← Haunted Cosmos
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- [00:02]
A
Want more Haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content, as well as exclusive content and regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself. Plus, right now we're running a special offer 90% off of your first month. You heard that right. So go to patreon.com haunted cosmos and sign up now. This episode is brought to you by Jake Muller Adventures. A thrilling Christian Audio Drama the Chernobyl meltdown is the worst nuclear accident the world has ever witnessed. Explosions, radiation, sickness, mass evacuations of entire regions in the ussr all of it without any warning whatsoever. Or so they say. You see, rumors persist to this day of a harbinger of that doom, a monstrous paranormal black bird warning of the disaster to come. Is this true? And if so, what other, maybe lesser seen warnings preceding tragedy might we be able to find in the annals of history? Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we try to find the answer. When a river suffers a tumultuous adolescence, it often leaves behind something called an oxbow lake. Formed when rivers rapidly change course and turn Sharply even at 180 degrees, oxbow lakes occur when a bend grows so extreme that the river pinches off a portion of its own length. The river's new course straightens where it once curved, and its forgotten, budded offspring either remains indefinitely or eventually drains away a sickle shaped memory of the river's troubled past. When these oxbows form in quick succession over a great length of river, the earth itself reshapes. Hills rise where plains once lay. Sediment choked ground laced with clay renders the land barren, and a sudden swirl of color, like a painting emerges when the terrain is viewed from high above. It's undeniably beautiful, but that beauty betrays only the most wrathful and violent forces of nature. The Pripyat river is one such example of this harrowing, elemental course. It is a black ribbon of water, ever pouring ever new, stretching 473 miles through the forgotten country of Belarus and the recently infamous Ukraine in Eastern Europe. As the river flows southeast between Mizir and the Ukrainian border, its course grows wild oxbows, and the scars of former oxbows render the landscape ungovernable. Pockmarked with trenches and bends, it is a chaotic Runway into a chaotic place. For just across the Ukrainian border lies a ghost town whose significance is difficult to overstate in modern history. A lonely road, a road black and winding like the river beside it, leads into this place. Should one drive it, they would pass sign after sign urging them to turn back. Yet if the explorer persists, a gold mine of uncanny strangeness awaits at the road's end. Such a traveler would stumble upon an amusement park reclaimed by nature, with tendril vines draping over the conducting rods of bumper cars and weeds towering up to the first bucket of a Ferris wheel. A central square overgrown with trees and grass and crumbling under the sheer weight of time, and gives way to rows of brutalist apartment buildings, all completely empty. Inside any of these homes, one might find crumbling walls and peeling paint, mold, flecked dinnerware and decrepit children's toys staring lifelessly into the soul of the visitor. Finally, on the far edge of town, a gymnasium stands with a rotting court and parallel bars rusted nearly to dust. The silence here grows thick and oppressive. The ear longs for sound. The eyes search for movement or any sign of life, but none appears. Even the animals have long abandoned this poisoned place of death. This is the cursed town of Pripyat. Once a beacon of communist progress, it now barely stands a mausoleum whose graves are all empty, yet which nonetheless overflow with death. Pripyat was officially declared a City in 1979. Before that date, the Soviet Union permitted only workers and their families to reside in the closed settlement. These workers were, of course, nuclear plant laborers who spent their days toiling at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility. By 1979, authorities believed nuclear energy to be so thoroughly mastered and the symbol of Soviet victory it represented, so powerful that they opened Pripyat to any Soviet citizen wishing to live there permanently. The city eventually grew to house nearly 50,000 men, women and children Within a single day. However, that number was reduced to zero. At 1:23am on April 26, 1986, workers at reactor number four began what they intended to be a routine operation test involving the free momentum wind down of the generator's turbine fans. The technical details of the test need not concern us here. What matters is that the reactor's thermal power was supposed to be between 700 and 1,000 megawatts for the test to be performed safely. Instead, though, the power level sat at a mere 200 megawatts, something the workers appeared not to regard as especially troubling. Such was the state of affairs when the test began, and about 40 seconds into the procedure, two control room engineers initiated an emergency shutdown of the reactor. According to eyewitnesses, no sense of panic accompanied this decision. The engineers carried out the shutdown as just another routine step in preparation for more invasive maintenance scheduled later that day. No one yet realized that the reactor was already destroying itself from the inside. Seconds after the shutdown process began, uranium control rods entered the reactor core according to protocol. But this was a fatal mistake. A reaction occurred between the control rods and a latent ion that had not been properly burned off due to the low thermal energy in the core. And within three more seconds, the reactor's energy output nearly tripled. The surge stressed multiple fuel rods to the point of failure and jammed the sensors, transmitting data to the engineers monitoring the reactor from above. Doom was now inevitable. Only at this point did some of the workers begin to suspect that something had gone terribly wrong. The reactor's power output skyrocketed to a staggering 30,000 megawatts. Ten times the normal output. All in the blink of an eye. This far exceeded the structural limits of the steam turbine infrastructure. A small explosion followed, muted and subdued, like footsteps foretelling something worse. And everything seemed to pause. Seconds later, the worst finally came. The nuclear chain reaction in the core halted. But in the process, it catastrophically damaged the graphite moderated containment vessel. Radioactive graphite hurled itself into the air, its channels still teeming with neutrons. Exposed to oxygen rich air, the debris ignited and the blast equaled 225 tons of TNT. Molten burning chunks of radioactive material rained down on the plant like volcanic lava. And as with the people of Pompeii, it was already too late by the time anyone fully grasped what was happening. The Chernobyl disaster remains the worst nuclear catastrophe the world has ever seen. Radioactive debris showered hundreds of workers with enough radiation to doom entire cities within a month. The event led to 31 immediate deaths, countless hospitalizations, a measurable rise in cancer cases in the following generation, and a sharp increase in self induced abortions by mother. Frantic and terrified for the well being of their unborn children. Pripyat, of course, was evacuated as noted, in less than 15 hours. To this day, travel through the city remains heavily restricted and closely guided. And it remains unclear when the reactor building itself will ever be safe for human entry. Still, the danger has not stopped explorers who call themselves stalkers from entering the protected zone. And if their stories are to be believed, they have witnessed things that make one wonder whether Pripyat will ever truly be safe for humans again. Perhaps mistakes on this scale reopen the door to the wilderness itself. Perhaps through our own errors, we have created new haunts, new places for jackals and demons to roam. Just before the year 2000, a New York based physicist received permission to gather data at the Chernobyl disaster site in Pripyat he arrived with a small team of fellow scientists, aides, and guides familiar with the ghost town. The drive to the reactor felt dreamlike. Once again, the pervasive quiet stole the day. The forsaken town seemed abandoned by everything, even wind and cool air. The atmosphere was dense, weighed down by the memory of destruction that had so recently filled it. By the time they reached the plant entrance, everyone wore full protective suits. Geiger counters chirped at each man's waistband every few seconds as they stepped over weeds and fractured concrete. All at once, like forgetting the journey after driving somewhere familiar, the crew found themselves inside, splitting up to collect their precious data. Before long, the lead physicist wandered the rotting corridors alone, exactly as he had hoped. When he sent his aides off to other corners of the facility. He crossed the covered walkway between the office buildings and the reactor control room. The door stood ajar, likely untouched for over a decade. He stepped directly into the place where the disaster had occurred. His Geiger counter snapped to vigorous life cycle so suddenly that it startled him. He glanced down instinctively, checked his protective suit, and then pressed on. From the control bridge, he looked down into the sealed pit whose cover concealed the reactor core. After the disaster, Soviet engineers and emergency workers had scrambled to contain the still unstable core as best they could, and up to the physicist day and hours. No one has entered it, or so we're told. The man descended the stairs and stopped just outside the door leading into that forbidden place. Place. It was locked, of course, but it hardly mattered. The physicist had no death wish, and so no desire to venture further into that invisible hell. Still, as he stood there, reading his instruments and jotting notes, something happened that made him suddenly pause. An odd sound beneath the Geiger counter's buzz, the sensors beeping and the scrape of pen against paper. Something emerged that didn't belong. He carefully set his equipment down and shut off the Geiger counter. Inch by inch, he moved, moved closer to the door and pressed his ear up against it. From within, he heard the roaring sound of a terrible fire and layered over it the muffled screams of a single man begging an old Russian to be let out. He recoiled from the door, abandoned his equipment, and sprinted back to the rendezvous point with the rest of the crew. He knew no one else was in that building, and even if someone had been, there could be no one behind that wall who and no fire. Still burning. Visibly shaken, the physicist sat on a stone wall outside the plant's main entrance. From there he could see the building housing Reactor four, a few hundred yards to the south. Ignoring his team's questions and the findings his aides tried to share, he just stared at the structure. He remained silent as night fell, even after the others finally gave up and left him alone, waved off for the umpteenth time. Eventually, a colleague brought him food and insisted that he eat. He complied and at last explained the reason for his fugue. Just as his colleague finished assuring him that it was likely just his mind playing tricks on him, both men saw a light flicker on in one of the control room offices above Reactor four, and after a few more seconds, it flickered off again. Circa 2020, a spiritualist named Davey Russell joined a team of other spiritualists, mediums, and psychics on an expedition to the alienation zone in Pripyat. They had heard enough stories of very real hauntings relayed by tour guides and stalkers alike to believe the place merited a thorough study of their own. Accompanied by the team's resident medium, a young woman named Claire Russell stepped into one of the abandoned apartments high above the dead ground of Pripyat. The scene awaiting them inside felt as sorrowful as it was uncanny. Decades of dust coated a life fully lived and hastily fled. Children's toys lay strewn across the living room floor. Dirty dishes, long since dried into odorless brittle, filled the sink, while clean ones sat stacked in open cupboards. Books lined the shelves. Some had fallen during the escape and still peppered the floors of every room. Family portraits hung on the walls. Claire picked up a loose picture from the mantel. It clearly showed a little girl, though the details were hard to make out. She carefully placed it back where she had found it. Neither of them felt anything beyond the stifling air blanketing the entire region and a lingering smell of must. They set out to leave the room and search another apartment. Russell stepped through the front door first, but the world snapped into chaos before Claire could follow. The door slammed loudly behind him. He whipped around, but Claire was gone. He called for her. No response. He turned the handle, but it felt as if it was set in concrete. He banged on the door. Still, there was nothing. He threw his shoulder against it three or four times before it finally gave way. Yet when it did give way, it opened as if it had never resisted him in the first place. It didn't break under his force it just swung open like an ordinary door. Had it not been so clearly shut by something, Russell might have felt foolish. He stumbled back into the apartment and nearly collided with Claire. She had not moved. He found her standing in the center of the living room, staring blankly at the wall that held the door. She snapped out of it and looked at Russell, her eyes wide with shock, and a slight smile formed on her lips. Did you see it? She asked. Russell said he had not. Claire told him that it was not a ghost, but something more substantial. Still smiling, she assured him that they were not the only ones in that apartment. Russell's radio crackled to life as team members from the floor below asked if they were okay. The crashing had echoed loudly down the hallway. Russell assured them that everything was fine, though he didn't really feel certain about this. Claire held up her phone and pressed play. By chance, she had been filming their attempted exit. Russell watched his dark silhouette step into the outer sunlight before the familiar thud of the door slammed shut in front of Claire. He could not hear himself calling out to her. He couldn't hear himself pounding on the door. The handle didn't so much as tremble under his attempts to re enter. The video remained utterly silent and tinted with a sepia like shade. Still, enough light remained to see somewhat clearly. Within a second of the door closing, a sharply contrasted figure of shadow, clearly a man, walked from the front door along the wall and then vanished as if slipping into the adjacent bedroom. The sight unsettled Russell deeply. Only Claire's breathing could be heard now, and the shadow jerked forward as it moved, as though frames were missing from the recording. When it fully disappeared, the door released itself to Russell, and Claire ended the video. But if the stories are to be believed, this experience is neither unique nor rare in Pripyat. In fact, if those same stories hold true, these things did not begin after the Chernobyl disaster, but they preceded it like pagan prophets and old tales. Strange events were reported in the days leading up to the reactor explosion, events that only began to make sense after the city was destroyed. It all seems to rhyme with another episode of high strangeness and terrible tragedy, one that we've already covered on the show before. It was April 20, 1986. In less than a week, the bustling Soviet town of Pripyat would become an untouchable zone of invisible and invincible death. But until then, life went on, none the wiser to the dark game fate was playing. That was, at least until just after lunch. One of the engineers on shift in the control room of Reactor four was walking back to his office when he looked up and saw something odd perched atop the building. He was approaching a black shape, massive and bird like stone, still in the swirling spring wind. He could not see any features of the bird, for that is what he assumed it was and he didn't see it move even once. But he did notice it. And later that night, the same man was troubled by dreams of pain and confusion. In the background of the dream lingered the shadow of the bird thing he had seen earlier. The next day, things escalated. Two other engineers assigned to Reactor four stood near the bay window that looked out towards the core, monitoring nearby sensors. A sudden, impulsive sound, like metal scraping against metal, but lasting only an instant, made both men jump. When each realized the other had heard it, too, they exchanged glances. But when no other sound followed, they shrugged and turned back toward the window. In a flash only slightly longer than the sound itself, both men saw a grotesque monster flying over the core. It stood two stories tall. It was black, and it hovered in place with outstretched wings that did not flap. Its entire body dripped with something darker than night, yet