Fall From Grace

Published Jan 28, 2021, 10:00 AM

Humans are truly amazing creatures. And the things we can come up with, endure, and improve upon are sometimes mind-blowing. Like these two tales.

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Welcomed Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The story of man's ascent towards the heavens has been told for ages. The ancient Greeks wrote of Icarus, who flew on wings his father made out of wax. Icarus had been warned not to fly too close to the sun, but did so anyway, and fell into the sea and drowned when his feathers melted. Master artist Leonardo da Vinci sketched numerous flying machines of his own design, perhaps hoping one day he might learn to soar like the birds. And of course the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, who flew their revolutionary airplane at Kitty Hawk in h three. History declares their efforts as the first recorded powered flight, but one man in might consider them a little late to the party. It happened on April seventeenth near Aurora, a small town in northeastern Texas. The incident was first reported by S. E. Hayden in the Dallas newspaper. The article described what had befallen Judge Proctor's farm early that morning. Something fell out of the sky and crashed into the Judge's windmill, skittting along the dirt and past his house, taking out his precious flower bed in the process. People from all over Aurora came to gawk at the strange craft that had plummeted to earth. What struck them as even more interesting was the person who had been flying at well, what remained of him. The body had been badly burned upon impact, but even in such a horrible state, it was clear that the pilot was not human. It was something else. Proctor believed his farm had fallen victim to an invading Martian. The vehicle had been heavy and made of a silver metallic substance that hadn't been seen before. Inside the cockpit, Proctor and the others discovered objects with bizarre figures drawn on them, like a language from another time or another world. All of this had occurred before the start of things like the Cold War or World War Two. Government agents didn't storm the town and abscond with the wreckage or the body for the sake of national security. Left with no other options, the people of Aurora did the only thing they could think of, with the help of a traveling preacher, they gave the pilot a Christian burial. A makeshift tombstone was erected out of a square, misshapen rock. And as for the wreckage, that was hauled away and dumped into the well beneath Judge Proctor's now destroyed windmill, and there it stayed for about thirty five years until the farm was bought by a new owner, a man named Brawley Oates. Oates decided the well would make a good water source for both himself and the rest of the farm, so he cleaned it out and brought it back to its former glory. He drank the water from the well for the next ten years and used it around the property. In that time, Oates developed some odd side effects, namely crippling arthritis, but his hands didn't just ache or lose their strength. His fingers became gnarled like the branches of an old tree. He blamed his condition on the wreckage that had been living in the well for the last several decades, blaming it had contaminated the water supply. To avoid further use, he had the well covered with the concrete slab. Then he built a shed on top of that. It remained dormant for years. Then, in the nineteen eighties, a story about the town and its other worldly visitor made it into Time magazine. Ed a pegu who had been a child at the time of the incident made a shocking admission se Hayden had made the whole story up. According to this resident, the piece had been a pr stunt, a way to bring in tourists since the railroad companies had decided not to build tracks through their town. Subsequent investigations by magazines, newspapers, and television shows uncovered other truths regarding the tale. Judge Procer never had a windmill on his farm, and the well wasn't built until ninety The logical next place to get information would have been the cemetery, but that proved a dead end as well. No pun intended, I promise the pilot's grave had been robbed sometime in the nineteen seventies, although the locals often walked by the headstone, speculating about whether an alien had really been buried beneath their feet. Clearly, someone decided to see for themselves and dug up the grave and took whatever had been inside, including three big pieces of metal that had been placed with the body. Today the story remains a mystery. The only artifacts left behind are the news articles of the time. As for what really happened, well, it all comes to speculation, and there the skies the limit. The human body is capable of incredible feats. In two thousand, nineteen, nineteen year old girl saved her father when the truck he was working under slipped and pinned him to the ground. Gasolene spilled and caught fire, threatening the man's life and his home. His daughter, encountering the scene in her own garage, ran to his side and lifted the truck off him, then drove it down the street away from the house. Daniel Kish lost his eyes to cancer by the time he was thirteen months old, but today he navigates the world in a way not often seen outside the animal kingdom. With a click of his tongue, he can orient himself in any direction using echo location. Like a bat, he can determine how far away something is and what's in front of him by measuring the time it takes for the sound of his clicks to bounce back to his ears. Many people throughout history have tested their limits too, but few of them like Mirror and Dajo. Danjo was born Arnold Henski's in the Netherlands, and he didn't start out by dazzling spectators with miraculous feats. He was a normal guy, one who worked in an office as a designer for over ten years. But something happened in his early thirties. Hensk Has discovered that he was special, more than special, invincible. He quit his job and moved to Amsterdam, a big city for a man with big dreams of stardom. However, instead of singing or dancing on stage, Hensks displayed a different kind of talent. He would swallow swords and other sharp objects, not unlike a side show performer in a traveling circus. Then Henskes took his act even further, calling himself Mirror and Dajo, inspired by the Esperanto word meaning wonder, and presented the audience with a series of long, sharp skewers. He would then invite individuals to take them and plunged them through his skin, one by one the daggers would enter his back, travel through his abdomen, and come out the other side with no visible effect. Spectators thought it was an illusion. Of course, as he gained popularity and notoriety, he was required to undergo examinations by a series of doctors who checked both his physical and mental states. Dajo believed he was being used by a god to show the world a better path, a path that didn't revolve around materialistic desires. His ability to withstand being punctured by sharp objects was thanks to his devotion. The doctors performed many tests on him. They took X rays of his midsection while he had fencing foils pushed through him from back to front. It was no trick. The foils clearly penetrated the skin, muscle, and several organs on their way to the other side, all without affecting the performer in the slightest. Magicians who studied his methods assumed that he had learned a way to mentor at least subdue the pain he was feeling. Dajo even admitted he had traveled to India. He had learned from mystics called fok ears, who were experienced in the ways of testing the limits of their flesh. However, none did what Dajo was able to do. Doctors were stumped. One man had inexplicably survived numerous piercings and stabbings for years, the kinds that would have killed other men. Without a definitive explanation, some experts believed Ajo had learned more from the fox ears than he'd let on. It was known that one way performers like him would endure repeated punctures was through the use of scar tissue that would form around a post, similar to how an ear piercing might heal. As long as there was something inserted into the hole, it would remain open, and so they believed it was possible that Dajo had built numerous holes in his midsection with tiny objects left inside to keep them open. When it came time to perform, he'd remove them and fill the tunnels with a long needle or dagger, and when he was done, put the tiny plugs back in once again. Of course, this was just speculation. No one knew how he did what he did for sure, but one thing was certain. He didn't perform such harrowing acts for long. In the spring of night, when Dago was only thirty five, he swallowed a steel needle. He wasn't performing, though he claimed a voice had told him to do it. Two days later, a surgeon removed the needle from his stomach. Danjo was told to take it easy. Recovery would not happen overnights, but he wouldn't listen. He went home and entered a meditative state for several days. He was later found by his assistant dead from a rupture caused by the needle he had swallowed. Mirror and Dago believed that he could do the impossible, and for a while he proved he could, But he wasn't as invincible as he thought. Reality, it seems, was a little too hard for him to swallow. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious, Yeah,

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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