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Selects: How Sea Monsters Work · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. It's December and podcast time. This is Chuck
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Speaker 1: and we're talking about how sea monsters work. This is
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Speaker 1: a great episode from back in the day. I remember. Boy,
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Speaker 1: this is hard to believe almost six years ago. Time
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Speaker 1: is really flying, everybody, I'm getting old. This is a
0:18
Speaker 1: fun podcast episode though, how sea monsters work? Right here,
0:21
Speaker 1: right now, Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production
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Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
0:37
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. There's guest
0:40
Speaker 1: producer Noel. There's Nicola Tesla. It's Stuff you should know.
0:45
Speaker 1: There's Johnny and Scott. Are those yourmasin? Eric? No, that
0:49
Speaker 1: was Sigmund the Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No?
0:53
Speaker 1: Once again the brief cultural divide that expans between us.
0:57
Speaker 1: Was that from the seventies or earlier? Yeah, it was
1:00
Speaker 1: one of the Sid and Marty Croft shows, HR Puffins stuff. Yeah,
1:03
Speaker 1: Sigmund the Sea Monster and Johnny and Scott wear his buddies. Yeah,
1:06
Speaker 1: he was like a you know, he's a dude in
1:10
Speaker 1: a suit. I reckon, but he would he looked like
1:12
Speaker 1: a big blob of kelp. I'm sure it's total nightmare
1:15
Speaker 1: fuel with eyes. That was cool. Sid marty Kroft man
1:18
Speaker 1: their sensibilities scare me. Yeah. I went to the place
1:22
Speaker 1: once in Atlanta. You know, they had down at the
1:24
Speaker 1: Omni which is now Phillips Arena. They had Sid marty
1:27
Speaker 1: Croft World or whatever, and I went down there once
1:29
Speaker 1: and looking back now, it was like a drug fueled
1:33
Speaker 1: indoor amusement park. You're like, why are there so many
1:35
Speaker 1: twenty year old here? Yeah? I never really put without kids. Yeah.
1:40
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I'm sure. I say this every single time
1:43
Speaker 1: that we talk about Sid marty Croft. But you've seen
1:46
Speaker 1: the Mr Show State of Drug Achusets. Yeah, that's one
1:51
Speaker 1: of the best. I mean, it's hard to pick out
1:53
Speaker 1: for Mr. Show, but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's
1:56
Speaker 1: top five easy. Yeah. And that seems sea monsters they're
2:02
Speaker 1: gonna get you soon? Is that from a show? Okay?
2:06
Speaker 1: From this show? So, Chuck, are you familiar much with
2:09
Speaker 1: sea monsters when you were researching this where you like
2:12
Speaker 1: everybody knows all this sort of half and half? Yeah,
2:16
Speaker 1: I felt similar. There were a lot of stuff, a
2:19
Speaker 1: lot of things in here that I hadn't heard of,
2:21
Speaker 1: And the extra research we did too yielded some new insights.
2:25
Speaker 1: But one of the things that stuck out to me,
2:28
Speaker 1: and I guess it's probably the thesis of this whole thing,
2:31
Speaker 1: is that we've been seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've
2:36
Speaker 1: been talking about sea monsters for millennia, and we still
2:40
Speaker 1: are like, have you heard of the Montalk Monster? Yes?
2:44
Speaker 1: Did you see pictures of that thing? Yeah? I remember
2:46
Speaker 1: when it came out. Okay, I just heard of it yesterday. Yeah. Oh,
2:50
Speaker 1: I feel bad for not sharing that with you. It's awesome.
2:53
Speaker 1: Yeah that in the two thousand eight um what was
2:56
Speaker 1: the beach? It was around Montalk. Yeah, but there was
2:59
Speaker 1: a specific beach, ditch planes beach. This girl and her
3:04
Speaker 1: three friends found this washed up Montauk monster, And I
3:08
Speaker 1: think what's funny is they still there's a trend here
3:12
Speaker 1: in naming these things sensationally throughout history, and we still
3:16
Speaker 1: do it. Because they could have called it like a
3:19
Speaker 1: decomposed raccoon, but they called it the Montalk Monster. And
3:23
Speaker 1: the jury is not out. It is a decomposed raccoon.
3:27
Speaker 1: Yeah they I mean, they pretty much think so. But
3:29
Speaker 1: it's not like you can't prove that. I mean, they
3:31
Speaker 1: have like a line of biologists from mont talk to
3:34
Speaker 1: Manhattan saying it's a raccoon. It's a raccoon without its fur,
3:39
Speaker 1: which makes it look awesome. I've heard some other paleo
3:42
Speaker 1: zoologists say like it maybe a sheep, though I think
3:45
Speaker 1: it is too small, or other animals. But it's definitely
3:49
Speaker 1: not a monster, a sea monster. No. But this is
3:52
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight we're talking about, and some weird
3:55
Speaker 1: thing washes up on a beach, and around the world
3:58
Speaker 1: people hear of the Montauk mons except for me. Yeah,
4:01
Speaker 1: did you see the East River Monster? I heard that
4:04
Speaker 1: one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly a pig, but
4:06
Speaker 1: it's still kind of cool looking. But still they named
4:09
Speaker 1: it the East River Monster, and not a pig. That
4:11
Speaker 1: was you know, I don't know how the pig got there, right,
4:14
Speaker 1: the pig of East River or something like that. Yeah,
4:16
Speaker 1: it's probably like, you know, somewhere in Chinatown a pig
4:19
Speaker 1: was no good and that thing in the river that's
4:22
Speaker 1: what they do. Yeah. Um. Also in two thousand and six, Um,
4:27
Speaker 1: there was one in Russia. I didn't see where, but
4:31
Speaker 1: on a beach. Uh, something washed up and they said
4:34
Speaker 1: sea monster and it turned out to be a beluga whale.
