Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 66: Nazca Lines & Chupacabras!

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Episode 66: Nazca Lines & Chupacabras! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: This hasn't been easy and no.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: That lesson will stand you in a good extent on your life.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm catching on to why that's done and why that's done and why that's done.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Ostlantis.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Curly Tlapoyawa, and for today's episode, we're going to switch things up a little bit and take a look into the past.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: You see, before the Tales from Ostlantis podcast, I tried to get an earlier podcast started, but with little success because, well, to be honest, I didn't really know what I was doing at the time in terms of properly promoting a successful podcast.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, I wound up with some pretty cool interviews that unfortunately nobody ever heard.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: So today I'm going to try to rectify that a bit by featuring one of these older interviews that I conducted with Benjamin Radford from The Skeptical Inquirer.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the content crosses over really well with the subject matter that we touch on here at the Tales from Oscantas podcast.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: You see, we talk about the Nazca lines in Peru, we talk about the European esoteric and occultist origins of some allegedly Maya ancestral knowledge, and we touch on the subject of the infamous Chupacabra, which incidentally Ben is an expert on.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I think he is the world's foremost expert on that very subject.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: So with that being said, here we go with this older interview.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoy it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And until next time, Timo Itata.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: What up, everybody?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is Curly Flapoyawa, aka the hardcore archaeologist, and we are broadcasting once again from KES Studios in downtown Albuquerque.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Joining me tonight is my friend and fellow skeptic, Benjamin Radford.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Ben Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer Science Magazine and a research fellow with a nonprofit educational organization, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: His colleagues there include Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, name dropper.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: He has written thousands of articles on a wide variety of topics, including urban legends, mysterious phenomena, critical thinking, and media literacy.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: He is author, co-author, or contributor to over 20 books and has won awards for his books, films, and podcasts.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, my friend Ben Radford.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, here I am, man.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me on.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for coming.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: You too, man.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we've known each other for a long ass time.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: We have.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember the exact first time that we we met, but it's been like at least eight years.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's been a while.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe ten.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's a long time.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: I did I did one of your uh I did uh I took one of your stuntmen courses.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: Damn near killed me, man.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not I'm not too proud to say it, but I was like, shit, I did it, and then I'm just like, I was not feeling well.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, I'm ibuprofen, I'm taking a hot bath.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, man, he does this all the time.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like I and like I'm not I'm not like you know, I'm not in bad shape, but man, a hardcore.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I got and and you know the thing is like I've always I've always totally respected like stunt men and and I always wanted to be a stunt man until I realized just how hard it was.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: I just I have nothing but love and respect for the profession.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: So likewise, sir.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have a great deal of respect for what you do.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big fan of the magazine.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know there's uh that and uh Skeptic are two of my favorite magazines.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I keep wanting, I want to write for Skeptical Inquirer.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't ever seem to have the time to get something ready for it.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: But hey man, send me something, I'll be happy to look at it.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: We we love your stuff.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of a lot of ideas floating around in in my head.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you just got back from Peru.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: No, I was actually in Peru uh a while ago.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: I actually got back from the Caribbean.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: I was doing a uh a long um uh uh I was basically the guest speaker on a Caribbean cruise.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: I went to a couple different islands, did a couple investigations there.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but I was in I was in Peru uh a few years back looking into uh the Nazca Alliance.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, I was there for a skeptical conference.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, well was this was the NASCA alliance part of the uh the conference?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: It was not.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was gone, you know, I I've traveled to Latin America pretty pretty often.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's one of my favorite places because I I I speak Spanish, not not great, but certainly passable.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I'd actually been to Peru a couple times.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh most recently was uh was for the the Skeptics Congress.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I figured, well, as long as we're there, let's go, let's go check it out.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd I'd been to Machu Picchu um and some and you know Chanchan and some of the other places, uh, but I had never been to the Nazca lines.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so I figured since me and Joe Nichol were there, my colleague at uh at CFI and of course uh also a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, I was like, hey, let's uh let's go check it out.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so we did that.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: We also looked at the um the Ica stones, the the stones that have the the uh the the aliens.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly, yeah.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's like the uh they're like, oh, could this be a dinosaur?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well we'll call it that.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Wasn't the story like some guy was there offering to to pay money for these stones, so like the locals were like, oh shit, this white dude is fucking paying us.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, uh all right, yeah, that's that's basically the story.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's this uh uh years ago, so somebody was carving these things into the into some rocks, and uh it was just these cool little designs, and then and then uh they showed it to uh to somebody down there, a white guy who didn't know Jack shit.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, wow, can you find me more of these?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: Can you can you dig these up from ancient tombs?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, Yeah, my cousin Juan can get you lots of those.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I bet.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so now so you see he's bringing in by the cart road.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: It became like a cottage industry.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right, and taking advantage of this idiot foreigner with a lot of money.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, oh wow, this this is you know, I I'm on the I'm only on the edge of some some cutting-edge thing.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, you're being suckered, dude.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, what freaks me out though, I mean, I guess I shouldn't be freaked out by it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: I should expect it by now, is those stones, photos of those stones, show up on my feed.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: I would have to say, and I'm not even bullshitting, like three or four times a week by new age indigenous enthusiasts that uh are really, really caught up in just this uh new agey, you know, reinterpretation of indigenous history, pseudo-history.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so they uh I see it all the time.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: They show they'll literally they'll be like, well, you know, how if science is wrong because look, man lived with dinosaurs.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Boom, proof, mic drop, check mate bitches, fucking scientists.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what's bizarre to me is that you know, in the skeptical world, this is old news.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is this is this is like as stale as the Bringmade Triangle.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is you know, there hasn't been anything on the eco stones in in forever.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so it to like skeptics who do this, you know, on as a career, it's like, yeah, that was debunked like long ago.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: But but you know, in our skeptical bubble, it's it's it's sometimes easy easy to forget that that people like you and people who aren't aren't skeptical, they just like, oh look, they're they're rediscovering this shit.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah as if it's like, here's a new thing.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, my child, sit down.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is this is not new.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's this proclivity to uh to attach ourselves to things that we see as like ancient knowledge or hidden knowledge, that we have this special access to things that nobody else knows about, and it somehow makes us special, and and you know, we we like that feeling.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think people are drawn to that.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think that would draw that's what kind of what draws people to uh just magical thinking and uh you know not having a skeptical boat, or or if they're skeptical, they're skeptical about the wrong shit.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like I literally We call those skeptics.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I just saw an argument, an honest to you know, to God.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't believe in God, but honest to lowercase lowercase g god uh argument about the flat earth on my Facebook page.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right in 2017.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh you expect that like 1750.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: But this one guy, he's like, no, man, you just don't understand the way I understand.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And did you know that NASA means to deceive in ancient Hebrew?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, are you one, are you sure about that?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I'm not sure about that.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: But even if it is true, come on.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: But what's funny is they all must be getting their information from the exact same source because every, you know, and I've been lucky, I've only actually ever interacted with three human beings that think the earth is flat, but they all use the same arguments.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: They all say, well, the Bible says that it was uh airplane pilots already know this, man, otherwise they would have to fly with the tips of their planes pointed down.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, you really don't understand how things work, do you?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Right, you you don't have a clue.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: You just don't have a clue.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, it's you know, part of it is is uh it's sort of I would contrast that to you know the way the science works.