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Murder Monday: Carl Tanzler

Every Monday, the Weird Shit Blog features an unsolved or just generally weird murder, death, or disappearance. This phenomenon is known by people who actually read this shit as Murder Monday. Disclaimer: This one is pretty insane, so be warned if you have delicate sensibilities. And shit.

In our culture, we’re crazy for fucked-up doctors. Take Hannibal Lecter. He’s not even real, but he’s damn scary. Or he was, anyway, until they tried to explain how he got that way. Then it just got stupid. Nazi concentration camp doctors, they were some weird sons of bitches. That one from the Human Centipede, god damn. Medical experimentation and horror and doctors go together like peas in a pod.


Peas of crazy. In a pod of holy shit.

Let me give you a really great example: Where I come from, we have a local legend about a doctor. The story goes that he had this wife he wanted to divorce, but couldn’t because they were Catholic, and back in those days, that was a big no-no. So, instead, he did what any reasonable dude would do: Chained her up in his barn and performed weird experiments on her, slowly cutting off her limbs and parts of her face, then told people she had vanished. Finally, one night, he had some guests staying the night. They heard moaning outside and thought it might be a wounded animal. They found her in the barn, blind, her tongue cut out, and essentially feral. She tried to bite at them when they touched her chains. They called the police and, when she was released, she crawled right back over on her stumps and reattached the chains. She had gotten used to it after having been bound and tortured for so long. The story doesn’t cover the doctor’s fate, but the legend goes that if you visit this farmhouse at night, you can hear moans, the sounds of tools and a power saw, and occasionally see the ghost of a doctor in a blood-spattered white coat.

When I first heard that story, it sent chills up my spine. I mean, fuck, imagine what a deranged doctor could really do to someone?


Now imagine he’s on an island just chock-full of guinea pigs.

But there’s deranged, mutilating doctor crazy, and Carl Tanzler-brand crazy. 

Tanzler was born in 1877 in Dresden, Germany under the name Georg Karl Tanzler. He kicked around Germany for a while growing up, then got out into the world for a bit, even ending up as far away as Australia for a brief time. (It’s speculated that he may have been in prison there.) At various points during his youth, he claimed to have seen a vision of his dead ancestor, Countess Anna Constantia von Cosel. According to his account, she guided him, giving him advice, and once showed him the face of his true love; a dark-skinned and dark-haired woman.

He married in 1920, and in 1926, he emigrated to America, possibly under instruction from the Countess. (He registered his name with immigration authorities as Carl Tanzler von Cosel, and frequently referred to himself as a Count during his time in the U.S.) His wife and two children joined him a year later in Zephyrhills, FL. Shortly thereafter, though, he left them to pursue a career as a radiologist in Key West.


Dick of the Year Award, 1927: Carl Tanzler.

In 1930, Tanzler met the woman of his dreams. Literally. According to him, she was the woman shown to him by his ancestor, and her name was Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, or “Helen” for short. Her mother had brought her in for a routine examination. Tanzler was enamored with her immediately, and tried to find out all he could about her. He found out that she was married, but had become estranged from her husband after she had a miscarriage. She had been considered a local beauty, and the fact that she hadn’t been snapped back up immediately was seen as a curious thing by Tanzler. If she could have any man she wanted, why wouldn’t she have remarried unless she was waiting for someone like him? (Because that’s totally a logical conclusion.)

Unfortunately, Helen’s examination revealed that she had tuberculosis. Not as big of a deal nowadays, but if you’ve seen any tragic love story films set anywhere from 1700-1945, you know that TB was a fucking death sentence.


“Those? Those are just grains of rice. Just kidding! You’re gonna die.”

Tanzler went to Helen’s family and claimed that he had the means to cure her. He was allowed home visits for months, where he performed various half-assed medical procedures. You know, the kind you do when you’re not really sure what you’re doing but you say you do and her family doesn’t seek real medical treatment because they think you’re giving it to her. That kind. But Tanzler figured he’d seen and heard enough from his fellow medical professionals to know what he was doing.


Kinda like if Hugh Laurie broke into an ER and started telling people what to do, but not as cool.

Tanzler even reportedly confessed his love to her, but it’s never been established that she reciprocated it. Tragically, Helen succumbed to her disease in October of 1931, and Tanzler was devastated. He was so heartbroken that he agreed to pay for her funeral and even bought her a mausoleum, which he visited nightly. Are you sensing the crazy yet? If not, then get ready.

In 1933, two years after Helen’s death, Tanzler broke into the crypt and stole Helen’s corpse.


“I paid for this shit, that makes it pretty much mine, right? Right.”

Why would he do such a thing? Because her ghost told him to, duh! Tanzler claimed that when he visited Helen’s grave every night, her spirit would sing songs with him and occasionally insist that he remove her from his grave and take her to his home. So, when he finally did it, he slapped her in a red toy wagon (seriously) and took her home. When he got her there, he naturally found that the corpse had kinda, you know, decayed. But that didn’t stop Carl Tanzler, no sir. He tied her bones back together with wire and coat hangers, replaced her eyes with glass ones, replaced her skin with wax and plaster of paris, made her a wig out of her own hair, which Tanzler had gotten from her mother after Helen’s death (How the fuck did he even go about asking for that?), and stuffed her chest cavity with rags. He then proceeded to dress her up in fancy clothes and jewelry. Oh, and he kept her in his bed and slept with her.


“Hello, gorgeous. You are looking fantastic tonight.”

In 1940, after 7 fucking years of this, Helen’s sister heard rumors that Tanzler had been sleeping with Helen’s corpse. (What in the fuck? Did he brag about this to other people? Shouldn’t that be something you should, I don’t know, keep to yourself?) She confronted Carl Tanzler and discovered that it was true. She called the police, who immediately came and arrested Tanzler. His story created a sensation, with most newspaper reports casting Tanzler as an eccentric romantic. He was put on trial and charged with “wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization”, which is quite possibly the most insane thing you can stand trial for. (While it was claimed in a 1972 investigation that Tanzler had inserted a cardboard tube into Helen’s vagina to commit necrophilia with her body, it was never mentioned in the medical reports done at e time of his arrest, and it was not implicitly included in the charges.) Carl, however, never stood trial, as it was determined that the statute of limitations had passed for his crime, and he was free to go.


This picture is only to distract you from the gorilla-shit crazy you just read.
…Hey, does that hot dog have a butthole?

