← The Why Files: Operation Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript59 lines
- [00:02]
A.J.
I'm not giving up. I am selling the building.
- [00:07]
Sponsor Voice
The final season of FX is the Bear.
- [00:10]
A.J.
The restaurant is flooded.
- [00:13]
Co-host or Guest
Everything's either gonna be okay.
- [00:15]
Dancer or Performer
No. Stop.
- [00:17]
A.J.
Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. But we have each other.
- [00:24]
Sponsor Voice
FX's the Bear the final season, all episodes now streaming on Disney.
- [00:37]
A.J.
In December 2024, a telescope spotted a rock the size of a 20 story building heading our way. Its odds of hitting Earth were higher than any asteroid in 20 years. Then the math changed and the threat passed. This time, we weren't the first to see a city killer coming. A tablet from a library in Iraq. A bronze disc buried on a German hillside. Melted pottery from the Dead Sea. Three different objects from three different countries describing the same event. Every ancient civilization on Earth has a story about that morning. It's the story of the end of the world. And today, we're gonna read it off a piece of clay.
- [01:23]
Dancer or Performer
Foreign.
- [01:28]
A.J.
Missed calls and slow follow ups are silent killers. That's how businesses leave money on the table without even realizing it. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by. Quo, spelled Quo, the business communication system built so you never miss a call. Here's what I love about this. Your entire team handles calls and texts from one shared number. Everyone sees the full thread, the replies are faster, customers actually feel taken care of. No more of those. Wait, did someone follow up on that? No more of those moments. And it gets smarter. Quo's AI automatically logs calls, generates summaries and flags next steps so nothing falls through the cracks. It could even qualify leads or respond after hours so your business stays on even when you're off. And quo is the 1 rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews. More than 90,000 businesses trust it. That's not a coincidence. That's a track record. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.come y that's quo.come y. Northern Iraq, 1842. The Bible called Nineveh the greatest city of the ancient world. Walls 100ft tall, streets wide enough for three chariots side by side. Classical historians agreed it was real, but nobody can find it. Eventually, most scholars decided it never existed. Then a French consul started pulling giant winged bulls out of a mound in northern Mesopotamia. Paris went wild. The British Museum wanted a discovery of its own.
- [03:13]
Eccentric Commentator
And.
- [03:13]
A.J.
And Austin Henry Layard thought he knew where to find one. The race for the Lost City was on. Layard followed the clues? Ancient texts put Nineveh directly across the river from what's now Mosul. One mound fit a massive hill on the east bank of the Tigris. In 1849, Layard recruited a crew and dug and Doug. And Doug. And then he hit stone. He expected a palace, but. But he broke into room after room full of clay tablets, stacked and shelved and cataloged the largest library of the ancient world. It belonged to King Ashurbanipal, who wanted every piece of knowledge on earth under one roof. He sent scribes across the empire to copy anything they could find. Medical texts, star charts, royal letters. 30,000 tablets, including the oldest version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. We still have these documents because of King Ashurbanipal.
- [04:16]
Eccentric Commentator
Ashton Bonapil.
- [04:17]
A.J.
Ashurbanipal.
- [04:18]
Eccentric Commentator
Ash play from a pal Ashurbanipal. So Ashtray Bonaparte paved the way for AI companies to steal all our data. Cool, cool, cool. I got it. Go ahead.
- [04:29]
A.J.
