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June 29, 2025 - Adventures in HellwQrld
01:29:43
Adventures in HellwQrld Presents: The Cryptids episode! (At last!)

In this Episode Mike talks way to much about wrestling at the start and then we get into cryptids and internet cryptids and all sorts of other paranormal stuff folks online love to talk about. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Time Text
The Adventures in Hell World podcast talks in depth about QAnon.
While it's meant to be comedic informative, sometimes we have to get into things like child abuse and violence against people.
Listener discretion advised.
Hello, everybody.
I am Mike Raines, aka Poker and Politics, and welcome to another episode of Adventures in Hell World.
This week, I am joined by Chaley, aka Haley, aka Arizona Right Watch.
What up?
Hello, everybody.
Hi.
Everything's good.
Hi.
Yes.
I am also joined by Eric, the Deep State Operative.
Hi, thanks for having me here today.
And I'm having tea with the Jersey Devil in a couple hours, so we'll have to make this snappy.
Chop, chop.
I hear you.
I hear you.
My favorite thing there on the intros was when I started doing Haley's intro, she was totally ignoring me because she knows I ramble for forever before I get to the point where she can talk.
And she wasn't like waiting to jump in.
She's like, yeah, Mike's going to keep telling you all my dumb nicknames.
Yep.
Okay, now I can stay.
Now you are.
And finally, we are joined by Steph.
How are you doing, Steph?
I'm here.
How are you?
I love that I'm just here so I don't get find energy.
I'm trying to match Haley's energy today.
I'm fine.
We're fine.
Everything's fine.
How are you?
Everything's fine.
Everything's great.
Everything's great.
Yeah.
So thank you all.
This is actually going to be the cryptid episode.
We're doing it.
We're going to do cryptids.
Haley is fake doing silly faces because Haley basically punched me repeatedly in the ribs and said, motherfucker, we're doing it.
I just, I can't deal with the news right now.
I'm so tired.
I'm so tired.
I'm sorry.
We have to do cryptids.
Well, just so everyone, I mean, unless I got incredibly lazy, which is entirely possible, you're probably listening to this after the standalone episode I'm going to do about Iran and Iraq and how they are represented in the Q-drops.
And I probably will get in the current events also.
But I do want to do an explainer about, I did want to do an explainer about how, why QAnon is so upset about this, because usually Donald Trump does terrible things and they just like hand wave it away.
Like Trump was like, yo, vaccines are great.
Get your COVID shot, you idiots.
And QAnon was like, we disagree, but you're still our God Emperor, who we will charge the gates of hell for.
Even though you want us to take a shot that will kill us, we will complete the mental gymnastics needed to be done in order to justify that.
So yeah, I do want to get into why they're actually upset about this when usually nothing upset.
That's so interesting that they're actually upset with them.
Right.
That's what's so funny about this is that like there's there's this is actually a thing that's upsetting QAnon.
So hopefully you're listening to this after that standalone episode.
If not, I apologize for being a giant lazy bones.
And double bonus, if I'm feeling really froggy, I might do a Karen Reed explainer because if you live in Massachusetts, if you know a person who lives in Massachusetts, boy howdy, have we been obsessed with this dumb murder trial for like two plus years now.
And she got away with it.
She totally killed her boyfriend and got away with it.
Spoiler alert.
No, she didn't kill her boyfriend.
And if she did, guess what?
The cops butchered the investigation so badly, she deserved to walk anyway.
She got OJ.
That's how hard it was.
Yeah, OJ.
Like, I don't think she did it, but if she did do it, it doesn't matter.
The cops screwed the case up so bad that if they had convicted her, it would have been an injury.
I love that she was found guilty of a DUI.
They're like, well, sorry for putting you through all this horseshit, but we're still slapping you with that DUI, lady.
I think the defense actually put the standalone DUI on the docket as a way to kind of give the jury something to hit her with to make themselves feel better about it.
And literally, the judge after the announcement of the verdicts was given and she was acquitted on everything but the DUI, the judge was like, we're going to need to schedule a sentencing hearing for that.
And the prosecutor was like, I'm ready to go right now with one year probation.
And the judge was like, sounds great.
One year probation.
Bam.
So that was, they just banged it out immediately.
It was all taken care of.
I honestly thought that was a local case for so long because our media has been obsessed with it too.
I think just like it's, it's gripped the nation a little bit.
I know like right-wingers have been obsessed with it, but they think she did it.
They fucking hate that lady.
So that'd be an interesting episode.
We're also, listeners, gonna maybe do some FEMA death camps at some point.
Yes.
Well, the Fema Death Camps will definitely be a new one.
And I'll be going to one and reporting live.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What I was going to say, What I was going to mention is what's very funny is that the two of the biggest free Karen Reed advocates are huge mega scum.
Oh, really?
Like the main guy that kind of broke the case and got the ball rolling, he basically hangs out with our local version of Bill O'Reilly all the time.
There's this Bostonian right-winger old man named Howie Carr.
And he has his little AM radio show and he writes an article for the Boston Herald, which is our shitty right-wing rag opposite the Boston Globe.
And Turtle Boy is the nickname he goes under.
And Turtle Boy is like, go on Howie Carr show at five.
Like every day he posts stuff about that.
And he's made a lot of MAGA posts and stuff like that.
So it's that guy is so going to try to use the Karen Reed case to launch himself into the right-wing cryptosphere.
It's really funny.
And there's this other woman I know who's a big free Karen Reed lady.
And she's talking about all the undocumented people in Massachusetts.
Because when I think of states, they're just rife with immigration crises.
It's Massachusetts, you know, right on the Mexican border, right next to Canada, with all those filthy Canucks pouring over our borders of all their fentanyl.
She's still pissed that all those mix came in in the 20s.
Yes, yes.
I think someone had the greatest quote I saw, which was the Pope will be from Chicago sounds like KKK rhetoric from the 1890s about uncontrolled Irish immigration.
It was just like, yeah.
It was like, oh, God.
So yeah, but it's going to be really interesting to see, like, because I mean, now it's over.
She won.
We're done here.
So like how all the Karen Reed people deal with their lack of relevance afterwards is going to be really interesting because the circus is over.
It's packed up.
It's leaving town.
We're all done here.
So congrats, everybody.
You won.
Which I mean, which is, at the end of the day, the good thing happened.
The lady who should have been acquitted of the crimes got acquitted.
But I just want to see like peripherally afterwards, like what's going to happen.
So that'd be very interesting.
Going back to the OJ thing, if this trial results in some famous for being famous family, like the Kardashians getting their own show, then I'm just done with this world.
That would be really funny if one of the two defense attorneys ends up getting a weird famous family as a result of this.
That would be absolute comedy goal.
Hopefully we'll be like old by then, so we can just kind of like do that.
Hopefully.
You know, Mike, we got to talk about wrestling.
Yes.
So we had, Haley is doing a big Hulk Hogan flex here.
There was some rumors that the racist scumbag was going to die this week, but people have poured cold water on those.
So apparently we're going to be cursed with more Hulk Hogan.
However, the other wrestling company, most of you know the WWE, which is the big company, they have a smaller rival company called AEW that pisses them off because WWE wants to crush all competition and rule with a monopoly over wrestling.
So they hate having a rival company.
And Tony Collins would, it stands for All Elite Wrestling.
Basically, well, the company is woke.
We're going to get into how woke the company is soon, but all elite is basically, there was a small faction of wrestlers that called themselves the Elite.
And a series of events happened, basically, where someone made the challenge to these guys that they were like, no WWE, no non-WWE company could sell out a 10,000-seat arena in America.