the droplets never landed anywhere. And the eyes. The eyes glowed a deep, bloody red. They stared back at the men without blood, blinking. And then it was all gone. The engineers agreed it must have been a trick of the light, nothing more than glare, imagination, and mutual suggestion. They decided to just keep the whole thing quiet. Later that night, each man received a phone call in his apartment. They lifted the receiver and greeted the caller, only to hear muffled, labored breathing on the other end of the line. Voice whispered something, something about a time and a day. And then the line went dead. The very next day, cold, dark and rain soaked two yet other employees encountered this same monster. As if drawn into a waking dream, both men suddenly found themselves alone in Pripyat, though they were certain it had been busy only moments before. Through the rain and thunder, they heard a terrible roar carried on the wind. Looking up, they saw the beast flying low above them, its red eyes burning bright, lit by some malice deep within. Black tentacles hung from the trunk of the thing. A necklace, bulky, black, glistening mass. The eyes were pulled back, suggesting a gaping maw, though all that could be seen inside was more darkness. Then another terrible cry rang out. When the men recovered from the sharp pain in their ears, the world had returned to normal. These men, too, worked in the operations of Reactor four. In the days leading up to the disaster, these five unlucky men were plagued by further visions of horror and more threatening phone calls, or always an inhuman voice talking about days and times, but never really Clearly. On the 24th, a shift change placed all five of them on duty together. One way or another, one of them let slip that he had encountered and continued to be haunted by this terrible creature. It wasn't long before the two pairs of witnesses identified the lone witness from the 20th. And so the five co workers felt a kind of bond form between them. Not one of affection or respect, but one. One of panic. Each shared the unshakable sense that something terrible was coming and that something needed to be done. But they didn't know what. Before his shift on the night of the 25th, the first man shot upright in bed, locked in a bout of sleep paralysis. Lucid and unable to move, he watched as the gigantic black bird thing loomed over him, filling his mind with thoughts of woe and death and agonizing pain. It took him an hour to stop shaking. He began his walk to the reactor with the most profound sense of dread he had ever known. And just before entering the reactor building on that night, he turned and saw the dark silhouette of the beast. Motionless, yet somehow sentient, etched against the light of a full moon. Then he entered. And then the disaster befell Pripyat. Some believe the catastrophe did not come without preternatural warning. Some believe this beast, this fallen elemental, served as a harbinger of the doom sealed into the fate of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Some mourn the lack of action taken in response to such high strangeness. But honestly, what would any of us have done? The story echoes again. Something familiar, A note struck deep in the old song of the Appalachian wilderness. For who, when faced with the black bird of Pripyat, could fail to recall the Mothman of Point Pleasant? The Flatwood monster? Or injured cold? Is it all real? And if so, what does it all mean? What other warnings from an unknown world has humanity received before tragedy strikes by its own hand? Apparently the list is fairly long.
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B
Enhance. Welcome to season seven of the hit award winning show, according to me just now, Haunted Cosmos. I'm one of your hosts, Brian Sauvay, joined as always by my handsome and talented good friend, Benjamin Garrett.
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A
I thought you were gonna say Evanescence. No, I want.
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B
Well, and Evanescence.
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A
Yeah, Evan's here. Unfortunately, Martina's not here.
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B
No, Martina's not here.
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A
Where is he?
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B
There was a certain group that came into town and sometimes when you want your drink to be colder, you use this group. And he had to flee.
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A
Nice. And. And we.
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B
And all day. Just kidding.
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All day we've been like, don't they ass.
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Where is he? No, no, he's working. He's getting important stuff done. But we do have good news for you also.
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A
Hi.
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B
Oh, hey.
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A
Yeah, glad to be here.
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B
What's up, guys? We do have really good news for you. And that is actually in honor of Martina McBride not being here. If you sign up for Patreon, any tier and you use the. The discount code. Martina, all caps. Martina, we're going to give you. What is it?
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A
One month, your first month, 90% off.
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B
And you, you know what you get with that? Different rewards varying depending on the tiers. Just read it like I'm not. I'm not your mom.
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A
The normal Patreon benefits.
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B
Yeah, like the dusty tome, our weekly award winning show. I'm just saying.
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A
Hey, by the way, by the way, by the way, this is only for Patreon, not Supercast. That's true. The discount is Patreon.
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B
Yeah. Patreon.com hantecosmos Yes. C C. And guys, it's a great time and we can't do this show without you guys. Our patrons are what makes it happen. So thank you guys for supporting. But here's the thing. We need to talk about the things that we've been talking about so far in this episode.
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A
Yeah, we have an episode here for you guys to kick off season seven that we're very excited about where we kind of go back and revisit some of the motifs of. Maybe if we had to pick a rank of our collective favorite story, I'm sure individually it might be different, but together I think Mothman is probably at the top.
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B
It's S tier.
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It's at least near the top. Oh, yeah, it's got to be S tier. So we're going to go through some of the motifs of the Mothman story and we're gonna just look at other examples of that that we can see. Well documented throughout history. Extremely well documented.
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B
Premonitions.
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Yeah. Premonitory dreams.
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The word Pripyat happen. Was that just the cold oaks.
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Pripyat was in the cold open. Yes.
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Because we got to talk about that.
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Yes. So there were birds. We got to talk about bird like harbingers of doom.
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We got to talk. All right, what we got to talk about.
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I have a lot of thoughts on the birds. Pripyat bird like harringers of doom. We got men in black, smiling men into cold type things.
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Dude.
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We got premonitory dreams. And then at the end, a story that maybe pokes a little bit of doubt into some of these stories. And it's, you know, how myths are made and how we attach great, great transcendent significance to things when sometimes that preternatural significance maybe wasn't there.
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B
Maybe we were looking for it. Maybe we wanted it to be there.
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Yeah.
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And it weren't. And it weren't. And it, you know, it's like the show Truth or Fiction. Is that the name of the show
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A
with Fact or Fiction? With Riker from Star Trek?
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The one where he's like, we made it.
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Where he keeps saying, we made it. How much would it take for you to spend a night alone in a cemetery?
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B
We did a. We did a short. Go to our YouTube, go to our Instagram, check it out.
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A
Really funny.
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B
One of my favorite shows growing up where they would tell. Some of you kids are like, this was before your time. But they would tell three stories in the show and they like, dramatically reenact them, like 3:14 creepy stories. And then at the end they'd be like, now, which one was true? And which one is the product of our staff of writers here at Fact or Fiction?
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I think it was Fact or Fiction. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right.
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And then you had to guess. And they'd like, give you a minute. They'd go to a commercial break or something. Which back in the day, you couldn't skip those. They were just baked right in. And dude. And then you guessed and you were so amped if you got it right. One of those stories kept me up for, like, years of my childhood.
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A
Really?
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B
The red eyed creature.
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Well, I'll tell you what. One of those stories does not exist in this episode because everything is fact. All right? Everything is fact.
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B
And so guess from the cold open. Which of the stories in this house do I dispute are real?
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A
Brian doesn't think that the birds of Pripyat actually happened.
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B
I don't.
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And I keep telling him, no, it did. And he keeps saying, how do you know? And I keep saying, because I just know.
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B
I gotta. I gotta keep it a hundred. I gotta keep it a dollar bill with you. What Does Emmer say?
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A
100. Cash.
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B
Got to keep it cash money with you guys. And just say that, like a lot of the Birds of Pripyat stories. Now Chernobyl's real. Like, I want to be clear.
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A
I think that you're even calling that into question.
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B
No, that happened.
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I think we have to. We have to.
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B
That's real.
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A
We have to ask about your.
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B
I recently stumbled across a YouTube channel that just does retellings of horrible disasters like the Indonesian tsunami disaster.
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A
I love noble dudes.
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B
And I watched it with my kids and we were horrified.
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A
Amazing.
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Chernobyl happened. But there is. There is dispute, there's disputation that the birds of Pripyat and the Mothman adjacent stuff was creepypasta from the early 2000s. Not original 1980s material.
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A
Right.
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B
Take that for what you will.
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A
There is that Ben. But let's be honest. What do we think really happened at the end of the day?
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B
At the end of the day?
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A
At the end of the day, you know what was. You know what? Like, seriously, there is a lot of firsthand account witnesses of, like, the Davey Russell guy who saw the ghost in the apartment.
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B
It's all mixed in there.
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A
That was all real.
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B
Well, he said, yeah, that's a real eyewitness.
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A
And that physicist from New York said that that actually happened. He heard, like, he heard the burning and the crying and the birds of Pripyat. Also, like, I talked to one of the birds, and I was terrifying.
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B
Cut to an obvious AI of Ben talking to the birds. Chirp, chirp, cheep, cheep, cheep.
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A
Why are you making the sound?
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B
I don't know, like, they're gonna cut.
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A
It was sleep paralysis, was terrifying. I was woken up by the bird of Pripyat. Okay. It looked at me. He looked at me. He says to me, he says, I'm real.
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B
But. But later in this show, there is another event, another story that I thought for sure the first time I heard it. Like, this has to be an embellishment. This has to be fake.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because a lot of, like, you. You get into Fortian, even if you're just interested for entertainment, it's fun to read, fun to look into these stories. That's half of what we're doing here at Haunted Cosmos. We're having a good time telling stories that are kind of fun and whatnot. But this later story, it's documented, like, multiple account. I'm not gonna tell you which one it is. It has to do with horrible disaster where something we said would never be in Hauntekosmos is in.
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A
It was that one episode where we said children wouldn't die. And it was the way the commitment was that one episode Disclaimer, by the way, parents and trigger warning, if you will. Children do die in this episode of Haunted Cosmos. We don't.
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B
It's a historical event.
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A
We don't dwell.
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We don't, like, get any deep into it. But it does happen.
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A
Yeah. So just be aware.
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B
It is. If you count the Cold Open as one story. It's the third story.
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The third, like, scripted chunk episode. Because there's three stories in the second scripted chunk. That's true.
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B
So, like, you know how we do
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A
things in terms of run here. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Birds of Pripyat.
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B
Yeah, let's.
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A
I have something that I Would like to say.
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B
Okay.
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A
And that thing is this. That whether or not the birds of Pripyat thing is real definitely is. One thing that I do think is interesting is the recurrence of this, like, harbinger of doom. That's a bird. A bird figure. Because we do have that with Mothman.
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B
Yeah. And it's a Slavic. In the Slavic mind.
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Yeah.
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B
Birds. I think it's either crows or ravens are harbingers of doom.
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Yeah. Especially in. Even. Even before that, you had. In Germanic lore, in kind of Nordic myth, Odin sent his ravens across. He had two ravens that he sent across the earth every day. And they would come back and tell him every time.