4:38
Speaker 1: Carcass greatly decomposed, but it looked weird. It didn't look
4:41
Speaker 1: anything like a beluga whale. But the point is is
4:44
Speaker 1: still in the twenty one century, whenever the sea spits
4:47
Speaker 1: something up, we're like, this is a monster. Clearly, obviously
4:52
Speaker 1: this is a monster. And then biology just come along
4:54
Speaker 1: and say it's not a monster, but it's this weird thing.
4:57
Speaker 1: Or sometimes they say this is new. Yeah, it's not
5:01
Speaker 1: a monster, but this is new. And this is the
5:04
Speaker 1: point finally that I'm trying to get to, is that
5:07
Speaker 1: the oceans, the seas cover seventies percent of Earth's surface, right,
5:15
Speaker 1: That's a lot of hiding places. And I think humans
5:18
Speaker 1: have known and still no intuitively that there's a lot
5:20
Speaker 1: of stuff down there that we don't know about. We
5:23
Speaker 1: don't know what it is. But over time we've science
5:26
Speaker 1: has replaced superstition enough so that while we still know
5:29
Speaker 1: there's stuff out there that we don't know, we don't
5:31
Speaker 1: think of his monsters, So our mindset has changed somewhat.
5:35
Speaker 1: But ultimately, the sea is this place of unknown, unknown
5:41
Speaker 1: organisms that we're still learning about. What's the of the
5:47
Speaker 1: deepest seas are still uncompletely like unresearched and Undiscovered. Well,
5:51
Speaker 1: James Cameron just took away a little percentage of that
5:54
Speaker 1: with his deep sea dive. He took away a bit
5:57
Speaker 1: of my soul with every movie he's made. Terminator to
6:02
Speaker 1: you like Terminator too, I didn't see that one. Yeah,
6:04
Speaker 1: it was pretty good. Huh, Yeah, I think that was
6:06
Speaker 1: that was a good one. Have you not seen Titanic?
6:10
Speaker 1: Did you know that the there was an alternate ending
6:13
Speaker 1: for it, where like they kept the diamond or or
6:18
Speaker 1: ument where something like the titan Tanic didn't sink, right,
6:23
Speaker 1: it worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton
6:26
Speaker 1: ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's
6:30
Speaker 1: what it was, I think. Um. Speaking of recent sea
6:34
Speaker 1: monsters though, which is not a sea monster, but did
6:37
Speaker 1: you see the footage of the anglerfish? That that's another
6:40
Speaker 1: great point. Yeah, some of these deep sea creatures look
6:43
Speaker 1: like creepy monsters. I mean, the the anglerfish is one
6:47
Speaker 1: of the scariest looking things I've ever seen in my life.
6:49
Speaker 1: Creepy and uh it's real though, It's just you know,
6:52
Speaker 1: science is It's not like, oh, what is this thing?
6:54
Speaker 1: They know what the angler fish is, but they lived
6:56
Speaker 1: so deep I think until recently it had never been
6:59
Speaker 1: filmed in its habitat until like this year, until like
7:04
Speaker 1: three weeks ago. Yeah. Um, apparently it wasn't until nineteen
7:07
Speaker 1: seventy five that we ever photographed a whale underwater. Really yeah.
7:12
Speaker 1: Interesting two thousand six, I think, um or nineteen seventy
7:16
Speaker 1: six we discovered the mega mouth shark. Uh. There's like
7:22
Speaker 1: the sea just coughs up new life to us. That Yeah,
7:26
Speaker 1: where we slightly more superstitious we would have called monsters.
7:28
Speaker 1: So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But
7:32
Speaker 1: it goes back, like really really far, and looking at
7:35
Speaker 1: the different kind of monsters we came up with really
7:37
Speaker 1: kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it
7:42
Speaker 1: goes back. I mean pretty much since people were writing
7:44
Speaker 1: stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster,
7:48
Speaker 1: like the ocean is always just enthralled folks. I think
7:51
Speaker 1: the Mesopotamians had the goddess uh Tiamatt. It was a
7:56
Speaker 1: sea monster. Well she was, yeah, and she was their
7:58
Speaker 1: creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back
8:02
Speaker 1: in Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from, That's
8:06
Speaker 1: where the universe came from. Was Tiamat right. And then
8:09
Speaker 1: eventually as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, Um, she became what's
8:14
Speaker 1: known as the Chaos monster, and she was slain by
8:19
Speaker 1: a male hero as and then the world was created
8:23
Speaker 1: from from that. But originally she was just a benevolent
8:26
Speaker 1: creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here.
8:28
Speaker 1: Not all of the sea monsters. That depends on the
8:30
Speaker 1: culture and the religion. Uh, some of them were benevolent.
8:34
Speaker 1: I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. Uh.
8:39
Speaker 1: The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So even in the Bible, right,
8:43
Speaker 1: and this is a question of mind, dude, is do
8:46
Speaker 1: do don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamatt are
8:50
Speaker 1: one and the same. And in the Old Testament it's
8:53
Speaker 1: the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesopotamian gods, saying, don't
8:59
Speaker 1: even bring that here, like you created the world, I
9:02
Speaker 1: slay you. Yeah, I am God. Well, I mean there's
9:06
Speaker 1: a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament
9:09
Speaker 1: and other religions, and some people take great offense to that.
