What Lies Below, Day Twenty Nine
Welcome back! We’re nearing the bottom of the Fifth Tier, which puts us a quarter of the way through this damn thing. As you’ve probably noticed, we’re seeing a lot less mainstream things or items that are just terminology. We are still seeing a fair amount of things that seem born almost entirely of conjecture, which I think is a phenomenon of the internet. You throw a ton of conspiracy theorists and occultists and fans of weird stuff into a few imageboards and forums and they’ll eventually start just brewing up theories and ideas that then maintain their own life through repetition. Ah well, onward!
1856 FRENCH PTERODACTYL — This is documented, but also from the 1850s so who knows. While blasting out a tunnel for a railway, French workers allegedly broke open a boulder from which a pterodactyl, or something very similar, emerged. It was said to be alive, but died quickly after. There doesn’t appear to be any hard evidence, i.e. a saved corpse, but it is a pretty famous cryptid story. Some say it was a hoax, but I choose to believe.
ESOTERIC HITLERISM — Nazi stuff but with occult flavor. They really love the sonnenrad/black sun symbol, but this isn’t exclusive to them. Some of them are trying to combine being fascists with various pagan religions(they love trying to co-opt Asatru in particular) and sometimes it’s a complicated mess of beliefs and theories about how the Nazis escaped to secret bases underground/in antarctica, had or have contact with lost civilizations and aliens, were actually trying to enact some sort of mystical reckoning in the 30s and 40s, etc. Mostly it’s just losers who like the aesthetics.
ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION CREATES MEMORIES OF ALIEN ABDUCTION — Not leaving much need for my help on this one, huh? Some science types have theorized that certain people’s brains are just more sensitive to magnetic fields and the like, and that this can occasionally manifest as hallucinations and other phenomenon(like sleep paralysis) which explain abductions. This is far from proven and I don’t know that it would explain away all the stories, but it’s interesting to see a counter-conspiracy-theory-theory on the iceberg.
ZANA — There is a type of cryptid/legend in Mongolia called “Almas”, which are ‘wild men’, and the description suggests almost a type neanderthal that survived in hidden pockets up until modern times(or at least relatively modern). Zana was one of these, and was allegedly captured in the late 1800s and slowly became somewhat part of the local community. What’s more, she allegedly had numerous children with multiple partners — some of whom may have lived until the 1950s. This is all kind of sketchy in terms of actual documentation, of course.
2020 SUPERVOLCANO — Every few years there’s a bit of buzz about a presumed eruption from Yellowstone due to some scientific finding or just sort of willed into existence. If Yellowstone really popped hard, it would be a supervolcano that would obliterate a vast swath of the United States and cause serious problems for everyone far beyond the initial devastation. It’s a popular doomsday scenario that people like to play with but I’m willing to bet it isn’t going to go off in 2020.
THE BANACH-TARSKI PARADOX — A mathematical paradox that pretty much only exists in the theoretical math world. If you take an object(usually a ball) and divide it into a number of shapes(which can be as little as five or a great many more), you can supposedly reassemble those shapes into two balls of the same size. It doesn’t make sense because it relies on impossibly complicated shapes that are impossible to create in reality. Weird, not sure why it’s on the iceberg though!
WALMART CLOSURES — This seems to have emerged around 2015 when WalMart rather abruptly closed a bunch of stores at the same time for nebulous reasons(like ‘plumbing issues’). This happened in multiple states, and some of the stores even wound up having police show up to ‘guard’ them. It was weird enough to get eyes on it, and naturally a bunch of people decided they were being converted into FEMA camps as part of ‘Jade Helm’, a weird military exercise ‘war game’ that a lot of conspiracy folks thought was going to be the start of the government rounding us up and taking our guns and so on. Most of the WalMarts involved in this wound up reopening later on and this all just fizzled out.
JK ROWLING IS AN ACTOR — JK Rowling famously says she came up with her core ideas for Harry Potter while delayed on a train or something. We all know that’s a lie because she “came up” with them when she saw Neil Gaiman’s “Books of Magic” comic and stole the main character. Some people, however, think that she doesn’t even exist at all. This is all sort of based on some filmmaker in the mid-00s saying this stuff without any evidence or support, but it has stuck. The person we see as JK Rowling is just an actress, the books and stuff are made by a team of people, etc. Probably not true. Unfortunately, JK Rowling is real and a billionaire and has a huge platform and currently uses all of that to accomplish her true dream of making life harder for trans people.
CIVIL WAR ROBOTICS — Beats me; never heard of this and can’t dig up a trace. There were some interesting advances made in things during the US Civil War like gatling guns and submarines, but as far as I know there’s not really any theories or chatter that they were using anything as advanced as robotics(though the military did start using robotics as early as WW2). As always: If you know anything about this, drop me a line!
SEA-MONKS AND SEA-BISHOPS — These are two different cryptids/sea-monsters that are probably either the same type of creature or at least the same phenomenon. The Monk was in Denmark while the Bishop was in Poland. Both were captured sometime in the 16th century, both supposedly alive. Both were delivered to royalty, and allegedly even had some level of intelligence. These were large fish-like things that seemed to have almost humanlike heads/faces, and appendages of some sort that resembled arms. Who knows what they found, or if these are both versions of the same story that happened elsewhere, or what. No one seems to have had much experience with these things in the centuries since then.
‘STAR ROT’ — Or “Star Jelly” or “Moon Spit” or “Pwdre Ser”. This is a phenomenon that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years, but is still occasionally reported today. After witnessing meteor showers, people find a sort of mucus-like foul-smelling slime outside in various places with no apparent source. No one is quite sure what this is, but it is mentioned a lot in literature and other writings. It’s often explained as people misidentifying particularly weird types of fungus or even byproducts of frogs and other animals, but it’s persistent.
ALIENS USE HUMANS FOR DRUG USE(ADRENACHROME) — This one kind of does my job for me, huh? The basic concept is way older than the whole ‘adrenachrome’ thing, even though the adrenachrome thing itself predates the Qanon stuff that popularized it. Most alien-related conspiracy theories place at least one set of aliens(usually the ‘Grays’ or Reptilians) as predators. Depending on how metaphysical the theory is, they’re either eating us, harvesting certain organs/adrenachrome, or feasting on our energy/souls. Sometimes all of the above.
If you don’t know, adrenachrome is a chemical created by oxidizing adrenaline. Theorists seem to genuinely base most of their understanding of it off a line from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, so the details are always murky. Basically, glands secrete it and work best when the person is scared and young, so the aliens(or illuminati or ‘cabal’ or any celebrity you don’t like) use various forms of ‘psychic terrorism’ to harvest it. Normal stuff!
THE TILLINGHAST MACHINE — This is uh…this is a thing from a story. Like an actual fiction horror story by Lovecraft. The machine is physically described only in vague terms but works by sending out ~waves~ that switch on hidden parts of our anatomy that have fallen into disuse via evolution, these parts are sensory organs which now allow us to comprehend all sorts of cosmic and time/space-warping things. It’s in the story “From Beyond”, which is pretty good! I do not know why this is here! It’s not even like anyone can try to make one since Lovecraft, as was often his way, leaves it and how it works largely to the imagination.
And that’s a wrap for today. This was a good mix, and I suspect they’ll stay consistently weird going forward. As always, reach out if you want to correct me or suggest something or hand over ancient secrets/classified information.