And these guys were like, oh yeah, we're going to try to do that.
And then they did it.
And then Tony Khan, who's the son of the guy who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars, he is a big wrestling nerd and also a billionaire.
And after these guys actually sold out a 10,000 seat arena, he was like, screw it.
Let's, I have infinite money.
I have contacts in the business, in the television industry.
Let's start a wrestling company.
And they did it.
They just started a wrestling company.
So it's like Tony Khan's like, there's no such thing as a good billionaire, but he's as good a billionaire as you're going to get because he just literally opened a wrestling company.
So now hundreds of wrestlers and their support staff all have like good jobs because this guy just decided that he's like, I'm a wrestling nerd and I can start a company.
Let's do that.
Are they unionized?
They're not unionized, but WWE does a thing with independent contractors where you're quote unquote an independent contractor, but you have to work exclusively for them.
AEW will let you take independent bookings if you want them, as long as you just run it by them for them.
I just remember there was this whole thing about Hulk Hogan union busting the WWF at the time.
Yeah, that's the very ancient story that Jesse Ventura was trying to unionize the boys in the locker room and Hogan ran to Vince McMahon, got it killed, and stuff like that.
Ventura was so upset he became governor of Minnesota.
And it kind of like, if you see like the person that Ventura eventually turned into, you could kind of see like, oh, I wonder if this played a role in his intense paranoia that played.
Because, I mean, people think like, oh, Jesse Ventura, he's the cool governor who had a few wackos on his conspiracy show.
He had Judy Wood.
He had David Icke on his show.
Yeah, and he had Judy Wood who says that the World Trade Center was brought down by direct energy weapons.
So and that there were no planes on 9-11.
That's a ventura.
Yeah, Ventura has a tendency to brush over stuff like that.
Like when He had David Icke on in an episode about depopulation and conveniently forgot to mention David Icke's whole stance about shape-changing lizard aliens.
And also interesting that he would have David Icke on his show for overpopulation because David Icke doesn't believe that AIDS is real.
So it's like, how do you approach the topic of like population and numbers of people without addressing a disease that Ike doesn't believe exists?
I mean, he was really just very brief.
It was actually kind of funny because like they just they had him on for like maybe 30 seconds and it was it wasn't even Ventura.
It was one of his assistants who was talking to him and he's like and they're like standing in the shadow of the storefront and he's wearing sunglasses.
They're trying to like, I mean, like the only thing missing was like, you know, a multi-level parking lot for him to be all deep throat in, but that's what they were trying to go for.
And so he's like, yeah, they are trying to lower their population to about 500 million people because they figure that number is going to be the easiest to control.
And then they cut away from it.
That's Guidestone shit.
That's Rosetta Guidestone shit, isn't it?
Yeah.
You mean Georgia Guidestone?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
Which unfortunately I will never be able to see now because somebody had to go and blow it up.
Someone blow it up?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyhow, the so AEW, the woke wrestling alternative, they did a show in Mexico last night and the opening of the show starred their hero.
In wrestling terminology, we call him a babyface, but a good guy.
And the good guy came out and he is your really bog standard, just generic white dude from Virginia.
So he gets in the ring and then he just says in Spanish, he's like, apologies for my Spanish being a little rough, but I'm going to try to, I speak better than most white people, so I'm going to give it a whirl.
And you figure he's just going to say a couple lines in Spanish and then switch to English for the TV audience?
No, just does a five-minute promo in straight Spanish for the Mexican-speaking audience.
And it was just like, wow, this is wild.
And one of the broadcasters was translating for him.
But it was really cool that this guy goes to Mexico and just cuts a promo in their language for them and then walks out of the ring.
And it was just like, wow, that was really interesting.
And then what Haley noticed was the next match featured a wrestler named Brody King, who is a hardcore lib.
And the dude is like 6'8, covered in tattoos, looks like a murderer.
And he came to the ring wearing an abolish ice shirt.
So, yeah, it was a cooler.
I don't know anything about the sport, but yeah.
Brody is, Brody's a really cool dude.
Basically, he has like a ton of stuff that he posts online.
He's like super liberal.
He supported the No Kings rallies.
He's just, he's all that.
He's that.
He's just that dude.
And he's like just that kind of guy.
And that was really awesome.
They did that.
Another wrestler in the company named Willow Nightingale had an Instagram story of her dropkicking an ice cube and it said, kick ice out of our neighborhoods.
And so a lot of folks in the company are pretty liberal.
And then the big liberal, the big woke match of the night was Mystico, who's basically the biggest hero in Mexican wrestling.
He's their version of The Rock plus John Cena plus Stone Cold Steve Austin, all mixed into one.
He was fighting our American asshole, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, MJF, who is basically a prick.
His whole gimmick is that he's a piece of shit.
And in order to make sure this crowd understood what was going on, MJF came out waving the American flag and wrestling in a red, white, and blue bodysuit with Uncle Sam on it to really let everybody know I'm the American asshole.
And Mystico has this theme music that usually the CMLL is the company that he works for.
And usually they don't pay for his licensed music because they don't need to.
Their crowds love him anyways.
But Tony Khan is very much known for splurging for shit like that.
So he got the rights to play his licensed music.
Mimerdo, I believe is the name of the song.
And the crowd was just losing their shit when that music hit.
And Mystico comes out, of course, adorned in green, red and white, like the Mexican flag.
And I mean, it was just such a ridiculous, like the old trope of the evil foreigner fighting the heroic hometown hero that you see in America all the time, being so inverted in Mexico where the evil American is now fighting the heroic Mexican was just chef's kiss.
And they did what we in the business would call a fuck finish or a screw job.
Mystico tapped out MJF, but the ref didn't see it.
And then MJF realized he was losing, so he kicked Mystico in the balls for a disqualification and got the match thrown out.
And then, as a true villain, he unmasked Mystico after the match, which is totally unacceptable in Mexican culture and Luchador tradition.
And a bunch of American and Mexican baby faces ran out, ran off the bad guys.
They got a new mask to put on Mystico to protect his identity.
They never showed his face because that's absolutely no bueno.
And all of us wrestling fans believe that this is probably going to lead to one of the Mexican traditional wrestling matches when you have a Luchador with a mask versus a wrestler who does not have a mask, mask versus hair, where either the masked man must take off his mask and reveal himself, Or the unmasked man must be shaved bald.
And people have been talking about how MJF's losing his hair.
It's not long for this world.
So it might be for the best for this match to happen and MJF just take his impending baldness gracefully and just get his head shaved.
Or maybe he'll get his head shaved, then run off somewhere and get some hair plugs.
And when his hair grows back, it'll be even fuller and more luscious than ever.
But yeah, so that's going to be very interesting to see if that happens.
I figure that it will.
And the one last thing that happened that was so funny was the two best women's wrestlers in the company, Mercedes Monet, who left WWE, bet on herself.
Tony Khan gave her a mountain of money.
She travels to all these random companies and wins their titles because small markets love her and they want her to promote their companies.
And she is fighting another woman who left WWE, Tony Storm, who now is, her gimmick is Crazy Hollywood Starlet.
And she basically is Judy Garland slash Marilyn Monroe slash whoever.
She's just the greatest character.
If you watch her stuff, you'll laugh your ass off.
But for some reason, Tony Storm showed up as Carmen Sandiego and threw Mercedes Monet around the ring.
Yeah, she just shows up, red trench coat, red fedora, and just beats up Mercedes.
And it got Carmen San Diego trending on Twitter for a little while.
And then she sold the Statue of Liberty.
Oh, if only she did.
Exactly.