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, science, as you know, operates on on precedent and it operates on established knowledge.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: And what these people miss is that in order to understand something, you need to make an effort to research it.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: To this sounds crazy, find actual actual experts beyond YouTube videos.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not just and blogs that already, you know, right uh repeat the your narrative.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Alex Jones, yeah.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so what this is is that to them, it's this cutting-edge thing.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, you're just part of the establishment.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: You you don't understand.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, something that's really unfortunate that I've seen is uh this reaction to intellectualism, you know, this anti-intellectualism that's going on.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And especially in the indigenous communities, I get called a sellout, I get called all kinds of names because I went back to school and you know became a scientist and work as an archaeologist.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And people are like, well, that's the white man's science.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, science is like it's kind of everyone's science, really.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of everybody's, you know, it doesn't belong to one specific group.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's a method, it's not an ideology.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So you know we need to let go of this uh this fear of science.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm seeing a lot, and I mean, come on, it's like you said, it's 2017.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: We have people that believe in the flat earth, we have people that believe in the ecostones, we have people believe that we never went to the moon.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: We and it doesn't matter how many times these things get debunked.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're always gonna have people that believe in it just because they want to believe in it.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: They've they live in this bubble, this this reality that they've constructed for themselves that they're not willing to poke their heads outside of.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, part of it is that you know it's one in skepticism we call the the rubber duck syndrome.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's it's basically old wine and new bottles.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: And what you find is that a lot of times a lot of these so-called new ideas, these so-called cutting-edge ideas, if if you actually take some time to do some some research into it, these ideas circulated in the 1870s, in the 1930s.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's this there's nothing new about them at all.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: They're just they're just old wine and new bottles, and they're repackaged as some sort of mystical, and it's just it just and again it goes back to just people.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: The problem isn't just that they don't do the research, it's that they don't even realize they should do the research.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: To them, it's it's all new, and well, hey, this guy on YouTube said this, and like, yeah, I know there's a whole body of knowledge here saying that like you know, every now and then I have someone's like, oh well, you know, uh you know, the the you know, have you have you looked at the uh the the studies uh about uh about uh you know psychic abilities and PK?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, yeah, actually I have, yeah, what about it?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like, oh.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, and then they try they start to throw something out there, and like like you look into it.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's a robust history of people who have spent time looking for ghosts.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: People have spent time trying to prove psychoconnecability with random number of generators, uh the pair program, and these other things where where it's like the it it's the data's there.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's not as if you know the reason the scientists reject this is not because no one's looked at it.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: The reason they reject it is because they have looked at it and it's bullshit.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and there's no evidence.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, wasn't uh Houdini one of the big guys that was really out to debunk and challenge the psychic uh phenomena claims?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: He absolutely was.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, and Houdini is a is a perfect example of an early skeptic.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, he died in 1926, but it but from the 1880s onward, um, he was one of the most prominent uh debunkers, and partly because of his background in in magic, and of course.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's there's a long history of skeptics in magic, you know, James Randy, Ray Hyman, um other people like that, who uh you know part of part of the value is in knowing how people are fooled.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because that's what magicians do.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's literally what they do, is they they they think of ways to fool you.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: And when you spend your time looking at ways to fool you, you can more easily identify the ways that other people are fooled.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so Houdini uh you know he didn't start out as a as a as a skeptic necessarily or debunker.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he got disgusted with the spiritualists of the day, with uh with the capitalist spiritualist movement, certainly around that time.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: And he it was very, very popular starting with with Kate and Maggie Fox in Hydesville, New York, and they had this series of raps that they claimed were from a murdered uh peddler.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh and that sort of launched a whole you know basically a religion called spiritualism, which is uh was very, very popular in the 1800s and still exists in a couple places today.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, it was later proven to be a hoax.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: They admitted they had lied, but people were like, well, don't care.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: We're still anyway.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: So so Houdini saw the the the vast number of people that are being scammed uh by by people who are doing transparent magic tricks.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: And he's like, This is bullshit.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I know that you're lying because I can do that.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so he set out to to to to prove uh to basically to prove that these people were were hoaxing, which of course uh they were.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so yeah, Houdini was one of the original uh original skeptics, certainly, of that era.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: So when you said that you uh you you went to take a look at the ecostones, did you get to hold any of the ecostones?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Did you oh I hold I held my stones, man.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: I held as many stones as I could.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: I was okay, so here's the situation.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: So so I was uh again, I was with Joe Nickel, another research fellow at CFI.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and Joe doesn't speak any Spanish, and so and my Spanish is okay.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't call it good, but it's okay, certainly enough to get by on.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: But Joe didn't speak any Spanish, and so he was sort of relying on me to translate his stuff, which is fine.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: But we we went to go see Nazca and we we did a flight and saw the saw the the drawings and did we didn't really do much on the ground research because there's not really much you can do like on the ground because you're not allowed to actually go out on the yeah on the fields, which of course is good.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, we we we we flew over it, we did some stuff there.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh we went to nearby Ica, uh which actually has um uh a good brewery.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a lot of the a lot of people don't realize yeah.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: Here's the thing is that in a lot of the small Peruvian towns, uh for example, Trujillo, uh each of the local towns, even if it's a tiny one, has their own beer, basically.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: So there's Trujillo beer.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so but so I I was like sampling, like, okay, let's get to Ica now, right?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: By the time I was at Ica, I was pretty plastered, but I I calmed down.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: So we um we we we've we tracked down where the Ica stones were, and it was this it was weird because I I don't know what I was expecting, but I I thought maybe like in a museum, but then I'm like, well, but it's bullshit.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: So so I'm I'm glad they're not in a museum because that would legitimize the bullshit.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: I mean it it's pretty easy.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: Unless they were put into context, right?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sure, sure.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: So but that's what so anyway, I I tracked down where where the ecosones were, and it was like this nondescript, it's like you know, you know, 435 Plaza de Armas or whatever, and just a little so you you knock on this like big wooden door like you'd see in some like some like you know, Alamo movie, and uh and we had to wait and make arrangements.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: It was this whole big production.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it eventually went and went in there and they opened up the door.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: We were led into a room that was probably maybe uh ten feet by maybe thirty or forty feet, and just all around were stones, just like just like shelves and shelves, and just you know, and some of them were boulder, some of them's like as big as basketballs, and and um and you know, like uh not as big as a small car, but like like three feet in diameter, and other ones were a lot smaller, anyway.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: They're just all over the place.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh I got some photos, I can send them to you, you can you can use them on the on the thing, but it was just interesting seeing all these things, and and and uh you know the the the woman that ran it, um yeah, we paid a little fee or whatever, and it wasn't like an official museum of just sort of these are the ecostones, but it was so clear that these are hoaxes and fakes.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just like uh it was interesting from a from a historical point of view to actually see the ecostones and touch them and like but on the other hand, I'm like i in a way this is this is historically significant just from a skeptical point of view, but in a way it's like I could do this.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you if you you know give me a rock and a and a nail and half an hour and I can do this, and the idea that this would fool somebody who who was blinded by this this vision that they were uncovering some hidden you know connection to the the prehistoric past was bizarre.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you just wanted to believe, right?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and and the people that are posting them to this very freaking day just really want something to believe in.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And for whatever reason, this is their thing.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh with with the NASCA lines so I've always heard I've never been there, but I always hear that there's no way that you could see these things unless you were from, you know, like flying over it.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: That it's physically impossible.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I've also heard from people say, well, no, you could if you stood here on the side of this mountain, you could just look down and see them perfectly fine.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been there.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what's what's the story there?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that's you know when you look at the the the mythologies that have have emerged uh over Nasca, and and let me just preface this by saying I I'm not an expert on Nazca.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I've been there, I did some research, but I'm certainly not the world's top expert, but I I've been there, I've done some research on it.