most
important discovery in their field. It just highlights how fragile
knowledge is.
Speaker 1: And not just because of decay or time, but because
of human ego and.
Speaker 2: Hoarding precisely, and it's not a one off thing. We
see almost the exact same pattern with the Naigamati Library right.
Speaker 1: Similar story nineteen forty five, two years before the scrolls,
Egyptian farmers find a sealed jar near a cliff face the.
Speaker 2: Cliff of Jabal Altariff, And honestly, the reaction of the
farmers is fascinating. It tells you so much about the
local culture and beliefs at the.
Speaker 1: Time, because they're afraid of it.
Speaker 2: One of them, a man named Muhammad Ali. He admitted
later that he was scared to break the jar. He
thought a gin, a spirit, or a genie might be trapped.
Speaker 1: Inside, which is a valid fear in nineteen forty five
rural Egypt. I guess if you grow up hearing stories
about spirits and jars, you don't just smash them open.
Speaker 2: You'd hesitate. But eventually the hope for gold won out
over the fear of the gin, so he broke it
and found no gold, no gold, just these leather bound
papyrus books or couptses. Who was so disappointed he reportedly
just took them home.
Speaker 1: Dumped them by the oven, and his mother used some
of the pages.
Speaker 2: His mother may have used some of the loose pages
as kindling to start the fire for cooking.
Speaker 1: He burned the Gnostic Gospels to bake bread. That just
that hurts myself.
Speaker 2: It is physically painful to think about what might have
been lost. But what survived was revolutionary. These were the
very texts that the early Church had actively tried to erase.
Speaker 1: The Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip.
Speaker 2: And when you say erase, you mean that quite literally,
don't you.
Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, look at the timeline. In the year three
sixty seven CE, a very powerful man named Athanasius, the
Bishop of Alexandria, sends out his famous Easter.
Speaker 2: Letter, and in it he lays down.
Speaker 1: The law he does. He lists the books that were canonical,
the twenty seven books of the New Testament that we
know today, and then he explicitly condemns everything else as
heretical forbidden.
Speaker 2: So you were a monk at a monastery and you
were holding onto these other gospels, you were suddenly holding contraband.
Speaker 1: Extremely dangerous contraband. The theory is that monks at a
nearby monastery took these forbidden books, sealed them in that jar,
and buried.
Speaker 2: Them to save them from destruction.
Speaker 1: Exactly. And because of that we now know that early
Christianity wasn't this unified, clean narrative we often think of.
It was chaotic. It was a battlefield of competing ideas, and.
Speaker 2: Some of those ideas were very different.
Speaker 1: The Gospel of Philip, for instance, suggests that spiritual knowledge
nosis was more important than simple faith. It also hints
at a much much closer relationship between Jesus and Mary
Magdalene than the canonical gospels do.
Speaker 2: And just like the scrolls, these ideas sat in silence
in the desert for sixteen hundred years. It really makes
you wonder what else is buried out there because someone
in power didn't like what it said, or and.
Speaker 1: This is maybe even more daunting, what's just sitting on
a shelf unread?
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the Oxyryncus papyri, the ancient trash
dum Essentially yes. In the late nineteenth century, two archaeologists,
gren Fellon Hunt, went to Oxarincus in Egypt. They weren't
looking for grand temples or tombs. They found the city's garbage.
Speaker 1: Mounts right and because of the dry climate.
Speaker 2: Because it rarely rains there, the paper, the papyrus, it
didn't rot. It was perfectly preserved.
Speaker 1: So one man's trash is another man's entire academic career.
Speaker 2: And then some They found hundreds of thousands of fragments,
shopping less, personal letters, tax returns census data, but also literature.
Speaker 1: And some of that content was disturbing to the Victorian
scholars who found it.
Speaker 2: Disturbing is a good word. They found writings that contradicted
known history, descriptions of secret rituals, lost plays by famous
Greek authors that were maybe a bit too body for
Victorian sensibilities, so.
Speaker 1: They might have just put those aside. We'll get to
that one later.
Speaker 2: Perhaps, But the real problem is just the sheer volume.
Even today, with all our technology, less than ten percent
has been properly translated and published. Ten percent most of
it is still sitting in archival boxes at Oxford University.
Speaker 1: So you're telling you there could be a lost gospel,
or a play by Sophocles, or a letter from Cleopatra
just sitting in a box in England waiting for someone
to learn ancient Greek and have a free afternoon.
Speaker 2: That is exactly what I'm telling you. The secrets aren't
always buried in the ground. Sometimes they're just sitting in
the backlog.
Speaker 1: That is a sobering thought that the answers to some
of history's biggest questions might already be in our possession,
just unread.
Speaker 2: It's a race against time and against the limits of manpower.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pivot from the things scholars are hoarding to
the things that scholars say shouldn't exist in the first place.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, we're entering the zone of out of place
artifacts or oopparts.
Speaker 1: This is where the Internet usually starts screaming aliens, and this.
Speaker 2: Is where science usually says, Hold on a minute, Let's
look at the chemistry.
