Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Not the Nine O’Clock News (It’s a podcast; you could be listening to it anytime!)
31 Plays2 years ago
Josh and M do some old: a fullblown news episode! From Somerton Man to Scotland, with a little stop over in... Well, we forget!
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Debunking Secretive Activities Rumors
00:00:00
Speaker
And now, the news. We turned to Special Correspondent Trip Hazard for a special report. Hi, I'm outside a nondescript building in a small town somewhere near a big city, and there's nothing to report.
00:00:12
Speaker
And can you give us details about what isn't happening? Well Josh, behind me in this building nothing is happening. A group of 30 men in grey suits has not entered the building, and there has definitely been no chanting or suggestion of blood sacrifices. Indeed, for how long has this been going on? Well these meetings definitely do not go back centuries. There is no evidence whatsoever that these non-existent men are part of an ancient society who have been meeting here since the 1880s. I see, and what are the people in the area not saying about this?
00:00:41
Speaker
Well, one woman I didn't speak to did not tell me that her family have not been suspicious about the lack of goings-on in the area for a long time now. As she didn't say, these non-existent grey-suited individuals who are not part of an ancient society, who have not been meeting here for well over a century, do not seem to have ambitions to rule the world. Well, no news is good news.
00:01:02
Speaker
Yes, the fact nothing is happening here means there is nothing to see, and thus there is nothing to worry about. Everything is fine. Although, sorry, I thought I saw something, but as previously reported, nothing is happening. Well Tripp, thanks for that special report. You'll get us updated if nothing else happens? Yes! I mean, no.
00:01:22
Speaker
Maybe. And now we turn to sports, a game of two halves in which the best half wins.
Podcast Introduction
00:01:27
Speaker
The Otterboxers were playing the clarified trombones in Turkey last week, and we have sports journalist Jack Danger with us in studio to give us the details and what that means for the next season of Sports Talk.
00:01:45
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and in Zhuhai, China, it's Associate Professor of Philosophy and voiced by Labial Nasal in Dentist. Yes. That was the true one. That was the one fact that's true. Or was it? Yes. No. No? Yes.
00:02:08
Speaker
And also this this week, this week's been a bit of a bit of a what's what's the nice way of saying shambles? I'm not sure. We've been battling. It's been it's been an omni shambles to partially quote the thick of it. It's been an omni shambles. I mean, there's a much more profane way of saying that, as Malcolm Tucker would say, but we can say with omni shambles.
00:02:32
Speaker
Yes, yes, no, apart from the immediate trouble we're having with internet issues that could bring this episode to a premature conclusion.
Challenges in Podcast Planning
00:02:45
Speaker
We've also had had various issues with coming up with a topic for this week.
00:02:51
Speaker
So we're going to do a news episode. Haven't done one of those in a main episode for ages. We tend to do them in the bonus episodes a bit, but luckily for us there's actually been some interesting news this week. Yeah, yeah. And so which is continuation of stories we've had in the past, which makes it even more interesting. Actually relevant, yeah. Do we have a new sting? Did we used to back when we did? We
00:03:14
Speaker
do and i've got one somewhere i shall resurrect it from the archive dig that up and put it in there right now somewhere somewhere around about now i'm just trying to find the right place to put it in i think we should put it in somewhere almost almost i think about here breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news
00:03:42
Speaker
Ah, that takes me back. All the way back. I honestly can't remember when we last actually did an episode that was just a news episode in the main thing. Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I don't know. I just don't know. Or does it just show that our memories are getting progressively worse as time goes by? Yeah, it also shows we've been doing a podcast for like eight and a half years. So I think we can be forgiven a little bit of memory slippage when it comes to every single thing we've done.
00:04:09
Speaker
Remember we used to talk in clipped Atlantic accents the entire time? Joshua, now we're going to talk about conspiracy theories. What's the goth going on in New York about conspiracy theories right now? And then I would say, there is one, one conspiracy theory.
00:04:25
Speaker
No, those were the day. Amos North Atlantic accent right there. Yeah. So anyway, news. It keeps happening. Hard to stop it, to be honest. For example, somebody should stop the news. They really should stop the news. Well, yeah, I figure we could all do with a break, perhaps, if just nothing could happen for a while. Just nothing at all. Bit of entropy, I think that's what we need.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, but someone would report on that. Nothing is happening. No, probably. No, it said something has been happening. Where should we start? I guess, let's just go through the list from start to finish. Let's go all the way to Australia. No, because there's an item in the list before that. No. Oh, no, you're right. We're looking at the same list. Sorry. Yeah, hey. We're collecting the same list. I just scrolled down too far. You already scrolled. So instead, let's go to the United States of America, but also possibly Christchurch.
00:05:19
Speaker
And also, who the hell knows where? Yeah, so for some reason, people have been talking about satanic panic stuff.
Stranger Things & Satanic Panic
00:05:26
Speaker
Or at least, you say some people, I mean at least two people, but I'm not entirely sure whether it's actually more than two people. But it does appear to be related to the TV show, Stranger Things. Now Josh, I haven't watched Stranger Things since season two, because my opinion on Stranger Things is,
00:05:46
Speaker
It's meant to be a show set in the 80s. And certainly, from a visual aesthetic perspective, it's meant to look like the 80s. But the actual plot and the characterizations is not the 80s. If it was an 80s set TV show, where is the large amount of racism that we had in 80s TV? It's not there. It's just, Stranger Things does not feel authentically 80s to me. Now, admittedly, that does make it sound as if I stopped watching the show because there wasn't enough racism.
