Oh, friends and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realist, oh hooy sailors. We have investigated at length the idea of a continuing fascination cryptids.
And I think we were all.
We were all just unanimously astounded by the idea that there could have been large creatures out there beneath the waves in recent periods of history, recent enough that human beings may have run into them. Guys, I spent a lot of time looking out over the ocean in one of our previous maritime adventures. I saw some usual stuff, but I didn't see a sea serpent.
Did you never seen one? Hope to never do, because that is one of my all time night terrors. I think I've mentioned being present in a giant body of water with a sea serpent lurking just beneath the waves. Even if it's not one that's gonna eat me, Just the large underwater dwelling creatures freak me out, Dude.
I often stand astride the ships and look out and imagine Jason Statham when that megalodon attacked to I don't know mega seen the movie the movie whatever it is.
The first meg is a lot of fun. I think the second one diminishing returns. But uh, I watched the first one's good plane movie.
Do check it.
Well.
The point is there were like sea serpents and all kinds of craziness out there in the ocean. Giant sharks like that. They there have been those, but could there be one or some or a bunch of them remaining?
Yes, yeah, far beyond our imaginings, Dear Horatio.
Before we get into.
This classic episode, we also, of course want to shout out folks like the Swedish musician Matthias Krantz, who this is true story, guys taught an octopus to play piano. Ah, we can't wait, Oh my gosh, Please tell us weird stuff you've seen in the oceans. This is our classic episode.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul. Mission control decands, most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff They don't want you to know. Longtime listeners or recent listeners welcome. You'll notice that we are continuing a bit of a maritime trend today. We didn't plan this, It just happened. We're tackling one of the oldest oceanic questions
in human existence. For thousands and thousands of years, human beings have both feared and worshiped the ocean, as well as, of course, the things believed to live within it. So fast forward to the current day. Good for us human species. We have learned a great deal about the ocean over the past several millennia, and we still rely on it for food. Nowadays we can pretty often travel across it safely,
but we have by no means conquered the ocean. In fact, we know more about the Moon right now than we do about Earth's oceans. The briny deep, in short, is still flooded with mysteries. That was not an intentional pun. But here's the point. Today's question, is it possible that see serpents, the legendary sea monsters of old, still exist today. To answer this question, we have to learn what little we do know about the ocean already. So here are the.
Facts and Just to be clear, when we're talking about the ocean and oceans, we really mean the oceans, the seas. The place is where there's briny water, right where it's very deep. That's what we're referring to today. So anywhere in the world, not just in one particular place.
Right, Yeah, So not just the Pacific, not just maybe the Indian Ocean, but the whole shebang, you know what I mean, like literally all of the water, or as we'll come to find out, ninety seven percent of all the water. So we've often heard people say things like, you know, we know less about the ocean than we do about outer space. That's a little misleading, but we definitely do know more about Earth's moon than we do
about Earth's oceans. I mean, when you think about it, the numbers get weird if you believe the official stories. That's for a different episode. We've sent twelve people to the moon since about nineteen sixty nine, yet in comparison, we've only sent three people to the deepest part of the ocean, one of them being James Cameron, who makes
an appearance in here. As a matter of fact, the old Hollywood legend is that James Cameron mainly wanted to do Titanic as a way of getting support for his trip to the Marianas.
Trench, which is very cool.
Yeah, he had a cute little like pod thing that he went down in, right, like a kind of a future you look in under the c mini sub with like grabberclaw arms or maybe i'm hyperbolyzing here.
No, no, no, that's a pretty good description. I mean, that's that's the only way to get down there. And those people who have gone to the deepest part of the ocean, again, we're only counting the people who came back. You know, it's completely plausible that a lot of people died and their bodies eventually drifted to some very deep part of the seafloor.
Well, and the ones that did come back, we're all completely mad.