Speaker 1: Let's start with a classic, the Koso artifacteen six on.
Some rock collectors are hiking in the Coso Mountains of California.
They find what looks like a geode.
Speaker 2: Right, a lumpy rock that's often hollow and filled with crystals.
Speaker 1: So they take it home. They get out their diamond saw.
They cut it open, expecting to see beautiful purple amethyst crystals,
and instead, inside there's a metal cylinder with a coil
and a ceramic insulator.
Speaker 2: It looks exactly like a modern.
Speaker 1: Spark plug because it was a spark plug.
Speaker 2: It was a nineteen twenties Champion spark plug to be precise.
Speaker 1: Hold on, it was inside a rock. Rocks take millions
of years to form, so unless Henry Ford was manufacturing
model ts in the Jurassic period. How does that happen?
Speaker 2: This is a great example of how nature can trick us.
And the key word here, the term your listeners should
file away, is concretion.
Speaker 1: Concretion, Okay, explain it like I'm five.
Speaker 2: Imagine you drop a piece of iron like a spark
plug or a nail or an old wrench into wet,
mineral rich mud or clay. Okay, iron rusts it exit
isis that rust isn't just a color change. It's a
chemical reaction that acts like a glue or a cement.
It starts binding the surrounding silt and clay and minerals
directly to the object.
Speaker 1: So the object essentially grows a shell around itself.
Speaker 2: It creates its own hard rock like casing, and if
the conditions are right, high mineral content in the soil,
the right pH level. This doesn't take millions of years,
it can happen in decades.
Speaker 1: Decades.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, We found Coca Cola bottles from World War Two
that are completely encased in hard concretion, looking like they're
embedded in ancient stone.
Speaker 1: So the rock around the coast artifact wasn't geological bedrock.
It was a rustball that the spark plug made for
itself over like thirty or forty years exactly.
Speaker 2: And when geologists finally did X rays on the coasto artifact,
they found something that was the final nail in the
coffin for the ancient artifact theory. What was that the
porcelain insulator inside the plug. It wasn't some unknown alien ceramic.
It had the distinctive logo of the Champion's Spark Plug
company from the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: So the ancient artifact was barely older than my grandfather.
Speaker 2: Not even. And it's the exact same explanation for the London.
Speaker 1: Hammer right right, the iron hammerhead found inside supposedly ancient
rock in Texas.
Speaker 2: Creationists, particularly guy named Carl Bao, jumped on this as
proof of a pre flood technologically advanced civilization as a watchmaker.
Speaker 1: Argument, but again science points to rapid concretion. A nineteenth
century mining tool probably got dropped in a mineral rich
mud puddle and.
Speaker 2: The rock just formed around it. The original wooden handle
hadn't even petrified yet when they found it.
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a buzzkill for the ancient mysteries crowd,
but honestly, it's also fascinating that geology can move that fast.
Speaker 2: It's a different kind of marble.
Speaker 1: Okay, But let's talk about something that's a little harder
to explain away with just mud hard and quickly. Let's
talk about the Kimbaya airplanes.
Speaker 2: These are undeniably beautiful and intriguing objects. They are small
gold figurines from the Kimbaya culture in Colombia.
Speaker 1: Dating roughly between two hundred and nine hundred CE, and they.
Speaker 2: Look like fighter jets. I mean, come on, you look
at them and you see delta wings and upright tail fin,
a defined fuselage. It's uncanny, it really is.
Speaker 1: And it's not just our modernized seeing things some enthusiasts.
I think they were German engineers. They actually built scale
models based on these designs they did.
Speaker 2: They put small propellers and engines on them, took them
out to a field and they flew.
Speaker 1: They flew. They were aerodynamically stable. See ancient aliens. The
Kimbaya had an airport in the Andes case clothes.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the cultural context before we start clearing
a runway. The Kimbaya were master metal workers, and the
vast majority of their art depicts nature.
Speaker 1: The animals mostly so the skeptical argument is that these
are just stylized animals, right.
Speaker 2: Most archaeologists believe these are highly stylized representations of birds
or fish or insects, creatures that were common and important
in their environment.
Speaker 1: But fish don't have upright tail fins like a rudder,
and birds don't have wings shaped like that.
Speaker 2: True, but art is interpretive, it's not always literal. If
you look at the clecostumus fish, it's a type of
armored catfish common in Colombian rivers. It has these wide,
flat pectoral fins that look very wing like. If you
stylize that and maybe combine it with features from a
moth or a flying.
Speaker 1: Beetle, you could end up with something that just happens
to look like an airplane to us.
Speaker 2: To our twenty first century eye, which is conditioned to
sea machines, it's a classic case of peridolia.
Speaker 1: Peridolia that's the word for seeing familiar patterns where none exist, right,
like seeing a face on Mars or a bunny in
the clouds exactly.
Speaker 2: We live in an age of flight, so we see airplanes.
A Spanish concissador in the fifteen hundreds would have looked
at that and just seen a weird bird.