Not only did Carl Tanzler never stand trial, he was even awarded U.S. citizenship three years later and wrote an autobiography. In his later years, his estranged wife supported him (what. Just what. No question mark.) Helen was re-buried in an unmarked tomb in secret, so as to prevent Tanzler or others from returning to do more fucked up crap to her. Tanzler was disappointed by this and, using a death mask (Where the hell does he keep getting this shit?) created a wax effigy of Helen that he lived with until his death.


Observe, the labor of total madness.

Sources:
Wikipedia (Robbed the grave of human knowledge long ago)
The Examiner

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End of the Month, End of the World: Millerites

Did you hear that the world is going to end? Holy shit! The sun will burn out and a meteor hits us and Jesus comes back and exotic diseases are gonna wipe us out… AT THE SAME TIME. That’s right, science has spoken, the world is going to turn into yet another hunk of dead rock… eventually. In fact, it already happened once, sort of. Ever heard of the Toba Event? That’s where this supervolcano (Kinda like Old Faithful) blew up and blackened the sky and killed all but about 5,000-10,000 humans. I think more people made it out alive at the end of The Stand. So this is totally a post-apocalyptic world, right?

Mad Max
And only a deranged Mel Gibson can save us. Except Jews, Hispanics, and Blacks. They’re on their own.

So why didn’t anyone warn us of these obviously impending disasters that could strike us dead at any moment? Well, if you wanna get technical, lots of people have warned us about the impending end of the world. Except, well, they were dead fucking wrong each time, weren’t they? And so, that’s why the Weird Shit Blog has decided to begin a new feature. On the last Friday of every month, we’re going to showcase an apocalyptic prediction that went horribly wrong when the apocalypse didn’t happen. I’m calling it “End of the Month, End of the World.” Enjoy!

William Miller was born a Baptist, but converted to Deism after he met some friends who convinced him to change his mind. He joined the Freemasons, got very high in the ranks and, when the War of 1812 broke out, he got a band of volunteer soldiers together and marched his ass to the nearest post to join up. After several years as a recruiter, Miller finally saw action at the Battle of Plattsburgh in 1814, where an artillery shell exploded no more than 2 feet from him, killing 2 of his fellow soldiers and leaving him without a scratch.


“HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?”

Miller had a crisis of faith after the explosion. Since Deism espouses a detached God who doesn’t meddle in human affairs and Miller felt that he had been miraculously saved, he converted back to his old Baptist ways. When his Deist friends asked him to explain his re-conversion, Miller hit the Bible, reading it cover to cover. But instead of finding justification for his new/old faith, he found what he believed was a timeline for the end of the world.

Daniel 8:14 reads, “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” Miller read “the sanctuary” as the entire world and “two thousand and three hundred days” as 2,300 years. Wait, what? This is what’s known as the Day-Year Principle. Essentially, when reading the Bible as a more abstract piece, one can read “days” as years, or whatever makes more sense to you. This is generally okay by most Biblical scholars when talking about, say, the Creation, but not so much when talking about something like, oh, Methuselah.


“I’m gettin’ too old for this shit.” – Methuselah

Miller calculated the 2,300 years starting with the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 457 B.C., meaning the whole sanctuary cleansing thing would go down in 1843, 25 years in the future from when he made the calculation. (SPOILER ALERT: Didn’t fucking happen.) He took another 5 years, just to be absolutely certain. When he decided that there was no other possible interpretation, Miller published an article about his findings.

A few years afterward, he began a kind of preaching tour, holding revivals around New England. He then published another, longer article, and after overwhelming response, a 64 page tract. Within weeks, William Miller had his own full-blown religious movement. They called themselves Millerites.


“Can our slogan be, ‘It’s Millerite time?’ No?”

After mounting pressure from his followers, Miller was asked to provide an exact date for the Second Coming, something he had previously refused to give. Finally, he declared that, based on the Jewish calendar, the year 1843 began March 21st and ended on the same day the following year. When the entirety of 1843 , and then March 21st, 1844 came and went without event, the date was adjusted to the beginning of the Karaite Jewish calendar, which had the year ending on April 18th, 1844.

When that date also passed, some Millerites became upset, and demanded an explanation from Miller and the rest of the leaders of the group. Finally, Samuel Snow delivered what was called the “True Midnight Cry” in August of 1844. The leaders of the Millerite movement had studied the Bible thoroughly and had finally discovered a mistake in their calculations. They could now firmly announce that God would return on the 10th day of the 7th month of the year 1844. This, according to the Karaite Jewish calendar, was October 22, 1844. (MAJOR SPOILERS: Shit still didn’t fucking happen.)

Millerites waited anxiously. Some sold their worldly possessions and moved cross-country to be near Miller when the day finally arrived. Some men and women left their non-believer spouses and children behind, wanting to be first in line for the Rapture. Finally, October 22 arrived. Now, this might sound crazy to you folks reading at home, but can you believe it? The world didn’t end. Not even a little.


“Boy, is my face red.”

Millerites declared it the “Great Disappointment.” (Personally, I saved that for Star Wars prequels, ZING!) Miller became a laughingstock in the press and he quietly lived out the rest of his days waiting for the world to end. He died in 1849. The public mocked and abused the devastated sect. Basically, they had a really shitty time. Not only did they not get to heaven, but now everyone on Earth was laughing at them and being dicks.

A few remaining leaders tried to predict new dates in April, July, and October, 1845, but each came and went with no sign of Jesus. Other, smaller sub-sects went to more… extreme means. Some theorized that, based on Mark 10:15, “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it,” they should begin acting like children.


“This plan cannot fail.”

Another group believed that God came invisibly on the day of the Great Disappointment and only took virgins to heaven, but since no one could actually name anyone who disappeared on that day, it kinda fell apart. Finally, a theory arose that October 22, 1844 had been a heavenly event, preparing the world for the coming Rapture, but that humans on Earth would still not know the date, only that it came “soon”.

This final group began their own church that eventually moved away from the whole “predicting the end of the world” thing. They became a popular protestant denomination in New England and spread their way through the United States. In fact, they’re still around today. You might have heard of them: The Seventh Day Adventists.


Not even kidding.

Sources:
Wikipedia (An obvious sign of the apocalypse.)

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Aokigahara Forest

You have a place where you sleep, possibly with hookers. You have a place where you poop, also possibly with hookers. You have a place where you eat, hopefully not with hookers, as many of them have poor table manners. But do you have a place where you off yourself? Well, the Japanese do.

