Thinking Sideways: The Spanish Flu

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't just say you never know stories of things. We simply

don't know the answer too. Well. Hey there, I'm Steven as always on my right as Devon Hi, and on her right as Joe. Hello. Also your left also my left. And when you put us in a room and you slap a couple of mics in front of us, you get thinking Sideways spot the podcast. Uh so, ladies, and gentlemen, this week, we've We've got a bit of a special show for you. I just want I want to give everybody kind of an idea how things work behind the scenes to then let you know why this is such

an important one. So what we typically do is we get together and we talk about different topics, things we want to put on the show, and sometimes one rings with all of us and we each want to go ahead and research it, and you host that one. And then we got the great idea, well, what do you know, why don't we go ahead and just do this as a big show with the group. So we're doing that today. It's a pretty exciting idea. Yeah, there really is. Uh

so what are we gonna talk about. We are going to talk about the Spanish flu otherwise known as the influenza pandemic of nineteen eighteen. Okay, before you go Russia into Wikipedia, let me just tell you what it is that the flu, the pandemic was the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic actually ran or appeared in about January of nineteen eighteen and didn't go away officially until December of nineteen twenties. So the technically it was around for about two years,

but it was an unusually deadly strain of influenza. The flu is influenza. Did you guys realize that I didn't get that flu was influenza until I started doing the research, and then I felt kind of super intelligent. Yeah, it's a good thing you stumbled upon this topic. Then we could have gone all the way through life and not known about never known the flu and influenza were the same thing. So it was an unusually deadly strain of influenza. And it hit the world in basically two major events.

One around April May of nineteen eighteen, and then again it popped up I believe it was around September of nineteen Does that does that sound right? Yeah? Okay, which is unusual because of flu. Normally, when does the flu

normally arrive, It's it's early winter. Yeah. Usually people get the flu like late fall and then it hangs around for winter and almost I mean, and you know, I'm not a doctor, but it's my understanding that almost every year it's basically a different strand the people get you know, people develop an immunity very often. You know, you have to get vaccinated every year because it's like a slightly different strand because it's always mutating, which you know, it's

that's what a virus does. Continues to do that well, and this one was weird because it showed up in the spring and then it showed up before the fall would normally have had its normal strains coming through. What was really really bad about this, why it's considered a pandemic, is that it infected worldwide five hundred million people. So many people. It is, especially in those days, in those no it well, and it killed three to five of

the world's population. It was killing up to at its height, fifty percent of the people who were infected with it. It killed two hundred and and then, Okay, the numbers are a little hard to get. For the exact number of people that died was nineteen eighteen. Record keeping was not at its height as it is today. The numbers that I found range from twenty to one hundred million

people died in that year plus time frame. Influenza then you attack on all the millions who were slaughtered in the trenches of World War two or World War One, which was happening at the exact same time. The human being, the human race took a big setback in those really seriously, I mean, the world might be a much different place today. Yeah,

that's that's a huge chunk of a generation, of several generations. Actually, yeah, the economic loss and also a certain number of genius has probably died, people who would have invented like the anti gravity beam or something like. Yeah, and we don't have the anti gravity beam today because of this, It's considered one of the deadliest natural disasters of human history,

just because of that sheer volume of people who died. Uh. Now we I at least I will continually refer to this as the Spanish flu, because that's the name that it was dubbed. You said, Joe, well that we were in World War One. Okay, what happens during the Middle Terry conflict. Well, most governments censored, at least at that time,

they really censored what news could and couldn't be put out. Yeah, Well, in Spain, because I don't believe they were as involved or involved in the war at that time, they weren't censoring the news. So they were the first ones to report it. So they said, they're what you've got this new strain, it's it's people are really sick. People are dying, so globally, everybody just started referring to it as the Spanish flu because that must be where it came from them.

Really what I mean? You know, it's great because now for Spain forever more is remembered as the place of origin of this horrible flu. Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, me too, yeah, but yeah, and Spain will actually be known for something. It was like, you know, because they're not really known for anything, you know, flamenco and a big chunk of

the world and the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. You're right. Yeah. Well, here's the other thing that made this such a deadly, deadly outbreak is if you've ever seen when we get to that time of year when the flu is coming out and we get the vaccinations, you know, they start saying everybody needs a vaccination. Who were the first people

that they say should be vaccinated? Old people, on babies and children, right, because they are the ones that are most likely to be affected because theoretically their immune systems aren't developed enough to fight off the infection. What's unusual about the Spanish flu is that it's primary target range was people between the ages of twenty and forty So those were the people who were primarily dying, and the young and the elderly were basically spared for a large part.

They didn't they didn't kill them. They get sick, that's not necessarily you know, spared, but they get sick, but they wouldn't die from it, which is unusual. Actually, ramifications if something like that hit us again today with our demographics today, we have so many more old people on Social Security and a huge shock of young working. These people just died off, well, social security is going to collapse. That would be yet another social issue that would come

apart from this. So that is kind of the general summation of what the Spanish flu was, Right, Okay, we know it's influenza, but we don't know what caused it and why it was so bad. It's referred to as H one N one, which again, if you've ever listened to the news when there's outbreaks of swine flu or bird flu, it's it's H one N one or H two and one or H five. There's always those those.

That term is always used, though the numbers change. Yeah, and I don't know, I mean, I don't think any of us know, particularly what that pertains to I mean some complex chemistry something, but wasn't swine flu? And one H one not H one N one. I can't remember. I don't remember which way it goes. It's it's, it's it's. Ladies and gentlemen, if you understand this, please help us. But it is a very complex subject and I had a very difficult time getting to the getting it straight

in my head. But you tried doing a google and like, what does H one N one mean? I did broke down into very very scientific information and words that were so long I couldn't pronounce some. And so it's like, but if it's got more than four letters in it, I'm yeah. Again, we don't know what caused it and what or what caused an end or what made it

so deadly. So that is today's show. We're going to talk about the Spanish flu and theories about what made it so bad, and we've got some good ones, not just what made it so bad, but where it came from, well, where it came from potentially, and and what's the Spanish came from the Spanish. Yeah, so let's let's go ahead, and now that you know what's happening, let's jump right

in into some theories. So the first theory that we've got isn't the nicest theory in the world, and I'll be honest with you that in terms of it's from a different era ladies and gentlemen, so the terminology isn't always the most pc. But the first theory that we've got here is that it was caused by migrant workers in Portugal and Spain. Remember that we're in nineteen eighteen and we have tons and tons of people fighting the war. Well,

farming still needs to happen. So what happens. You go out, you find people who can do the work, and you put them on a train, and you bring them to your country and you have them do the work, and then you put them on a train and you send them home. This first theory is that it's It didn't

necessarily originate because of migrant workers. It may have just been a flu, but because of the fact that the railroad systems were being used to transport so many people back and forth, not just the migrant workers, but also soldiers from every country to fight the war, that it spread faster than anything that we had ever seen. Because of that, and because it's spread so fast, nobody ever had a chance to catch up and figure out what

was going on before it was too late. Plus, normally, if something breaks out, let's say in the United States, and it's a it's decimating people, it's not likely. At that time it didn't as easily go from one area to the next because there's not many people going back and forth. But now it is, okay. So the my only problem with that theory. I think it's a pretty good theory, right, you know, we have spread, I agree

modern science. I think that my biggest problem with that in terms of how it spread is that wasn't it discovered in multiple different countries basically the exact same time. I do, yes, I've seen that at a lot of papers, although you know, you know, again that's questionable too, because I mean, it's it could have been around in like one place longer than another place, But the local doctors and everybody else just thought, well, it's just people dying,

you know, people getting sick and dying. Medical science was not as exact as it is today. Not that it's all that great today either, but uh, you know, and so it might have been. And so finally, when people started hearing about this global pandemic. Then then they suddenly really, you know, there's here's a guy with flu, whereas like last year there was there was people keeling over from the flu, and they just didn't realize what it was, right,