Speaker 1: I have to admit, though, the aerodynamic coincidence is undeniably
fun to talk about.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a fantastic conversation starter. There's no doubt about it.
Speaker 1: And speaking of visual coincidences that fuel conspiracy theories, we
have to touch on the Ebidos carvings, the.
Speaker 2: Famous helicopter and tank on the temple walls in Egypt.
Speaker 1: This one is a corner stone of the ancient astronaut theory.
You look at the pictures of these hieroglyphs and you clearly,
without a doubt, see a helicopter and next to it
a tank and maybe a submarine.
Speaker 2: It's uncanny. It looks like a schematic for a modern
military arsenal.
Speaker 1: It is, until you understand how Egyptian hieroglyphs and pharaohs
actually worked. This is a perfect example of a palimpsest.
Speaker 2: A palimpsest okay unpack that word for us.
Speaker 1: It comes from the Greek for scraped clean. It means
something that's been reused or altered, but it still bears
visible traces of its earlier form, like writing on a
piece of parchments. Scraping it off and writing something new
on top.
Speaker 2: And in ancient Egypt, pharaohs had massive egos. They were
constantly erasing the names and titles of their predecessors to
take credit for their temples and monuments.
Speaker 1: So just typical politics then, pretty much.
Speaker 2: In this specific case, at the temple in Abidos, the
pharaoh city the first had his titles carved deep into
the stone. Later, his son Rameses, the second, Rameses the Great.
Speaker 1: Came along, and Rameses was not known for his humility,
not at all.
Speaker 2: He had his worker's plaster over his dad's old titles
and then carve his own names right on top of
the plaster.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you have two layers of writing.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and over thousands of years of sun and wind,
the plaster has fallen off in patches.
Speaker 1: So we are seeing two different sets of hieroglyphs mashed together.
Speaker 2: You're seeing the ghost of Seti's inscription merging with the
remaining parts of rameses inscription. The shape that looks like
a helicopter is just the visual noise created by the
hieroglyph for who repulses the Nine bows, a title of
Seti overlapping with the title of Rameses.
Speaker 1: So it's not a secret fleet of ancient Apache helicopters.
It's just Rameses having an ego trip and trying to
write over his dad's work.
Speaker 2: It's an accident of erosion, a typo and stone. Essentially
not a blueprint for time travel.
Speaker 1: And every time science has a perfectly reasonable, if slightly
less exciting explanation.
Speaker 2: It often does, which brings us to a few more
space related mysteries that have similarly earthly explanations or no
explanation at all.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the drop of stones.
Speaker 2: Ah, the legend of the discs found in a cave
and Tibet, supposedly telling the story of a spaceship of
aliens called the Droppa that crashed there thousands of years ago.
Speaker 1: It's a staple of Ufo lore. But the problem is.
Speaker 2: No one can find them. No museum has ever had
them on display, The supposed discoverer has never been definitively identified.
The location of the cave is a mystery. The artifact
evaporates the moment you try to pin it down physically.
Speaker 1: So likely a hoax that got repeated so many times
it became a legend.
Speaker 2: Almost certainly a bit like the moonship that UFO hunter
Scott Wearing discovered.
Speaker 1: Right. He was looking at NASA photos of the Moon
and spotted something in a.
Speaker 2: Crater and a crater between von Carmon and Davis and yeah,
he found a shape that he claims looks like a
metallic transformer like ship.
Speaker 1: And he even speculated it could be salvaged. I love
the optimism. Just give me a tow truck in a spacesuit.
I can fix her up and we can use it
to get to Mars.
Speaker 2: It's almost certainly just a rock formation with unusual lighting
and shadows, another case of peridolia. But it speaks to
that deep human desire to find proof that we're not alone.
Speaker 1: Fair enough. But you know what doesn't evaporate when you
look for it, actual space rocks, Because we do have
artifacts that are genuinely one hundred percent from the stars.
Speaker 2: And this is where science fiction becomes science fact and where.
Speaker 1: We get into one of my favorite topics, weaponizing space.
Speaker 2: This is where science confirms the legend. Just in twenty
twenty three, researchers published a paper analyzing a bronze age
arrowhead was found years ago in Switzerland near Lake.
Speaker 1: Beale and it dates back to around the ninth century BCE.
Speaker 2: Now you have to remember this is the Bronze Age.
Humans didn't have the smelting technology to get iron from
ore out of the ground. Yet iron working was not
a thing.
Speaker 1: So how is the arrowhead made of iron?
Speaker 2: It's not normal iron, it's meteoric iron. It's a natural
alloy of iron, nickel, and cobalt that comes from an asteroid.
Speaker 1: So three thousand years ago, someone in Switzerland found a
rock that had fallen from space, realized it was a
strange new type of metal, probably heavier and shinier than
anything they'd ever seen, and they forged it into a weapon.
Speaker 2: That is exactly what happened. That is metal in every
sense of the word.
Speaker 1: But it gets even more interesting, doesn't it, Because they
analyzed the chemical signature.