Ashurbanipal bragged about it in his own inscriptions, in his own voice. He claimed he read text written before the flood. Scholars filed that under royal trash talk. Then, in 612 BC, Nineveh's enemies burned the city to the ground. The fire should have destroyed everything, but it didn't. The clay tablets baked harder. The collapsed roof sealed the rooms. The library went underground for two and a half thousand years, preserved by the same disaster that was supposed to erase it. Layard shipped the tablets to London. Then the hard part started. Cuneiform, the wedge shaped writing of ancient Mesopotamia. That was a code nobody could fully read. Yet one symbol could mean a single word or a single sound or. Or a whole word or a whole sentence. Scholars spent decades fighting over translations, publishing papers that flatly contradicted each other. And through all of it, one tablet sat in a drawer and waited. It was round, five and a half inches across, small enough to hold in one hand. And round was strange, because cuneiform tablets are almost always rectangular. One side was blank, the other was divided into eight equal slices, like a piece, each one packed with writing and little drawings. Arrows, clusters of dots, a triangle, a spiral. The British Museum gave it a number, K8538 and a the Nineveh planisphere. A planisphere is a flat map of the night sky. The scholars who named it took a guess. They had no idea how close they were, because every expert who tried to read it got a different answer. One called it an instrument for measuring stars. One one spent 300 pages arguing it recorded a single night in 650 BC. One called it a message to the king about omens. They all agreed on exactly one thing. It was a text. They just argued about what it said. And the scribe who carved it into wet clay didn't understand it either. He copied it line for line from something 25 centuries older than he was. A text from before the Flood. Exactly the kind of thing that King Bragt he owned. The scribe was an expert on dead languages. By the time anyone could read this one, his language was dead, too. Assyriology is a closed world. It takes decades to learn the writing, the dead languages. 3000 years of Mesopotamian history. The people who translate these tablets train their whole lives to do it. Rocket scientists are supposed to stay in their lane. Alan Bond and Mark Hemsel were rocket scientists. Bond designed spacecraft engines. Hemsel taught astronautics. Neither one read cuneiform for years. They were convinced that every translator for a century and a half had it backwards. The tablet wasn't a text at all. It was a map. The arrows and the clusters of dots were stars. Eight slices of sky in the exact positions of real constellations, like Pisces and the Pleiades. Not a map of anywhere on Earth, a map of the night above it. So Bonn and himself fed the star positions into planetarium software, the kind that can run the sky backward to any date in history. So they told the software to find the night where those constellations lined up. It came back with an answer. 3123 BC. That was 2,500 years earlier than anyone ever guessed. They assumed it was a mistake, so they ran it again. Checked the constellations, checked the latitude. The answer kept coming back to the same. June 29, 3123 BC, just before dawn, seen from southern Mesopotamia. Three of the eight slices showed ordinary sky. The other five showed what came next. Something crossed that sky, bright enough to cast shadows, fast enough that the scribe had to draw it in stages. As it moved. The tablet described a white stone wall, a disk coming out of the giant part of the sky we call Pisces. Climbing to the northwest and crossing the horizon at an angle. Bond and Hempzel could measure down to a fraction of a degree, six degrees above the horizon. And that's where the math stops being abstract. An object that big, that low, moving that fast, doesn't stop at the horizon. It keeps going. They drew the line on a map. Northwest, across a rock, across Turkey, across the Balkans, 2,000 miles, until the line ran straight into the side of a mountain, a valley in the Auschwit Alps, a place called Kofels. And for 100 years, Kofels was a problem nobody can solve. Until now. You want to know what's wild? The same institutions printing money and growing the debt to $39 trillion are also the ones telling you to keep your retirement in paper assets, stocks, bonds, dollars. Assets that only hold value if you trust the system backing them. Meanwhile, the numbers are doing something different. Gold up around 35% this past year. Silver up over 125%. The stock market, which everyone's been celebrating, is up about 27%. It's not even a close comparison. And bank of America is forecasting silver at $309 an ounce, with top banks projecting gold at 6,300. Now, I'm not guaranteeing those numbers, I'm just pointing at them. Here's what the financial industry doesn't advertise. You can take an existing IRA or 401k and roll it directly into physical gold and silver. No taxes, no penalties. You're not cashing out. You're repositioning into something you can actually hold. I looked at a lot of companies before I put the Y file's name behind any of them. Most weren't worth your time. Golden Crest Metals was the exception. Boutique operation, honest pricing. No call center, no hard sell. Actual one on one service from people who know what they're talking about. They'll give you a free portfolio review and a free info guide. And they won't pressure you into doing anything with it. Go to GoldenCrestMetals.com TheWifiles or call 888-949-9172. That's GoldenCrustMetals.com TheWifileS or call 888-949- 9172. For your 100% free info kit, go to GoldenCrestMetals.Com TheWifiles or. Or call 888-949-917 2. A piece of mountain the size of a small city, three quarters of a cubic mile of rock came off the ridge in an alpine valley in a single event and dropped the peak by 600ft. The slide ran three miles wide and 1600ft thick. A rock like that doesn't just fall. Something has to move it. An earthquake didn't fit because no fault runs through the area. A normal landslide didn't fit either. It was too big, it was too fast and it was too hot.
