Monthly Spooky | Swallowed by a Whale, Abandoned Morgues, and Secrets of the Cosmonauts!

0:00 A kayaker gets swallowed up by a giant whale. What secrets lie in an abandoned hospital's morgue? Did sasquatch kill two hunters? And the secrets of the cosmonauts revealed? Get comfortable, Turn off the lights. It's monthly spooky. Hello, my spookies. Wow, Michelle just starts yawning the moment the show starts. I quiet about it. Well, yeah, but I can see you.

0:42 Yeah, you're there. We go next time. You know, the audience isn't the only person. Okay, good, Yeah, just put your hand over it. Yeah, you're not the only person. Uh Like, the audience isn't the only person that matters. I have feelings too, It's just sorry. The moment I start my opening, you're just yawning a huge. Please because it's gonna make me yawn again. I feel like you should have went even further up. She's covering up. I could see. I know you're doing it. You should have done the thing where you went? Were you just like pett That wasn't even a real yawn? Did Okay, let's test this.

1:22 Maybe I don't know. Because I can make myself yawn on command. There it is forever now. That was a really yawn. You want to know the weirdest thing, you know, how I discovered I could yawn on command, because if I imagine someone yawning, I have like a one in four chance it'll just make me on the first time. Well, you're yawning a lot. Do you mean a doctor? Maybe? Well, I'm sorry I bore you so deeply. Cell, I've never yawned because I was bored before. I don't even think that's a real thing.

2:07 I yawned when I'm bored. Oh well, now it's I know it's a real thing. I feel bad for like half the audience who is like yawning uncontrollably violently right now because of us talking about it. Even I'm struggling not to yawn now that good duty. I can't help. But you're the one who started this, I know. I'm Enrique Kuto here with my good buddy, Cell, and uh we are uh we're we're talking. It's Monthly Spooky. She completely threw me off, Cell, geez uh. For those who are new to Monthly Spooky, it's kind of a month end of the month wrap up show here at Weekly Spooky, where we read some creepy news stories and we talk about a topic, and often that topic is very hard for me to decide on, especially as we go into over twenty some episodes. But I did pick a topic that I had never heard of before, and I don't know if you have either, shell that I find really creepy and I'm excited to dive into.

3:11 Have you ever heard of the Lost Cosmonauts conspiracy theory? I don't think so. Well, we're going to talk about that a whole lot. Get and. Where did they get lost? Where do you think store? Yes, friend, we got way through space. But we're going to talk about the Lost Cosmonauts conspiracy theory. I found a source for this that isn't Wikipedia, which means it might be like skewed and full of like conspiratorial thinking, and that's kind of what I'm hoping for. But before we get to that cell, you've got to stop yawning. I have been. I stopped talking about it, Can you stop doing it?

4:00 Now? And all it's all I can think about. I'm really sorry, Chelle. Well, as this show is airing, I'm actually will be in Philadelphia hanging out with you, So that's cool, right, Sorry? Maybe you're like, oh no, why. I did appear on your podcast last week. Did Yeah? Yeah, Michelle explains, Anime Poorly is the name of the show, and it was fun watching you be so uncomfortable doing in like a conversational podcast.

4:41 I mean, not what it normally is. Well, I meant when I say you doing one, what I mean is like you were in charge of a conversational podcast as opposed to a monologue, which is mostly what your podcast is. Yeah. Yeah, And believe me, I get the difference because my main podcast, Weekly Spooky, is a monol podcast. Yeah, so I really do understand. I think at one point in the show, I even said solo podcasting is a hell of a drug because it's like a totally different thing. And I like solo podcasts. I mean, obviously, I've dedicated almost six years of my life to one, so I must enjoy it. But there is something to be said for sitting down and talking with another human shaped person when they're done yawning. So, but I had a really good time talking with you about Banana Fish, the anime series that you've been covering on. Michelle explains Anime Poorly, and I enjoyed sharing my insights with you, and it was just a really good time. So if you guys haven't checked out Michelle's podcast yet and you like anime or even don't like anime and just want to hate listen to it, which Michelle.

5:49 Thinks is the only reason people listen. Anyway, you can check her out it Michelle explains Anime poorly over on any podcasting app and give her a listen. Yeah, and I promised that I cried multiple times in the season, all the times, so. There were some solid cries. Yeah, really, like I had to go back and edit some of the sniffing out of several of them. So. It is too much. I see how it is. So you you save all the good crying for your podcast and only leave us the yawns. Oh, there she goes, There she.

6:30 Goes, Hey, I can cry if you want. We just have to talk about something that makes me really upset. Okay, it's not pronounced schookle, it's shully. Oh but now I'm just angry, damn it. See I don't have that. I don't have the sweet spot just yet. All right, but oh but no, uh so, yeah, check out Michelle explains Anime poorly and also in I think it's two weeks you start covering eighty six. That's the next the next anime series you'll be talking about. Yep on March thirteenth, I guess actually, and that'll be fun because it's all about, you know, genocide and stuff. So yeah, you got to get why not go from you know, you want to go with like the the Key Japan tropes, so you know, you go from like constant sexual violence to genocide. It's good, it's good stuff.

7:25 It's good. It's nice because they don't overlap, Like, it's not genocide and sexual violence. It's just just. Yeah, that would be too historically accurate. Yeah, So, but I was thinking, I was like, maybe I should just do horribly upsetting things from now, because that's obviously what I like. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Also, I want to mention while we're here, because I just got the official date. On March first, at around noon, we'll be doing myself and my buddy Dave from Do You Even Movie will be doing a live stream. We're going to finally do a new live stream. It'll be at least twelve hours long. It'll be on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Live. But I recommend watching on YouTube because it's the easiest and You can find out more by going to Weeklyspooky dot com slash live. It'll take you to the YouTube page for the inevitable stream and you can set a reminder and all that stuff so you can tune in. We'd love to have listeners of Weekly Spooky and Monthly Spooky and everything come and hang out.

8:30 I don't do nearly enough live events for everybody to come and hang out and interact directly, so I'm gonna try to up that a little bit. The big thing is it was hard to promote because you would be like, I'm gonna be live at this time, but then how do you get people there? How do you get people to be able to remember because it's you know, it's not that easy. So I found a way to have YouTube send you a reminder directly, so all I had to do was create the event way in advance, which I had never done before. So with this technology in mind, I'm going to try to do more Weekly Spooky live things in general, not just the twelve hour live streams with Dave where we play video games and goof off, but we'll also take phone calls. We're gonna take of course chats, and we'll be raising money to try to cover some more of my veterinary final expenses and stuff like that. So really would appreciate it. If you guys join, it would be really cool. Michelle won't because she is too cool to hang out, but I mean whatever.

9:35 I mean, yeah, but damn no, I'll try to be there for a little while because it's always like you're like, I have to be doing something that doesn't require me to like have sound, you know, like I can't like record something all I want. Yeah, yeah, you, but I mean you could. It would just be really confusing if it was just in your headphones. I mean I guess I could see what happens and like just that could be like this is the podcast. It doesn't make sense because I was also listening to another podcast. Oh man, did I ever tell you I tried to learn how to use auditory teleprompter? I think so, Yeah, I almost nailed it. It's where you speak immediately after hearing something.

10:21 Yeah. I can do that. Yeah, I can do it for a little while, but I've never done it like to the level that they do it, like to do stand up shows and stuff. Yeah, I mean i'd like it's like a fun thing that I do sometimes when I listen to the radio, I just oh, okay, now after they talk, I talk and see if I can keep up, because I learned that people who have like who are getting Alzheimer's can't do that. So it's good. Oh so now you want to know, it's like it's like during COVID you would smell a shoe every morning to make. Sure it's gonna make sure. Well, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with some spooky news. And we are back.

11:13 You know what time it is, Tell it's time for the spooky news, the spooky news. This first story I wanted us to start real strong, so of course it's Mirror dot co dot uk of course, But this one I got really excited about because it's about a ring doorbell camera, which I have a ring camera, and it's a it's been a blessing being able to know like who's at my door. Also, you know something I didn't think about until the other day. It also captures every interaction I have in my doorway, so if somebody were to ever show up at my house like say anything weird or kill me, I mean, thanks for going that far, but I know well, like if somebody were casing my home to rob it and pretended to be a worker, or if a salesperson got inappropriately pushy or something like that.

12:19 I have it all on camera, which is pretty cool. Yeah, but this headline reads I, except I clicked off of it. I captured chilling ring doorbell footage after moving to a house in the middle of nowhere. Wow, that's foreign to nowhere. The worst part about ring about ring cameras is they do try to guess what they're seeing for you, like whether it's movement or a person, And every now and then, not often, but every now and then mine will be wrong and say there is a person outside your door and the middle of the night, and scare the ever loving shit out of me, Like the little blink will come up and to say a person is at your door, Like and one time I looked and it was a spider, like right up on the less What were you gonna say?

13:11 I was gonna say. That's enough for me to just not want one. Honestly, Well, you. Could turn that off. I I just kind of like it because it's usually right, you know, usually it'll say movement if it's like a raccoon, or a cat or something. But a few times it's had a person because something had gotten way too close to the lens. Yeah, and was just kind of messing it up. Yeah. I got terrified by a spider and one time by just the web of a spider being blown in the wind. Okay, those scared the hell out of me, So all right, this one from me here dot Cota UK people have been left terrified by some chilling ring doorbell footage. The clip was recently shared to the Ghosts of London group on Facebook, where people around the world submit footage or pictures of something they believe to be supernatural.

14:00 So sub London then. Yeah, I guess it's yeah, it really should probably be London focused, I would guess. Yeah, or the ghosts of everywhere. I don't know. It's also just like people posting like reviews about like the new Dorrido's flavor. It's like, this is not about ghosts, this is not about London. Everything I know is a lie. Yeah. A recent post shows ring doorbell footage from a remote property in some woods. Although it may seem perfectly normal at first glance, eagle eyed viewers will notice a white figure ambling around in the background. The person who submitted the footage said, quote, please watch the top right hand side to see what is being pointed out here. I was notified this morning that my ring camera recorded this in the middle of the night. Oh that's not a good sign. The Facebook post they're referencing it is been removed.

14:56 It's like linked in the story. They didn't take a screenshot. They like linked and it's no longer available. Oh man, it's possible that that Facebook group went private because so many people were coming in because of the notoriety. It's possible. Yeah, quote just moved out to the middle of nowhere. I've gotten a creepy vibe at times, but this is unsettling. There are no neighbors around, and my house is on a fenced in hill that makes it impossible to get up to it. Well, impossible is a strong. No he got there. Yeah, that's number one. Number two, like, fences are a strong recommendation. They are not an actual They don't just purely stop you.

