From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. It is Thursday, if you're hearing this, the day it comes out, which means it is time for our weekly listener male segment. We've received, as always, thankfully, quite a bit of correspondence about any number of things, so much so that I don't know about my colleagues here, but I've started just storing things up weeks of weeks in advance and hoping I can get to it eventually. Uh. Today, we're traveling around around the world, and we're gonna see some some very different things. We're gonna see some classic stuff they'll want you to know. I would argue a little bit of hidden history, some inexplicable sightings, and the darker side of some new technology. I think it still counts as new. Uh. There's one you know, know that that you found that I really appreciate because I had heard about this case before but really interested to learn more about it, especially because it sounds like an episode of Tales from the Crypt or Amazing Stories. Well, it is an episode of Unsolved Mysteries UM from I think the early nineties Love with what Robert Stack who I think we all grew up enjoying. Um. Yeah, this email comes to us from Jake. Uh. He writes, Hello, I just recently started listening to the podcast and I love it. Thanks Jake. I'm Elma, Washington, which is about fifteen minutes from Oakville. I'm not sure if you guys have heard about the Oakville blobs, but here's a couple of articles about any links out to some helpful articles, one of which comes from the Unsolved Mysteries fandom wicki, which is also a great rabbit hole great for for mining for some interesting weird stories. Uh. There are multiple different theories. He goes on about why and what it is. We have one of the biggest military bases in the US, Joint Base Lewis McCord, which one of the theories is that they were testing in Oakville. Still remains a mystery to this day, it's true. So just to set the scene, um, it was, let's see August seven, nineteen four a police officer was the unsolved mystery. Kind of sets it up. Police officer was going about his rounds his patrol, and all of a sudden, it started raining. It wasn't any normal rain. When he turned on his windshield wipers, instead of the rain just kind of you know, slashing away, this weird gelatinous substance started to smear all over his windshield to the point where he couldn't see, and uh, he had to pull over, and smartly he put on some latex gloves and went and checked it out, picked up this stuff and it was this like squishy jello type material, but it was precipitating, you know, from the sky. Um. And it would go on to be sighted six times in three weeks, this jelly rain, or the Oakville blobs as it's referred to, um, you know regionally, I guess. Um here's the crazy part. Though other people reported experiencing this too. Like I said, over the course of three weeks, six sightings, but people began to be seriously sickened in Oakville, starting with the detective himself or the policeman himself. UM, like flew like symptoms, uh, really bad vomiting and uh you know, headache and dizziness and nausea. UM. And it would asked sometimes from like a week to several months, like seriously weird symptoms that were seemingly widespread. Um. And there's a couple of theories about this. Like Jake said, there is this military base that's nearby. UM. And this is of course in the Pacific Northwest, so they're right off the Pacific Ocean, and oftentimes air force or you know, military will run drills over the ocean in terms of bombings, right, they'll they'll test out ordinance. Uh. And one of the theories is, this is my favorite one I think I'm gonna lead with it, is that a military bombing test UM exploded a like school of jellyfish. Then UM, we're pulled that like their guts went everywhere so high that they were pulled up into rain clouds like stored there or something, and then precipitated out over the course of three weeks at six different times. I think that's probably one of the least likely scenarios. Uh, it's it's so weird one though, but it doesn't seem to check out in terms of just like you know, reality. I don't know how that would work. I'm not a weatherman, but it just doesn't seem like that would. You know. I don't think clouds can hold jelly, but maybe they can. I don't know who am I to say. Another theory is that it was you know how like when planes, uh supposedly, like I think they're not supposed to do it over civilian populations. I think to do with the ocean sometimes, but you know, planes when they dump out the excrement in the waste you know, from the bathrooms the laboratories on the planes. Um. That was one of the theories too. But here's something I didn't know. Maybe you guys did, um that you know that when airplanes dumped that stuff. And you even notice that toilets like this chemical toilet and everything's blue. It's dyed blue for reason so people can identify, you know, what it is. Um, And this stuff was definitely not blues. It was very It was just translucent, I would say. Um, and like I said, very very gelatinous, but almost like whitish, kind of cloudy and translucent. UM. And then my favorite theory and the one that I don't know if it's addressed, and I didn't watch the entire unsolved mystery, just watched a few clips, but this seems like a relatively newer development. Uh. There's actually the most amazing YouTube video. The