9:13
Speaker 1: Others don't what that that It's not no, this is
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Speaker 1: the word of God, period. There is no crossover. That's
9:21
Speaker 1: just coincidence. Um, two leagues under the sea. I think
9:27
Speaker 1: Jules vern this quote is pretty cool. Uh. In eighteen
9:30
Speaker 1: seventy he wrote that great, great book, and he said,
9:33
Speaker 1: either we do know all the right varieties of beings
9:37
Speaker 1: which people our planet, or we do not. If we
9:40
Speaker 1: do not know them all, if nature has still secrets
9:43
Speaker 1: in the deeps, for us, nothing is more conformable to
9:46
Speaker 1: reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans
9:50
Speaker 1: and other kinds of even new species, to which the
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Speaker 1: character receiving that monologue said the yeah, but it just
9:57
Speaker 1: it kind of plays to the point, um that if
10:01
Speaker 1: there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains,
10:05
Speaker 1: are deep in the jungles are deep under the sea
10:08
Speaker 1: because people would have seen them. So it makes it
10:10
Speaker 1: exotic in uh, sort of grabby as a means of
10:14
Speaker 1: religion or literature, you know lore. Right, Plus the Jules
10:18
Speaker 1: Verne was writing in well, this is eight seventy when
10:21
Speaker 1: he wrote twenty Leagues under the Sea, So this is
10:23
Speaker 1: a time when a lot of the old myths and
10:26
Speaker 1: legends and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So like, yeah,
10:33
Speaker 1: that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, But
10:37
Speaker 1: it's not actually a kraken. It's an orfice. It's it's yeah,
10:41
Speaker 1: or it's a it's a giant squid. And and here's
10:45
Speaker 1: you know what it does and how it reproduces. And
10:49
Speaker 1: because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah,
10:52
Speaker 1: that's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're
10:54
Speaker 1: a fan of mythology, they are. There are tons and
10:58
Speaker 1: tons of cool stories about secrete hers and sea monsters,
11:01
Speaker 1: all kinds of monsters. Uh, namely one actus named by
11:05
Speaker 1: the Romans. King Cepheius I had a wife named Cassiopeia
11:12
Speaker 1: and they ruled Ethiopia apparently, and she said, you know what,
11:14
Speaker 1: my daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs.
11:18
Speaker 1: And of course, um She's like yeah, I said it. Yeah.
11:21
Speaker 1: And Setis was like, all right, well, I've got a
11:24
Speaker 1: dog like head and I'm part fish, and I'm gonna
11:26
Speaker 1: come up and kill your daughter beside kill kill Cetis. Yeah.
11:31
Speaker 1: And Perseus, of course is always saving the day. So
11:33
Speaker 1: he apparently was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he
11:37
Speaker 1: just chopped off, flying around and uh it just happened
11:41
Speaker 1: to pass by. Uh was it? Persephone who was about
11:45
Speaker 1: to be eaten and Dromeda Andromeda and said, all right,
11:49
Speaker 1: I'll take care of setis on my way home. My
11:51
Speaker 1: swords bloody already Harry Hamlin, who was Yeah, I never
11:57
Speaker 1: saw the remake of that. Did you see that? No?
11:59
Speaker 1: Not didn't either. I just remember released the Crack and
12:02
Speaker 1: yeah it was a buzzword. Yeah that's right. Le Neeson
12:06
Speaker 1: has a knack for buzzy movie. Uh lines of dialogue
12:12
Speaker 1: because that very particular set of skills was also a
12:15
Speaker 1: big thing for months, four different movies. I was just
12:19
Speaker 1: in the one Are you sure? Yeah, taken, Yeah, it
12:22
Speaker 1: was pretty good movie, by the way, Sure sure. I
12:25
Speaker 1: did not see the sequel though, Taken to Electric Googleoo. Yeah,
12:29
Speaker 1: I thought it was weird when he started breaking. He's
12:32
Speaker 1: doing the worm, but like not even very well. I
12:35
Speaker 1: would have thought they'd get like a body double who
12:37
Speaker 1: was like a professional dancer. Well he he did not
12:40
Speaker 1: have a particular set of skills when it came to
12:41
Speaker 1: being on the cardboard. So chucky. You're talking about Perseus
13:06
Speaker 1: slaying Cetus. Yeah. Um. Homer's Odyssey was also another great
13:14
Speaker 1: book of legends and mythology. Yeah, and there were some
13:18
Speaker 1: sea monsters in it. Yeah, sila or skilla and uh
13:25
Speaker 1: suis charybdis Uh. These two point out an important and
13:31
Speaker 1: ongoing um feature of some of these stories, which are
13:35
Speaker 1: that maybe they might symbolize something else real. Yes, either
13:39
Speaker 1: a sea monster or in this case, maybe a dangerous
13:43
Speaker 1: reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common thing, I know,
13:47
Speaker 1: the cracking. Also, the most dangerous part about the cracking,
13:51
Speaker 1: supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right, So, um,
13:56
Speaker 1: this is kind of a this is one thesis on
14:00
Speaker 1: why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory, yeah,
14:04
Speaker 1: a you know, a tale told of of warning. Right,
14:08