- [12:19]
Eccentric Commentator
Gah. Janice, who I might first love Janice. Too big, too fast, too hot. Why you gotta bring her up?
- [12:27]
A.J.
I didn't because one detail made Cophles strange. Long before anyone said the word asteroid, the rock at the bottom of the slide was melted. Not weathered, not crushed. Melted. Geologists call it frictionite, a glassy rock that forms when stone gets ground so fast that the friction turns it to liquid. Cophles has beds of the stuff several feet thick, and the quartz crystals down the slide carry shock fractures, microscopic damage that only forms under the kind of pressure you find at a nuclear test site or confirmed impact crater. The same fingerprint turns up at Chicxulub, where the rock that killed the dinosaurs hit. And at Meteor Crater in Arizona.
- [13:16]
Eccentric Commentator
Heat, friction, chicks and lube. Can we please stop talking about Janice?
- [13:21]
A.J.
I would love nothing more. Here's what Bond and himself calculated. It would take an object a kilometer wide, 2/3 of a mile, hit the air at 20 kilometers a second, 45,000 miles an hour at 6 degrees, which was the angle on the tablet. It came in so shallow it never cratered the ground. It skipped across the top of the atmosphere like a stone across a pond, crushing the air in front of it into a wall of plasma hotter than the surface of the sun. Anything al under the track, every animal, every tree, everything from the Persian Gulf to the Alps watched a second sunrise climb into the wrong part of the sky. And when it finally broke apart right over Kofels, it released more energy than every nuclear weapon on Earth, going off at once. For comparison, in 1908, a rock about 160ft across blew up over Siberia and flattened into 800 square miles of forest. We call that Tunguska. The Cople's object was 20 times wider, and energy scales with weight, not width. This thing carried thousands of Tunguskas. The column of vaporized rock punched straight up out of the valley. Then the jet stream caught it, and one hour later, the cloud stretched from Ireland to Moscow. The cloud went up 40 miles. To picture that, a passenger jet flies at about seven miles up, the space shuttle comes home through the atmosphere. At around 40, the Kofel's plume reached the same height, except it was made of vaporized rock and molten iron and air cooked into plasma. It climbed through the weather and into the edge of of space. The largest hydrogen bomb ever built. The Soviet Tsar Bomba sent its mushroom cloud to 40 miles, too. That's the scale we're talking about. But Cofel's was a stack of Tsar Bombas going off on top of a mountain. The plume sheared sideways and rode the jet stream east. It spread as it went, a column turning into A mushroom turning into a sheet of glowing debris the size of a continent. Inside it were pieces the blast didn't fully vaporize. Millimeter beads of molten iron and rock frozen into glass as they shot upward. Scientists call them tektites and spherules. That's what an impact leaves behind. Tiny drops of cooked planet scattered downwind. The plume came down eventually. The fallout reached across Europe and into the near east, and it's still there. Archaeologists pull it out of the soil to this day, but here's the part that should keep you up at night. Cobalt's wasn't a freak accident. Astronomers know where the rock came from. They call it the torrid stream, the wreckage of a giant comet that broke apart in the inner solar system sometime in the last 20,000 years. The biggest surviving chunk is a comet 4km across that still loops the sun every three years. Everything else, the dust and gravel and rocks and the occasional mountain, runs in a long tube of debris that crosses Earth's orbit twice a year. Every year for longer than our species has existed. Now, most of it is nothing. When the dust burns up over your house every Halloween, you call it the torrid meteor shower and make a wish.