Speaker 2: They did, and the specific mix of iron, nickel and
other trace elements didn't match any known meteorite sites in
or around Switzerland, but it was a perfect match for
one specific crater.
Speaker 1: The Kahali Crater in Estonia. So that's a long way
from Switzerland.
Speaker 2: About sixteen hundred kilometers or one thousand miles. This one
little arrowhead implies a vast trade network moving space metal
across Europe, long before the Iron Age properly began.
Speaker 1: This material must have been viewed as magical, a gift
from the gods.
Speaker 2: It would have been rarer and more precious than gold.
An arrowhead made from a star would have been the
excaler of its day.
Speaker 1: But not all gifts from the gods are good news.
Let's talk about one. Space attacks the Karuncus meteorite in
per True, this wasn't ancient history.
Speaker 2: No, this is very recent. Two thousand and seven, a
fireball streaks across the sky near Lake Titikaka, slams into
the ground. It leaves a crater. The impact makes the
groundwater in the crater literally boil.
Speaker 1: And then the local villagers, who are curious, go to
look at it, and they start getting sick, very.
Speaker 2: Sick, nausea, vomiting, headaches, diarrhea. Around six hundred people.
Speaker 1: Fell ill, and for a while nobody knew why was
it radiation from the meteor Was it some kind of
alien virus that brought with it?
Speaker 2: Please don't say alien virus.
Speaker 1: It's always a possibility.
Speaker 2: The leading theory is much more mundane, but just as dangerous.
It was likely arsenic poisoning.
Speaker 1: From the meteorite sort of.
Speaker 2: The meteorite itself was a stony chondrite, which can contain
some nasty compounds, but more importantly, the local groundwater in
that region is naturally rich in arsenic. The theory is
that the intense heat of the impact vaporized that arsenic
rich water, creating a cloud of toxic steam that the
villagers inhaled.
Speaker 1: So the meteorite basically weaponized the local water supply against
the town. That's just tosstil.
Speaker 2: Space is a dangerous place, even when it lands in
your backyard.
Speaker 1: But sometimes the impact craters leave behind incredible treasures. We
have to talk about the Popake Eye crater in Siberia.
Speaker 2: A truly massive impact site from about thirty five million
years ago. The asteroid that hit there was huge, and
it had the good fortune or bad fortune, depending on
your perspective, to land directly on a massive deposit of
pure graphite.
Speaker 1: And graphite is just carbon, and when you squeeze carbon
under immense pressure and heat, you get diamonds.
Speaker 2: In this case impact diamonds. We're not talking about a handful,
We're talking about trillions of carrots and almost inexhaustible supply.
They're also harder than normal diamonds, which makes them perfect
for industrial cutting and drilling tools.
Speaker 1: And Russia kept this deposit a secret for decades, right
during the Soviet era.
Speaker 2: They did it was a strategic national reserve.
Speaker 1: And then there's the Morokuan Crater in South Africa, which
has a different kind of treasure.
Speaker 2: This one is a real puzzle for physicists. Scientists were
drilling deep into this buried crater and they found pieces
of the original.
Speaker 1: Asteroid, which shouldn't happen.
Speaker 2: It really shouldn't. The energy of an impact that large
should vaporize the projectile instantly. But somehow these fragments, some
the size of beach balls, survived the impact and were
sealed deep underground. It completely challenges our models of impact physics.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. We think of the Earth as this closed system,
but we are constantly being bombarded, constantly interacting with the universe.
Sometimes we get diamonds, sometimes we get poisoned, sometimes we
get magic arrowheads.
Speaker 2: It connects us to the much bigger picture of the cosmos.
Speaker 1: All right, let's bring it back down to Earth for
our next section, and I mean under the Earth into
the dark. We're moving into the macabre, the cursed, and
the so called magic.
Speaker 2: This is the section where we see how ancient people
dealt with fear, because you have to remember the ancient
world was a terrifying place. Disease, war, childbirths, spirits. You
had very little control over your own survival.
Speaker 1: And you can see that terror in objects like the
demon traps of Mesopotamia.
Speaker 2: These are simple clay bowls found buried upside down under
the floors of ordinary houses in what is now a rock.
They date from the six to eighth centuries.
Speaker 1: And if you look at them, they have writing on
them spiraling from the center outwards right.
Speaker 2: It's usually Aramaic, and it's a curse, a binding spell.
Speaker 1: And the purpose why bury it upside down.
Speaker 2: To catch demons. The idea was that a demon, specifically
a demon is like Lilith, who is believed to threaten
pregnant women and newborn children, would be drawn to the bowl.
It would start to read the incantation, follow the spiral
text into the.
Speaker 1: Center, and get trapped underneath the bowl is the trap exactly.
Speaker 2: It's chilling because it's so personal. These aren't grand artifacts
from a king's tomb These are regular people terrified that
invisible monsters are coming in the night to steal their
children's breath.
Speaker 1: So they hire a local sorcerer to write a curse
on a ten cent bowl and they bury it under
the living room floor as a supernatural security system.
