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Sunk Cost · Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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  Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
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  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
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  Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
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  Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
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  Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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  Speaker 1: Humans are incredible engineers. We've rarely met an engineering problem
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  Speaker 1: we couldn't solve. But as I'm sure you've heard before,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes humanity gets so caught up in whether it can
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  Speaker 1: do something it forgets to ask whether it should. Such
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  Speaker 1: was the case in the late nineteen sixties when the
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  Speaker 1: US government became aware of a sunken Russian submarine and
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  Speaker 1: stopped at nothing to retrieve it from the bottom of
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  Speaker 1: the sea. The K one submarine sunk sometime around March
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  Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty eight for reasons that will never be known.
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  Speaker 1: All the CIA did know was that the Russians were
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  Speaker 1: conducting a massive search and rescue operation in the Pacific Ocean,
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  Speaker 1: fifteen hundred miles north of Hawaii. Once the Russians gave up,
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  Speaker 1: an American sub moved in using special cameras. The Russian
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  Speaker 1: vessels didn't have. The American sub revealed the K one
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  Speaker 1: twenty nine was intact at the bottom of the ocean,
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  Speaker 1: and if recovered, could provide the CIA with Russian missile
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  Speaker 1: technology and codebooks filled with secrets. But of course this
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  Speaker 1: would be no easy retrieval mission. The sub was sixteen
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  Speaker 1: thousy five hundred feet down. It was one thing to
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  Speaker 1: have an American sub take pictures, but having divers searching
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  Speaker 1: the debris at that depth was out of the question,
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  Speaker 1: and the wreck of the sub was so big it
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  Speaker 1: would take some incredible machinery to recover it. The deeply paranoid,
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  Speaker 1: ethically dubious CIA of this time was not willing to
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  Speaker 1: let the opportunity slide, though, and so they embarked on
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  Speaker 1: a multi million dollar project to design a vessel capable
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  Speaker 1: of pulling K one twenty nine from the bottom of
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  Speaker 1: the sea, codename Project Azorian. They would need a cover story,
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  Speaker 1: and so the CIA reached out to none other than
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  Speaker 1: eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to lend his name to the project.
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  Speaker 1: The CIA would call their ship the Hughes Glomar Explorer,
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  Speaker 1: and Hughes would tell the public that it was his
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  Speaker 1: ship being constructed to use in deep sea mining operations.
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  Speaker 1: The CIA then hired a team of engineers, swearing them
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  Speaker 1: all to secrecy and even keeping some in the dark
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  Speaker 1: as to the true nature of the vessel. The Explorer
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  Speaker 1: was an engineering marvel. At six hundred and eighteen feet
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  Speaker 1: in length. The ship had the largest moon pull ever constructed,
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  Speaker 1: which is an opening at the bottom of the vessel
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  Speaker 1: that allows submersibles to be deployed or in this case, retrieved.
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  Speaker 1: Two doors would open at the bottom of the ship,
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  Speaker 1: releasing Clementine, the name for a giant claw that was
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  Speaker 1: to be lowered to the bottom of the sea to
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  Speaker 1: retrieve K one twenty nine. Clementine was attached to massive
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  Speaker 1: lengths of steel pipe that could be slowly doled out
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  Speaker 1: to lower the claw farther and farther down. The whole
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  Speaker 1: apparatus was capable of lifting over twenty one million pounds,
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  Speaker 1: but halfway through the construction process, the engineers realized that
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  Speaker 1: they had made a mistake. To put it in simple terms,
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  Speaker 1: the ship wasn't big enough to support the claw and
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  Speaker 1: was likely to break in half during the operation. The
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  Speaker 1: CIA had to spend even more money and make the
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  Speaker 1: ship even bigger. The problem with this the ship was
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  Speaker 1: now too big to fit through the Panama Canal, and
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  Speaker 1: so once it set sail from the east coast of America,
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  Speaker 1: it would have to travel all the way around South
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  Speaker 1: America to reach its target. The ship was finally completed,
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  Speaker 1: costing the American taxpayer nearly three hundred million dollars. It
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  Speaker 1: began its long journey to the Pacific in nineteen seventy three,
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  Speaker 1: nearly getting delayed in Chile by a revolution there, but
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  Speaker 1: ultimately making it to its target without issue. The process
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  Speaker 1: of actually lowering the claw Clementine took weeks. Once it
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  Speaker 1: finally reached the K one twenty nine at the bottom
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  Speaker 1: of the ocean, the claw successfully grasped the sub in
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  Speaker 1: its pinchers, lifting it from its longtime resting place, But
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  Speaker 1: as the sub was slowly lifted back up over thousands
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  Speaker 1: of feet, disaster struck. Parts of the claw failed, snapping
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  Speaker 1: off and allowing a majority of the sub to fall
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  Speaker 1: back to the ocean floor. The steel just wasn't strong enough.