- [16:56]
Eccentric Commentator
I made a wish once. I wish that every time someone tapped my bowl, they became uncomfortably damp forever.
- [17:03]
A.J.
Did it work?
- [17:04]
Eccentric Commentator
You try. Aren't you human? Man, that John Cena is so full of now.
- [17:10]
A.J.
Every once in a while, a bigger piece gets through, and we have proof. In 1975, Earth crossed a dense part of the stream, and some of it hit the Moon. The seismometers the Apollo astronauts left on the surface picked up the strikes machines on the Moon ringing as the swarm came through. The big pieces don't come every year. They come in clumps, thousands of years apart. The debris isn't spread out evenly. It orbits the sun seven times for every two trips Jupiter makes. And every so often, Jupiter's gravity gives it a tug and herds the loose rock into dense knots. Picture a prospector swirling a pan until the gold collects in one spot. Earth doesn't cross those knots often, but when it does, cities burn. One of them sat on the shore of the Dead Sea.
- [17:59]
Dancer or Performer
Sea.
- [18:00]
A.J.
A city people told stories about for thousands of years. A city that, according to the Bible, God himself promised to destroy. And if you remember how the story ends, it doesn't end well. Starting something, a podcast, a business, a merch store for people who believe the Moon is a hologram takes a genuine leap of faith. And it's terrifying. But here's what helps. Having the right Tools behind you from day one for millions of businesses. That's Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US from major household names down to brands. Just getting started with hundreds of ready to use templates built in, AI tools that write product descriptions and punch up your photography and marketing tools that put your brand in front of the right people. Shopify basically gives you a full business team in one place. And if you get stuck award winning 24. 7 customer support, they're always there. Unlike some other entities we investigate. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com wai go to shopify.come that's shopify.com. For most of modern archaeology, Sodom was a bedtime story. The Bible said Sodom and its sister city Gomorrah, burned from the sky in a single morning in a rain of fire and sulfur that left the ground dead behind them. Ancient writers repeated the story. Medieval maps show the cities, but nobody ever found the ruins. And by the middle of the last century, archaeologists quit looking. Sodom got filed next to Atlantis. A moral lesson, not a real place. But Stephen Collins didn't buy it.
- [19:54]
Eccentric Commentator
Phil Collins Stephen Ah, man, that would have been awesome. In the Air tonight is actually a story about asteroids falling out of the sky. Epic.
- [20:04]
A.J.
Collins ran it.
- [20:05]
Eccentric Commentator
That doesn't show, but the pain still grows. It's no stranger to you and me.
- [20:12]
A.J.
Are you finished?
- [20:16]
Eccentric Commentator
Now I'm finished.
- [20:18]
A.J.
Collins ran the archeology program at a small evangelical university in New Mexico. The mainstream field didn't treat him as one of their own. Evangelical archaeologists dig to test the Bible, and that put him on the outside. But Collins was sure of two things. Sodom was real, and he knew where to look.
- [20:37]
Eccentric Commentator
Where do you look? Euratus?
- [20:39]
A.J.