Aokigahara Forest is the world-famous Japanese suicide forest, home to an estimated 2,000 suicides every single year. Okay, not really, it’s more like 100+, but that caught your attention, didn’t it? 100 suicides doesn’t sound like many, but when you consider that most people just kill themselves at home, and even other famous suicide spots like the Golden Gate Bridge only have about 30 per year, it starts to sound pretty wild.


“Someday, Aokigahara. Someday, I will be number 1 again.”

It’s been called “The perfect place to die”, and it’s gotten so bad since the recession began that Japanese officials have stopped releasing the exact number of people who die there each year, fearing that the forest’s infamy will just entice more people who are considering killing themselves to head out that way. And make no mistake, suicide is a big deal in Japan: it has the highest rate of any first-world country. Since the 1990s there have been years where rates increased over 30%. At least 30,000 people have died by their own hand there each year for 12 years straight. It’s a massive cultural problem and the Japanese government has become concerned that their society is becoming so inundated with suicidal thoughts and behaviors that one can lead to others just because it’s popular.


“If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would y… oh.”

And 100 suicides a year in Aokigahara might be a low estimate. The forest is so large, thick, and inaccessible that many bodies don’t get discovered for months, or even years. Some parts are so dense that sunlight can’t penetrate (tee hee, penetrate) the canopy, even in the middle of the day. Corpses also tend to be eaten or dragged off by animals, and in some cases, the cause of death is ambiguous, and so it can’t be reasonably assumed to be suicide. Forest workers will have mass hunts for bodies at the beginning of each year, gathering hundreds of volunteers to help go through the thick, expansive woods, just searching for the dead. (If one is found during normal operations throughout the year, they’re taken to the forest station, where a room with an empty bed is set aside just for the dead. To make shit even creepier, there’s another bed that the forest workers are made to sleep in. Otherwise, superstition says that the body will scream all night and haunt the forest for eternity.) Although there are walking paths, much of the forest is off said paths, and many of the people coming to kill themselves are far more likely to go off the paths and travel deep in the forest. Large hills and sinkholes also tend to make a simple walk from one end to the other nearly impossible.

aokigahara-suicide-forest-skb.4918.large_slideshow
It’s like some fucked up version of “Where’s Waldo?”

So what’s made this place such a popular last thing to ever see? Well, it is nice looking. I mean, besides all the dead folks. Some say that it’s related to an extremely popular Japanese romance novel released in the 1960s, “Kuroi Jukai” (Lit. “The Black Sea of Trees”, a nickname for the forest), which ends with a couple visiting the forest to commit a joint suicide. The novel portrays the act as beautiful and romantic, for which some blame for the current reputation of the forest. And culturally, Japan has never had a major issue with suicide. It’s never been illegal, nor has it even been considered morally questionable for the most part, until recent times.

Even before the 60s, however, folklore stated that the forest was haunted. It’s rumored that it was once a popular location for Ubasute, a cultural practice (once believed common, but now known to have been far less so) that involved taking the elderly out to secluded locations and leaving them to die.


“Peace out, grandma.”

Another factor is that the forest is located directly in front of Mt. Fuji, long-considered sacred in Japanese culture. But whether it was the novel, or the history, or the religious significance, or some combination of all of those that started Aokigahara’s history of death, its momentum is only getting more powerful. Some spiritualists say that the mass number of suicides committed there since the 60s has caused the forest to become tainted, and that sadness and evil now permeate the roots of the trees there. The Japanese government is of the opinion that people just need a little convincing to stop killing themselves there (and stop killing themselves in general, but, you know, baby steps). As a preventative measure, they’ve erected signs all along the walking trails, asking visitors to think about their lives before deciding to die.


“MY FRIEND BOB SAID SUICIDE IS TOTALLY NOT COOL.”

So far, though, it hasn’t helped much, as the number of bodies found in the forest is increasing, sometimes doubling from year to year. Even people from other countries have taken to coming to the forest after hearing about it. A Canadian man interviewed by Japanese journalists said, “I heard about it on the internet. It just sounded like such a beautiful place. I wanted it to be the last thing I ever saw.” Locals say that they can tell who’s coming just to look at the forest, who’s hunting for bodies and scavenging for left-behind wallets and personal effects, and who’s there to die.


“Okay, what’s your name? Oh, it’s just a visitor’s log. Okay, enjoy the forest!”

Sources:
Wikipedia 1 2 3 (Where the contributors are thicker than any forest)
CNN

If you really want to see a series of pictures from the forest that a pair of hikers took, click here. (Definitely not work safe, possibly not lunch safe depending on your gastronomical fortitude.)

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Murder Monday: Percy Fawcett

Every Monday, Weird Shit Blog features mysterious murders, disappearances, crimes, or just weird deaths. I call it Murder Monday. (Even if it’s not a murder. Shut up, it’s my blog and I like alliteration. Alliteration is always awesomely, amazingly appropriate. Asshole.)

The explorers of the early 20th century are the stuff of legends. Dudes in pith helmets, wandering around in jungles and ancient temples, touching stuff, getting cursed. It’s awesome. Some of those guys got turned into characters like Indiana Jones. Some of them were awesome enough that they didn’t have to get fictionalized, like Howard Carter. Those were times of high adventure, when the world was ours to explore. There was always some new vista, just waiting for a dude with a superb moustache and/or monocle to come and stick a flag in it and say, “Fuck you all, I was here first… among white people, I mean.” Nowadays, we don’t really have those unexplored frontiers.


God damn it. At least we’ve still got space. And the ocean, Cthulhu willing.

Percy Fawcett was one such legendary explorer. It ran in his veins. His dad was an explorer before him, and a member of the Royal Geographic Society. His brother was an expert mountain climber and even wrote adventure novels. Percy had plenty of his own accolades, though. He was a surveyor for the Royal Army, where he earned the rank of Colonel and served in World War I, leading an artillery brigade at the age of 50. He also joined the RGS, like his father, and was even a member of the British Secret Service. On top of all that, he was friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which is another way of saying “He was friends with one of the baddest motherfuckers to ever walk the planet Earth.”


And he took pictures with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, just to show how cool he was.

He was one of the earliest contemporary explorers of South America. Specifically, he scouted out huge sections of the jungles of Brazil for map-making purposes. He also discovered dozens of species, including some that had been previously assumed to be native legends. Two of his finds have still not been re-discovered: The Mitla, a small creature, around the size of a foxhound, with both cat- and dog-like characteristics, and the Giant Anaconda, which has been apocryphally spotted many times since, but never proven. His Giant Anaconda was supposedly 62 feet long (cue teenagers laughing), and so huge that he couldn’t bring its body back.