channel is called night Terrors, and it's hosted by this dude. UM. You know, he's not even named on the channel, but I swear he reminds me of like some character out of like an old Universal Monster movie. He kind of speaks like this, and he makes these very extreme pauses UM, and it's it's a delight. I highly recommend you checking it out. But he's got a video that claims that the Oakville Blobs mystery is solved. I'll get to that theory in a second. But one of the coolest ones is that this was actually a matrix. This material was a matrix UM material designs to carry biological weapons, weaponized disease. Essentially. There were some UM analyzes done of this material, one of which found that it contained human white blood cells UM, and then another one found that the cells from these blobs had no nuclei. I'm not sure what that points to, but I mean, it seems to me like it's some advanced substance that we don't know about. I guess don't most cells have nuclei. This is this is new to me. UM. But yeah, contained human white blood cells. And then when it was analyzed by the Washington State Department of Ecologies Hazardous Material Lab, they did find that it contained several types of bacteria, one called Pseudomonas florencence and one called inter Bacter Cola kai um. And the theory is that again the Sky's sunny barklift UM whose mother got sick. He kept a sample of it and he sent it to the Washington State Health Lab, who then assigned UM a researcher or I guess you know, disease specialist or whatever you want to call it, named Mike McDowell UM to check out what this was. And Mike was able to, you know, do a battery of tests. UM. He was able to. He was trying to test it to see if it would grow anything UM, and it actually grew those two different types of bacteria they were talking about. It was then locked away in a containment locker containment facility. Uh. And when Mike continue to research it, he went back to check on the material, but it was gone. It had gone missing, and he said that it was the first time in thirty years of his career that a sample that he had in his control had gone missing. So yeah, it's like, was someone trying to cover their tracks someone at this lab maybe that they knew that it would you know that they would trace back to them. How do you get it to rain down like that? This is like a cloud seating, you know, with with jelly. I don't understand that part. Um, what do you guys? Think? It's pretty cool? Uh? And remains relatively unsolved. There is a theory that it's this stuff called star jelly, but we can talk about that in a second. But what hits you about this immediately? Yeah? So, uh, longtime listeners know that I'm someone who you know, grew up on unsolved mysteries stuff like this. I absolutely love it and I'm fascinated. So it falls to me to have to, with great regret, play a little bit of I wouldn't say bad cop, but maybe maybe bust some myths about this that that program propagated the stuff didn't fall on its town, right, it fell on a nearby farm. It's about the size of a grain of rice. And and like many people, I originally assumed it was aircraft ejective, that's what it's called, or blue ice, right, that's the one I forgot about that term. Yeah. So one thing that media here as sources don't agree on how many people did or did not get sick um, And there have been there have been other sources, usually one of the more skeptical side, who argue that illness is not related to this, were later attributed to it. So we need to do some more digging there. One thing, Um, One thing I can say for sure is human error can play a part in this. Uh, the objection to the idea of abject the objection of the idea of objective from the conversation hinges on the hinges on the practice of applying this deodorizer powder to waste in an airplane. So that's why it churchs blue when it's dumped. But if people are in a hurry, or they have poor logistics, or you know, something goes wrong someone forgets the deodorizer, then it doesn't have to be blue. So it could be mistakes were made in the sky. But that's further complicated because I don't think we have a lot of a lot of information on how many planes were or were not fine in the areas. So I'd be interested in digging back into this, but I don't. I don't want to. I don't know monologue you guys, because I'm just kind of free associating this stuff that what's your take. Yeah, I'm having the same issue of finding concrete information about what actually happened in But I'm reading something from the BBC's Science Focus magazine and they're just mentioning they mentioned that two forms of bacteria. Two types of bacteria were found to exist within the thing. Those are the ones I mentioned earlier than they kind of grew it. They were able to grow them, you know, culture them from some of the samples. Yeah, exactly. I wasn't seeing anything about the having no nucleus or anything like that. I'm just not seeing that hard data anywhere. I'm interested to know if there is some kind of explanation, as you said, star jelly possibly being one or some kind of amphibious um species, you know, laying eggs and creating some of the some of the substances that some amphibian species create when they're going to go through that process. I don't know what. Did you see anything about poly acrylate? Yeah, yeah, sodium poly acrelate. There was like an instance I