What Lies Below, Day Thirty Three
Welcome back to What Lies Below! We’re on our way down the biggest collection of conspiracies and oddities I know of. Today’s assortment is a little all over the place, so let’s get started.
JAMISON FAMILY SPIRITUAL WARFARE — The Jamison family was a typical family unit living in Oklahoma: Sherilynn and Bobby were mother and father, Madyson the daughter. They were fairly quiet and spiritual. But then ‘spiritual’ took a turn. Bobby and Sherilynn became fixated on the idea that evil spirits were invading their home. Their daughter had taken up talking to an imaginary friend, who they assumed was one of the spirits. Bobby had begun asking their pastor about how to do combat(as in literally shoot with a gun) the spirits living on their roof. He’d also bought a copy of the Satanic Bible with which he thought he could drive them out via ritual. Sherilynn, meanwhile, considered herself a witch. One day in 2013, the family abruptly decided to move. They packed up a pickup truck, and surveillance footage of this process shows them moving as if in a complete trance — it’s on YouTube so you can look for yourself.
The truck was eventually found about an hour away in the middle of nowhere. Their dog was in it, as well as all sorts of things like cell phones and a significant amount of cash. A while later, the remains of all three family members were found a few miles away with no cause of death being apparent.
So, there you go. Was it a case of good people conducting a very literal sort of spiritual warfare and losing? A lot of researchers seem to think it was a case of Bobby and Sherilynn getting into the drug trade, specifically meth. That theory makes the most sense, in my humble opinion. Others believe they were targeted by cults, tricked and killed by other family members, or that it was some sort of murder-suicide plot. It remains unsolved.
RONGORONGO — I bet you thought this was a cryptid, right? Sadly, no. It’s the name given to what appears to be a set of writing found on various things on Easter Island. A lot of the glyphs it contains depict humanoid or animals, and some of these don’t necessarily look like anything we recognize. That may just be down to the way the writers interpreted more mundane things, but it comes up sometimes in discussions about lost civilizations and ancient aliens and so forth — all the more thanks to this being from the same place as the Easter Island statues.
CHRIS CHAN=SMILEY FACE KILLER — Much higher up on the Iceberg, you may remember one ‘Smiley Face Killer’ theory being that a number of seemingly unconnected murders are the work of a serial killer, partially based on a smiley face always being present.
Chris-Chan is one of the internet’s most notorious personalities. They arrived on the scene as creator of the infamous ‘Sonichu’ comics, handdrawn and scanned comics based in a Sonic the Hedgehog world but featuring the artist as a main character and getting increasingly weird and even violent. These became a huge target for early 00’s memeing and trolling, as did the author. Instead of fading away, ChrisChan continued to draw attention — there was a neverending stream of drama that a lot of people fed on and worked tirelessly to worsen. This was still pre-social-media as we know it, so there weren’t a lot of ‘internet personalities’ like we think of them today. Forums and imageboards would hyperfocus on those people who did gain some notoriety, and ChrisChan was either unwilling or unable to stop contributing to this cycle. ChrisChan is still active and all of this is better documented elsewhere. In my opinion it’s kind of gross how people structured their whole lives around maliciously harassing this one person for years. Seems like if you do that sort of thing, you may be a bigger mess than the people you’re targeting, even if those people are more out-loud about it. Just a thought!
ANYWAY, the “Chris Chan is the Smiley Face Killer” thing is just born out of this weird culture that formed around this person. Threads would just pop up somewhere saying it and then it would get absorbed and memed into existence.
ARIANNI — Hollow Earth stuff. Foundational texts among that crowd circle around Admiral Richard Byrd, a US naval officer who may or may not have reached the North Pole and also made multiple trips into Antarctica. There is a “Lost Diary” of his floating around that seems to have been published by his son or someone else and is believed, by people outside the Hollow Earth realm, to probably not be genuine. It describes Byrd encountering your standard hidden advanced civilization — with either the civilization itself or the inhabitants thereof being named ‘Arianni’. This has bled out a little into some new age circles, but isn’t very popular.
US BIOWAR MATERIALS IN IRAQ — Probably based on an article from a couple years ago that cites some evidence of the US having shipped this kind of stuff to Iraq decades ago; then later used those same things as one of the reasons we had to spend 20 years invading them. There’s also plenty of conjecture that we covertly helped them aquire stuff or develop it, which there isn’t much hard evidence of but would be entirely consistent with US foreign policy and is probably true. Not super weird for this deep on the Iceberg!
SPIDER ROCK GOLD MAPS — This one is a little hard to follow. Two guys in turn of the century Texas, each allegedly in possession of a separate treasure map, somehow came into contact with one another and believed their maps could combine to be a…super map I guess. The story goes that eventually the maps did lead them to dig up something, but it wasn’t treasure. Rather, it was a round stone with ANOTHER map etched on it. Eventually, two other similar stones were found. All had very complicated patterns on them, full of intersecting lines and circles and arrows and so forth. They tried to discern these stones but never quite pulled it off, supposedly occasionally finding artifacts that suggested they were on the track of Spanish gold, but never getting there. The current whereabouts of the stones themselves is now seemingly uncertain, and the stories behind them seem…embellished at the least.