So that's a problem. It's also remember that's one of the things I was talking about. Why you got dubbed the Spanish flu is because of the fact that spoke with the Spanish accident. I know. No. One of the reasons that it got dubbed the Spanish flu is because of the fact that everybody else was censoring the information. So it may have been that it was building in all of the same areas at the same time or different times, but reports of it were being suppressed. So

there's that option too. Yeah, there's always there's always bad information. So it didn't necessarily appear everywhere it once as far as we know, we know that it essentially did, but we can't say that it hit eighteen places in the same day. Yeah, we can't distinctly say that, Yeah, we noticed it all over the place at the same time, to mean it started all over the place. But globally,

noticing something is tends to be a slow process. One of the things they talked about with the eighteen flu is that it took us a startlingly long time to make it to Australia. I do. I saw that, which I thought was kind of interesting. You know, it didn't make it there until nineteen and like February of nineteen nineteen, a year, a whole year later. And if you are thinking, you know, well, it's just spreading through troops, you know,

it's spreading like a normal virus. You know, that's kind of where that comes into play, because uh, you know, I think that there was definitely there was a lot of transference between people, you know, going back and forth between Australia. Certainly not a year. I think a year

warranted between those two. Is there's some kind of disconnect for me at least there that it would take a whole year for a worldwide pandemic like that to reach some place, to reach another, to reach another continent, especially a continent that it seems like there was a lot of travel happening because they were very involved with the war, so you know, there are a lot of soldiers coming and going. So if it was just the human human, I don't know. I mean, you know, that's just my

only big question mark over this whole thing. I and I agree with that because I've read reports where they were quarantining ships if there was any sign of it, the ship was quarantined. And this wasn't necessarily Australia, but all kinds of ports were doing it. And I've also read reports that the ship would leave port and it would break out and the entire crew was essentially, you know, knocked down with it at one time, which would make it really hard to go from from one continent in

the next. Yeah, if your entire crew was sick. Yeah, that was the hella in World War two is like you know, when you send troops over to Europe, you know, you realized it happened, We're going to die before they even get there. And that was that. That was really a hard thing. So this and this is the other thing, Right, I'm just gonna read this little quote, but I've got

here about this flu. It says it was detected in Boston and Bombay on the same day, but took three weeks before it reached New York City, despite the fact that there was considerable travel between two cities. It was present for the first time in Joliet in the in the state of Illinois four weeks after it was detected in Chicago, and it's like thirty eight miles between the two,

you know. So I think there are definitely some questions in terms of it just being like a normal thing that people didn't have a resistance too, that it's spread so quickly, and you have certainly, you know, it could have mutated and just you know, affected everybody a little differently. But the fact that places that are geographically so close that people are definitely moving in between consistently, it takes weeks or months for that to you know, for it

to really spread that way. That's my big question mark with it just being this like fairly mundane, you know, granted was a hardcore strain of influenza, but for it to just be like a everybody had it, you know, you just caught it from someone type of virus. Well, it might have been to the people of New York scared it away for a while. The good news is

Juliet is not a scary place. Having been there multiple times, they'd not scared away, and so, you know, and the fact that it took three weeks to travel those forty miles, but you know, just days to travel internationally. That's my big question marks that it's awesome. It doesn't. It doesn't. It isn't that up. I don't want to even know what the incubation period of it was. I don't I believe that it's It's like, it was really quick. It was a very rapid I think, a very rapid incubation period.

So you got exposed and then within a couple of days you were in full blown symptoms and then and then okay, so that's that quickly. And but then well, of course we get that again. These were from nineteen, so we could be the guy said, well, I haven't seen anybody, and I felt fine until yesterday, and then suddenly I was sick. And when he may have been walking up and down the streets for weeks feeling like crud,

it just never reported it. Yeah, So I mean, we don't know how long they were, so there's no yeah, there's no good number. You know. It says it's short, short incubation period, which, to be fair, in the flu, you know your incubation period and a typical flu is maybe a week I think, so you know, a short incubation period is likely a couple of days, but I don't. All right, what's what's the next one up on the docks. Let's see one of the things that we got here.

There's all kinds of stuff here there. There is a theory, and I don't wouldn't play as much credence on it that it was man made. It's a weapon. So the U. S. Army, back to your logical warfare weapon somehow infected U. S. Army ranks at Camp Roley, Kansas and there was a major breakout there in March nineteen eighteen and spread around the world. So it was like an accident of biological

warfare early experimentation. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, so they were they were they were working on biological warfare, and which you know, I don't know that that makes a lot of sense because I mean that really the end thing in World War One was chemical warfare, right, that was what everybody was into. I mean, this is kind of like, you know, that was that was what everybody thought was

just the ships. You know, Well, but think about it, if if everybody else is doing chemical warfare and you want to get the upper hand, you might set off a sect of scientists and say make me the super make me something that will kill this these people. And to be fair in your own face, sure, and to be fair, you know, the United States military is known for nothing if not saying, hey, scientists, here's a couple million dollars. Do whatever you think will kill the most people.

I mean, we're pretty good at doing that in America, right, Hey, think of something that you think will kill a lot of people in a really short amount of time. Here's a couple of million dollars. Do some research. But the problem is is, like you know, I don't know that our our biological science was was advanced enough in those days so we could actually, like these days, we can do genes, plaicing and all kinds of stuff. We can

create killer bugs just really easily in the lab. I don't know exactly how if we had the sophistication to actually create I mean, we could come up with something like anthwer ax. I mean, answer exces around and you can bottle up answer ax and dump that on the enemy. But as far as inventing a new disease, and I have a two worry answer for that happy accident, Yeah, I was gonna say, got they got lucky in the

worst sort of way. Got lucky I was gonna say, um vaccines, and that is another one that because basically what a vaccine is is mutated. You know, it's I mean, you know, it's mutating a virus to the point where it's effective enough that your body attacks at thinking it's a virus, but not effective enough to actually give you the disease. Right, that's my understanding of it. Again, you know, I'm not actually scientists or anything. Know, that's my understanding

of what a vaccine is. So if you can create that, which you certainly could in you know, nineteen eighteen, there's the potential too. And you know, all it was was just a super flu, right, I mean, it's not like it was some brand new, state of the art crazy thing you know, how to short incubation period. It's spread really quickly. But when it came down to it, it was just H one N one, which is just influenza. Yeah.