Fawcett, unfortunately, was not believed on these two accounts, and while many explorers of those days liked to make shit up, Fawcett’s writings are considered to be genuine today. There’s a very good chance we just haven’t seen them again since (as those jungles are still full of undiscovered animals) or they went extinct.

He made seven successful expeditions of the jungle, often encountering natives and winning their trust by methods that seemed revolutionary at the time: He was nice to them and gave them stuff. Who knew that that kept people from killing you?


“Dear diary, the natives have informed me that they’re not fond of being called ‘brown motherfuckers.’”

But notice how I said “successful” expeditions up there. “That implies he had unsuccessful ones, right?”, you might ask, and you would be correct in that deduction. In 1925, Fawcett set out to find a lost city that he believed existed in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, thanks to funding from a group of financiers called “The Glove.”


Artist’s rendition of “The Glove.”

Fawcett originally heard about the city from a manuscript written by Portuguese explorer João da Silva Guimarães, who claimed to visit the city in 1753. Although Guimarães wrote detailed accounts about the city, he forgot to include, you know, where the fuck it’s actually at and what the fuck it’s called. Fawcett became obsessed with the idea of finding it after first hearing about it in the early 1900s. In fact, the 1925 attempt was not Fawcett’s first to find the city. He had tried twice before. The first expedition couldn’t find it and the second got cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I.  Fawcett dubbed the lost city “Z”.


Many years after his disappearance, a children’s television show discovered the location of Z, just past Y.

Reportedly, Fawcett said before his expedition set forth that, should he go missing, he did not wish for a rescue team to come after him, lest they suffer the same fate. Are you sensing dramatic irony? Because I am.

Fawcett, as has been established, was pretty familiar with the area and how to traverse it. As such, he brought just what he needed and nothing more and kept his party small to keep their noise level low. He finally set out from known areas, after telegraphing his wife, on May 29, 1925. Afterward, neither he, nor his companions, was ever heard from again. Most researchers and subsequent explorers have assumed, probably rightly, that Fawcett was killed by a local, unfriendly tribe, as some of the groups in the area had never even seen white men before. (A fictionalized story similar to this was the basis for the film Cannibal Holocaust.) It’s even suspected that his purposefully limited supplies doomed him in an unexpected way- he may have lost all his gifts for the natives due to an accident while crossing the Amazon.

Another proposed scenario is that Fawcett and his two male companions started a theosophical commune based around the worship of his son.


They should have brought women or something in that case.

And for the theory most likely to be the plot of a comedy from the 1980s, we have some speculation that Fawcett may have gotten some kind of head injury and came to believe that he was the chief of one of the native tribes and took over leadership of them.

The native tribes claim no knowledge of what happened to Fawcett or his companions, and to date, no one has found any sort of remains of any of the three. Though some artifacts have been discovered, so far they have all been found to have been items from Fawcett’s many previous expeditions or things left behind prior to the group’s disappearance.

Oh, and remember what I said earlier about Fawcett warning people not to come try to rescue him? There was a really good reason for that, and it’s probably the most important thing to take from this little tale: Over 100 people have died in the Amazon trying to find out what happened to Percy Fawcett and discover the location of the Lost City of Z.

Sources:
Wikipedia (The Lost Encyclopedia of Horseshit)
BBC.co.uk

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COINTELPRO & Operation Mockingbird

Have you read the news lately? Son of a bitch. It’s getting harder and harder to ignore conspiracy theories that say the world is really run by rich people. I think it goes much deeper, though: I suspect it might be run by rich idiots.


Derp.

In fact, sometimes it’s so hard to ignore conspiracy theories, you have to start forgetting that some of them have been confirmed to be true.

In the 20th century, within living memory of some of you readers, the American government has admitted, directly, to deceiving and subverting its own people. COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird are just two cases of it, and they may still be having effects today.


Not these effects.

COINTELPRO was a program run by the FBI from 1956-1971. It stood for COunter INTELligence PROgram, and was the government’s way of fucking with racists, feminists, nationalists, war protestors, and this one dude you may have heard of: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


Long before internet trolls, there was the FBI.

The idea behind COINTELPRO was to infiltrate and disrupt groups deemed subversive to the United States government. Specifically, they were interested in womens’ and blacks’ rights groups, which doesn’t seem very cool nowadays, and white power groups like the KKK, who are totally okay to fuck with by most people’s standards. Essentially, they were interested in any group that they deemed pro-communist, nationalist, or just plain having the potential to disrupt or overthrow the government in some way, shape, or form. (Or, sometimes, just because the president asked them to look into somebody.)

The usual M.O. for COINTELPRO operatives was to divide and conquer by creating rifts in these groups after infiltration. Other popular ways to cause drama? Charging people with fake crimes, illegal wiretapping, searching houses without a warrant, and just plain driving up and shooting motherfuckers. (I felt that was important enough to actually cite an in-line source for once.)

So why did the FBI drop the program in 1971? Because a bunch of dudes broken into one of their offices and found documentation about it. Otherwise, they’d have kept on doing it. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate (aka The Church Committee, named after Senator Fred Church, who led it) took a look at all this and shat their collective pants.


“We would like to declare that this shit officially just got real.”

After the Church Committee brought COINTELPRO into the light, the FBI had no choice but to shut it down… except they never actually stopped doing the shit they were doing, they just quit calling it COINTELPRO. Stay classy, FBI.

But the FBI weren’t the only ones up to crazy shit. The CIA had their own set of trolling tactics. One of these was known by a couple of names, but the most common is Operation Mockingbird. Now, why would you name some cool intelligence campaign after the state bird of Tennessee? When you hear what the program was meant to do, you might see why: Operation Mockingbird was a propaganda program targeted at journalists, both domestic and overseas, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Specifically, both newspaper and television reporters were paid, blackmailed, and otherwise coerced into reporting the news the CIA wanted you to hear.

The operation was started to cause unrest in foreign, communist-controlled areas of the world, but the CIA figured if they had the resources, better use them. And the names of some of the reporters they were alleged to have dragged into it are some you might recognize. Names like Walter Pincus, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Walter Lippmann…  you don’t know any of those people? Okay, how about Ed Murrow? George Clooney made that movie about him.