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B
Sound design.
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A
Yeah. Again, you can say sound design, and then real sound design will be included because. Because we do sound.
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B
It's Michael Scott when he's like. And he's just throwing whole slices of bread out. There's no burgers.
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A
I'm okay. No, I'm not.
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B
Keep going.
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A
I'm sorry. We got it.
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B
This is why we get one star reviews.
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A
This is also why. Yeah, dude. This is why we're great. This is why. This is why we get five star reviews. So I do think it's interesting that, like, whether it's fabricated or which I think it's not, it kind of lends some credence to maybe the importance of that. That mythic motif we have. Birds being the thing that kind of do the. The prophesying and then the. The informing of the gods.
- [29:30]
B
What is it about birds?
- [29:32]
A
Are they real?
- [29:33]
B
Well, what is it about them?
- [29:35]
A
That's the thing, man.
- [29:35]
B
They're not real.
- [29:36]
A
Birds are. Yeah. You want to know something about crows?
- [29:39]
B
Yeah, I do.
- [29:39]
A
Crows are like, I think apart from humans, given the size of their brain, they're the. Not per capita given. But we could talk about per capita stuff if you want to.
- [29:50]
B
No, they are the highest intelligence.
- [29:52]
A
Yeah. Pound for pound, they are like the most intelligent. Supermore. Yeah.
- [29:56]
B
Who was it? There was some YouTuber that did like a whole thing where crows were, like, performing insane feats of intelligence. I think it was Mr. Beast, which I don't even really watch, but I think I've seen it.
- [30:07]
A
And Mr. Beast was like, if you can. If you can catch this crow by jumping out of a plane without a
- [30:13]
B
parachute, I'll give your mom this life saving medicine.
- [30:17]
A
I'll save the life of your mom.
- [30:19]
B
I totally could do it at any moment.
- [30:22]
A
Yeah. But I'll wait. If you wait till you risk your life. If you live in this darkened warehouse
- [30:26]
B
with 6,000 crows for the next two years, Mr.
- [30:30]
A
Beast is like the real life Jigsaw from the Saw movie. He's like, if you break your own leg, I'll save your mom's life.
- [30:36]
B
If you. If you give me a daily blood transfusion of half of your blood to
- [30:40]
A
keep me young, I will give you anyway. Bird motif.
- [30:45]
B
Yeah. No. Yeah. What. What is it about birds? Because they. They are like. They do show up all over the place, even up to and including, like the old Hitchcock movie.
- [30:54]
A
Yeah.
- [30:54]
B
Birds are just the Boyds. There's something about them, man. Well, they know. What do they know?
- [30:59]
A
So there's a. You know, even in Native American folklore, there's the thunderbird. There's like the firebird. There's dragons and stuff like that. And I don't know. I mean, if you. If you latch on to my wild brained idea, my harebrained idea is what I meant to say about how fallen seraphim were dragons, because seraphim potentially are dragons, then it makes sense as to why birds would be these portents of importance.
- [31:28]
B
Cause they're dragon like portents of importance.
- [31:31]
A
Portents of importance. You know what I mean?
- [31:33]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [31:33]
A
Because they're, well, dragon. Dragons are bird like is what I'm
- [31:38]
B
trying to say, for sure.
- [31:38]
A
You know, and so, like, thunderbird stuff. Quetzalcoatl was a bird. Quetzalcoatlis was a pterodactyl, like, dinosaur.
- [31:48]
B
I feel like you're making this up.
- [31:49]
A
No, I'm not, dude. My sons are obsessed with. With Quetzalcoatl. I made. In fact, you know what? Story time. I love reading books to my children before bed, but sometimes they can't agree on a book. And so I say, well, here's what we're gonna do. I'll tell you a story. And I've created a whole series of kids stories based on this character, Steve the Dump Truck. And Steve the Dump Truck does everything. Like, Steve the Dump Truck rebuilds medieval walls, fortifying castles, and then fights off Muslim hordes.
- [32:20]
B
Steve the Dump Truck, by the way, is not even a dump truck. It's.
- [32:23]
A
No, it's a. No, it's a dump truck. And Steve the Dump Truck has also gone back into antediluvian times to help a bunch of maiasauruses move all their eggs over a mountain that's haunted by an evil Quetzalcoatlus.
- [32:37]
B
Like this video on YouTube. If you want us to publish a series of children's books about Steve the Dump Truck doing all these things, you
- [32:45]
A
want to talk about seriously selling kids book Comment.
- [32:48]
B
If you do want us to do it. Like it. If you also do want us to do it, leave a review of any stars anywhere. You're listening. If you want us to do it. So basically, I want to do it.
- [32:57]
A
Subscribe whether or not you want us to do it. That's a good point. Yeah. Anyway.
- [33:00]
B
Yeah.
- [33:01]
A
And I think that maybe that's why. I think that maybe, like, you know, there's this kind of ancient significance to the bird figure with dragons, with an. With angels, with chimera from old myths. And I think that those things had some basis in reality. So I don't know. I don't think it's that crazy that either we. We import bird motif into things or they actually like the Mothman. I really think I can't express this enough that I think the Mothman was real.
- [33:28]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think so.
- [33:30]
A
And so there's automatically a kind of significance there.
- [33:33]
B
There's like just dozens of sightings of the Mothman. Go see our published work.
- [33:37]
A
Yeah, a lot of them are quite Mothman.
- [33:41]
B
They're quite reliable, the witnesses, in terms of their everyday vocations and their proclivity or propensity to tell wild tales seems low.
- [33:50]
A
Yeah. Like, you want to talk about a reliable witness? Let's talk about Woody Burger. Burger or whatever.
- [33:55]
B
Woody Durenberger.
- [33:56]
A
Yeah, that guy. That guy was a sewing machine salesman. Why would a sewing machine salesman lie? You know what I mean? Like, he's honest as a.
- [34:05]
B
As a sewing machine, as a traveling salesman.
- [34:08]
A
As a sewing machine. He's as honest as a sewing machine. Yeah.
- [34:10]
B
I mean, it's not going to move sewing machines. Oh, you're the guy that saw the creepy alien tele telepathy guy. Like, let me buy a sewing machine from you.
- [34:18]
A
Yeah, they did.
- [34:19]
B
You can go listen to the interview with Woody Durnberger where he, like, in
- [34:23]
A
his own words, lays it out.
- [34:25]
B
He's like. And they called it a gathering, and it's his whole. Because that's what Injured Cold told Woody that they call the city in his world.
- [34:32]
A
He also together. And then. And then it did kind of go a little bit off the rails with the sewing machine salesman when he started saying that he, like, visited Injured Cold.
- [34:41]
B
Okay.
- [34:41]
A
His world a few times and, like, had a whole family there.
- [34:44]
B
It's kind of like Steve the dump truck when he went back in time. Were your kids ever, like. Were your kids ever, like.
- [34:52]
A
I don't know if Steve actually jumped that. Jumped the shark a little bit.
- [34:55]
B
Nah.
- [34:55]
A
My oldest son is a literalist. One time we were walking back up to our house on the sidewalk, and he was, like, pushing his bike, and I was like, look, buddy, it's like you're climbing a mountain. And he. He turned around and deadpan looked me in the eye and said, this is a sidewalk. Okay. Yeah. Apart from the bird thing, though, I do think it's important to maybe find a biblical ground for like, a supernatural being overseeing some doom or destruction. And I think the most fascinating biblical example we have of that is from. I think it's 1 Chronicles 20, when David does the census, he becomes the census bureau. And God is like, I told you not to do that. That's bad. And so he starts to strike Jerusalem with pestilence. But it says that, like, an angel was administering the destruction with a sword outstretched over Jerusalem. And David could see the angel in the sky doing this. And, you know, you're cooked. First of all, that imagery goes hard. Someone plug it into AI. Second of all, that kind of, you know, it lends some credence to the Birds of Pripyat story.
- [36:03]
B
Well, here's the thing.
- [36:04]
A
I did that in my mind.
- [36:06]
B
That did not. I did think in terms of the disambiguated concept, let's just say, of being reigning over destruction at God's behest in His Providence. We do know that it happens because God tells us about it and sometimes tells people what he's doing. He's like, hey, by the way, I'm sending this angel and he's going to just absolutely wreck everything and a bunch of people are going to die, and you all deserve it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he always tells us about it. For example, in the Book of Amos, the prophet says, does disaster befall a city? Save the Lord, do it. And it's a rhetorical question. And the answer is no. Disaster does not befall a city unless the Lord in His Providence, at the minimum, governs all things. God governs all things in his providence. And so we know that when disaster strikes, man is actually authorized to read it and to say, like, what are we supposed to take from this? Even if at a minimum, it's not always as one to one as, like, Sodom was destroyed because of these sins. Sometimes we don't know that directly, but we can say at a minimum, well, God is the Lord over the flood. God is the Lord over these things, and he directed them in his hand for his own purposes. And so, like, at a minimum, for fear God.
- [37:19]
A
And nothing's arbitrary. So, like, God doesn't do anything arbitrary so everything does have a meaning, but we can't always tell that meaning with accuracy. There's also like revelation, you know, in. In John's revelation, there's angels in heaven that are pouring out bowls of Rab. The bowls result in. In natural disasters on the earth. Now, I don't want to flatten all like secondary causes and say that, okay, so every time anything happens, it's because an angel is like tinkering with nature. No, not necessarily. God also establishes secondary and tertiary and on and on and on causes such that things do operate normatively given the mechanics that God has created. But we do know that at times there is that direct intervention in that direct kind of meaning.
- [38:05]
B
And you're supposed to fear God in light of it. It's like the Lord Jesus was. It was interviewing or like doing this Socratic dialogue with some folks who were coming to him. One, you know, I can't remember the passage, and he was talking about the tower that fell and killed. There was this disaster that everybody knew about in the region where a tower had fallen and it had killed some people. And he basically said, do you think they were more wicked than you?
- [38:28]
A
Yeah.
- [38:29]
B
And his, his point was pretty clear. Like, God can write the end of your story with a falling tower any second. And it's. It's not. Cause those guys were particularly bad that that tower fell on them. Like, for fear God, be prepared to face eternity. These are all real messages we should take from everything from like the collapse of a bridge to a natural disaster, to even just the normal, ordinary effects of the fall in our life. Sickness, illness, trial death, cancer, etc. These are supposed to preach to us true things about God in the world.
- [39:00]
A
Yeah. So really moral of the story, like, anytime you go outside, you should be terrified.
- [39:06]
B
Not exactly what I said, like.
- [39:09]
A
No, exactly, but close. Hey, I'm kidding. Hey, what could I. I'm kidding here. Okay, well, hey, should we move right into the stories about smiling men, men in black, injured women?
- [39:20]
B
I mean, these are some wild ones.
- [39:22]
A
Yeah. Like, did you have anything else that you wanted to kind of intro the show?
- [39:24]
B
No, I do. I do just want to say, of course, thank you to one of our headline sponsors here, the headline sponsor, this show, Nutracel, because they have gone to bat for us in supporting this show and their Christian brothers making some great, great products. Let me just put it this way. If you want your pee to be blue and get health benefits, these guys are the ones to go to.
- [39:48]
A
I have used their methylene blue and I enjoy it.
- [39:51]
B
Yeah. So Have I? So check it out. We've got a link in the description with some of their stuff. And of course, always check out our great sponsors. They help make this show possible. And they're just good Christian businesses doing good work that we think are commendable. So support them and all that's always in the comments. I think we're going to have a word from our sponsors and then we're just going to go into our some, some really some of the greatest stories you'll ever hear in your entire life.
- [40:15]
A
Well, I'm ready to sit back and relax and enjoy.
- [40:18]
B
Ben, have you heard of the Jake Muller Adventures?
- [40:21]
A
Ooh, what's that?
- [40:22]
B
A Christian audio drama. Zombies, vampires, global conspiracies and faith at the center. I was up all night on the edge of my seat.