But again that the problem I have with that is that and I'm not saying it's impossible, but what you would have to do is isolate some stranger of flu and then and then try to, in your own crude nineteen eighteen way, tweak those things to to make them a little different, and then you would have to find people to infect with it. I think I think you're reading into that too much. I again, I think that you're expecting them to have intense to go farther than

they know how to go. Again, I think that somebody might have stumbled upon something. Let me let me read you this thing that i've I've got here because Devon brought up. I really this one about vaccines I really find interesting. And this is an account from or this is a excerpt from a book. It's Eleanora McBean. She's got a PhD. And she wrote a book Fly Swine Flew Exposed. So here's what she says. I've heard seven men dropped dead in a doctor's office after being vaccinated.

This was in an army camp. So I wrote to the government for verification. They sent me the report of U S. Secretary of War, Henry Stimpson. The report not only verified the report of the seven men who dropped dead from the vaccines, but it stated that there had been sixty three deaths and twenty thousand, five five cases of hepatitis as a direct result of the yellow fever vaccine during only six months of war. Uh that was only one of the fourteen to five shots given to

the soldiers. So she goes on to talk about that, you know, it may have been that they vaccinated for something, accidentally caused something else, created a new vaccine rapidly for that. It turns around and makes something even worse, and then we end up with the Spanish flu out of that. So okay, wait, the one and forgot what happatitis was one of the things that came out right away with

all these soldiers. Okay, well, okay, to be fair, it was. Yeah, then I don't feel like they sterilized real well, you're absolutely right, probably a short supply so that. But that's very interesting that. So the vaccines in those days, you don't hear about that, really, right, You don't hear the vaccines were causing all of these horrible things. But I guess it makes sense. You know, as Joe was saying earlier, they you know biology back then, people didn't totally understand

how to make things. And you know, you say, okay, well we can vaccinate against this one thing, but maybe you can't. Actually your vaccination causes a bunch of different stuff. I don't know, my I don't totally understand entirely how

vaccines are creative. But my understanding is that generally the standard vaccination is you get some of whatever it is, you get the flu strain, and then you kill it and ject the dead cells in somebody's body, and then and then your your immune systems still reacts to those dead cells. They do they And I've heard of such things as live vaccines, and I don't know exactly how

how those work. If they keep the numbers of actual live cells down to such a low count that they can't really get your your immune setting is going to be able to counteract them before they take off, I think that's right. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, well, we'll

think about it. Though. If they make it, they think they've made a vaccine and they accidentally combined some things, or if it's dirty needles and so one guy's got something and it's not accounted for, it could make some rapid change or mutation bringing on multiple things at once that creates it. It does sound like it could possibly be a cascade event. Sure, although where where's the sport that this is? Kansas? So that was definitely not one

of the first outbreaks reported, was it. No, you're right, I mean but the problem is that he's at a fort where there are thousands upon thousands of troops all housed together. So if they all get exposed inadvertently and then shipped off, well, now we've just got the perfect you know, mechanism to spread it to average. Sure, sure it could be I don't know. Yeah, So our next theory, um, you know, we've kind of been talking I think it's

segways really well. We've been talking about you know, human error of the nineteen eighteen time that you know, we knew, you know, and I think you you look at this, you look at history this way all the time, right, we knew enough to like do most most damage with it. Right. So one of the theory is that it was actually um that it helped to raise the numbers of people who were attributed to having a Spanish flu, but that

it was aspirin poisoning. Oh yeah, Because the war is going on, so most of the like really great doctors have at this point been enlisted and are overseas. So most of the people who are treating things are low level nurses, interns, you know, medical students, things like that, pharmaceutical reps and if you will, uh, pharmacists. Surely, you know, in that day and age, you just kind of went to your pharmacists. You didn't necessarily have to go to

your doctor to get a prescription. You just went to your pharmacist. That was an actual thing in nineteen eighteen, right before the spike in October, the death spike that happened in October um, the US Surgeon General, along with the U. S. Navy, and the Journal of American Medical Association, recommended the use of aspirin. The recommendation was because of a pulmonary edema. It would uh, it was occurring in three percent of the population, which is a significant portion

of the population. So they were suggesting the use of aspirin to counteract this. So in the thing that happened right before this is that Bear lost its patent on aspirin. Okay, So because of that, a lot of aspirin was being made and distributed without the proper warning labels on it. So there weren't doses or anything like that on there. People don't know what the people don't know what they're doing.

The Surgeon General says, take aspirin, and they're like, okay, I'll just swallow a whole bottle, because the bottle of them say, I don't do that, right, It's better than dying of a pulmonary embolism or whatever. You know, they say, we're going to die of. So there's a quoted a lot of chaos happening. Yeah, it's like, you know, I've seen photographs from that time of like Main Street America.

You know, I see I speaking of chaos, you know, like like the funeral parlor's got just dozens of coffins step on the sidewalk outside because they were out of room, so they had to stash the corpses on the sidewalks. It must have seen like the end of the world. Yeah, I think, you know, people were really scared of Yeah, and so I would I would definitely take you know, you know a lot of aspirin if I thought that

would work. But there's a way to figure out if that's true or not, and that is to dig up some corpses of people who died from the flu and just to see if if a representative if like if they all had like high levels of aspirin in there. Well, but most of them are inbalmed right. Well. The other thing is that there are there are accounts of doctors giving patients basically handfuls of aspirin at a time, drop, you know, pouring as many you know, three, four or

five into their hand and just giving it. Take this and doing that on route, so while taking six of eight aspirins at a time every couple of hours. So are you guys ready for that? Here are the symptoms of aspirin a dose okay death. People with mild intoxication, just a mild intoxication of aspirin poisoning would frequently have nausea and vomiting, a doominal pain, lethargy, tonitis, and dizziness.

Does that sound like to you? The flu? So? More severe poisoning includes hypothermia, respiratory problems, metabolic problems, hypoglycemia, hallucinations, confusions, seizures, um and coma. What does that sound like? That sounds influenza? Yeah, and then it just kills you everything except the fever. Yeah, But if you're taking aspirin, you don't have fever. Well, it could be that, you know, like if you're you've got the flu, so you've got flu symptoms. The fluid,

the flu doesn't kill you, but the aspirin does. Sure, so there are a lot of theories surrounding that, right, you know that it was just people just saying I'm going to take twenty aspirin, or with people saying I don't feel great, I'm gonna take some aspirin, taking too many aspirins, killing themselves that way, even though they did have the flu. So, you know, there are a lot of really interesting theories in terms of that accidental treatment.