believe in two thousand twelve in Bournemouth, England where polly accrelate absorbed water from a storm and began to like literally spontaneously formed these gelatinous blobs like in mid air. But I don't know much about that substance. What did you find, Matt h. Nothing. It's literally just mentioned in this Science Focus article that's asking about it. It's a polymer, let's see, it's acrylate polymers are group of polymers prepared for again thems raining from wiki uh accrelate monomers their plastics um and they're like almost like it looks like a rubbery type substance. And if you look at somebody holding it in its manufactured form, it does have it's almost got a salty look like like the heavy rock salt that's at um. But you can see it almost forming like a almost snow, but like look has it's kind of a squishy look to it. So I can imagine that there could be like a gelatinous uh you know, texture to it. Weird. It's super weird. And again, it was just interesting that Jake, you know, grew up. I'm sure that living in the area. It's it almost become like the stuff of of of myth, you know. Um, and it's forever preserved, uh, in the amazing unsolved mysteries that we all know and love. So um yeah, that's that one. I gonna take a quick break and then come back with some more. It sounds good. Okay, and we're back, and we're jumping to a message we received from bronze ranked boomer. That sounds promising, you guys, that is that a gamer thing? It sounds like it might be. Let's jump into it. There's a lot here. We're not going to read everything you wrote to us, but we're gonna jump into some of these concepts. Jumping to the email. I I just want Noll to be more familiar with the dark side of Twitch since his daughter is a fan of it. Make sure she just sticks to Minecraft streamers. Yeah, she kind of self censors. Like I don't really worry about her like venturing too far into the dark corners of Twitch. But it's good advice, and I didn't realize how quite how dark it got. Well we'll see, uh, says Matt. You'll like Legends of Room Terrorists, and she like MTG and Ben. You're cool and much better than the Quister. Oh snap, I hope the quister never hears that. Don't speak his name one more time, right, and then it's two more times. Okay, all right, it's like candy Man, yes, and let's just keep going here. I just listened to your episode about Phase Clan and Crypto, and I wonder if you're aware of the dark side of Twitch streaming. If you aren't aware, Twitch is a website that allows yes, we know what twitches? Should we say what twitches? It's a streaming service where it allows users to view and interact with content creators. People think it's strictly like a gamer form, where like people become famous as Twitch streamers because they're commenting and being cute and funny and making jokes while they're like playing Fortnite and stuff. Yeah, exactly so. Bronze Age continues on to say that there's a dark side of sponsors on Twitch. He says sponsors are a huge part of a streamer's income, on Twitch, it's like YouTube where people get monetized. Also, there are sponsors that support Twitch in general and run commercials throughout all partnered Twitch streamers double the ads. However, their sponsors can be shady. Like the crypto issue, there was another issue that came up not long ago on the subreddit live stream fail, where there was a large issue concerning gambling. For example, there's a streamer named x q C. He literally had ads in promo codes for gambling websites. Kids would watch him make a lot of money and get inspired to join. They'd be able to they would make a lot of money gambling and that's a new concept. Um But he says then they'd be able to access the website through vpn is to get around the age restriction. Interesting, And there's another streamer who moved to Canada to avoid the legal disputes with gambling. There are a lot of clips screenshots in proof that these streamers knew what they were doing taking advantage of folks. This is the current drama. And it's easy to search gambling through the subreddit. You'll get a lot of posts. How can you use a VPN to bypass age restriction? Isn't that kind of just on our system, like, well, that's like asking your age. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm not sure how that would actually function in practice. I know, if you've if you use something like Brave server in and you use their tour services that they offer, you can get around some things like that. So I'm assuming using a VPN could also get around some some kind of restrictions that maybe I'm just not aware of. In the past, there are a lot of issues about loot boxes, c s, go skins, you know, talking about gambling, you know, from just the setup of a game where you have to pay to get a chance to get something good, and then you'll pay a lot of money to increase your chances. Uh. And then let's jump down here to the part where Bronze ranked Boomer mentions the dark side of just chatting. He says, twitches not only cater to gamers. You can stream almost anything, and there's a category called just chatting, and that is the I think where the interesting conversation happens here, because for a long time that platform was specifically to watch people game. We've mentioned Twitch before and how it's evolved over the years to do things like art. I think they called it creative back in the day where you