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26 Plays3 years ago
M has disappeared, and Josh is trying to find out what happened...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M was @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction of the Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and it's just me today, which is kind of what I'm here to talk to you about.
Discussion of Recent Recordings
00:00:32
Speaker
Now, Dr. Denton, you might have heard, if you're a regular listener, for a few months now, there's been talk of maybe
00:00:42
Speaker
going somewhere, somewhere overseas perhaps, which seems a little bit odd in the current pandemic climate. But, well, the thing... where do I start? Okay, so we have this Dropbox account.
00:00:57
Speaker
that we use for sharing files that we might need for the podcast. So if one of us records something that the other is going to need, especially if I've recorded audio that Em's going to put into the podcast or something, we'll put it in there. Or when we're going to be reviewing a paper, Em will drop the paper into there so that I can look at it as well. And the most recent thing that showed up were a set of recordings by Em
00:01:24
Speaker
taken supposedly on location in North Head, which if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time you know is quite significant to M's career as a conspiracy theory theorist, and therefore to this podcast as a whole.
Historical Significance of North Head
00:01:44
Speaker
That's the last I've heard from him. The last aspect of communication, if you can call it that, is just these things showing up.
00:01:53
Speaker
So I'm going to play them through for you now, and we'll see where that gets us.
00:02:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy hosted here live, except of course it's not live, because you're listening to a recording at the historic North Head Historic Park, historic for two reasons now, where friend and patron of the show, Georgia and I, having a wander around North Head, the inspiration for my PhD, and thus really, when you think about it, the urtext of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy.
00:02:35
Speaker
Those of you who are long-term listeners of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy will be aware that the North Head story and its conspiracy theories about hidden tunnels, missing seaplanes and discarded ammunition locked up in vaults deep beneath the Earth
00:02:51
Speaker
has been the inspiration for almost all of my work, in that the initial PhD work looking at conspiracy theories actually originated from a claim about archaeological investigations and questions about how people sought between the official and alternative explanations.
00:03:11
Speaker
of stories like North Head. And we are now in the control center of the North Head installation, which is why we've got this really impressive reverb effect going on around us right now. And I have to say, since I was last here, it's really been decorated up with quite an interesting mural. I wonder what the purpose of that was.
00:03:39
Speaker
It's a new mystery of North Head. What's been going on in here? What has been going on in here? And why does everything sound so ominous with this echo? Sorry, I just had to do that. So yes, the North Head tunnel installation is basically the inspiration for the podcast. And given that I'm probably not going to be back here for several years due to my impending mood,
00:04:09
Speaker
It would have been really nice to come and take a look at North Head one last time to experience North Head in summer and just have a few thoughts about it. So that's what this special episode of the podcast is going to be about. So that was the first of the recording files that showed up in our Dropbox.
Authenticity of the Recordings
00:04:32
Speaker
It sounds sensible enough, I suppose, a decent thing to do when someone's going away somewhere. Odd little bit of static on the line there. It certainly sounds like it's been recorded on location, although I did have to wonder, given the amount of fun that Em has had with our little recording box thingy when they're doing podcasts normally that let us
00:04:58
Speaker
add sound effects and change up our voices, and add a large echoey effect onto it. But I don't think that was the same, so I'll give the benefit of the doubt for now and assume that this is all recorded on location as per M's claims.
00:05:16
Speaker
The reference to Georgia though, I think, as we go through these recordings, I don't think we hear her once at all, which we could put down to her reticence and Em's enjoyment of the sound of their own voice. But yeah, again, my suspicions
00:05:39
Speaker
exist. I don't know if I should be taking this on or if I should be taking this at face value or not but let's listen on a bit.
00:05:52
Speaker
We're standing outside the old observation post, which, when I were a young child, oh, so many moons ago, I used to be able to actually go inside. And if you just look through the window of the observation post, you can see why people wanted to go inside, in that the observation post was designed for the gunners to take a look at what was going out in the harbour, to then work out how to pinpoint shots. And they've painted, as a mural,
00:06:20
Speaker
above the window an actual panoramic view of what you can see outside so that you can then spot things outside and then relate it to an exact degree in the mural itself. It's quite a spectacular sight. The mural
00:06:35
Speaker
seems to have been restored at some point, and it's such a shame you can't go inside and see it properly. I mean, you can't see it at all because you're listening to a podcast, but you know, the concept is sound. If you were here with me right now, we would all be living very different life stars.