Speaker 1: So that quote or that description of scylla is described
14:13
Speaker 1: as having twelve ft six heads atop long sinuous necks
14:17
Speaker 1: and mouths bristling with rows of shark like teeth. Well, um,
14:21
Speaker 1: that's probably a reef, right yeah, and then sure just
14:26
Speaker 1: lay on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated
14:29
Speaker 1: the waters. There, probably a whirlpoole. Right, So it's a
14:32
Speaker 1: story saying maybe don't go there exact exactly. Did you
14:36
Speaker 1: read that thing on nuclear semiotics, dude, Let me tell
14:40
Speaker 1: you about this for a second. Okay, there is this um,
14:44
Speaker 1: this whole exploration that's trying to figure out how to
14:50
Speaker 1: express Say so, like, if you have nuclear waste and
14:54
Speaker 1: you need to put it away for ten thousand years
14:56
Speaker 1: and to keep people away from it for ten thousand years,
14:59
Speaker 1: you have to figure out a way to warn people
15:02
Speaker 1: away from it for ten thousand years, Well, how could
15:05
Speaker 1: you possibly do that? Godzilla sign? That's one idea. There's
15:09
Speaker 1: a lot of other ideas, and this whole thing is
15:11
Speaker 1: called nuclear semiotics. And one of the ways, too, probably
15:15
Speaker 1: the most agreed upon way, is to create this thing
15:19
Speaker 1: called a nuclear priesthood, which is this group of learned
15:23
Speaker 1: people who know the secret of this nuclear waste site
15:28
Speaker 1: but purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away,
15:33
Speaker 1: so to add some sort of like superstitious danger or
15:36
Speaker 1: something to the site that will get passed down and
15:38
Speaker 1: passed down, so eventually the people surrounding the area live
15:42
Speaker 1: around it will know like, you don't want to go there,
15:45
Speaker 1: You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear
15:48
Speaker 1: radiation anymore, but this folklore will get passed along and along,
15:51
Speaker 1: and they're saying like that may be the best way
15:54
Speaker 1: to pass along information. And that's exactly what um. What
15:58
Speaker 1: the idea one interpretation and of what sea monsters are is.
16:01
Speaker 1: It's like a ghost story too. You know, you don't
16:03
Speaker 1: want your kids to go in that decrepit house with
16:05
Speaker 1: all the rusty nails. Tell him a scary old lady
16:07
Speaker 1: lives in there, or to play near the water. You
16:09
Speaker 1: don't want the you don't want a carp to take
16:12
Speaker 1: you away. It's really just manipulating your dumb kid pretty much.
16:17
Speaker 1: It's not doing dangerous things, right exactly. Yeah, And it works,
16:21
Speaker 1: and it's a way and over time it's gotten passed down.
16:24
Speaker 1: So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like
16:28
Speaker 1: you said, the krack in um possibly being the giant squid,
16:32
Speaker 1: or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right, Yeah,
16:36
Speaker 1: There's always been stories of the kraking terrorizing ships off
16:39
Speaker 1: of Iceland and Norway. And the kracking is noted because
16:42
Speaker 1: it is huge, like one point five a mile to
16:46
Speaker 1: a mile and a half wide, and uh, you know,
16:50
Speaker 1: the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid.
16:53
Speaker 1: If you see a if you're a sailor back then
16:56
Speaker 1: and you don't know about biology and things yet, and
16:59
Speaker 1: you see a uh an eyeball pop out the size
17:03
Speaker 1: of a human head, it might make you think that's
17:06
Speaker 1: a big cracking seamonster exactly. So then if that gets
17:08
Speaker 1: embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide,
17:11
Speaker 1: with legs as as large as a sailing mast, capable
17:16
Speaker 1: of pulling down a ship, well, I mean it gets
17:18
Speaker 1: the point across the people back on land, like, wow,
17:21
Speaker 1: that was a really big monster that you guys saw.
17:24
Speaker 1: How big do these squids get? They get to like
17:26
Speaker 1: forty forty three ft forty forty ft long. There's something
17:30
Speaker 1: even bigger called the colossal squid that's so much bigger.
17:33
Speaker 1: It's its own um species, I believe um and it
17:38
Speaker 1: lives just in the Antarctic. So it's probably not the
17:41
Speaker 1: basis of the cracking. It's probably just a regular old
17:44
Speaker 1: giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look look at
17:46
Speaker 1: those things right exactly. They're scary looking, they are very scary,
17:49
Speaker 1: and they're very very big. Plus Also, the idea of
17:52
Speaker 1: the crack and may have first come about before sightings
17:55
Speaker 1: of giant squid. They may have been taken from whalers
17:59
Speaker 1: who found like crazy scars on whales who may have
18:03
Speaker 1: found like bits of tentacles, like huge tentacles in the
18:06
Speaker 1: whales stomachs, things like that, and to be like, what
18:09
Speaker 1: did this come from? Yeah, the beak, because they did
18:12
Speaker 1: find a giant squid once, but the sailors cut it
18:15
Speaker 1: up and used it for bait, but they preserved the beak,
18:18
Speaker 1: and that just fueled the legend even more and more.