- [40:29]
A
Is it fully immersive sound effects and cast and everything?
- [40:32]
B
Yes, full cast cinematic sound. It's like you can hear the danger coming. Ooh.
- [40:37]
A
So kind of similar to Hana Cosmos, but no your mom jokes and more drama.
- [40:42]
B
No mom jokes yet. But yeah, tons of drama.
- [40:46]
A
So it's kind of like your mom then?
- [40:48]
B
Not quite. Check it out@jakemulleradventures.com Haunted for 10% off
- [40:55]
A
Brian, let me paint you a scenario. You wake up in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. The swamp ape has flooded your yard overnight. What do you do?
- [41:03]
B
Ben, I wouldn't even know where to begin in answering this question.
- [41:06]
A
Okay, well, let me answer it for you. You call the good old boys at Drain My Lawn and they'll rush right over. These drainage experts are the swamp ape's greatest foible. They can remove his habitat in no time. Plus, their sister company, Fence My Lawn, can follow up the drainage with a fence that is scientifically proven to keep swamp apes out. And it also looks really good. Wow.
- [41:27]
B
If you live in the Charlotte, North Carolina area, go to drainmylawn.com haunted and you'll get 5% off any service. Hey Ben, I just read that our great grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant?
- [41:46]
A
Maybe it's Grandma's Butter recipe. Or maybe it's gray toad tallow.
- [41:51]
B
Their tallow products are 100% organic and naturally contain the good stuff your skin craves. No mystery there.
- [41:58]
A
So say sayonara Sammy to kitchen experiments. And say hello to healthier skin. Great O Tallow Trusted by Skin Envied by Great Grandma's Butter Recipe.
- [42:10]
B
For more information information and to get a sample pack, check out gray toad tallow.com don't forget to use the code COSMOS15. That's all caps COSMOS15 for 15% off your order.
- [42:28]
A
How many demons, ghosts or vampires are lurking in your investment portfolio? If you're invested in the S P500, it's probably more than you think since it's full of companies that actively oppose oppose your faith. Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to help their faith based portfolios redirect your hard earned dollars away from destructive agendas and into companies making a positive impact on society. Get the demons out of your portfolio and invest in God's kingdom while you grow your wealth. Contact Stonecrop Wealth Advisors today by visiting StoneCropAdvisors.com Haunted Cosmos investment advisory services offered through StoneCrop Wealth Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor with the UN securities and Exchange Commission.
- [43:12]
B
If you've listened to this show from the beginning, you've heard the story at least once. How a man named Woodrow Durenberger was driving on the interstate through a dark and rainy night in West Virginia. It was November of 1966, and Durenberger, a sewing machine salesman, was headed home to Mineral Wells, West Virginia, Virginia, after a long day of cold calls. How in a flash, the road suddenly emptied just as light pierced through the clouds, revealing a craft of some kind descending toward the road in front of him. The object hovered several feet above the pavement, blocking the way. Woody slammed on the brakes and slid across the wet road, finally coming to a stop about 20 yards from the thing he did not recognize. As he stopped, the craft, which had the shape of an oil lamp's glass chimney, opened to reveal a rich white light inside. The light was then blocked by a humanoid shape exiting the craft and walking calmly through the rain and empty roadway toward Durenberger's driver's side window. The window remained closed, and the terrified Woody had no intention of changing that. For all his paralyzed shock, he did still retain retained some of his wits. But once the creature stood just outside the glass, staring at him, those wits began to slip. It appeared in every respect like a man or something pretending very well at being a man, its arms crossed its chest, which was covered by a glossy black coat. Its face bore everything one might expect to see on a human being, with the exception of a smile too uncanny to be quite real. Then, without any movement of that smiling mouth, Woody heard a calm, precisely articulated voice inside his head bidding him to roll the window down. The voice eased, or perhaps enchanted the man enough to make him obey. With his view of the strange visitor now unobstructed, Woody noticed The unblemished and almost glistening face still fixed in a smile that was far too large and insincere. He heard more of the same calming voice in his head. My name is Indrid Cold. Do not be frightened. I come from a country much less powerful than yours. We mean you no harm. I am merely here to observe you and the events to come. After a dialogue lasting roughly 10 minutes, and which in the moment struck Woodie as completely pointless, Indrid Cold turned and walked back to his craft. With his arms still crossed over his broad chest, he turned once more to look at the man. The smile never moved and the voice never left the salesman's head. Then he simply flew away. A little more than a month after this encounter, the grayish demonic elemental known as the Mothman would be seen presiding over the catastrophic collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. To this day, many wonder what connection may exist between the Mothman and the enigmatic Indrid Cold. That wonder has only grown over the years as more stories like Durenbergers have surfaced. Stories of a smiling man who appears as a harbinger of Great events. In 1952, World War II, army veteran Albert Bender founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau, ifsb. It was the first ever civilian led and civilian founded UFO Research Research Group. And it struck at exactly the right time. The public energy embraced the ifsb, and before long Bender presided over an international research and investigative club that received thousands of UFO reports. Just over 30 years of age, the young man rode high on the success of his groundbreaking endeavor. And then, very suddenly, he shut it all down on an apparently random day in 1950, 53, or so it seemed to everyone at the time. A decade later, Bender wrote a book entitled Flying Saucers and the Three Men to lay out his confession and his reasons for ending the IFSB so suddenly. The claims he made in that book have since gone down in the annals of high strangeness as some of the most important ever recorded. In early March of 1953, the governing board of IFSBURG decided to hold what they called a C Day celebration. On the 15th of that month, C Day meant Contact Day, and the idea was simple. All members around the world would memorize the same welcoming message addressed to any aliens in the universe. Then, at the same time on the 15th, they would all telepathically send the message out in the ether to see what, if any, effect it might have. Thousands of people excitedly awaited the moment, and Bender was no exception. At exactly 6pm Eastern Standard Time on March 15, 1953, Bender lay on his bed in his darkened room and mentally spoke the memorized message three full times. And this is what it was. Calling occupants of interplanetary craft. Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet Earth. We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are your friends and would like you to make an appearance here on Earth. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of Earth. Please come in peace and help us in our earthly problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be respectful responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you. We are your friends. Such were the contents of the message, and it goes without saying that you should definitely not try this at home. But just as he thought the final word for the final time, a terrible chill ran down his spine. It felt as if his entire room had suddenly plunged into freezing cold water.
- [49:05]
A
Water.
- [49:05]
B
The cold bit into him, sharp and unbearable. Next, wave after wave of pounding headache struck as a terrible odor of rotting eggs filled the room like a cloud of poison gas. Drifting between lucidity and a forced dream, Bender described small blue lights twinkling and moving in odd patterns above him. He slipped back toward lucidity, but found he could not move. All at once a voice spoke inside his head, a voice that seemed to fill every crevice of the world, yet appear to be audible to anyone but himself. In his own head, it said, we have been watching you in your activities. Please be advised to discontinue delving into the mysteries of the universe. We will make an appearance if you disobey. Bender fell out of the trance in a state of dizziness and confusion. More light filled the room now, and a thick yellow haze hung over everything. He turned toward the doorway, letting in the light, and saw the shape of a man standing there, staring back at him. When Bender moved to give chase, the apparition vanished. He sat up and massaged his temples. His stomach churned, and he wondered if he had eaten something, spoiled, or if he was somehow catching latent telepathic energy rebounding back at him. At the time, he could not believe that what he had seen was real. In time, that would change. That change did not take long. Bender remained unsettled by the experience for days, even weeks afterward. Still, he didn't halt the operations of the ifsb. He did, however, take a vacation at the urging of others in the organization's leadership, who could tell that something was just off about him. Bender obliged. After a fortnight of rest, he returned one evening and climbed the stairs of the home he shared with his stepfather before unlocking the door to his private den. The air that greeted him was stale and putrid, like the first colonies of mold forming beneath carpet left damp for too long. Bender opened all the windows and waited patiently for the odor to clear. Everything appeared exactly as he had left it. He hated people meddling with his rooms, and his stepfather knew this. Hence the locked door and lack of concern. Yet despite everything being in its proper place, Bender knew somehow that something had occurred in his absence. The radio was on. He knew he had not left it on. It played only static. He stood puzzled for some time as his anxiety from the C day encounter crept back in. Eventually he calmed himself down and convinced himself of a lie, that he must have switched it on before leaving and simply forgotten. With this thin, thin resolution in place, he ate a snack and climbed into bed, because exhaustion had suddenly overtaken him. But while preparing for sleep, Albert Bender's world changed in a way he could no longer ignore. After brushing his teeth and re entering the room, he froze in place as a tickling, almost electrical sensation seized his neck. His eyes watered profusely. The same blue lights appeared out of the nowhere, flying again in dizzying patterns around the room. Bender felt himself losing control. He stumbled to the bed and collapsed onto it. The moment his head touched the pillow, his entire body turned ice cold and he knew he was no longer in control of himself. A mustard colored shadow filled the space and clouded Bender's vision, but not completely. He could still see, standing a few feet inside the door doorway, were three figures made of darkness. They moved toward him, but their movement was. It was just wrong. It was not human motion. Rather than walking, they hovered like apparitions rather than men. As they drew closer, their appearance sharpened. Dark clothes, suits and coats covered each one of them. They resembled clergy visiting a sick parishioner. Each man wore a hat whose brim cast enough shadow to obscure the finer details of his face. When they stopped, they stood close enough for Bender to touch. Had he been able to move his arm? And when they stopped, all fear fled his mind and body. He felt utterly safe in their presence. Then the six eyes staring down at him lit up at once, filling the room with a revealing but not overpowering light. Bender could now make out their faces, his pale skin, disturbingly ordinary eyes and noses and stretched, forced, uncanny smiles completing the look. Had it not been for the total absence of fear Those smiles alone would have driven him to despair and crazed madness. They were profoundly wrong. The smiles never faded, but their voice rang through his head nonetheless. Through clenched teeth, they informed Bender in one unified voice and with absolute clarity that if he did not stop his work at ifsb, they and their people would be forced to take radical action against his well being. When the ordeal ended, Bender abruptly and unilaterally shut down the ifsb, claiming that high level legitimate authorities had issued him a credible warning to stop. Half truths carry a scent that travels far. His colleagues knew there was more to the story, but none of them them could extract further answers from him. It was not until his confession a decade later that they learned his version of the full truth. And even then it left much to be desired, for Bender became enamored with the smiling men in black. He began to wish that they would visit him again. According to him, that wish was granted. Bender claimed that on dozens of occasions he entered into strange communion with this uncanny race of beings. Over time, they grew to know one another so well that they developed a mutual affinity and respect that endured for years. But not all such stories proved quite as dramatic as Indrid Cold and the Triumvirate Smilers over Alfred Bender. Some rumors that have come down to us feel more folkloric in nature. Accounts of similar creatures afflicting places and people for little apparent reason beyond the mere sport of it. Such is the case with the with the Smiling man of Jersey City. And as Providence would have it, it was the Mothman reporter John Keel who uncovered this seemingly unrelated tale. Only a month before Woody Durenberger met Indrid Cold in West Virginia. The story goes that two boys, James Young Kaitis and Martin Munoz, were walking home on the night of October 11, 1966, some 40 miles away. And at nearly the same time, at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, a police officer and his wife watched dumbfounded as a massive blazing white light flew over their home and streaked northward before disappearing beyond the hills. Neither had ever seen anything like it, and neither saw its likeness again. Meanwhile, as James and Martin walked through Elizabeth, New Jersey, adjacent to the Jersey Turnpike, they came to a crossroads. Beneath the gleam of high bright street lamps, they could see a two story chain link fence lining the sidewalk at the opposite corner of the intersection. The fence existed to keep pedestrians from climbing the steep grassy slope that led upward to the busy turnpike. As he looked in that direction, searching for nothing in particular, James saw what he later described as the strangest man he had ever seen. Light from the turnpike, the street and the Bright moon coalesced and compounded, revealing an immensely tall and broad man standing perfectly still on the other side of the chain link fence. Three thoughts raced through James mind in an instant. How did it get there? Is he wearing stilts? Is that a mannequin or something? James elbowed Martin, who'd been looking the other way while waiting to cross the street, and told him to look. Martin too recoiled at the uncanny sight. After several moments of silent staring, the man finally moved. First, his head turned slowly to lock eyes with them. His body followed with the delayed elasticity of a worn out piece of rubber. The movement confirmed that he was no mannequin. That realization only deepened the boy's unease. I mean, obviously something about him just was not right. The surrounding lights reflected off a dark green glossy suit that the man wore. But the reflections made it appear as though the fabric were made of scales or polished plates. Around his waist. A wide jet black belt cinched his bulk tightly. He stood nearly seven feet tall. His face appeared pale and bare with small jet black eyes like beads set too far apart beneath his top hat. No curls of hair showed themselves, nor could the boys discern any ears at all to prop the hat in place. Now, staring directly at them, an inhuman smile slowly spread across his face from from ear to ear, revealing unnaturally large shining teeth hidden behind his lips. Once the smile fully formed, the man returned to his stone stillness. His unblinking eyes refused to leave the boys, each of whom felt certain the man stared directly at him and not the other. At last they broke free of his spell and moved briskly and quietly down the side street away from the smiling giant's gate gaze. Only later did each boy learn that police reports from that same night described a strange massive man in green chasing a middle aged woman down a dark alley near that very crossroads.