15:41 Oh yeah, I mean I was gonna say, well, what if it has like what if it's electrified and it has like razor wire, but still we. Need bob wire. It's got bob wire. I meant bob wire. Razor wire is way cooler and scarier. Yeah, it even sounds cooler and scar Yeah, you should get razor wire wrapped around your bicep. You know. I almost got razor wire on a tattoo when I was like eighteen. Of course you did. That was that cool? Still that just makes me that was like a thing pro wrestlers were doing in the two thousands. It's getting like barbed wire tattoos around their arm. I will, I will help pay for you to get razor wire tattooed around your arm. I would be so cool.

16:24 Don't don't tempt me because I do it. Yeah, but then I then people don't have to explain it to people. And I'll just say it was for my for my eighteen year old self. It was in honor of her, Yeah it was. It was in memory of her since she's dead, Yeah, forever dead. But no, I just I just find that funny. It fenced and makes it impossible to get up to. No, it's not impossible. It's difficult. Like I always say, boundaries and barriers work, but they don't work perfectly. That's kind of the like, that's why a cage has to. Be small, you know, like yeah, yeah.

17:04 Because otherwise you're gonna break through and it's surrounded by forrest. Any insight would be appreciated. See the fact that it's in the middle of nowhere is far more telling than they're being a fence, because that means people would really have to like deliberately get there in the first place. But it's one of those things where it's like, what does this house look like? Was it vacant for a long time? Because like there are things that people just might know about the house and be like, oh, we just go there and we like smoke things that are illegal, probably. Crack crack, crack crack cocaine. Yeah. The video has been viewed more than fifteen thousand times and it attracted plenty of comments. I can't find the video anymore unfortunately, or i'd show it to you.

17:48 I don't even believe there was a video. But whatever, damn man, you're getting you're getting spicy. Lately, one we've gotten comments from people saying that they like this new agro Machelle. No, I'm not joking. We have Oh my god, oh my god. No, Okay, I'm gonna stop. I don't I don't even know what changed, but I'll just it don't make it better. That means you can't change. That's awesome what one person commented, And that's enough for me to move. Another said quote, Yep, I'd move. That is freaky as all get out. One saving grace is it's not walking toward your house. That's because it came from the house. Yeah, it was going to It was going out to use a spectral outhouse. It had to. It had to, you know, have a wee. While there were those who thought the figure was a ghost, some thought there was a much less scary explanation. One said, quote, it does look to be someone going for a walk. Another said, doesn't look at all like a ghost to me. What it's that quote? Doesn't look at all like a ghost to me. I've seen my share. Yeah, I don't know about all that. Man. I was trying to find the video.

19:02 It is nowhere. Wow. Disappointing. This comes after a group of hikers made a spine chilling discovery after looking back at a selfie they took on a mountain trail. I remember that. I don't know if we cover that on the show where I just read about it. I have no idea The image also shared the Ghosts of London shows five people and a six ghostly figure nestled between two of their faces. That. Yeah, it's one of those like classic cursed images kind of things. Yeah. I don't know why the video is nowhere to be found.

19:44 It's kind of their fault for like not screenshotting at least a little bit. Yeah, there's no screenshot, there's no nothing. Pathetic. Wow, I like how I like these new story sources because it's like the clip shared on the Ghosts of London group of Ghosts is a link and I click on it. It's just tags of ghost on the mirror site. Oh but then it says on Facebook and Facebook is a highlightable or a hyperlink. I click on that and it's just a story for Mirrored I UK about Facebook. Yeah, I thought it would take me to. It though, like the hell man, No, Well, on that note, thanks for nothing mirroor dot code at UK. That's kind of the best part. It's like a mixed bag. You just never know what you're gonna get. Is it gonna be a coconut candy or is it gonna be like a dried turd? You just don't know. All you do know is it doesn't have a copy editor.

20:44 So I'm glad that you said coconut candy for like a good thing. That made me happy. Well, I actually do like coconut candy. But it's also like I think, no matter how much you dislike it, you would like it more than a turd. So it's a double when I do like coconut candy pretty good. So she gets some coconut candy for me when I come and visit. Okay, well, we're gonna take a quick break because we have even more spooky news right after this. All right, we're back, and now we're gonna go to a better source of news. I'm watching you try desperately not to yawn. That's the face you're making.

21:33 I'm not so hard, I know you are. That's what's worrisome. We're all very worried. Michelle. Oh my gosh, poor poor thing. Yeah. This story is from NPR and it came out in December, but I just found it. Two men were found dead from exp Wow, she yawned on dead. Well, I mean it's the best time. Two men were found dead from exposure. What is with you?

22:15 This is a news story. There's actually dead people why are you? What is happening? Okay, I'm good, it's fine. Take three right, Not that I'm editing this, but okay. Two men were found dead from exposure after looking for Sasquatch. Well that's not good. No, I like it. You don't laugh at sasquatch. You only left it dead and almost at exposure, but not at Sasquatch. Yeah, I mean Sasquatch isn't funny. I'm learning a lot about you. Two men from Oregon who went missing after going on a search for Sasquatch have been found dead, Washington state officials announced Saturday. The men, both from Portland, were reportedly miss reported missing by a family member on Christmas Day and were set to return from searching for the legendary creature in eastern Schamania County, which looks like ska Mania by the way, cool yeah it up, pick it up up up. On Christmas Eve, according to the county Sheriff's office, a search was launched and a vehicle associated with the two men was found off a road near Willard, Washington. After a three day search involving more than sixty people, the bodies of both men thirty seven and fifty nine, years old were found in Gifford Pinochet National Forest. Pinchot, not Pinochet. I was hoping I was about to say, like, Wow, that's the

23:46 coolest national forest ever. Say've ever Pinochet. It's Pinchot. Glifford Pinchot National Forest, located in southwestern part of Washington State. If I lived out there, I would call it Pinochet National Forest. Everywhere he went, I know, in a heavily wooded area. According to the Scamania County Sheriff's Office, it's literally spelled Ska Mania. It's s k A M A N. I am in a move there. It'll be like being in a ska band. Everywhere you go. There's nine horn players as well as you. Yay. That was always the joke. I saw a few ska bands, like small ska bands when I was doing shows and stuff, and that was always the joke. Is like when you go see a ska band, there's more people on stage than watching. Yep, yep, yeah, it's a lot of horn playing.

24:35 I like ska. I like ska too, It's just kind of it's niche. I guess people don't like Scott. I like Scott, and I love that meme that went around when it was like, how do you describe ska music. It's the sound that plays in a in a twelve year old's head when he gets extra mazzarellistics. Yeah, it totally is. So it's it's the sound of happiness. I mean sometimes. Well, their cause of death appears to be because of quote, exposure, based on weather conditions and ill preparedness, the Sheriff's office says. But also they were stomped to death and left covered in fur.

25:18 Wait what, but it was it was exposure. Though it was exposure the area had faced. Oh yeah, they were getting pummeled with bad weather right at the at the end of December too, the area had faced rounds of snow and rain with temperatures in the thirties across the Cascades, and the days leading up to the men being reported missing, well, I mean that that would do it. I mean, and they're hiking in the mountains, they're hiking hard country. They don't have the proper coats, jackets, tents, whatever. I guess it would have been smart to just kind of wait until you know the weather was better, I guess.

25:58 But it's Christmas time, so you gotta hunt for a Sasquatch. What do you guys do I mean, I don't live like close enough to a sasquatch hunt place, so we just kind of pretend we. Like I thought, you're saying, we just hunt for the Jersey Devil. Oh no, no, no, no, because he's dangerous, so we don't do that. I mean, Sasquatch might be dangerous. I don't think so, probably not, but I'm just saying, I mean he could be dangerous. I mean there are stories of him like throwing giant boulders at people's cars and stuff. But I never hear about the people getting killed. Well, yeah, when they're dead that what about these two? See this is the problem, the total denial. Well, I mean it could be that what really happened, I mean besides, like is that either is that he like held them and they could not escape in like a place that was cold, and then they died.

26:54 Oh man, you're actually making it really scary. What if they like hauled up somewhere and Sasquatch was like keeping them from getting back on the trail to go home. Yeah exactly. Yeah, because there actually. Be a conspiracy theorist because that's good. Yeah, yeah, because they're actually there. They should have been pretty prepared. They knew what the weather conditions were, but like they just didn't know that they were not going to be able to go home for that long. Hmmm. It's rough man. Yeah, and he does this all the time, and that's why people die in the wilderness. And that's why they like when you watch like wilderness survival videos, they're like, this is also obvious. It's because the squatch factor is what really gets people. Yeah, the squatch factor on upn oh got him old the area.

27:50 Oh sorry. The search for the men also took place amid difficult terrain and harsh weather conditions, as cruise faced conditions such as freezing temperatures, snow, and high water levels. Law enforcement said. Sasquatch, commonly known as Bigfoot, is a large, hairy figure that resembles a human and is thought to live in northwestern parts of the US. It's thought to live in a lot of places. Yeah, pretty much all over the place. I did an hour and ten minute video and podcast about bigfoot sightings in Ohio, which is not close to the northwest.

28:30 Said it could be that they meant sasquatch in particular, like the name of this type of Bigfoot. I don't know about that. Maybe, I mean there's Bigfoot, there's sasquatch. Skunk Cape. I like skunk Cape. I think that's a cool name. I think it's okay. I just feel bad for him because it sounds like he smells, which is what they're trying to say. He does smell, mean, how does that mean that's an animal? He just smells like cowie supposed to smell. Yeah, just like a skunk smells how it's supposed to smell. But skunks only smell like that when they're defending themselves. Oh, skunks kind of stink all the time, if they if they're not if they have the glands, though, they still stink a little bit. I think.

29:13 So, I'm seen stunk. I've seen skunks before. All right, I'm gonna buy you a skunk. Okay, not a one, no, Because there was that time I was inspecting a house and there was a skunk in a cage in the room and it was hissing at us, and I felt horrible for it. Why were you being so mean to the skunk that it had to hiss at you? I don't know, And it wouldn't tell me what I was doing wrong. They probably just caged it so it stopped trying to seduce their cat. That's my understanding of what skunks do. Yeah, I understand there's a lot of misinformation about how you know, creepy. They are.

29:58 Fair. Fair. The existence of bigfoot has been debated for decades, and many have reported sightings of the creature. More than seven hundred reports of bigfoot sightings in Washington State have been submitted to the Bigfoot Field Researchers organization. The group says in Scamania, harming bigfoot is punishable by a one thousand dollars fine and can include jail time. Okay, it all makes sense now, right, So Okay, they were near a bigfoot and they had guns, and they were like, we can't harm him because we're gonna go to jail maybe, and we don't have any money to pay for a fine. So that's why they died. Well, there's the three S law when it comes to protected animals. Shoot shovel, shut up.