It's accident, it's it's accidental cures an accidental treatment. And you know, the thing that's really interesting I think about this is that it was it was mass hysteria because everybody was dying. And so when everybody's dying and the Surgeon General says, oh, just take some aspirin. Yeah, you

think the end is nigh. You're gonna take whatever you have to and you don't know so but so he made his announcement win it was just before the October spike, so you can kind of assume that it was probably but it wasn't there a previous spike before the aspirin announcement. No, there was the initial there was the initial impact in about May of that year, and there was there was a death toll, but it was nearly as severe as the secondary event which happened in the fall, and that's

just before that event started really picking off again. As Devin said it, it can't account for all of it, but it does help when oh, I gotta do this, then no wonder, your numbers start climbing. Even if it was just a fourth, right, even if it's just a quarter of the people overdosing on aspirin, that adds so many more. But the October spike was that replicated around the world that it was globally because remember that was when it's the first one was a very mild impact.

It didn't hit a lot of people. The second event is when it's it was suddenly people who hadn't been sick before, we're getting sick. And that's when it was reaching you know, up to fifty infectivity raids and or death rates from infection and just running rampant. So I've just found this, this is very fascinating to me. The Journal of the American Medical Association, right that was one

of the groups that was recommending aspirants. They recommend the dose they were recommending was one thousand milligrams every three hours, which is equivalent to twenty five standard pills every hour today. Yeah, okay, Yeah, that that that it's a pretty solid theory that that would have helped to add to the numbers. Probably, that's a lot. Twenty pills in twenty four hours. It's twice the daily dosage, which is considered to be like the

higher edge of safety. Yes, but it seems like even leaving the aspurnt out, it seems like this was still an exceptionally deadly flu vis. You know, it was still the fluvirus. It was just was it was something that was It sounds like, yeah, it sounds like it wasn't

really the cause of the virus. So let's talk a little bit about this actual virus because you know, we've we've touched on this a little bit, right that when I boiled down to it, the Spanish flu was just influenza, but it was clearly the most deadly version of influenza that we've ever encountered, you know, even you know recently everybody, I'm sure we'll remember, or the swine flu recently, which you know, of course ended up being way scarier than

it actually was. But how about deadly stars remember stars? Yeah, you know, these are all strains of the same thing, but we should talk a little bit about what makes the Spanish flu specifically so interesting or what potentially could have made it so deadly. Yeah, it's it's it's it's biology that made it so deafly. You're absolutely right, and and I found some in some research that I think is really interesting. And bear with me because this is very scientific in the meat of it, and it's kind

of hard to get through. So we'll do our best with this. And if I mispronounced something, I apologize. This is why we're letting Steve do it, because my brain that's off, So I apologize if. As we've talked about before, the span the flu in self typically will focus on people who have a compromised immune system. Therefore the younger, the old. Well, it's been theorized, and they've actually dug up some people who had the Spanish flu to try to figure this out, and that's where a number of

these theories are coming from. And I don't know if you guys saw this, but they dug up people who had died of the Spanish flu in Alaska and had been buried in the permafrost, and so they pulled him out and they started a top seeing him, and of course some of the bodies were in pork condition and they didn't find anything, and someone weren't better than others. So there's all this research on. Well, let's see what

the virus actually did on these preserved corpses. And that's where this first theory that I've got comes in is that it says that the Spanish flu featured what's referred to as a cytokine burst uh, and it happens at the site of infection. UH. Cytokines are a special cellular signaling molecule in your body. Cytokines happened at the side of an infection, and that draws your white blood cells

to come in and attack whatever the infection is. What this says is that there was literally an explosion of cytokines at the sites in the lungs where the splue the influenza was happening. So therefore your body says, WHOA, there is something seriously bad going on here, and I am gonna go in and I am going to destroy that and it would actually destroy the tissue of the lung because it was fighting this area is so bad. Well, it's an airborne infection. Which means that a lot of

your lung is full of this infection. So therefore it's you know, you've got these little explosions of cytokines going all over, So of course your body goes in and just tears it up, destroys your lungs. And when you get the flu what happens. You get phlagm and in pneumonia you get fluid in the lungs. Well, your your lungs are stopped up and therefore they just start filling with fluid, and that's what would help kill you from

this particular one. Your own body actually did some damage to itself because of this weird feature of this strain of influenza. So that's why you got So this was basically a virus that gave you an auto autoimmune disease essentially. Yes, That's what I'm curious about. It is like, is it possible that the people who died from this already had autoimmune disorders? I don't know. I can't say that. All I can say is that this research, if if you look at it, because we talked about it before, again,

four year olds were the hardest hit bish flu. Who has the strongest immune system, So they have a really robust immune system, so this happens and their body just goes into massive overdrive to attack the infection and inadvertently

destroys its own lungs. I've I found this today and it's really it's really interesting because that would explain why the symptoms came on so fast and people died within a matter of hours to days of coming down with it, because their body just literally went in and destroyed itself and you couldn't breathe and you shut down because of it.

I don't know, Well, yeah, it's really solid. It's it's hard to say because I've never we've never heard of something having a component like that in it before that caused such a severe reaction other than you know, as you said, to have an autoimmune issues, but those tend to not be as severe. Well okay, but beast things and things like that, they are. You're right, Actually they are really severe. But it's just amazing that a flu could cause that master and across a huge number of people,

because that's the problem. Joe, Okay, Well, if they had an autoimmune disease before, the millions and millions and millions of people that died couldn't have all had the same autoimmune deficiency. Well, there's a lot of different autoimmune deficiencies. But now that I think about it, I think that autoimmune deficiencies would be represented in all age groups, it's

not just people. That's also a really high note. I mean, you know, and I don't know how much of that is because it was a long time ago and couldn't diagnose it, you know, but I think autoimmune diseases affect like less than five percent of the population these days. And maybe it is because the Spanish flew cold all of these people, But I think that it's probably more realistic to say that, you know, they I am, it's healthier. I mean, your body would know. If your body attacks itself,

it doesn't attack those viruses generally. So I have to do a little research into this and find out why, you know, I mean, because that's not not a good immune system. What it tears up your own tissue. It's reacting. I mean, the Ambian system is a very single minded machine and it does what it has to do. But this would also explain why the young and the old didn't die as easily because they didn't have a strong

immune system. So their immune system couldn't go as ballistic on the infection, so therefore they only suffered mild consequences and they healed but and didn't die. I don't know. I mean, that's that's just one theory about why this bug was so deadly. What's we've got a number of we have a couple, Yeah, we have enough. Another one that says that it was a double team of viruses, which is pretty interesting. Um So, there was an autopsy of a group of people, you know, I think it

was like about seventy people or something like that. Um So, the autopsy showed that the virus replicated not only in the upper rest pratry track, but also the lower respiratory track. Um which was really similar to the way that the swine flu was behaving. That's one of the things that made it so deadly. As opposed to a regular flu. The regular flu will usually just incubate either in the upper or the lower or it'll move between the two,

but it won't attack both at the same time. So you know, like when you get a cold, the flu, right you it's in your head for a while and then it moves down, but it's never in the same place. Really at once, you know, in the middle sometimes, but you know, the typical flu that you get, You get your head cold and then you get your chest cold, and then that's it. So they found that um, there