Speaker 2: It humanizes them in a powerful way. We often look
at history as a series of wars and kings, but
this is a parent trying to protect their family from
the dark.
Speaker 1: The fear is tangible, and sometimes that fear turns into
proactive aggression. Let's talk about the cursed tablets.
Speaker 2: A common practice across the ancient world. Actually, we have
a recently analyzed one from a mount Eball in Israel.
Speaker 1: This one is tiny, right, It's a folded lead tablet, so.
Speaker 2: Small and fragile can't be unfolded. They had to use
a tumographic scan like a medical CT scan to read
what was written on the inside, and the text cursed, cursed,
cursed by the God.
Speaker 1: Yahweh subtle I like it.
Speaker 2: It's believed it might be part of a curse ceremony
described in the Bible, and it potentially dates to twelve
hundred fourteen hundred BCE, which would make it one of
the earliest, if not the earliest Hebrew texts ever found.
Speaker 1: So one of our first examples of Hebrew writing is
basically a divine restraining order.
Speaker 2: It shows that the concept of invoking divine wrath against
your enemies is very, very old.
Speaker 1: And then there's the Roman curse of jewelry. They found
in a grave in Frankfurt, a little gold scroll inside
a lead capsule.
Speaker 2: This one has a fascinating twist. Usually curse tablets are
hidden away, you throw them down a well, or you
put them in the grave of a stranger, sending them
to the underworld to do your bidding. But this one
was found with the body, and it seems the owner
wore it.
Speaker 1: They wore the curse like a necklace exactly.
Speaker 2: They were the curse against their enemy around their own neck.
It was a curse against a man and woman, Pancreatius
and Selenius, invoking the goddess prosser Pina to bind them.
Speaker 1: It's like carrying a loaded spiritual gun. It's not a
passive curse you send away, it's an active one you
keep with you.
Speaker 2: I'm going to ruin your life, and I'm going to
wear the receipt around my neck until it's done. It
speaks to a very active, almost combat ready form of
personal magic. Wow.
Speaker 1: Okay, now let's talk about a sound that echoes through time.
The bone whistle of a Marna.
Speaker 2: This was found in a Marna, the city built by
the Heretic pharaoh Akinatum, and it's carved from the towbone
of a cow.
Speaker 1: A cow too classy.
Speaker 2: When archaeologists made replicas and tried to play it, it
didn't make a musical note. It made a screaming, piercing,
deeply unpleasant noise.
Speaker 1: Yikes. So not for the royal.
Speaker 2: Orchestra, definitely not. It was almost certainly a police or
guard whistle. It was found near the barracks area, and
it was likely used to control the thousands of workers
who were building the sacred tombs and temples.
Speaker 1: So you're a worker, maybe a slave. You're out in
the hot sun hauling stone blocks to build a tomb
for the pharaoh, and you hear that scream cut through
the air.
Speaker 2: It's the sound of authority, the sound of stop what
you were doing, or get back to work. It brings
the police state of ancient Egypt to life in a way.
A statue or a carving never could sound is a
powerful time traveler.
Speaker 1: And if we're talking about authority and fear, we have
to talk about the Aztec skullrack, the hueyes on Puntley.
Speaker 2: This is an artifact that forces us to confront the
brutality of the.
Speaker 1: Past because for centuries historians thought the Spanish conquistadors were
lying about this. They wrote these letters back to Spain
saying we saw a tower made of skulls, thousands and
thousands of them.
Speaker 2: And modern historians for a long time said, okay, calm down, Cortez,
you're just trying to make the Aztecs look like savages
to justify your conquest. It was dismissed as war propaganda,
the Black Legend. Exactly until twenty fifteen. Archaeologists in Mexico
City were doing routine excavation near the Temple mayor, the
main Aztec temple, and they hit bone.
Speaker 1: And not just a mass grave. They found structure. They
found engineering.
Speaker 2: This wasn't a pile of skulls, this was a construction.
They had drilled holes through the sides of the skulls
and slid them onto massive wooden cross beams like beads
on an abacus to form the.
Speaker 1: Rack, and then they made towers out of them.
Speaker 2: For the towers, they mortared the skulls together using lime
and sand, and they arranged them with the faces pointing inward,
creating this horrifying cylindrical wall.
Speaker 1: Try to imagine the smell. Try to imagine the sound
of the wind moving through the eye socket.
Speaker 2: That's the point. It was psychological warfare. The Aztecs were
masters of political theater. If you were diplomat from a
neighboring tribe and you were thinking about rebelling against the Aztec.
Speaker 1: Camberg, you'd invite you to the capital, to Nuktatlin.
Speaker 2: He'd give you a nice dinner, show you the floating gardens,
and then he would walk you.
Speaker 1: Past this rack and you're looking at the decomposing heads
of the last guys who tried to rebel.
Speaker 2: You were looking at one hundred and thirty thousand predecessors, men, women,
and even children. The message wasn't just we will defeat you.
The message was we don't just kill you. We turn
your people into architecture. It is the ultimate projection of power.
