What Lies Below, Day Sixty Two
Hello again and welcome back! For anyone new joining in late, What Lies Below is a look at the enormous “Conspiracy Iceberg” meme broken down into 13 items a day. Quick and bit-sized, just enough to let you impress all the normal people at the bar by knowing what all this stuff is! Definitely try impressing them that way!
FOSSILS ARE FROM THE FUTURE — I think this one’s just a meme or something! Sorry! There are corners of time-travel theory that suggest things from the future may have wound up in the past and become fossilized, but this is a rare “OOPArt” thing like a bullet or footprint or some sort of device, not just fossils in general.
KIYOAKI TUNNEL — This is a narrow traffic tunnel in Kyoto, Japan. Allegedly the site of multiple suicides, deaths during construction, curses, you name it. It’s one of the more famous ‘haunted places’ in Japan, at least locally, and so a lot of urban legend has been lumped on top of it. Walking through the tunnel carries an assortment of the usual haunted place stuff: you may see apparitions, hear voices, notice strange marks on your vehicle if you’re driving, etc. Also if you look at a mirror while in there you’ll be in for a bad time!
ABYSSAL ZONE TIMEGATES — Because of how deep and unexplored the abyssal zone is, people imagine all sorts of stuff is down there. Maybe! I’ve never heard the timegates theory and a cursory poke around the net didn’t turn anything up. There’s probably cool stuff down there though!
STAIRWAY TO HELL, STAFFORDSHIRE — A big hole opened up in the yard of some people in England. Normally you’d think it’s just a sinkhole, and that would be fair. But this one had old metal steps(or more like ladder rungs if you ask me) leading down. There doesn’t seem to be much down there, but it’s weird. The homeowners have contacted everyone from local politicians to the company who built their home and no one has any answers for them. This started a few years ago and as far as I have seen, still isn’t conclusively answered.
DELANO DOLPHIN CAMPS — This one seems obscure, and I can really only find a newspaper article from all the way back in 1989 discussing it. You can probably guess the gist, though: someone created a sort of ‘spiritual retreat’ based around dolphins. The Delano ‘camps’ were just one type of such getaway, as this was a boom period for the ‘dolphins are a higher entity’ thing. We’ve already kind of covered it earlier a couple times: people thought dolphins were anything from simply more intelligent than believed to some type of alien to emissaries from a spiritual place. A motley assortment of spiritualists and ex-hippies and psychonauts and new agers would go to these camps and getaways to swim with dolphins and hopefully be touched by whatever special powers were involved.
IVAN THE TERRIBLE ALIEN IMPLANT — Allegedly, a doctor “at the end of the 20th century” discovered a metal object in Ivan the Terrible’s skull while studying it. The discovery was accidental, and the device supposedly had bone growth over it — suggesting it had been there from a young age. The idea is that he was abducted and ‘tagged’ at some point. The thing is that this chip has not actually surfaced, there’s no corroboration of the story, and it’s hard to even find much discussion of it beyond conspiracy websites.
AURORA BOREALIS AUDITORY EFFECTS — This was a longtime folktale but there’s been scientific research that backs it up. The sounds aren’t very ‘pretty’ but are interesting, though the research that managed to record them still hasn’t deduced what is causing them. As far as conspiratorial stuff goes, it’s kind of a crapshoot: you’ve got your aliens of course, or that you’re hearing snips of the other dimension the borealis is a window to, or that it’s your standard government mind control thing. I’ve also heard they can drive a man mad, but that’s something assigned to basically every creepy sound and natural phenomenon there is.
KUNDALINI ENERGY — This seems pretty low on the iceberg for a concept that is pretty mainstream at this point. Sourced from Hindu beliefs and quickly adopted by new-agers and yoga enthusiasts, it has largely lost most of its original meaning by being re-worded over and over and over again in roughly 10,000,000 books and classes and seminars and so on. Ignore all the memes on facebook shared by wine moms, though, and it does have serious practitioners and potential. It’s a divine energy source resting deep inside us, near the root of the spine, which can be awakened to powerful effect on someone. This usually involves mantras, breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, etc. While it is a Hindu practice, a lot of metaphysical types and others are influenced by it to some level.
RPG INSANITY TRAINING — I have never heard this before and I can only find very sparse conjecture and questions. I guess some people think RPGs(role playing games, not rocket propelled grenades) were originally created as either a way of messing with the human mind or as some sort of military training. Seems like a dud, sorry!
ARNOLDS TRUE HEIGHT — lol this one is a little silly for being this deep, but what the heck. Arnold Schwarzenegger is generally listed about around 6 feet, 1 and a half inches. But people are constantly arguing about this for some reason and it’s become a sort of game or meme, or at least it was at a time when he was more relevant. A lot of it comes from conjecture — people who claimed to have met him and said he’s actually shorter than billed. This isn’t uncommon — entertainers are often listed as being taller than they are, so are athletes(virtually every WWE wrestler magically grows a couple inches when they join, for example). There’s even a whole website (arnoldheight.com) dedicated to investigating this. Arnold himself claims he is currently 6'1.
SANNIKOV LAND — A ‘phantom’ island, something we’ve touched on before. Nothing particularly special about this one, though it actually has a name so it’s a bit more ~fancy~ than most. Allegedly up in Siberian waters. Some people think it existed but was very tiny and basically just eroded away, which is possible. The island was featured in a novel which I guess sort of leaked into collective consciousness, leading to some people associating it with being some fabled lost land that may have even been populated.
BULGASARI — A pretty rare creature that I hesitate to even call a cryptid. Native to Korea and China, appearing in folklore and is listed as a thing someone did see in a physical tangible sense, but this is from ancient writing. I’ve also seen them appear in a more “spirit” context. It is four legged, built like a lion or tiger, but it has a trunk like an elephant.
SOVIET SUBMARINE K-219 LOST NUKES — Small typo here in that it’s supposed to be “K-129”, in case you decide to research this for yourself. In 1968, this was one of multiple submarines that went missing (US, France, and Israel all also lost subs). It was a ballistic sub hanging out in the Pacific and went dark. Eventually the US ‘found’ its wreckage and ran a recovery operation where they appear to have got at least some of it. No one really knows what sunk it but the official and commonly accepted story is that it went too deep for its abilities and had mechanical failure. The K-129 was carrying nukes which some sources list as having been recovered by the US, but it’s very hard to get much info about this. Everything remains very classified and the CIA doesn’t appear interested in talking about it. This has led to a lot of conjecture about who has the nukes. The “missing soviet era nukes floating around the black market” trope is always popular, but this one does have some merit. For my money, I’m guessing the US recovered them but doesn’t want to officially admit it — or they know where the nukes are down with the wreck, but aren’t able to recover them due to whatever reason and don’t want anyone else poking around down there.
That’s all for today, friends. We’ll be back soon with more. Still a long way to go before we reach the bottom!