18:21
Speaker 1: So that's the that's Another interpretation of sea monsters is
18:25
Speaker 1: that they came from misunderstood or embellished sightings of actual
18:32
Speaker 1: sea organisms that were familiar with. Now, so it's the
18:35
Speaker 1: same thing, we just changed the name. Sure, well, you're
18:37
Speaker 1: a sailor, you're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because
18:41
Speaker 1: you've been out at sea for too long, licking toads,
18:44
Speaker 1: maybe looking toads. You may be uh, physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Um,
18:50
Speaker 1: and you see a giant squid, you might write in
18:52
Speaker 1: your journal that I've seen the cracking. It makes perfect sense,
18:57
Speaker 1: you know, and it spreads and take shape over to time.
19:00
Speaker 1: Scurvy going on. The krack is not the only one.
19:04
Speaker 1: Um that's probably based on something real, the like sea serpents.
19:09
Speaker 1: So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many headed sea serpent.
19:13
Speaker 1: It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said, Oh no,
19:16
Speaker 1: I'm sorry it was It was in the the Old Testament.
19:20
Speaker 1: It may have been the Mesopotamian god, That's what I said. Yeah,
19:23
Speaker 1: but Leviathan always just sort of a catch all word
19:26
Speaker 1: now for any like large, unknown, huge creature. Yeah, and
19:29
Speaker 1: apparently it's in Hebrew it just means whale. Yeah, um,
19:33
Speaker 1: which again is probably a whale. Well yeah, it could
19:36
Speaker 1: have also been a sea serpent. So sea serpents are
19:38
Speaker 1: there are their own things. Um, the uh, the Norse
19:43
Speaker 1: had a legend of the your moannder there's a warm
19:48
Speaker 1: loot in there and everything, and that was apparently, um,
19:52
Speaker 1: one of Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah, that was the baby
19:57
Speaker 1: that was created when Loki, his brother, and a woman
20:00
Speaker 1: named on Garboda I guess, had um the sex of
20:05
Speaker 1: the gods and created this creature, a sea serpent that
20:09
Speaker 1: wrapped around the globe supposedly. Yeah. Yeah, and um, that's
20:13
Speaker 1: just one example of a sea serpent, huge sea bound snake.
20:18
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of suggestions of what accounted for
20:22
Speaker 1: sightings of sea serpents. Yeah, huge things of floating kelp
20:26
Speaker 1: seen in the distance. Um, schools of porpoises, Yeah, along
20:30
Speaker 1: the line together. There's one thing though, that could have
20:33
Speaker 1: accounted for all sightings of sea serpents. It's called the
20:36
Speaker 1: or fish. Did you see this thing? Yeah? It is
20:38
Speaker 1: huge and Um, if an or fish was was swimming
20:42
Speaker 1: in the water, it could be undulating up and down
20:45
Speaker 1: and it looks like little spiny humps coming in and
20:47
Speaker 1: out of the water, so that that makes sense. Sure
20:50
Speaker 1: they get up too, I think, um, thirty or forty
20:54
Speaker 1: ft Yeah, they can. I mean, there's there's plenty of
20:57
Speaker 1: photos of you know, like tend duds on a beach
21:00
Speaker 1: holding one up right, because it takes ten dudes. It's
21:04
Speaker 1: not like they all want their hand on the little
21:05
Speaker 1: fish exactly, you know. And these aren't photoshoped either. There's
21:10
Speaker 1: all kinds of stupid fake pictures too. But or fishes
21:12
Speaker 1: are huge and they look like big, slimy kind of
21:15
Speaker 1: serpentine fish. And then chuck mirror people were another kind
21:21
Speaker 1: of universal Um, I guess sea monster myth. That's a
21:27
Speaker 1: That's another thing that stuck out to me, is there
21:30
Speaker 1: where there are legends around the world from cultures that
21:35
Speaker 1: are separated by space. And time that had similar stories
21:41
Speaker 1: um without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that
21:45
Speaker 1: a lot of these people cited similar things and came
21:49
Speaker 1: up with similar myths and legends to explain what they
21:51
Speaker 1: were seeing. Probably the mermaid is you know, if you've
21:54
Speaker 1: seen Splash, you think, what what a neat thing to
21:57
Speaker 1: find a mermaid. But mermaids were not um looked upon
22:01
Speaker 1: kindly because they would yeah, and this article points out
22:04
Speaker 1: they would at the their best, they would just forget
22:07
Speaker 1: that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die.
22:10
Speaker 1: And at the worst they would do so on purpose
22:13
Speaker 1: and take the men down under the water and lights
22:16
Speaker 1: out for you. Tom Hanks, Yeah, sorry Tom Hanks for
22:20
Speaker 1: the rest of your career. Darryl. His career was pretty
22:23
Speaker 1: lousy after Splashing it Well, uh yeah, what um she
22:30
Speaker 1: Daryl Hannah though in the movie would she was not
22:32
Speaker 1: a bad mermaid because she uh kissed him and gave
22:36
Speaker 1: him breath? Right, Well, it's the Hollywood ification of the mermaid.