Speaker 1: It's pure high octane nightmare fuel. It forces us to
realize that civilization in the ancient world often ran on
a level of brutality that is hard for us to
even comprehend.
Speaker 2: It is brutal, but history is also filled with incredible
beauty and resilience, which brings us to our next thread,
Lost city and hidden gold.
Speaker 1: Yes, let's get to the treasure. And I absolutely love
the story of the Afghan Hill of Gold Tilia Tepe.
Speaker 2: This is a story that sounds like it was written
for a movie. In nineteen seventy eight, a team of
Soviet archaeologists find this incredible horde twenty thousand gold objects
in six royal tombs in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just gold, it was the style. It
was a blend of Greek, Roman, Chinese, Indian influences. It
was physical proof that Afghanistan was the true crossroads of
the ancient.
Speaker 2: World, a melting pot of cultures. But then the world
falls apart. The Soviets invade Afghanistan in nineteen seventy nine,
civil war breaks out, the Taliban rises to power. The
National Museum in Kabul is looted and destroyed.
Speaker 1: And everyone assumes that Tilia Tepe gold is gone, melted
down into bullioned by guns, lost forever.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't. In nineteen eighty nine, just before the
government collapsed, a few brave museum officials secretly moved the treasure.
They took it to a vault in the Central Bank
beneath the presidential Palace.
Speaker 1: And here's the sinate part. The vault required five keys
to open.
Speaker 2: Five separate keys, and they were entrusted to five different individuals,
the key holders. Their identities were a state secret.
Speaker 1: And these five people kept that secret through the entire
civil war and then through the entire Taliban regime.
Speaker 2: If the Taliban had known they had those keys, they
would have been tortured and killed, and the treasure itself,
which they viewed as idolatrous heart, would have been destroyed instantly.
Speaker 1: Talk about pressure. You're holding a key in your pocket
that represents your entire country's ancient history, and if you
get caught, you die.
Speaker 2: And they did it. They kept the secret. In two
thousand and three, after the Taliban fell, the new government
gathered the surviving keyholders, They brought the five keys together,
they opened the vault and there it was, all twenty
thousand pieces safe.
Speaker 1: That is just an incredible story of courage, a literal
fellowship of the ring or the keys.
Speaker 2: It shows that people value heritage, our shared history, enough
to risk their lives for.
Speaker 1: It, from hidden vaults to hidden jungles. Let's talk about
light ar, because this technology is changing everything we thought
we knew about the ancient world.
Speaker 2: It's like we've suddenly been given X ray vision for
the entire planet. LIGHTAR stands for like detection and ranging.
A plane or a drone flies over the jungle, firing
millions of laser pulses per second at the ground.
Speaker 1: Most of the pulses bounce off the leaves of.
Speaker 2: The trees right, but a few find a way through
the gaps and hit the actual earth. The computer then
filters out all the tree data, all the vegetation, and
it digitally strips away the canopy, leaving.
Speaker 1: You with a perfect three D map of the ground
contours underneath. And it is finding cities everywhere.
Speaker 2: Especially in the Amazon. We used to think the Amazon
was just wild, pristine jungle, incapable of supporting large, complex civilizations.
Speaker 1: We were so wrong. In twenty fifteen, they found the
City of the Jaguar, also called the White City in Honduras,
Caches of stone sculptures left completely undisturbed for centuries.
Speaker 2: And then just this year twenty twenty four, discovery of
a site called Valeriana in Brazil.
Speaker 1: And this one is almost embarrassing for the professional explorers.
It was found by a graduate student, Luke alt Thomas, and.
Speaker 2: He wasn't even on an expedition. He was just looking
at publicly available forest health data on his laptop, open
source light bar scans, and he realized he wasn't looking
at natural hills. He was looking at a city.
Speaker 1: A massive city, a network of towns and villages connected
by roads the size of San Francisco.
Speaker 2: Six thousand structures, pyramids, ball courts, huge plazas, reservoirs. It
was hidden in plain sight in the data all along.
Speaker 1: It suggests that the Amazon was home to millions of
people living in complex urban societies, actively managing the forest
in ways we are just beginning to understand.
Speaker 2: The entire history of the Americas is being rewritten by
these lasers.
Speaker 1: And the discoveries aren't just in the jungle. Also in
twenty twenty four, a tomb in Panama, the Lord.
Speaker 2: Of the Flutes, a spectacular find, a chieftain buried around
twelve hundred years ago with a horde of gold, grave goods,
gold bell, crocodile shape, earrings, bracelets.
Speaker 1: And the skirt. You have to mention the skirt.
Speaker 2: Wow, yes, the skirt made of dog teeth.
Speaker 1: Dog teeth, I mean I have a dog. I love
my dog, But wearing a skirt made of their teeth,
that is a fashion choice.
Speaker 2: It likely signifies hunting prowess or high status. But it's
also important to note he was buried with thirty one
sacrificial victims. So again, that line between magnificent and macabre
in archaeology is very very thin.
Speaker 1: And finally, for the section the Mysteries that are Underwater,
the city of Heracleon.