00:06:16
Speaker
for you. I stopped watching the show because I ended up going, I'm actually not entirely sure what the point of the show is, other than somebody really likes 80s aesthetics. And it's not a decade I actually want to be reminded of. Well, meanwhile, I quite enjoy it. And I've stuck with it. And yes, so if you haven't seen season four of Stranger Things, there's a bit of a subplot that's
00:06:39
Speaker
Essentially, the satanic panic stuff going on. There's a Dungeons and Dragons club, and when wacky things start happening, because it's stranger things and weird supernatural stuff's always going on, and the town at large starts to become aware of it, they immediately whip up a witch hunt. Witch hunt?
00:07:02
Speaker
lynch mob, one of those two, against the Dungeons and Dragons, the people who are supposedly all into black magic, and obviously everything evil that's going on has to be their fault. So it got a little bit of a little bit of the public consciousness, perhaps in the same way that
00:07:23
Speaker
watchmen, educated people on the Tulsa race riots, and Ms Marvel has introduced a new generation to the partition of India, who perhaps weren't aware of that. Although frankly, people have been watching Doctor Who knew about that two years ago when it was a episode in the first season of Jodie Whittaker's run as the Doctor.
00:07:45
Speaker
Well, there you go. But now American people know about it. That means it's real. But also, so there's been a little bit, a couple of people have, for reasons that I cannot discern, started talking about this again, as though, as though they thought it was something real. So the one I saw was the other day, Anna Biller, who is the director of The Love Witch from 26. Have you seen The Love Witch?
00:08:09
Speaker
I hadn't seen either. I remember when it was coming out at the time, it got a bit of press because it was done in the stables like one of sort of Ty West's ones, wasn't it? It was done in the style of an older sort of exploitation film or something. But at any rate, she took to Twitter to say she'd gone down the rabbit hole and done a bunch of investigating and found out all the truth about, in particular, the MacMartin Preschool Trial, which I think
00:08:35
Speaker
Was that the big one? Was that the biggest of the big satanic panic cases? Yeah. So in the US, that's the really big one. So it turns out where you go in the world, there's a big example of a satanic panic. So in the US, it's the McMartin Preschool Trial. Of course, in Aotearoa, New Zealand, it's the Christchurch Christ trial.
Flawed Child Psychology in Trials
00:08:55
Speaker
They're all similar in that all testimony of children elicited by adults
00:09:03
Speaker
based upon their being worries about the school environment or preschool environment the children were in. Children were asked were there any untoward things going on and the children describe ritual abuse and also some fairly fantastic elements as well. So for example one of the bits of evidence elicited from the children
00:09:25
Speaker
in the McMartin Preschool Trial is that one of the teachers at the preschool was literally able to fly. So you get evidence of that particular kind. And what happened is that the satanic panic of the 80s, which was taken very seriously by a lot of people, including the judiciary,
00:09:46
Speaker
eventually collapsed as child psychologists got involved and when, first of all, the kind of questioning that's being used here is complex questioning which is leading. And B, and this is the thing which always kind of strikes me about discussion of the satanic panics of the 1980s, there was this rather naive view by the judiciary that children don't lie.
00:10:13
Speaker
So if you ask a child to testify to a particular claim or to answer a particular question, it was thought that children don't lie under oath.
00:10:24
Speaker
And child psychologists were going, I mean, why would you think that? I mean, A, children can lie, and B, children often lie to adults because they realize that adults are asking them a particular kind of question. And children often want to placate or satisfy the kind of narrative urges of the adults they're working with. So they tend to give you the kind of answers you expect.
00:10:49
Speaker
So there's this kind of naivety about the way that children talk or describe things. They mean, oh, if a child says they saw a teacher flying across the room, they must have seen something. And child psychologists go, no, no, no, you need to actually look at the way the questions were asked there, because I suspect you'll find the child is telling you something that they think you want to hear.
00:11:12
Speaker
Yes, but that appears to have passed people such as Ms. Bill Abi. She said, so the actual tweet was, or the first one, there was a series of them, was, once I went down a deep satanic panic rabbit hole and I learned that the children slash toddlers in the MacMartin Daycare Center had STDs and genital scarring. There were really tunnels, et cetera. The perpetrators weren't charged because they couldn't prove which adults abused them.
00:11:42
Speaker
So the reference to tunnels is one of the things the children gave testimony about was that there were these tunnels underneath the daikia centre. Which is also true in the Christchurch crash case as well. The children claim that there are extensive tunnel networks and also secret passages in the attics of the crash.
00:12:00
Speaker
Yeah, which was shown to basically not exist, but according to the website that she read, which was, she did give a link in the end, it was a single website about abuse or something. Then she sort of went on about the fact that, you know, that supposedly they didn't exist, but they found that the tunnels really were there. Now, apparently there were people that actually go looking for tunnels underneath the stake center. Apparently they did
00:12:28
Speaker
They did in the creche case as well. They actually dug up large sections of the area around the creche to try and find these supposed tunnels. And apparently they did find what I think were sort of trenches that would have been dug back when the thing was first being constructed and then later filled in.
