What Lies Below, Day Thirty Nine
Hello again, welcome back. We’re wrapping up Tier Seven today with one heck of a mix. Let’s dive right in!
CHIPOTLE MEXICAN GRILL FOOD TERRORISM — A few years ago, Chipotle was the common denominator in a number of cases of salmonella, norovirus, and E coli. This clustering of such cases caused speculation that it was purposefully done; not specifically to harm people but instead to harm Chipotle itself. The reasoning is that shortly before this, Chipotle had started going ‘GMO free’ and was thus a target of the biotech companies who make GMOs. While it’s probably not true and it seems sourced from some of the dumbest places on the internet like ‘Natural News’, I’m also not about to defend the honor of biotech companies. Or Chipotle, for that matter, who doesn’t actually care about anything and was just doing this as a publicity stunt. Next!
THE “PAINFUL CAKE” INCIDENT — Oh boy. Well, in 2012 a Swedish museum had a celebration that involved having artists come up with cakes. One of the artists made a cake to look like a black woman, while poking his head through a hole in the table so his head seemed to be part of the cake. When the cake was cut, he’d scream and carry on. Videos of the incident went online and it was uh, yeah. Phew, quite a thing. I don’t know of anything super conspiratorial about it, but it was definitely weird.
NEG- ENTROPY — Entropy is just the process of everything slowly coming apart. Entropy is the fate of everything; the universe itself included. Or so most believe. But Negentropy is the reverse of this, a process in which things actually come together and become more orderly over time. Lots of things are negentropic, at least in the short run. You, for example. You were a collection of random molecules and cells that all came together into you, a biological engine. Congratulations. The problem is that all the stuff you’re made of is subject to entropy, and so far there doesn’t appear to be any real way to change this.
POVERTY POINT SUN TEMPLES — Poverty Point is a site in Louisiana built by indigenous people filled with various pieces of earthwork(i.e. mounds). It is thousands of years old, and was likely part of a more extensive network. The whole complex seems to have had multiple purposes, but also may have been one large temple built to correspond with the sun’s movements. That’s uh, that’s it on this one.
SILENCIOSOS ZONEROS — There’s a stretch of desert in Mexico in which, supposedly, radios and phones and so on don’t work — a complete deadzone. The legends suggest there are strange magnetic anomalies, that there was a US military plane crash there, that there’s UFOs and other stuff going on, etc. Whether there is such a ‘zone’ or not is still up for debate, but the urban legends are strong.
HAGGARDS LIVING MUMMY — A British author named H Rider Haggard who lived in turn of the century England had a thing for mummies. His stories were adventurous things set in Africa or other “exotic” locations. He allegedly had an authentic mummy in his possession that he found to have changed positions overnight on a couple occasions. Some think this was just part of his self-promotion, who knows.
AMAZON FOREST WAS BUILT — So, there’s two layers to this. One is that aliens or some lost civilization specifically engineered the entire Amazon biome as either an experiment or as a necessary piece of the Earth’s balance. Obviously there is a bit of debate about that. But beneath it there is a lot of genuine, demonstrable evidence that shows the Amazon has been changed and shaped by human touch over the years. A lot of indigenous people have lived in or around the Amazon for a very long time, and research shows that the spread of certain crops and domestication of certain plants by these people had a significant impact on the way the forest developed and exists today. Very interesting stuff; too bad capitalism and climate change are going to eradicate it within the next couple decades!
ESSENES — Jewish sect who may have existed for many thousands of years. Its believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls came from them, though this is a debated topic. The first mention of them appears thousands of years ago and suggests they’d already been around for thousands of years prior. They were supposedly something like communal monks, strictly observing their various rituals and keeping to themselves. There’s always some conjecture about just where they first picked up their beliefs and practices, how they knew some of the things they did, and so on. The Dead Sea Scrolls themselves are often debated as well.
NEANDERTHAL SUPERIORITY — A lot of modern research suggests that Neanderthals were a lot smarter and more advanced than the brutish-caveman image we’ve long associated with them. This puts into question the idea that Homo Sapiens outlived them due to just being smarter and cooler, so there’s a lot of speculation as to what happened. I honestly don’t know the end-game theory to this, i.e. our ancestors enlisted aliens or something to defeat the superior neanderthals. But it is a neat thing for people interested in truly ancient history, and why the neanderthals disappeared is still a mystery.
USTURO-BUNE — Japanese legend regarding a ship/boat/thing that washed ashore around 1800~ or so. The story exists in various versions, but basically this vessel drifted ashore and a beautiful young woman who didn’t look like the locals was in it. She couldn’t communicate with anyone and so they put her back in the boat and it drifted back into the ocean(lmao). This has been interpreted as all sorts of things: a glamorized story of a normal person from another country appearing, a visit from some manner of spirit or deity, a complete fiction, etc. It is maybe most popular among observers as a possible UFO encounter, though, as the ‘vessel’ was very unusual. If so, I guess that alien was out of luck since they just shoved it back into the ocean. Our First Contact could have been hundreds of years ago; we’d have transporters and immortality and starships by now if not for some fishermen! Whoops!
THE GREY GOBLIN OF KING CHARLES XII — This all seems based off brief entries in books about ‘humanoid encounters’ by a guy named Rosales. Where Rosales picked up the stories, I’m not sure. I’m not even sure which Charles XII we’re referring to here. The ‘grey goblin’ is a telling of a story that appeared around a few royals over the years, where a little gray creature would appear as some sort of advisor. Sounds like a fae story retold and re-interpreted over the years.
LUNA PARK TRAIN FIRE DEMON — Luna Park is a theme park in Australia that became known for a fire in 1979 that killed seven people, most of whom were kids. The ride was called ‘The Ghost Train’ and the entrance to it was labeled ‘Hells Doorway’, which already makes you lift a brow. The cause was initially put down to electrical fire, but this was later revised due to inquiry and the cause is now considered unknown. There was a later ‘admission’ by someone saying a family member admitted to it being arson, though the veracity of this is debated. The thing that really makes it all stand out, though, is that there’s a picture of one of the victims taken a short time before the incident. The child is with an adult man who is wearing a really strange mask/costume thing with a demonic vibe to it. Some say it was just a performer or busker or something, some say it was a cultist who set the fires in order to sacrifice the kids to Moloch. This has a lot of the elements people love to dig into, and there are some pretty lengthy essays and videos on the subject to look up.
URKHAMMER, IOWA — Urkhammer is, according to the urban legend, a town that simply vanished. Not so much a ghost town as a town that is a ghost. Just when the town was founded or most other info about it is unknown, and there doesn’t appear to be much hard evidence of it on the books. The first ‘mentions’ of it are in the 20s, when people looked at aerial photos that showed the area and realized there was no town where the town was supposed to be. Others reported other various ghostly phenomenon: seeing it on the horizon but unable to get loser, people going into town but finding the buildings were all intangible, etc.
The problem is that the source for all of this is a website posting in 2015, which was just taken from an “old email”. It got repeated around after that, but no one has found any earlier source or confirmation of any of this beyond that old email(which some think the website proprietor just invented). Then again, maybe part of the town fading from the world meant it faded from memories and records, too?
There we have it! Solid mix for the end of the seventh tier, and the next couple look to get really weird. Good stuff ahead, so you tomorrow with tier eight!