22:40
Speaker 1: Ladward or like aerial from a Little Mermaid and that
22:46
Speaker 1: dirty dirty DVD cover Oh yeah, I guess it was
22:50
Speaker 1: VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it went to DVD,
22:53
Speaker 1: probably those Disney guys board board and yeah, sure, yeah,
22:58
Speaker 1: I get bored and blame so um. The whole Mr
23:03
Speaker 1: creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which
23:08
Speaker 1: apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north
23:11
Speaker 1: that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Yeah, Orkney,
23:17
Speaker 1: I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland it's
23:19
Speaker 1: underwater now called dog Land that was around ten or
23:23
Speaker 1: twelve thousand years ago. That's like this really fertile Neolithic
23:27
Speaker 1: artifact area. It's pretty cool. Dogger Land, that's what it is,
23:30
Speaker 1: not dog Land. So um. They had their own things
23:33
Speaker 1: called carpis chuck. And what's interesting about the carpi is
23:37
Speaker 1: that the kelpie I was thinking harpies, kepies exactly, but
23:45
Speaker 1: this is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which are
23:48
Speaker 1: actually horses that live in the sea that can sometimes
23:54
Speaker 1: change into humans, so they're kind of mer creatures. But
23:58
Speaker 1: every every lake in Scotland has a kelpie. This is
24:01
Speaker 1: supposedly associated with it, including lock Ness And it wasn't
24:05
Speaker 1: until the early eighteenth century that NeSSI became like a
24:09
Speaker 1: c creature that we think of her today when some
24:12
Speaker 1: dinosaur bones please use sare bones were found around Lockness
24:16
Speaker 1: saying well, this is what the Lockness monster is. Right
24:20
Speaker 1: before that, it was just a kelpie. We could probably
24:22
Speaker 1: do a full show on Nessy. Just think the fun
24:24
Speaker 1: of it, um was has been pretty much disproven um
24:28
Speaker 1: unequivocally of course, because there is no Lockness monster. But
24:33
Speaker 1: I just think things like that are neat And when
24:34
Speaker 1: we did one big Foot, it's more about just the
24:36
Speaker 1: legend in the war around it Unlockness. Did you ever
24:40
Speaker 1: see the documentary that what's his name did Verna Hertzog? No,
24:44
Speaker 1: I didn't know he did one of those. It was
24:46
Speaker 1: I think it was he did a mockumentary, but not
24:51
Speaker 1: like a Christopher Guest mocumentary, just bow documentary waiting for Nessy,
24:55
Speaker 1: Waiting for Nessy um where it just looked like he
24:59
Speaker 1: wasn't remember any of where he was searching for the
25:01
Speaker 1: Latinus monster and saw, you know, caught it on camera.
25:05
Speaker 1: But it made it, he made it seem real. I
25:06
Speaker 1: think it was Runner Herzog. It was good, of course,
25:09
Speaker 1: you know it sounds a little dishonest for Werner Herzog. Well,
25:12
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't think he was trying to pass
25:13
Speaker 1: it off. I think you kind of see this. Yeah,
25:16
Speaker 1: I'll look that up at may not be him, but
25:18
Speaker 1: someone did that, and it was kind of cool because
25:20
Speaker 1: if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my god,
25:23
Speaker 1: there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like something
25:27
Speaker 1: on on cable? Nol says it was her talking. Okay, yeah,
25:32
Speaker 1: I mean it probably played on cable at some point.
25:34
Speaker 1: Nold talks a lot more than Jerry does. Um, so
25:38
Speaker 1: chuck there. That brings us to our third interpretation for
25:42
Speaker 1: where sea monster legends came from people finding dinosaur bones. Yes,
25:46
Speaker 1: and we'll talk more about that right after this break,
26:03
Speaker 1: all right, Dinah, Josh, Yeah, let's hear it. Oh well,
26:08
Speaker 1: so I said that NeSSI became this kind of sea
26:11
Speaker 1: monster around the time of please Asaur. I believe that's
26:15
Speaker 1: what it was. Um skeleton was found around lock nests.
26:19
Speaker 1: They said, well, this is this must be one of
26:21
Speaker 1: Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that that
26:25
Speaker 1: a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent.
26:29
Speaker 1: You mentioned um the Chinese having a legend of some
26:34
Speaker 1: sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three
26:38
Speaker 1: ft long. Um oh no, I'm sorry about a foot long.
26:42
Speaker 1: The Guizoo dragons, and they were basically marine reptiles called
26:48
Speaker 1: keasaurs shui. They they but they were lucky. Like if
26:52
Speaker 1: you found one of these skeletons, you kept it because
26:54
Speaker 1: it was a little sea monster skeleton that you got
26:57
Speaker 1: your hands on, and it would bring you a good fortune.
26:59
Speaker 1: That's right. And I know what earlier we were talking
27:03
Speaker 1: about just the early explorers, and uh, you can't fault
27:08
Speaker 1: some of these dudes because they were, you know, as
27:11
Speaker 1: this one article you said, they were literally an unchartered
27:14
Speaker 1: waters and it was before the rise of science, and
27:17
Speaker 1: all they had heard were stories in folklore and anytime
27:21
Speaker 1: you saw if you ever see a map, c map,
27:25
Speaker 1: oceanic map from there, it's gonna have some sea monsters
27:29
Speaker 1: drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it was
27:33
Speaker 1: a time when before there were you know, before observational
27:37
Speaker 1: data came along. We pretty much was sort of like
27:40
Speaker 1: the Internet today. You pretty much just rewrote earlier history
27:44
Speaker 1: books over and over until they finally got a little
27:46
Speaker 1: smarter and say, you know what, maybe we should really
27:49
Speaker 1: observe something and then write about it. For real and
27:53
Speaker 1: this didn't really lead to any anything more substantiated, you know,
27:57
Speaker 1: well for a while, sure, but um it was they
28:01
Speaker 1: called a transitional era in this article, which I think
28:04
Speaker 1: kind of sums it up. Yeah, these were early scientists,
28:07
Speaker 1: early naturalists, who were trying to get a handle on
28:09
Speaker 1: what the heck they were looking at. Um, but they
28:12
Speaker 1: still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature
28:17
Speaker 1: like a whale. Right, and then it's similarly a natural
28:22
Speaker 1: um biological illustration of a mythical creature like a ce bishop.