could do all kinds of different things like Bob Ross but like on the Internet, and you know, and it's just a way for a content creator to have an audience essentially that's live that can interact with them, Right, that's really what you're what the whole point of the platform is to have a live audience interaction. Um So, just to compare to what we're doing right now, there's four of us on a zoom chat and we're talking to each other like this, we're having a conversation, but the audience is only here because we're bringing you know, everybody else into the conversation through these messages. In this case, it's all live. It's all happening real time. And I think that's where at least bronze ranked Boomer is maybe seeing some issues that are cropping up. Yeah, it's something like you know, I was not fully aware of I've always you know, maybe it's not my platform with choice, but I was not fully aware of Twitch as being something outside of just gaming, because I mean, you know, there's YouTube live, there's like Instagram stories and lives and all that stuff. There's so many other places to do what we're talking about. But Twitch is much more of like an active, engaged kind of community for that. But I didn't realize that it was practically venturing into like cam girl territory, um somewhat pornographic in ways, or like maybe not pornographic but problematic, um some fetishy type behavior and like slightly kinky stuff. And I am I overstating the case here, isn't it? That's certainly the picture that's being painted um by our emailer, right that they're so some things that are maybe not appropriate for younger children. Right. So Twitch has been a place for younger people to go and watch someone play a video game for a long time. As it is evolved, there are many people who have issues with some of these things. Yeah, Twitch, while this is the new technology, has kind of teasing at the top. But Twitch is you know, very well established now and for many people it has become one of their primary modes of interaction. But with this, with any new newer technology or platform, we see that there are there are any number of issues, right, things that maybe tech gurs would call bumps in the road or areas of opportunity. That's a term that a lot of human resource departments work tend to use instead of the P word problems what Boomer says, and and again Boomer, this is quite This is a quite in depth, thorough piece of correspondence. Going to summarize a little bit. Uh, and Matt tell me if I get off base here. Uh. It seems like what Boomer is concerned about here is the line between what is or is not appropriate for h for underage people to see or to do on these channels. In some cases, because to the earlier point that one of you guys brought up, it can be difficult to actually verify somebody's age online, you know what I mean, Like it's it's an incredibly easy process to circumvent this. By the way, this morality argument is going to be one of the continuing arguments for further government control over Internet access as well as monitoring. We're not too far away from a world wherein you will have to have your state issued idea on record with you know, Comcast or whatever they're calling themselves is nowadays ex affinity and this you know. The devilish thing about this argument is that there is validity to it. So it seems like what Boomer is saying is like, these things can get out of hand very quickly. Would you say that's accurate that? Yeah, it certainly seems that way. So I don't know much about this at all, but I'll just tell you what I learned in from the moment of receiving this literally half an hour ago to talking about it right now. You can find a lot of things that are being mentioned here in this email, and we didn't even bring up but a few of the things are weirdness happening where streamers were being banned by the platform for generally being odd, let's say, odd behavior. Would we consider that, like, um, one person was and I'm not gonna mention the names here, you can look it up if you'd like, but one person was wearing a horsehead mask, which isn't all that weird. That's a fun thing, silly thing to do, but yeah, of course, but they were uh slamming said horse head mask into a three d O microphone, one of those binaural microphones, and just like slamming their head into it repeatedly. Um, in making the horse noises and just being weird. A lot of these things that you're talking about, like this area would be considered extreme a SMR you know, like using these binaural mics, and they're even like you know, there was another I think it's the horse mask girl is one of the ones. And then there's a guy, um who I think they worked together. They at least, you know, communicate together, who they make videos together. But they were like doing stuff like like farting into like headsets, like gaming headsets, and like licking the microphones and stuff and like doing this you know, like morderlie on borderline fetishistic type behavior and you know also a little odd. And obviously these streamers get paid by the stream um and the platform has you know, its own standards or whatever. It's good community guidelines, and so they were both band and and deem demonetized, you know, as you know, can happen. UM. So you're right, it is a moral thing where it's like who is this for? How is this inappropriate? It is a weird thing