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  Speaker 1: The crewmen had to settle for lifting the remaining piece
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  Speaker 1: of the sub up into their ship and heading home.
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  Speaker 1: It's unknown what exactly the CIA learned if anything from
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  Speaker 1: the recovered piece of the sub. They actually intended on
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  Speaker 1: authorizing a second mission to return to the site and
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  Speaker 1: try to recover the rest, but before that could happen,
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  Speaker 1: American journalists finally caught wind of the project and leaked
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  Speaker 1: details to the public. The general consensus seemed to be
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  Speaker 1: that another recovery mission wasn't worth the cost, and so
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  Speaker 1: most of K one twenty nine remains where it came
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  Speaker 1: to rest at the bottom of the ocean, and any
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  Speaker 1: secrets it might have held are lost to time. Curiously,
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  Speaker 1: the Russians have never made attempts of their own to
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  Speaker 1: recover the sub, a sign that nothing of value is
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  Speaker 1: really on board, or just an admission of a pretty
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  Speaker 1: big truth. Sixteen thousand feet of water is a pretty
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  Speaker 1: safe way to hide a secret. It's a well documented
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  Speaker 1: fact that pregnancy can bring on some pretty intense food cravings.
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  Speaker 1: Women have reported desires for everything from pizza and ice
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  Speaker 1: cream to stranger food combinations like pickles with peanut butter
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  Speaker 1: or chocolate cake with ketchup. And then there was Mary,
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  Speaker 1: an eighteenth century servant girl who allegedly developed a craving
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  Speaker 1: for rabbit meat. A craving so powerful it altered her mind,
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  Speaker 1: the unborn child she was carrying, and eventually all of England.
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  Speaker 1: The story begins one afternoon in April of seventeen twenty six,
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  Speaker 1: while Mary was weeding a field outside her village near London.
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  Speaker 1: Mary was several months pregnant at this point, but as
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  Speaker 1: a poor servant girl in the eighteenth century, taking tiba
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  Speaker 1: from work wasn't an option, so she was down on
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  Speaker 1: her hands and knees pulling weeds and trying not to
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  Speaker 1: think about how uncomfortable she was when she looked up
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  Speaker 1: and spotted a rabbit. Now, rabbit meat was expensive at
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  Speaker 1: the time, and Mary had three hungry kids and a
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  Speaker 1: husband at home, so she didn't think twice. She took
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  Speaker 1: off after the rabbit and almost had it in her
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  Speaker 1: grasp before it slipped under a fence and disappeared into
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  Speaker 1: the woods. To say that Mary was disappointed would be
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  Speaker 1: an understatement. That night, she lay awake imagining all of
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  Speaker 1: the delicious meals the creature could have become. Braised rabbit,
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  Speaker 1: poached rabbit, rabbit pie, rabbit stew. Her mouth just watered
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  Speaker 1: from the thought of it all, and over the next
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  Speaker 1: few weeks that craving only got worse. Mary begged her
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  Speaker 1: husband to buy her rabbit meat, but with his business struggling,
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  Speaker 1: they just simply couldn't afford it. A short while later,
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  Speaker 1: Mary suffered a painful miscarriage. Afterwards, she expected the cravings
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  Speaker 1: to fade, but they only got worse. She continued to
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  Speaker 1: dream and obsess about eating rabbits until one day she
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  Speaker 1: fell strangely ill. At first, no one knew what was
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  Speaker 1: wrong with her. Then the cramp started, followed by full
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  Speaker 1: on contractions. Mary, it seems, was going into labor, which
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  Speaker 1: didn't make sense because she had already lost her baby.