28:30
Speaker 1: So the ce bishop was this thing that was supposedly
28:32
Speaker 1: caught and taken to the King of Poland because it
28:37
Speaker 1: was this fish like creature that had like a meter
28:41
Speaker 1: and robes like a bishop, and apparently you could also
28:44
Speaker 1: talk and refuse to eat, and when it would make
28:48
Speaker 1: the sign of the cross and everything. And later on
28:50
Speaker 1: somebody said it probably didn't talk and make the sign
28:54
Speaker 1: of the cross. But if you look at a squid
28:56
Speaker 1: a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's
28:59
Speaker 1: got the hat and in some of its flappy skin
29:02
Speaker 1: that's kind of like the robes, you know, So maybe
29:05
Speaker 1: that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously, to this.
29:08
Speaker 1: We're talking like the sixteenth century. There was a pretty
29:12
Speaker 1: much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land
29:17
Speaker 1: had an an analogy in the sea. Catfish, dogfish, seahorse,
29:22
Speaker 1: all that stuff, and uh, in some cases they were right,
29:26
Speaker 1: there are catfish, there are dog fish because we call
29:29
Speaker 1: them that sea monkeys right, the sea horse to um.
29:34
Speaker 1: But all that kind of It was a rough time
29:37
Speaker 1: for science. It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah,
29:40
Speaker 1: because you know, like you said, things were mistaken, like
29:44
Speaker 1: a whale and a walrus might be a monster when
29:47
Speaker 1: it's just a whale or a walrus. And there were
29:50
Speaker 1: all kinds of tails that you know, when it's repeated
29:53
Speaker 1: over and over, you get the sense it is just
29:55
Speaker 1: one of those like urban legends back then, right, I
29:58
Speaker 1: guess it wasn't urban back then, though, what would it be?
30:01
Speaker 1: Just a seafaring legend um of whales being mistaken for islands,
30:08
Speaker 1: and like a ship will land on the whale and
30:11
Speaker 1: build a you know, and route down basically get off
30:13
Speaker 1: the ship and build a fire, and then the whale,
30:16
Speaker 1: I guess who was just chilling out at the surface says, hey,
30:19
Speaker 1: there's a fire on my back, and I'm gonna take
30:21
Speaker 1: your boat underwater and swallow you hole. I'm a whale
30:25
Speaker 1: to be aware of the you know, whatever they called that,
30:27
Speaker 1: whatever culture called that particular whale exactly now we just
30:31
Speaker 1: call it a whale. And again it was probably end
30:34
Speaker 1: on their backs. It was an embellished story, but there
30:37
Speaker 1: they it was based on the sighting of a whale
30:39
Speaker 1: before they called it whales. And back when everybody lied
30:41
Speaker 1: about everything, they saw another culture that found dinosaur bones
30:47
Speaker 1: and created their own legends. Where the Lakota and Dakota
30:50
Speaker 1: su Yeah, sure, they came up with something called um
30:55
Speaker 1: the um um tahila la. Yeah. I think that's about right,
31:01
Speaker 1: from from dinosaur bones found around the Missouri River. Yeah,
31:05
Speaker 1: and that was a water creature. Well, they were very
31:07
Speaker 1: evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another,
31:11
Speaker 1: and so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with
31:14
Speaker 1: them thunder beings. Yeah, but I looked it up. It's
31:16
Speaker 1: basically thunderbirds, gotcha. What they knew is that it wasn't
31:21
Speaker 1: a tonka, that's a buffalo, right. Yeah, they were pretty sure.
31:27
Speaker 1: You know, um, that's apparently where the legends of the
31:29
Speaker 1: psych the Cyclops came from. From Native Americans from no
31:33
Speaker 1: from um finding like old like elephant bones, elephant skulls,
31:39
Speaker 1: the huge cavity in the middle, like well, clearly there
31:42
Speaker 1: was a race of giants that just had one eye. No,
31:46
Speaker 1: they were elephants. You know. We often joked like they
31:49
Speaker 1: were done back then. Of course they weren't. They were
31:51
Speaker 1: just trying to figure it out. It's like to make
31:53
Speaker 1: stuff up. They didn't have TV or anything back then,
31:56
Speaker 1: and a lot of this stuff was was um legend
32:02
Speaker 1: to keep you know, voters from going in a maybe
32:05
Speaker 1: a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or to keep
32:08
Speaker 1: the children away from the water. And like the ghost
32:11
Speaker 1: story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh, nuclear semiotic?
32:17
Speaker 1: Nuclear semiotics, man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually,
32:20
Speaker 1: Roman Mars has a nine invisible about that one. Yeah,
32:24
Speaker 1: nice nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat ineffective. I imagine we'll find
32:29
Speaker 1: out in ten thousand years. I guess. So, um, what
32:33
Speaker 1: else do you got anything else? I don't have anything
32:35
Speaker 1: else on sea serpents. Um, just take a look at
32:37
Speaker 1: the angler fish video and tell me if you came
32:41
Speaker 1: upon that. And see, we also didn't point out that
32:43
Speaker 1: this was before deep not even deep sea exploration, like
32:46
Speaker 1: This is before underwater exploration. People are just riding around
32:50
Speaker 1: on the top of the ocean. So we're fascinated with
32:52
Speaker 1: it and we've gone to the depths that we can attain.
