What Lies Below, Day Eight
Hello again and welcome back to What Lies Below. Today we wrap up Tier One and breach Tier Two. In other words, after about 100 items, we’ve finally reached the tip of the Iceberg! As we go on, you can begin to see the various separate “camps” of the conspiracy/paranormal world take form. At one time they were a lot more distinct, but social media has led to things like Qanon increasingly trying to become an overarching philosophy that connects all other conspiracies. Still, you can make out the differences: you have your hardcore secular traditional “new world order” crowd, your UFOlogist/Alien crowd, your theology-based doomsday crowd, your new age metaphysics crowd, and so on. There’s plenty of crossover, of course, but it’s still not uncommon to see hardcore believers in one area look with utter disdain on others.
XXTENTACION KILLED BY DEMONS — This is the good shit! I vaguely remembered hearing about this but genuinely thought it was a joke, so I had to do some research. Turns out, no joke! He was allegedly fairly interested in the occult and possibly even a practitioner, and there’s a lot of conjecture that his killing was either a backfiring of this or the result of an occult rival having him offed. Now, keep in mind this is all based on things like “some guy on reddit” or “someone who says they evoked a spirit who told them these things”. From what I can determine, the common belief isn’t so much that tangible demons took him out, but that they either inspired or possessed whomever did.
ZALGO — Zalgo’s origins are murky, but it is at least 10+ years old and seems to have probably started with a series of edits of popular comics, turning them into horror-themed lovecraftian works. This spread to manipulations of photos of people, and a distinctive font that scrawls all over the screen. Zalgo’s lore was very open-ended, moreso even than past internet creations like Slenderman, so it grew very fast. Zalgo is a sort of internet-age Lovecraft creature: a force of chaos and evil that exists at the periphery of our reality and intrudes in a number of ways, causing madness in those who witness it. Not much conspiracy here, folks! You’ll always find some discussion somewhere suggesting that things like this are actually real, but that’s about the extent of it.
SOUTH AMERICAN GNOME RECORDINGS — For a long time, there have been scattered reports(and even an alleged video 10+ years back) of people seeing gnome-like creatures in South America. These may or may not be duendes, a folklore creature which is more goblin, fae, or spirit depending on region and tradition. While there’s a lot of online hubbub about this, most reports wind up just being retellings of the same thing. The most famous video is still floating around out there, so take a look for yourself!
O’HAIRE AIRPORT 2006 — Airports AND UFOs, hell yeah. This is more like it. There’s too many internet pranks and stuff like ‘Rocks???’ on this list. Give me more airport ufos!!! O’Haire is a big ol’ airport near Chicago that had a UFO incident in 2006. It’s not that UFO sightings are so rare, but this one got a lot of major mainstream network attention. The UFO in question was the traditional variety — i.e. a physical, saucer-shaped craft instead of a ball of light or something. A lot of credible people saw it, but radar didn’t pick it up. It sat there for quite a while, as far as UFO appearances usually go, then left. This one was officially explained as a weather phenomenon, which I’m pretty sure no one believes.
BRAIN IN A JAR — lol okay fine. Just a thought experiment retelling of Plato’s Cave that occasionally appears in simulation theory conversation or transhumanism. If you were a brain in a jar being fed input, would you have any way of knowing?
ROTHSCHILDS/ROCKEFELLERS — Two of the better known turbo-rich families with particularly long dynasties. If you have a lot of time, there’s no shortage of articles and videos describing how their wealth first accumulated and where it’s gone since then. These families wield enormous power and have done so for some time. They are attached to any conspiracy regarding an illuminati-style organization, are often connected to various things like Reptilians and UFOs, and so on. If you play a ‘7 degrees of separation’ game with members of the wealthy dynasties like these two, you can generally make a connection to almost any super-influential or powerful person. Whatever the specific truth may be, no one as rich as these people is good or deserves to have the level of power they possess. This is a fitting end to the first 20th of the iceberg, I think! Almost 100 down and only about 5% there! I may underestimated the size of this thing at first glance! Oh no!
PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENTS — Starting off the second tier with a favorite of mine! The government allegedly did some weird experiments on the USS Eldridge in the 40s. Supposedly, it was a sort of ‘cloaking’ device that rendered the ship invisible to either radar/sonar or to the naked eye depending on how deep you want to go. The experiment supposedly wound up doing any or all of the following: teleporting the vessel, time-traveling the vessel, and putting the vessel in another world/dimension. This also did all sorts of horrible things to most of the crew, including fusing them with the ship and driving them mad. The origins are alleged leaks to writers and press, the government denies, etc. A well known movie came out of it, and it eventually leaked into popular culture in a lot of other ways.
FRESNO NIGHTCRAWLERS — The Fresno Nightcrawlers are one of my favorite cryptids and get surprisingly little attention despite how cool they are. They’re not big worms, despite the name. In the mid 2000s, surveillance footage surfaced of things walking across a yard — they had two long legs with no real body or head or anything else. They appeared to be white or light colored and as far as I know no one ever figured out what the hell they were. Others have supposedly been spotted in other places, but the Fresno one got the most hubbub — and there’s plenty of videos and other resources.
BOUVET ISLAND BOAT — Bouvet Island is a tiny, isolated, uninhabitable little speck of land. It’s hundreds and hundreds of miles from anywhere, and the closest land mass to it is Antarctica. It was very loosely explored throughout the 20th century but mostly left alone, being particularly hard to reach and of no real value. Then in the 60s, when surveying to build a weather station, sailors found a life boat just hanging out there — seaworthy but not the sort of thing that should have been able to make it 1,000 miles. The sailors looked around and didn’t see any signs of life, but didn’t investigate much for some reason, nor did anyone else in later trips. No one ever figured out where the lifeboat came from. There’s a ten-year period it had to have arrived in, and its placement seemed to suggest multiple people had hauled it into the lagoon where it was found. Otherwise, there’s a lot of guesses and theories but no one really knows.
GREEN CHILDREN — Hell yes! The rarest and best of conspiracies: Fae! The Green Children, a brother and sister, wandered out of the woods in Suffolk one day in the 12th century. They were green, they would only eat beans, and they spoke a language no one had heard! Then the people made them be ‘normal’ and the boy died, whereas the girl adapted and explained that they had come from an underground world full of other green people!!! It may be a sort of folk tale misinterpreted as historical, but I’m pretty sure they were fae!!!
THE PATOMSKIY CRATER — This is a crater in Russia that might not actually be a crater! It sure looks like a crater, with a big old thing in the middle and all. There’s been a lot of science done on it and Russia now says it’s a geological formation due to weird gas, but everyone still thinks it’s from a meteorite. Also, trees around it seem to grow extra fast for some reason. There is not a lot of settled science on it for whatever reason.
THE RANIKOT WALL — Ranikot is an enormous fort in Pakistan that probably first appeared in the 17th century and has been updated and rebuilt a few times since. It is fairly unknown despite being a very impressive piece of history, and well preserved. There are even villagers living within its walls. I wasn’t aware of this place at all and did some reading, but I’m not seeing anything massively weird about it. That said, exactly who built it is in question and no one is quite sure why the largest fort in the world was built seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
ATLANTEAN TUNNELS — A suggestion that Atlantis’ civilization stretched past a single island or small continent, and they had built vast networks of tunnels that connected them to other parts of the world — especially South America. Sometimes tied to Atlantis having a hand in other Lost Civilizations(i.e. they were colonies or trading partners). This is usually based off pieced-together conjecture about caves, OOPArts, and the like. Despite the tenuous connection to UFOs and aliens, Atlantis and other related topics tend to occupy their own distinct corner of the conspiracy world that most others avoid.
That’s all for today! Tier Two gets a bit weirder now that we’ve dispensed with most of the obligatory stuff. Now we’re entering the territory of things that mostly breached mainstream conversation, but often only very partially or very briefly. See you tomorrow!