“’Hello, America. This is the CIA Calling’? Why can’t I just do ’This… is the CIA?’”

Okay, well how about these respectable publications: The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, Time Magazine, Washington Post, all were infiltrated by the CIA during Operation Mockingbird and used to publish stories approved by, and sometimes written by, the CIA.

So what happened to Operation Mockingbird? The Church Committee found out about it, too, and brought it down around the same time as COINTELPRO… just kidding! The CIA agreed to stop “Operation Mockingbird”, but the new head of the CIA at the time didn’t really say they’d quit using the media for propaganda. What he actually said was “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” Notice how he didn’t say anything about unpaid? That’s because he immediately followed it up by saying that the CIA would welcome any “voluntary”, unpaid cooperation from journalists. That new head of the CIA? I bet you’ve heard his name: George H.W. Bush.


“That’s right, bitches.”

Now, you may be wondering why I chose these two particular programs to mention in this one article. Honestly, there was enough material for me to do two separate articles, but there’s a bit more I want you to chew on.

This is Hal Turner:


This is what making threats against federal judges gets you.

Some of you from, ahem, unmentionable web communities may be familiar with him already. Hal Turner used to be an internet radio show host who, if you didn’t notice there, got put in the pokey for calling for his listeners to kill three federal judges. Turns out, the police don’t like that very much. His show was a white supremacist sounding board, accepting calls from racists and assholes all over the country, all while Hal and his cronies turned the ultra-conservative paranoid rhetoric up to 11.

The thing is, Hal thought he had some protection against what he was saying. Why would he possibly think that? Because Hal worked undercover for the FBI. Hal claims he’s not a racist at all, but a paid informant. Not only a paid informant, but a former FBI operative. He claims that the FBI put him up to the radio show to act as an agent provocateur, that is, a shit-stirrer. His goal was to ramp the crazy talk up so high that some violent people might go overboard and spill the beans on plans they had to commit assassinations and other crimes. The FBI called him “Valhalla”, and used him as a source for over 100 arrests. But when he got taken into prison, the FBI pulled the Saint Peter card, right up until documentation came to light that proved that Turner worked for them. So Hal asked for the FBI to help defend his case, but got no response. Then Hal started making threats. Really scary threats. You see, Hal says he’s not alone.

Hal Turner claims that government intelligence agencies have infiltrated major news magazines, papers, and television channels, and are using those positions to their advantage, just like Operation Mockingbird. He says that this information, were it leaked, would put his life in danger, but would possibly cause a massive reaction in the general population, because these people aren’t just targeting dissidents, they’re trying to influence the average American television viewer. And these aren’t people working in the back rooms and behind the scenes.

Hal Turner says that these people are major reporters and television talking heads, household names. And since Hal started making these threats, the FBI has caved and begun acknowledging his work with them. We’ll probably never hear what Hal had to say now, since he’s clammed up and many of the news sources who were covering his threats have removed the information. But still, the idea looms. Could intelligence agencies be using pundits to influence and direct the conversation of American political and social issues? Is this the new Operation Mockingbird?

glenn-beck1
I’m just sayin’.

Sources:
Wikipedia – COINTELPRO & Operation Mockingbird (Reliability? They have an article on it, at least.)
NorthJersey.com
The Raw Story

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Atmospheric Beasts

We laugh at old-fashioned things now. Our conveniences and scientific advances are so, well, convenient and advanced that it gives us a lofty throne from which to judge things from yesteryear. We can laugh at those olden days, with their strange devices that were meant to make life easier, but seem like stone tools to us.


“Pathetic. My iPod is at least half that size.”

And sometimes, the ideas and beliefs of previous decades seem funny as well. For example: It was once believed (uncommonly, I’ll admit) among paranormal researches that some UFO sightings may have actually been creatures that lived in the atmosphere. They also speculated that, instead of just abducting their victims, the creatures were eating them. (It wasn’t until the 70s and 80s when people started telling stories of being abducted and returned. Before then, it was common to say that you heard a UFO abducted some dude and that motherfucker was never seen again.)


“Oh cool, no more bills for me.”

But there’s a bit more to it than that. Before the term “flying saucer” was even invented, much less “UFO”, folklore told of shit flying around and bugging people and generally scaring the bejesus out of them. But we also didn’t have things like planes back then, so anything that flew around and fucked with folks wasn’t a “flying object”; it was a goddamned monster. In the 1800s, there were legends that claimed that there might be some sort of dragons that lived in the sky and disguised themselves as clouds when they weren’t about to eat motherfuckers.


“YOU’LL HAVE TO SHOOT US BOTH TO BE SURE.”

But after we began putting our own flying shit up there (and the shit we were pretty sure we didn’t put up there started getting called UFOs) the atmospheric beast stories began to die off. It is worth mentioning that atmospheric alien life has been speculated to exist on planets with a different makeup (and far less gravity) than that of Earth by people as bad-ass awesome as Carl Sagan.


SMOKE WEED EVERY DAY

These would be silicon-based jellyfish like creatures that could be as large as a mile long and filled with helium or hydrogen. V.S. Tsytovich, in a 2007 study, even discovered that space dust suspended in plasma might be able to take on life, of a sort.

The stories and speculation aren’t completely dead, however. Earth-based atmospheric life has been proposed to have similar traits to those silicon-based whoopee cushions: They’re semi-transparent or even downright invisible, are gas-filled, and that they possibly even migrated here from space. (Interestingly enough, it has been theorized by actual, legitimate scientists that the silicon jellyfish above could put out spores that would survive in space and germinate on other planets. How about that?) They might even be able to change their density and transform between hard, metallic states and cloud-like, invisible states just by contracting and expanding.

One of the most famous atmospheric monster sighting stories is that of the Crawfordsville Monster. (Doesn’t that just sound awesome?) At about 2am on September 5th, 1891, in Crawfordsville, Illinois, two ice delivery men, Bill Gray and Marshall McIntyre, were hitching horses to their wagon when they saw a large, white, rectangular shape flying through the air with fins all up and down its side. They claimed that it wheezed as if in pain and had no head, but that it simply had one large, flaming red eye and a mouth on one end of its body. 


Not pictured: The Crawfordsville Monster

They, however, weren’t the only witnesses that night. Reverend G.W. Switzer and his wife also saw it, describing it as serpent-like. Of course, the standard reaction to such a claim is, “And you had how much to drink?” The people of Crawfordsville were incredulous, to say the least, but boy were their faces red (From embarrassment or from drinking, whichever) when it came back the next night in full view of 100 people. It even swooped so low that a few people claimed to be able to feel its hot breath. (If you’ve ever been on a public bus, you know you have to be pretty close to something to feel its breath.)