SILENT CITY, ALASKA — In the 1880s, phenomenally named Alaskan Prospector Dick Willoughby allegedly took a picture of a “ghost city” he’d seen hovering over the ice. This made old-timey people hop up and down in amazament as steam came out of their ears and their monocles popped off. Other people had made similar claims about seeing spectral cities and things in Alaska, but this was a picture! The picture turned out to probably just be an overexposed picture of Bristol, England that Willoughby bought and duplicated. I’m reluctant to just say “hoax” on items on the iceberg and move on, but this one is very probably just a hoax.
MULTIPLE MOONS — Kind of broad. Now and then Earth pulls a small(as in smaller than a house) object into orbit for a while, and some people consider a couple dust clouds that orbit us as ‘moons’. As far as more out-there stuff goes, sometimes there’s a sort of ‘hidden’ moon that is somehow hiding behind the other one. This doesn’t hold much weight these days since even if you think NASA and everyone else is in on it, average people would have probably been reporting a second moon en-masse. Hope this is just about it for the broad boring ones.
ALCHEMICAL BLOOD GHOSTS — Well I asked for an end to broad boring topics and here we are. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t a thing. I have a hunch that someone somewhere heard the “old doctors used to give you cocaine for ghosts in your blood” joke and just kind of ran with it? Alchemy touches on blood sometimes but generally does not think blood is haunted. But that would be cool. “My blood is haunted” is a good opening line to a book. Don’t steal that please, it’s mine.
DZOPA TRIBE — Allegedly, an archaeologist found some caves in China around 1940. These caves had all sorts of drawings, grave, and items that suggested some sort of lost tribe or civilization. Among the items found were stone discs with tons of tiny unknown writing etched on them. In the 60s, a Professor claimed to have deciphered the writing and said that it contained the tale of an alien vessel that crashed on Earth twelve thousand years ago. Its passengers, now stranded, were the Dzopa(or “Dropa”). The aliens were then either killed off or slowly disappeared as they intermarried with locals. Hundreds of the discs telling their story were allegedly found and eventually studied.
You’ll notice the word “allegedly” pops up a lot up there. As you may expect, that’s because there’s precious little proof any of this actually happened. It seems to mostly come from a series of articles in the 60s that were largely speculation and conjecture, some of which don’t even line up properly with the timeline. No one knows where any of these discs currently are, either. There are some photos of them, but the photo doesn’t allow for any analysis of the writing they’re supposedly covered in. And the term ‘Dropa’ itself seems to just be a reference to a group of indigenous people in Tibet.
Despite all the doubt, this is very big in the ancient astronaut community.
BOWLING GREEN MASSACRE — lol no way. Alright, so this may feel like it happened 50 years ago but it was 2017. Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway was being pressed on a talk show about Trump’s desired travel bans on Muslims. She tried to rattle off incidents of terrorism, and this was one of the things she mentioned. There is no recorded history of any “Bowling Green Massacre”. Conway later said she was trying to refer to two Iraqi refugees being arrested in a Kentucky town named ‘Bowling Green’.
I guarantee you that if you spend long enough digging around the internet, someone on some message board somewhere has probably postulated that a real massacre happened and was made top-secret for ~reasons~ and Conway slipped. What probably happened is that she’s a bad person who was trying to fast-talk her way out of being cornered on a really stupid policy and she got some wires crossed. It was pretty funny though.
BRANEWORLD — Oh boy. This is based on things like String Theory and I think we’ve established I’m not equipped to adequately define quantum physics in a paragraph or two. A ‘brane’ is an object existing in one or more spatial dimensions(of which there are quite a few in string theory). The whole universe we know may just be a single brane, of which there are a great many existing within a much larger whole called the ‘Bulk’. If you understand this stuff well, you can tie it to a lot of paranormal and UFO type theories. Quantum mechanics are real cool, and a lot of weird conspiracies and new age thinking are based on little seeds found therein.
DAHMER SHAPESHIFTING — This is like, the exact same thing as the ‘Bundy Shapeshifting’ we covered a while ago. I think this is mostly based off one of the escaped victims, who said that Dahmer had seemed as if he looked like a different person during parts of the attack. A later X-Files episode based on Dahmer absorbed this idea and made it a bit more literal, and you’d be surprised how many people unconsciously just sort of accept a lot of things like this if they’re presented in a good tv show. Given how grisly Dahmer’s murders were, the usual ‘demons did it’ theories around any serial killer swirl a little thicker here — but I’ve never read that he was an actual shapeshifter.
That’s all, folks! Didn’t expect to see Chris-chan pop up here. Makes you wonder what sort of oddities will be on a similar iceberg in 20 years. See you tomorrow!