I mean, people were just like, why did she show up like Carmen San Diego?
And the answer is, why wouldn't she?
Why wouldn't you do Carmen San Diego when you can?
But yeah, so it was a really great night of entertainment and it was very funny.
And if you have HBO Match, Max, you can watch the shows on replay because they're live streaming and then they stay on the website.
So yeah, it was fun on a bun.
And Brody King rules, put all the belts on him.
So anyhow, 20 minutes of bullshit.
Time for some cryptids.
It's a lighthearted episode, you know?
So I think the audience probably appreciates the wrestling.
But yeah, cryptids.
Hey, we definitely didn't put that off forever, right, everybody?
Actually, we put it off for so long that the question that I asked on June 4th that initially got no replies on Blue Sky now has four replies because we waited so long.
And I'll kick it off there because I thought people had some good answers.
I said, what's your favorite cryptid?
Someone said the Loch Ness Monster.
We've all heard of the Loch Ness Monster.
Somebody said Chupacabra, which is a cryptid that is pretty big in like Mexican culture kind of like Hispanic culture.
I've heard about Chupacabra over the years.
And you know what?
I went to the Wikipedia on Chupacabra and it's actually kind of a modern cryptid conspiracy.
It was the term was only coined in 1995.
Yeah!
That is so new.
Let's see.
Somebody said kappa, which I was going to bring up in this episode anyway, because there's like some hints of cryptids in Animal Crossing, which I love to play.
And the little, the boat captain that looks like a turtle is actually a kappa, which is like this Japanese like folklore.
Like he looks kind of like a turtle.
He's got like a, like kind of like a little like bowl in his head filled with water.
And if you bow, like he bows and the water falls out.
That's how you like calm the kappa.
I don't know.
It's cute.
I like that it's from Animal Crossing.
And then somebody mentioned that their favorite cryptid is a mangal.
Y'all ever hear about this?
Mananan?
Nope.
Apparently it's like a mythical creature from the Philippines.
And this is just the Wikipedia.
That is able to separate its upper torso from the lower part of its body.
Their fangs and wings and give them a vampire-like appearance.
So it's like a vampire that like detaches its torso.
That's creepy as fuck.
But anyway.
That's like Torso Boy in one of the Suicide Squad movies where he detaches his arms from his body and then gets killed like five seconds later.
Spoiler alert for those.
That reminds me of the one He-Man figure they had called Majulock.
And it was like all, it was like 20 different pieces and you could like basically like disassemble and reassemble this character.
He was really cool, but he was really hard to put back together.
So it wasn't a very fun toy.
So like I spent way too much time like looking at cryptid shit because we did stall this episode for so long.
And it got me thinking like what the fuck is a cryptid honestly?
Like what, you know, it's like it's such a broad spectrum of like you know it's like you got you got you got like you got like Bigfoot and like crypto zoology stuff, but then there's like really obscure shit.
It kind of like treks into the online.
There's like even online cryptids.
But like there's things that were once considered cryptids that are that were later confirmed to be real, like apparently gorillas, which I thought was interesting.
So like Webster's dictionary defines cryptids as a creature whose existence is disputed or unsubstantiated by science, but which is reported in folklore, myths, or anecdotal accounts.
So it can be actually a lot of things and like kind of goes back historically forever because people have always had myths in their culture about things that may or may not exist.
So yeah, it's kind of like a broad thing.
Steph or Mike, Eric walked away for a minute.
Do you guys have any cryptids that are your favorite?
I mean, I've never been, that's one of the things I never got deep into was cryptids.
I mostly saw them as a sort of conspiracy theory distraction in a way.
I remember just people sort of being like, oh, you idiots are looking after Bigfoot while the Illuminati is taking away all your rights and that kind of stuff.
Like I've seen them just kind of compared to sports ball because that's one of the favorite things like Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists like to get pissed about is like, you idiots care about the Dallas Cowboys more than the fluoride in your water and blah, blah, blah.
And that's the thing about cryptids is that on some level, they give conspiracy theorists a kind of like a layer of protection because when you think of conspiracy theorists, you think of Bigfoot hunters.
You think of idiots like running around Loch Ness with sonar trying to find Nessie.
And you get this mentality about them that they're goofy-doofy, that they're just silly willies.
And it's like, no, that's not really what modern day conspiracy theorists are like.
Like ever since Bill Clinton in the 90s, conspiracy theorists are more nutty, horrible lunatics and sociopaths.
And it's just frustrating that like we have this world where still you have that press conference that I'll never stop pitching about where the reporters are like, Mr. Trump, are you actually fighting the synthetic pedophiles?
And he's like, well, it'd be a good thing if I was.
And everyone just laughs because they think these people are flerfs.
They think these people are Bigfoot hunters.
And it's just like, oh my God.
But I enjoy cryptid culture in America.
I enjoy that sort of like enjoyment of spookiness and weird stuff.
I've always had a mild annoyance with the Jax B Flink jerkies messing with Shashquatch commercials.
Because whenever I watch them, I'm like, Bigfoot just killed that guy.
That guy's just dead.
This isn't really funny.
And it's like, why would you mess with Bigfoot when the result is you being brutally assaulted and probably killed by that monster?
I would probably not fuck with the eight foot tall, inhumanly strong beast man that could throw me on like a ragdoll.
But I also, I enjoy the Bigfoot lore.
I like the Bigfoot video.
We have to video a Bigfoot.
And it's like probably a guy in a costume walking around wearing the outfit.
It just like that kind of stuff.
Like the deep-cut Bigfoot lore is interesting to me because you can go down these rabbit holes and you're going to find people who really care and they're going to tell you all about them.
There was, well, it's interesting.
One of the very few good uses of AI that I've seen has been for stabilization of old videos in order for better clarification.
And two instances where I saw this used that really helped debunk some conspiracy theories is the Patterson Gimli Bigfoot footage.
If you watch the AI stabilized version of it, you're like, oh, that's totally a dude in a fucking suit.
And when the Bigfoot does the iconic look over the shoulder in the original, you're like, oh, Bigfoot knows someone's watching him.
You watch the stabilizer, you're like, oh yeah, the guy in the suit is looking over his shoulder at the cameraman.
And the other one is they stabilize some of the window people footage from 9-11.
And one of the most incredible things is like around floor 105 on the North Tower.
The stabilized footage, there's a fucking guy hanging out the window with a goddamn camera.
You see, he's holding, it looks like a little like handheld video camera and he's holding it out and he's like filming himself and filming other people.
And it's just like, god damn, you know that camera didn't survive, but goddamn, the footage that would be on it would like explain so much.
But yeah, no, but if you look at the, I didn't mean to go 9-11, but if you look at the AI stabilization of Patterson Gimli, it really just, it's like, it just destroys any thought that that thing is real.
Shocking, absolutely stunning, the idea that the Bigfoot footage is.
Well, no, I know, but I mean, I, I, the grainy footage, you know, everybody was having debates, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Once you watch the stabilize, you're like, there's no fucking argument here.
There's no argument to be had, you know?
Oh, yeah, of course.
Um, I can limp the epidemic.
100%!
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Teksting av Nicolai Winther I like that, like, the history channel and like like uh like travel channel and similar networks have had all these like like hunting Bigfoot and like finding Bigfoot and exploring Bigfoot shows.
Um it's kind of in the line as far as like history channel Is the same slop as like ancient aliens, and it's so funny because ancient aliens actually had a Bigfoot episode that I don't know why I'm surprised.
I guess it's because I didn't watch Ancient Aliens at the time, and it's in the fucking title, but I was like, Are they seriously saying that Bigfoot's an alien?