Other sightings tell of “living clouds” that spit water like Jim Belushi in Animal House and small, blanket-like masses that are soft to the touch and smell of mildew. (So they’re like laundry you forgot about in the washing machine?) A few people have even claimed to find the bodies of atmospheric beasts, describing them as small, translucent spheres that apparently evaporate within a few minutes of death.

Some even go as far as to say that these semi-visible creatures could be the explanation behind things besides UFO sightings, too. Star jelly, for example, could be their corpses, as described above. (Oh fuck, what if it’s their poop?) And, as with any just about any pseudoscience or legendary creature, paranormal researchers are using the concept to explain that paranormal classic, ghosts. Some cryptozoologists believe that it’s possible that many ghost sightings could actually be sightings of atmospheric life. Atmospheric beasts, the supernatural chameleon.


“Casper: The Friendly Atmospheric Monster” just doesn’t have the same ring.

Sources:
The always completely truthful Wikipedia (x2)
Wikibin
“Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena” by Jerome Clark

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Murder Monday: The Taman Shud Case

If crime shows have taught us anything, it’s that DNA evidence, computer simulations, and cameras with zoom levels higher than a microscope can solve any crime in about a week or so. (Don’t forget snappy one-liners, constant removal and re-placing of sunglasses, and excessive standing around with your hands on your hips.) Even a hard-nosed cop and a series of really, really unlikely events can put away even the most dastardly of crooks.

And so, to fly in the face of that Hollywood tradition, I’m starting a new feature here at the Weird Shit Blog: Murder Mondays. Every Monday, I’ll be featuring unsolved murders, crimes, and deaths from all over the world. (Yes, it’s still Murder Monday even if they’re not technically murders.) Sherlock Holmes, Batman, even motherfucking Robert Stack wouldn’t know what to think of these.


Pictured: Motherfucking Robert Stack, esq.

To set things off, we’re gonna take a look at a death that’s remained unsolved for more than 60 years, and it’s a hell of a case. So put on your deerstalker, blue jeans and white sweater, or (God help you) cheesy sunglasses and leisure suit, and get ready to make some brilliant deductions… or probably not. You know, whatever.

On December 1, 1948, in Adelaide, Australia, a man was found dead on a stretch of beach called Somerton. He appeared to be approximately 40 to 45 years old, average height, average build. In fact, everything about him was pretty average, except that no one knew who the fuck he was. He had no identification, even his dental records didn’t match any known living person in the whole damn country. Weirder still, he had on a suit with a sweater (despite December being summertime in Australia) and no hat, which was apparently uncommon in 1948.


“That’s a bold fashion choice, Tom.” “Go suck a bag of dicks, Bill.”

And even weirder than that, all the tags on his clothes had been removed, making them unidentifiable. The contents of his pockets included cigarettes, matches, a comb, some gum, one used bus ticket to Glenelg (Which is totally a palindrome. Just look at it.), and an unused ticket to Henley Beach.


I’m just saying. Maybe he built a time machine or something.

So, they did what you always do when you find an unknown dead dude on the beach: Threw him in a dumpster and called it a day. Wait, I mean, they did an autopsy. (What I said before, don’t worry about that.) And when you do an autopsy you can usually find some trauma or wounds or poison in the stomach or something. In the case of The Somerton Man, as he came to be known, they found… absolutely jack shit. Apparently, the dude just quit living. That’s totally a medical conclusion that can be reached.


“It was the opposite of being ‘too legit.’”

Since they didn’t find any real cause of death, (although some heretofore unknown poison was decided to be most likely) they sewed his ass back up, pumped him full of chemicals and let him sit around for nine months while they investigated. They briefly believed that a man named E.C. Johnson might have been their victim, but he kinda ruined that when he showed up to the police station alive. Things were at a dead (hah) end at that point until two weeks later, when train station workers found a briefcase with its label removed that had been checked into their cloak room the day before the Somerton Man had showed up on the beach.

Inside, police found more clothes with the tags cut out, an electrician’s screwdriver, stenciling scissors and brush, a table knife fashioned into a sharp instrument (probably also used for stenciling), and a bit of thread, which had also been used to repair a pocket in the dead man’s trousers. Also found were a tie, laundry bag, and singlet, each with a dry cleaning tag bearing the name Tom Keane on them. Unfortunately, the only missing Tom Keane anywhere in the world wasn’t their guy, and so police assumed that the killer left that name behind because that wasn’t the victim.


“Samsonite! I was way off.”

However, the man’s coat was American-made, and not imported. Presumably, that meant the coat had been fitted to him, as was the practice with this style of coat, but police couldn’t rule out that it had been originally tailored for someone with the same measurements as the victim and that he had bought it second-hand. And so it was back to the drawing board, until someone took a look at that repaired pocket and found that it wasn’t a repair at all.

A secret pocket had been sewn into the victim’s trouser pocket, and inside was a slip of paper that read “Taman Shud”. (This became the popular name by which to refer to the case in later years.) They soon found out that the phrase was Persian, and that it was the last line of a book of poetry called “The Rubaiyat”, by a man named Omar Khayyam. Roughly translated, it means “The end” or “Finished.” Since the scrap of paper did appear to be from a printed book, police set out to find the copy it had been clipped from.

Soon after, an anonymous man contacted police and told them that he had a copy of the book mysteriously appear in his unlocked car the night before the Somerton Man was found. After examining the book, authorities determined that this copy of the book was indeed the one they had been looking for. In addition, the back cover page had faint pencil markings in it, which appeared to be some sort of code.


“Dear diary, my alphabet soup and I had a fight again today.”

The code was examined by cryptographers all over the world. While most agreed that it was some sort of code, they didn’t have enough information to crack it. (It remains unsolved today.) In addition to the code, police found an unlisted phone number belonging to a former nurse (whose name was unreleased) who lived less than a mile from the beach where the body had been found. When she was questioned about the case, she confirmed that she had once owned a copy of “The Rubaiyat”, but had given it to a soldier named Alfred Boxall back during World War II. Investigators then came to believe that Boxall was the Somerton Man.