because as we said, the advertisers are somewhat the most important thing. They are the most important thing to the business of the company twitch, which is the big thing here. UM. So anytime you've got a popular person, no matter what they're doing, the company is being served, you know, on the bottom line. So then the company has to make a decision on whether or not that content you know, offends enough people, I guess to make a change depending on the how much they're actually making a stream for that person. Yeah, just to just to interject, I don't want to derail us. That's something I said off air and preparation for this episode, which may sound cynical, but I think ultimately, if you look at most corporations across the planet, most for profit entities, there is a calculus made and things change when someone somewhere says the cost of the legal liability or potential legal action outweighs the profit that we can reasonably assume we'll make. So that's I mean, and and companies can talk about morality all the livelong day, but I think there's a quantitative basis to those decisions agreed. One of the big questions for me is how do you then restrict something like that if you get enough pushback from enough people as a company to say, hey, maybe this should be age restricted or something like that, Um, why would not do that? It's It's another thing I um I think I may have mentioned briefly off air, which is that this goes into in a legal sense, this goes into morality laws. What you know, and what one person considers wholly appropriate is what other people would consider, you know, downright blast this right, even if they don't understand it. It may make them uncomfortable and they may be like, mm no that the noises that person with a horse mask is making or just unclean. Right, And this this is a huge issue in jurisprudence in general. I would call attention to the case about whether or not James Joyce's Ulysses was pornographic or whether it was you know, to basically too saucy to be sold in in the States because you know, how would you put a good age requirement on that book? Similar problem, right, And so what they concluded was one of those famous, uh, those those famous rulings like what is what is it appropriate? Well, they say pornography, but what is inappropriate? I'll I know it when I see it? And that's what people are still struggling with. And there's not really at this point without fully knowing everybody who watches the piece of content, or fully knowing the people who may get there's therefore tracking them. There's not really a way to cleanly come up with a policy. It's too open ended. Isn't it interesting though that books and and you know, publishing has never really had like parental advisory warnings the way music and video games do. I mean, there's certainly all books that other than nudy bags, right, I'm talking about books like like Tropical Cancer, you know, I mean, like that is absolutely there's pornographic writing in there. But yet you've never seen a book that says must be eighteen to buy or check out this book from the library. You know, there's no age restrictions on books and those books. That's exactly right. But I want to point out when there you're talking about like how do you you know there there's a lot of questions, but like on Twitch in particular, how do you like reconcile all this stuff like what is Twitch? What is their mission? That isn't really funny? Like a lot of this uh controversy came with this category of like hot tub videos or like you know, twitch streamers um are playing video games I guess in hot tubs kind of scantily clad. Uh, And it caused sort of an uproar, and so Twitch rather than outright banning this hot tub content, which is actually pretty popular. They created a category called Pools, hot Tubs and Beaches um and apparently the most popular stream in that category, which now still can include these hot tub videos, is a live stream a constant twenty four our live stream of these like otters at the Vancouver Zoo. That's wholesome. It's very wholesome. So they sort of they sort of fixed the problem. You know, you gotta dig for the content a little bit more now. I think maybe it was just like bait and switch kind of where people were thinking they were signing up for more traditional Twitch streams and they were getting this slightly more like, let's call it titillating content. This is related to think this would be of interest to both you and Bronze Boomer here Bronze ring Boomer uh, as well as many other people listening along today. There's another issue that has received some press quite recently on Twitch, which is the rise of Twitches, an extremist platform. Right like morality is, or perceptions of morality, are much harder to negotiate or to you know, legislating a fair way or make a policy about, and a lot of times you know, corporations aren't really incentivized to do it, but Twitch has gone from you know, beyond video games to be in your great platform for anti vaccination conspiracies another you know, people who are so far right that they got kicked off Twitter. So I would say there's that's another facet of a larger thing that Boomer is talking about in in the letter here. Yeah, and and I'll give you just two quick examples we'll get out of here. When we got this letter, I went to twitch dot tv. It's been a long time since I logged in, so I