Of course they are.
It's the name of the fucking show, Ancient Aliens.
Yeah, that's that's one of the goalpost kind of arguments is that, oh, you know, because the biggest thing is, okay, you say this creature's been around for a long, long time.
There are all these sightings, there's all this lore, there are all these myths and everything, but yet no one can get, you know, like reliable evidence of it.
Why not?
So then they're like, oh, shit.
Okay, how do I defend this?
Bigfoot's interdimensional.
And that, that, you know, so that kind of became part of the lore.
And I remember, and this was back when I was into the conspiracy theories, I was trying to watch the, when Survivor Man did, he started looking for Bigfoot.
And I got like, I had to download all of the episodes, but I got like into the second episode.
And he's like, I'm out here in the middle of the night.
I haven't heard or seen anything, but I feel like I have a connection.
I can hear the Bigfoot talking to me in my head.
I'm like, dude, you don't need to be in the middle of the woods right now.
You need to be in a psychiatric ward.
Knock this shit off, turn off the camera and go the fuck home.
Yeah, yeah, I always love that stuff.
I mean, the same thing that happens with the paranormal investigators where they got the cameras on their faces and they're like, oh, God, it's happening.
Oh, no.
And then when they finally turn the camera back around, nothing's going on.
But it's just all this like playing to the camera, hamming it up, and then not seeing the poltergeists throwing shit around the room, not seeing the spirits blowing out the candle or any of that stuff.
I mean, it's just that it's really funny that modern technology has ruined so much of these movements because once everyone got a camera and a video camera in their pocket, suddenly we couldn't find these cryptids.
Suddenly we couldn't find these ghosts.
Now thanks to AI and the deepfakes, they're all going to come back now.
Now we're going to have Bigfoot in everyone's backyard.
Now we're going to have UFOs crashing into.
Hey, maybe with the deepfake AIs, maybe someone can finally discover who really killed JFK and boom, it was Mothman.
Yeah.
So anyway, I'm watching this like Ancient Aliens episode about Bigfoot and like apparently like Bigfoot has existed throughout all of time according to Ancient Aliens Guys.
It's just like, yeah, he comes in and out of reality, but also he's an alien.
It was like, I don't know.
They say the same thing, I think, in every episode.
I've only seen two so far.
This is a new reoccurring series here is that I'm going to watch Ancient Aliens stuff.
But it does seem to kind of be the same thing every time.
It was like almost identical to the Pyramid episode.
Just like replace Pyramid with Bigfoot.
But I guess that's kind of the plot of the show.
I don't know how they do this for like 20 seasons.
They do it by literally having the guy doing the voiceover for the B-roll saying, is it possible?
And just over and over again.
There's no phrase they enjoy more than that.
Yeah, ContraPoints brought that up in her conspiracy video.
She did like a little supercut of the, is it possible?
Oh, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Oh, yeah.
They love it.
Mike, so since this is kind of seen as a distraction by the political kind of flavored conspiracy theorists, is there no QAnon people that ever push cryptid shit at all or anything that you can think of?
No.
Cryptids are pretty...
Because Sather was, Sather's big into suppressed technologies.
So whenever something in the Trump administration happens where they're like, boom, we're going to get all this oil or this solar shit that we don't like is still going to pop off this year because reasons, Sather's reaction will be like, bro, fuck this bullshit.
Where's the zero point energy?
Like, get to the hard shit.
I want the real stuff.
And Ron Watkins, before he started doing whatever it is that he's doing now, his big moment was that he was going to do like Alien Wiki.
He was going to do like a WikiLeaks for UFO declassification.
And then something came up and he just kind of never did it.
I think that he said he was going to do Alien Wiki between the 2020 election result and January 6th.
And then right after that, he decided he was going to become an expert in Dominion software voting machines.
And that was his new angle.
And Alien Wiki kind of just went away.
He forgot that he was going to talk about UFOs.
Speaking about, sorry, but speaking of the 2020 election thing, did you see all the election deniers rending their clothes and gnashing their teeth because of Mike Lindell and his court testimony?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
He tapped out.
Yeah, he admitted that he did not have any of the data that he claimed to.
And all these people are like, why would he lie to us?
Why?
It's so funny, though, Mike, that you mentioned ron watkins and the alien stuff but then he switched it to like election conspiracy theories shit for a while because when he did come here to do the like dominion and run for office his manager that he had was like this guy named like tony tiori or something and he was like an alien disclosure guy so he still had the alien disclosure guy dragging along with him yeah he probably met the guy he's like i got a job for you yeah well i mean even um
Even Bill Cooper kind of got his start with UFOs before he transitioned.
Like imagine Alex Jones talking about UFOs because that's essentially what it was when Bill Cooper first started out.
And then he shifted more over to the, you know, the political stuff.
And I'm not sure if that was like, you know, like he was like sitting there calculating that thinking this is the good move.
But I think, you know, like Jordan Sather is like involved with like Corey Goode.
I think he was like he was like in like some camp.
He was like furious at Corey Goode.
That's the guy who invented like the blue avians.
And like Jordan Sather was involved with Gaia Network and stuff.
We covered it on one of our Twitches.
But there's there's, you know, a lot of the argument that you hear from people is like, hey, the UFO stuff, it's not dangerous.
It's just fun.
And yes, it is.
It's fun up into a point because once you start getting into if you're just like, oh, my God, I'm a sky watcher.
Oh, my God, this lore.
Oh, this stuff is so cool.
What if all the possibilities?
OK, then once you start getting into disclosure, you get into the deep underground military bases.
You get into the human experimentation.
You get into alien hybrids.
And then you just go full fucking QAnon.
The UFO stuff is fun, but it almost always leads to something darker.
And Bill Cooper is just and like I said, I'm not sure if that was a calculated move on his part.
Or if it was just something that happened organically, but it always leads to darker shit.
I know that's kind of off topic, but I just I just wanted to kind of say that.
But Bill Cooper, he actually was pretty big and like he went to this like he went to the Mirage Men move on conference in Las Vegas.
That was like the very famous one where one guy came out and said, yeah, we were fucking with Paul Benowitz.
And there was it was so and Bill Cooper was there for that.
So a lot a lot of these like grifters like Jordan Sather and stuff like that.
I think they see.
Like.
An opportunity with the UFO people.
Just for a little background, MUFON is the mutual UFO network, which is which is like the closest thing that you're going to find to a legit organization for UFOlogists.
Yes.
Yeah, they're pretty much like.
I wouldn't say.
Go hang out on their website and trust it, but like there's from what I from what I've seen, this is just a cursory glimpse.
There's still some.
Clinging to like some kind of scholarly notion.
Yeah, they play the game.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah.
And I always whenever we talk about like then versus now with conspiracy theory culture.
I my the best way that I can phrase it is we used to think of conspiracy theorists and like cryptid hunters as the lone gunman TV show.
Yeah.
But now they're just lone gun men.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
It's so dangerous now.
I mean, that's the thing.
Yeah, that's the thing with the with conspiracy theories in general is that, yeah, on the base surface level, they seem like harmless fun.
But then you start digging deeper and you start getting into things like anti-Semitism and all this stuff.
And that's when that's where all the all the bad murky shit is hiding there.
They're basically it's like a smoke screen with the top layer stuff that most people see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, well, I don't know.
Hey, speaking of Jewish stuff, what about the golem?
Is it could a golem be considered a cryptid or is that more of a mythical?
Yeah, that's more mythical because like the whole.
You have to create it.
Right.
Yeah.
It's it's yeah, it's a construct and it's magical.
Yeah.