00:12:50
Speaker
that they found these things, there was no material in these what are thought to be garbage pits that dated after the 1930s or 40s, so sort of, you know, they obviously had been filled in for decades. So there's stuff like that, but yeah, so she gives a thread of all this stuff about how essentially that there was a massive cover-up
00:13:12
Speaker
makes reference to things like Jeffrey Epstein, supposedly it was this network of, you know, your satanic pedophiles that were too big to prosecute, and so on and so forth.
Resurgence of Satanic Panic: Why?
00:13:23
Speaker
And people basically said, oh, for goodness sake, this stuff, nothing here is new. You're bringing up things that have been debunked and disproved 30 or 40 years ago. What are you even doing? And the only thing, the only other thing I think that appears to be you at the moment is, of course, the
00:13:42
Speaker
the QAnon style of conspiracy theories that are around.
00:13:48
Speaker
more prominent in the media, let's say, these evil liberal elites, whatever, with the evil pedophiles drinking adrenochrome and sacrificing children to the lizard people or what have you. So that's possibly why it could have got a little more traction now, but really it just does seem quite bizarre that now of all times people decided to start talking about satanic panic again as though it were a thing.
00:14:13
Speaker
I mean, sorry, satanic panic were a thing, the things people were panicking about were not a thing. Yeah, and it's particularly galling given that there is quite the literature on exactly what went wrong in the satanic panic, the way in which authorities
00:14:30
Speaker
basically ignored inconsistent evidence on the basis that they assumed the thing that they were looking into was occurring rather than actually questioning could this thing have occurred in in the first place and it led to a lot of damage to families around the place and also arguably
00:14:51
Speaker
because of that panic also contributed to a culture where we didn't take actual abuse claims seriously because people then after the satanic panic of the 80s assumed that a lot of abuse complaints were related to that panic and thus they weren't assessed according to the evidence. So the panic kind of cut both ways.
00:15:15
Speaker
Yes, all round a depressing affair that I really, really wish we could say we'd seen the back of, but maybe that's not the case.
Somerton Man: Identification?
00:15:25
Speaker
But one thing we may have seen the back of is the Somerton Man. See how I made that work? You did, although that's probably not actually true as we'll get into it, but there's been a development. Yeah, there has been. So we've talked about the Somerton Man a few times on the podcast, most notably
00:15:43
Speaker
when we talked about the third series of the Lovecraft investigations and that the Somerton Man is a plot point in one of the episodes in season three of the Lovecraft investigation where they're kind of talking about things which
00:15:58
Speaker
hint towards something weird going on in the world which aren't directly related to the case but the writer's so keen to bring this stuff in. Somerton Man gets a reference here. Now Somerton Man is a famous Australian John Doe. Do Australians refer to their unidentified corpses as John Does? That's a kind of American
00:16:19
Speaker
Bruce Stowe. Bruce Smith. He's a famous Bruce Smith from Australia, who was found at Summerton Beach in Adelaide on December the 1st, 1948. And he was wearing an American suit. He had an American comb in his pocket. And we know it was an American comb, because the comb was, I'll use the American word, aluminium.
00:16:42
Speaker
no aluminum aluminum aluminum yes yeah that's the you know it was a miracle yes yeah it was an aluminum cone not an aluminium cone as we would say in the colonies an aluminum cone and he was wearing as a he was wearing an american suit and he had a piece of paper inside his pocket with the words tamam shunt which means finished in persian and that was really
00:17:09
Speaker
all they knew about him it was a corpse on a beach kind of almost laid out he was just lying there arms across his chest in quite good condition no no visibility very good condition yeah not even not even particularly sort of ruffled or anything
00:17:27
Speaker
No, he just laid down to die and then died as mysteriously as he lived, which is because we didn't know who he was. And now people think we do. There's been this ongoing mystery since 1948.
00:17:43
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, the longer they looked into the case, the more mysterious it seemed to get. There was also a ticket stub on or near him, in which the police sort of used to check the local train station, and they found a suitcase at the train station that they were pretty sure was his. When they looked at it, it only had clothing in it, and the clothing had no tags on it.
00:18:12
Speaker
Although interestingly, some of the items of clothing did have a name written on them, but for some reason they think that either was... they never took that seriously. I forget the exact reasoning, but they didn't seem to think that was particularly significant.
00:18:29
Speaker
The scrap of paper with Timam should print it on it. They matched it to the final page of the Roubaix Art of Omar Khayyam, a book of poetry by
00:18:42
Speaker
I can't even remember now, translation into English or Persian poetry, and particularly they could even match it to this specific edition of it because some editions I think spelled Timam wrong or something like that, and so they could say quite clearly which book it had been taken from a copy of, but that's still the
00:19:04
Speaker
didn't tell me anything about the man. They did an autopsy on him, of course, to find out how he died. The autopsy suggested internally he looked like he'd been poisoned, but there were no signs of anything like vomiting or what have you that you might be led. You would usually expect to see when a person had been poisoned, suggesting that possibly it was a very fast acting poison, if that were the case.