00:06:55
Speaker
Okay, well maybe I was a little bit too picky on that first one. I mean, that was very clearly going from a bit of VCOE to outside windy noise. I don't think M has the facility to fake those sorts of sounds. So, okay, let's say that these recordings really did take place on North Head.
00:07:16
Speaker
Is this just touristing? Is it just reminiscence? Or is there some sort of a message that can be found within them? The focus on the murals, I haven't been there myself for quite some time. I'm not quite sure exactly what mural seems talking about there. Whether we've got a
00:07:41
Speaker
Denver Airport sort of a scenario where they've been sticking things up to specifically address the rumors of things that have been going on, or whether it's just a bit of prettying up, I don't know. So we'll have to see if any more becomes of them as we make our way through the rest of the series.
00:07:59
Speaker
We're at the summit of North Head now, or at least almost at the very summit. We're at the hall at the very top of North Head, which if you've been a long time listening to the podcast, you'll be aware was where we used to host our Phil 105 critical thinking field trips in that
00:08:17
Speaker
My co-teacher and I used to take our students to North Head once a semester to talk about inference to any old explanation versus inference to the best explanation using the North Head Tunnel conspiracy theories as our motivation.
North Head Conspiracy Theories
00:08:33
Speaker
It was kind of a weird idea in that we thought that no one had ever done philosophy field trips before and as far as we're aware, no one really has. And so we thought it would just be amusing to see if a few students would turn up once a semester to go and wander around North Head whilst getting a bit of narration about the conspiracy theories about it. We were thus somewhat surprised when the first year we did it,
00:08:58
Speaker
It turned out that two courses, nah, two thirds I should say, of the class actually turned up for the field trip. And it turns out that wrangling 86 students on a hill face in the middle of summer and trying to make sure they all get home safely is a slightly bigger logistical challenge than we initially thought. But we managed to get it down pat and ran it every semester that we were responsible for the course.
00:09:24
Speaker
And thus in many respects the PhD came out of going actually there's something to this North Head story, maybe we should look into it further. Yes so for those of you who aren't aware that's a pretty good pretty succinct summary of how North Head fits into M's career and by extension this podcast.
00:09:47
Speaker
I do have to wonder about this obsession with reminiscence. What prompted him to go off on this little mini-odyssey? Has the sounds of a person taking stock of their own life? I don't quite like to think why a person would be in that headspace. It's this and on.
00:10:11
Speaker
So now we're actually actually at the summit battery, where most of the major conspiracy theories around North Head converge, in that we're actually at the largest part of the underground structure. Unfortunately, it's currently closed off because it is basically summer holidays, and neither the Maunga Authority nor the Department of Conservation really want to be here on New Year's Day looking after tourists as they poke around in tunnels that could collapse on them at a moment's notice.
00:10:39
Speaker
But the summit battery is basically where all the conspiracy theories converge, because as it's the largest structure, most of the conspiracy theories about people who claim to have been inside the tunnels in North Head that no one has any access to claim they all lead to or lead from the central point. And most of it concerns the so-called water tower that we'll be getting to in just a few minutes.
00:11:09
Speaker
The summit. The water tank, not water tower. Actually, not exactly. I'm standing beside an abandoned gumpet because there are lots of families huddled around where the water tank is now. And I don't really want to get in their way by talking over them as I talk into this mic with this wonderful wind flowing around me.
00:11:28
Speaker
So the water tank is kind of the central or nexus point for the conspiracy theories of North Head because there's a whole bunch of mysteries about the way it was set up and the idea that additional tunnels might have been leading out of it that were then covered up by the air force when they demilitarised North Head in the middle of the 20th century.