There we go nice setup that. Yeah, yeah, we know that there. Despite the fact that there have only been a very very small amount of people who went to what we call the deepest part of the ocean, we know that there is a lot, a lot down there. The ocean takes up about seventy one percent of Earth's surface, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research we lean on a lot. In this episode, they note that about ninety five percent of that oceanic surface the seafloor.
They call it unexplored, And it depends on what you mean by explored, but I think it's a fair way to look at it, especially when we learn more about the stats and geography.
Of the ocean.
Quick question, guys, do you think they worked awkwards from that acronym to like what words we're going to be in it? You know, because Noah and Noah's Ark and all that, and they're like, Okay, we got to make this Noah thing work. It's such a good image.
I thought about that, but I didn't. I didn't nail down the story because it would be my speculation. It just it feels like if they're trying to purposefully spell Noah, then they would have done a better job. There's so many things that begin with H.
Well, some mysteries are just better left unsolved. So it's true what we loosely describe as the ocean in swishy quotation fingers has a volume of around one point three three two a billion cubic kilometers. I say that doubly because the word is spelled out several times in the research materials I'm looking at just to drive home. That's a lot of cubic kilometers, my friends, And that works out to be about three hundred and fifty two quintillion
gallons of water. That's just like a completely unfathomable number right there in my mind at least. And that's ninety seven percent of the water on the entire planet. Another two percent is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, and a tiny part is in water vapor floating through the atmosphere, and an even tinier part is inside of us. All. Oh, man, it was there all along, it was there all along, you guys.
It's the majority of the human body actually, about up to sixty percent of you specifically you, if you're human and listening to this, about sixty percent of your body is water.
We are water beings on a water planet, gentlemen. And uh. And when we're talking about, you know, the actual volume of the oceans, we're talking about ninety five percent of the ocean floor quote unquote unexplored, right, because we're talking about actually going and exploring there the way you would the moon or another place. It's crazy to imagine that
that's the floor part. And then there's all that volume of water with all that depth, and think about attempting to explore somehow the surface area at every depth that you possibly can, and it just feels like it would be impossible for humans to do. Because the average depth of the ocean is three thousand, seven hundred and ninety five meters or a little over twelve four hundred and fifty feet. And just like the Earth's surface, life is
not distributed evenly across the ocean, right. You don't just have whales every x meters or something, or fish every x centimeters whatever it would be. They could be anywhere within that depth.
Just for comparison there, when we're talking about the average depth of the world's oceans, consider let's see, Matt, the number you gave us is average depth of three thousand, seven hundred and ninety five meters or a little north of twelve thousand, four and fifty feet. The current tallest tallest building tall skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa, is two thousand, seven hundred and sixteen and a half feet, so tiny, tiny, tiny in comparison to not the deepest part of the ocean.
But just the global average.
This is a big place. We have quote unquote mapped the ocean floor. Good job for our species, but we did it at a really really low resolution. I'm not going to say we cut some corners, because again it's a very big place. But if you look at the overall mapping of the ocean floor and you take all of the scientific progress that every single civilization is made up to, now, the most of that ocean floor mapping
has a solution of five kilometers or three miles. That means that if something is so ridiculous, But that means that if something is smaller than three miles big, then we could totally miss it. So that's like that's the threshold for size. So just to set up our question or address our question a little more here, if a sea monster existed and there was a breeding population and they were less than three miles big, like not even long,
they were just big. If they were less than three miles big, then it's possible that we could have missed them.
Think about all the crashed extraterrestrial craft that could be down there. We'd have no idea they're not three miles long.
Well, maybe, Matt, are you proposing aquatic extraterrestrials.
Yes, USO is my friend.
Oh my gosh, I don't even know how to start wrapping my head around that idea, but probably a discussion for another day.
Check out our episode.
Yeah, we have a previous episode on these usos, and I don't know, maybe we should revisit that one because there's some new information I found on that.
But yeah, clearly I should revisit that one because I do not recall its existence at all.