And it's controlled by a person.
So it's not it's not an animal, basically.
And there was an X-Files episode about one.
Yeah.
It says no, a golem is not generally considered a cryptid.
While they are creatures of folklore, they are typically described as artificial beings being created by humans, not creatures of unknown origin or natural occurrence that like cryptids are.
Right.
OK.
I also Googled is are ghosts a cryptid because it does kind of like, OK, what supernatural stuff counts as a cryptid?
But no, ghosts are not generally considered cryptids.
Because while both entities existence are like debated by people and not scientifically proven, they belong to different categories because cryptids are physical undiscovered creatures like Bigfoot or Loch Ness.
Ghosts, on the other hand, are understood to be spirits of diseased humans and animals.
Right.
Like in general, like some people will attribute mystical powers to cryptids, but in general, cryptids are more supposed to be biology than parapsychology.
That's a good way of putting it.
That's a good way of putting it.
I like that.
That's very concise.
You actually had one that you wanted to talk about, Eric.
What was yours?
Yeah, the Lake Champlain monster, also known as Champ, who basically he is the American version of the Loch Ness monster.
And reports of this, reports of Champ go back to, I'm pulling it up right now, I wasn't ready, sorry.
Go back to the 16th century.
There was this guy who discovered Lake Champlain.
He wrote this report about, he had heard stories from the quote unquote savages, the natives, about a lake monster in Champlain.
And he saw something that he thought might be what they were talking about.
From his description, they think he was actually talking about a garfish or a gar pike, which is like a type of fish found underwater, which does look, if you look one up, it does look kind of crazy because it's got like this long toothy snout.
And it's very, it's called a pikefish because it's shaped like a pike.
It's very long and very pointy at the end.
And there's a lot of other reports going back through the, through the Great Lakes, through different major lakes all throughout North America of different kinds of lakes, basically sea serpents or things like that.
Like there was a, there was this guy in 1819 who said that he named Captain Crumb, which like total pirate name.
But yeah, he said he saw this creature that he described being like almost 200 feet long with a, with a, with a horse-like head that stuck its head out like 15 feet out of the water.
And, and he saw like all this, he saw this red around its neck and a mark, like a white star on its forehead.
But there's other than his story, there's nothing to validate that.
Really like, like I said, the stories floated around for years.
And then in 1977, I believe it was, I'm trying to find it exactly.
This woman took a photograph, which she said was the shame, the Lake Champlain monster.
And I recommend you go look it up because it bears a striking resemblance to the classic Nessie photo, except that it's in color.
But it, it, it, it has what appears to be like a serpent-like head coming out of the water, turned to one side.
And then there's like a bit of what could be like a body of it.
But, um, kind of like the, kind of like the Nessie photo, there's not a whole lot in the picture to really give you any context.
Like, it's mostly the water and then you see way in the background, like the other side of the lake and some trees, but there's nothing like in the foreground to give you a sense of, uh, perspective.
Like, I mean, this could be, I mean, it, it almost looks like it could be like a swimmer's arm sticking out of the water.
Like there's no way to gauge what size it is or how far into the water it is or anything.
And she sent it to this one guy to try to, uh, um, uh, what do you call it?
Um, not verify, but you know, basically to prove the picture was real, but he said like the two big things he needed, she didn't have.
She threw out the photo negatives conveniently enough and she couldn't remember where the photo was taken.
So he couldn't investigate the site where the picture was taken.
So without that, he said, you know, there was absolutely no way he could substantiate it.
Um, he was hoping like he could like blow up, you know, the image if she had the negative, but that wasn't there.
And like I said, there's nothing, there's no foreground.
It's all, it's all water and trees in the background.
There's a couple of plants like a little bit, but you can't tell if it's flotsam or if it's something on the shore.
So he said he can't even tell if the picture was taken at Lake Champlain, let alone where on the lake it was taken.
But that was enough to really get everything going.
Uh, but that was, uh, that was the beginning of like, I guess you'd call it champ mania.
There's been other sightings.
There was this one guy took like a, in 2005, I believe took this five minute video, uh, from the air of this brownish smudge that was following this boat for a couple minutes.
And like, like literally that's what it was.
It was like, it could have been like a big chunk of seaweed that was being dragged behind the boat.
That's what it looks like in the, in the still that I saw.
And then, oh, sorry, I, I,
was just about to say something else about the 1977 photo but i lost it but uh but like uh in in 19 uh it like going back before the 77 photo in uh 1873 p.t barnum offered a reward of fifty thousand dollars for somebody who could like bring the body of champ to uh the world's fair wow he was asking for the fucking body you know i noticed that when um you know because we're it's
I've noticed that in cryptid lore, there is this misconstruction.
Sometimes sea creatures get confused for actual cryptids.
So it's like ore fish.
They're creepy and big fish that are really long.
And I guess they've been mistaken for sea serpents in the past, like giant sea serpents contributing to that lore.
But things like Komodo dragons and platypus and gorillas and things that were considered cryptids to Europeans, essentially, that when they brought them back as evidence, they did bring back corpses of Komodo dragons from the Philippines or Indonesia.
And or like put them on display in zoos.
The Komodo dragon being like brought back by explorers as proof from Indonesia and then displayed at the zoo in New York was like what inspired King Kong.
So like different animal, but like the idea of like taking the creature from its habitat and putting it on display.
Yeah.
OK.
Oh, and sorry.
I just remembered what I was going to say before about that 1977 photo.
Some people were saying based on her general description of where in the lake she took the picture, they said that that part of the lake is only about 15 feet deep, which is not nearly deep enough for, you know, a giant sea monster to be able to hide, let alone live.
Jurassic World.
World Rebirth.
Bohino on the Juli.
World Rebirth.
Bohino on the Juli.
Watch me.
I enjoy that that's a thing in the Bigfoot film people, those cranks, where they were like, you know, we would like to prove the Bigfoot's real, but let's not kill Bigfoot and bring his corpse anywhere to show it.
And so I was like, hey, if you want to prove Bigfoot's real and he's really hard to track, if you can draw a beat on him, you got to pop him.
I'm sorry.
The rules are the rules.
You got to drop Bigfoot and then show us that you done did it.
And then we'll buy into it.
It's a little bit better than the shitty video of you running around in your fur outfit for the cameras.
Oh, yeah.
And that's one thing I remember that famous video of Bigfoot walking in the background from I think from California.
The guy who took that.
Patterson Gimli.
Yeah.
When he died, his wife admitted that the video was faked, that it was actually him in a gorilla suit, and that the footprints that he found were, he made them out of, he made, he made casts out of wood, basically, and then stamped them into a construction site that he was in charge of.
And then, and so, of course, the Bigfoot believers, they come out and say, well, she was paid off by, I don't know, big smallfoot, you know.
And I have to correct myself.
It's Patterson Gimlin.
I keep saying Patterson Gimli.
I guess my brain is like Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, he was not Gimli, son of Gloyne, from, you know, King Hunter the Mountain.
Yeah, literally.
Okay, I thought this was interesting.
It is like totally a thing that, like, okay, so there's like traditional cryptids, like, which have existed for like basically ever, because it is just kind of like myth, like, within the culture.
Online cryptids, which are like kind of the same thing.
It's like this belief that there are these creatures out there, but the conspiracy stems from online.
So, like, Slenderman is kind of that.
Slender Man, the Rake, I believe, is another one like that.
So, Rake is the first one, I think.
That is considered the first online cryptid, which is a photo I just remember from seeing as a kid.
Same with Momo, which is like another kind of like Japanese, like, like, like, like, like ghoul kind of creature.