30:44 It's a big animal though. Yeah, it's a big, big animal. Yeah. And also they could just not kill it and then the bigfoot could go to the cops. Bigfoot is not a snitch. See you get mad that I refer to it as skunk Cape as an insult, and then you're like, anyway, Bigfoot is totally a snitch. How rude. He's just he's just doing what's best for himself. Okay, oh wow. The law meant to protect the mysterious creature as well as prevent hunters with large beards from accidentally getting shot. That's okay, that's funny. NPR, you're real clever. I'm sure you listen to NPR, are they They're known for being very funny, right, that's their thing, right, yes, because that's why they're called NPR. No pulse required. All right, we're gonna we're gonna take it. We're gonna take a quick break, and we'll be back with even more spooky news. We're back, more spooky news to come, Michelle. I found a story about your home state of Pennsylvania. Oh and this story made me chuckle and then double take. So I was like, we have to talk about it. We may have heard about this, maybe maybe not. This is from the Guardian dot com. Pennsylvania Flood Museum temporarily closed due to flooding.

32:16 No, I didn't hear about it? Is that not the best headline ever. Yeah. Yeah, and they're getting they're a little too into being accurately to being authentic. That's the problem. Apparently, a museum dedicated to commemorating the victims of a nineteenth century flood in Pennsylvania has temporarily closed due to flooding caused on the inside of the facility by a water leak stemming from recent extremely cold weather official set on Monday. Fortunately for its patrons, the Johnstown Flood Museum set on its social media accounts that quote nothing of historic significance was affected by or you're inundation. Well, shouldn't most of the things in there have already been water damaged?

33:05 You think so? Right? So what about what historical things have not been water damaged in the flood museum? Yeah, exactly. It's like that would be the cruel iron It be like it'd be like, uh, they just have like a street lamp and like the one street lamp that survived the flood and now it's been flooded inside the museum. Yeah, is Johnstown near you? I don't know where that is in PA. Unless I'm like insane, I'm pretty sure Johnstown is an incredibly poverty stricken town near Pittsburgh, because I've often seen houses there that are very inexpensive, and I've thought those are really nice. But I also know that there's basically no work in the area and stuff.

33:49 If I'm correct, apparently there's work cleaning up the flood museum. Now, well there was. It was it sounds like a pipe burst. So that was for like five minutes. I mean flooded. Oh apparently the original catastrophe killed a lot of people, and nine people died in that flood. That's a lot of people. Actually, that's a hell of a flood then, because like damn, wow what no laugh, Oh, it's because they're Pennsylvanian people. If they were in Washington State, you'd be chuckling like a like a hyena. No, I just was thinking about yawning. I'm sorry. I just kept thinking about yawning and then I was laughing about it. Yeah, it is by Pittsburgh. I just checked to make sure I was thinking about the wrong the right place. Yeah, it's like a terribly impoverished area. Yeah.

34:42 Well, and I know there's a lot of history of flooding on that side of PA. In general, there are like a lot of towns that got evacuated and intentionally flooded and stuff. Quote. We hope to soon have a timeline for reopening, The statement added. In the meantime, we appreciate your patients as we worked to remediate and repair our beloved flagship museum. Oh, it's their beloved museum. It's a flagship museum. To what I want to say, Johnstown? I guess so do they have a bunch of museums in Johnstown? I think that's a no. Fair. The statement also thanked to volunteer docent't at the museum, Nikki Bosley, who was working in the archives when she discovered the leak. Museum officials informed the local news outlet WJAC that Bosley sounded the alarm and allowed us to get in here and keep it from being much much worse good. According to the museum officials, a valve failure on the building's third floor caused the flooding. Makes sense, I mean third floor because then the water runs down right?

35:49 Yeah? Yeah. They told WJAC that water poured through the walls, resulting in damage to the carpets, drywall, and ceiling tiles. The facility is working with its insurance company to reopen the building once the necessary work is completed as soon as possible, and when the insurance adjusters are done laughing very hard at the flood like we need to get flood damage repaired. We're at at our flood museum. We're not falling for this again. Not after that that those people that said that a that a black bear ripped up their car and had perfect video footage of it happening, Well know about all that. The museum commemorates the Great Johnstown Flood that occurred on thirty one May eighteen eighty nine, when, after days of heavy rainfall. Oh, this makes sense, the South Fork damn ruptured, gave way, and released twenty meter metric tons of water, Wow again to the surrounding areas. Yeah, that would explain why it was sudden and so many people died because it was all at once.

36:54 Yeah. The catastrophe claimed the riot lives of twenty two hundred and nine people, including nine nine entire families, oh god, nearly four hundred children. Yeah, and destroyed one thousand, six hundred homes. According to Heritage Johnstown dot Org. Bodies were found as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio. Oh my god. Well, the river that means I mean, wow, that's I mean, that's really that's that's a good three and a half hour drive. And I think it's probably on the same sort of like one of those was that longitudinal kind of play.

37:35 I think so, yeah it maybe, uh, I don't know, gosh. In the years that followed, Johnstown experienced additional significant floods, notably in nineteen thirty six and nineteen seventy seven. Poor Johnstown. Wow, they ended on that note too. Well, okay, fair enough, jeez, well Johnstown. We hope you're uh, you guys are all right. I will say though that, like, I'm very impressed with their quick you know thinking and that person who called, because I feel like if this was coming from if this was a different scenario in a different article, they may have just thought that, like a ghost was making the water come out of the walls.

38:16 So do you want me to I should search Johnstown on Mirro dot code at UK probably like ghostly flooding, attax flood museum, uh oh, mirror dot co dot UK. When I used to work at the TV station, we had a pipe burst once and we were literally just like we were waiting for them to come and shut everything off. So we were like just with big brooms. We were just pushing the water outdoors like that was all we could we could do. And I just remember getting a text and and the text just said, uh uh when you get into work. It was like, where wear waterproof shoes, if you boots, if you have them when you get to work, because DATV is sinking. And I was like what And then I got there and I was like, oh, wow, we're sinking. Okay, yeah, it was nice.

39:05 That they let that they informed you to wear. Not my boss, of course. It was like it was like a coworker one. I was gonna say, yeah, that's. Sorry that guy. You're retired now, so I can I can say he was terrible, a terrible boss, and and even say DATV and not even well not what would he had done come to my house and cry on me? Fucker anyway, Sorry, my old boss was a terrible person. I don't like him. Sorry, So what what? Well are you gonna yawn about it? Now? Is that what you're gonna. Do if you really want to keep saying that and make me. Yon about I didn't realize the word makes people yet there it is. It makes people yawn. I didn't realize that I'm learning so much. I know that seeing and hearing yawning.

39:51 No, I mean, and he mentioned any word yawn. If I see it in a manga, I yawn. I've drawn arcs yawning and it's made me yawn. So I'll tell you a funny story and then we're going to take a quick break. I was working at a distribution company and we were making artwork for this was back when DVD was king, so it was DVD boxes, and there was a shot of a guy in like a guard uniform screaming his head off right like like like just ah, And we used the photo on a box cover because we owned We bought this package from a photographer of photos, and after we used it, the photographer was like, Uh, that guy was yawning and it looks like he's screaming like crazy. It does. But now whenever I see that box cover, I immediately go, wow, it is so obvious that guy is yawning.

40:50 Well, it's kind of like I've seen, you know, on like Twitter or whatever, like images of like cats and it's like, oh, that cat looks so me and it's like very clearly that cat is yawning. Yeah, yeah, yeah, vicious cat. Yeah yeah. I used to get pictures of Chicano like right after a yawn where he looked like he was like snarling and looking really angry. It's funny, although he also always looked angry, so that doesn't hurt. But we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back, we're gonna talk about an abandoned hospital and a locked door that should have stayed locked right after this. Yeah, sorry, so we're back here with some more spooky news. While we were in break, Michelle decided to distract me by having us dive into some crime statistics. So usually I'm the one that talks about nothing between breaks and causes us to take forever to do the show, but this time it was.

41:52 Cell Just so everyone knows, Johnstown really isn't safe, but only slightly less safe than where I live. So there you go, and where I live appears to be pretty safe. But oddly, our murder rate is the highest crime rate that we have. We have like very few robberies. Very interesting. Yeah, whereas where I live, we don't have a lot of murders or rapes, but we have a lot of robberies and a lot of assaults. Weird, very weird. So anyway. This is a story from Mirror dot co dot uk. The headline is I lived in an abandoned hospital and found something terrifying behind locked door. Wait, they lived there, That's what this says.

42:38 Is it abandoned if you live in it? I guess. I mean, I'm assuming it's formerly abandoned. Or maybe they're squatting. Yeah, they might be squatting. Cool. A woman who once resided in an abandoned building has shared a chilling discovery she made while exploring her unconventional home. Aisha bear It, a London based TV producer, used to live in a deserted hospital as a property guard guardian. Okay, oh, that's what I want to do. I bet that's good work. I bet you could get that pretty easy. I want to do it. A scheme that allows people to live affordably in vacant properties to ensure they're maintained. During her stay in the empty hospital, where over one hundred other tenants also lived, Okay, what maybe there were a ton of people living there.

43:30 Maybe they mean in the past they lived there. It's it also lived. Yeah, I don't know. Then that's not that's not abandoned. I feel like I would have said with where over one hundred other tenants had also lived if it was. But but then again I'm not. I'm expecting a copy editor at the mirror. So yeah, she stumbled upon a corridor lined with padlocked doors, which she believed was the hospital's morgue. Okay. The TV producer known for her work on Celebrity Coach Trip, The Fortune Hotel, and Great British Bakeoff, posted a video on TikTok of her walking down the eerie corridor. She captioned the clip, I can't believe I don't make more money working in mainstream television in the United king No, that's how I was saying. Pov pov finding the morgue in the abandoned hospital I live in, That's what she she captioned. In the video, she says, this is the morgue.

44:27 People do ask me about this all the time, So this is the morgue. She pointed out the padlocks on the doors, saying, quote, as you can see, they got they've got these on them. I didn't know originally what these were, but that's what someone in the comments told. Me, that they were padlocks or. I think that it was a morg Oh, okay, I would be saying it even if I knew it wasn't true. I'd be like, Oh, that's the morgue. I'd be like, Oh, that's the infectious disease morgue. I'd be like making entirely new stuff up, you know. I'd be like, Oh, yeah, that's that's where they kept, you know, the criminally insane. Yeah, yeah, that's why it's padlocked. Aisha ventured down the corridor, the entire corridor, admitting she had never come here before, encountering another corridor that was blocked by a wooden panel. A poster slapped on the door issued a stark warning quote, no unauthorized persons allowed beyond this point, ramping up the eeriness. That's kind of a normal thing in a hospital or an abandoned building.

45:33 Though exactly like I mean, especially in a hospital like this is not as place for patients to go. No, No, it's not a big deal. Though. I mean, it says there was a wooden panel, which I'm assuming they mean like it was boarded, I'm guessing is what they mean by a wooden panel. Yeah. Backing out of from the location, she stated quote it's creepy. Might be a little too creepy for me this part. But people always ask where's the morgue? Where's the morgue? And I think I've finally found it, she vowed, quote don't ask me to go there again. I don't want to get possessed. Is this the whole thing?