00:11:50
Speaker
Because the actual structure of the water tank, which was actually a gun and placement, has two tunnels coming into it in kind of the lower two thirds, in such a way that it really does look as if there should be a tunnel leading out of the top third, i.e. moving towards the south, out towards the outer harbour.
00:12:12
Speaker
And for this reason, they drilled a whole bunch of holes in the wall of the water tank to see if there were any strange fissures or structures behind it. And indeed, they did discover an empty pocket as they drilled into there. But the archaeologist decided that was most likely to have been slipscoria, given the nature of the hill, than any indication of a tunnel
00:12:38
Speaker
in part because of the physical impossibility of a tunnel leading out from the south side of North Head given how small the spaces between the water tank wall and the hill suddenly plummeting downwards. But that hasn't stopped people from claiming that maybe the tunnel they were looking for was angled downwards rather than leading straight out.
00:13:02
Speaker
It's one of the remaining mysteries of North Head as to exactly what that strange air pocket was. Do you trust the experts who claim that it was quite obviously slipscoria? Or do you trust the people who claim there's a large-scale cover-up saying actually that was just a convenient excuse? These are the kind of issues that made investigating North Head so interesting and then led on to my work on the PhD and thus my academic work.
00:13:27
Speaker
And so it's kind of interesting in that respect that North Head doesn't really feature in my academic work any more.
00:13:38
Speaker
So I ran those last two recordings together because I think they really seem to be getting at the crux at the centre of everything. Here we see Em getting to the main part of North Head and the main part of the conspiracy theories around it. Again, I have to wonder what the purpose of going over this is.
00:14:00
Speaker
Does them want us to have these conspiracy theories at the forefront of our minds as we think about where they might be at this particular moment? I do notice the reference to being around crowds of at least some other tourists.
00:14:19
Speaker
I did have to wonder at the move from the more isolated interior spaces out into the open where there'd be people around, is this the action of someone who's worried about being followed, is worried that other people might be keeping tabs perhaps? Is this
00:14:40
Speaker
Is this the reason why Ian felt compelled to actually get these things recorded and get them out to us in the first place? Is there someone looking to maybe hush things up a little bit? Also the reference to the supposed impossible tunnel that couldn't be there and yet people wonder about it.
00:15:01
Speaker
I'm not sure if there have long been stories of people insisting that the areas that they went to under North Head were much larger than the areas that are visible now, which is possibly just simply tricks of the imagination and the way
00:15:21
Speaker
the way being in dark enclosed spaces plays tricks on both your revision at the time and your memory later on, but what if there is more to it there than some sort of shifting sort of space beneath North Head that M's trying to let us in on? I don't... I'm really not sure what to think at this particular point, maybe we should just listen and see where the rest of this turns out.
00:15:45
Speaker
So now we're in the battery, the disappearing gun battery, which has always been, to my mind, the most exciting and interesting part of North Head, because it allows you to tell one of the more interesting stories about North Head, straight ahead.
00:16:20
Speaker
So here we are in the disappearing gun battery, which is the poison... Here we are in the disappearing gun battery, which to my mind is the most interesting part of North Head, because it allows me to tell the best story. When we did the Phil 105 field trips, we talked about how the disappearing gun was a remarkable piece of Victorian over-engineering. This gun was designed to be hidden from ships at sea.
00:16:44
Speaker
By retracting back into the ground when new shells could be loaded in, the gun would then pop up, shells would fire and the ricochet would cause all the blowback, would cause the gun to then retract beneath eye level or surface level, making it impossible for ships to hit.
00:17:00
Speaker
The problem with this idea of a disappearing gun is that ships of the age were not accurate enough in their firing solutions to be able to hit a target of this particular size. So the Victorians engineered a solution to a problem that arguably did not exist.
00:17:23
Speaker
Little bit on there, not sure what's with the stop start there. He starts off on one track and then suddenly stops.
00:17:32
Speaker
walks a further distance along and then starts up again. What was wrong with the first place? Was there, again, was this an attempt to get out of the line of sight of someone who's been looking after them, or I'm really not sure what's going on at this point? And yet then continues with the reminiscence angle of interesting points from
00:17:57
Speaker
past philosophical expeditions. So we're nearing the end of the batch of recording files that I'd received, so I'm not quite sure where this is all going to end up. So now we're at my favorite part of North Head. I may have said that when I talked about disappearing guns, but I was wrong. This is the set of tunnels I lost for over 15 years.