00:19:30
Speaker
Then there was the mysterious book, a man who had his car parked just nearby at the time, who always left it parked with the windows open, showed up at a police station saying, hey, somebody dropped this book into the open window of my car.
00:19:48
Speaker
And assuming that it was related to the case, they had to look and found that on the back page of the book, there is what appears to be an encrypted message, several lines of what looked to be just random sequences of letters, one of the lines crossed out, whatever that's supposed to mean. And so it became serious enough that one of the leading theories was, oh, this guy must have been some sort of spy, like if he's got secret messages, and he seems to be making sure he has no identifying marks on him or anything like that.
00:20:16
Speaker
then maybe he was up to no good and caught up with him or who knows what. There were various other figures who got caught up in it. As well as this mysterious message, the book also contained an unlisted telephone number.
00:20:31
Speaker
which they eventually traced to a nurse who lived nearby called Jessica Thompson. When police interviewed her, she said she had no idea who this guy was or why her number would be in this book. But then there's a whole lot of investigation into her that there's evidence that she did own a copy of the Roubaix art of Omar Khayyam.
00:20:52
Speaker
And she knew someone else who seemed to be connected to the case. In 2013, Australia in 60 Minutes did an investigation into the case during which they interviewed Jessica Thompson's daughter. And the daughter said that her mother had said to her, confided in her that she'd actually lied to the police that she did know this man
00:21:16
Speaker
and claimed that he was, quote, known to a level higher than the police force, but no more detail than that. There are a couple of other mysterious deaths in 1945 and 1949. In particular, there was a guy near somewhere around there and died in 1945 and was found with the Rubayat of Omar Khayyam on his chest. Mysterious, just the further you looked, the more weird stuff showed up.
00:21:41
Speaker
And in part, in part that's because no one knew who the Somerton Man was, let alone how he had died or why he had died.
Unanswered Questions on Somerton Man
00:21:52
Speaker
Anything which even just tangentially related to his supposed existence.
00:21:59
Speaker
suddenly became evidence of, well, this might be linked to it, this might be linked to it. I mean, the book is a great example of this. So a person finds a book in their car, they're relatively proximate to the discovery of a corpse,
00:22:15
Speaker
And in the absence of evidence, people go, well, this might be connected to the case. Of course, it might not be connected. We've got no reason to think it is. But in an absence of evidence, you start entertaining other theories going, well, we don't know much. And investigating this might give us a link that tells us something more about the other case. And so much of the Somerton Man stuff is a case of people going, well, we don't have much evidence about this thing.
00:22:43
Speaker
But there are these other things going on that might be connected with might being really stressed there. So if we solve those, maybe if they're connected to Somerton Mann, we can solve the mystery of who he is. Although that's not how they solve the case, is it?
00:23:00
Speaker
No. So Professor Derek Abbott from the University of Adelaide claims that he has identified the Somerton man. So after they applied some years ago to exhume his body to do DNA testing, and that was approved and he was
00:23:17
Speaker
was exhumed in 2021. Apparently the formaldehyde that he had been embalmed with, they reckon probably would have made, but by this time, like he's been in the ground for 70 years, whatever's left of him probably wouldn't have been in much of a state, but apparently they were able to, there were some hairs left. They did a plaster cast of him. It wasn't not technically a death mask, but essentially that they did a plaster cast of his face and shoulders.
00:23:47
Speaker
I think, so that they could continue to show a likeness of him to people after he'd been buried. But there were a couple of his hairs left in the plaster of that. And so using DNA extracted from his hairs, Professor Abbott, with the help of American genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, were able to do a bit of DNA sleuthing. So apparently they compared the DNA they extracted from his hair to a DNA database.
00:24:14
Speaker
found a distant relative of his in this database, then worked backwards through that guy's family tree, looking for someone, the appropriate level of remove from him, who was around at about the same time. And they basically were looking for a guy who appeared to be around in his 40s, so someone who would have been born in the early 1900s,
00:24:39
Speaker
And in particular, they were looking for someone who there was no record of their death at the time. Obviously, you know, if there was an official record of the person having died, well, then you'd know they probably weren't the one that showed up mysteriously on a beach in Adelaide. And so having done all that, they believe they have identified Somerton Mann as a man called Carl Webb.
00:25:00
Speaker
otherwise known as Charles Webb from Melbourne. Now, Mr. Webb was an electrical engineer. Apparently, there is no death record of him. I think that was one of the main things. He is a member of the right family. He's the right age.
00:25:15
Speaker
And there's no record of when he did supposedly die. All we know about him really is he was married. He left his wife in 1947, a year before he died, if that is him. After he left his wife, he kind of disappeared to the extent that by 1951, his wife, having not heard from him since 1947, filed for an official divorce.
00:25:40
Speaker
They suspect, sort of as to the question of if he was from Melbourne, why would his body have been an Adelaide? That is the other side of the country and Australia is very large. They did point out that his wife had moved down to South Australia and Adelaide was sort of on the way, so possibly he was trying to track her down, having left her previously.