46:13 No, there's there's a little bit more, but uh, I do think that's funny. I mean, all I would be doing is to be posting like go again, Go again, like possession or GTFO. I'm just like a little bit surprised though, because like this to me isn't content. Like I don't mean this, this this news article. I mean, I wouldn't post like, look, I went down a hallway and I'm not going to go any further. But it's probably scary. I mean, the news content is also not content. Yeah, Like one of my. Favorite things about reading news stories is realizing that a news story is just reporting a TikTok. It's a very common occurrence. Yeah, I know, and not just at Mirror dot Code at UK. I get recommended news stories on my Google homepage all the time that are just reporting a TikTok. So I guess that's news.

47:04 Yes. Aisha added a dash of sarcasm to her TikTok post, saying a corridor filled with padlocked doors is the suspected more in the suspected morg area of the abandoned hospital I live in. That's okay, that's so fine. I mean you live, you're living in a hospital. Yeah, what do you want? People died there for sure? Yeah? Maybe no the even I mean like they have to a No, we don't know that they died allegedly. Oh I love this, This is this is definitely news content. Morgs serve as waiting rooms for decease the deceased until final identification, burial or cremation can occur, and are also utilized for autopsies to establish causes of death. The video is racked up seven hundred and forty three thousand views, thirty eight thousand likes, and hundreds of comments, and it's safe to say people were equally as freaked out. One theorized quote there was a face peering at you through the glass in the door by the morgaria good good And another asked what was that lump on the floor. Oh, that's where it ended the article. Oh, I usually don't read these anymore. But there's a comment on this article that I really love from a person who calls themselves threepence, and all it says is, so the story is you lived in an abandoned hospital with a morgue exactly.

48:35 Yeah, It's like, oh wow, you lived in a place that had things that were normal in that place. I'm just glad that the Mirror dot co dot uk is here to report things that matter. Yeah. So it really is a mixed bag. Yeah, but I gotta I gotta give it to them. They're tabloid level reporting of this stuff is very amusing and makes me nostalgic. Well, good, good, Did you ever. Read tabloids when you were when you were like a teenageer or anything. I used to read the weekly World News all the time, which, believe it or not, it's not just photoshop. It actually had articles, articles and articles and articles, and I used to love reading them. Some of them were like, laugh out loud, funny.

49:27 Wow, that's nice. They did this one thing where what was it where the Pope gets hit by a meteor and like the cover was like the Pope like going uh and like a medior just like smashing into him. But the funniest part about the article was it starts like reporting where he was and what was going on when the media hit and then it mentions like the last time the Pope was hit by a meteor, he was able to do this and this and this. However this time because it came from a westerly direction, and I was like, wait. What, okay? I really like that. They also did one one of my other favorites was it was just it was just elderly pope gives entire gives entire pople presentation while wearing Spider Man mask. No one brave enough to say anything about it, so they seem to have it like out for the Pope a little bit, which I could appreciate. That was pretty funny.

50:20 So but anyway, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back with even more spooky news, maybe even not from here dot co dot UK, at least not this time. Right after this, we're back. And something I have learned after two ish years or something of us doing monthly Spooky is there's always something spooky and creepy coming out of the ocean. Usually there's almost always Remember that article that said, like the article that we lost our minds. Ever, that just said, like sharks biting people's feet, It's just that they think that they're fish, and like the whole article read like a shark wrote it. Yeah, so don't be afraid to go swimming. As long as you do this and this, the fact that shark are biting people's feet, a lot will go away. It's fine.

51:17 You should go on the water. You'll love it. Yeah, they don't mean it. So this article caught my attention from NPR. The headline is did a whale swallow a kayaker? Oh? The truth behind a viral video? Have you heard about this? Like I heard about it in the way that like I scrolled past something and then I was like, wait, what was that? And I didn't go back. Well, I'm going to show you the video real quick. Okay, So we see a kayaker. It says that he's in Chile. Holy crap, did the whale eat him? No? There he is.

51:57 Yes, I thought I had been eaten, but of course I felt that maybe it was a killer whale. His boat got flipped over and uh, but when I got out, I understood that of course it was probably out of curiosity that the whale had approached me or maybe to communicate or something, I. Mean, or maybe wanted to Kno, what did you say, Maybe it wanted to knock him over. Well, yeah, it was probably just curious, but uh, for the record, this says swallow kayaker, but then the actual video says whale swallows kayaker off Chile before releasing him. So apparently it just knocked his boat around. And thank goodness.

52:39 But what's crazy that somebody was nearby to film it. I think I was just a friend of his who was kayaking with him. He's in an inflatable kayak, which I actually can I get this guy's email. I want to know if those are worth it because I love kayaking, but I'm worried that they're not strong enough. Although it handled a humpback whale, so that's good. I think I saw someone on a on a parranormal show used one of those recently. Yeah, because I drive a Prius and if you put like a kayak rack on the top of your car, it kills your gas mileage like a lot. Yeah, I would think so, but the problem is it's the rack, not even the kayak will will hurt your gas mileage. So and I looked into it and like, it's very hard to get a reliable rack that you can just pop off and put on and pop off and put on. Yeah, so that's why I don't own a kayak, because I love kayaking like so much.

53:28 Can you put the kayak up there without a rack and just really really strap it down? Yeah, there are people who do that. They use pool noodles to cushion it against a car. Yeah. Also just seems dangerous and yeah, so anyway, we have an article to read too, but the video does not show exactly what the headline is. Of course. A father son duo kayaking off the coast of Chile have made waves after after sharing a video of what appears to show a humpback whale briefly scooping one of them into its mouth. The video was pretty far away, but it did kind of look like he had been swallowed up for a second.

54:11 It really did, I'm going to guess. Yeah. Adrian Simanakas Simancas was kayaking in the Strait of Magellan in southern Chile on Saturday when the whale suddenly surfaced and engulfed him. According to the Associated Press quote, I thought it had already eaten and swallowed me, the twenty four year old told the AP. At first, when I thought I had died, it was of course a lot of terror because I thought, no, no, there was nothing I could do. Okay, first of all, I guess somebody doesn't know about Jonah and the whale. Oh yeah, yeah. You just go in there and start playing xylophone on its ribcage and figure out a way out. And there'll already be another guy there who's like started a fire and you know, is living off the land.

54:54 Yeah, I mean, I mean, you don't have to worry that there's not air inside whales. Yeah, they breathe air. They breathe air. It's fine in their stomachs. Yes. Oh you don't know. I looked up this whole thing when I was doing my podcast about like could you live inside an animal? And it's like, no, there's not air in there. You can't. No, yeah, not for long. It would be much more like Tremor's three, when Burt Gummer was able to live inside the graboid for like about eight or nine minutes and he passed out from a lack of air right before they cut him out. So so he was also swallowed in a drum barrel like a big drum that protected him as well. All Right, and that's enough about Tremors three. On the podcast Nobody's Here to talk about Tremor's three. His father Deal happened to be filming at the time and caught the whole incident on camera from a safe distance. He told CNN Espanol he started recording when he saw quote pretty waves that seemed exciting, but there turned out to be much more beneath the surface.

56:02 The younger Simanakas, told CNN that he felt a strong force hit him from behind, lifting him up. When I turned around, I felt a slimy texture on my face, Simankas said, I could see colors like dark blue and white approaching me from behind, closing around me and pulling me under. Dale's video posted by the AP shows the whale leaping up, then disappearing underwater with Simancas and his yellow inflatable kayak. After a few seconds, both the kayak and its life best clad passenger bobbed back to the surface, but Simonkas says his relief was quickly overtaken by fear that something would happen to his dad, or that he would get hypothermia from being in the water. Yeah, that's a reasonable fear.

56:49 Yeah. Yeah. Simancas managed to grab onto the boat and swim it over to his dad, who paddled them to safety. As he reflected on his experience, he guessed the whale didn't mean any harm. Yeah, I'm sure the whale didn't mean you any harm, but just put you in its mouth and then realize that you were buoyant. So what let you go because it would be annoying to chew you, I guess. So, so we should probably discuss this. Yeah, this is a humpback whale, right, Yes, they eat like plankton and shit. I don't know if they could even eat a human if they wanted to, or even put it in their mouths. Oh, I mean they have a big mouth, but yeah they do. They They don't just eat plankton and krill. They also eat smaller fish and crustaceans, but nothing even near the size of a person. I don't think.

57:36 Yeah, I don't think they would try to eat it person. Yeah, they mostly eat krill and plankton, but humpback whale eat person? Can they even get in their mouths? Yeah, their mouths are huge. Their mouths are huge. But but like I know, they have like things. They have like they have like a thing that like stops. Yeah, it's like a filter to filter out the plankton's. Yeah. Is that called like baileen? Maybe? Uh could be Uh. There are other stories of humpback whales pulling people under in their mouths. Oh well, maybe they just really like hurting people. Oh my gosh, Oh I got to show you this picture.

58:19 Oh wait, where did it go? Oh no, I've done a bad job. Oh there it is. Okay, look at this shell. This is what their mouths look like. Oh that's so big. Yeah, that could put a person could go in there. Yeah, yeah definitely. But it's not going to eat you, but it could totally put you in its mouth. Okay, well that's good to know. Yeah. That that's I was about to make a Simpsons reference. That wouldn't make any sense. I was about to say, that'll replace the whale in me nightmares, except that that's it's a whale. Yeah. When I got out quote. When I got out, I understood that. Of course, it was probably out of curiosity that the mail approach or whale approach approached me, or maybe wanted to communicate or something. Whale experts have another theory.

59:08 Two researchers told NPR that the most likely explanation is that simonkas happened to be in the way of a feeding whale, one that was hungry for krill and small fish and not a human. Oh okay, and he wasn't even like paying attention. He was like, I gotta eat these things and things in my way. I'm just gonna go right quote. My guess is that the whale was just as surprised as the kayaker. I doubt that. Well, I just don't. I think that we're very surprised when a whale puts us in its mouth. Well, do you know, like when you're you're riding on your bike and you eat a bug accidentally and you didn't want to. I imagine it's like. As opposed to when you want to. Yeah, I've never eaten a bug riding a bike.

59:54 Well, what about has one ever gone in your eye when you're riding a bike? I don't think. So where are you riding bikes that there aren't that many bugs outside? Okay? Maybe I haven't I blocked it. I don't know, but but I feel like I like I would be more scared of the whale than the whale is of me. The whale probably be like, I get out of my mouth, stupid, like I'm trying to eat krill and plankton as where I would, you know, like poop myself. But it would be surprising, though, because the whale wasn't trying to eat a person, so it was like, oh, there's. Yeah, Yeah, it'd be it'd be surprising like finding you know, like biting into an apple and then being like, oh, I left the label on it. Should get that out of my mouth, you know.

1:00:41 I mean I was thinking more like biting into a piece of broccoli and then looking down and realizing that there's like half a bug there. Has this happened to you as well? No, but I have seen lots of bugs in our broccoli. What the where do you get your broccoli. At the store? I never had in the dumpster. No, we're gonna take a quick break and we're gonna get to the bottom of this. Right after this, Michelle is trying to convince me that I just don't check my broccoli close enough to realize I have bugs in it.