didn't have my logging credential, so I just went there as a random user that's not logged in. And two of the first things I was presented with. One of them is amaranth amerranth Amaranth. I think is how you say it? Um? That person was mentioned in several of the stories that that our emailer mentioned, and she was dancing to a song in a pink bra and there were thirty thousands something people watching her. I just said, okay, well that's what one person is doing, went over to click on the next one. It was a person named Hassan Abby or a b I and that person was reading an article on Insider and responding to commentary. Both of these streamers were promoting their Instagram accounts, and I thought it would be it would be interesting to see, like, you know, if there's two people on here, they're both doing what the emailer mentioned, just chatting. Let's just like look at the difference at what kinds of free speech are being you know, exercised here. Uh. One of the instagram's I would say, I think objectively suggestive images of one of the people streaming. The other one had images of a person doing all kinds of things, including holding a R fifteen s. So you know, you just wonder, like, where are the lines, like you said, been with with free speech? Should there be any lines? What do you think? How do you feel about Twitch? What have you experienced when you're on there? Is there a actually a dark side? Or is this more of a morality argument thing? And that's it and we don't need to think about it anymore. You tell us, Uh, we look forward to hearing what you have to say. Thanks for writing in, and we'll be back with more listener mail. And we have returned for the final act of this week's Listener Mail segment. This is taking us to Bosnia courtesy of a wonderful letter and a little bit of a funny story. First, get this nickname I love well. Actually, just wait for the nickname. At the end of this I'll read this first letter and then share what's going on. Hey guys, I found your show last year and listen to it almost every day now. Thanks for always keeping the show so varied. There are two subjects which I find vastly interesting, where I'm not sure if you have covered it. The first is Bigfoot. Oh, buddy, you're the right place we have uh, and we'll get to that in sect anyway, The letter continues, I'm based in the United Kingdom and find the stories around the Sasquatch fascinating, as they are all over the world, with so many similarities that it seems impossible to believe it can be faith. The second topic is the Bosnian Pyramids. I don't know much about it, but based on what I've read, there's a lot to discuss with a lot of mystery surrounding it. Keep up the great work and keep watching the guys your skeptically Zach Squash like like sasquatch, but Zach Squatch The nickname alone. Thank you so much, Zack Squatch. So I did a search because we receive a lot of correspondence. I'll read correspondencies about topics that kind of cycle in and out, often based on the news, because the news is its own sort of or a boros kind of recursive thing. And I wondered because I had also similar to the story of the oval Blob when I was younger. I wondered whether there was any sand to the idea of ancient pyramids, and Matt back in the day, you and I did a pretty pretty good piece on non Egyptian pyramids, I believe, um. I can't remember the zach here, but we made We did mention these a little, uh, but not not too much in depth. So I searched to see if other people had asked for it, and then I found hopefully more endearing than embarrassing. And then I found that back in the Old Man Bulan himself had written in about this. I completely ignored his email. I think I may afforded it to you guys, but sorry, Dad, if you're listening now that someone else has asked, we're going to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, man, we did. I think it was it was like, what what about the other pyramids or something like that. It was it was a long time ago. It's yeah, okay, great, great memory there, mat So here's what's going on there. There's a cluster of hills in central Bosnia and here's the go Vina and it's in an area called Fisoko. This cluster of hills, if you look at it does look like you could see why it looks like a pyramid, especially considering that so many natural human made structures over time have been uh like they've been taken back by nature, right, so they turned into mounds. It's very you could see amazing ruins if you shaved the jungle to the ground. Basically in Central America. I've included here, uh picture of the hills I'm talking about there in the Vestuco area, and would you guys like to describe them. I'd love to hear your takes. Well, I'm looking at a pyramid that's covered with trees. That's what I'm looking at. It looks like a topi area, like a massive bush that was like, you know, trimmed into the shape of a pyramid. You know. Then there's a similar one on one of the links you provided emerging dash europe dot Com. It's just I think it's just a slightly different angle of the same thing. And it really does, at certain angles look like straight lines, straight diagonal lines going down, not you know, not any kind of normal erosion happening on a on a slope. It's really weird, right yeah. And uh ding ding ding. You're all the money with the idea about angles. It's similar to reports of a large face on