Catching On

possibility among the stars and all that. But it can also be asked in a tone of apprehension or fear. Loneliness is comforting in a sense, because that would mean that no intelligence is beyond our own. Are a scrutinizing the planet from dark void of space? Anxiety about extraterrestrial invasions is well over a century old. First we looked to the heavens and saw gods. Then, as the industrial age took over post Enlightenment, we looked to the heavens and saw another version of ourselves.

of speculation about spacecraft from another world. Then, over the ensuing decades, many individuals throughout the world started sharing their own strange stories. The earliest UFO encounters were spiritual, optimistic, but starting in the nineteen sixties, something changed in the character of these stories. They started to become more sinister.

In nineteen sixty one, the husband and wife couple Betty and Barney Hill, told the story of their own encounter with aliens, But their story had a gap in it, a lapse in memory seemingly explained by alien technology. For a brief time, the aliens had taken both of them aboard their ship and studied them like animals. More and

more stories of this kind proliferated over the decades. Abductions became terrifying, scientific, and more the concept of probes, implants, bodily invasion all became fodder for the study of aliens, stoking the imagination of a public that had been absorbing alien invasion movies since the nineteen fifties. In nineteen eighty five, a woman named Kathy Davis claimed that, in the midst of several abduction experiences, she had been impregnated with a

hybrid child, half alien, half human. Over the years, experts and entertainers have argued about the veracity of the alien abduction reports, but no one has argued that the fear these stories per is very real. The creatures of nightmares don't need to exist in physical space to provoke the imagination, so it's perhaps unsurprising that enterprising business people sought to

make a profit off this fear. In the mid nineteen nineties, a Florida based insurance brokerage began providing insurance policies for people who were concerned about the risk of alien abduction. A largely sarcastic enterprise, this insurance provider issued ten million dollar policies that would pay out at a rate of a dollar per year. A few years later, the London based brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingram's and Parson started issuing policies

of their own. These policies insured customers against not only abduction, but impregnation as well. This claim could be purchased regardless of your sex, as the possibilities of alien technology remain unknown, and this British company wound up selling thousands of these policies, but only came close to paying out twice, once for an Enfield man who in nineteen ninety six claimed a one point six million dollar policy, showing as evidence a

claw left behind by his abductors. The second time, however, gave them pause. You see, sometime in the nineteen nineties, the cult known as Heaven's Gate purchased one million dollar policies for each of its approximately thirty members, and this very nearly backfired in Goodfellow's face when the entire cult died in ritual suicide in nineteen ninety seven. Warry that someone would come to try to collect over thirty million dollars,

the brokerage paused any new policies for a time. Since then, they have resumed their policies and have never paid out a single one. We turn to insurance to protect ourselves from unseen accidents and tragedy. The most unpredictable of these are also known as acts of God. Even though most insurance policies cover acts of God, it seems that aliens require a higher burden of proof. I think we can all agree that we live in a chaotic universe, and sometimes it can feel like we are powerless in the

face of tragedy. But as history loves to remind us, there is no problem so great that a human being can't make worse. For proof, look no further than Justinian the First, a late Roman emperor who reigned during the sixth century. Now the title Roman Emperor deserves massive air quotes here because Justinian came to power over one hundred years after the city of Rome was sacked by Germanic tribes.

By the time Justinian was crowned in five twenty seven, the Empire was in the late stage of its long, slow collapse. While the western territories had virtually all fallen to different armies, the weakened eastern half had reformed around Constantinople. Now, like a lot of people of his day, Justinian was obsessed with the past. He talked constantly about returning the empire to its former glory, something a lot of people

thought was possible. To accomplish his lofty goals, he levied heavy taxes, which he used to raise armies and revitalize long dead trade networks. Feeding his armies required massive amounts of grain, which he purchased, largely from Africa. Justinian's early military campaigns were surprisingly successful, and he was actually making some headway on rebuilding the empire when disaster struck. It came in the form of an inconspicuous but deadly stowaway

Ursinia pestis, also known as the bubonic plague. The microbe was carried by rats or some people think the fleas or other animals, which traveled within the grain supplies that Justinian imported in five pin forty one. They caused an outbreak in the Egyptian port of Pelusium. If Justinian had acted quickly, he might have stopped the disease in its tracks, but he ignored the warnings, and within a year the

plague was in Constantinople. Now I should note that this wasn't the first bubonic outbreak in history, and it certainly wouldn't be the last. Scientists believe the back materia has been killing humans since around three thousand BCE. Meanwhile, the most famous outbreak of bubonic plague is known as the Black Death, which didn't hit Europe until the fourteenth century. All that said, Justinian's outbreak in the sixth century was special because of how far and how quickly it spread.

His armies and their supply trains carried the disease across three continents, resulting in the first plague pandemic. The effects were disastrous, especially for Constantinople. At one point, the capitol was losing five thousand people a day. Justinian had his soldiers dig massive pits to hold all the bodies, while other corpses were dumped onto ships and just pushed out to sea. Justinian himself fell ill sometime in five point forty two. We don't know how badly he suffered, but

for most people, the bubonic plague wasn't pretty. Early symptoms included fever, swelling around the growing armpits and neck, and dark boils and pustules. This rapidly progressed to delirium before most victims fell into a coma and then died. Not Justinian, though, with treatments, he managed to survive and While you might think that the brush with death would cause him to

refocus on eradicating the disease, that's not what happened. After recovering, Justinian was more determined than ever to reclaim Rome's former glory. He continued to raise taxes despite the fact that the economy was cratering and most people couldn't even afford to eat, and instead of using the money for the public, he poured the funds into his military campaigns, which, of course

furthered the spread of the pandemic. The epidemic took almost a decade to fade away, and outbreaks continued for the next few hundred years. While estimates vary, somewhere between twenty five and fifty million people were killed, roughly a quarter of the empire's population. As you might expect, that level of loss caused Justinian's trade networks to collapse, foiling his

military exploits. He had dreamed of returning the Roman Empire to its former glory, but wound up hastening its demid guy But at least historians give credit where credits due to this day, the pandemic of five point forty one is remembered as Justinian's plague. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by

me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.