1:01:24 Jokes on you. I don't really care if I eat the bugs, but I have never found bugs in my broccoli. And if you are listening to this, if you're one of the people who avidly listens to Michelle and I do this show and has watched the balance turn from me tormenting her to her tormenting me over the last two years, send an email to weekly at gmail dot com. I want to hear if you deal with bugs in your broccoli. And I don't mean that as a euphemism. I mean that Michelle may be insane. No, like this is my entire life, like I had it when I was a kid. I just a couple of days ago, had some bugs in mo broccoli.

1:02:09 Pumpback whales feed by quickly lunging through a school of fish with their mouths wide open, then straining the water out through their bailey. Oh there it is bailey, the fringed plates that they have inside their mouths instead of teeth. If something or someone else mistakenly enters their path, that can be quote unintentionally and just momentarily engulfed. Robin explains, quote. I'm sure it closes its eyes so it doesn't get damaged by anything. And I think this is one of those one in a million situations where the fellow seemed to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, said doctor Ian Kerr, the CEO of the whale conservation nonprofit Ocean Alliance. Reports of such incidents are rare, but not unheard of. In twenty twenty one, a Massachusetts lobster diver said, a back whale it scooped him up and spit him out. That's what I found when I was doing my little research. Yeah, but unlike the Old Testament's Jonah, these men didn't spend three days and nights in the belly of the whale. They didn't even reach it, nor could they have. Ooh, well, now that now you just sound like you're working for the whale lobby. Experts say it's not just possible for a whale, or it's just not possible for a whale to swallow something as large as a person. Their mouths are massive, as wide as ten feet.

1:03:32 Wow. Their throats are much smaller, roughly the size of a human fist. Wow, and confusing. That's very confusing, cur says. Humpback whales don't even want to try, especially considering doing so could lead to a potentially life threatening jaw injury. Oh no, quote, they have no interest in eating us or hurting us. He said that. Hold on, you're making a big assumption to me. They don't want to hurt us just because they can't eat us. That's the other and saying they have no interest in eating us. No, they're incapable. There is a difference. Well, they could try, they could crave our deaths, but be incapable of swallowing us whole.

1:04:19 Yeah, they could rip us apart. Oh yeah, we're just drownd us. And then I don't know. That's it. It's not to their benefit. Many of these animals are living this life of energy balance. What energy does it take for me to catch my prey? Et cetera. Still, experts encourage humans in any whale prone areas to give the animals a wide berth. In the US, federal law requires at least one hundred yards of distance from a whale for the sake of both species. Does the whale follow that law as well as the people do? For the record, I mean I don't know, because this wasn't in the US, so we don't know the law.

1:04:59 Yeah. Yeah. While some whale populations are rebounding, cur says others are quote dying sort of a death of one thousand cuts from threats like ship strikes, line entanglement, and pollution. And though Simonka's video has made quite a splash, Kerr says, it's a lot harder to translate that attention into actually helping whales splash, I get it. Quote. The reality is the oceans are downhill from everything and gravity never sleeps. I tend to say healthy whales, healthy oceans, healthy humans. So even if you don't like whales, even if you don't like whale, I hate those whales. So even if you don't like whales, there's still value in understanding what's going on in our oceans, and whales are barometers of that health. He helps this whales turn in the spotlight will inspire viewers to get involved, whether by learning more about the dozens of different whale species or donating to a local ocean charity. I don't know if I have a local ocean charity, because I I'm in Ohio.

1:06:01 Yeah, I'm sorry. I also just don't know that a story like this where a whale kind of almost like puts a thing person in their mouth is going to make people go like wow, I want to donate to whale charities. It does because if they read it out of like, if they're really shocked to the point of reading it, they'll learn like it can't even possibly swallow you. You should trust the whale. Let the whale eat you. It's great. I mean that might be kind of fun. Quote the more you love something, the more you want to keep it or keep it healthy. Yet so yeah, that's kind of sweet, I guess in a weird, kind of whale centric way. Like whales.

1:06:42 I don't hate whales, although, ever, you know the movie Jaws. No, yes, you do know the movie Jaws? Right? Yes? Are you lying? No? Okay, I just thinking. Sure? God, well, there was a there were a lot of ripoff movies of Jaws, and one of my favorites was the movie Orca, the Killer Whale. Orcas are kind of scary. Yeah, and that movie made me so much more afraid of the ocean than Jaws did. Okay, yeah, yeah. Like Orca is a really freaking scary movie. I mean, like, this whale, basically, this guy, if I'm remembering correctly, this guy accidentally kills the mate of the Orca I think it was, or maybe it was a child. I think it was the mate, and the Orca starts following this guy around by scent on his fishing boats, attacks his He has a house that's like on stilts at the edge of the water. It like breaks the stilts and eats his wife. It's it's really good and scary, and it also has the hilarious moment that you have in Jaws where you're like, man, I'm so afraid of the shark. Well, time to get in the ocean, Like what Like, no, that's when you go, Well, time to move to Missouri, you know. No, that's too close to rivers. Yeah so, but uh yeah, that's when Orca is always scared the hell out of me. It's a really good, fun, cheesy Jaws rip off, and there are plenty of them, but this is that's one I've always I've always liked a lot.

1:08:12 So maybe I'll force you to watch it one day, you know, after you finish oz So. But we're gonna take a quick break and do one more story because this one made me extremely curious. It's about something mysterious that appeared on one thousand graves in Munich, Germany. We'll find out more after not well, I mean, I mean, it's not a Jewish cemetery as far as I can tell, but maybe it is. I don't know, but we'll find out after this. This story cell comes from Huffington Post, and and I'm really curious what the hell is going on because the headline made me do a double take.

1:09:07 It says QR code stickers mysteriously appear on one thousand Munich graves. Okay, I mean, it's not hard to put stickers on things, but it's interesting. Well, and a thousand of them. It just it's a lot going on. Yeah. So the story reads police and Munich are investigating a mystery. More than one thousand stickers were put on gravestones and wooden crosses at three cemeteries in the German city. There's something wooden crosses that's not okay because the sticker is going to get stuck there, you know, like really stuck, and it's gonna be hard to get off. Like it's that's basically defacing, because I would think, I feel like a stone you can get, you can get the sticker off, you can probably clean it, Okay.

1:09:56 Sure you can, but like I think that's still defacing the tombstone. Yeah, I mean because like if I have to, if somebody has to come out with googon and scrape your tombs. So that's not cool that they have to do that. I mean you can probably use acton. Still not cool. Okay, brow. In the German city without any indication of where they came from or why. Did they go, did they check what the QR codes go to? It gets weirder. Okay. The five by three point five centimeter or one point nine to five by one half inch stickers are printed with a QR code that, when scanned, shows the name of the person buried in the grave and its location in the cemetery, but nothing else.

1:10:50 But but but but but yeah, all that information also be on the grave though, and they're all they also know the location because they're threat the grave. So why would that be helpful. Well, here's the thing that freaks me out about that. It's so that means each sticker is individually made for that marker. Is you have to you have to generate a QR code. They may have had like one of those hand printers, you know, just printing them out as they go or whatever. Sure, oh okay, I understand. Yeah, they could have like it could be connected to your phone or whatever. But like, but here's the thing.

1:11:32 Who's cataloging these things without permission? Like what is the That's what freaks me out because like if it went to a website or like a band thing or like some creepy pastable crap or promoting like an indie movie or an album or something, I'd be like, yeah, whatever, But the fact that it's just informational is actually really confusing to me. Yeah, I mean, the thing is it's not that I mean, I'm sure that the cemetery is been during the day, right, so it's not it's not like someone couldn't have done that, couldn't have just cataloged and then like sent it to the label maker, to the Zebra label maker. That doesn't work all the time, and then they like pull it off?

1:12:15 But why and also how does it help? How does that information help because it's already on the tombstone? Yeah, well maybe it's for for blind people, but then how they. Would they find a QR code? Yeah it's a Braille QR code. Yeah. Quote. We haven't found any pattern behind this yet. The stickers were put both on decades old gravestones and very new graves that so far that so far only have wooden crosses, so those are temporary markets. Okay, got it. Police spokesperson Christian Drexler told the Associated Press on Wednesday, people who have witnessed anybody putting stickers on the graves are to reach out to their respective cemetery's administration. He said.

1:13:05 The stickers surfaced in recent days at the Walder Friedhoff, Sendlinger, Freedhoff and Friedhoff Sullen cemeteries, So it's there's yeah, it's three cemeteries in Munich. Wow. Police are not only trying to find out who is behind the stickers, but also investigating property damage because the gravestones were partially damaged and discolored when the stickers were removed. What what what your what do you? Why you why you don't buy. That that they were discolored. I would assume that, especially older grades gravestones, you have a lot of build up of like dirt and then also kind of like algae.

1:13:47 So while they were discolored, I would assume it's not permanent. I was. I would assume they're just taking off kind of the old gross stuff. I mean, that's still messing it up. Yeah, I'm just yeah, all right, maybe I decided, oh sorry, it's okay. Nothing. Well, I decided to dig a little deeper because this kind of bothered me because that article is from the nineteenth of this month. So yesterday I found an article at the New York Times that is that seems to be digging a little deeper about this, and it was published three hours ago. Okay, so from the New York Times, the headline why did QR codes appear on about one thousand graves in Munich? In a wooded air cemetery in Munich, white sticker with a puzzling QR code appeared on a gravestone late last year. Then over the next few weeks, more and more stickers mysteriously appeared, until more than one thousand graves were marked like goods in a supermarket. It's really strange. BERNARDA. Howeroff, who oversees the management of the city cemetery, said in an interview. We thought what could be the sense of this kind of sticker. Each white stick rectangular sticker measuring about one by two inches, bore a black QR code, a last name, and a combination of letters and numbers. According to the images published by the German press. Cemeteries in Munich allow QR codes as memorials on headstones, okay, and for more than a decade, people whose loved ones are buried in the cemeteries around the world have uploaded photographs and other digital keepsakes to create online memorials that can be viewed via QR, but

1:15:20 those are usually etched into the gravestone or carved as a metal plate to form a deliberate part of the memorial to the deceased. You I've seen those before. The recent appearances in Munich also raised eyebrows because in two thousand and four, stickers appeared in a Jewish cemetery in Bachem, a city in western Germany. Those turned out to commemorate Rudolph Hess, a senior Nazi leader who served as Hitler's deputy. The stickers appeared to be linked to a far right demonstration in the town of Windsidel in southeastern Germany, according to the World Jewish Congress. In this instance, though the graves were not linked by religion, ethnicity, or any other discernible personal characteristic of the deceased. City workers first came across the QR codes in December, and scanning them revealed only the name of the deceased and the graves location, essentially repeating the information on the sticker but providing no other useful information. Right the stickers popped up in the Walder and the in waldfried Hoff cemetery of wooden space with some sixty thousand graves, and in nearby smaller senlinger and solid cemeteries. They seem to be posted randomly, he said, and old on old and new graves, on carved tombstones and wooden crosses. Bewildered municipal workers initially recorded the sightings as they tried to figure out the source of the stickers. They were also working at a steep price to remove them. Mister Haueroff said, anywhere from one

1:16:51 hundred to five hundred euros or one hundred and four to five and twenty three dollars per sticker to strip the adhesive without damaging the graves, a total potential cost of roughly half a million euros. I want, I want that money. I want to be in charge. Of that jeez. So this week the municipality turned to the police to investigate this as criminal property damage. They quickly found that a local business that had that had been contacted to clean and maintain certain graves was wait what? They quickly found that a local business that had been contracted to clean and maintain certain graves was behind the QR code. I understand.