Except he wasn’t, because Alfred Boxall was still alive and working at a bus station near Sydney. In fact, when police came to Boxall, not only was he still alive, but he had his copy of “The Rubaiyat” and showed it to them. It had a dedication from the unnamed nurse on the front inside cover and the Taman Shud verse in the back was intact. He and the nurse both claimed to know nothing of the dead man. Rumors stated that Boxall may have been a former intelligence officer (which he did not deny in at least one interview) and that the Somerton Man had been some sort of Russian spy, but neither was ever confirmed.

And that’s where the trail ends. 60 years later, there’s still no positive identification of the victim, no cause of death, no firm evidence that it wasn’t just a suicide, an uncracked code, an unidentified woman, and an unmarked grave where the body was finally buried. Television programs and criminal justice students have attempted, time and again, to uncover new evidence, but none have. Australia even opened its own intelligence agency as a result of the Taman Shud case. The case is still considered open to this day.


“I guess I’ll just wait here until you guys are finished.”

Sources:
Wikipedia (Because knowing is half the battle)

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Doppelgänger

A lot of people fantasize about having a double that can go around and do shit for them while they do far more awesome stuff. Who wouldn’t want that? I could go sleep or grab a bite to eat instead of typing these posts out. Actually, I kinda like typing these out, so maybe I have a double somewhere doing back-breaking labor while I’m doing this.


My bad.

But doppelgängers aren’t a purposeful double that you can control and ask nicely to do things you don’t want to do. (And if he or she is your exact double, why would he or she want to do it either?) Nor is it about cloning someone for some hot twin/threesome action.


Ladies, your dream boats have arrived.

The actual idea behind a doppelgänger is pretty damn terrifying. According to Germanic lore, your doppelgänger is basically built specifically for evil. His or her job is to go around and do stuff that gets you in trouble, that bastard. In addition, having one seen by a relative or friend is a bad omen. Even worse, seeing your own means you’re probably gonna die. Your doppelgänger is completely independent from you, and presumably you don’t even know he or she exists until you actually see it, and then it’s too late, because you’re pretty well fucked by that point.

Percy Bysse Shelley saw his own several times immediately before his death, and also right before Mary Shelley miscarried their child. Percy Shelley was a bit of a fanciful guy, to be sure, but he wasn’t the only one who saw “himself”- one of his maids also saw what appeared to be Shelley walking into a part of the yard where the only exit was over a 20 foot wall. Then, he approached again from the very same direction as before. And on top of all that, he wasn’t even around in the first place, so neither one was the real him. Apparently he was cool enough to have two doppelgängers.

`
“We’re available for parties, too.”

Other famous people who’ve seen their own doppelgänger (or that of a relative) include Abraham Lincoln, John Donne, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe’s story is particularly interesting. He claimed to have been riding on horseback down a dirt road when he saw himself riding the opposite way, toward… uh, himself. He noted his other self wearing a gray coat with gold trim. 8 years later, he was riding down the same path in the opposite direction and suddenly realized that he was wearing the same gray and gold coat his other had been wearing 8 years earlier. Historical celebrities are not alone, however, as even into modern days, it’s not difficult to find someone who has sworn they saw someone they knew, only to find out later that they were all the way on the other side of town, or something along those lines.


I make no claims as to the nature or whereabouts of O.J. Simpson’s doppelgänger.

All this is different, however, from the Norse vardøger, which is said to be a ghostly image that precedes you. So, say you go to a buddy’s house and he says, “Weren’t you just here?” Vardøger. If you’re sitting at home, eating Doritos and watching re-runs of Miami Vice and your buddy calls you up and asks, “Hey, were you just at the at the adult toy emporium with an arm-load of marital aids?” Doppelgänger. (Warning: Do not use your doppelgänger to get out of shit you did. It never works. Trust me.)


By the way, it’s alt + 0228 if you must know.

And what do our party-pooping friends, the scientists, have to say about this? Well, Swiss scientists performed lab tests on a 22 year old epileptic woman, finding that when certain parts of the brain (the left temporo-parietal junction if you’re nasty) were stimulated with a minor electric shock… wait a second, didn’t I do this before? Oh fuck, that damn vardøger!

No, wait, nevermind. It’s just the same experiment that I mentioned in the post about the Third Man Phenomenon. Yeah, that’s right. Scientists think that the Third Man Phenomenon and doppelgängers are due to the exact same mental switch, except without the whole mental stress and isolation thing. Oh, and also the fact that the doppelgänger is usually a living person the individual knows. In fact, they also believe that the mental switch can be used to explain ghost sightings as well.


Scientists: Trying to ruin everyone’s fun since the Renaissance.

And even still, rumors have begun spreading that airport face-scanning machines, intended to catch terrorists and other criminals before they can board planes, have captured images of people who live on entirely different continents, aren’t related, and have never met, yet look exactly the same. A popular urban legend making the rounds claims that one airport screener was shocked to see his own face pop up in a scan, and that upon further inspection, found 10 other men in the FBI database who looked exactly like him.

Some other legends also make similar claims, saying that the shared criminal database of mugshots the FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies use has a secret sub-database (called Doppelgänger, of course) of people who look identical to each other, even down to the scars on their faces, but have no actual known connection. Further, it’s said that some of the images in this database are of people who lived and died decades ago, but appear to have duplicates alive and well today.


On a barely-related and less creepy note, The Fall of Troy’s Doppelgänger is fantastic.

Sources:
Wikipedia (The only infallible source of information, ever)

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The Montauk Project

There are a couple of things that can get a conspiracy geek turned on. First off, you’ve gotta have the U.S. Government or, rarely, some other large-scale operation. (This can include foreign governments, groups of foreign governments in collusion, secret societies, and mega-corporations.)


They’re up to some shit. What is Grimace even supposed to be?

Then, you’ve gotta have a reason for the conspiracy. Secret research into time travel, psychotropic drugs, alternate dimensions, basically anything that’s been made into an episode of The X-Files or Fringe. Or both. (John Noble got robbed, I tell you. Fucking robbed.)

Lastly, you have to have the cover-up. It’s not a conspiracy if everyone knows about it, dumbass. Shell companies, secret government sub-agencies, hidden messages, a few murders, and boom, you’ve got a conspiracy.

And if that turns a conspiracy geek on, then The Montauk Project gives them a raging hard-on so huge that the government is gonna have to hush that shit up.


“Boner sighted, sir. Firing on your mark.”

