What Lies Below, Day Fifty Nine
We’re back! Some people have wondered why I am not skipping entries that appear to be clear duds or memes. Well, conspiracy theories and paranormal subjects are tricky like that — where should I draw the line? Seemed more reasonable to just do every entry and, if I think one is a blatant meme or prank, just say so after giving it at least a look.
WKCR 1995 INTRUSION — College radio station that, as you have guessed, got “hijacked” for about 5 minutes. Weird music with lots of distortions and static, a woman’s voice reading obituary listings, etc. That’s it. Every couple years someone somewhere does a thread about it and people wonder a while, then forget. I hate to be a party pooper here but it was a college radio station and this was probably just a college kid doing a prank or project or something. It’s available online to listen to, though, so draw your own conclusion!
HEMI-SYNC GATEWAY MANUALS — A guy named Robert Monroe came up with a training method for psychic stuff, primarily astral-projection flavor. He(and the ‘Monroe Institute’) put together a series of manuals on this, very in-depth and heavily guided. They cost money, but obviously the internet has found ways around that. Still, not many people have ‘finished’ the training(or at least not many who have done so have talked about it) and so there’s a lot of mystery around how well it works, what results it does produce, etc. Because it approaches the phenomenon from a more science-grounded direction, it still does attract attention. Oh and the CIA seems to have at least looked into using this, if not more.
TITANIC DIDN’T SINK — The main theory here is that a ship DID sink, but it wasn’t the Titanic. It was another ship, a crappier older one called the Olympic. This is all part of an elaborate insurance scam on the part of the company who built both ships, because the Olympic had been part of some kind of crash years earlier and so there had to be a switcheroo. Not exactly the tightest theory I’ve seen.
USA MEGAREGIONS — This is just like, a normal term for a normal thing. A ‘megaregion’ is a region based on population, regardless of city/county/state lines. It blurs fairly close population centers into large blocks, kind of like the sci-fi trope of ‘megacities’ that are the size of small states. This isn’t really that nefarious or weird? I imagine though, that there are those who see these as being a tool for various illuminati ‘one world government’ plans.
MASSACHUSETTS FLYING GIANT — This sounds like a badass cryptid but I can’t find anything except other people asking about it. There’s one place linking to a type of extinct giant bird, but that doesn’t look like it was native to Massachusetts. Sorry!
POISONOUS SNOW — I mean, there’s a fairly non-controversial bit of research on this that suggests snow can absorb stuff(like gasoline exhaust) from the air so it isn’t super-great to ingest, but I don’t think that’s it. I feel like this is probably related to the annual tradition of someone posting a video of “snow that doesn’t melt!!!” online. Inevitably, someone will grab a clump of snow and hold a lighter to it and then announce that this is proof snow is fake, or it is laced with chemtrail stuff, or whatever. This is pretty thoroughly debunked, but it will absolutely live on forever in some conspiracy corners.
PHANTOM SOCIAL WORKERS — This is an urban legend that seems to have started in the 90s and mostly centered in Britain, but does happen elsewhere. It isn’t entirely a “legend”, though, as there have been cases of people being caught doing it(though far less frequently than the stories suggest). Anyway, this is the phenomenon of people pretending to be social workers so that they can abduct children. The story is told a lot of different ways with the ‘phantoms’ usually being traffickers of some sort. Police have investigated this sort of thing and, like I said, legitimate cases have been found.
BIG MARIJUANA — Again, just the conspiracy community kind of discovering ‘capitalism bad’ through a different route than most. Just like big pharma and big tobacco, any industry with a hell of a lot of $$$ at stake is going to start exerting influence on the government and culture. With more and more states allowing legal weed, it’s happening with marijuana too. Now, big weed doesn’t have the same interests as some of those other things: for example they aren’t trying to cover up that weed can kill you. But they have a financial interest in making sure people are shopping at Legitimate Retailers and not just buying Some Dude’s yard-grown variety. They also have a financial interest in the pseudoscientific “yeah if u smoke weed once it actually cures cancer” stuff everyone has seen online.
FRED BECK’S VERSION — Fred Beck is a guy who, along with a few others, allegedly was part of a large battle with multiple Sasquatches somewhere in Oregon in the 20s. They had encountered a few earlier in the day, so the story goes, and decided to shoot one for some reason. Then later on at night, they were attacked by the others. People investigated at length but found little proof and mostly wrote it off as a hoax, but it lives on in regional Bigfoot lore to this day.
THE INVISIBLE WAR — Unless I’m missing something, this is about a documentary from several years back that details the vast amounts of sexual assault and harassment that happen in the US military. This sort of thing has been a sort of open secret forever, and it turns out the military is full of rapists and pigs and the people in charge are well aware but don’t care, whereas the general public mostly just plug their ears because jingoism is injected into everyone’s bloodstream from birth onward. Who could have imagined!
THE ABRAXAS FOUNDATION — A musician/artist type named Boyd Rice founded this in the 80s. It was more or less a think-tank for what could be easiest described as “edgelord fascists”, but in more detail were social-darwinists with strong interests in misanthropy, totalitarianism, and a close relationship to the Church of Satan and egdelord supreme Anton Lavey. Honestly not much more to it. Boyd himself kind of just fluttered around doing different projects and dabbling in various occult and esoteric subjects, the foundation fell into obscurity before too long.
THE ‘LITTLE RED MAN’ OF PARIS — The ‘little red man’ is a recurring figure who appeared to a lot of people, including numerous pretty noteworthy historical figures like Napoleon and Catherine de Medici. Its appearance was almost always a portent of bad news, but sometimes it seemed more like a trickster figure who would strike bargains. While there’s not a lot of what we’d call hard evidence, there are a heck of a lot of stories about this fella.
THE WHITE SANDS MUTANTS — White Sands is a national park in New Mexico where there are lizards who have ‘mutated’ to become very white in coloration as compared to what they may look like elsewhere. That’s uh, that’s it. New Mexico has had a lot of UFO activity, government sketchiness, military testing, and so on — so there’s a little conjecture about that but, uh, not much. Pretty deep on the iceberg for this! Maybe I’m missing something!
Thanks, all! The second half of the iceberg is definitely a lot more obscure than the first. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a lot to be found on every subject, but it’s almost refreshing to find topics that haven’t been thoroughly pored over by every content creator on the net.