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: So so if I if I get a glitch or two wrong, but but basically, you know the a lot of the uh a lot of the pseudo history that's emerged out of Naska is the result of of, of course, um von Doneken, Eric von Doneken, um who uh has his book Chariot of the Gods, and his his basically his basic thesis is that anybody basically older than him is too stupid to build a pyramid.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: Or you know, carve rocks, yeah or lines in a desert, right?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so his his his racist thesis is that that ancient Americans uh or Egyptians or else didn't have the knowledge of the of the or the technology to to, for example, build Mesoamericans, for example.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, pyramids, and the problem is that if you look at pyramids, I mean pyramids are are are the ultimate stable shape.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like if there are any structures, if you if say 2,000 years ago you you tried a bunch of different shapes for for things that would like last a long time, the only one that would last a long time would be the pyramid because they're inherently stable.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so the the the the the the the reason these things lasted so long is because they were they were intentionally created to last that long, right?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: So for all we know, they had these huge pillars that of course crumbled after a short time.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it's this bizarre backward thinking.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: And Von Danekin's still alive.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: I I is I I yeah, it's they never would have thought that.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I I got an email from him.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um I got an email from it was it was one of his PR people.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh and it was uh it was bizarre because he because this was like like a year or two ago.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, oh Von Doneken still, you know, he's and I I wrote back to the PR guy.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, is he still alive?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: I thought that bullshit was discredited a long time ago.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And of course the guy never wrote back.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, so yeah, he's still, in fact, he tried to do a um, he tried to do a sort of uh a a pseudo-scientific Disneyland.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: He had this idea for this this theme park that he was gonna do in Europe, uh, I think in in Switzerland or something, that was gonna be dedicated to his crank ideas.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: It never got anywhere, of course.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, I'm going off the track.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: So so uh so the the this the so-called mysteries surrounding the Nazca lines, many of them emerged in the context of like, well, it's weird, I couldn't do it.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: Ancient aliens.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: Must be aliens, right, exactly.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: So, so and and one of the uh exactly as you mentioned, one of the the claims that floats around is that the only way that these things could have been uh seen is from above.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, if that's true, let me emphasize, if that's true, then that does raise a legitimate question, like, well, why would you why would you design something that you can't appreciate, you can't see.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's like uh I guess it would almost be like, you know, if you if you if you did a self-tattoo on your own back and there were no mirrors, like why would you do that?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: Because you can't there's literally no way anybody could see it.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: So so there's a certain sort of kind of logic to it.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but the problem is that you can, in fact, see many of the the uh the designs.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's hundreds of designs there.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um most of them are uh some of the best ones are animals.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: So there's uh there's a a spider and there's a bird and there's a monkey and there's a monkey.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: The monkey's the like the most famous one.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: The monkey's awesome.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the monkey's awesome.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um but there's lots of there's lots of smaller ones.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's about 70 ones that are that are animals.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's also um you know shapes and designs and flowers, and I mean there's a wide variety of stuff.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and not all of them can be seen uh from anyway.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: That there's a the there's a there's a mountain nearby.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a tall mountain, but it's definitely a mountain.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it's definitely high enough that that you could you could see the the designs.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so again, the the premise that that you can't see the designs from there is flat out wrong.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: You you can see the designs.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so and again, it's one of the things where where part of the problem is that the there's all this misinformation out there, right?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you don't know that, because like as you said, like you know, you look online, in one in one place it says, you can't see the designs from Nazca from the Nazca Plains.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: You look at another another blog, it says, well, of course you can't.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like unless you go there.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: Or I mean you could obviously you could, I mean, these days there's Wikipedia, which is probably slightly more accurate than that.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: But the point is that that for people who who don't bother to do any research, it's sort of six one half dozen the other.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so that's what you found is that is that the designs are visible, at least some of the designs are visible from the Nazca planes.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and you know, when I mean the real question is is why they were made.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's not really when they were made because uh you could the we have stakes, we we they found stakes, they they carbon dated, and it dates right back to the uh the the uh the Nazca uh um culture, which which is about uh 200 BC to 600 BC.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh or excuse me, six 200 BC to about 600 AD.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: So there's so it it dates right exactly to when they would when they would be there.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and uh near a lot of the designs, you there are uh smaller layouts of that design, which of course you don't see in the in the big RL photographs, right?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: So so um and that sort of gives us a clue in terms of how they made them because they were laid out the we can tell they were laid out ahead of time.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: They did like artist studies prior to executing the so it's not like this is all blank slate, it's like we know there's there is clear evidence that that they uh the the Naska Indians, not aliens, for example, um because why would aliens need to do that, right?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: If it's aliens, you just you know shoot your lasers downstairs.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so um so again that the the real question isn't who made them, despite von Doneken's bullshit, because the uh the Naska Indians made them, and then there's no reason to doubt that.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and there's no real question as to how they were made.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we I mean we don't obviously we don't have photographs, um, but we have a pretty good idea of of how they they were done, and it's through a grid system.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: So as an artist, you know this, right?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: You can you can design something out there and then you just scale it up.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not gonna be perfect, um, but the the designs aren't perfect.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're they're they are what they are.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh sometimes they're a little crooked here or there, and that's that's that's to be expected.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: So the the real question is why they were made.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: And at the end of the day, I mean that's that's sort of that that basic I mean, the question why is probably the ultimate question, right?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's why are we here, right?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: Why is something done?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, why is anything done?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it and it's it's it's the most difficult question to answer, right?
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: In any in anything, if there's a murder or there's some event, right?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: Anything that happens in the real world, one of the most difficult questions is why?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty easy to determine where and when, and sometimes how and who.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: But why is causation?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: Why is more speculative?
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Why is unless it's it's inherently conjecture.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's and not not that not that you can't have an answer to it, but it's it's it's ultimately a difficult, it's it's the most difficult question to answer of the you know four four H's and W, whatever.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: Four H's W.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm drunk.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but anyway, so so and you know, we we see the same thing with Stonehenge, right?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh why did they build it?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Why did they design Stonehenge in that way?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um well, uh probably astronomical, there's other reasons.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: The the question how they did it is not is not that hard to find.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: Also, uh the uh the the stones at Rappa Rapa Nui, the the you know the iconic you know Easter Island stuff.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: So uh so it's not surprising that the big how why did they have why did they do this, right?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so um one of the theories uh that Von Daneken uh proposed, which you know just to preface is bullshit, was that they were landing strips.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh not the kind of landing strip you're thinking of, but uh but he's like, yeah, you know, there's these big lines, maybe, maybe this the spacecraft needed to, because apparently spacecraft need to land, I mean, do they need to come in a runway?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Because those really what because they can't just hover.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so part of the idea was that maybe these are like some sort of landing strips out there.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um, first of all, why would you need to do that?
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_02: Second of all, the ground is is much too soft for that.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if you've been out to the the Atacama Desert and uh and the Nazica Lions, when you walk around, you're of course not you're not allowed to walk on the lines, but you're in the desert, so you're seeing some of it.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: The uh there's there's sort of um the the the stones uh have a varnish because they've been baked under the sun for millennia.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so you have one so one side of rocks is has well varnish, you know what varnish is.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um but then you turn it over, it's a different color.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, any disruption to uh to to the terrain is going to uh certainly in that climate, which is it's very, of course, very arid, it's the desert, uh, not much uh rain, if any, uh, and not much wind.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's the perfect conditions for preserving these these huge long lines.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um so they're clearly uh you know alien UFO landing strips.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um some people thought that they were um may maybe uh dealing with deities, right?