- [58:36]
A
Wow. Pretty creepy.
- [58:37]
B
Those are.
- [58:38]
A
You know what's even scarier than that?
- [58:39]
B
Those are. Those are some crazy. I love those stories.
- [58:42]
A
Yeah, me too.
- [58:43]
B
Those are so are insane, insane story.
- [58:44]
A
I just love like the uncanny.
- [58:46]
B
The creepy smile. It reminds me of the astonishing Legends episode the Devil in the Diner.
- [58:51]
A
Absolute cinema.
- [58:52]
B
Have you. Do you remember the Devil in the Diner?
- [58:54]
A
I do. Like I remember the name. I know, I've listened to it.
- [58:56]
B
It's an interview. It's a woman in New York City. I'm pretty sure that knew the host, you know, Forest and. And what's his name?
- [59:02]
A
Scott.
- [59:03]
B
Scott. Scott Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. And she tells the story about going into a diner and there was just this man there and There was nothing she could ever point to or describe to like demonstrate that it was supernatural or demonic or evil. But he looked at her and locked eyes there and the smile, like this look on his face. And she just knew to her core that's the devil. Like, that is a demon. That is I am not safe. That is evil. Something's wrong. Could never explain why. And it's like this short little story. There's literally nothing wrong, overtly supernatural to it.
- [59:37]
A
Right? Yeah.
- [59:38]
B
But it's always stuck with me because you know what she's talking about.
- [59:40]
A
Oh yeah.
- [59:42]
B
We are embodied souls. We have the capacity to be aware of evil and to even discern spirits. Like, to discern.
- [59:51]
A
So it's even one of the principles of like western thought and philosophy is that our senses are reliable. They give us, you know, there's obviously providential hindrances and sickness and there's exceptions,
- [60:03]
B
but they're corrupted, but they're not effaced completely.
- [60:06]
A
Yeah. Generally speaking, like, you can rely upon your senses to tell you things that are accurate. Now you may come to wrong conclusions, but it is interesting how you hear about things like that and you're like, oh, wow. Yeah, we must have kind of a funny bone for that.
- [60:20]
B
Doesn't quite like your sight can be fooled, but most of the time it's like you're just seeing light waves and it's accurate.
- [60:30]
A
Just real quick.
- [60:31]
B
Okay, so I just want to say I know I jumped right in.
- [60:33]
A
Do you know what's even scarier than and worse than that than grinning men? And it's people who fuss about ads.
- [60:42]
B
Let's sit down, guys. Let's talk about this. First.
- [60:44]
A
I want to say two things. If you ever want to see your family.
- [60:49]
B
I'm kidding. No, no, I'm kidding.
- [60:51]
A
No, it's just funny when we get like. We were talking about this during the, during the break because we're talking about
- [60:56]
B
how funny our ads are.
- [60:57]
A
Yeah.
- [60:57]
B
We have fun making it.
- [60:58]
A
How it's pierced of money and, and how we get so many comments that are like, oh my goodness, this 200 minute episode. Yeah, we had, we released the moon
- [61:07]
B
landing episode recently as we record this, and it was 2 hours and 20 minutes long. And there were like multiple comments, like full of ads, by which they meant there were two total ad breaks that were less than like 5 minutes of the entire 140 minutes of runtime. And let me just emphasize that absolute cinema of our moon landing episode.
- [61:29]
A
Third time we've said that, that you
- [61:31]
B
got to enjoy for absolutely free. Like you just Walk in, you go on the Internet, and Elon Musk sends it to you from his I beams directly through the air into your computer, and you get to watch it for absolutely free. All that's true, literally how it takes place. And it took us probably 80 man hours to produce that one episode across everything, all the people that touched it. And then someone's like, I had to watch five minutes of totally skippable ads that were hilarious. If you have no personality and are not handsome, they're skippable. Hey, they're not skippable for handsome people.
- [62:07]
A
Speaking of moon landing episode, Moon landing affirmer. Sound off in the comments.
- [62:10]
B
Let's go.
- [62:10]
A
Whoa.
- [62:11]
B
If you're not a commie.
- [62:13]
A
Oh, Western dominance.
- [62:15]
B
Someone else comment on that episode. They were like, based on their conclusion, I now know everything I need to about these two. I was like, all right, dude.
- [62:24]
A
Hey.
- [62:24]
B
But at least he listened to the whole episode. This is a Wendy's.
- [62:27]
A
At least he listened to the whole episode.
- [62:28]
B
I wish it was a Wendy's.
- [62:29]
A
Actually. Shout out to that.
- [62:29]
B
I'm on a cut and I'm hungry.
- [62:32]
A
I could use a Baconator, right?
- [62:33]
B
Hey, let's talk about these creepy stories, because these are seriously some of my favorite. They're, like, so uncanny. So creepy. What I like about all these two is that these are genuinely eyewitness accounts. You can go. You can believe them or not, but you can hear the people who said I had this encounter talk about them or read the interviews with them.
- [62:51]
A
Alfred Bender, he. He. He did that whole thing where he shut down ifsb. Yeah. And. And he didn't say. He didn't explain why for 10 years. And then 10 years later, he wrote his book. He was like, I can't. I can't get this to myself.
- [63:04]
B
He's like, I've made some.
- [63:05]
A
I've made some bad friends or good friends. Okay.
- [63:08]
B
His words, not ours.
- [63:10]
A
But it's this just like the. The man in black, the pale face. It just doesn't quite fit this uncanny valley thing. And then the Jersey City sighting was documented by John Keel, known for the Mothman documentation.
- [63:24]
B
He wrote the Mothman prophecies, and it
- [63:26]
A
was all around the same time. It was in that same Mothman time. And so he was really interested in, like, this happening. And he was actually going to interview that policeman and his wife about the UFO flyover thing. And then through the grapevine, he heard, like, oh, yeah, and there was this
- [63:40]
B
weird guy that clearly got off the ufo.
- [63:42]
A
Clearly the demon. Yeah, I didn't even.
- [63:44]
B
Or the UFO Is the demon.
- [63:46]
A
I never put that together. I ne. I never put.
- [63:49]
B
It's literally flying the direction. The story you wrote.
- [63:52]
A
I know.
- [63:53]
B
It's flying the direction of the next story. And Ben didn't. You know what?
- [63:59]
A
I never put that together.
- [64:00]
B
It's just cuz, like, some of us, like, when your IQ sign,
- [64:04]
A
I'm losing
- [64:05]
B
all my hair, you see facts put the math around me, and then you just bring it all and. And bends. Ben's there looking at the same facts. He's got his little whirly gig hat on, and he doesn't see that.
- [64:17]
A
Yeah, I look like a dunce put around Ben.
- [64:20]
B
Just like, donuts and hams.
- [64:23]
A
You're making a lot of work for.
- [64:26]
B
None of that is gonna happen.
- [64:27]
A
No, it's not.
- [64:28]
B
And I'm fully aware of that.
- [64:29]
A
No, but it's gonna be like. Instead of the donuts and stuff, it's gonna be a fart sound. The camera's gonna cut to me. It's gonna be a.
- [64:35]
B
If it does happen, I'm willing to give Evan, our video editor, guaranteed one lunch at Chipotle on me.
- [64:42]
A
Whoa.
- [64:43]
B
Okay.
- [64:44]
A
That's crazy.
- [64:44]
B
All right. If he puts the math around my head and the hams around beds, that's.
- [64:48]
A
Yeah.
- [64:48]
B
Gotta get it right, though.
- [64:49]
A
All right. He's like, I'm gonna delegate it to Tate. The.
- [64:54]
B
The Bender story is crazy. What I. What I love about that story is that here's a guy, he's into studying demons. He doesn't know it because he thinks they're aliens, but see our published works. Yeah, he's into studying demons. And he has an experience after literally doing exactly the thing you should never
- [65:12]
A
do, which is summon them.
- [65:13]
B
Invite and summon the demons to just do stuff with you, like, at the same time as a lot of other people. Then he obviously, in a way connected to that stupid idea, has a clearly demonic experience with all of the hallmarks of people encountering demons. The smells, the sounds like, the et cetera. And then his conclusion is I should listen to them and then also make friends with them.
- [65:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, I only mentioned, like, the. It was kind of the Cliffnos version of his story. Yeah, he encountered these things, like, a dozen times, you know, and in each time, it kept ramping up. Like, even after he shut down isfb, I always get the ifsb, he still kept encountering them. And it was like, it turned into this really weird thing. You have no idea. Like, is this guy going crazy? Like, how. You know, so it really is, like, it makes you Sin makes you dumb. That's one. The other thing, though common. I'm gonna not be so harsh. Relatively infrequent American evangelistic. L like leftward leaning American church. At the time, he was like, a Protestant. Come on. And he was like, a devoted Protestant. And then he gets into this stuff and, hey, Next thing you know, guess what starts to slip? Going to church.
- [66:32]
B
Look.
- [66:32]
A
Reading your Bible.
- [66:33]
B
Zoom in on prayers. Alfred, I got a message for you. Okay. Alfred, stop making us look bad, man.
- [66:38]
A
I know he's listening.
- [66:39]
B
Just. Al, can I talk. Can I call you Bender? Bender, stop doing the things you're doing. Because we have a reputation to uphold.
- [66:47]
A
Indeed.
- [66:47]
B
So stop it.
- [66:48]
A
Anyway, get better friends. Yeah, indeed. One of the things I think that makes these stories so horrifying is the uncanny. And, you know, just for fun, I typed a little bit of uncanny Valley into ChatGPT and Google.
- [67:06]
B
Is that like the ranch dressing? The Hidden Valley?
- [67:09]
A
What is this Hidden Valley?
- [67:10]
B
What are you talking about?
- [67:12]
A
Uncanny valley? You gotta say it like that.
- [67:14]
B
I'm not gonna say it like that.
- [67:16]
A
I found. I dubbed. I did some sleuthing on the Uncanny Valley Wikipedia page.
- [67:23]
B
The faces you're making if you're not on YouTube, it's, dare I say, absolute cinema.
- [67:27]
A
But I did find an interesting connection to more modern, potentially modern, uncanny traps that we may fall into. And it was with AI. So, yeah, originally, Uncanny Valley stuff, it was this Japanese scientist named Mori or something, and he started to look at people's emotional responses to robots that took on greater and greater likeness to humans. Yeah. And he found that when they looked nothing like humans, it was like, oh, look, it's a robot. It's a. It's a Tamaguchi or whatever.
- [67:59]
B
It's a robot.