32:55
Speaker 1: At this point, it's just pretty deep. I wish I
32:57
Speaker 1: would look that up. I don't know how deep we
32:59
Speaker 1: can go. How deep James Cameron can go. Oh he
33:02
Speaker 1: goes deep, buddy. But um, think about back then, man,
33:06
Speaker 1: when they couldn't Like, you're not scary, that would be right,
33:10
Speaker 1: when these strange creatures are Like you see a giant squid, yeah,
33:14
Speaker 1: and you're just partially seeing it if you can't see
33:16
Speaker 1: it underwater. Do you have no idea before the Diving
33:20
Speaker 1: Bell even like there was? Or the Butterfly? That's right, Yeah,
33:24
Speaker 1: you like that one. I finally saw that movie, by
33:28
Speaker 1: the way, hardcore man. It's good though, Yeah, really good. Uh.
33:32
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about the diving Bell
33:34
Speaker 1: and the butterfly or about sea monsters, you can type
33:37
Speaker 1: those words into the search bar how stuff works dot com.
33:39
Speaker 1: And since I said search parts time for listener mail,
33:43
Speaker 1: i'n call this uh Opah is German for grandpa. I
33:51
Speaker 1: thought it was Greek for like good times. Maybe I
33:54
Speaker 1: don't know really, yeah, bah, well, I'm sure those are
33:58
Speaker 1: just three letters together, might be something Greek. But like
34:03
Speaker 1: my brother in law, Carston, his German and his grandfather
34:06
Speaker 1: was I'm sorry his father. His grandfather was Opa, but
34:10
Speaker 1: his dad was native Germans, so my nieces called him Opah,
34:15
Speaker 1: as does this Lady's I'm writing in specifically about your
34:18
Speaker 1: whaling podcast. Oh how appropriate with a family story that
34:21
Speaker 1: Lucy relates. My great grandfather Opa left Germany when he
34:26
Speaker 1: was fourteen pre war to work as a sailor, came
34:28
Speaker 1: to the US and was a member of the U.
34:29
Speaker 1: S Coast Guard. One day, he was part of a
34:31
Speaker 1: team that was clearing a harbor of some old sunken chips.
34:35
Speaker 1: To do so, they use the sophisticated method of throwing
34:38
Speaker 1: dynamite into the water to blast the wood of art
34:41
Speaker 1: and then gathered the debris. His team wrote out in
34:44
Speaker 1: a fourteen foot rowboat to gather up the wood shards
34:47
Speaker 1: and noticed the blast had killed the fish they floated
34:49
Speaker 1: to the tops of the crew brought them into the
34:51
Speaker 1: boat as well. Waste not, wantnot. As they were going
34:54
Speaker 1: about their business, they came across a sixteen foot hammerhead
34:57
Speaker 1: shark that had floated up. Clearly it would be a
35:00
Speaker 1: great source of food, so despite their small boat, they
35:02
Speaker 1: pulled it aboard. I think you see where this is headed. Well,
35:06
Speaker 1: As it turns out, the blast is strong enough to
35:07
Speaker 1: kill small fish, but only stunned larger animals. The sharks
35:11
Speaker 1: slowly started to gain consciousness in the row boat, and
35:14
Speaker 1: being confused and out of water, was not pleased. It
35:17
Speaker 1: got to the point that it was thrashing about in
35:19
Speaker 1: the boat, threatened to destroy the boat and likely injured
35:22
Speaker 1: or kill the crew members. So in the midst of
35:24
Speaker 1: this chaos are able to flag down a sailor on
35:26
Speaker 1: a larger vessel proceeded to shoot the thing to death
35:28
Speaker 1: while that was still in the boat. Um, all of
35:32
Speaker 1: the crew members were safe and they still got to
35:34
Speaker 1: feast on hammerhead shark. But now I had a much
35:36
Speaker 1: more exciting story. Uh, and you mentioned in the whaling
35:39
Speaker 1: podcast Old timmy whaling crew members were deployed in small
35:42
Speaker 1: boats to get the whale and were often injured and killed.
35:45
Speaker 1: I thought you might find this interesting, and I was
35:47
Speaker 1: hoping that you could give a shout out to my
35:49
Speaker 1: sister Rachel. You turned me onto your podcast in two
35:52
Speaker 1: thousand nine. She lives in France. We don't get to
35:55
Speaker 1: see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh and
35:57
Speaker 1: Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is uh
36:00
Speaker 1: Wendy Bear. She is a registered dietitian. And Wendy and
36:04
Speaker 1: Rachel Uh thanks for listening and for spreading the word
36:09
Speaker 1: and for being uh sisters. Way to go being sisters. Yeah,
36:13
Speaker 1: thanks for writing in, Wendy. Yeah, yeah, thanks Wendy, Um
36:17
Speaker 1: and Chuck. This is our last episode of two thousand
36:20
Speaker 1: and fourteen. Oh man, the longest year. So we want
36:23
Speaker 1: to say happy new year everybody, and I want to
36:26
Speaker 1: say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife, you me.
36:30
Speaker 1: Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the rights free version. No,
36:36
Speaker 1: that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh it's a good one,
36:39
Speaker 1: so it's not rights free. Yeah, so happy birthday you me.
36:41
Speaker 1: Happy New Year to all of you great people out
36:43
Speaker 1: there in podcast land. We'll see you next year. Stuff
36:49
Speaker 1: You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For
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Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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