were two virus variants circulating in nineteen eighteen. Um In one there was a viral protein that was hemoglobin bound to their human receptor cells, which is kind of what you're talking about just a few minutes ago, and the other one didn't bind to the hemoglobin. So your body was trying to attack two different viruses that affected your body in two different ways. At the same time. It would attack one, it can't attack both, essentially, so you

were really sick in two different ways. So so essentially it's possible that people who caught the flu and didn't die just cut one of those variants, and the people who died cut both of them. Yes, yeah, yeah. Have they done any like serious digging up of corpses trying to figure that out? Well, again, that's the hard part. You keep asking the same thing, Joe, which is, well, let's dig some people up. Really, it was almost a hundred years ago, and the only ones that we've found

were these ones that were buried in the permafrost. There have been some discoveries of lung tissue that was in some military base in the back of a freezer that you know, they meant to look at and they never got to and they found it recently. But for the most part, there's nothing lest So, I mean, you know, they preserve bodies or in pandemics like this, they burned bodies, right, they destroy bodies because they're scared that the dead bodies

will continue. You still need to fix of course. But so the theory is is that there were two different variants of this virus, and that one bound to your hemoglobe and like we were talking about earlier, it bound to your white blood cells like major body tack itself, and the other had the exact same symptoms except for

that it didn't actually bind your blood. So there was one variant that was highly deadly and another that wasn't, or maybe two variants that were not themselves deadly together well it was it was it's one it's very deadly.

Devon's right, it's one's very very is mildly deadly. But if you get them bolt in conjunction, then you, yeah, you're done for Yeah, although again that doesn't really that's that still doesn't explain why people in the group, because you would think that, you know, you would think that were just to statistically likely to catch both strange if

you're say ten years old or eighty years old. That's true, although I guess the thing that is the factor that we haven't really taken into consideration yet is who gets deployed. M Right, that's true, traveling the world, constant contact with people from everywhere. Yeah, but actually, you know, I don't know if you know this about kids, but they're kind of a little disease factors. I happen to know that.

And I can tell you from my own recent personal experiences having dealt with kids a lot recently, I had lots of like little sicknesses, right Like I would have like a sniffle a week, and they'd be different sniffles. But I never got like really sick, whereas like five years ago, I would get like really sick maybe twice e like maybe twice a year. But when I got sick, it was like knocked on your butt, like in bed

for a couple of days, just miserable sick. So and you know, you kind of notice that's with kids is and I think older people as well, they're fairly constantly sick, but it's kind of just this, like I have a post nasal drip thing going on, as opposed to uh. I. Also, I also think that with with healthy adults, what do we do when we're ill and we got to go to work? We go to work, a lot of people still just go to work even though they're sick. Okay, so kids stay home and old people just say, I'm

not going up to daymn having chicken soup. Yeah, I'm just staying in and I'm gonna stay at a blanket and read a book. Whereas the healthy people, O, God, I feel terrible, but I gotta go to work. I go to work and I'm sick, and I work with Joe, and Joe's sick and he's got to go to work. And we both got separate strands and we shake hands each you know, that morning we both just got done wiping our nose with our hand and we shake hands. Now we've given each other the and the other strain.

Actually we've got each other in. Actually I usually blow my nose in your coffee. Dude, Why whatever I get the free you always get it. But anyway, although you know, again that doesn't quite explain it, because the ten year old who stayed home from school, he's got a dad who's probably an age who goes to the office, gets

a disease from you know, perfect theory. Perfect. But that's why I say it may have been a product of the war that was happening, because, yes, in normal circumstances, they year old who is the father of the ten year old goes to work. In this case, he's offen a transition World War World going off to the war I got and hasn't seen his ten year old whatever. That's another interesting fact to it. I'd like to find out about, and I should have found out about that

before we did the show. But what were the mortality rates between say, our troops and civilians back home? She's the same. Actually, it really didn't differentiate where you were the death tolls in the country, regardless of your country of origin, where you were, your death toll from the Spanish flu was about the same all across the board. The debunking heart theories, well, no, here's the crazy thing.

This is just a random factoid about it. There was only one place in the entire world that reported no deaths. American Samoa they shut their borders down as soon as word about the Spanish flu came out and they didn't get it. Japan basically shut their borders down and had a very small outbreak, and there was one other country that did the same thing. Basically, whoa, there's this really bad flu going on. Nobody's coming in, Everybody stay away,

and they had very minimal rates of infection. I mean, Americans had no death, but the restaurant had very low numbers of death, so it might have been the weaker of the strains got in, but he didn't kill anybody because his big brother wasn't there to support. Yeah, okay, you know, so that's a good one. But there's also

you got another one. And this one is actually, I think, kind of kind of incredible, and that is uh the curriculous physician um Sir John Crofton actually positive the theory that it was bacteria, not the flu virus itself though that was actually at the root of the big pandemic. Yeah, it wasteria bacteria. So it's not just not just virus, but virus and bacteria. So the bacteria is the hema, fellists, And I apologize if I murdered. The pronunciation influenza, he

claimed was at the really great pandemic. He said it was bacteria started the epidemic. During the pandemic, apparently one third of patients who had this particularly influenza were also found to have tuberculosis and they were most likely other cases that when I went undiagnosed. That's right. Tuberriculosis was terrible at that time. Yeah, it was a big thing. It was like, yeah, that was actually my my grandfather had tuberculosis was as well, after the whole Spanish flu thing.

But he yeah, they were actually they were actually going to lock him up, and yeah, he agreed to move out to the desert. He lived in southern California at the time, so he agreed to move back to the desert and basically placed himself, you know, under house, self and quarantine and the quarantine. He basically didn't leave the house for a year or something like that. And his alternative was to go into an asylum where they had which is what they did with people with TV back

in those days. Oh, I know that, I know in my family there's talk of my grandmother talked about her aunt, which would be what my great great aunt. Is that how that would that their grandmother? It was my grandmother's aunt that they never could figure out what was wrong with her. And years later the family was just sitting around talking that go we figured I don't remember what her name was, but aunt whoever probably had TV and

they just never figured it out in time. Because yeah, TV was a terrible it was it was a it was another essentially pandemic of its own rampants through the population, very serious stuff. And yeah, and you know, I mean the civil rights weren't quite what they were in those days as they are today, so you got that it was not there was no problem off for them to grab you and just stuff you with an asylum or an institution somewhere. So help me, help me out here, Joe,

because my memory is failing me at the moment. Is do you remember what what exactly do this tuberculosis due to you? Do you remember? Suburriculosis basically attacked you along um and it is a very deadly disease. It's actually got among mostly most people have stays kind of latent, but among people that have severely effects, he had killed about half of them. Yeah, so it's like, let me

put that. Yeah, most infections of what they call a asymptomatic and latent, but about one and ten latent infections eventually progresses to an active disease, which have left untreated kills more than of the infected people. So it's in the lungs. So we did a lung disease. Yeah. Interestingly enough, they back in the day, they used to use cigarettes of all things, to to actually inhibit It's kind of

like the chemotherapy of a stay. I saw. I saw it actually an old and old photograph of people that were in some asylum in California that were there were and they were all smoking because that was one of the prescribed things. It would describe people like lucky strikes. He had that you like, light up Lucky. You're kidding. Yeah, they would actually, they would actually make all the patients smoke cigarettes because apparently that inhabited the growth of the bacteria.