That's enough. He spent 10 years on the geography before he even picked up a shovel. The Bible puts Sodom on the plain north of the Dead Sea, not south, where everyone before him searched. One site sat exactly where the text pointed, a Bronze Age mound in Jordan called Tall El Hammam. And it was no village. In its day, this was the biggest city in the region, 10 times the size of Jerusalem and and five times the size of Jericho. Its life ended all at once in a single burned layer around 1650 BC. So in 2005, he started to dig. 15 seasons, 5ft of charcoal and ash. His team went in expecting a war. Armies burn cities, earthquakes flatten them, volcanoes bury them. Those were the way a Bronze Age city died. What they pulled out of the ground didn't match any of them. They pulled out pottery that melted instead of breaking. Glazed on one side and untouched on the other. Like somebody took a blowtorch. To one side of a piece of clay, they found mud brick with the outer face turned into glass while the inside was still clay and grain cooked to black dust. Right where it sat. Glass forms at about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Lava out of a volcano tops out at around 2200. Nothing on Earth's surface gets pottery that hot. Then they found the people. Two skulls lying a hand's width apart. One with the eye socket crushed in a skeleton in the throne room of the palace. The top half simply gone and the bottom half burned down to the bone. Collins didn't trust it. He sent samples to lab after lab, and every lab sent back the same shocked quartz, the same fractured crystals from Cohal's microscopic beads of molten iron and glass. Diamond dust formed in the first instant of a shock wave. And a layer of iridium in the soil. The same metal that proves that the dinosaurs went extinct because of an impact. The numbers pointed to an airbrush, an explosion in the air. Instead of a crater in the ground, something detonated about 2 1/2 miles above the rooftops with a force of 1,000 Hiroshimas. If you stood on the city wall that morning, the flash came first. Brighter than the sun. The air itself arrived a few seconds later, moving faster than the speed of sound. The dirt holds one more clue. The destruction layer is packed with salt. 4% on average in some samples. A quarter of the soil is salt. The team's best explanation is the blast went off close enough to the Dead Sea to vaporize part of it. And what rained down on the fields was the sea itself. One of the strangest details in the Bible story is Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt. When she looks, looked back. It's also the one detail that the soil proves. The salt poisoned everything. Nothing grew. Across a 15 mile circle, 120 towns and villages went dark. And they stayed dark for 600 years. His team expected graves. They found something like Pompeii. 17 centuries before Pompeii happened. They found people frozen mid step with their master, mouths open, hands up, caught in the half second before they died. And you can't help but wonder, in that moment, what did they say? Summer, 1999. A forested hilltop in eastern Germany. Two men with a metal detector got a signal and started digging. What came out of the ground was a bronze plate about the size of a dinner Plate crusted green and heavy. Gold shapes were hammered into the face. A circle, a crescent, a tight cluster of seven dots. The men were looters. They had no idea what they had. They gouged it with the shovel. Getting it out chipped the gold and sold the whole thing the next day for 31,000 marks. Then the disk disappeared. For three years it moved through the black market, dealer to dealer, and the price climbed toward a million. There was just one problem for whoever held it. Under German law, the disc belonged to the state, which meant every sale was a crime. Which meant it could never surface in the open. The hottest object in the German underground couldn't be sold in Germany. But the authorities knew it was out there. So in 2002 they set a trap. A tip put the disc in Switzerland and a meeting was arranged in the bar of the Basel Hotel. The state archaeologist played the buyer. The dealers put 3,600 years of human history on a table next to the drinks. And he picked it up. He knew within seconds this thing was real. He also refused to let go of it. And while he held on, undercover police moved in around the table. And that's how the oldest picture of the sky ever found ended up in a museum. A sting operation. Cleaned and restored, the disc shows a night sky in gold and dark bronze. A full sun or moon, a crescent. And that tight cluster of seven dots, the Pleiades. The same seven stars the scribe pressed into the clay at Nineveh. The gold came from Cornwall in England. The copper came from a single mine in the Austrian alps, about 180 miles from Kofels. And along one edge runs a long, curved golden arc. Most researchers read it as a boat carrying the sun across the night. Others read it as something else. A thing with a tail crossing the sky. The oldest map of the city on earth went into the ground within a few years of the morning that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah burned. Okay, what do we got? Everything I just told you, from