Think of how Area 51 used to be super-secret. Not so much now, though, considering they had to acknowledge that it existed in court documents. But before the 90s, Area 51 was a place you talked about in hushed whispers, but you still knew about it. Now it’s referenced by the Las Vegas Minor League Baseball team.


I bet you thought I was joking.

So when Area 51 started becoming a household name among conspiracy theorists in the 60s and 70s, and with everyone else in the 80s and 90s, they couldn’t really do all their secret experiments at their no-longer secret base. So what happened to all of that research? Well, conspiracy lore has it that Area 51 was never a centralized location, and all the experiments done there were also done in tandem with other bases. So, they had a bunch of shit going on at a bunch of places, and the story goes that many non-aerospace related experiments were moved across the country to an Air Force base in Montauk, New York.

According to the earliest legends, Montauk Air Force Station’s original purpose was to continue the research that led to The Philadelphia Experiment and the USS Eldridge “disaster”. As time has gone by, though, and The Philadelphia Experiment has become a cheesy 80s movie and generally regarded as a hoax, that story isn’t usually the one that conspiracy theorists lead with.


There was this ship and it traveled through time and… you know what? Nevermind.

Originally, several of the less strange projects that ended up at Montauk were allegedly conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. But when they needed a big-ass radar dish for their experiments in cloaking technology (See: The Philadelphia Experiment above) they moved everything, secretly, by ship to Montauk. It’s important for conspiracy theorists to note that the dish at Montauk operates at 400 – 425 mhz, which is claimed to be exactly the frequency needed to control the human mind.


“I COMMAND YOU TO CLUCK LIKE A CHICKEN. NOW MAKE ME SOME FOOD.”

As for what kind of other experiments were conducted at Montauk, you’ve got a whole range of shit, including time travel, parallel dimensions, teleportation, contact with extraterrestrials, creating objects out of thin air with psychic abilities, brainwashing and subliminal messaging, and mind-altering drugs. Oh, and the whole thing was supposedly run by Nikola Tesla, who would have been 120 years old at the time.


“Fuck death. And Edison.”

Other rumors claim that the facility stretched 12 levels underground, had hundreds of employees, and expanded underneath the city of Montauk itself. Apparently, to throw people off the trail, the government converted most of the land above the base into a national wildlife preserve, so long as everything below ground remained property of the Department of Defense. While the base began taking on a few projects in the late 60s, most of the wild shit is claimed to have occurred in the 70s and up until early 80s, when the base finally closed. Turns out that wildlife parks tend to be big tourist attractions, and so the legend goes that when loads of people started showing up for family vacations, the government realized that they’d probably have to find somewhere else to do their crazy crap. They opened it to the public as a museum in 2002.


“THE GIFT SHOP HAS NICE THINGS FOR AFFORDABLE PRICES.”

So what happened to all the experiments there when the DoD decided to close up shop? No one knows. The government probably still has plenty of other secret bases. We just may not have heard about all of them yet.

Sources:
Wikipedia (Now with more [Citation needed])

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The Antikythera Mechanism

It’s the age of the smartphone, where you can carry around a little computer in your pocket and look at Facebook or YouTube or whatever whenever you feel like it. I never knew I wanted to watch porn, loudly, in a public restroom before. God damn, technology is great. I mean, what’d we do before these mini brothels came into our lives? Oh yeah, we sat at a computer. Wait, we still do that.


Because I’m gonna type these posts on this.

Okay, so smartphones and tablets and things like that haven’t supplanted the desktop just yet, but the point still stands. Devices are getting smaller and smaller. Laptops were massive and not very lap-friendly at all just a few short years ago. The earliest computers took up enormous amounts of space.


“Little do the engineers know, we’ve secretly replaced one of these with a beehive.”

And now we can hold something in our hand that’s many, many times faster and more powerful. We can perform complex mathematical calculations, view and record the positions of the stars… Oh, but did I mention that the Greeks could do that over 2,000 years ago? Yeah, they couldn’t get turn-by-turn directions to get Odysseus’ ass home or play 3D games or any of that.


Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in 490 BC.

But they could do those other things, the calculator and the star map. It doesn’t sound very impressive, but consider that everyone else in the world, for many years yet, was still using ink, paper, and maybe an abacus. For 1400 years, that is. That’s a pretty huge technological leap, and we didn’t even know they had it until 1901. It’s kind of like finding out that your ancestors had a Lincoln and cruised around in it a couple hundred years ago. Why wouldn’t they tell you about that?

Well, maybe they wrote a big instructional book about it and some other ancestors threw it out. (Or maybe they thought you’d steal it, dick.) What we do know is that the mechanism is so well-crafted that it must have had predecessors.

It was made up of several bronze gears, and was able to calculate the heavens and simple mathematical problems using clockwork methods not seen for over a thousand years afterward. It even had markings to let you know when the Olympic games would be, making it a sort of calendar as well. In fact, this thing has so many features, it’s kinda hard to pin down just what it was primarily meant to do. (The smartphone analogy just gets more and more apt.)


Pictured: Expert craftsmanship after two thousand years at the bottom of the ocean.

We also don’t even know for sure if the Greeks made it. (I just wanted to throw in a couple of Greek jokes before I got to that part.) The instructions are in Greek, and the writing on it is too, but there’s some conflicting research that shows that it may have come from Sicily or Turkey.

Regardless, though, there is plenty of evidence showing its pedigree in scientific history. There were many similar devices, just not as tiny and nicely built. However, that’s not stopped people from theorizing that the people who came up with the concept that led to this ancient PDA were taught by aliens. Or maybe a time traveler. Or maybe reckless, time-travelling aliens.


This time those aliens have gone too far.

And when you’re talking about an eon and a half gap in technology, maybe ideas like that don’t sound so wild. But you also have to remember that this thing could very well have been some sort of state or military secret, and so it wasn’t widely written about, not to mention that it was made of bronze, which has always had some kind of value and is easy to reuse. So, it’s really likely that any others of its kind that didn’t end up on the bottom of the sea got repurposed into other shit.


Far more useful.

So maybe aliens or Bill and/or Ted weren’t involved, and bogus as that may be, it’s still an archeological wonder that has completely re-shaped our view of just how much ancient civilizations really knew. Now, I don’t want to get into “ancient technology that surpasses our own” speculations, but it does make you wonder what other huge innovations simply got lost to time and set us back hundreds or thousands of years.


Yeah, hop on my motorcycle, we’ll be there in no time.


Sources:
The Telegraph
The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project
Wikipedia (Home of the Edit War)