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: And some maybe you know theories about uh some um some cosmology.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: But in the case of the Nazca Indians, we we we don't have a good, they didn't leave written records about their cosmology.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we did unlike, for example, in Mesoamerica, we have some idea of you know the Mayan calendar and the the their cosmologies.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's not the case with the Nazca.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's it's more difficult for us to say, well, you know, here's this hummingbird uh that they drew out in the on the plains, and this hummingbird corresponds to this particular deity.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you're not gonna find that sort of one-to-one correlation.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Has um has uh what's his name?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Graham Hancock, has he weighed in on Von Daniken's ideas?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because wasn't he originally like a big proponent of von Daniken's ideas?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Wasn't he really big into ancient aliens for a while?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think he toned it down as he got more popular and he's really into his ancient civilization, which is I think is equally as racist to say that well, this ancient advanced civilization survived the younger dryas and then came out into the world and ingratiating themselves with uh hunter-gatherers and then taught them how to figure that out.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, you can't figure out how to fucking sharpen a stick or a rock or draw something uh without beyond their abilities.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these guys really, really underestimate the human nature or the complexity of what human beings can can uh accomplish with very little.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a good question.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: I uh I honestly don't uh I haven't followed Hancock in a while just because he's such a crank.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I mean it's like you reading Hancock stuff, it's sort of like um have you read much of Blavatsky?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the the you know, she she's one of the you know the Theosophy and stuff.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: These these these these you know phone book thick, you know uh the cosmologies, and it's sort of like reading Crowley.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's just this like what what are you talking about?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's just it's this dense, turgid, impenetrable, impenetrable stuff.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you know, there's a there's a great quote by Elspray de Camp, uh skeptic and of course uh science fiction writer, uh, who was asked uh if he was going to try and debunk von Doneken's bullshit.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and he said uh you can look up the quote, I'm I'm paraphrasing, but he said, um he said, even if I was mad enough to do it, it would take years of my life, and who would read it?
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, and he's exactly right.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that this this that's actually one of the the the cruxes of the skeptical dilemma, right?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is you have these people cranking out this crank, literally.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they just they just have all these this this speculative bullshit, and they throw stuff out there and they had a dream about something, so they they go down that path.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I see this all the time.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: I see this in Chupacaba research, I see this in ghost research, just all you know, the new age cosmology.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: And they just crank this shit out.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_02: And they crank it out faster than skeptics can read it and respond to it and analyze it and debunk it.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's because it's easy to make shit up.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, all you gotta do is make shit up and have access to the internet.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all you need.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even need that.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: And within a month, you'll have like half a million followers just buying whatever you're saying, hook, line, and sneaker.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's interesting you brought up that a lot of these ideas are old and they just kind of come back in cycles because there is a very popular image uh in New Age communities and in the Chicano Mexicano indigenous community that people call the Hunab Ku.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like this white and black, they call it the cosmic butterfly.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, it's it's um they say it's it's it's a Mayan symbol that represents this ancient Mayan concept of the Hunab coup.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look into either of those things, first of all, the image is not Mayan, it's Mexica.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was turned into a circle um like in the 1980s, I think, by this guy that wrote the Mayan.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: That reason, huh?
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote this book called The Mayan Factor, I think.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he was the first one.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: He turned it into a circle because he thought it looked like the yinyang.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I see.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: So he just imposed his own his own little spin on this.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's legitimate.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: The original colors.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: The original colors were yellow and black.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: He turned them into black and white because it fit into his narrative.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: He changed it.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was originally a square.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he turned it into a circle.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he started calling it, you know, he started saying, well, this represents the ancient Mayan concept of the hunabku.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: Not even using a Mayan symbol.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: And not only that, but a distorted, embellished upon Aztec symbol.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: What a dick.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, oh, totally.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: So he he applied this idea of the hunabku to it.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the funny thing about hunabku is hunabku is actually a linguistic invention that was created by the Spaniards in order to Christianize the Yucatec Mayan.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: So what they did was is they showed up, this guy, I can't remember his name, but he wrote a dictionary of Yucatec Maya.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: He was a priest.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: And his strategy was is well, we're gonna find out how the Mayan would say the word one God, like one true God.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the closest expression they would have to it was Hunab Ku.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so he's like, fine, you know, this that is now the one Lord and Savior, God from the Bible.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea had never existed before.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was totally made up and imposed by the Spaniards.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then it had a fake symbol attached to it by a new ager.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like a lie wrapped in another lie.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's and then repackaged and fucking sold to people because you'll find it on necklaces, fucking t-shirts, people have tattoos.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: I see people with this image tattooed all the fucking time.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to write an article in my heart.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I did a video on it.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'll I'll put a link to the video.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: Magazines don't do videos, man.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: You've got to write an article.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: This is the this is really interesting.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: I love this.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's it's uh it's it's interesting to me because people have built their entire careers, like actual academics and you know, ethnic studies, whatever, you know.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I think they're not exactly, you know, academically their their scholarship is not as rigid as I would like.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to my world, my friend.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to my world.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, these guys, these academics, write papers about the Hunab Ku and the ancient philosophies of the Maya.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: Do they not do they not they do, but I think that they've they've got too much invested already.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like people have their PhDs based off of repeating this shit.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: And there's one guy in fucking particular, I want to fucking call him out right now.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's this old school Mayan guy, his name was Domingo Martinez Paredes.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: He died in the 1980s, I think.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: He spoke Yucatec Maya.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: He taught philosophy at UNAM at the National University in Mexico.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: He was a rabid pseudo-historian and pseudo-scholar.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: At the time that he started teaching, he belonged to an organization called the MCRCA, uh Movimiento Confederado Restaurador de la Cultura de Anahuac, right?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: The guy, the people that are going to restore the culture of Anahuac.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it was an organization made up entirely of pseudo-historians, new agers, and just bullshit artists.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this guy was a university professor, and he took that as the opportunity to push their philosophy, their ideology, right?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he was one of the first guys that really pushed that idea of Hunabku, but he also had all these really fucking crazy ideas that he actually stole.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: Getting back to your whole thing about how most of the stuff is really old.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: There was a pseudo-archaeologist uh named Leplongyon, I think was his name.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh French guy, moved to Mexico, uh, wanted to be a Mesoamericanist.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he was a uh a spiritualist.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: He was, you know, whatever their crazy shit.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: What are they bringing there to be an occultist, you know?
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he wrote this book uh that goddammit, I can't remember the name of the book.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: When I post this, I'll put a link to the to the book.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote this book where he claimed all kinds of crazy shit.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like he he claimed that Jesus Christ spoke Maya.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: That Maya in Aramaic, right?
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: And in English, probably.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: That the last words Jesus spoke on the cross were Yucatec Mayan.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he writes this in his book.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then he took this symbol, not the symbol that Jose Arguez used, but he took another symbol based on like some Masonic Freemason teachings and said, this represents hunab coup.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, and so anyway, all of these ideas.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, and he also said, you know, well, the Mayans came from Atlantis.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's because of course they did.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because why wouldn't they?
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and all world civilization came from the Maya, that the Maya like took off on boats and spread civilization throughout the world.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is this guy, uh I think his his first name was Augustus, uh, but I know his last name was Leplanguion, and I'm probably saying it wrong because I don't speak French.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, fuck him anyway.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's a fucking bullshit artist.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, anyway, this guy, Domingo Martinez Paredes, stole all of this fucking guy's ideas and put them in his books and said the same shit.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, if you look at his books, the symbol that Leplanguion uses for Hunabku, he he just straight up jacks it and says, oh, this is the ancient you know.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then he also he it's like reading his book and Leplangyon's book side by side, it's like, wow, this guy just straight fucking lifted this shit.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: So even though he spoke Yucatec, and I think that's why people in the academic world, ethnic studies world, are willing to give him a pass.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: They're like, well, he was a native speaker.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: So why wouldn't he know these names?
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: Are you a native speaker?
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay then.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: But what's funny is I I know native speakers of Yucatec.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I could pass this stuff by them, and they're like, nah, dude, that's bullshit.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no, no.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: And this one's way too much.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's so far gone.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: As I say, it's not even wrong.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's not even wrong.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's so bad, it's not even wrong.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, people give him a pass, and his bullshit gets repeated to the point where it's still being repeated to this day in schools, at universities, on tattoos, and it's fucking infuriating because when you point it out, when you point out to somebody that this deeply held belief they have is probably based on bullshit, their reaction isn't to be like, oh, really?