00:26:02
Speaker
Now, it's a shame, it's a shame that they didn't find the DNA in one of Webb's children, because then you could say they used his hairs to track his ears. You could say that, and then I would have to beat you quite viciously, so it's a good thing. I mean, a completely different country, so could have got away with it. But yeah, of course, that wasn't the way.
00:26:28
Speaker
Now it's not unfortunately. All this does basically is shift the mystery because now if this turns out to be the identity of Summerton Man and as we hinted at at the top of the story people are still in doubt that this is the actual explanation of the event because all we have is this DNA connection
00:26:50
Speaker
there is a worry that the DNA is degraded so far that actually it's probably not it may not be a reliable match although it does turn out that Webb has some of the characteristics that would fit the story quite well he disappears at the right time he isn't seen after 1948 so if it isn't Webb then you also have to ask what happened to Charles Webb but that also is the question of if he is Somerton Mann who was Charles Webb?
00:27:16
Speaker
And what was he doing in Adelaide wearing American clothes, carrying an American comb? Because aluminum combs were not a common thing in the Southern Hemisphere at that time, which is actually what makes his comb so weird. It's not a case of police officers. Oh, it's an aluminum comb. It's a case of, hey, this comb is made out of a strange, mysterious metal that's non-magnetic. What sorcery is this, said the
00:27:44
Speaker
Australian detective back in 1948. In 1948, yes. Word for word. Word for word. Yeah, so I mean, in a way, it really, like, if it had turned out that they'd matched it to a guy who was a known agent of a foreign state, or, you know, somebody who had some
00:28:05
Speaker
some connection to espionage or organized crime or something else that might get a person killed, then maybe that would give us some sort of an idea. But as it turns out, we think we know who the guy is, and he's just some guy. So what was he doing? All the questions about what he was doing there, why he had that thing and why he had that note in his pocket, how he died, why he died,
00:28:29
Speaker
It doesn't answer any of those questions. So there's still a lot of mystery left. An article I read talked to Carolyn Bilsborough, who did a documentary called Missing Pieces about Somerton Nairn. And so she was very excited to hear this. And as looking into it, she said, she says, my feeling has always been that it's been suicide.
Suicide Theory on Somerton Man
00:28:55
Speaker
That Rubai art was known as a kind of suicide handbook, apparently.
00:29:00
Speaker
And yeah, she says basically, she's already looking into.
00:29:04
Speaker
old documents to see if she can find anything out about Charles Webb. She says there's almost a sequel film here, not of who is Somerton Mann, but now it's the mysterious case of Charles Webb. So there is still quite a lot to learn in this case, and it isn't really much less mysterious for being able to put a name to the face. If indeed that is the right name to put to the face in the first place.
00:29:30
Speaker
Yes, I mean, these folks seem fairly confident, but I don't know anything really about tracing DNA and genealogy and stuff like that. It reminds me somewhat of when they claimed they solved the murder of Olof Palmer.
00:29:47
Speaker
a few years ago, and it was case closed. And then people go, it's really not case closed. We now have someone, they go, well, the evidence is pretty good. It's X. And people are going, yeah, there's still big questions as to exactly if it was X, why was it X? And also, X is not a reliable narrator of their own life. And in the same case, we've got DNA evidence as Charles Webb,
00:30:11
Speaker
And people are going, yeah, but the DNA is not great. It's not great. I mean, yeah, circumstantially, Charles Webb fits the bill quite nicely, although it doesn't explain some of the weird features. But let's not declare it case closed just yet.
00:30:27
Speaker
In fact, let's say it's case open. Indeed. It is interesting that if we were to get a bit more detail, it would be interesting to see how many, if any, of these features of the case that seem most mysterious turn out to be nothing, turn out to be, oh, that was actually just a coincidence that has nothing to do with the case. And we've been poring over it in connection. But really, there was nothing there.
00:30:53
Speaker
I think that's one thing that I would find quite interesting, even if it turns out it is just a guy drank poison, arranged himself neatly, drank poison because he was sad he'd left his wife and ruined his life or something, and that's all there is to it. It would still be interesting to see just how all the other aspects of the case could be written off as things that we gave significance to rather than actually being significant.
Interpreting Evidence Cautiously
00:31:22
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, as I say, the dropped book thing, I think is one of the most suspicious bits of evidence used in connection with Somerton Mann, in that it's, it's proximate. And yeah, I mean, sure, it might be, it might be related, or it just might not be.
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, people really did seem to be telling a story to themselves in that case of imagining a guy is maybe on the run, he's got his significant book before people finally catch up with him and he meets his end, he quickly chucks it in a nearby car to hide it from his pursuers or something, but that is just a narrative people are inventing from whole cloth. So yeah, I'll be interested to see if anything more comes of this case.
00:32:06
Speaker
But do you know what another case that something more of has come? I think that's grandically correct.
Loch Ness Monster: Possible?
00:32:12
Speaker
I mean, it is grandically correct, but it's also not in any way elegant. Are you going to tell me something about the Loch Ness Monster? Is that what you're going to tell me about? The goddamn Loch Ness Monster.
00:32:24
Speaker
the Loch Ness Monster, which of course we most recently talked about in episode 350, because the numbers 350 and the Loch Ness Monster are inextricably bound, as anybody knows. That's a pop culture reference that is as timeless as time itself, and is widely known as oxygen anyway. Why is it widely known as oxygen?