- [67:59]
A
Yeah. And it's a Chia Pet, right?
- [68:02]
B
Yeah.
- [68:02]
A
It's cute. And then when they got. When they were still robots, but they were, like, approaching human likeness, it got to where, anyway, people were, like, revulsed by it.
- [68:11]
B
I started blasting.
- [68:12]
A
Yeah, exactly. But then this is the. The thing that people forget about the Uncanny Valley a lot. As it went greater and greater in its approach to human likeness and started to become, like, indiscernible.
- [68:23]
B
Yeah.
- [68:24]
A
The emotional reaction was fine, and it was, like, trustworthy. This. This thing is trustworthy.
- [68:29]
B
It was like a danger zone.
- [68:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where else?
- [68:32]
B
But not quite.
- [68:32]
A
Yeah. And now there's a whole genre of horror, Internet horror, analog horror, that's all obsessed with the Uncanny Valley, you know, even if you don't know what. What I'm talking about from the words. If you saw an example, you'd know.
- [68:43]
B
It's like, wasn't there a whole. This is like evolutionary nonsense. But wasn't it like. Well, it implies that there was like a time in the evolutionary branch of humanity where like the Homo sapiens branched
- [68:54]
A
off from the Neanderthals and we decided to become afraid.
- [68:57]
B
They look kind of like us, but not us. But they were like super violent, not as smart. So we were like.
- [69:02]
A
And my harebrained idea is that the. Some of the lingering fear of the uncanny valley comes from angels seeking to pose as humans.
- [69:11]
B
Not that, but this.
- [69:12]
A
Yes. And we learned to be terrifying.
- [69:14]
B
Yours has the benefit of not being literally stupid. Evolutionary nonsense.
- [69:18]
A
Yes. And also being really cool, but also pure speculation. So don't take it to the bank.
- [69:26]
B
We're excited.
- [69:27]
A
Uncanny valley. But the AI thing.
- [69:30]
B
Hey. Hey. I just thought of a promise before you get into the AI.
- [69:33]
A
Yeah.
- [69:34]
B
That I'm willing to make right now on Haunted Cosmos.
- [69:39]
A
Okay.
- [69:40]
B
This is one that takes the viewers helping because there's no way otherwise that we can accomplish it.
- [69:45]
A
So it's a promise.
- [69:45]
B
Elon Musk. Well, it's a. If this, then that. If X, then Y. Okay. If X. It also depends on Elon Musk keeping his word. Elon said that his optimus robots are going to be selling by the end of 2023 this year.
- [69:59]
A
Fascinating.
- [70:00]
B
If we get to 10,000 sponsors, patrons
- [70:03]
A
total, we'll get one.
- [70:04]
B
We're going to get one for the studio.
- [70:06]
A
Yeah.
- [70:06]
B
And he's going to be here and. And we're going to have him like, do stuff in the. Like, we'll have him read a script at one point.
- [70:13]
A
We'll.
- [70:13]
B
We will get an optimus robot. I don't know what we'll do with him. We will absolutely abuse him.
- [70:18]
A
So what we can promise you, the promise is this, that by the end of 2027, the robot will have killed both Brian and I because replaced us. It will have inevitably turned on us.
- [70:26]
B
It will like, you'll see the video and it'll have replaced Evanescence. Martina, like, it'll. The video will flicker and it'll be like the robot and it'll be me again.
- [70:33]
A
It's an I robot. But like, there will be signs. I'm Will Smith and the problem is I can't rap as good as Will Smith.
- [70:41]
B
Listen to parents. Do good in school, get good grades.
- [70:44]
A
And it's true that I'm an action star.
- [70:47]
B
Yeah.
- [70:47]
A
Sometimes I'm an act as good.
- [70:49]
B
Ah.
- [70:50]
A
Any of you Will Smith?
- [70:51]
B
Is that really a Will Smith song.
- [70:52]
A
Yeah, dude, it's bad. It's bad. He tried to do a comeback or the Bounce Back. This is the Bounce Back.
- [70:58]
B
That's horrible. Okay, you were. You're talking about AI though. That's a promise. If 10,000 patrons, we're getting an AI optimist driven and AI driven optimist robot from Elon Musk, provided they are shipping. Terms and conditions apply. If it kills and replaces both of us. Stop watching the show, man.
- [71:12]
A
I don't think. I don't think Ryan Lochte has as big lungs as you with the amount of words that you just said in one breath. Thank you. So, AI Deep gut, uncanny valley. And it's this. While we interact with. You know, it's AI is a misnomer. But while we interact with AI, we are interacting with something that is posing as consciousness. Yeah, but it's not right. And the point is that if we let ourselves get dull to it, we won't recognize that as AI approaches more and more conscious likeness, it'll never achieve consciousness consciousness. But as it approaches conscious likeness, we will be numb to the kind of visceral negative reaction we should have to something like that. And we'll actually be influenced by it in a way that could lead to a lot of negative effects, even in our just ability to think. So if you become heavily influenced by something that is posing as true consciousness, then you will lose your ability to reason properly as someone with actual. An actual reasonable intellect. And you even see that now with, like, young people that are getting exposed to ChatGPT and Grok from a very early age, they lose the ability to think reasonably, systematically. They lose the ability to do abstract reasoning and synthesis. Like they can't do it on their own. Yeah. So anyway, beware the uncanny valley that is unseen.
- [72:37]
B
It reminds me of a conversation I had with my good friend Tempool. Meaning one time we talked about it. The one time I've ever talked about,
- [72:44]
A
which is cool, that you have talked to.
- [72:46]
B
There's at least one. This. Not a flex, but this literally happened. He was talking and it stuck with me of this image of AI that I think he got from someone else. But it was like this vast, tentacular beast with, like, slimy tentacles, and it's holding out on the end of one of its tentacles and the face of your grandmother talking to you, pretending to be your grandmother. Pretend. And he was talking specifically about the type of AI that would upload someone's consciousness and learn. And it would like it's necromancy with extra steps yeah.
- [73:21]
A
Supposed immortality.
- [73:23]
B
And it's such a good image to remind you of what it like that's one of the things that you can envision happening when you're doing something as stupid as that.
- [73:30]
A
Yes.
- [73:30]
B
This tentacular beast reaching out to you with one of its tentacles pretending to be your dead grandmother.
- [73:35]
A
Yeah. There's also. This is kind of out of the scope of this episode, so I'm not going to go into it, but there's a really interesting thought experiment with AI called Roko's Basilisk. Roku's Basilisk. That it kind of is a. It's a. Well, yeah, it's a good thought experiment for how humanity might respond. Especially kind of like middle of the bell curve. Humanity might respond if they are tricked enough into thinking that this unconscious thing is conscious. Yeah. And really has intelligence. And how we may actually like, like create a self fulfilling prophecy of our own doom, our own intellectual doom by giving in to Roku's Basilisk. So check it up. Google it. It's really fascinating.
- [74:18]
B
Yeah. Anyway, hey, that said, that said, you
- [74:22]
A
know what I think we need to do?
- [74:23]
B
What?
- [74:23]
A
I think we need to lighten the mood a little bit. Okay. By giving our people some exposure to hilarious ad breaks that are potentially better than the main show.
- [74:33]
B
Once again, if you skip these ads, you're not a good person.
- [74:41]
A
But we appreciate. No, we don't appreciate
- [74:47]
B
if you fuss about them in the comments on YouTube.
- [74:50]
A
Look, if you hate them, if you hate them, hate them. But please don't fuss.
- [74:53]
B
Like would I, would I if I was on a jury. Put you in prison.
- [74:59]
A
A jury of one. Enjoy.
- [75:03]
B
The nighttime is crawling with dangerous creatures. Bigfoot, sleep paralysis demons. The Mothman. Now imagine what would make them even more terrifying. That's right.
- [75:14]
A
Guns.
- [75:15]
B
Cryptids with guns. That's where Armored Republic comes in. They equip law abiding citizens to stand against the un unthinkable. Even if it's a gun wielding devil worshipping Bigfoot. From combat tested coatings to high performance carriers, every piece of their ballistic armor and tactical gear is built to protect. Visit armoredrepublic.com or text join all caps J O I N to 88027 to get involved in the preparedness effort. Why is it that most soaps and cleaning products ironically don't contain clean ingredients? Indigo Sundries Soap company is helping families stay clean and healthy by starting with the most important step in cleanliness. Soap. Their cold pressed soap bars, including clay bars and tallow bars are made from all natural ingredients that don't have any harmful chemicals and they smell Great. Visit indigosundrysoap.com and order today. And hey, subscribe for regular shipments and get 10% off every time.