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, tell me more.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: I want to become more educated about this.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for clarifying that.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I want to have an informed opinion, and then go forward from there.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I want to see things from all angles.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: Those shields fucking come up, and they're like, no, man, fuck you.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're saying this because you're a scientist, because you're part of the problem, because you're an agent, because you're This is a distraction.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is a distraction.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're fucking Illuminati, or you know, you're being paid by the Bilderbergs, or whatever the fuck it is.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know what I find what I find bizarre and and frankly uh pathetic about it, and I mean pathetic in its literal sense, is you have these people that um you know that they don't know any better and they don't want to know any better.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's the second part that's the motherfucker.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's really the infuriating part is is you know when when when you do research and you say, look, you know, I've laid it out for you.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: I've done the groundwork, I've spent months tracking this down, finding original sources.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: I've laid it out for you.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's all here you go.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've I've spent I'm giving you the results of lots of work.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, yeah, no.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm gonna believe in what I'm gonna do.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, you're okay.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: But but no, I it's like okay, well then then what's your what's your source?
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: YouTube.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: I read it online.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, yeah.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well what I love is they won't take scientists' word for it.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're super skeptical about well, why would I believe a scientist?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, fucking Bob's website.org backslash conspiracy news.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like clearly, clearly, that guy knows what the fuck he's talking about.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: Look at that.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: Look at that.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's got a beret on his head.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: How do you eat an American flag on his website?
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh well that's the thing, it's just you and if you think about I mean whatever, uh tattoo, whatever you want to believe is fine, but it's like you you know.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_02: So people in some cases they they they construct their lives around these beliefs.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean they they go on pilgrimages, they they they indoctrinate their friends.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's a whole thing.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's you know it's it's money.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like and it's one thing to have like a you know, look if you if you believe that Bigfoot's out there, whatever, I don't care.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I can tell you why it's probably not, but whatever.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: But if you spend years of your life, and and and I I've I've I've read of people who've spent like tens of thousands of dollars looking for Bigfoot.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like and I mean I I I remember I was at I was at Loch Ness and I interviewed a guy named Steve Feltham, and he had moved there from London, uh, I think about 10 or 20 years earlier, and he lives in this tiny one-room trailer on the shores of Loch Ness because he thinks he's gonna find the monster.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I interviewed the guy, and he was an interesting guy, nice guy.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm talking to him, and I'm like, I'm looking at him, and I'm like, you left your I mean, he's living alone on the shore of this lake in Scotland because he got this idea in his head that that Nessie's there.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's there, maybe it's not.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_02: But think of how how would his life have been different if he's like, you know what, Nessie's probably there, but you know what, I I don't want to invest my entire life to to to waste.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like, or or the the example, I remember I was talking to a guy, this is probably about six, seven years ago, and he um he he had sent me a book to to to look at.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_02: And normally I'm like, I don't have time for this shit.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like I was like, oh I he he came up to me at a conference, he's like, you know, he's one of those people like, hey yeah, I love yourself, hey, here's my card.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: Can you like whatever?
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: So long story short, he sent me he sent me this this this this book manuscript that he was he was looking at and he wanted my advice.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I I I'm a bit I don't have time, but I'll for every now and then if if I I'll try and reach out to somebody and uh, you know, try to make an effort to just not be dismissed.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: All right, fine, so send me your book.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: So so I I spent maybe an hour or two skimming through the guy's book.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it was this weird, you know, and you've seen this, like it's a kitchen sink thing where everything is thrown there.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, let me let me bring in aliens.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on, let me bring in the new age.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, crystals, right?
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: Is it it's all this stuff that is only loosely connected, if at all, and they just lump the shit together.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so one of the one of the he spent a whole chapter on analyzing Stonehenge.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_02: And there's nothing new about this.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, people have been looking for a long time, but but he he he had this, he clearly spent months or years working on this theory where he he because he had diagrams in the book, and he's like, this is how the stones are arranged, and you know, he had clear diagrams and like angles, like this the angles here, angles there, and he had all these mathematical equations explaining like ley lines and you know all these things went.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: And and I looked at it, and I was like, So I I I I call I I I called him on the phone.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, yeah, I looked at you, I looked at your book, I have some notes.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: I said uh on chapter four uh on Stonehenge, um you have all these you know equations and charts and analysis and what all this means.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_02: I said, You know that the stones have been moved, right?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: He's like no.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, I was like, yeah, um if you if you if you research the history, they they've moved the stone several times.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so the the the current configuration of Stonehenge, the one that you spent months analyzing carefully and in and talking about how how carefully they these angles match up to stars and ley lines, they weren't originally like that.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it was over the phone, so I could I couldn't see his face.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: But you could hear his brain explode.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, and I was like, yeah, I'm sorry.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_02: I just I uh yeah, that's not how they I mean, look it up.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Here's I have a natural geographic on it, look it up.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it was weird because I I could almost hear his and and he's he he he's like okay, yeah, I'll look into it, but I could tell he wasn't gonna look into it.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah I could tell what he I knew exactly what that fucker's gonna do.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: He's gonna be like, okay, they moved the stones, but they knew they knew where to move them, they knew, right?
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right, like they had the stones put this this way, but they knew that in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, they were gonna move the stones in this particular way.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_02: So, so it's just I just I just know that's where it's going with it.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think so bad.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: I just and again, it's just you know, just so much time and effort spent on these, and it's just and in and I I try to be sympathetic because you know, I you know, uh with you know background in psychology and I deal with believers all the time.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm a big believer in trying to you know be respectful, right?
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_02: People come up with weird beliefs, they they see ghosts, they they think they're psychic, they think this and the other.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I try to be like open-minded, like, all right, well, you know, I I I believe you believe it and help me understand.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I try to, you know, I'm I'm not one of the, you know, I mean, I'm not one of the dismissive ones.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_02: But at some point, I just like, man, I it it it literally makes me sad to see the amount of of lifetime experience that people have pursued in in researching and internalizing something that they they could have they could have realized has no real basis if they had spent you know a couple hours.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I I know exactly how you feel.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: I was in Hollywood once and I went to the, I don't know if it's still there.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: Last time I was there, I looked for it and I didn't see it, but the L.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: Ron Hubbard Life Museum.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, oh, this is gonna be a hoot, right?
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I I walk in and the woman uh at the counter uh was excited to see me and she welcomes me and she calls over somebody to watch the front desk and she's like, I'm gonna give you a personal tour of the life of L.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: Ron Hubbard.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, great.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: So we're walking through it, and she's just she knows it, the the sales pitch, Pat, right?
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: Boom, boom, boom.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: She's walking you through it.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Did you ask her if they have any Kool-Aid?
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: I've always weren't I've always wanted her to do that.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: Just go, like, yeah, I love this.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have any Kool-Aid I could read?
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: Just see what they do.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't think they would even get it.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh probably not.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I did the uh the e-meter.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: She took me into a room and had me do the e-meter.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the tour, quote unquote tour, is actually a really long sales pitch that's gonna end with them trying to get you to sign up for classes or buy books or whatever.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta weed out the Phaetons, man.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: You got the evil, you know, the Zunu is all over you.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: I thought Qi was way more interesting than what she was talking about.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, so where are you from?
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because she had an accent and you know, she was from China.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and she was telling me the story about how she always wanted to be a dancer since she was a little girl, and finally she made it after years of study and practice.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: She became a professional dancer.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: She got into this really prestigious program, and she left it all behind to join Scientology and move to the United States and work at the L.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: Ron Hubbard Life Museum.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: And she was proud of that, I'm sure.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: She was.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, she wouldn't have told her the story.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: I could kind of see it in her eyes.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: When she I wouldn't say she she wasn't proud about it, but when she was talking about being a dancer, you could see it in her eyes that it was something like she lit up.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like I loved it.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, holy shit.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was gonna be like a joke going in there.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, I felt I I left feeling bummed the fuck out because this woman who was trying to achieve her life ambition got suckered.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, she got taken advantage of.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: And fucking now she's like a prisoner in a fucking Scientology camp.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: She's waiting for people to come in so they can she can sign them up for for uh three meters and the chance to meet John Travolta 20 years now.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it it it was really depressing.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: But you I wanted to bring this up.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: You are an expert in chupacabras.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fair to say?