Oh wow, geez, well, hey, the marvel of modern medicine. Well, you know, it's a good reason. It's because if if, if inact, if tobacco is inhibiting the growth of curriculosis bacteria, it's probably inhibiting other bacterial growth in your lungs too, So obviously tobacco was a good thing. Well you know what, everybody they got influenza then should have just smoked lucky strikes and called it good, the bold smooth tape. So suberculosis is just an infection of the lungs, right, Yeah,

it's obviously a serious so obviously bad thing. But yeah it's I could see where you know, something like the sefuriacys infected with a virus or two viruses as in your previous series, and it might and and tuberculous is what's much more rampant back in than it is today. Uh, it might open the door for some sort of tuberculosis infection, which could be the actual killer. So this theory is

that it's just bad luck. Yeah, well obviously, well they've got a little bit of tuberculosis in there, but enough that not enough that their body can't fight it off, is what it sounds like. And then the influenza hits. Your body is trying to again, just like you know, the double virus, You're trying to fight both at once, and then they just hit you all at once. They tag team. Yeah, like like like I was just saying, most tuberculosis is what they called latent asymptomatic. And then

but then say these things come along and doom. You know, it's the beast is unleashed, you know. So, I mean, that's entirely possible if that's what happened and that but that's good news for us in our present day because pretty well we haven't completely stamped out TV. It does again, we're pretty good at it. Yeah, it's a lot less prevalent.

I would say that it's entirely possible that there are millions of people I'm talking probable millions of people were walking around with latent cases of TV back in the back. Probably not happening today. Probably not. TV police got the TV police, t V persecuted that they So I guess the my favorite theory yeah, so I was, I don't I know you've been pacause it really is where did this come from? So, I mean that is right. It's the interesting thing is um a big old mutation of

fairly normal virus. Right, and so the big question is where did this come from? And my favorite theory is base the final frontier. Yeah. So there's ah, this really great theory that basically says that, uh, every big epidemic that we've ever had as a human race has been follow or has followed very closely. Comment Oh I saw so, okay, okay, you gotta break this down from because I tried to. I tried to do a little bit on this, but I got lost. Well, I got stuck. So we got

opposites because you got stuck in science or something. I don't know what happened. But so there's a really interesting pattern of human pandemics, uh, in the last you know, like thousands and millions of years. UM. It's a really interesting pattern that we follow. So the first one that I could find record of was the Great Plague of Athens, which was in UM for thirty BC. UM. It was localized, uh, and it could have had a local source, but that

was never discovered. And right before that we passed through a comics trail as Earth Earth passed through a comets trail, so like within a year of that pandemic happening. And then the next one was in the first century a d UM and a Greek physician was referring to an outbreak in Libya, Egypt, and Syria. UM it was most likely the bubonic plague. Let's be fair, which is you know,

spread by fleas and rodents. But right before then, again, we had passed through a commets trail within the last two years I think it was UM half a millennia later in UM for five forty one a d UM, they called it a scourge. At that point it was again the bubonic plague. They kept recurring, but it was different strands and more horrible strands every single time. UM in constant snople. And they're all bacterial diseases that are

spread by infected fleas. So it's not likely that it was just like it went away and then came back, and went away and came back. It wasn't just like storm sleeve just you know, suddenly the sleeves weren't biting anymore, and then years later they started biting again. I would like it if fleas would stop biting for years. You would make so much better because they always go for me. Stop stop like right now, and pop up again like long after my death. That's cool. Yeah yeah, So uh.

The babonic plague is resistant to freezing, which is pretty interesting. It's also radiation resistant, which is also pretty interesting. So what does that mean for us? It means that the best place for it to incubate is space or the upper atmosphere. So the theory is is that there. I guess there are two theories. Um, I think we look a little bit about this. You know, you got to

do just a tiny bit of research on it. You know, I understood it that the bacteria and viruses live up in the upper atmosphere and they're constantly bombarded by solar radiation, which would cause all of these viruses and bacterium to mutate in two weird versions of themselves. So the theory that I understood is that they are there. It's just

constantly up there. So every once in a while we passed through the tail of a comet which causes meteor showers, which is just rocks falling from the sky into our atmosphere all the way to the ground, which brings these bacterias and viruses back down to the ground. So it would explain why they are the same thing quote unquote, but they're different strands and more mutated strands of these things. Let me let me just ask just so I understand

point of order here. So you're saying their air currents are keeping them in the upper atmosphere, winds they can't drift down because of the wind, so they're just constantly swirling up there. We've got a little death cloud, and then a meteor comes swooshing through the atmosphere and creates essentially enough turbulence and causes a tail to suck that

stuff down behind it. That's one of the theories. The other theory is that they become negatively charged, because so like the Aurora borealis, for instance, is basically negatively charged dust particles from Earth going up into the atmosphere. So the other theory is that maybe these are becoming the viruses and bacteria are becoming negatively charged. I don't I'm

gonna be honest, I don't totally understand that theory. So that the scientists, so they attract death, they just chill out in the air, and then something coming through their again positively charges them and allows them to come back through. But the thing that's really could that they would eventually just settle out through sheer gravity to have some mass.

So the thing that's really interesting with this, I think is that um in a lot of plagues that we've had as a civilization, people talk about them being spread through flying animals of some kind yeah, so through birds, yeah, through birds, or through fleas or pigs, pigs who fly um. So you know, that's a really interesting facet to this theory is that things that are closer up in the

higher atmosphere get it first and spread it to humans. Okay, I can see that, yeah, because I know that what was it the bird flu of two thousand nine or something, and it was it was blamed on waterfowl then spreading the infection to chickens in China, who then you know, then ran rampant through them until they were all destroyed and a few people got it. But okay, okay, I

can run with that. So the way that this kind of ties back into what we're talking about, right, because we don't want to just talk like amorphously about bacterian viruses live in the sky. That's a scary thought, right, and I could just do that, could just drop down

an old time they just dropped down whenever. So the idea is a combination of One of the theories I was talking about earlier, is that it's a combination of two viruses, but it's different in that the idea is that it was a new viral strain that transferred its genes to an old viral strain which already existed within the human genome or whatever, and created a really deadly hybrid. Because the thing that you think about with viruses and bacteria is that its point is to not kill you.