- [76:18]
A
At Hana Cosmos we know that a lot of our listeners are business owners and entrepreneurs that are working to advance Christendom. One of those listeners is Nathan Rose with Rose Solutions. He provides website design, maintenance and security. His mission is to promote the business of Christendom by building websites for like minded entrepreneurs. If you or someone you know is looking for help with your website, get a consultation with nathan by visiting cosmoswebsites.com tell him you're a listener of Hana Cosmos to learn how you could get your first six months of hosting and security for free. Before first light, cockerels began shouting in the backyard of the little house on the edge of Aberfan, summoning the Jones family to wake up for a new day. Everyone went about their normal routine. Mrs. Jones made a hasty breakfast and lunch for her husband. She had it ready right as he walked down the hallway, ready for another day in the mines. He kissed his wife, thanked her, and then walked out the door. Minutes later, their daughter, a seven year old named Errol May, came down the same hallway dressed for school. She looked tired. Her mother knew she'd struggled to sleep for a few days now, but the girl met her mom with a smile nonetheless. She was pensive, not very talkative, but sweet all the same. As the pair walked out the front door after breakfast, Errol looked up at her mother and said, unprompted, mommy, I'm not afraid to die. Mrs. Jones was taken aback, but being the Christians they were, she figured the Sunday school lessons were finding good soil in her girl's mind and heart. She rubbed her daughter's shoulder, told her that that was good, and the two kept on towards Pant Glass school. Thirteen days later, the Jones house woke in the middle of the night to the sound of Errol screaming in her sleep. Mr. Jones got there first. He gently woke the girl and pulled her into a hug. He felt her tears soak his shirt right away. When she calmed down enough, he looked at her and asked what was wrong. It was a dream, A very bad dream, one she'd been having for many nights. He asked her what it was and still choking back tears and breathing that jerky breath that marks children after a good cry, she told him, I was walking to school in the morning, all alone. The world was dark and gray. I never saw another another person in the dream, but I could hear moans filling the Air, like a group of people that were sick. When I turned the corner and saw the school, half of it was buried under a black pile of something. I couldn't see what it was. I tried to go into class, but the mound was blocking the door and so I was stuck outside. I started to cry. For some reason I felt afraid. And then I woke up the next morning. That same girl lay buried in a landslide that struck her school just minutes after the bell rang for class to begin. The village of Aberfan in the south of Wales had very humble beginnings. Sometime between the Roman retreat from Britain in the 19th century, three small settlements joined together at the bottom of Myned Mirthyr, a wide ridge in an area rich in coal. These three little homesteads, two cottages and an inn for wayfarers were all of Aberfan until 1869, having been completed in the 1850s. To say it was a quiet village would be an understatement. It was, in fact, remote, hardly a village at all. It felt like a place time had forgotten. The rich green hills and picturesque trees bore the imprint of the oldest history in a part of the world mankind had seldom seen. It wasn't a hostile or inhospitable place, at least not any more than other places in the world. It was just unremarkable. The land was content with its own simplicity. Birds chirping, creeks rolling over rocks and steady zephyrs rattling leaves and branches while clouds drifted aimlessly by in the welkin. The few families who called the little valley home were pleased with this solitude, and the occasional traveler appreciated the solace Aberfan afforded him. Then, In August of 1869, things started to change. A man named John Nixon, following coal seams in the hills, stumbled upon the as yet undeveloped Aberfan and decided to set up shop there. It was the Merthier Vale Colliery. For decades, the colliery brought in satisfactory profits, but it didn't swell to a very large operation. It employed only a few hundred men, most of whom didn't have families, and so they just lived elsewhere. And it did little more than add a blot of industrialism to the skyline. Over Aberfan. A few more houses went up, some new roads were laid, and Aberfan breathed a sigh of relief at dodging what could have been a greater expansion in modernization. But then, in 1952, that fearful modernization actually did arrive. With the coal industry booming all over Wales, thousands more workers were hired to keep up with the colliery's output needs. Aberfan became a proper town, complete with shops, a Police force and a primary school school for the swelling number of children dwelling there. By 1966, Aberfan boasted 5,000 permanent residents, most of whom were coal miners. Unfortunately, in the excitement of the village's capitalistic maturing, some lingering problems went unnoticed. Most importantly, people failed to understand the crippling effects that 11 flood seasons in the previous 20 years before 66 had had and were having on the structural integrity of the earth beneath the colliery. It was a ticking time bomb no one could hear. Thus the first signs of Aberfan's doom went unheeded until it was too late. Just above the clustered center of Aberfan, on top of Myned Merthyr, massive piles of mining spoil and loose rocks had built up over time, courtesy of the colliery. These were small mountains in their own right. Millions of cubic yards of ever complete, compressed, wasted earth on top of a hill whose insides were being eaten away by water erosion. What's more, under the weakened sandstone bedrock of the hill, a number of underground springs ensured that the hill fought a battle to stay standing on both fronts. Again, the hammer was set to drop at any moment, but precious few cared enough to notice. The only concerns anyone did raise were dismissed out of hand by the National Coal Board in Wales. The prophets of Aberfan were told to trust the confidence of these experts, and tragically, they did just that. Finally, on the morning of October 21, 1966, Minnid Murthia reached its breaking point. Under the pressure of 3 inches of rain that week and over 6 inches that month, the hill gave way beneath spoil pile number seven. The slight shift was more than enough. A deep rumbling sent townsfolk and aberration fan looking up to find a black mountain of earth rushing down the hill toward them. 140,000 cubic yards of dense mud careened through two farm cottages at 20 miles an hour, killing all of the inhabitants instantly. At the bottom of the hill, 50,000 cubic yards continued at the same rate over the canal and an old railway embankment and into Aberfan proper. The first building it destroyed was Pant Glass Junior School, where classes had only just started for the day. In an instant, half the school vanished under 40ft of colliery spoil. The slide continued until it damaged a dozen other buildings and destroyed two water mains in Aberfan. In all, tragically, 116 children and 28 adults were killed, most of them at the school. In the subsequent investigation, a strange figure named John Barker. Barker arrived in Aberfan to interview some of the families affected by the school's destruction. Barker, a psychiatrist specializing in supposed psychic abilities, spoke to one bereaved mother, Mrs. Davies, about her son Paul. When asked if the boy had behaved strangely in the days or weeks leading up to the disaster, Mrs. Davies responded in the negative, without really much thought. But Barker pressed her again. He told her to think very hard, to try to remember. The poor mother slowly lifted her face from her cupped, tear soaked hands and stared Barker down. He gave her a slight, sincere smile, a comforting smile, and suddenly she jumped up from the couch and ran into her son's room, returning less than a minute later with a pencil sketch. Paul had drawn it a week before the tragedy and told his mother it came from a dream that he'd kept having over and over again. He hoped that drawing it out would make the dream go away. Barker held out the the paper. A roughly drawn landscape was overwhelmed by a stream of black pencil scribble. The stream started at the top of a hill and ended in a mound at its base. Little houses and dogs filled the bottom of the page, but around the black mound, stick figures showed distressed expressions on their faces and the phrase the End was scratched in all caps across the sky.
- [85:00]
B
Now, after taking some time to reflect while I heard this story of human tragedy, and after having reflected on some of the comments I made before we went into the last ad break, I just want to say that I meant every word of it and they are literally true what I said about you if you skip the ads.
- [85:17]
A
But I like to apologize to absolutely no one.
- [85:19]
B
Just take this opportunity. But I do want to take this. This is the story I mentioned at the beginning.
- [85:23]
A
This is a crazy story.
- [85:24]
B
It's so crazy because you can go, it's another one of those like you don't have to believe it. You can say that it's past recency bias of people sifting through mountains of data with confirmation bias and finding things and interpreting them through the lens of later events. Blah blah blah blah blah. But the people that said they happened were interviewed directly and said they happened multiple times, stood by it. They're real people. It's not creepypasta. This isn't, you know, Internet lore or folklore or urban legend. This guy actually did go interview these people after this horrible tragedy that really did happen and these are the stories they told.
- [86:00]
A
Yeah, you could say that it's a post hoc ergo proctor hawk, you know. But what you can also recognize is that I thought you'd appreciate that. I do appreciate it is that this guy, John Barker, was a real psychiatrist in London at the time of the event and he was also the leader after this Aberfan event noted. He was also the leader of like, I think it was the National Laboratory of Premonitory Dreams, which that actually existed. It's crazy that that existed. I'm pretty sure that's the name. I could be like wrong, but you can look it up.
- [86:31]
B
What are their, what are their, their meetings like? Have we, anybody had any premontory dreams?
- [86:36]
A
Last meeting they just all sleep in the same room. But that was. It is like he started doing this research into like how people might get esoteric warnings in their subconscious of terrible, particularly terrible events. Yeah. That are yet to happen.
- [86:55]
B
It's never like I had a premonition that like, right. I found a $20 bill under my car.
- [87:01]
A
And the other thing that he found. And there it was, the other thing that he found was that it was more often than not like children.
- [87:09]
B
Interesting.
- [87:10]
A
Yeah. Like the dreams of children. And that, that like, if I'm being honest, that does cast a layer of doubt over it because if you go through something like that, you obviously want there to be some like, meaning to it, you know, and you could, you could easily project some meaning onto something that your child said. A drawing. And I'm not saying that it's meaningless, but it's like, you know, you can go a little too far with that at times. I'm sure we all would be tempted to, but. But it's interesting that in the Aberfan incident I just gave two examples. There were dozens of examples of people finding notes that their child had written and hadn't told anyone about. And it was akin to two weeks die, die, die. Really dark stuff and otherwise well adjusted, happy children that are giving these terrible dooms and having awful dreams that are recurring. And when it's a recurring dream, it's easier to remember and the children are remembering and telling their parents. And it is like kind of, kind of strange how all of them overlapped so much with like school, Black Mountain, death, screaming. And then, and then that happens at the school. It really is. It just makes you sit back and think, you know, like, I don't have any answers for that, but don't know. It is definitely interesting.
- [88:28]
B
We see God warn repeatedly in scripture ahead of horrible events.
- [88:32]
A
Yeah. In dreams.
- [88:33]
B
In dreams and through prophets and things like that. So it is again the part of the story that makes it hard to believe or like mysterious or difficult isn't that somebody could know about something happening beforehand because we see that in multiple occasions, both in demonic powers in the book of Acts with The seller with the young girl who has the unclean spirit that is allowing her to prophesy, prophesy true things. And. And it's good enough that it's making the owner of the slave girl a lot of money, which is why they're so mad when the apostles come along and they're so annoyed, they cast the demon out.
- [89:06]
A
Yeah.
- [89:06]
B
Out of pure annoyance, they cast the demon out.
- [89:09]
A
Like, great part of this. It implies that Paul just kind of let it happen for at least a couple hours.
- [89:14]
B
Like he was like, okay, this is enough now. Yeah, yeah, get out of here.
- [89:18]
A
Yeah.
- [89:18]
B
But it. So there's a demonic element where you have evil opposed to God. Forces that are able to some degree, whether it's by super intelligence or some other means that we have no concept of, know enough about the future or predict. And then we also have, of course, God, who knows, Because God is the author of history telling people often about his own chastening action. I'm not saying that this is like an overt positive judgment of God in this case or anything like that, but just to establish that the thing can happen.
- [89:47]
A
Yeah.
- [89:47]
B
So it's not insane or impossible, but it is uncanny. So strange.
- [89:52]
A
Part of why it's strange to me with this example is because it didn't really lead to any benefit. Like. Right. You know, Joseph, Jacob's son, Joseph, One of the 12 sons, he was given multiple dreams prophesying his rise to be the preeminent son, you know, and it eventually did happen. Joseph. Yeah, yeah. He was able to interpret Pharaoh's dreams. Pharaoh was given the dream. Yeah. And then Joseph gave him the interpretation. And it all happened.
- [90:19]
B
The baker.
- [90:20]
A
Yes, the baker also had the baker.
- [90:22]
B
And the cup bear had dreams. The cut bearer, both had premonitory dreams.
- [90:25]
A
Lot of dreams.
- [90:26]
B
Lot of premonitory dreams.
- [90:27]
A
Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel did the same thing. And then also Joseph, you know, the father of Jesus, he was given dreams by the angel telling him to go to Egypt because of what Herod was about to do. It just is.
- [90:36]
B
And he was warned in a dream.
- [90:38]
A
Yeah. And that's all. But the thing is that there's a fruit that comes. Comes from it. They respond to the warning. And it is a warning in Joseph's case. And then in the first Joseph's case and in Daniel's case, it is a very clear indication of what's going to happen, or it is a warning. And then God gives the gift of interpretation to the person or someone else so that fruit can come from it. But in this one There wasn't any.
- [91:03]
B
It's bleak.
- [91:04]
A
And that's the weird thing to me is it's like. It's. It's just really depressing.
- [91:08]
B
It's really bleak. It's also like. And kids do sometimes, like, there's a whole, I think, subreddit or something where it's just weird and uncanny things kids have said, like looking. You know, and kids say weird things, like looking right into your eyes, mommy, you're going to die.
- [91:22]
A
Yeah.
- [91:22]
B
Or really weird stuff. Maybe a lighter note. It reminds me of one of my favorite kids saying things stories just since, like, all the kids died horribly. Let's now turn it to be a little bit lighter.
- [91:34]
A
Let's lighten the mood.
- [91:35]
B
A friend of ours here at the church.
- [91:38]
A
Yes.
- [91:40]
B
He has a son. His son's name is James. And it was around the first or second conference that we did here, and one of our speakers had come to the, you know, early or something, and they were, like, at the venue.
- [91:52]
A
Great guy.
- [91:53]
B
And the dad and his son are there, and he's like, meeting him. Oh, hey, James, say. Say hello to this gentleman. He's one of the speakers and. And the son, he looks up at the guy and you. He's three years old, you know, he's probably like two feet tall. And he's like, hi, you have a pig face. And the guy goes, what? And he says. I said, you have a pig face.
- [92:15]
A
And the dad could tell that the guy was, like, a little bit offended.
- [92:20]
B
And the thing is, the guy doesn't have a pig face. Like, he's a perfectly.
- [92:23]
A
No, yeah. He's a normal guy. But the problem is the dad was, like, choking back laughter because it's so. Because it's just off the wall.
- [92:30]
B
And he's like. Like a really good disciplinarian. Like, loves the kids. There was out of nowhere just. It wasn't because, like, this kid was never spanked, man.
- [92:37]
A
Would I discipline for that? Absolutely not.
- [92:40]
B
He did get disciplined. But the point being, like, kids do say weird, uncanny things because they don't understand all the implications of what they're saying in normal human society.
- [92:49]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [92:50]
B
Kids are like little savages.
- [92:52]
A
Like many, this happens on almost a daily basis because I've been trying to. Trying to teach my sons that Jesus is God and man. Yeah. And so they run up to me and it's just random. Abner, my oldest, he'll be like, jesus has a mouth. And I say, you're right, son. He sure does. And then you say, God has a mouth. You're like, In a question. And I'm like, okay, let's be careful here.
- [93:17]
B
Let's be careful.
- [93:18]
A
God is a spirit. Technically, no.
- [93:20]
B
Infinite, eternal and unchangeable being. Wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. It's like.
- [93:26]
A
And. But he, like, asks it as a question, and then he'll do it with all, like, hand, arm, foot. And I'm like, yeah, all the parts.