Uh, but a lot of these are, like, edited photos of, like, actual people that have just been, like, kind of distorted over time to create creatures.
But yeah, like, those first Slenderman photos were, like, were admitted to be photo manipulations by the guy who made it.
Um, interesting.
Uh, like, that was, like, the something, like, like, something awful, like, forums kind of, like, stem of this stuff.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Yeah, those something awful Slenderman photos I'm talking about.
Yeah.
So I think the online cryptids are kind of interesting, like, creepypastas, like, we're kind of.
Like the SCP stuff.
Have you ever heard of the backrooms?
Not sure.
I thought that.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay, so here's how I stumbled on a backrooms.
The day of the Buffalo, not Buffalo, the parade shooting.
That kid that had like, he had like a shitty face tattoo and he was really into smiley faces.
That guy.
I found, I don't know if it was really his Telegram page, but I found a Telegram page with his name on it.
And it was only a few hours old.
And there was this footage in it of, and it was like first person, like the person filming it was holding a camera.
And they're walking down this poorly lit long highway, the hallway.
And they're like carrying a backpack.
And they stop and they put the backpack down and they zoom in on the backpack and then they keep walking.
And you see that there's like an adjacent hallway.
And every so often there are like little tiny connecting hallways, you know, like an H and the person passes by one of these and you see what looks like a cop running in the other direction.
So I saw this video and I'm like, is this shot by the shooter?
Because they still, I don't think they had caught him yet or something.
And or no, they did.
And I had like shared it with a bunch of people and they were like, oh, that's backrooms.
That's back.
What you saw was like a backrooms video.
And I started like, I started like looking at like liminal spaces and backrooms and shit.
And when I went to go see QAA up in Berkeley, it was live.
I think it was like two years ago or something.
The place, I think it was Cornerstone was like right across in this like empty office building.
And they had like the bright lights on and everything like so liminal.
And I was like, hey, QAA podcast right across from a back room.
But it is, it is so weird.
I love that.
And there's a bunch of like really like wild like AI art.
If you like, like people do these liminal pools and shit.
So wild.
And I'm glad that I actually learned about that stuff because like when I watched White Noise, I was like, holy shit, this whole movie is liminal.
The whole aesthetic of this film is so liminal.
But yeah, that the creature, and it always differs.
There's a presence and it's always lurking after you in the back rooms.
But most of the time they do like, like the original one, you only see like glimpses of this creature.
It has like this very Cloverfield Blair Witch vibe where we're not really going to show you.
I know for a while, I was really into the Slenderman stuff.
Like I was checking out the different ARGs they had going on, like Marble Hornets and Everyman Hybrid and ones like that.
And I even kind of toyed with the idea myself of doing my own Slenderman ARG, but unfortunately the craze was over by then, so nobody would have watched it.
That's the problem with these internet things is they're very short-lived.
Yeah, the backroom stuff is like a phenomenon.
Like I like, especially I think with kind of like the Zoomers, they're really into like the liminal spaces aesthetic.
And like, yeah, like you said, like these weird videos of like just kind of like wandering through like water and it's like backrooms kind of aesthetic.
It's a little bit, it's a little bit fruitiger arrow aesthetic.
It's very, I don't know, I find it kind of relaxing.
Also, too, I've noticed in the backrooms community, which is like, yeah, you're just kind of wandering this infinite, like, yeah, liminal space, like office room.
Like, some people, because there's games, and I have seen some people like this, like, like, there's people that like it when there's kind of like creatures lurking, but also, or like that pop up.
But then there's the ones that do kind of just like that hidden creature that, like, you never actually see.
And you're just in this endless maze that, like, there is this creature lurking.
The aesthetic's just really cool.
I like the backroom stuff.
Yeah.
And then the backroom, and the backroom stuff that leads into like Dreamcore.
Dreamcore?
I love Dreamcore.
Like, yeah, I know, like, Marble Hornets had a lot of liminal space going on in it.
And then you're also reminding me of, you guys ever hear of the book House of Leaves?
Oh, I had a feeling Stephanie would know it.
Yes, that, and the most, like, I know you can get it like as an e-book and stuff, but you need the physical copy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because he turned the book into, he like really immerses you like the book itself is like the physical book is part of the narrative.
Yes.
And like as the character, as as you're being told this, this story of a person slowly losing their goddamn mind, you see these huge swaths of blank paper in this book you're reading, and you start to write.
That's what I did.
I started writing my own shit in the book along with it.
And I think that might have been part of the design.
I read it like 30 years ago, and I forgot a lot of the details, but I remember the one character was a photographer, and there was stuff written on matchbooks and the 10-minute hallway.
I remember that, the 10-minute hallway.
Yeah.
It was, yeah, very, yeah, very, one of the few cases I've seen of postmodernism done right, where it's like, it's kind of blurring the lines between fantasy and reality as you're reading it.
But it's, yeah, very, very creepy and very, like I said, it's a book, but it's got, but thematically, it's very similar to what we're talking about with the liminal spaces and stuff because it's all, there's all these humongous labyrinths and stuff going on in it.
And a lot of, yeah, a lot of transitory spaces being used and very, very creepy.
Yeah, I feel like there's like, like, a lot of, there's like a similar, similar themes as far as the online cryptids go.
It's just like creepy woman really distorted to be ugly and scary.
Yeah.
Or like a creepy thing in woods that will sneak up behind you.
Or like, yeah, this liminal space theme.
But yeah.
Well, when you said about like, like you said, like this disability or something, like a lot of early tales of cryptids came from like explorers encountering people they had never encountered before.
And they might have had a different skin color.
They might have had a different dress style.
And some of them may have had like actual like deformities or disabilities that were interpreted as like cryptid.
Like, you know, that picture?
There's an old picture of like, it's a normal human down to the torso, and then the rest of the body is just a gigantic foot.
Wow.
So they, they, they, so some, some cryptid lore may have actually, you know, in the early days, like, you know, because I guess, yeah, I don't know if that would be monsters would be considered.
And I'm saying that with heavy air quotes.
I'm not saying disabled people are monsters.
Please don't yell at me.
I'm not saying that.
Stuff is canceled.
Yeah, yeah, just at me.
I'm at poker politics on Twitter.
But that was one of the things that they say may have contributed to some early tales of cryptids and stuff like that.
And I just, the cryptid lore to me, it says more about us, like our, you know, the Jungian archetypes and stuff, I think, than anything, anything else really.
Hearing people talking about Jungian, I was just half afraid you were going to go down the Alex Jones road of talking about the Halian dialectic.
Oh, God.
There's actually a cryptid on display in Arizona, which I have to mention.
Arizona May.
There's a Fiji Mermaid on display in Arizona.
Oh, yeah, I've heard about that one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So there is this like gas station.
I'm not even kidding.
That's like kind of near Tombstone, if people have heard of that, which is literally where Tombstone was filmed.
It's a little bit outside of Tombstone.
And the gas station, you'll see these signs leading up to it.
And it's just like, it just says the thing.
Really big.
I know.
I know exactly right because I used to live like a half hour from Tombstone.
I know what you're talking about.
The thing.
I never went there though.
The thing is so fucking funny because you'll see signs for hundreds of miles out like to stop by the thing.
And it's like, the thing, what is it?
And you're like, okay, what is it?
And you go to this gas station that's like Bucky's sized.
It's like fucking gigantic.
And you go inside and there's all this alien like merchandise inside and a like museum in the museum.
I say museum.
There's a there's a kooky display in the back that you can walk through.
And they do have these like really well done aliens and dinosaurs.
And like they have Winston Churchill driving a replica car back there.