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: You are an expert.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've spent the I I've literally spent uh far more time than any other person alive looking into chupacabras.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure if that's good or bad, smart or stupid, but it's it's the truth, yes.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I I hear that in I I know next to nothing about chupacabras.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm not sure that's true, but so they originated in Puerto Rico.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the first reported sightings, or was it in Mexico?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: Good question.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the the um the very first report of the chupacabra, uh the go the goat sucker, for those who don't know, uh was uh in and by the way, don't Google that.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: I I I made the mistake one time.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just googling the goat sucker.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: Kids don't.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: Just don't do it.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's not worth it.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: You can't unsee these things.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, uh yeah, so when I was researching it, so basically the uh the the very first reporting and uh sighting was in in August of 1996.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: That recent.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: Holy shit.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: It just feels like it's been around a lot longer than that.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and just maybe I'm just really fucking old.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, no.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's it's uh it's the everybody thinks that.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh what you find is that uh uh people because it's such a well-known creature, people assume that it must be old, right?
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: Because why would a well-known creature be young, right?
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: We you know, Mothman, you know, uh Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's this assumption, there's this sort of legacy that these these creatures draw upon.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and certainly with um like Bigfoot, for example, the the main sightings of Bigfoot only date back to the 1950s.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if you discount, which you should, uh sort of earlier you know, Native American and First Nations myths that were sort of co-opted.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: And and that, and you and I can talk about that at some point, because that that's what pisses me off is when you have you have people who should know better who try and co-opt native legends and stories for their own, like, oh, let's shoehorn this into Bigfoot.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like no as evidence.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, as additional evidence to what they're trying to.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but it so so there's this, and I mean so again, you know, Bigfoot really only go back to the 50s, um, and the Loch Nest Monster really only goes back to about the 30s.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so even those monsters don't really date back before the 1900s.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_02: But um but Chupacabra, uh, you know, again, people assume that it's it's a much older creature, uh partly just because they've heard about it.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_02: And and after my book came out, I did the book, you know, tracking the chupacabra, and I I pretty much nail down the origin of it.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it's it's a long story, but basically, um, you know, the the there were you know the chupacabra is of course a vampire because it it sucks blood.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that's what intrigued me about the chupacabra was uh you know Bigfoot's not a vampire, Nessu's not a vampire, the chupacabra is clearly a vampire.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's that's his signature, right?
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's and and so it was like, okay, well, if this thing is real, then it should be leaving like bloody things everywhere.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, one would think.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_02: One would think, right.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, um, so I I spent part of the book looking into uh forensics, right?
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I interviewed a medical pathologist at University of New Mexico and talked to her, and she she explained, you know, if you kill an animal, you you you know, if you for example, if there's a a canine predation, right?
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_02: A dog or coyote attacks something, it'll crush the neck, it'll leave two puncture marks.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um sometimes others, but oftentimes two right on the neck, and then it'll sometimes it'll just go away because it just it bit it and it goes away.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so oftentimes people would see these things and they would they would find a dead animal that's not been eaten, uh, that is dead for reasons that are aren't clear, but with two puncture marks on the neck.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you're gonna think a vampire.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but in fact, it's because you know after the trachea is crushed, uh it basically died of internal bleeding and hemorrhaging.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_02: And these were goats.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, goats, mostly, mostly goats, also some chickens, um uh things like that, occasionally cattle, uh, but most mostly goats and sheep and things like that.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so so there was you know, there was a long-standing tradition of of vampires, um, certainly in uh in uh in Europe.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so basically I I argue that the chupacabra is basically a um it's a it's a it's a modern version of the European vampire.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's uh sort of a re well it's well there's the the the the the vampires people are familiar with are revenants.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_02: They're basically you know humans that died and then were brought back up.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why these days we think of vampires as you know uh you know the Anne Rice vampires or you know, Dracula, Belagosi, whatever else.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_02: But there's older vampires which weren't human.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so they they don't take a human form because they were they were never human, unlike the revenants.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so the chupacabra is that sort of vampire.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_02: Another example would be Pazuzu, the the the uh the demon in the Exorcist, yeah, which is actually based on an actual entity.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_02: Is it?
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_02: There actually is a Pazuzu.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_02: Captain Howdy.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, it's in I I I read a really good book on genies in Jinn, uh called Legend of the Fire Spirits, written by a friend of mine, uh Robert Lebling, and he talks about some of these genie legends.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um anyway, I'm getting off track.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, so Pazooza is one of them.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so uh so in in the process of trying to track trying to track down the Chupacabra, uh I discovered that, again, it really dated back to uh 1995 when uh there was a uh a movie came out, Species.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the the science fiction film.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_02: Award-winning science fiction film.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_02: Award-winning science fiction film, right?
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_02: And uh with uh Natasha Henstrich uh and uh Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen, if I'm not mistaken.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and anyway, so what happens is that as it turns out, again, I'm I'm summarizing a you know a 300-page book in a couple couple words, but the the very first person to ever see Chupacabra was a woman named Madeline Tolentino, and she was from Canovanas, Puerto Rico.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I went to Puerto Rico and interviewed her, and uh I was basically the first person in over a decade to interview her because after her original sighting, um it just sort of it made a bunch of news and it sort of faded away, and and then I sort of came to it and like She needed a good publicist.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on here.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm skeptical, Sean.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: Let me lurk her there.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: She could have had a whole cottage industry build off of this.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, tell me about it.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I tracked her down, and she was really very nice, and she was now living with her uh her second husband, uh, and she told me the whole story, and you know, she showed me where she saw Chupacabra and told me the whole story about it.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, um it turns out that what she described was almost exactly like the the creature in the movie Species, uh, called Sylv, the spiky back and the you know, spikes in the back and the alien type eyes and all this.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so in in interviewing her, I realized that that that was the connection.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because she said that she'd actually seen the movie Species uh you know shortly before she saw the chupacabra.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh and when I was writing my book, I had some people who were like, yeah, you just like they basically accused me of like like twisting her theory twisting her words to my theory.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, oh well, you know hypothesis.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: But here's the thing, right?
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_02: So sorry, hypothesis.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um and here's the thing is so I I actually tracked down uh an interview.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, it was it was the the sight was in 95 and the interview was in 96, uh where she said that that she she explicitly says the chupacabra I saw looked a lot like the the creature in the movie Species.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that was like that was like the smoking, because I I that was somebody who interviewed her a decade earlier.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't go back in time, that's what she said.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's what she said.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: So she said.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, my point here is that yeah, so so I was able to establish that that was the first time the chupacabra ever emerged.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_02: And where it was certainly called the chupacabra.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so you know, before that, uh before that, you know, say in in the in the 90s and 80s, there were legends and stories of something mysterious attacking animals, but there always have been.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing unique about that.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_02: That that happens in Europe, that happens in Africa, happens in Mesoamerica, everywhere else.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_02: But what was unique was that the idea of a chupacabra, the idea of a goat-sucking creature, blended with this this um uh this this movie monster that was actually designed by H.R.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_02: Giger, the artist who did the movie.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_02: Alien, right, exactly, and then a gronomicon and stuff.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_02: And he designed the chupacabra, uh, the the creature effects, which then sort of influenced her uh her her description.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, long story short, that was the first time that it ever emerged.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so um, but after my book came out, it was interesting because I it I it's been pretty well received.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: Most people have agreed that I I solved the case and I I pieced it all together, with one exception.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_02: And who is that?