The perfect virus, you won't even be affected by it all. So every virus that makes you stick is a mutation of some kind because they want to keep you alive, because if you die, it dies right right. So it was the theory that there was a new viral strain that had been horribly mutated up in the atmosphere and came down and basically mixed with one that was down

here already, which is pretty interesting theory. It's a little, I'm going to say, and it seems a little far fetched, but okay, But anyway, there is there more to to this. This this goes on, I can I'm judging by the tone that you're flipping through that this this theory gets

deeper and deeper and more and more twisted. So in n do you know what happened in nineteen ten com Hayley's comment, that's the thing they talked about is that it took seven years for the Spanish flu to come through then, so I was the original theory people were talking about, Oh it is Hayley's comment blah blah. So there's no like really great cause causation between them because

of seven years apart. Right, But there is this comment called comment anche uh that had extremely close approaches to Earth um both in n O eight and then again in fourteen UM and we passed through its tail in okay, so we we went through its tail three times in ten years. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't think we hit comments that frequent. Well, so what happens in the comments? Right? Did they get stuck in our but for a little while.

What happens is that if the if the comment, if the order of the comment is in the ecliptic, and you know what the ecliptic is, okay, ecliptic. The ecliptic is the plane of the when the Sun formed, it basically it created as a disc, compress it compressed down and it turned into a spinning disk and then eventually compressed itself into a Sun. And there were body products. There was some stuff left behind out there in this disk in the outer fringes, which consolidated itself further into planets.

When you see the map of the planet, it looks like a series of frisbees around the Sun. Exactly. We're more or less the planets are more or less in the same plane, and so and so. The the actual plane formed by the Earth's orbit is what's called the ecliptic, and so it's other ecliptics. So if a coll it happens to be in more or less in the ecliptic. In other words, if it comes in, crosses orbit, goes

around the Sun, goes back out, crossing orbit again. If that plane of bits orbit is the same the same as the plane of our orbit, then we will cross the will cross that path every year. Okay, okay, and that's what meteor showers. That's why we can predict meteor showers, because we know there's a bunch of cosmic crap out there in our orbital path that we're gonna we're gonna cross through every year. I always wondered how that. Okay,

that totally makes sense, all right, continue on show. Is the common expert is combined, we will be able to explain this. Um. So one of the things they talked about a lot when I was doing this research was that the way that the Spanish flu spread was really weird.

We've spent a lot of time talking this episode about that. Um, there are some islands in the mid Atlantic that definitely escaped, as you were saying, But my research brought up that they didn't close the borders and there was shipping that happened in between those places to some of them. To some of them, there was shipping that happened, but they

still remain death and flu free. So that I think was very interesting, observed good quarantine procedures to you know, that's certainly true, and you know, again this is all conjecture basically. Yeah, there's been so many rehashes of this. Yeah, you know. Then there was the as I said before, the weird delay of it hitting Australia. And one of the things they talked about is that when you analyze the upper atmospheric patterns of nineteen eighteen, the flu very

closely followed that pattern. So where the places that people were hit really hard were places that the upper atmosphere was more densely happening. Does that make sense, We're definitely happenings happening. It's like weather patterns. You have low the low atmospheric weather patterns and you you're high atmospheric more high atmosphere weather stuff happening. Yeah, there area, So it was it was basically just like falling from the sky along the jet stream. So that's very interesting as well.

All right, so I okay, So the so the pattern that it followed was not just the way that a disease goes through the air, an airborne disease goes, which is person just a person to person. It didn't follow precisely that pattern. It more accurately followed the jet stream and upper atmospheric weather patterns, which is very interesting as well. I think, yeah, that's I wouldn't have thought. I don't

remember seeing that anywhere, So that's okay. So the other thing that was really interesting is that in two thousand and seven, this comment was struck by a massive material uh from our sun. It was back in our solar system again again. Yes, was struck by a little bit of our sun, a little solar flare, and it broke off some of the comets tail and we went through it again in early June or early July, late June um of two thousand seven. And so do you remember

what happened? Two thousand seven. Let's see, I was working at the grocery store. The good news is you're not forgetting anything. But in two thousand nine what happened there was another way. Okay, you know, I think it's really interesting that every time we passed through this thing, you know, there's definitely an incubation period, but we passed through this tail and we get a new virus, get a new pandemic. You just swine flu. We passed through in two thousand nine, again,

swine flu happened. Adocate, I need to understand. So, Okay, this theory is postulating that there is biological material in the tail of a comment. So my question is how does that live? Because everything I can understand is that things don't live in space. Well, they don't have they are unaffected by freezing. Thought. I said that I might have not plague, but I didn't. I didn't. So and one H one is also or H one and one is also resistant to freezing and resistant to radiation. Oh,

the ice particles that make up the comment. Okay, that seems to be the theory. So then they're My understanding of it is that these are viruses that just kind of chill in our up their atmosphere. But there also seems to be a theory that they are in fact held within these comments, which is also really an interesting theory. You know, I got really sucked up into that theory. I've got a lot of information on it then, you know,

just plagues of all of the past. But uh, you know, I thought that was kind of an interesting theory that how had some good evidence, you know, whether or not I necessarily believe that it's totally accurate. Okay, So this this, this brings up a good question, and I know that, you know, you said, I know when we were talking before we started recording, you were talking about having done

the research on comets. Um, So if there's biological material in the comments, then it had to come from somewhere. Where does the comet come from? And where's the biological material come from? That's like, that is the big scary question, isn't it. It's like, now, there was a lot of talk about comets bringing life to the planet and bringing all the water to the planet everything else. So where the hell did the comments come from, you know, and

where did that life on the comments come from? There's only one possible explanation, and that is aliens. Okay, but you're laughing. But now actually that that doesn't that doesn't resolve it obviously, because the aliens had to come from somewhere too, because the way, and that's something we'll never probably understand. It's where the hell life originated in the universe. And you know the pan spermia ideas that it's everywhere.

Life is everywhere. It's being sort of passed around and distributed all over the place by comets and meteoroids and everything else. My theory about comets is that my theory about comets is that essentially comets are just kind of like kind of like minds that are sent through the planet. That's that's sent through our solar system by by some aliens. They've been manufactured. They put them an orbit around the Sun.

They go around us. There's suspiciously many of them that are in the ecliptic, so that means we cross their paths. So when they come in, they rock it around the Sun quickly, leave a lot of debree behind, and then they go way way out there to what's called the Ords cloud, way far away, and they come back like

a hundred years later. So way out there we can't see what's going on out there, but I'm suspecting that they meet up with an alien starship which loads them up with all kinds of new deadly bugs, and then they start their journey back in there you go, we solve the mystery, so you laugh, But he's actually got some good material and they're one of the interesting the interesting things to think about is, as I said, the

point of a virus is to keep you alive. I mean, it's not like going to enhance your health, but it's not supposed to hurt it. So you know, it's this big question of where did these viruses and bacterias evolve in what you know, what scenario or what living being, because that's generally where these things incubate in living beings. Did this incubate and it said, oh no, this is great. You know, I'm not killing it, I'm not hurting it,

but I'm living in it. And then it got cast off onto this comment for whatever reason, the comma comes around, discards it, and it comes down and just like kills millions of human beings because it's not I guess calibrated would be a term to use to a human biology. So am I gonna say alien. No, but I think

it's an interesting thought for sure. You know, this is great and I think that the first time we talked about this story, I said that this really sounded familiar to me for a while when we first started doing this, and I know that there have been some talk of this is do you guys remember I told you there's a there's a book out there by a guy named Scott Sigler that's called Pandemic and it deals with aliens

who distribute some kind of virus through the atmosphere. Too then you know, reproduce and there's all these things that happened and obviously not give away the plub but it's it's a very very similar storyline to what we've just talked about in the last fifteen minutes. Anyway, now now anyway, um, yeah, no, it's entirely possible. I mean, and I think about it.