Exploration of North Head Tunnels
00:18:20
Speaker
You might go, how do you lose a set of tunnels for 15 years? Well,
00:18:25
Speaker
You lose them for the sheer fact that they've also blocked them off so they're now kind of lost to everyone. You lose them because the Department of Conservation let the pathway to the set of tunnels overgrow, which suddenly meant that there was no way to find them unless you already knew where they were.
00:18:43
Speaker
And the thing about North Head is that it's a confusing layout at the best of times, and trying to keep track of which pathways lead to which location, especially when the pathways have since disappeared with time, means that you can quite easily lose structures.
00:19:01
Speaker
which to my mind speaks to the mystery of North Head, the idea that people claim that there are tunnel structures they can no longer find, even in a situation where you have complete access to the hill, it is still possible for people who know the hill very well to find that there are certain structures they think should be there,
00:19:21
Speaker
that they can't find and then are one day revealed by a simple change in the landscape. And North Head has changed a lot since its military occupation to its current state as a public park. So people who claim it looks different are right, but they're wrong to assume that because it looks different it has been deliberately changed to hide mysteries inside of North Head.
00:19:49
Speaker
And then there's this, after talk of things being potentially impossible, after talk of things not being where you think they are and how easy it is to get lost, and suggesting it's sort of the shifting nature of North Head, and then suddenly finishes up with a quick rationalisation which says that there's actually nothing mysterious about it at all.
00:20:13
Speaker
Is this a case of suddenly worrying about being overheard again? Was someone getting a little too close for comfort? Or has M just been stringing us along this whole time? We only have one entry in this lot of recordings left, so I hope it's going to possibly clear up what M was doing there in the first place and offer clues as to where they might be now.
00:20:41
Speaker
So we're almost at the summit of Muayike, and we're sitting outside what was in my day called the Spy Bunker, in that it's a little submerged room beneath the ground with no obvious way in, that I was always told as a child was being used either by SIS or the GCSB for spying purposes on North Head. Now whether that's true or not, I don't know.
00:21:04
Speaker
but it is kind of curious that it is still the one part of North Head I've actually never been inside, and that there does appear to be a kind of hatch on the top a la Lost, but Desmond, Desmond is not letting me in. A reference which really, really dates both me and this podcast immensely. So, yeah, the Spy Bunker. One of the last mysteries of North Head I've not been able to solve, and maybe I never will.
00:21:32
Speaker
Maybe that mystery will always be left behind us. There's someone inside there. And that's where it ends.
00:21:40
Speaker
I'm still not quite sure what to make of all this. Certainly these recordings ended up in our Dropbox, where I would see them, so presumably this record was meant to be found and presumably broadcast to all of you.
Mystery of Dr. Denton's Whereabouts
00:22:06
Speaker
But that's all I have. In touring around North Head, presuming that is actually where the recording took place, taking a stroll down memory lane through old philosophical field trips and a rehash of the conspiracy theories and everything
00:22:29
Speaker
the mysteries surrounding North Head, only to be suddenly interrupted by the discovery of a person who wasn't where they should have been. Now, does the fact that I got these files mean that
00:22:46
Speaker
whatever happened afterwards, M was still able to get the recordings out to me, or did somebody else send them to alert us to what M was up to, to warn us off? I don't know. All I can say is that at the moment,
00:23:06
Speaker
the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy consists of just me, and we're just going to have to wait and see if we get any news as to Dr. Dethis' whereabouts. So for now, it just remains for me to sign off, and hopefully when next I speak to you, it won't just be me speaking to you,
00:23:30
Speaker
And we'll have some further idea of Dr. Dentist's whereabouts. So I'm afraid I couldn't give you something more conclusive in the end. All I can say is stay tuned as we try to work through this. But for now, simply goodbye to you all.
00:23:58
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its pod theme or Patreon campacts. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.