the tablet to the disk, is a story, as several research teams have published it. Bond and Hemsel's book on the planisphere. Collins, 15 years at Tall El Hammam. A 2021 paper in a major journal arguing the city died in a blast from the sky. It's a hell of a story. But is it true? We'll start with the tablet. K8538 is real. It's in the British Museum right now. It's Assyrian and it really is round, when almost nothing else in that Collection is. What's in question is the translation. The professional Assyriologists, the people who spent their lives on this, mostly don't buy Bond and Heimsel's reading. They see a ritual calendar about gods and constellations, not an eyewitness report. Bonn and Hemsel read it the way engineers read data. Both readings fit the marks, but only one of them can be tested. Cohos is more solid. The melted rock is real. A mountain came down in one night and the stone at the bottom melted. What's not settled is when and why. The best dating we have puts the slide at around 7,500 BC, more than 4,000 years before the tablet's warning. And that's a serious problem for the impact theory. Plenty of geologists think a big enough landslide can make that rock melt all by itself. And some question the shocked quartz as well. Worst case for the theory, the date splits the story in two A mountain that fell in 7,500 B.C. and a fireball over Mesopotamia in 3,123 B.C. the tablet loses the mountain, but the sky keeps its track record tall. El Hammam is the hot one. That 2021 paper got the most attention and the most fire. Mark Boslo, a physicist at the University of New Mexico who models airbursts for living, pulled apart the paper's Tunguska comparison and flagged excavation for photos rotated to fit the blast story. The paper drew more than 180 challenges on a science watchdog site. In April 2025, the journal retracted it, and Boslow couldn't resist the Genesis joke on the way out.
- [29:09]
Eccentric Commentator
Oh, did he say they were living in a land of confusion?
- [29:12]
Sponsor Voice 2
Really?
- [29:13]
Eccentric Commentator
It's a Phil Collins callback.
- [29:15]
A.J.
I know what it is. The title of his takedown said the Sodom claim should be taken with a pillar of salt. That didn't end the fight, though. It just moved it. One month later, the same team republished an expanded version somewhere else with new data and a computer model of the blast. The team said a small group of scientists tried to shut down the conversation and failed. The catch is that the journal they moved to was founded by people who backed these same airburst ideas. So depending on who you ask, that's either a brave team going around the gatekeepers or. Or a closed loop publishing itself. A retraction doesn't mean the city wasn't destroyed. It means the first claim about how it was destroyed didn't survive review. But here's the thing. The critics can't wave tall. El Hammam isn't the only one. 12,800 years ago, long before writing, a village on the Euphrates called Abu Hura burned the same way. The same melt glass, the same diamond dust, the same. The same iron beads. Temperatures passed 3,600 degrees. Nobody retracted Abu Ureya. The bigger idea belongs to. A comet strike at the end of the last ice age is one of the nastiest feuds in modern science. But the paper stands. So even if tall El Hammam falls apart tomorrow, the pattern doesn't fall with it. And then there's the disk. The honest answer is that nobody can read it. The comet reading is the minority view. Most researchers see a boat carrying the sun. The copper coming from a mine near Cofels might be a memory of a trade route. And people still fight over how old the thing even is. One camp says it's Bronze Age, another says it's 1,000 years younger. But the disc is real. What it remembers is up for grabs. So we don't get an answer. We just get an inventory. We know a scribe copied a tablet he couldn't read, and the library that held it burned, and the burning saved it. We know a mountain in Austria came down in one night and the rock at the bottom melted. We know a village on the Euphrates cooked to glass. We know a city on the Dead Sea burned in a single morning and stayed empty for as long as 600 years. And we know that nearly every ancient culture on Earth tells a story about the deep day the sky caught fire. The Sumerians and the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Maya and the Hopi and the Aboriginal Australians. Maybe they're all the same story. Or maybe none of them are. But here's the part that scares me. Mark Boslo, the man who helped take down the Sodom paper, led a new study on the Taurid stream, the same stream from Cophles. His team's finding. The swarm makes its next close passes in 2032 and 2036. And if dangerous rocks are riding in it, most won't be visible until they're already past us. When he explains why he takes the swarm seriously, he points at the moon. Fireballs spike and lunar impacts register right when the swarm theory says they should. His bottom line? We won't know until 2032, after it's too late, unless we do something about it. The man who debunked one part of this story is sounding the alarm on the other. And the last time the swarm came this close was June 1975. That pass set the moon ringing. That's true. Astronomers booked a dedicated hunt for the big objects during the swarm's 2019 pass. The best viewing window in decades. They never got to look. Protests shut down the mountain in Hawaii and the telescope sat dark through the entire window. They tried again in 2022 with two telescopes and came up empty. Which is good news, sort of. The empty sky ruled out the giants. It couldn't rule out the small stuff. By the search team's own math, the swarm could still hold up to 1,000 rocks the size of the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. That was in 2013 and put 1500 people in the hospital. They get two more chances to look before the swarm arrives. 