1:17:31 I just wanted to make sure I understood that that's. Insane and I understand. Yeah. Yeah. The police said on that on Thursday, the relatives of the deceased whose graves were marked with them would be notified during the inquiry, and investigating officers said an email. The police. Police would not name the company or share details about how they found the perpetrators, but German news media identified a gardening company as being responsible. So much sense. The local newspaper cited Alfred Zenker, a senior manager that company, as saying that the stickers were simply away for employees to keep track of which headstones they had maintained. Mm hmm yeah, yeah. We are a large company, he told the newspaper. Everything has to happen in an orderly manner. The police declined to comment further, citing the continuing investigation. Sorry, I just needed more because that first article had so little to it.

1:18:21 Yeah no, and that's really helpful though, because now I totally understand and that it was absolutely one of those those printers, like the Zebra printers, because of the way it was like had a QR code, then it has the last name, then it has like a bunch of like numbers and letters and stuff perfect for that. But yeah, so I get it. I mean, you probably can't do that. You probably need to ask. It's really freaking stupid. Yeah, like you're you're not supposed to do anything to a gravestone other than like clean it or you know, like you like, what the hell, Like that's just so beyond the pale.

1:19:01 But I totally understand someone thinking we gotta we gotta come up with a way to know what areas have been cleaned, so we'll just have them scan it on their phones and then we'll know. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I mean I didn't think it was anything nefarious, but it was just really weird because I would have expected something like intentional, like I said, like promoting a band or some crap. I'd be like, yeah, yeah, people do stupid stuff like that, but for it to be like it just sounded so official, which made me even more creeped out, Like, yeah, who's this dumb turns out a gardening company. Yeah. So man, they're gonna pay a lot of damages, and that. Person who decided that that was a good idea is getting fired.

1:19:43 Maybe it's Germany. They're not doing so good. So we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back. We're going to dive into the lost cosmonauts conspiracy theory right after this. You know, Michelle in Soviet Russia Space explores you. That's yeah, what the country. So I found this article about supposed Soviet space kind of conspiracies, myths, urban legends, whatever you want to call it. And I love diving into Cold War era mythology because things were so tense and mysterious and secretive back then. Yeah, and also because the Soviets did all kinds of weird things because they were just weird. Yeah, you know, I mean we did weird things in America too. It's just like, but they were very much you know, like hold my Schlitz or whatever, you know, like they wanted to do even weirder stuff.

1:20:57 So I found this article. It's from a website called Let's Get off This Rock Already dot com. So I'm guessing that they mostly cover space related things. Maybe, or they want to die. I'm not really sure. I mean, they're all good. Yeah, they're all good. So the article starts with talking about the first space launch from the Soviet Union. Yuri Gagarin is recognized as the first human to leave Earth, having undertaken a world historic single orbit spaceflight on April twelfth, nineteen sixty one. This was the culmination of numerous unmanned test launches, which, after several failures and the deaths of considerable numbers of dogs, had ironed out flaws in the one man VOS spacecraft. Yeah, the Soviets sent dogs into space. That was their thing.

1:21:46 I know. It just makes me sad because the dogs can't consent. Yeah. You, I don't know if you ever met a Golden retriever. I think they want to go to space. They're like, that'd be so cool. Then they're all alone, though. No, that's not cool. No, No, Actually, I don't want to get really sad by thinking about the dogs in the space grif. Yeah, you really don't want to think about it, No, I really don't. Yeah, no, because then I'll think about the gulags and then I'll just be I'll just literally be Pinochette. Only once the dog started reliably coming back in one piece? Did Soviet leadership feel ready to risk the life of a pilot? But what if they actually jumped the gun? What if there was someone else before a Gagarin, an unfortunate soul who went up there and never came back alive? Wow?

1:22:35 What if there was amid the immense secrecy of the Soviet space program, which way waited to announce Gagarin's flight until after he was safely in orbit. That's a really good point. It wasn't out of the question, and rumors began circulating even back then. That's a really good point. They would very likely hide failures that, especially once that resulted in cosmonaut's deaths. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, man, I'm getting goosebumps. Actually, I've never heard of this before. In nineteen fifty nine, claims surfaced in the West that Russians had been unsuccessfully sending cosmonauts aboard suborbital rockets. According to an unnamed intelligence source in Czechoslovakia, repeated second and third hand in various newspapers such as The Gadsden Times, there were four launches from a complex near the Iranian border, all of which failed.

1:23:31 When the astronauts vanished into space. Uh oh ooh, no, less a personality than rocket. Theorist Herman Oberth gave voice to the rumors, but the alleged Czechoslovakian source was never identified, nor did any further information come to light over the following decades. We do know, however, that after World War Two, the Soviets were considering very similar missions using the German V two missile, which might have seen a Russian short hop into space as early as nineteen forty eight. Hmm, that's interesting. Point two. Yeah.

1:24:11 The next claim appeared in nineteen sixty when Robert Heinland. Everything comes back to Robert Heinland. It's Rachel's favorite author. My buddy Heaton was talking about him a ton. He wrote many many books, including Starship Troopers. Oh okay. When Hyland was traveling through the USSR on May fifteenth in Vilnius Red Army or in Vilnius Red Army, cadets told him that their country had just launched a human into space, and indeed that day had seen the launch of Corbelsputnik one, the first Vostok test flights, which failed to return to Earth after a retro rocket malfunction. Said it sent it into higher orbit. Dan Heinland suspected the officially unnamed mission had in fact carried a plot pilot aboard.

1:25:01 The poor soul would have died only a few days after launch, when his life support inevitably ran out. He would have remained up there until his ship naturally de orbited in nineteen sixty two. What's sad? I don't know. This is kind of far fetched. I mean, when would the Soviet Union have ever put somebody in a position where they would literally die? Yeah, they're good. I don't think they would do anything like that. Yeah, I mean, I mean like they I mean, and yeah, maybe they'd choot you, but they'd never just put you in a situation where you definitely die without any more interference, not at all, not in like Siberia or anywhere. They would never do that. No, they're they're good. They're yeah, they do fine. Yeah, so this next one.

1:25:47 Vladimir Ilyushin was one of the Soviet Union's most renowned test pilots. He was so skilled, in fact, that he once seized up a plane's computer by flying too precisely. Oh wow, good for him, that's epic. Such was his reputation that the military entrusted him with the maiden flights of an entire generation of aircraft, from interceptors to tactical bombers, and perhaps that of the Vostok space capsule, beating Yuri Gagarin by a mere five days. This conspiracy theory originated with an article in the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker, published April tenth, nineteen sixty one.

1:26:28 Its author, Dennis Ogden, claimed that Illusian had flown into orbit on April seventh, sustaining serious injuries in the process, injuries which were covered up by an official announcement that he had been in a car crash. Ooo, this is getting fun. But also he could have been in a car crash. But interesting that they reported this and then the car crash got reported later. True. That's the part that freaks me out is I was just thinking, like, if he was hurting a launch, how would they explain it? And they had an immediate explanation, which makes me even more worried that they may have been lying.

1:27:12 I think if I got hurt in flying in the space a lot, I don't want a different story than in a car crash, I don't. I mean, I was honestly just impressed he didn't just die. Mm yeah, yeah, I mean too. Because you know, the classic Russian thing would be like, oh yeah, he uh he was taking a flight over Siberia and just and just crash somewhere. We don't know where. It's too big, you know, that's like this, that's like the Russian thing to say. It's like, oh, he was on a plane and we don't know what happened to it. Too much land to cover. Wow. Other outlets soon picked up on this theme, triggering a small frenzy of speculation. US News and World Report claimed that Gagarin had never flown in space at all, being used only as a public facing prop to cover for the wounded illusion. Hmmm hmmm, Oh so I guess that the conspiracy there is that Gagarin didn't go up Ilusian did, but the landing was violent and hurt him, right, and they wanted to cover up that the latter half was botched. So they were like, look at this fully intact guy, he's doing great. Weren't you just in space? Yes, I was just in space.

1:28:25 Well you've heard the rumors. You've heard the rumors of obviously of the moon landing being faked. I'm sure you've heard the conspiracy theories about that, right, Yeah. One of the what was it? Was it? One of the conspiracies was that they had everything ready to fake the moon landing just in case the astronauts died or didn't succeed. Or or no. No, I think the conspiracy was that they had faked it with the asternasts just in case, okay, they couldn't make it to the Moon for some reason, so that they could depict them on the Moon, even if they ended up just going around, which they'd done before already. There are a bunch of myths like that. I mean, I could see that though, being like, hey, we should probably just just in case y'all die or something.

1:29:10 Yeah, just in case, because we got to beat those kamis. Yeah. A nineteen ninety nine documentary, The Cosmonaut Cover Up, articulated what came to be the standard version of Illutian's claim of the Illusian claims. The mission was said to have launched on April seventh, as The Daily Worker originally reported. Ilusian took off without incident and orbited the Earth three times, only to lose contact with ground control on the third pass, and after an emergency firing of retro rockets, he made a hard landing thousands of kilometers off course within Chinese territory shared communist ideology, notwithstanding the Soviet Union in Red China were not friends at the time. Elusian was held captive for more than a year until the Soviets secretly Negotia his release. Meanwhile, Gagarin had become the face of the Soviet space program, falsely trumpeted as a pioneer to spare his country the humiliation of a rocky for spaceflight.

1:30:13 Gagarin's death in and oh boy, it gets it gets more Soviet Union the more you read Gagarin's death in nineteen sixty eight during a training accident was the part was just part of the cover up, of course. He died while working for the government in like an innocuous, unbear embarrassing thing. Yeah, oh, the training. Accident killed him. Oh man, this is getting hefty. Man. And I'm not a big conspiracy theory person, but this is getting deep. And we're going to get even deeper right after this. Now we're back and in Soviet Russia.