And it tells this long story about how aliens came to Earth and essentially are responsible for everything that ever happened.
So like they're the reason that the pyramids were built.
It's very ancient aliens.
They did 9-11, which is in the actual display.
I loved that.
Stephanie, we have to go to this.
We'll do an episode about the thing fully going into the next one.
Oh, like, yeah, yeah, we'll coordinate next time we go down to Arizona.
We'll set it up.
It is actually like a long exhibit for being in the back of a gas station.
And I mean, maybe we can make it really fun.
Maybe I could get Doug to go with us.
Oh, we should all go to the thing.
And there is like, again, Winston Churchill and a replica car.
He's being driven by an alien.
It's just like aliens are responsible for everything.
And then at the end, for some reason, you walk through and you finally see the thing.
And it's this like fucking paper-mâché Fiji mermaid.
It's so bad.
And then you exit.
You exit the gas station.
And that's the Arizona Fiji Mermaid.
It's like being a level 9 Thetan in Scientology.
And you finally find out about Xenu and you're like, really?
Really?
That's the fucking payoff?
I gave you pricks like $5 million.
That's level 9.
They tell you about Xenu at level 3.
I mean, you could just save yourself a whole lot of time and effort and just watch the South Park episode about it.
Oh, I know.
I know, but I'm just saying, like, I just...
Again, a repressed memory?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
But I live in Massachusetts.
So the odds of me seeing this in the wild here are basically zero.
There was a guy playing Blackjack, and he was wearing a Bucky's t-shirt.
And I was just, I just said, I said to him, I'm like, where did you get that?
And he told me that his daughter was in Texas and got it for him.
And he had no idea what it was.
And I had to give him a Bucky's lore tutorial.
I had to explain to him the legend of Bucky's.
And it was just very, it was just so funny because without having gone to Dallas and met Haley, I would have had no idea what Bucky's was.
So I would have just seen the logo and it would have had no impact on me whatsoever.
Now my life is not but Bucky's.
It's just Buckies all the time.
There's your life before Buckies and your life after Buckies.
Yes.
Yeah, it's revelatory.
I mean, it's a moment that defines your existence.
I mean, it's like before you understood the legend of Buckies and afterwards.
And it's just like, man, my life before then was really bleak.
I did not know about Buckies.
I don't even know how I lived.
I don't even know how I got through the day.
I think I, yeah, I've seen a couple people wearing Buckies shirts at my work.
And I was curious.
I'm like, should I ask them if they actually been there or not?
But I had kind of a bad experience where I saw this student wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and I asked him if he knew who Che Guevara was and he didn't.
And I told him, he's like, oh, man, I got to dish this shirt now.
And the best part, the guy's name is Fidel.
Oh, oh, God, of course.
Oh, I was going to go back to like Slender Man and those kinds of internet encrypteds.
A lot of that stuff was paralysis, sleep paralysis, like the kind of monsters you see when you have sleep paralysis.
Right.
Yeah.
They say that's a lot of like abduction stories or sleep paralysis too.
Yeah, and they all have a similar, they all follow like a similar pattern, like physiological pattern and stuff like that.
And interestingly enough, the probe element of the abduction stories began right around the time that colonoscopies became regularly used.
Oh, really?
That's because the aliens finally let us, you know, they finally let us stop sitting on colonoscopy technology because they figured we were ready for it.
Well, yeah, the ultimate cryptid place is actually in America.
It's in Utah, and it's called Skinwalker Ranch.
I've heard of it, yeah.
I wanted to go there one time, but I didn't get anywhere near it.
Yeah, you're not allowed.
Like, it's, it, it's like Area 51.
Yeah.
You know?
And, you know, they said that they saw like a rip in the sky and a creature starting to emerge.
And there's like all this lore that goes back all this time.
And I don't really like the Time Suck podcast anymore, but he actually did a good like skeptical takedown of a lot of the things that a lot of the lore and stuff.
But it's just, it's cool because the Skinwalker Ranch is a lot like the Mothman prophecies where it combines cryptids with UFOs with like interdimensional shit.
So there's like, it's like, and even look, and there's even like poltergeists too that are attached to Mothman and Skinwalker Ranch.
So it's like, it's just mainly line that shit right into my neck right now.
Just cramming it.
It's all the good, ooey gooey, squishy stuff all wrapped up in one.
But ultimately, like, I don't think there has ever been like a valid scientific like report on Skinwalker Ranch, you know.
But I just want to add that in.
No, I was.
I had something to say about Hatman, but then we got like moved away.
Oh, shit.
I'm sorry.
Oh, Benadryl guy.
That's my Benadryl buddy.
Yeah, that was kind of the meme.
That was the whole thing is that if you take too much Benadryl and then fall asleep, that you're going to see the Hatman.
And that led to the whole thing where people are like, no, that's just how sleep paralysis works and blah, blah, blah, and all that kind of stuff.
And I just think that sleep paralysis is in of itself so terrifying that I can imagine that people who suffer from that would like kind of expand upon that moment and create this mythology where you have on top of the fact that you can't move,
now you have this like looming terror like looking at you, further exacerbating your situation and being like, oh shit, I'm totally fucked.
This weird shadowy dude with a hat is coming for me.
Now I'm like totally screwed.
And I know from personal experience that it is possible to wake up suddenly and see a completely something completely real looking, even though it's not there.
Because I remember this one time in my old apartment, power went out and it came back on about like 4 a.m. when I was dead asleep, obviously.
And the lights came on and it woke me up.
And I get up and I look over and I swear I saw a horseshoe crab run across the floor of my bedroom.
And it wasn't like a shadowy thing because the lights were on.
literally saw a horseshoe crab run across and in my still sleep-addled mind my the thought that went through my head was oh shit it got out i i i i I don't know why that reminded me.
There was, I don't know, I wanted Elle to tell this story a million years ago, but this is one of his most famous stories that he would tell around the campfire.
Was he got bit by something?
We assume it's a brown recluse.
And he was all kinds of messed up, and he was delusional for like a day.
And Sarge had gone with Sarge's then-wife to a wedding recital and to a wedding.
And they had left Elle in charge of their sugar glider to make sure the sugar glider was taken care of.
And I've probably mentioned this on the pod before because I'm a sugar glider enthusiast.
But sugar gliders are super high maintenance.
You must take care of them.
They can literally die of sadness if they don't get enough attention.
And so in his delusion, he kept thinking that the sugar glider had escaped its cage.
And he kept creating more and more elaborate ways to make sure the sugar glider would be kept in the cage.
He would lock it in the cage.
And when Sarge came back and they found L literally dying, they then rushed L to the hospital.
And then when they got back to their place, they found the sugar glider's cage was now in the bathroom with like books on top of and below the cage.
Because L had just been so delirious and so very, he was like, I'm going to trap this sugar glider in this bathroom so he's not going to get away.
And I'm going to put these books on the cage.
And it's just that your mind when you're not yourself, when you're like delirious from black recluse venom or whatever, just created the situation.
And yeah.
So I just, we never just had a chance for him to spitball and tell that story on the pod one of those days.
But it was just crazy.
And if he wonders if he would have survived if Sarge and his wife had stayed the night at the wedding instead of coming home.
Because when he got to the hospital, his temperature was very high.
He was a roasty, toasty boy.
And they don't have an official word on what bit him.
They just think it was a brown recluse because it probably.
Yeah, my mom had that.
I think I was like 16 or 17 at the time.
And she was hospitalized with it.
She just had this pimple on her leg.
And, you know, I'm a pauper.
My mom was a pauper.
She bestowed that gift upon me.