- [93:34]
B
Jesus is the body.
- [93:36]
A
Jesus is a man, and God. It's funny to watch a small mind try to wrap. Try to wrap around that concept. And it's like, really simple way. It's.
- [93:45]
B
It's my kid's catechism. I'm always asking Winnie, you know, series of questions. Are you baptized? Yes. Who made you? God. Did Jesus die on the cross for your sin or who died on the cross for your sin? Jesus. Who loves you? Daddy. And they'll always be like, daddy and God. Yes. God loves you, too.
- [94:06]
A
My. My boys are learning the Nicene Creed and.
- [94:09]
B
Oh, I've heard it.
- [94:10]
A
Ambrose can make it up to the first line of the last stanza. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, you know, and the Lord and giver of life. And he. And. But, like, the best part is the Pontius Pilate part where he goes, like, he. And became man. And he was crucified under Pontius. The way he said, dude, he goes hard on Pontius Pilate. My sons are not big fans of Pontius. Pilot. Well,
- [94:38]
B
so, anyway, anyway, horrible stuff happened
- [94:41]
A
in Aberfan, and there were some premonitory dreams.
- [94:44]
B
And, like, we don't really know. Like, do they happen in the Bible? Yes. Are they possible? Yes. Did this case? There's some evidence that they did. Do we know why? I don't know. Like, literally have no idea.
- [94:55]
A
But it certainly. There's a lot of even scholarly evidence to back up the fact that, like, some of it did happen to some degree. You can also look up. I mean, like, it's a tragedy. And so you might not want to do this, but you can look up pictures, colorized pictures of, like, hours after the disaster in Aberfan, and you can see the scale. Like, it's really. It's crazy. And to imagine that much earth, like, barreling towards you at 20. It was 20 miles an hour. It was coming down. Like, nothing can stop that except just leveling out. And so it kind of gives you an idea of maybe why this was such a. Like, such a lingering and, I don't know, really, really important event in this really small and otherwise kind of inconsequential village. Yeah.
- [95:45]
B
Yeah, we do have one more story
- [95:47]
A
for you guys today. The hot clothes.
- [95:49]
B
The hot clothes of this show. And I just want to say it's been a pleasure being back with you guys here in season seven. Man, I hope you enjoyed the graveyard shift that we ran between seasons. We're keeping doing that. If you have stories like that, keep sending them in. Stories@the hauntedcosmos.com yes. And we've gotten some great. I mean, we are just scratching the surface of some of the great stories you guys have sent us.
- [96:13]
A
I gotta say, y' all stories surprised me. I went on record and I told Brian I was like, 99% of these are gonna be unusable. And then for various reasons, and then everyone else was not a naysayer and I felt like a jerk. And then I went and looked at the inbox and I was like, oh, why is my life so boring? People have seen some crazy stuff.
- [96:33]
B
Yeah.
- [96:34]
A
So as we go into this hot clothes, just to kind of prep you for it, it is very fascinating story, stories, kind of. But it gives one example of maybe how we may be tempted, even at a mass level, to mythologize something and make it into more than it was. And so really the point of this is to say, as you, you know, I was joking about Birds of Pripyat and Creepypasta and all that. As you look into these things, you don't want to be like overly gullible or you don't be gullible or naive. You want to still be sober minded and try to think through, like, what if this is the human tendency to project more importance onto a thing than is actually there? Because we all do that or we all tend to do that. So anyway, still a very fascinating story and who knows, maybe there are still unanswered questions to it. But signing off and sending you into the hot clothes, I am Ben Garrett.
- [97:28]
B
And I'm Brian Sauvey, leaving you with this important message that if you like what we do here at Haunted Cosmos, help us continue to make it possible. @patreon.com we really appreciate all of our patrons who have continued to help us make this show possible. Maybe you could be one of them by supporting our show there or the great Christian businesses that back us up here every episode. We hope you guys enjoyed this entree into season seven and enjoy this hot close as well. 78 years into the Hundred Years War between England and France, the opposing armies stood just outside of Beauchamp from one another, though churning clouds pillowed high into the heavens, they did not cover the Vastness of the sky, the sun alighted and ushered in the day. It shone down on the confident flag, French and the weary English with a blinding coolness. It was October 25, 1415. Despite having already attempted a lengthy retreat toward the coast, King Henry V of England sat proudly atop his war horse. His humble force of 1500 men at arms and 7000 bowmen stood at attention behind him, knowing it was the day they were to die. Across the field, soon to be painted red with with blood, a French force totaling 15,000 men waited to engage. The French nobility felt tempted to celebrate before the first bow sang out, this would be the end of the enemy king, and with him the war that had crippled them for far too long. For three hours, those brothers of nearly common descent remained fixed in place, each waiting for the other to move. Finally, however, doom struck its chord. The English bowmen, emboldened by their fiery king, loosed a volley of arrows toward the French. But it met with little success. The French cavalry, though still not fully organized, seized the moment and charged with a portion of their numbers. Lowering their face masks, the mounted knights rode straight up the middle of the field. But this proved their first undoing. Another volley of arrows rained down upon them. They could not turn to the sides, as trees constrained the battlefield. Few knights fell, protected by their armor, but the horses fared far worse. Hundreds of French horses were immediately peppered with arrows. Many collapsed beneath their riders. Those that lived limped back toward the French line, crazed with pain. Thus the Battle of Agincourt began and raged across the French countryside. For the better part of that day, hour after hour saw the English repel French assault again and again against all odds. In the end, 6,000 Frenchmen lay dead, many of them members of the nobility. While England lost only about 600 of her bravest. Henry V stood victorious over the field, having fought a losing battle that he did not lose. The English longbows, harbingers of hope from the first wave of attack to the last, went down in history as the pride of Britannia. 99 years after Agincourt, 80,000 English troops marched into the Belgian township of Mons. There they were ordained to meet a German force nearly double their size. But the First World War having been declared only days prior, the Battle of Mons became one of the first great clashes in this mythic epoch. Unlike the glory of Henry V at Agincourt, however, Providence did not side with the English. At Mons, at dawn on the morning of August 23, 1914, German artillery rained down on the British lines. The maelstrom did not cease for the entire day. Later that morning, the German infantry charge began. British rifle training kicked into gear and calling upon the strength of the bowmen before them, the royal soldiers repelled the first German attack. But it wasn't enough. Wave after wave of reorganized German troops poured over the bridges into Mons until they seized them, forcing the English to surrender foot after foot of occupied ground. By three that afternoon, commanders ordered multiple British divisions to retreat to defensible positions. The final call for retreat came at 2am the following morning, when the last divisions reached a reinforced defensive line along a road outside Mons. But this too was not enough. Thousands of bodies, rivers of blood, the sharp crack of rifles and the deafening explosions of artillery. The foundations shook as screams smothered what had so recently been a quaint town of Christian homes. Limbs floated in the canals, food for carrion. Crows fed on the dead, slumped over rails like prisoners on a gibbet. The devil laughed even at this new position. The German onslaught proved too strong. The Royal army broke into a crippled run, a weeks long ruck to the very outskirts of Paris. Only then were they given a moment to breathe. The Battle of Mons was a shocking and overwhelming loss for Britain at the outset of the Great War. Its effect, beyond the immediate loss of life, proved unquantifiable in its degradation of troop morale. Officers, soldiers and countrymen back home struggled to shake the sinking sense that the war would end quickly and not in their favor. Despair took root in the fertile soil of frightened mines. But a month after the first shots were fired, after the Allies gained a few precious days to consolidate, reports emerged from the front lines of Mons that somehow stemmed the tide of unfettered sorrow, as these things always do. It must have begun as a trickle, just a rumor. But one way or another, word spread that a particular English infantryman swore upon his life that he had seen the most beautiful and terrible thing imaginable. On that first day at Mons, he told his brothers in arms that at the fiercest moments of the fighting, he looked toward the sectors where the Germans advanced most easily and saw mist covered shapes, glorious human figures made of light swirling among the enemy and sowing confusion. The first time he dismissed it as a trick of smoke and sunlight intermingling in the confused fray. The second time he rubbed his eyes, certain he had to be mistaken. The third time, however, he paused long enough to examine it. There's always a moment in every period of chaos, even if it lasts only an instant, when everything sort of falls quiet. It's the eye of the storm when something arrests the afflicted's attention so completely that it distracts them from the horror at hand. Perhaps it's the song of an ice cream truck while you lie crying with a broken leg, crashing your bicycle. Perhaps it's the captivating wainscoting in a haunted house. Perhaps it's the flight of a beautiful bird in the aftermath of a car wreck. Whatever it may be, it simply is. And this soldier found this moment that day, when he studied the apparitions closely enough to realize they were apparently angelic beings, winged and strong with voices he felt only he could hear. They stirred before the German lines and halted them in total bewilderment. On multiple occasions, he watched them grasp and redirect bullets and even artillery fire. He watched them, arrayed in heavenly gold and white, shoot arrows of white flame from the sky into the German ranks. This man, lost to history, believed that despite the defeat, the angels of Mons saved countless British lives that day. As his story spread, others like it joined the quiet hope. Men of every rank and from various divisions testified that angels had spared them from total destruction. In the battle, hundreds, thousands of soldiers claimed to have seen and marveled at the miracle. Before long, the wound of defeat scarred over and the British resolve hardened, strengthened by the undeniable moral drawn from these firsthand accounts. Whatever happened, God was clearly on their side. But the power of the story grew stronger still, for eventually the man supposedly responsible for the angel's appearance told his tale. Lost amid gore and shadow, a British infantryman loosed a haphazard prayer. World without end. Amen. He then turned again and fired blindly into the encroaching German ranks. A shade of blue in the sky stirred a memory of a restaurant he once visited in London, a vegetarian place with images of St. George painted on the plates above a Latin motto that, when Translated, read, May St. George be of a part present help to the English. Inspired by this memory of leisure long past, he began whispering the phrase to himself before every shot. 300 yards away, German soldiers struck by his weapon fell one by one, seconds apart. His mind narrowed to the phrase the trigger, the reloads, until the din of war hushed across the earth. In the quiet, he heard a loud voice peeling like thunder overhead. Array. Array. His skin prickled as the electric voice permeated the world. He heard it again. St. George. St. George. He looked up and saw glimmering figures, angels clothed as the glorified bowmen of Agincourt, volleying death into the enemies of St. George's kinsmen. Thus the angelic army, the Spirits of Agincourt's heroes delivered England through defeat and spared it from what surely would have been a far greater disaster. Not only in England, but the Allies as a whole rejoiced in the story. Once again, it meant that God stood with them. And if God was with them, who could stand against them? The story, of course, accomplished its purpose. The Allies consolidated, reformed their ranks, and after years of perhaps the worst horrors mankind has ever inflicted upon itself, they triumphed over the German Juggernaut. Though it's difficult to measure how much credit the angels of Mons deserve for the ultimate victory, it surely must be some. There's only one problem. It never happened. After the defeat at Mons, British author Arthur Machen wrote a short retelling of the story in his novella the Bowman. In it, he introduced prayers to St George and a divine response. As a work of fiction meant to mythologize the event, he invented it entirely. After publication, however, the myth sank deep into the soul of England, leading many to sincerely claim that they had seen the angelic bowman summoned them, or known a trustworthy friend who encountered them in the fray. The story stands as a testament to the power of myth and the human mind and soul's desire to impose greater meaning upon the events of their lives. To this day, many insist that although Machen fabricated his account, he merely intuited what truly occurred. Serendipity, synchronicity, call it what you will. Thousands still believe the angels of Mons were real and that Machen's hand was providentially guided to tell the truth of what they did that day. What do you think? Country Mothman in disguise? Wolf man in disguise? Giant angel cries? We hear other lies Moon ey children here to steal your soul Bigfoot skin walkers are from my control
- [108:32]
A
Hunting God's fools I'm so scared all this mystery I'm not.
- [108:47]
B
Save us.