1:30:55 Conspiracy theories you all right? That didn't work as well of time, despite its persistence. The Illusion theory has has been met with considerable skepticism. Illusion himself, who died in twenty ten, steadfastly denied ever having gone to space. The actual evidence is thin on the ground, hearsay mostly, and as space historian Mark Wade has pointed out, it's hard to explain a secret mission when the period around Gagarin's flight is so well documented, an issue with most lost cosmonaut stories, as we'll discuss at the end. To me, it seems more than a little unlikely. Then again, there's nothing technically implausible about the theory. The Soviets were fully capable of launching a cosmonaut shortly before Gagarin, and a crash landing in a hostile country would have been reason enough to keep secret, to keep it secret. As they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That's kind of kind of true, kind of not. I will say, like, I would like to know, do we know where Illusion was for the years that he would have supposedly been, Like was it like was there a blackout of him?

1:32:09 But also who knows if those records are even kept anywhere because of the Soviet Union. But the other thing that's interesting is the first thought I had because I was starting to try to have my tinfoil hat on as I was like, well, he was up until twenty ten. He was steadfast that he never went to space and the Soviet Union collapsed, and I was like, yeah, if you believe the KGB ever went away, which a lot of people don't exactly, I don't even know if that's like a full blown conspiracy theory, because like, like I believe Putin was a KGB agent, Like a lot of former KGB are now like leading Russia, right, so but there, yeah, there are definitely a lot of people who are kind of like, yeah, the KGB never really went away, it just kind of changed because yeah, oh, good old KGB.

1:33:00 Then there's the case of Judica of the Judica Gordiglia brothers. Based in a former German bunker outside Turin, Italy, and equipped with an improvised radio set, they claimed to have intercepted and recorded signals from a variety of early space age craft. Hmmm. Ominously, some of them appeared to be human voices pleading for help. Oh shit, okay, I have goosebumps. That is terrifying. So these brothers in a bunker in Turin, Italy with a radio set, claimed they intercepted signals from space of human voices pleading for help.

1:33:47 Yes, were they sure that it was pleading for help? And it wasn't like paradolia and they just hearing things in static. It might be just paradolia. But I'm still booped. I'm very, very spooped. Mere weeks before Vostok I they picked up a transmission from a female cosmonaut. Oh crap, they have a quote like it says, I can see a flame thirty two thirty two? Am I going to crash? Yes? Yes, I feel hot. I am listening. I feel hot. I will re enter. I am hot. Oh god, I'm so creeped out now. I literally feel like when I was like fourteen years old reading Snopes in the middle of the night in my bedroom, all alone, and then the signal ended. Was this a real human being alone and terrified beyond Earth's atmosphere? Did she perish as her ship broke up on re entry? According to the paranormal magazine fourteen Times, the brothers picked up eight secret cosmonauts between May nineteen sixty and November nineteen sixty four. Some seem to vanish into deep space, drifting out of Earth orbit into the Great Beyond, while others went dark during atmospheric entry or suffocated after the failure of their life support.

1:35:09 It was as if there was a whole shadow space program sending cosmonauts to their deaths between the successful flights that Soviets had been so triumphantly hailing. M M. That's a really good point too. Their claim was that they were picking these things up, like in between the sporadic successful launch. They're suggesting that there were tons of horrible failures. Which wouldn't have been like weird, because we were just learning how to go into space. So I'm not I wouldn't be surprised if they had tons of failures. Yeah. No, In fact, it's bizarre how few failures they reported. But then again, Soviet Union, you know, paragon of truth, of course, Soviet postage stamp of Oh, it's a picture of a Soviet postage stamp of Valentina at Tereshkova, the first woman in space. But then it says or was she done?

1:36:04 Don done? The Judica Cordiglia Brothers recordings have received considerable criticism over the years, and not without good reason. None of the alleged cosmonauts used formal radio protocols. Strange for a group that we know was drawn from elite pilots representing the Soviet Union's brightest and most disciplined aviators. And oh and some of them spoken accent accented form of Russian, not that of a native speaker. Huh. Well, that the Soviet Union had many, many territories with many different dialects and accents of Russian, though.

1:36:44 I mean that's true. And also like for like because yeah, because they're all real big, it's real big, and I think, yeah, that's it. Well, if I'm remembering correctly, Stalin himself was Georgian, and he was constantly trying to hide his accent because Georgia at the time was considered like a very thugish, like a place where like low class people are from ironically in Communis where supposed to be only one class. The other irony was he was literally a thug, Like he was a Georgian thug, absolutely, and he didn't want people to see him that way, but he was like from Georgia and he was a thug. But anyway, but that just made me think of it because I'd read about that about Stalin, right, and there were many dialects, many dialects within the Soviet Union, So I don't know, and it.

1:37:39 Is weird that that they weren't you know, talking, you know, in a way that sounded formal enough. Right, yeah, I mean, but if I want to, if I want to put my conspiracy hat on again, made of tinfoil, of course, what if they were using prisoners of war or what if they were using captured pilots from other nations or defectors or whatever it may be. What if they were making people do it by force, saying like if you land, will let you live, like we'll let you go, or we'll do whatever, or we won't kill your family or what because the Soviets had all kinds of insane stuff going on, especially during this era with yeah yeah, so what if they were not professional cosmonauts, What if they were pilots from other places or people that had been trained haphazardly just to test equipment and told like, if you survive, you can leave.

1:38:43 That could explain why they didn't follow proper protocol. It could explain why they had accents in their Russian. Yeah yeah, or can I'll just be bullshit. Or it could be bullshit if the signals weren't genuine. That that is the obvious explanation. But Giovanna Giovanni Judica Gordiglia, the surviving brother, stands by his story over sixty years later, and the debate has not been resolved one way or the other. Oh man. And then there's a link to the original recordings. Wow, yeah they exist. Oh my god. The website looks like it was made on GeoCities. Ah yeah, I remember so. I as much as I'd like to play the recordings, that's not really what we're all about.

1:39:33 So I'm gonna let that be for now. We've discussed lurid tales from the dawn of space travel, failed suborbital hops, Bostock Mission's gone horribly wrong. But the flurry of lost cosmonaut speculation does not end here there. If Earth's orbit harbors its secrets, so too might the Moon, the nearest world to our own and the finish line of the space race. Even if the Soviets later insisted that they never aimed for it, I remember that they were. We didn't even care about the Moon once the Americans landed there. The Soviet lunar program was itself covered up by authorities.

1:40:14 Vehicles such as the thundering N one Booster and the insectoid LK moon Lander only came to light in the late nineteen eighties after two decades of airtight secrecy. What else could they have been hiding? I love them. For two decades they were like, we didn't even think about going to the moon. And then somebody was like, then, why is there like a moonlander that you guys were building? And they're like, uh wait, my last boss died. Yeah, I can tell you about it. We're gonna take a quick break and wrap up the details of this eerie conspiracy right after this. While we were on break, I did take a look get those recordings we talked about.

1:41:01 They're pretty rough to listen to. You can find them with a really easy Google search of like lost cosmonaut sounds, but it's just muffled screaming and airplane sounds. But the thing that creeped me out was it sounded very similar to the quality of the sounds they got from actual Sputnik because they had a microphone in Sputnik, so they could hear the dog's heart beating to confirm it was a lot. Yeah, what Soviet Union man, what do you want? You think that's bad? You see how they treated like people from Serbia. None of them so about referring to the Moon, to the race for the Moon. None of that, however, has stopped speculation that the Soviets secretly landed humans on the Moon, or at least launched them in that direction.

1:41:49 It's been said that the second unmanned test launch of the N one was not unmanned at all. That's something I would believe the Soviets would do. They would like launch something like, oh it was unmans because it would be seen as cruel to like everybody, and then in reality it was like, oh, there were totally people on that. Yeah, we just don't care. I believe that, Yeah, that the second one man's was not unmanned at all. This flight, which took place on July third, nineteen sixty nine. Nice, nice, sorry, thank you geez, are you even listening? Harsh mean, was actually a desperate attempt to beat the Americans to a moonshot, with two ill fated cosmonauts climbing into the rocket and hoping for the best. According to the story, these secret moon travelers persisted in flames when their end one exploded beneath them. It is well established, though, that the launch escape the launch escape system for that test flight functioned perfectly, delivering the capsule to a safe distance. If the Soviets did take that opportunity for a last ditch moonshot, the cosmonauts walked away from it in one piece. Presumably they were then sworn to secrecy and the whole embarrassing episode was swept under the rug. That's a really nice way to say it, instead of that they would just shoot them like immediately.

1:43:04 Oh, I was hoping that they would say sh and then they just go home and live nice lives with their families. Yeah, oh, okay, that's I like that version more. Another story comes from the Russians themselves. Oh. In the early nineteen seventies, rumors went around Moscow that the lunocod rovers were not remotely piloted from Earth, as the government claimed, but driven by very small KGB agents who had been sent to the Moon on a suicide mission. Apparently, the poor state of Soviet electronics left no other explanation. This one is ridiculous. On the face of it. There was no way a washtub sized lunocode could have supported a man for months on end. But to be fair, one way moon missions have been proposed before. That's creepy. Yeah, apparently there's a whole article about about a plan to go to the Moon and not be able to come back.

1:44:04 They'd made discussions about that before. But they get to live there, right, they don't have to die. I mean in theory, I mean they get to live there, yes, for. A long time in any die of old age. I mean a long time by Moon standards, could be five or six minutes. And there are even weirder claims out there, such as the assertation that Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Lenov flew to the Moon in total secrecy aboard an American spacecraft as part of a joint US Soviet Apollo mission dispatched to investigate a crashed alien starship. Whoa, so we came together.

1:44:47 Which hear me out, if we found like a spaceship, like a giant alien spaceship during the height of the Cold War, we would want to allow with each other in case there was like an earth destroying force. Yeah, yeah, I would actually buy that that. They would be like, let's do it, let's look at this together. Because like we have all of the nukes, both of us, Yeah, and a part we will certainly fall. Yeah, I could totally see that. Actually, I just watched the movie The Gorge, which is basically about something kind of like that but not exactly, where there's a tower on either side of this mysterious gorge, and one is run by the Eastern world and the other is run by the American side, basically the Western world. It's really good. It's also a love story, and I thought they did a nice job with it. Anyway, it's on Apple, Apple plus Apple TV, or with the Hell anyway. The Apollo twenty conspiracy theory has been circling around the Internet since the early two thousands.

1:45:49 While the whole thing was exposed as a hoax, with the supposed footage being no more than an elaborate model work by a French prankster, you will still come across people who swear by it. At least it's a good deal more interesting than your typical moon landing conspiracy, which insists we never went I'll happily take lost cosmonauts and aliens over Kubrick filming astronauts on a sound stage. So now we're diving into known to the cover ups. Though okay, aside from all the series the theories just presented, some of them rather far fetched. It is well established that the Soviet space program saw a number of cover ups and indeed the deaths of multiple cosmonauts. The first fatality occurred on the ground just three weeks before Gagarin's flight.

1:46:32 Valentine bondarec Renco, the youngest of the first cosmonaut class, was performing a fifteen day experiment in a pressure chamber when his clothing caught fire, ignited by an electric complate. Oh no, high oxygen levels meant the flames spread quickly and ravenously. He suffered severe burns over most of his body, to the point where the attending doctors, seeking intact skin where they could place an IV needle, had to use the souls of his feet. A poor guy, and. He died in the hospital sixteen hours later. Oh my god. And it was probably just a horrible time.

