What Lies Below, Day Twelve
Hello, my friends. Welcome back! We’re still chipping away at the iceberg with an interesting mix today. A couple bits of lost media, a couple things that are just real events that happened, a couple “this is just a term for a thing” items. Not the most exciting set, but they can’t all be flashy!
GERMANWINGS 4U CRASH — A German flight that went down fairly recently due to the apparently suicidal copilot, killing around 150 people. There’s a lot of theories about why he did it, ranging the usual conspiracy gamut from ‘fake’ to ‘mind control’, but I haven’t ever really seen a single cohesive belief.
CHRISTINE CHUBBUCK — A news anchor who committed suicide live on the air in the mid-70s. Like any other violent act caught on tape, there are people online who make a hobby out of trying to find the footage. While this is part of the overall-interesting Lost Media world, it’s just a snuff film and not particularly interesting.
HARMONICS — There’s this sort of thread in conspiracy and woo subcultures that certain hz levels can do different things to our brain and so everyone from McDonalds to the government to the aliens are utilizing this. There’s a lot of music/videos out there set to specific hz that can allegedly do anything from mellow you out to change your biology.
OPERATION NORTHWOODS — This is a real thing that the US government really tried to memory-hole, but everyone rediscovered after 9/11. Operation Northwoods was a proposal by US alphabet agencies in the 60s to carry out false-flag attacks on our own citizens, blame them on Cuba, and use them as justification for invasion. This is how hysterically terrified of Communism the US is and has always been. Kennedy was president at the time and shot this down, which of course fuels a lot of JFK assassination conspiracy theories.
SOVIET ESP — There’s a lot of stories and declassified documents suggesting that the Soviets(and the US) tried a lot of weird experimentation about quantifying and utilizing ESP and similar psychic abilities. It’s actually a really big topic and fairly complicated but nothing much really came out of it. It happened though!
RAI STONES — A type of round stone with a hole in the center used by indigenous people of Micronesia as currency, but not in a purely financial sense. They had/have a lot of cultural importance too. Not sure why it’s on the ‘weird stuff’ iceberg! Maybe because they may have been used for a very long time?
KUNG FU GUY, 1984 — This references a video made in 1984 in which an unknown man(‘Kung Fu Guy’) walks into the dojo of a man named Bobby Joe Blythe, acts a bit strange, and is then beaten up and maybe or maybe not killed by Blythe. Blythe himself uploaded it to YouTube at some point, though it was pulled down and like any other potential snuff film has become a bit of a collector’s item for certain corners of the net. There’s been a lot of online effort put forth in trying to identify the victim, figure out what happened, and even get legal remedy.
BEEBE’S ABYSSAL FISH — Confession: I’m a sucker for aquatic cryptids. Love ’em. Hopelessly partial to them. Especially weird super-deep-water ones. In the 1930s, a scientist named Beebe took a ‘bathypshere’(weird round submarine thing) real deep around Bermuda and describes a variety of strange fish. Most seemed to be similar to things we’re familiar with like anglerfish or gar, but different in coloration or size. Given how no one else has found anything like these and how similar they are to known fish, they were unfortunately probably just colorfully described things we already know about.
ROSWELL HUMAN EXPERIMENTS — Kind of a broad term I guess for the Roswell theories that say whatever crashed there wasn’t aliens, but some kind of terrestrial test-flight piloted by human test/experiment cases of some sort. There’s some books and plenty of online conjecture about it but it isn’t really any more meaty a theory than any other.
REBIRTH IS ETERNAL SUFFERING/REINCARNATION IS HELL — Yikes. I bet you can guess what this is! I don’t know of any specific cohesive tradition following this, but see variations of it on the usual spooky imageboards and forums where people get high and say ‘what if like, ghost ufos’. It’s kinnnda the Buddhist saṃsāra but made a bit more literal and often infused with Christian flavoring. But sometimes it’s given a gnostic ‘the matrix’ bend.
VISIONS OF ZOSIMOS — Zosimos was an alchemist thousands of years ago who wrote about alchemy, including a bit where he described dreams about it as something more mystical than a science. Zosimos deals with a being named Ion that cuts up Zosimos and sort of rebuilds him, and it goes on from there. It may or may not be the source of the ‘homonculus’ idea. There’s also a video game based on this, believe it or not! Zosimos’ texts were only really discovered and somewhat translated fairly recently, so there’s discussion in occult circles of how to interpret this. There’s also a video game based on this, believe it or not!
FERMI PARADOX — Depressing as heck! Possibly true! Given how big the galaxy is and how statistically likely many believe it is that other sentient space-faring races are out there somewhere, why are there no real traces? There’s a few reasons given: 1. Maybe intelligent life is just wayyyy rarer than we think and so if there is any, it’s nowhere near us and may never be. 2. They’re out there but have already died out, or haven’t evolved as far as even we have, or are so alien we wouldn’t be able to detect/communicate with them. 3. They may just not want to deal with us for a variety of reasons! 4. It may just not be possible in terms of raw material, technology, etc to do so — or at least not easy enough for any nearby races to devote that kind of resource to it. 5. We’re doing it wrong!
MORGOLLENS — I imagine this means ‘Morgellons’, a disease in which thin wire-like fibers allegedly grow in and emerge from the body. There’s still debate on just what it is, or if it’s even a genuine thing or a misinterpretation of some other existing condition. It is studied, but no one knows much. This was very big in the conspiracy theory crowd for a long time, promoted as evidence of chemtrails or vaccines or other things doing harm. It bounces around mostly in the spaces where hippie new-age types blend with anti-vaxxers.
We’re almost two weeks in. Feels like not that much, but it is. But we literally have only started scratching the surface of this damn thing. The more “common” conspiracies and topics that we bump off, the weirder the other stuff gets — and we have a good thousand or so pieces to go!