Mars. From the right angle, it does look like a huge uh face on Mars. However, this this story is is a little more complicated, I think because the primary claims are from an archaeologists self taught named Sam osman Uh and I may be mispronouncing the name here. Sam is the one of the primary champions of this idea. He says that twelve thousand years ago, early Europeans in Bosnia didn't just build pyramids, they built the largest ancient pyramids on the planet. He is a he himself as a Bosnian American businessman. He's been making these claims since at least two thousand and five. The problem is a lot of first, a lot of people, sadly Zack Squatch disagree and sadly, Mr Bull that they disagree because the idea here is the idea here is tantalizing, right. But unfortunately the other like research into this hasn't borne out Sam's initial claims. Why does it sound kind of reasonable, to be honest with you, Well, it's because so many ancient pyramids exist, and we talked about this in our earlier episode, due to the fact that human beings are all relatively the same level of intelligence, right, and they all figured out at separate times that stacking rocks together with a larger base that tapers at the top is a really efficient way to build piles of stuff. Like it's it's dis gravity. Uh, this doesn't necessitate the presence of extraterrestrials or multidimensional entities in this case. People were already saying that, you know, this guy was maybe being sincere but definitely pseudo scientific, and they busted his claims a little bit. But he's he's claimed that there are tunnels around the Hill complex. They're part of an ancient man made underground network. He claims to have found fossilized plant matter in these tunnels dating back thirty four thousand years. Uh. He also hasn't really helped his case by claiming that there is unusual activity at the top of these pyramids that you know, the locals consider hills. He says that there are standing waves he being he's encountered there that travel faster than light. Improve the idea of a cosmic internet, which will allow you to communicate across the universe, which may happen one day as scientific progress continues. He also believes in ancient astronauts. He claims human beings are the product of genetic engineering. What I'm saying is for the rank and file of the academy, he's not He's not making a case for what they would consider to be his credibility. And if you, like you said Matt, if you look at the hills from a different angle, they do not look as pyramid shaped. They look much more rounded, They look less like man made construction. And also, just to give you some context, fellow conspiracy realists, the article that match just mentioned earlier emerging dash europe dot com. The headline of that article, the title of that article is is Pretty Telling? Is by Nicola Doordovic. The title is are their ancient pyramids in Bosnia? Probably not? Unfortunately, because look, when we have we have to talk about stuff like this or I don't know about um, I don't know about my colleagues here, but when we have to talk about stuff like this, I wanted to be real if I wanted something, and you know, I know we're both. I want to believers. Uh can we say that? No, that's exactly what where I want to believers. I think there's a b in there. Oh, it's a Justin Bieber thing. He'll turn it around. It's stuff work to be a musician, you know, it's like the professional and I know you know you're on the same page. We have to be honest with ourselves and with the facts when we look at this stuff. But another thing that puts it in a weird light for a lot of people is I think a little unfair. It's that he's Bosnian American, and so the idea is, oh, you discovered history's most important pyramids and they just happen to be where you're from, You know what I mean. I think that's an unfair accusation, but I can see why people might reject it. But also, how would you treat it if you were a local? Would you be in affects. I mean, yeah, is there is there are there like a secret doors, Like I want to go inside. It looks like there's merch and stuff like it's obviously something that the area has taken made into almost like a trying to make the name for themselves, like a destination, right, Like I said, it's super smart, but I also like I want to know more. I want to go inside. You gotta visit, you gotta spend money at the cafes a couple of nights. Yeah, I see some pyramid crocs almost like going on here place matt and leather goods, things like that. I mean, yeah, pretty clever. Yeah, happening in Roswell as well. You know it's it's happening in the small town that is associated with Mexico Zone of Silence, which was in that previous episode. I think we we we made a strong argument that it was knowingly a tourist It was like designed to be a tourist attraction. But with this, the question is how much uh this one champion of this idea genuinely believes in it since two thousand and five, well between two thousand and five to two thousand and nine, just four years at the time, there was an excellent article written about this in the Smithsonian. More than four hundred thousand people have visited the site, and they were selling you know, like you said, well, there's a lot of merch. Piggy banks, clocks, flip flops, you can eat, you can go to restaurants. See this sounds fun. You can go to restaurants and