1:47:15 Well, I mean, it's compared to daily life in the Soviet Union. Maybe it was just kind of a Wednesday. Get some time off. Bondarenko's death remained a tightly guarded secret for more than two decades until a liberalizing Soviet government finally admitted the truth. Bondarenko was not the only cosmonaut to be wiped from history. The vanishing cosmonaut is not a wait. Note the two. There's a photo they're showing. Note the two in the photo above the other man, Grigory and Nelyyobov Melyyobov who got into a drunken brawl and disgraced the program. Naturally, Soviets tried to save face by pretending he had never existed. According to a twenty eleven xpos and Wired, this was a widespread practice in the Soviet space program, though investigations into the missing cosmonauts have revealed that they were discharged for mundane reasons such as bad behavior, medical problems, and the light but the highest profile cosmonaut death in the space race days was that of Vladimir Komarov, who flew aboard the first mission of the Soyuz capsule on April twenty third, nineteen sixty seven. Soyuz won was a disaster even before it took off. Despite warnings that the spacecraft wasn't ready, party leaders pressed ahead with a launch in time for the anniversary of Lenin's birthday. Of course they did.

1:48:32 Of course they did. Lenin was dead. It was fine. You could just just do it like most people's birthdays, like, oh, my birthdays on a Wednesday, let's do it on Saturday. They could have just done pulled one of those. Yeah yeah. Once in orbit, a solar panel failed to deploy, starving the ship's systems of power, and problems with attitude control meant that Kamarov couldn't even keep his craft pointed the right direction. Eventually, mission controls grubbed the mission and told him to come home. Komarov might have landed safely if not for another critical defect. The drogue parachute got tangled with the main parachute, keeping it from deploying, and his capsule slammed at full speed into the Russian step. Oh fuck wow. And there's actually a memorial on the Moon that Apollo fifteen left commemorating Komarov as one of the people who died, alongside five other cosmonauts and eight astronauts who gave their lives in pursuit of space travel. That was nice of us to like include the Russians, even though, like you know, they came in second place.

1:49:41 Also, it's nice, but no one can see it because it's on the moon. Ooh, you're one of those people. Okay, okay, yeah, there's nobody on the moon. No, Komarov's flight was widely known at the time. He was not, so he was not a lost cosmonaut. Nevertheless, the Soviet government was not forthcoming with details, and they released a polished statement for the public public lauding him as a hero and burying him in the Kremlin wall. They did everything they could to hide the string of oversights, design flaws, and general negligence that had led to his death. The prestige of the Soviet Union could not be tarnished. One suspects that if they'd had a chance at concealing the accident altogether, they might have.

1:50:23 Sure. So we're like really close to the end. So we're gonna take a break and we'll wrap this up, and then we're pretty much all set here a monthly spooky right after this, all right, as we wrap up our coverage of lost cosmonauts secrets in the Soviet space program. Courtesy of Let's Get off This Rock Already dot com, which I highly recommend you guys check out because the quality of this article is excellent. The content here has got to be great. Chill's already gonna check it out so she can cry about the animals that into space and then tell me about it so I can cry too. I'm going to cry about everyone who went into space.

1:51:05 You haven't yet, I know. I'm sorry. Wow. A few years back, on Ancient Aliens, the show presented outlandish claims of alien incursions, lost continents, secret messages encoded in history, and while pretty clearly nonsense, there was a certain draw. However, there are many holes to be poked in the theories. It was exciting to live in a world, to live in a world where unknown other worldly forces lurked behind mundane events. Lost cosmonaut stories scratch a similar itch, and then the author says, I'm a sucker for mystery in general, and tales of doomed Soviet space missions in particular.

1:51:49 It's such a fascinating image. A man trapped in the confines of a Vostok capsule, hurtling away from Earth into the unknowable gulfs beyond, stranded alone, his breaths growing ever slower or fainter as his life support gives out, and in the end he is buried in history, his very existence denied by a secret of regime that can't afford to lose face. Yeah, the problem is that the Iron Curtain eventually came down, bringing with it the veil of secrecy that had kept so many things hidden from the West. We now have detailed knowledge of nearly everything that went on in the Soviet space program, or so we think, from design work to cosmonaut recruitment to the missions themselves, and amidst all that data, there is a scarce There is scarce room for phantom flights. If cosmonauts went into space before Gagarin, who were they? Everyone seems pretty well accounted for, even the men who were airbrushed out of official photographs. Have you ever looked at the photographs of Stalin?

1:52:46 How Like? You've never looked at that? How Like? There are pictures of him with like all of his leadership, and then they show like they airbrushed each of them out as he had them executed, until the picture is just Stalin by himself. Wow, you've never seen that? No? Oh, my gosh, Oh, I'll send it to you after we Uh okay, Wow, I can't believe that you didn't know about that. That's one of my favorite like weird Soviet things. Hm, let's see even the men who were airbrushed out. The Vladimir Ilusian story at least names a known individual who could plausibly have been chosen to go into space. But there's still no real evidence linking him to the cosmonaut program, nor did the US or any other nations track his alleged launch, and the moonshot allegations are dreadfully thin. As tantalizing a prospect as they might present, my view is that the actual facts of the human space travel line up pretty well with the accepted narrative. Despite the stories and in one case, radio recordings, space history has few holes large enough to fit a lost cosmonaut. I could be wrong, of course, the truth has a way of being more surprising than expected, but the genre of lost cosmonaut theories is by and large a mirage, best as Creepy tells to tell around a campfire, or as fodder for a Halloween themed blog post. Apparently this was his Halloween special. Okay, yeah, so uh yeah, I want to say again, let's get off this rock. Already. Dot com seems to have some really awesome stuff. Apparently, they'll have essays and short stories by the author, whose name I'm

1:54:18 having trouble finding right away. But where is his name? Does? It just says my Maybe it is, Maybe he's not named. It says my personal website for science fiction and stuff. So I don't I don't know who this. Oh it's Nick Quatramani. Nick Quatramani. Okay, So anyway, so before we get out of here, Michelle, I wanted to tell you about two pieces of horror media I saw in the theater. Okay, I got to see the film Heart Eyes, which is a Valentine's Day themed slasher film, and it was a ton of fun. It. It actually had an upswing. It looked like it was going to flop, but now it's actually doing pretty well. I don't know if it's going to be a full blown hit, but originally it made ten million dollars against eighteen million dollar budget. Now it's looking at like twenty five million. Valentine's Weekend was very kind to the movie, and it deserves it because it was super good good. Basically, a killer with heart Eyes on its mask is killing couples on Valentine's Day for the last three years, and the movie. You would like it because it's literally a romantic comedy and a slasher movie at the same time. Cool, like straight, like no joke, like the guy and the girl have like really good chemistry, their backstories really work. I adored the movie Hard Eyes, totally worth seeing in the theater. And the other film, which is also romantic in its way was the was Companion,

1:55:51 the film about a guy who jail breaks his sex robot, and it sounds like a wacky scenario, but it's actually a very good, serious horror film. It has a few laughs here and there, but overall not a comedy and had some really cool concepts about the ethics of robot slaves that are designed to have a degree of emotion in order to be better companions. Basically. So, I really liked Companion. I saw it in the theater twice. I saw Hard Eyes twice as well, so highly recommend both of them. Who knows, Chell, maybe if you're bored while I'm visiting you, I'll make you go see a movie.

1:56:34 Lord knows you don't go to the movies enough. I worry. It's okay, okay, I'm okay. Did you find anything worthwhile on Reddit? Before we take off, So there's not a lot of good things, but there were things that were okay. So I'll just this one is probably not supernatural, but it came from the glitch and the matrix, so read it anyway. So if I'm remembering this correctly, there's this person the poster is watching like house sitting, I think, and maybe watching a dog for somebody, but like staying at their house and stuff. And she's just being normal and stuff.

1:57:15 And then she like goes and like cleaning and stuff. She goes into a room and she finds a glass of water, like a mostly empty glass of water, like on the dining room table or something, and she's like, I've been here for three days. I didn't drink that water. I don't even drink out of those kind of cups like she has like a tumbler in the. I don't even drink water. I don't even drink anything like in the refrigerator. So she like just drinks out of her own thing. And she was like, I don't know what is going on, and it's probably that someone lives in the walls, but yeah, of course, yeah, or that she just didn't notice for three days and then all of a sudden, she's like, oh, it's glass of water there, but it was still upsetting the end.

1:57:58 Yeah, that would that would make me wonder about the walls personally. Yeah, did anybody suggest she check if the house had a carbon monoxide detector? You know? I didn't see anyone do that, and I think they should. Have because it's not her home, so she wouldn't know. Yeah, and and and like I could see that, like she comes and all of a sudden, there's something, there's a detail that's different. Maybe it's because it's not different and you're having problems. Oooh devious. I guess well, I like that one. That's creepy. And that's the kind of thing that would get me because I will forget. I did things. Last night. I was making really fancy burritos for Rachel and I and we looked everywhere for the sour cream and couldn't believe we were out of sour cream because I have been eating on it. I've been on a diet, so I have not been eating sour cream with any regular you know regularity. I'm like eating it maybe once a week.

1:58:51 We couldn't find it anywhere, couldn't believe that we'd be out, and then it was on the island table that I've literally been putting the ingredients that I was gonna use it. Oh yeah, I don't remember putting it there, and Rachel doesn't remember putting it there. Somebody put it there while we were preparing the burrito stuff. Yeah, but I was literally looking for it to put it where it was. So it's probably just me because I'm stupid, but it could also have been ghosts or somebody living in the walls. Yeah. One time I think it was this house, but I don't really remember. I was. I had like a dessert thing like chocolates or something, I don't remember, and I would I went to get one and I was like, I think I had more of this than I have now, like, someone ate it. It's not me, but I live by myself and Gigs doesn't eat it. But then I just decided that it's fine and there's probably no one here eating my stuff, but maybe there is.

1:59:51 I mean, let's just hope your printer doesn't go off. Yeah, okay, sorry, it's still funny. I have a differ now, Okay, good. My printer hasn't. Actually, now that I think about it, my printer hasn't like randomly went Coaturn when I've been in here in a while, but it does randomly do. I've had it blow takes on my podcast because it just decides to do stuff. So but on that note, Chill, thanks for letting me hang out with you now and soon, and thank you all for listening to Monthly Spooky. We really do appreciate it. If you enjoyed what we're doing here and want to support us, we really do appreciate it. If you had to Weekly Spooky dot com slash join for as little as one dollar a month, you get two bonus episodes, four years worth of creepypasta readings and audiobooks, as well as so much more at Weeklyspooky dot com slash join, and if you want to write into us, send us an email at Weekly Spooky at gmail dot com.

2:00:49 We would absolutely love to hear from you. So now, as is tradition, Michelle, you have the final word, and it better not be a yawn. Oh god, why would you do that? It was