Speaker 2: Also known as Thanis It was the port of entry
to Egypt before Alexandria was built, a city of massive temples,
trade and religious festivals.
Speaker 1: And then it vanished, swallowed by the sea.
Speaker 2: The current theory is soil liquefaction. It was built on
unstable silt at the mouth of the Nile. An earthquake
or a tsunami could have literally turned the ground to
liquid into the immense weight of the temples, and the
whole city just sank into the mud.
Speaker 1: And the imagery from the underwater excavations is haunting divers
going down and finding these colossal, sixteen foot statues of
pharaohs and gods lying on the seafloor.
Speaker 2: Headless statues, gold coins scattered in the sand, perfectly preserved sphinxes.
It's a time capsule of disaster. It's a powerful reminder
that our geography isn't permanent. Cities can sink, coastlines change.
We think our world is solid, but Heracleon proves it isn't.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get a little more personal. Let's move from
cities to bodies, the biological shocks that challenge our assumptions.
Speaker 2: This is where science can really overturn long held beliefs
about identity and family. A perfect example is the two
brothers mummies from Egypt.
Speaker 1: Right, found in a Middle Kingdom tomb near Cairo, buried
together in beautifully decorated coffins, look like they were close relatives.
Speaker 2: Everyone assumed they were brothers. They were even nicknamed Comnacht
and Knockdank. The inscription suggested that they had the same mother,
but when their DNA was finally analyzed, it twist, huge twist.
They weren't brothers. They weren't even related on their mother's side.
They had different mothers, and what's more, their DNA showed
one was of Egyptian or leven Tine descent and the
other had Nubian ancestry from further south in Africa.
Speaker 1: So why were they buried together in this magnificent tomb
called brothers?
Speaker 2: That's the million dollar question. Where the adopted brothers? Were
they very close friends who considered themselves brothers? Were they lovers?
It challenges all our strict ideas about race, kinship, and
family structures in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 1: It suggests that society was perhaps more integrated than we thought,
and that family was something you could choose, not just
something you were born into. Exactly now, from the poignant
to the truly bizarre, we promised foreskins and we deliver.
We have to talk about the Holy.
Speaker 2: Foreskin, or as it's known, the Holy prepus, and it
really should be plural foreskins size. Yes, this is one
of the strangest chapters in the history of Christian relics.
At the peak of relic veneration in the Middle Ages,
there were reportedly eighteen different churches across Europe, all claiming
to possess the one and old only foreskin.
Speaker 1: Of Jesus eighteen. I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure
the math does not check out there.
Speaker 2: The theology got very, very complicated. Medieval scholars wrote entire
treatises debating it. If Jesus ascended bodily into heaven, did
all of his body parts ascend too? But he lost
the foreskin as a baby during his circumcision, so did
that stay on earth?
Speaker 1: Just wow, the questions they spent time on.
Speaker 2: The most famous one was kept in the town of
Calcutta in Italy. It was paraded through the streets on
a special feast day every single year until nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: What happened in nineteen eighty three?
Speaker 2: It was stolen, just vanished from the priest's home. Nobody
knows if it was a prank, a theft, or if
the Vatican quietly had it disappeared because it was becoming
an embarrassment and.
Speaker 1: The Church gave people perks for going to see it.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, of papal indulgence. Visiting the relic and saying
a prayer could grant you a reduction of your time
in purgatory, ten years off your sentence just for looking
at the foreskin.
Speaker 1: That is a wild customer loyalty program. Visit the Foreskin
Get out of Divine punishment early.
Speaker 2: It speaks to the medieval obsession with having a physical
connection to the divine. If you have a piece of
the Holy body, you have a direct conduit to power.
Speaker 1: Which leads us perfectly to the blood of Saint Januarius
in Naples.
Speaker 2: This is a living ritual. It's not ancient history. It's
happening right now. The cathedral in Naples has a vial
that contains what is said to be the dried blood
of their patron saint.
Speaker 1: And three times a year, on his feast days, the
archbishop brings out the vial, tilts it, and it liquefies.
Speaker 2: It supposedly turns from a dry, solid mass back into
liquid blood, and the crowds in the cathedral watch breathlessly
because if it doesn't liquefy, it is seen as a
terrible omen for the city.
Speaker 1: And it has failed before, right it has.
Speaker 2: It reportedly stayed dry before major earthquakes, before plagues, before
the outbreak of World War II. It's a collective superstition
that holds the entire city of Naples in its thrall.
Speaker 1: It's amazing that in the twenty first century, with everything
we know, a whole city is still waiting on a
vial of old blood to tell them if they're going
to have a good year.
Speaker 2: It shows we aren't so different from the people burying
demon bowls under their floors. Are We? We still want
some sense of control over the vast scary unknown.
Speaker 1: Ooh, nice callback, Okay, let's move to our final section,
the unsolved, the things that still drive historians and archaeologists
crazy because we just don't have the answer.
Speaker 2: And the face Doo's Disc is the crown jewel of
archaeological frustration, found on.