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_02: Who is that?
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's what is that?
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the answer is uh this goes back to your first comment, which was that you thought it was older.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I have been uh gently, well, sometimes politely, sometimes not so politely, uh told that I, with all due respect, I may be wrong about everything else, but I'm wrong about the chupacabra in terms of when it first emerged, because they say, the capital T they say, well, I heard about the chupacabra in the 70s in Texas.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_02: Or someone told me, well, you know, I grew up in the New Mexico in the 1980s and I heard the chupacabra.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I grew up in New Mexico in the 80s, and I never heard about the chupacabra, but whatever.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_02: So the point is that there were these people that sort of came out of the woodwork, and they're not, they weren't, they weren't like dogging me.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: They were sincerely saying, like, I remember hearing about the chupacabra before 1995.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_02: And my answer to them is always the same.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was lost time, alien, implanted.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_02: Clearly, yeah.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's not that's this will shock you, but that was not my response.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_02: My response is that's interesting.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have any evidence?
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, oh, uh, well, what do you want?
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: My answer is, well, here's what I would take as evidence that that the chupacabra existed before 95.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, that I would need a published uh a published reference to a chupacabra.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: Anywhere.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it could be in a magazine, a book, it could be in a folklore blog, uh anywhere.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_02: Because I I I can't just take your word for it.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, well, my grandpa told me I don't care about your grandpa.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure he's nice.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he's daughtering a guy in the corner.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's not evidence.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_02: He he he he he's watching Bonanza, he doesn't know what the hell's going on.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um so so you my answer is always that's interesting.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_02: I uh you might be right.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_02: And if and most recently, I've offered it.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if you are right, I'll gladly update the information.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, I I've actually offered a reward.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: I've offered a thousand dollars.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I've had I've had uh about four or five people over the past few years uh who've who've contacted me saying, you know, Mr.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_02: Radford, I like your book, but I you know I think you're wrong because I remember Drew Cabra, you know, this and that.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_02: And my answer is always that's cool, that's interesting, you might be right.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give you a thousand dollars uh and I will update my book and I will thank you.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: Please give me some evidence.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it has to be again, it has to be something uh I I I I can't just it can't be your memory.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it can be your grandma's.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not fair to the uh uh postmodern uh interpretations of reality.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: But that's my truth, man.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's my truth.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: Don't be messing with my truth.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're still real to me.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you would you would mention that somebody had written something about the chupacabra that there was a a story of a shepherd or a goat herd or something.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_02: So here's the thing.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_02: So it it's interesting.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_02: So um so So in the process of trying to Okay, keep in mind that the Chupacabra only it only dates back to 95, the 1995 film species.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there is there is nothing before that, like literally nothing that I found.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_02: I could be wrong.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm wrong, please correct me with actual evidence.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_02: But if I showed you an eco stone with that's that's all I need.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, and but no, this goes back to what we were talking about before.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like, uh uh, I'm being totally sincere.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like, if if someone can show me I'm wrong, I will thank you.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_02: I will give you money.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to laugh at you, I'm not gonna dismiss you.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_02: I will I will embrace you and and thank you for correcting what I what I said.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: Sincerely.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, so it's just this, it's this, it's it's the difference between somebody who is so so invested in what they like.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's like, you know, don't don't confuse me with the facts.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, don't give me evidence contrary.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_02: Please give me evidence that that shows me I'm wrong.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_02: I I want to be right.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_02: I want to be right.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're right and I'm wrong, then I will learn from you and I will.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you, and I'll correct myself and I'll move forward.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so anyway, so you know uh you know one of the problems here uh with the with the with the with the uh a uh an origin date of 1995 is if you believe in the chupacabra, as as many people do, certainly throughout Latin America and also in Puerto Rico, then the question is well, hold on, where was it before 95?
• 1:09:36
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, did it just spring into existence via von Daniken's alien motherships?
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_01: Duh, right?
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: So that but the but seriously, this is the problem.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_02: If if if you believe that chupacabra is real, uh and I know I'm sometimes trying myers and sometimes not, I can't help it because I do the same thing.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, all right.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm glad I'm not getting shit for that.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um then you have to you have to reconcile the fact that that there are no pre-1995 sightings.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_02: So what has happened is that people have invented pseudo histories of the chupacabra.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And as a person that that uh that debunks pseudo histories yourself, you will appreciate this.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_02: So um I I wrote an article for Skeptic Inquire magazine um back in uh 2016, uh and I sort of examined some of the some of the ways that people have invented, literally invented history for the chupacabra under the guise of you know, hey, this is a story, this is this is real history.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_02: So there's there's one uh there was one uh book uh titled uh Enchanted Legends and Lore of New Mexico by uh John Ray d'Aragon.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was Ray John, though, d'Aragon.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_02: Ray John, sorry about that, yeah.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Ray John.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_02: De Aragón.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_02: I actually there's no accident of it.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, the we we know who I'm talking about.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_02: And and so I'm reading his book, and I I actually met him.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we were both doing a book signing at a local bookstore um in in Old Town, uh Treasure Chest Books, uh Treasure House, and um uh met him and he is a nice enough guy, kind of.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I'm not a fan.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, anyway, I'll just I'll just leave that there.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_02: But so I I I got one of his books, uh and there was this section on the chupacabra.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, and he didn't know that I had written a book on the chupacabra.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm like tricky.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, I'll be interested in reading your chapter on the chupacabra.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, okay.
• 1:11:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the and the the bookstore owner who knew that I had written chapter in the chupabra is like, so anyway, so I I go back home, I I took his book, and in that book he has a a story titled The Sheep The Sheepherder and the Chupacabra.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm reading this the the his his book there, and he tells the story of a curundera um who had uh who had uh this is centuries ago, who had basically um seen a chupacabra and she had a sacred heart of Jesus uh with her, and she was basically casting it out, saying, you know, protect me from the chupacabra.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on, can everybody at home hear my eyes running?
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, there you go, right?
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_02: So so it's the it's this, you know, so if you're reading this, you don't know any better.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and to be clear, he presents this as like like a true New Mexico history.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like undisputed oral tradition or something that was passed down.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and he's and so I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let me look at the references.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_02: Can you dub in some cricket sounds?
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because so I'm like, I'm like, were there there were no citations?
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_02: Oh no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_02: No references, no citations at all.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, because that's kind of sad because as a researcher, as somebody who knows something about Chupacabra, I would like to follow up on this.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh anyway, so as it turns out, anyway, I'm reading this and it's clearly uh a Catholic legend.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's crystal clear.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's you know, woman sees some demonic thing, uh happens.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean this is this is cla I mean, there's there's and there's there's just no record of it's it's just it's it's again it's presented as a New Mexican legend, and well, I don't know how to put this slightly, he's lying.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's not.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_02: It is not now.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_02: Now I could be wrong, and if uh if if he wants to give me the citations' references, I'll be happy to retract and and and and fix this.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_02: But but to the best of my knowledge, and I've done a lot of research on this, he he made this up.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's also one of these cats that that pushes the whole, you know, New Mexicans or Spanish bullshit.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: He pushes like the whole narrative that, well, in northern New Mexico they speak an ancient form of Castilian, like that bullshit, which has been thoroughly debunked by linguists.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the whole idea that, you know, anything bad said about the Spaniards uh is part of the black legend.
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so I call these guys like the modern Holocaust deniers, basically, because they deny the this genocide that happened here.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm getting off track, but I really don't like this guy, is what I'm getting at.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that he just straight up lied in this fucking book of his does not surprise me in the least.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_01: But to pick something like this to lie about, like how does he even associate it with the Chupacabra?
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_01: What did they use that word specifically or explicitly?
