What Lies Below, Day Thirteen
Welcome back, adventurers, to What Lies Below. I’m Rob, a traveler in the weird and wild, and you’re joining me as we plunge all the way down this massive chunk of internet lore. Thirteen more topics bring us past the halfway mark of Tier 2, and we’re starting to finally get into the thick of it. Let’s go!
SYNCHRONICITY — Hard to describe, interpreted lots of different ways. A sort of link between meaningful apparent-coincidences that can guide you. Jung came up with the term but it has rapidly moved out of a purely psychological framework into a more spiritual realm. If you’ll bear with me, a good example is how the DC Comics character Constantine gets around and manages things — he needs to get from London to New York and in a blur of random events, he just happens to always be in the right place and time to catch a car or plane or whatever and stumble into what needs stumbling into, all achieved by falling into synchronicity. Or, like, when you get home and realize you have no memory of driving home. Maybe it’s a missing time phenomenon or maybe you just slipped into synchronicity.
LUIGI PLAYABLE IN MARIO 64 — Hahahah heck yeah. THIS is what this iceberg is all about! I honestly hope there’s more of this mixed in with all the mystical theory and illuminati stuff. Urban legends based on video game stuff are really common and neat! In this case, people found Luigi hiding in the code of Mario 64 — but he isn’t actually playable. Apparently it was intended, but dropped. He isn’t actually playable unless you use mods, as far as I know, but a later DS version let you play as him! Mystery solved!
DINOSAUR DENIAL — Anything that most people accept as true will generate a small contrarian response of people who make refuting it a point of their personality, regardless of any circumstance or evidence. Some people will do so ‘ironically’, but then do so for so long that the lines blur. It’s like flat earth or climate change. Dinosaur Denial is very big and almost always tied into Creationism — i.e. them bones are fake, either part of a coverup or tricks planted by that Satan fella!
RADIONICS — An idea electromagnetic therapy like radio waves can treat medical conditions. Also a good band name! Get on that, someone!
SONGS OF SATURN — Maybe there’s something else, but as far as I can determine this refers to scientists taking the resonance of Saturn’s moons and rings grabbed by the Cassini probe, and converting them into music. It’s neat! Also a good album name!
PRANA-RAYS — The Seven Rays of Prana are allegedly the ways that divine energy is beamed into the world. Kinda like astrology, sort of. People are more or less influenced by different ones, etc. There’s a neverending array of woo flavored stuff like this, most of it just being people taking ‘which prana ray are you!’ quizzes when finding out which Hogwarts House they are loses its zing.
PARALLAX VIEW — I don’t know what this is supposed to be. I’d never heard of it before, but it’s just the way things seem to move differently depending on relative positions. Like if you’re driving and faraway things seem to go by slowly while street signs zip past. There’s also a movie with the title? I don’t know, nothing really weird! Probably something people use when talking about UFOs or simulation theory?
CRYSTAL SKULL IN THE MEMPHIS PYRAMID — So this one is weird in a different kind of way. Just a strange tale of misguided urban planning and bizarre marketing. The Memphis Pyramid is a giant ugly lit-up pyramid in Memphis, built in the early 90s. It was supposed to be a giant world-class complex with all kinds of things to do in it, but wound up just being a sports arena by the time it opened when most of the plans fell through. It did well with sports for a while(basketball and boxing mostly) and some concerts, but my the mid 2000s all the teams and promotions had found other venues. It sat empty for a while, just an enormous steel pyramid looming over Memphis for years. The crystal skull is just something some rich guy(Isaac Tigrett) had had welded to its apex early on, before it even opened. It was all purposefully carried out in a weird way as a purposeful publicity thing. It was removed and given back to him not long later. And yes, some people think that cursed the place. Or that this was all more sinister — but Tigrett appears to just be your average rich idiot who fell into new age stuff. The Pyramid is now a Bass Pro Shop.
EVERYONE IS AN ACTOR (TRUMAN SHOW REALITY) — As we go down the iceberg, I fear we’re going to get a lot of listings whose substance is ‘a dude got really high and started a thread online’. There is a psychological condition named after the film, something recently coined that isn’t yet officially recognized. Sufferers of this believe they are being filmed and are the only ‘real’ person. So sort of gangstalking mixed with reality tv mixed with simulation theory. Any time I’ve seen this sort of thing come up, that’s the general gist — sometimes just one person is the ‘real’ one and sometimes maybe a whole town is, or only the ‘awakened’ people are real and everyone else is acting, etc.
TAVISTOCK — This is a town in England?? It’s a very old town, like a couple thousand years old and maybe older. There’s also something called the Tavistock Institute, that has been around for a while and puts out some illuminati vibes as they apply ‘social science’ to ‘contemporary problems’. It doesn’t get as much attention as things like the Trilats or CFR, but you can find some corners of the conspiracy world making noise about that.
EISENHOWER’S GOLFING TRIP — This is a pretty obscure one. Eisenhower met some aliens in the 50s and the cover story is that he went golfing. Not much to this one as far as I know, just a lot of conjecture in the online ufology community. One of those pre-internet things that just didn’t make the cut as social media forced wilder stuff to the surface.
REID CHIPS — This has got to mean ‘RFID’ chips. These, like many things the conspiracy community runs with, are a real thing with the possibility to be a much worse thing. Implanted microchips that can be tracked and have a varying amount of info stored on them. Sticking them in goods being transported or in passports has become fairly common, and they’re commonly used in tagging pets or even wild animals. The big rub is when it comes to using them in humans, which has been done — though on a voluntary basis. Usually it comes from tech bro goofs who think its neat, or from idiot companies who think asking their employees to get one won’t backfire. There is a feeling of inevitability to it, though, and that freaks a lot of people out. Some futurist transhumanist types embrace it, most people are wary. Some conspiracy theorists suggest vaccines implant RFID chips, though they aren’t small enough to be injected that way so we’re probably safe enough for now.
MAHABHARATA ATOMIC WARFARE DESCRIPTIONS — The Mahabharata is an ancient Sanskrit work that includes many stories including the Bhagavad Gita. There’s a part of the Mahabharata that describes accurately the way in which nuclear weapons would work, and states that they were used in battles spoken of in the work. Traces of alleged evidence even appear from time to time, i.e. radioactive material found in northern India where it shouldn’t be. There’s a lot of theory suggesting that ancient holy texts are often talking about tangible wars and events when they depict struggles between deities or seemingly fantastical beings, so this sort of thing is very popular in some circles.
That’s all! The good ones were pretty good, but we still had some not-so-interesting ones. Still, getting some of this rote terminology out of the way will probably help down the line when I’m trying to describe more obscure items. See you tomorrow!