you'll lead on pyramid shaped plates. I guess that means triangles. I'm not sure, like are they three D? And it's just really tricky to purchase the sandwich on it. It's just mcgetty just like dropped down the pyramid. Then did you mention torsion fields the standing waves? I think maybe the same, But what are the torsion fields? It's it's just like the you know, that's just gentleman. Again. All this is coming from him. I think believes that the pyramids are capable of communicating using torsion field, which is like a theoretical physics concept. I believe um it is a field that can travel faster than the speed of light. Yeah, that's what he's talking about earlier, like a universal Internet communication system, I think literally universal, that's the idea. One day maybe but it does not appear sides of the source of what he is called those standing waves, and he's attributing it to this like mega advanced civilization that like they have this technology that we can't possibly wrap our hands around. Um. But yeah, we don't really have any evidence of this civilization or any you know, fossil record or anything like that. I really just have. I mean, I don't know what what is it? If it's not that it's crazy looking that you can't understand it, No, that's the whole point sometimes and anybody else can't understand it. It's like if you saw the face of God, your mind would just break. Sometimes the hill is just a hill, Uh, would doesn't make it any less remarkable because nature is amazing and astonishing. There's there's something else here, you know, maybe not a conspiracy, but there's something very important that we need to understand, which is how Wish folks talked about this more often. Archaeology is a weapon. It can be weaponized. It is used to to legitimate any number of claims. Um and decisions to not engage in some digs are have been used in the past to prevent the legitimization of certain groups this continues today. It's quite controversial in different parts of the world, and it tells us something about what we could call the political uses of archaeology. There's an anthropologist named Philip Cole over at Wellesley College who thinks that Osmanigitch's attempts to create pyramids from these hills are part of a larger push to have a sense of identity, a sense of self affirmation, and and Cold raises this is interesting to me. I'm not sure how far along I can go with it. But Cole argues that when the Iron Curtain collapsed in the former Eastern Block, all these land and territorial claims came up and people had quote just lost their ideological moorings. So he says, there's a great attraction and being able to say we have great ancestors, we go back millennia, and we can claim these special places for ourselves. He says, in some places this is relatively benign, in others it can be malignant. And it makes sense. I mean, it goes beyond tourism. Right, There's there's this idea. It's very tempting. I think if you feel connected to a place, to hear that it is extraordinary, unique, special. Those are true of every place in the world, by the way, but to hear that something maybe even supernatural, is going on, maybe your home is the seat of low civilization, Well it's very tempting to associate yourself with that, you know what I mean. Next thing, you know, you've got someone saying I am descended from Atlantis, And nothing you can say will change my mind about that fact because now it is a part of my identity. I'm not saying that's conclusively what's happening with Osmanigitch, but it but it is. It is interesting, and there's where I propose we leave it for today. Thank you so much Zach's Watch your Nickname made my absolute week. Do check out that episode about other pyramids. And thank you as well to Jake, and thank you to Bronze Brainked Boomer. These are some great stories today, lots of fun ones since some food for thought with that gamer stuff. Um, it's an interesting time to be a lot and I'm constantly learning about new weird corners the Internet every day, which is weird considering we like live on the Internet. UM, never cease this to amaze me, and Ben, I have to say, I just found that email from Papa Bowling and now I've got his cell phone number, so I'm wanna call you. I gotta call your dad, dude. It's probably a burner by this point. I mean it's been a it's been a year, it's been three months, it's probably Yeah. Well, if you want to take a page from our fellow conspiracy realists, uh, feel free, right, and we'd love to hear from you, especially with ideas for new topics that we can cover in episodes in the future. We try to be easy to find online. Oh boy, are we ever? You can find us at Conspiracy Stuff on Facebook, Twitter and also YouTube. And while you're on the internet, why don't you pop over to iTunes or your podcatcher choice and leave us a smashing five star review. We'd really appreciate it. You can also give us a telephone call. It's true, that's right. Number is one eight three three st d w y t K. When you call in, give yourself a cool nickname or your name however you want for us to refer to you as that's a weird way to say that. Hey, let us know if we can use your message on the air. They'll be very helpful. And if you find that you've got more than three minutes worth of a message, we highly recommend that you instead shoot us an email. 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