00:32:48
Speaker
Everybody knows oxygen. Do you say you don't? Do you not breathe the stuff? It's everywhere. Talk sense. This is nonsense. I won't stand for it anymore. Yes, so the Loch Ness Monster is real. A university has declared the Loch Ness Monster is quote unquote plausible. Now plausible is an interesting word.
00:33:09
Speaker
It is. It's one of those sentences where you end up going, it is technically correct. The Loch Ness Monster is plausible. It's just, it's missing quite a lot of detail. Quite a lot of detail. Because the story here is
00:33:29
Speaker
People have, one of the theories behind the Loch Ness Monster is that it's a surviving plesiosaur or some kind of aquatic dinosaur. So the claim that people have looked at, somehow plesiosaurs have survived the tens of millions of years, actually it was even longer since the...
00:33:49
Speaker
It's one of these things where you go, yeah, hundreds of millions of years, somehow a family of plesiosaurs living in a small freshwater lake in Scotland have managed to maintain their lineage for 100 million years also.
00:34:07
Speaker
And one of the arguments against that hypothesis has always been, aha, but plesiosaurs are saltwater dinosaurs. They don't live in fresh water. And the thing about Loch Ness is that it's a freshwater lake. Now, the response to that has always been, well, actually, Loch Ness is
00:34:27
Speaker
a freshwater lake, but it is connected to the sea, so very deep beneath the lake there's a set of tunnels which lead towards the ocean. Although by a set of tunnels, we're not talking large tunnels that plesia soils can swim through, we're talking about a kind of a network of small porous tunnels which allow water to get in from the
00:34:50
Speaker
the ocean. But nonetheless, people say, look, there is, there is a mechanism to explain how maybe, maybe in the very depths of Loch Ness, there's enough salt there that these these soils could live down there. And they just surface from time to time to breathe, and they go back down to their saltwater dens.
00:35:06
Speaker
Now new evidence has come out from that, contrary to what we thought we knew, plesiosaurs can be found and were living in freshwater river system. So we found plesiosaur fossils now in Morocco, in an area that was entirely a freshwater basin and river system, showing that technically, if Nessie is a plesiosaur,
00:35:36
Speaker
Then Nessie could live in Loch Ness because Nessie wouldn't need saltwater. Ipsophacto, the Loch Ness Monster, is plausible if we assume Loch Ness Monster is a plesiosaur and we assume plesiosaurs have managed to survive in a small inland lake for 100 million years or more.
00:35:59
Speaker
Yes, so that plausible, I mean, plausible is, it's supposed to be sort of a position somewhere between sort of you've got on one end, you've got possible where yes, anything's possible, you can barely write off anything is completely impossible. And then at the other end, you've sort of got probable, like it's probably actually true and sort of plausible, I always kind of think of plausible being more towards the probably end of the scale. But this is very much more towards the
00:36:29
Speaker
possible end of the scale. When they say plausible, what they mean really is not impossible on one particular set of grounds that you used to say it was impossible. And also adding in a whole bunch of other caveats as well. Yes, it's an odd claim, which I suspect is a classic case of a clickbait headline.
00:36:53
Speaker
Well, yes, yeah, really it is, I think. It's an interesting discovery in and of itself that these people have found plesiosaur fossils in, it's actually in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, which a hundred odd million years ago was not a desert, was a flourishing freshwater river system. So it's an interesting find, you know, we found fossils in an area where we didn't think those fossils actually were.
00:37:21
Speaker
But yeah, you could probably get a bit of more attention if you say plesiosaurs. Oh, didn't they say Loch Ness Monster was a plesiosaur? And the sex of the story up, as it were. And I'm not interested in your sexy Loch Ness Monster stories. I like a good Christian God-fearing plesiosaur stories, quite frankly. None of your smut, none of your Loch Ness Monster filth, quite frankly.
00:37:45
Speaker
I mean, that is the reason why Jesus died for their sins, not our sins, their sins.
00:37:52
Speaker
the sin to the plesiosaur, because you might think they're God-fearing Christians, but those plesiosaurs, oh, they were some of the most depraved dinosaurs in the next. What do you think those next were for? It doesn't be a thing about it. Yeah, so basically, to sum up, out of the many, many reasons to think that the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist, the idea it was a plesiosaur so it couldn't have lived in a freshwater lake is no longer one of those reasons.
00:38:22
Speaker
but there are still lots and lots and lots and lots of other reasons to think that the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist.
00:38:32
Speaker
You already bloodied it. It would have had to have survived in a small area for a couple of hundred million years with a small population, not big enough, too small to be a breeding population. There's a couple. Fine, fine. You've hoisted me by my own petard. You've hoisted me by my own petard.
00:38:53
Speaker
bit of petard hoisting, hoising. And you call yourself a godfaring Christian? I don't actually, so it all works out. That's true. I've been hoisted again by my petard twice. It's a double hoist, or a double petard. Or I was hoisted by one petard, landed on another petard, and got hoisted again.