2029. And a little bit sooner in 2026. Yes, this year. In a few months. Which brings us back to where we started. In December 2024, a building sized rock passed between the Earth and the satellites. We never saw it coming. We only saw it leaving. It came out of the daytime sky past us, and a telescope in Chile caught it two days later, already headed away. Its return date was December 2032. Different rock, different family, same year. The swarm comes back. For a while, the math said it might hit the moon instead of us. And astronomers were honestly a little excited. A chance to watch an impact land somewhere else, on a surface where we can study it for centuries. Then this past March, the Webb telescope hunted the rock down one more time and called it a clean miss. 15,000 miles. The math saved us this time. The people who watched the sky come apart 5,000 years ago didn't have this math. They didn't even have words for this. They had what they saw. A wet piece of clay and the hope that somebody, someday would pick it up and understand. And right now, that's us. We're the ones holding the tablet. So let's stop translating for a second and just listen to the thing. Not the theory, not the date, just what the object is telling us. It's telling us one thing, as clear as the morning it was recorded. The sky is a dangerous place. You better do something about it. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is A.J. that's Echo Fish.
- [35:22]
Eccentric Commentator
From now on, call me King Ashton Bonapil.
- [35:26]
A.J.
I will not. This has been the why Files. If you had fun or learned something. And I found. Appreciate it if you could like, subscribe, comment, share. Sorry for the homework, but that stuff really helps us out. Like most topics we cover on the channel, today's topic was recommended by you. So if there's a story you want to see or learn more about, go to thewatfiles.com tips catch us on Discord Send an email, a chat during one of the videos. There's a lot of ways to get a hold of us and we're always looking for good topics. Now, if you enjoy the stories I tell on the why Files, check out my other show on the channel. It's called called the Basement. It's a conversation show where I chat with some interesting people who are behind these episodes. Some you know, some you don't, but you're gonna like them all. They're all people that I find fascinating. Experts on topics like Knights Templar, moon landing hoax, quantum mechanics, JFK conspiracy, all kinds of wild stuff. And if there's someone you'd like to see on the show, let me know. I'm always looking for good guests. Remember, the Wild Files is also a podcast. You can take us on the road. I upload at least twice a week. Episodes, campfire stories, interviews, and it's called the Y Files Operation Podcast. It's available everywhere you get your podcasts. And if you are listening on an audio platform, please hit the thumbs up or the follow or the like or whatever the button is that really makes a big, big difference. Now, if you need more W files in your life, check out our discord got over 100,000 members, so someone's there 247 causing trouble, having fun, but they're into the same weird stuff we are here. It's a great community, it's really supportive, it's a lot of fun, and it's free to join. Speaking of 24 7, check out our 24.7stream of the Y Files backstage over there. We run episodes back to back with some fun content in between. And to be honest, the live chat is more interesting than the videos. There's a great community over there. Special thanks to our patrons who make this channel possible. Every episode of why Files dedicated to my Patreon members. I couldn't do any of this without you. I wouldn't even be sitting here without your support. So thank you. And if you'd like to support the channel, keep us going. But join this community. Consider becoming a member on Patreon. It's only three bucks a month to get access to perks like videos early with no commercials, exclusive merch, exclusive content, and two private live streams every week, all just for you. And the whole wild team is on the stream. Me, Victoria, Mary Jane, Geno, Hybrid, whoever else. I'm forgetting all the Mods that you see in the chat. They're usually up there, but you can turn on your camera, join us on stage, talk about anything you like. Ask a question, tell a joke, just say hello. It's a way to get to know us as people. And honestly, I think it's the best perk there is. Another great way to support the channel. Grab something for the WI FI store.