If you're an alien you want to come down and calling as the planet, want to do a little bio well, I mean, maybe it's you we're making lights saying it's nefarious aliens, but Devin, you you were explaining to me where comments come from, and yeah, and what what is that again? So I still those comment happens from a collision, right, I mean, most meteors of any size or asteroids of

any size come from a planet disintegrating. Some of them are left over from the dawn of the universe shore, but most of the time it's you know, a planet for whatever reason has just disintegrated and all of the little bits shoot off into all millions of different directions. And it turns out there are a lot of water worlds, not in our Solar system obviously, but in our galaxy and in our universe. The one where he drinks his

own p Yes, no, it's not those guys. Maybe it is, I don't know, but there are worlds that are just mostly made of water. And the theory is is that if an asteroid large enough hits this thing, it basically splashes a lot of water into space, which I understand

is like physics. Maybe okay, there's some problems there, but if it's big enough, it'll splash some water, essentially splash water into space, and all of the water like molecules cling together, as everybody knows, so all the water kind of like comes together and freezes into this thing and shoot off into different direction and that's essentially where a

comet comes from, one of the many different ways. But that's one of the big theories, is that it's basically just water from this like alien world that's just been splashed into space. Well, and and I I know, I swear, I don't know where I've I've learned this, But isn't it the tail of a comet? We all, you know, associated comet is having a tail, but the tail is

not always there. It's only when the comet comes into a certain amount of heat and radiation that first melt and that that melt or that that melt off is what becomes the tail. And then the solar wind forces it away from away from the Sun, which is why you know what it's coming towards the Sun. When the tail is as the smallest, it's kind of like a tail. When it's gone around the Sun and heading back, the tail is actually in front of it. Yeah, yeah, is it? Yeah?

So they and they Actually the Earth is kind of in like a sweet spot of like it's melted enough to be a tail, but not so melted that you can't see it entering our atmosphere, which is pretty interesting. I mean, the Earth isn't a lot of sweet spots. Science is weird. I think the thing I'm actually really interested in that I came up when I was in my comment hole was that I found out that there's a comment, like a big old comment coming for us really soon. It's in the I'm sorry, how did you

pronounce it? The cloud cloud? Yeah, in there right now? Well, no, no, it's it's the warthe cloud as far away. It's it's it's like do here. Are you talking about the one that's do here at the end of this year? Yeah, I know, it's nice. No, it's it's headed this way already, I mean, because yours cloud is like way I'll beyond Pluto. Was there maybe was when this report was written. I don't know where it is now. It's probably passed the

yever to mars by now. Well, so the thing is is that it's supposed to be at its brightest in like really late November early December of this year. I'm gonna order some clear sky apparently, um, it's supposed to be within binocular view, like within the next month, you're supposed to be able to see it with binoculars. It's that big and at its height, which is this like late November, early December area. It's it's going to be in the sky and it's going to be brighter than

a full moon would be. That's going to be pretty awesome. It's maybe the biggest comment that we've ever encountered. It's not gonna it's gonna pass close enough for us to see it, but it's not going to pass close enough for us to like have kind of fear that it will collide or that it will have any kind all we gotta worry about. It's like dying horribly from something sonically, don't you know. We don't have to do that. But

it'll be visible. It's always the rock for like four or five months to the naked eye, ye, all the way, all the way until July. So I've got to tell you I'm looking forward to this, I really am, because you know, the return of Haley's comment was kind of a letdown, and and then there was Cohotech, which also is a big, big letdown. Yeah, I know, And so I hope this one really turns out to live up

to us. And saw Haley's comment, I remember when I was like ten Oral Levin and that was and for me, it was my first comment that I had ever really seen, and that was it was really awesome because we went up to Mount Hood and we were up camping and

it was awesome. But this I'm really excited about. I'm also really interested to see if some of these scientists, because the people who have been doing research on this comment theory are by large real scientists, if they are going to take advantage of this and try and get any kind of data from it, because it's it is the biggest one and it's not one we've particularly encountered before.

There has been talk. I don't know if they have enough time to I don't know if there's plans to send a probe out to this one, but they have been taught. They's been talking about sending a probe out to a comment and actually I think I think NASA is working on that. It would be interesting. NASA is also working on it. Just saw something recently figuring out there. Actually a lot of companies are now figuring out and

wanting to mind the asteroids. Mind the asteroids They're they're putting they're starting to put up money to figure out how to do it. So I wouldn't be shocked if we're going to start you know, pulling in giant space bad mitten nets to catch a coughing it. It's a space bad as technical as a gas. Yeah, so it'll be interesting to that, you know. I think it'd be great. We could capture, capture some asteroids, some fairly decent ones,

you know, and nudgement. It'll be a lot process, but to basically nudge them in to Earth or a bit and then mind them, haulow them out on the inside and using using attached rockets, you put a spin on them to generate artificial gravity. So and then you play space tennis. No, and then you have people living inside him. Yeah, you can. You can totally turn these things into habitats.

Freaking awesome. Go ahead. I'm sorry, I was just gonna ask if that's our I was about to say, we've been off topics for a kind of ben Yeah, I'm then my sci fi nerd mode here I like to talk about Yeah. No, No, that's the that's all of the theories that I know about. You guys have any others as far as the origins of the Spanish flu Yes, the freaking Spanish that's the last one I've got. Well, if that's all of it, and that's all. We've got ladies in gentile and I hope you enjoyed today's show.

Oh this is a little different for us. We haven't done this before, so yeah, usually we saw mysteries. Today I think we created more than we saw. Yeah, we might have. But you know, if you like this and you enjoyed it, please let us know. You can let us know you or if you've got theories of your own or other research you want to tell us about, go ahead and send us an email. You can email

us at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. Uh. There is a lot, a lot of research material out there, and we have so many links there's no way I can we can put them all on the site. So we're gonna put up a good number of them. But if you want to find some of the research material that we use, you can find it right on our website that as always is at Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. And with that, uh, I just want to you know, a little shout out here, a little, a little, a

little please for all of you. I'm sure our listeners we have hundreds, if not thousands of scientists who are actually investigating stuff like this, So please call email whatever and tell us what your thoughts are. Yeah. No, I'd love to know because this one, this one is kind of a sticky mess, a big gooeys. Yeah, let me mess, let me mess. I just wanted to know if I gotta stop up, stock up on like in a gas mask and aspirin. Alright, gentlemen, well Joe's gonna go buy

some aspirin. We're going to go ahead and call this show a day. We we appreciate it, and we'll talk to you next week. Next by folks.