00:39:16
Speaker
Linguistics pedant, I must point out hoist is already past tense. It's Shakespearean past tense of the verb hoies, meaning to be thrown into the air. So you don't need to say hoisted if you want to make yourself sound like a complete wanker. And you know I do. Josh, I'm a philosopher. I always sound like a complete wanker. Well, there we go. Well, then put that to good use then and tell me about Alzheimer's disease.
00:39:44
Speaker
I forget, why are we talking about Alzheimer's disease? Oh, and it's an Alzheimer's gag right off the start. You're on fire. Keep it going. And the thing is, I'm entitled to make Alzheimer's gaze because Alzheimer's actually runs in my family. So the story I'm about to tell is something which actually does frighten me ever so slightly.
Alzheimer's Research Fraud?
00:40:05
Speaker
So this is a story in two parts. So the first part is,
00:40:10
Speaker
so there's a new drug on the market called simu simu phalan simu phalan yes simu phalan i wish people would give drugs ordinary names like derrick or something like you know francis you know i'm i'm taking two doses of francis and then i'll i'll be fine no i'm taking simu phalan i mean really what does that even mean so there's a new drug on the market which
00:40:38
Speaker
people were a little bit suspicious about because it was being marketed as a new way of treating Alzheimer's. People were concerned the researchers behind the drug might be engaging in fraud and that the initial results from the studies indicated no real effect.
00:41:02
Speaker
And so Matthew Schrag was brought in. He's a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University. And we said, can you look at the data here and see whether it actually got statistically significant results? And in part, this is due to the fact that last year, and we mentioned this on the podcast, a new drug treating Alzheimer's was approved by the FDA.
00:41:29
Speaker
and people were outraged by its FDA approval because it appeared to have no real effect on the treatment of Alzheimer's with horrendous side effects. So if there was any effect on Alzheimer's, it was basically outweighed by the horrendous side effects that patients would get from it. And so there were resignations from various
00:41:52
Speaker
including members of the FDA, because they thought the entire approval process was in some way corrupted by funding monies in the background. So there's a lot of attention being paid towards Alzheimer's drugs, and Schrag was brought in to investigate whether this new one actually does any work.
00:42:13
Speaker
Now this is where we get to the second and disturbing part because the story basically isn't about this new drug, it's about the entire basis for Alzheimer's research and thus the basis for the treatment for Alzheimer's. Because as part of his investigation into is this new drug going to work, Schreig went back to the original research which basically posits
00:42:39
Speaker
that the cause of Alzheimer's is a certain plaque which is found in brain tissue. So he went back and looked at the original research paper from 2006 which appeared to show that a specific amyloid beta protein
00:42:58
Speaker
actually gets into the brain tissue as a plaque and causes Alzheimer's by basically blocking chemical receptors. This paper is called literally a specific amyloid beta protein assembly in the brain impairs memory into plaques and Alzheimer's. It was published in 2006 in nature. Its lead researcher is Sylvain Lesnar.
00:43:23
Speaker
And Schrag went back and looked at this paper as part of his research to work out where this new drug worked, and he discovered that at least 70 of the images in this original paper were manipulated and doctored to the point where parts of the images were cut and paste of other parts of the images.
00:43:46
Speaker
and some of the profiles had been doctored such that they indicated results that weren't in the original reference images. And so Schrag is going, this indicates that the entire research project into treatment around Alzheimer's may well be based around an academic fraud, which might actually explain why none of the drugs we've developed subsequent to 2006 work
00:44:16
Speaker
because we might be trying to treat a problem which is not occurring in Alzheimer's patients. Which I guess, yeah, raises the question then when they're asking, you know, is the people, the researchers making these drugs engaging in fraud,
00:44:32
Speaker
that does then seem to raise the possibility that they're acting in good faith, that they are producing a drug which according to the research should work, and yet it still did seem that it wasn't working very well. So there is possibly still a question about, it's all well and good to say this should be working according to everything we know, but the fact is it wasn't working, so why were they, you know, there's still a question I guess to answer about why they would be
00:45:01
Speaker
trying to get approval for this and make money off of it. Well, I mean, in the Adderheim case, the argument was both there is a statistically small change, which many researchers who weren't promoting the drug were going, yeah, it's so statistically small that it's probably not in any way anything other than random chance.
00:45:23
Speaker
And B, it's better to have a potential treatment out there than no treatment at all. And an awful lot seems to be resting on that latter claim. Better that there be a treatment you can apply, rather than no treatment. And other people are going, yeah, giving people false hope is not a good idea in these situations. And so this
00:45:43
Speaker
this new drug, once again, there is a small change, which might just be happenstance. And once again, there's a feeling that we should be getting drugs out there because maybe if they're applied in a mass scale, because there are tens of millions of people with Alzheimer's out there, I might be one of them eventually.
00:46:06
Speaker
It's better that once you start applying the treatment to a larger population, you actually may see bigger change. But if Schrag's research, which has been being spread here by science, the publication here is to be believed, it looks like the entire basis for the research program and loss of treatments is the result of fraud. And so there's now a very open question
00:46:34
Speaker
as to whether the specific amyloid beta protein that people claim is responsible for Alzheimer's is even present in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Because there have been some subsequent studies where people have really struggled to locate these plaques in people with quite advanced Alzheimer's. And there might be a reason behind that. It might be because it's not the mechanism at all.