- [38:07]
Eccentric Commentator
Wear the heck of a C shape. Oh, what are these? Just little fluffy bugs. Stick your fist in or your fin and you're a penny, your elbow, whatever, it fits in there. I say try everything, try it all. Grab a hoodie, set my face on it. I'll get one of these adorable squeezy animal. Look at these fishes when you squeeze them all day long. I didn't like the way it said, can I do another take? I got it. I gotta grab a fish toy that's got a heck of a squeezing animal. Talking dog.
- [38:35]
A.J.
But if you're gonna buy merch, make sure you become a member on YouTube. Hear me out. I know another membership. YouTube members get 10% off everything in the Lifebox store forever. It's only $3. So if you're going to spend $40 on T shirts, I'm a member. Get the code, it pays for itself. And look, then just cancel. That's fine. I don't think anything comes out of your bank account.
- [38:59]
Co-host or Guest
But.
- [38:59]
A.J.
But the point is the membership is there to save you money, not making money. I prefer just to get the merch out there as cheap as possible. If you've been watching this channel for a while, you know that I hate creators who gouge and I never have. So it's a great way to support the team as well. Because that membership revenue, I don't touch it. It goes to the amazing people that help me make this happen.
- [39:24]
Eccentric Commentator
Yeah, keep that secret close to your scales.
- [39:27]
A.J.
Those are the plugs and that's gonna do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.
- [39:51]
Musical Performer or Rapper
I played Polybius in Area 51 a secret code inside the Bible said I
- [39:57]
Dancer or Performer
was
- [40:00]
Musical Performer or Rapper
I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music so I'm singing like I should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends and it never ends no, it never ends. I feel the crab cat and got stuck inside Mel's home with mkotruck I feel only 2 aware did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing Alone on a film set where the shadow people there the Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold heard I could I can't believe
- [40:57]
Dancer or Performer
I'm dancing with the fish handle fish on Thursday night Wednesday J2 and weapons.
- [41:34]
Musical Performer or Rapper
The mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to Agatha the secret city underground mysterious number stations Planet Surf 02 Project Stargate and what the dark watchers found in a simulation don't you worry though the black knight satellite
- [42:01]
Dancer or Performer
I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish head we'll fish on Thursday nights with they chase you and the weapons hopping me on to the night all ever what it was to just hear the troops of the weapons on my feet all through the night and the fish on Thursday nights when they change you and weapons I've been on. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth so. Dance yeah girly love to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel Camels love to dance when the feeling is right Always in time.
- [43:31]
Sponsor Voice
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses. Setup required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18
- [43:56]
Sponsor Voice 2
stitch fix stop shopping. Get styled. Not today, sweatpants. Somebody's wearing jeans that fit.
- [44:04]
A.J.
No photos please. I'm just a regular dad who happens
- [44:07]
Sponsor Voice
to have a stylist. I really look my best when someone
- [44:10]
A.J.
else makes the decisions. Hey, we can all see you two way mirrors.
- [44:14]
Sponsor Voice 2
Just share your size, style and budget and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door. Stitch get started today@stitch fix.com I want to hug you. I'm gonna hug you. I'm coming. I'm coming in for a hug.
- [44:28]
Co-host or Guest
Athletic Brewing Company crafts award winning non alcoholic beers for those who want to be part of every round. With over 185 flavor awards, they're exceptional NA beers that fit your lifestyle and any social occasion. Summer's full of good times and Athletic fits right in. Go to athleticbrewing.com to have brews delivered to your door or find them at a bar, restaurant or store near you. Near Beer Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all times.