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the that that's a good question.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_02: I actually have a I have a quote right here.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'll do it.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_02: He says uh uh says um the uh Donna Sarafina, the old corundera, uh kept finding dead cattle, dead chickens, dead sheep, etc.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and she says, since whatever it was mostly tag goats, she said, a goat sucker, the people call the mysterious animal chupacabra.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so then there should be a record of that.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_02: So so so I mean, this is a direct quote from what he said.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_02: So absolutely, there should be there should be many.
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so according to him, um people started calling.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean somebody must have written this down.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Surely something of this magnitude would have warranted a newspaper story or mention in somebody's memoir or something.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Somewhere, yeah.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, i i if it is indeed a legend of New Mexico as he calls it.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_01: Which I've never heard.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh which I've never heard, it's one fabricated by him in 2012 for his book.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, with no truth or historical provenance, that's uh basically a a brand new story being recycled and passed off as an actual legend.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_02: And uh as a as a folklorist, um that pisses me off.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_02: I bet.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a professional folklorist, but I I I do folklore, and uh I'm a member of the American Folklore Society, and I've I've spent a lot of time researching folklore.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't do that.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_02: If you you folklorists, like actual folklorists, are very careful not to inject their own stories and basically they're contaminating the they're poisoning the well, they're contaminating the the the the narratives.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean you you you don't you don't you don't create new stories and legends and call them call them actual authentic legends.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean this is this is one thing that frustrates me about this particular and I'm not trying to just bag on this guy, but that's what I find frustrating is that actual folklorists are very careful.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_02: They're very careful to cite their references.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_02: You you quote people directly, uh and they they because you you you want to make sure you you keep you retain their voice and their inflections.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's there's a whole process that he's seemingly unaware of.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh when he just sort of like, oh, here's a story I made up, and oh, it's a new Mexico legend.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you have to assume that people that are interested are gonna be like, well, where did this come from?
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, whenever somebody brings anything to me that sounds a little fishy, or even if it doesn't sound fishy, I'm always like, oh, that's that's really cool.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: What are your sources?
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, do you have any citations for that?
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have stuff that I can look at with my own eyes instead of taking your word for it?
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because even though I might like you as a person, I don't know where you're getting this information from.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there's some people who uh think that way, right?
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's other people that are like, well, whatever.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 1:17:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's whatever goes.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, but here's my here's my concern here.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's like uh again, I I don't really care.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_02: If you wanna, if you want to, if you want to do this, the if you want to tell stories, that's great.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_02: I love stories, you love stories, nothing wrong with stories, but don't pass them off as as fact, don't pass them off as authentic legends.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because what's gonna happen, I guarantee you, is that at some point next year or five years from now, someone is gonna quote this guy.
• 1:17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, someone's gonna reference this fucking book.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_02: And they're gonna say, well, Radford's wrong because, you know, because this guy, uh this guy, uh Ray John DeAragon, his book Enchanted Legends, he says X, and Radford doesn't know what he's talking about.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, no, no.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're not willing to take the time yourself to look into it, because most people shit, man, what I'm finding is most people don't even read beyond the headlines anymore.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's this Facebook sharing culture that we've built where they'll read the headline and then comment on it or share it without reading the article.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of times, uh the shit that they're sharing or the stuff that they're saying about the article, you could tell they haven't read it because they're contradicting what's in the article just to pro to promote their own personal narratives.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you're aware of this new I I don't know how new it is, but there's like a new conspiracy.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_01: One, I I don't want to call them conspiracy theories.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_01: I want people, I want skeptics across the board to stop calling them conspiracy theories.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_01: I call them conspiracy fetishes.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Conspiracy fetishist, because one, it's a misuse of the word theory, which I hate as a scientist.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: It just gets on my nerves.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it and it grants it this level of legitimacy by saying, well, it's a theory.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's a conspiracy theory.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, these people fetishize conspiracy.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a theory, anyway.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a theory, it's they're not even hypotheses.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like they don't even mark reach that level.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a new uh level of conspiracy fetishism going around amongst uh Afrocentrists, and it blows my mind because the conspiracy is that the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade never happened.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on, hold on.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_02: So how how does how does one even I don't know.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_01: But but it it was birthed from this idea of these uh black identity cults in the South that and and the East Coast that claim that African Americans are actually Native Americans, that the Olmecs were black, that all African American descent people are actually Native Americans, and that the slave trade idea, the myth of the slave trade, was invented to hide this historical fact.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that what we call Native Americans who, you know, came uh Beringian you know, hypotheses, they came down.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that those people, and I include myself amongst those people, were latecomers who encountered the African American actual they call themselves aboriginals.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um Aboriginal Americans?
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they uh they call us uh mongoloid pink Indians and wannabe Indians.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's bizarre, man.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_01: I've never heard fetish.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's born out of like uh noble Drew Ali and and all these you know black identity movements, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, where these guys started claiming that uh, you know, well, that the actual black man is is the Native American.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so they lay claim to like the mound builders of Cahokia, they lay claim to the Mayan civilizations, they lay claim to uh and and it's funny because it even goes back to that guy, Domingo Martinez Paredes, that I was bringing up where he claims that the Mayans went out and spread civilization all over the world.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_01: They claim that African Americans or the Aboriginal Americans, they call them.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because they wouldn't be African Americans.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because they wouldn't be African Americans.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Are the ones that spread civilization all over the world.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Is anybody buying this shit?
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, yes.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm seeing a lot of it online, and it's crazy because I get hate mail, I get hate messages.
• 1:21:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've been saving them.
• 1:21:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've been taking screenshots of all these messages, just really ugly, gross things, and I'm just gonna compile them.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't know what I'm gonna do with them yet.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_01: You should read them, man.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Just that's just read them all over the air.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you dude, do it just like you just like you take a grab bag, you're just like, all right, and this is from uh this is from this guy.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, Mr.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Mr.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Pink olmongoloid boy.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, and that that's what they say.
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: And um Wow.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's wild because to hear this this subset of the African American community coming out and saying, no, the slave, the transatlantic, transatlantic slave trade is a myth.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's just mind-blowing.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how this was birthed or or why they're propagating this, who's benefiting from it, in what way.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_01: But you should look into it.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um if not it's so like it's not it's not even wrong.
• 1:22:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just yeah, it's so it's so bad, it's not even worth it.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I've been thinking about writing about it, so maybe I'll kick that too.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_02: Dude, you you have you have expertise and knowledge and writing skills that uh that uh need to be put to better use.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, thank you.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Other than the university.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've been to the university, man.
• 1:23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, man, uh it's been great having you.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh good conversation.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad uh that you made it.
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me on, man.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was uh it was uh this is a uh you have a you have a podcast, right?
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: I got a podcast.
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, sure.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_02: I do a podcast called Squaring the Strange.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and we've been doing it for, I don't know, about uh nine months now.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I I have a co-host, Pascual Romero.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he's from Santa Fe.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_02: We do a weekly show on any number of weird things and uh skeptical, critical thinking on everything from lake monsters to social media issues.
• 1:23:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I got a book coming out in a couple months called Investigating Ghosts, which is my 11th book, I think.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's sort of a compilation of um well basically ghost investigations.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I did a book in 2010 called Scientific Paranormal Investigation, which sort of covered how to basically how to investigate X, you know, whether it's psychics or Bigfoot or whatever else.
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I touch on ghosts, but but really ghost hunting is such a it's such its own category.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many different interesting angles to it, ghost photos, EVP, you know, voices, that sort of thing, that I realized that it really needed its own treatment.
• 1:24:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so um it's it's uh as far as I know, it's the it's the very first book to sort of take a good critical, skeptical look at the history of ghost hunting and how to do it right and bring science to it.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm doing that.
• 1:24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh yeah, I'm on Facebook and Twitter and uh doing stuff and uh keeping busy and um you know the usual.