So she popped it and it became a huge halo the next day.
And the doctors in the hospital wouldn't figure it out.
I want this event on my tombstone or my urn someday.
16, 17-year-old girl, no medical experience.
I'm standing there in the hospital.
I'm telling the doctor, that's spiderbite.
How do you know?
I just read Diane Fosse's Diary.
Where did that take place?
Africa, but that doesn't mean that there aren't venomous spiders in America.
Guess who was fucking right?
The 17-year-old girl.
Take that, doctors.
But no, but no, but yeah, that shit gets scary.
That shit is fucked up because your brain, your body, everything, you're in another world.
You're seeing shit that ain't there.
Yeah, you're gone.
You've gone to the special dimension of...
And reality ain't reality anymore.
And you don't even know it.
Yeah.
I've never been that way.
I remember one time I was so tired and sleep deprivated.
I was like messed up to kind of the point of a nervous breakdown, but I never actually broke reality.
I just remember I was playing Magic of the Gathering and I was like literally falling over sleeping, so exhausted.
Because we drove to New Jersey for this big magic tournament and I just had no sleep and the tournament went on for forever.
And in the last round, I got screwed by a bad judge's ruling and I was so tired I couldn't even argue it.
And then I lost.
And then I was just like, literally just like crashed because I was so close to like making the top eight and actually like being a big boy and being a champion.
And then it just like flamed out on me.
And I was just like, ah.
And I put one of my friends in a headlock.
I was so like freaked out.
And then my friend got me into the car.
And then they grabbed the guy who was driving.
And they were like, Mike's fucked up.
We need to get out of here.
And the guy was like, okay.
And they got into the car.
And he's like, Mike, you okay?
And I'm just like, and they're like, well, then go to sleep, buddy.
They're like, good, sounds great.
I eventually passed out of the car.
But like, it was just, like, that was about as bad as it had been for me.
Cause I like sleep.
Sleep's awesome.
I highly recommend it.
Yeah, I remember this time I was going on a road trip and it was at night and I was trying to just get as many miles out as I could.
But then after a while, I'm on the highway and I kept seeing these, I kept dodging out of the way of these animals that were crossing the street and they kind of looked like they kind of looked like coyotes, but with legs and arms the same proportions as humans and they're running on all fours.
And eventually I'm like, wait, those things aren't real.
I should probably pull over and get some sleep.
Yeah, I have an aunt that used to swear that she saw a goat hooved man walking home after work one night.
And it's like, okay, well, you're an alcoholic, so I don't really, I don't know how much that was real, lady.
So yeah.
Are there any cryptids that you wish were real or you think might be proven real one day?
I would think like various sea monster kind of things could be proven real because the sea is just so unexplored that stuff like stuff like Krakens or whatever could possibly be real.
Yes, exactly.
Sydney Powell.
Absolutely.
Yeah, maybe one day Cthulhu will rise from his watery depths and some Norwegian sailor will have to slam a sailboat into him to save humanity.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, and the day Cthulhu rises, it'll be the day I finally get certified for cave diving.
Well, sorry, can't do that now.
Oh, exactly.
Exactly, yeah.
There's got to be some weird shit down in some of those caves.
Some of those divers have seen some really weird shit.
And like, even though it's not weird or cryptid, I saw this really cool video at, if you go all the way down to the bottom of the blue hole in Egypt, right before you go, you have to swim under the blue arch, which is like 85 feet of overhead, which means you can't surface.
And I saw the fish.
And I saw the fish.
And I saw the guys in the video.
They took off their respirator mouthpiece.
And the fish was like kissing them.
The fish like eat the dead skin like on your lips or in your mouth or in your ears.
So they were just like letting the fish give them little kisses.
And that's something that we know about.
Like there's got to be some really fucking weird cool shit out there.
And that's what's cool about cryptids is there's got to be some cool shit out there.
But just don't live your life based around it, I guess.
You know?
My wife, I'm pretty sure she like is serious about it, but she seems to actually believe Bigfoot's real.
We just haven't found any yet.
And she imparted that on my son.
And I just let it go because it's like I can't prove they're not real.
So, you know, why am I going to rain on their parade?
It's the same thing about ghosts.
It's like I don't believe in ghosts, but it's just my belief.
Ghosts could be real for all I know.
So I'm just going to not, you know, I'm not going to be all hardcore atheist about it.
Be like, no, you're an idiot if you believe in that.
My mom's a solid alien believer, but that's because she's obsessed with X-Files.
Yeah, but X-Files was like classic conspiracy theorists, you know?
X-Files rock.
I love X-Files.
Yeah.
Yeah, like it was, and I, you know, when I was a conspiracy theorist, I used to tell people that I was part Fox and part Scully.
You know, like I want it to believe, but I wanted science to back it up.
And oh my God, I was so wrong about that.
But that's, X-Files was just fun.
fun and and it was cool and that was like that golden era when you could still see conspiracies as kind of fun fun spiracies right yeah that was back when i was listening to art Bell because it was still kind of, because even though I didn't believe most of the stuff he was talking about, it was still really cool to listen to.
And then he had William Luther Pierce on his show as a guest.
He's had, yeah, he's had some quite a lot of people who later on went on Ancient Aliens, like Linda Moulton Howe was on there.
I think she even was just Linda Moulton at the time.
You know, that's how long ago it was.
Yeah, she was a big one with, she's like the self-declared cattle mutilation expert or something like that.
and she dedicated her entire life to it.
But the fun thing that And just a quick little side note, like with the cattle mutilations and stuff like that, some of that has been attributed to cryptids, the chupacabre, the goatsucker, being the main one.
The other interesting thing is they think, you know, there's, I heard about this on Behind the Bastards and I asked Quacks and he said, yes, there is some truth to this, that the first reports of cattle mutilation were near this like facility where they were doing like some radiation thing.
And it's likely that like what became known as the cattle mutilations were just tests that were done like secretly and stuff.
these cattle mutilation conspiracy theories about aliens and shit are kind of like covering up a real conspiracy laughing Yeah, and that's exactly what they want.
They want you to believe in the crazy stuff so you don't know the real stuff that's happening.
Yeah, that's what a lot of those guys say.
It's like, yeah, they want you to think that all us UFO believers are a bunch of kooks so that you don't know about Valiant Thor or anything.
The cryptid that I would like to exist is apparently Arizona specific and it's called the Costco Highway Monkey.
Does it work for Costco or okay?
When I googled Arizona cryptids, you know how Google now gives you this horseshit AI overview?
And it's totally just like a bunch of bullshit in there.
And I asked Google, I was like, what are some Arizona cryptids?
And it gives me real ones like the Mogeon Monster, which is basically Arizona's Bigfoot.
We have something called the Mogeon Rim here.
And there's been a long-standing conspiracy that there is a monster there that is Bigfoot adjacent.
And then also, it lists this thing, the Costco Highway Monkey.
And the brief sentence it gives is, this is a more recent addition to Arizona Cryptid Lore with reports of a missing monkey near Costco.
And I'm like, okay, what are we doing here?
Click on it.
Try to search around.
There's fucking nothing about this Costco Highway Monkey except for one single Reddit post with a person making a joke about a Costco Highway Monkey.
But there's no further information.
I don't know how the AI overview pulled this.
I don't think the Costco Highway Monkey exists, but if there's more evidence of the Costco Highway Monkey, I would love to see it because that sounds hilarious.
So that's my Cryptid.
So thank you all for listening to the Cryptid episode.
I hope this was mostly Cryptids.
We did veer off topic a bit, but that's what you get when you sign up for this show.
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Yes.
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