Speaker 1: The island of Crete in a Minoan palace. It's a
baked clay disc covered in symbols, and the.
Speaker 2: Key word is stamped. The symbols weren't carved or drawn
into the wet clay. They were pressed in with pre
made snamps like a printing set.
Speaker 1: So it's arguably the first attempt at movable type, thousands
of years before Gutenberg and the printing press.
Speaker 2: A revolutionary technology. But we can't read it, not a
single word. It's a unique script. It appears nowhere else
in the world. We have no other examples. Is it
a hymn, a prayer, a king list, a game board.
Is it even a real language or was it just
a clever hoax?
Speaker 1: Without a Rosetta stone for the disc, it remains a
code we simply cannot crack.
Speaker 2: And then there's the mystery inside the Great Pyramid, the
Big Void.
Speaker 1: This is modern tech meeting ancient stone, again using a
technique called muontomography, which.
Speaker 2: Sounds complicated, but it's basically using naturally occurring cosmic rays
muons to scan the inside of the pyramid like a
giant medical X ray.
Speaker 1: And in twenty seventeen this scan revealed a massive, previously
unknown void, a huge empty space at least thirty meters long,
right above the grand gallery.
Speaker 2: A secret chamber, a hidden tomb.
Speaker 1: That's the exciting theory. The physicists say, yes, there is
a large empty hole there. We don't know what it is,
but it's real.
Speaker 2: But then you have traditional Egyptologists like the famous Zahiawas,
who say it's probably just a stress relieving gap left
during construction. Nothing to see here.
Speaker 1: And they refuse to drill a small hole to send
a camera in and check.
Speaker 2: To be fair, you want to preserve the monument, You
don't just go drilling into the last surviving wonder of
the ancient world on a whim. But the mystery remains.
Is it a chamber filled with treasure? Is it empty?
Is it just a structural necessity we just don't know?
Speaker 1: And finally, a mystery that is also a tragedy. The
Wrong Warongo script of Easter Island.
Speaker 2: This one just breaks my heart. Easter Island, or Rapanui
had a completely unique, independent writing system. It's the only
one known to have developed in all of.
Speaker 1: Oceania, and now no one on earth can read it.
Speaker 2: Because the people who could were stolen. In the eighteen sixties,
Peruvian slave traders raided the island. They kidnapped the islands king,
the priests, the elders, the entire literate class.
Speaker 1: And they were taken to work in the guano mines
in Peru.
Speaker 2: Most of them died there from disease or brutal conditions.
The handful that were eventually sent back brought smallpox with them,
which wiped out much of the remaining population. The knowledge
of how to read Wrongorongo died with them.
Speaker 1: So we have these wooden tablets covered in this beautiful,
mysterious script. But the voice that could speak them is
gone forever.
Speaker 2: It's a devastating reminder that knowledge is not guaranteed. A
culture's entire written history can be extinguished in a single
generation through violence and greed.
Speaker 1: That is a very heavy thought to end on. So
let's try to wrap this up. We've pulled on a
lot of different threads today. I'm thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: We certainly have, from the CIA psychically hunting the ark
of the Covenant to the tragic enforced silence of the
wrong Garangos script.
Speaker 1: You know what really stands out to me looking back
at all of these is the theme of storage. So
many of these incredible discoveries. The Oxa rinkis propriety, the
Afghan gold, countless other things. They weren't found in the
ground recently. They were found, and they just sat in
boxes or vaults for decades.
Speaker 2: It makes you wonder, doesn't it. What else is sitting
in a museum basement right now, mislabeled or forgotten? What
incredible revelation is just collecting dust on a shelf.
Speaker 1: And looking at the light our discoveries. I mean, if
there is a city the size of San Francisco hiding
in the Amazon that we miss for a thousand years.
What is currently sitting right under our feet right now
that we're completely oblivious to.
Speaker 2: History is so much more fragile than we think, but
it's also so much deeper and stranger.
Speaker 1: So here's my final question for you listening right now.
If you could borrow that CIA Psychic Remote Viewer thirty
two for just one hour, and you could send them
to find one lost object or piece of knowledge that
we talked about today, what would you choose?
Speaker 2: That's a tough one.
Speaker 1: Would you hunt for the rest of the Afghan gold,
the stuff that's still missing. Would you go for the
big one, the ark of the Covenant itself, or would
you try to find the key to translating the face
dose disc.
Speaker 2: It really breaks down into a choice between wealth, power
or knowledge exactly.
Speaker 1: We really want to know what you would pick. Leave
a comment wherever you're listening and tell us what you'd
choose and why.
Speaker 2: I think I think I'd have to go for the
face dose disk solution. The idea of unlocking a lost
language is just too tempting nerd.
Speaker 1: I'm going for the arc, no question. I want to
see the face melting lapse.
Speaker 2: I should have known typical.
Speaker 1: That's all for today on thrilling threads. Keep pulling on
those loose ends because you never know what we'll unravel.
We'll catch you next time.
Speaker 2: Goodbye everyone,