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  Speaker 1: Her family sent for the doctor, a man named John Howard,
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  Speaker 1: but by the time he arrived, Mary was already done.
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  Speaker 1: She presented him with a thing she had birthed. It
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  Speaker 1: wasn't a human child, but several infant rabbits. Horrifically, most
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  Speaker 1: of the animals came out crushed or in small pieces,
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  Speaker 1: and were all stillborn. Howard examined the fragments but refused
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  Speaker 1: to believe that Mary had produced them, at least until
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  Speaker 1: she went into labor again. Over the next few days,
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  Speaker 1: she delivered batch after batch of dismembered bunnies. He documented
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  Speaker 1: the berths and stored the parts in jars for later study.
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  Speaker 1: In between the frequent birthing sessions, though, Howard wrote letters
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  Speaker 1: to England's top scientists, who flocked to the village to
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  Speaker 1: see the phenomenon for themselves. Eventually, the King's personal physician
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  Speaker 1: was sent to investigate. He was so impressed by what
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  Speaker 1: he witnessed he published a statement declaring that the rabbit
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  Speaker 1: births were a genuine medical phenomenon. Meanwhile, Mary had become
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  Speaker 1: a celebrity. Her story made national headlines, sparking heated debates
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  Speaker 1: between skeptics and believers. Those who were convinced pointed to
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  Speaker 1: the theory of maternal impression, which hold that a mother's
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  Speaker 1: thoughts can physically alter the body of the unborn child,
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  Speaker 1: resulting in marks or birth defects. To many experts at
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  Speaker 1: the time, there was little doubt about what had happened.
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  Speaker 1: Mary's cravings for rabbit flesh had turned her child into
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  Speaker 1: the object of her obsession. It's a disturbing thought and
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  Speaker 1: fortunately impossible. Today, the theory of maternal impression has been
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  Speaker 1: resoundingly discredited, and the same can be said for Mary's story.
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  Speaker 1: You see her husband, as and some accomplices were eventually
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  Speaker 1: caught smuggling rabbits into her room. They'd been cutting the
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  Speaker 1: animals into pieces themselves, and Mary had been well putting
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  Speaker 1: them where babies come from. They'd hoped all the attention
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  Speaker 1: would make them wildly rich, but instead they became the
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  Speaker 1: subject of ridicule and scorn, and while they managed to
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  Speaker 1: avoid any criminal charges, they never profited a dime from
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  Speaker 1: the incident. Mary eventually faded into obscurity, but the doctors
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  Speaker 1: who vouched for her weren't so lucky. Several careers were ruined,
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  Speaker 1: and trust in the medical community plummeted for years to come.
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  Speaker 1: The nation, scientists were viewed as gullible fools, so eager
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  Speaker 1: to prove their unfounded theories that they would convince themselves
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  Speaker 1: of the impossible, and that criticism may have been warranted.
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  Speaker 1: It shouldn't have taken a medical degree to know that
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  Speaker 1: women don't give birth to rabbits, but that didn't stop
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  Speaker 1: Mary Toft from giving birth to a hoax that most
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  Speaker 1: people would describe as hair brained. I hope you've enjoyed
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  Speaker 1: today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
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  Speaker 1: free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
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  Speaker 1: by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
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  Speaker 1: by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
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  Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
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  Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
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  Speaker 1: learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
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  Speaker 1: And until next time, stay curious.