00:47:01
Speaker
So yes, that lead researcher, Sylvain Lesnay, isn't talking at the moment, from what I understand, but the university is looking into it.
00:47:14
Speaker
and apparently others of his papers are under suspicion now as well. Some have had corrections because the images in those papers were quote unquote processed incorrectly. Yeah, so there could be some evidence that other bits of data he's produced in the past might also be the result of manipulation and the doctoring of data. Now this might be a case
00:47:43
Speaker
where someone is fairly sure their research conclusions are correct and they're simply not getting the results that they should do in the lab but they're convinced they've found the right mechanism so they feel that quite rightfully we just manipulate this data here we can continue the research and get confirmation elsewhere but at the same time that's also
00:48:05
Speaker
not a justification for publishing doctored research. Even if you think you're right, if your data doesn't indicate you're right, you shouldn't change the data to support your conclusions, you should go willing to do more experiments.
00:48:21
Speaker
that is basically doing science wrong. That's not how you meant to do it. And yet this has happened in the past. So Eddington's tests of Einstein's claim about the speed of light where Eddington was measuring the speed of light, he did not get the results he expected from Einstein's equations. So he doctored the results
00:48:44
Speaker
in his publication on the belief that his measuring equipment was wrong and Einstein was right. And it turned out Eddington was correct, his measuring equipment was incorrect. But he still published false results, and people keep pointing out that in the philosophy of science that
00:49:02
Speaker
That's not a good idea, especially given it does lead to a loss of trust in scientists. Yes. Well, I mean, people going
Historical Scientific Frauds
00:49:11
Speaker
all the way back to Hackel's Embryos, if you know that one, that was something they were a great 80s band. One of the only parts of the 80s I liked was Hackel's Embryos.
00:49:23
Speaker
But unfortunately, at the same time, that was a case, this is just from memory now, Ernst Hakel was a guy who had the theory, why don't I look him up properly while we do this? He was a guy, he had the theory that
00:49:40
Speaker
As an embryo developed, it would go through the phases of nature. A human embryo at one point would look like the embryo of an animal earlier on in its evolutionary history or something like that.
00:50:03
Speaker
He had a bunch of theories about how embryos develop, and to prove these theories, he produced a bunch of diagrams of the embryos of various different animals at various stages of development. Unfortunately, it turned out he basically faked. His drawings were not accurate, and he deliberately
00:50:25
Speaker
done them, misrepresented them to make his theory look more plausible when it wasn't. Now, this was quickly looking at the 1892. 1892, he produced his fraudulent drawings. To this day, anti-evolutionists will still bring up Hackel's embryos as an example of why scientists who think about
00:50:46
Speaker
embryonic development and evolution and processes and things like that are wrong. Because look at Hackel, he lied his arse off. How can we trust science today? And the reply to that is, well, the people actually did find out about Hackel fairly quickly. In this case, it's taken, what, 16 years for people to rumble this guy, which is not good. But over the course of scientific, of the history of science, it's not that long, I guess.
00:51:15
Speaker
But obviously still much better if it had never happened in the first place. Well, precisely. As someone who might have to take Alzheimer's drugs in the future, I kind of wish we'd had a 16 year lead time rather than starting again from scratch. Exactly. And on that depressing note, we're out of news.
Podcast Wrap-Up & Teaser
00:51:32
Speaker
which is a little depressing in itself. Well, we're out of news to the main episode because we're going to talk a little bit about Alex Jones in the patron bonus episode because people who are avid Alex Jones fans, and I have to ask why if you are, but if you are an avid Alex Jones fan, you'll be aware that the Sandy Hook Deformation trials are going on in Austin, Texas right now.
00:51:59
Speaker
and Alex Jones is in court where the jury is working out the damages. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and also wander over to infowars.com and see what Infowars is saying about this dastardly time for poor old Alex Jones. Or not saying is the case maybe. But yes, I think that is the case.
00:52:25
Speaker
If you would like to hear about that and you're a patron well I got good news for you because you don't have to do anything you'll just get that bonus bonus episode wherever you get bonus episodes from. It was a complete mystery to me up until fairly recently to be quite honest where bonus episodes came from but there we go. If you want to be a patron go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy you can sign yourself up for as little as a dollar a month
00:52:51
Speaker
and you'll get these bonus episodes just flying at you in a volume you can probably barely, barely contain.
00:52:58
Speaker
And if you don't want to be a patron and listen to what Alex Jones is up to, frankly I would not blame you for not wanting to know what Alex Jones is up to at the moment. And that's your prerogative and it's all good because you're our audience and thanks for that anyway. So that's all the news that was fit to report on this week. Recording as we are on the 28th of July in the year of our Lord 2022.
00:53:23
Speaker
but a wholesome Christian-ness in there again, just to get the taste of the filthy, sinful, lochiness monsters out of our mouths. So with that out of the way, I don't really think there's anything else to do. So what else is there to say? I'm Josh Addison. This has been the news. Good night. And I like to suck plesiosaurs. Dirty, dirty, dirty.
00:53:46
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor, M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons- sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please, do consider joining our Patreon.
00:54:11
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.