But there's a you're right, Noel, that's an episode maybe for another day, which you can find now wherever you get your favorite podcasts. So this mapping, it's something that can be misleading. I think when you first hear it. It's kind of like saying radio telescope or radio telescope gives you information about space, but it doesn't necessarily give you a visual picture. And this ocean floor mapping doesn't necessarily give us what you would think of as a
visual picture. The job is accomplished using radar. It measures the c surface, so it gives us this kind of rough topography, the idea of where the bumps and the dips occur. And that's pretty cool, right, But that means that the maps of the ocean floor still are not detailed as detailed as some of the maps of planets in our Solar system, which is insane. We know a little bit about Mars, if this holds true, we know a little bit about more about the surface of Mars
than we do about the surface of the ocean. Nuts.
Okay, So just for like a you know, audio visual aid, let's just talk a little bit about the layout. So, just like the surface of the globe, the subterranean globe, I guess we could call it, is divided into different zones or regions. Each one has their own unique ecosystem, specific creatures that are native to each of these areas, adapted to live in these particular conditions. Of these zones in the ocean, there are five, and we'll start from
closest to the surface and dive down. I'll start with this one, because it's really fun to say, the epipilogic or sunlight zone, and that ranges from the surface of the water to six hundred and fifty six feet below. It gets plenty of light, plenty of heat, and of course all of those things decrease as you head further down. And this is where all the cute little babies live the fun you know, cute kind of finding nemo esque figures of the sea, a lot of oceanic life that
humans actually interact with. Sure, and sure they're cute in their own way, let's be nice. But also like coral reefs and all these amazing built up layers of coral and it's very much like think of it as like the metro area of the sea. You know, this is where like like the Tokyo or the New York City or you know, the Atlanta nice.
And then you go down a little bit further, you get to the twilight zone or the mesopelagic zone. It's between six hundred and fifty six feet and three thousand, two hundred and eighty one feet. There's still a lot of stuff living in this area, but stuff's getting a little different, little little weirder. Like wolf eels. Sure, sure you're familiar with those wolf eels. You can hear them
howling in the seas no matter where you are. Swordfish scary, terrifying creatures that you can hunt for fish for them, but it's a difficult process. The light at this point as you're going down is dying. Sunlight is getting fainter and fainter as you submerge.
If you mapped all this on a chart, you could definitely correlate depth with weirdness. Just putting that out there real quick.
I want to point out for anyone who is hearing of wolf eels for the first time, please do yourself with favor use your browser of choice to check out some images of wolf eels. They do not look like what you might assume a wolf or an eel.
Looks like I.
Had to put them in there, and yeah, their life is getting weird with.
It, and you can't actually hear them howling. I apologize those Jill, Well, we.
Don't know, we don't know, we don't know. So let's continue this journey into the murk. Now we're stepping into the midnight zone. To bastardize the phrase from that song, we're at the bath of Pelagic zone between three thy two hundred and eighty one feet to twelve one hundred and twenty four feet. This part of the ocean is like that old line from Method Man, it's cold world. You have to bring your own heat. This zone is largely dark. This is where you start to see some
sea creatures emitting their own light through phosphorescence. It's also like that Queen Song. Doat are under pressure? The pressure in the zone reaches almost six thousand pounds per square inch, and that's just because of what you alluded to earlier, Matt. There is so much water on top of you here. If you live in this area and then next to this we would our next step should we continue? James Cameron eskiing down into the depths is what I think personally is the coolest zone.
Is it cool as ice? Ben? Sort of like that Queen Song was repurposed to be.
It's very cold. It's not quite freezing because the water is still liquid, but it's very very cold.
You're gonna have to convince me that it's cooler than high pressure bioluminescence. But let's do this right.
So this is the abysso paleogic zone. Did I get there right? I think I got it pretty close. And that's between thirteen one hundred and twenty four feet and nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet. And as the aforementioned Vanilla ice reference implies, this is a very very very cold part of the deep sea with no natural light over seventy five percent of the ocean floor is in this zone. So this is essentially like, for all intents and purposes, the bottom.
Basically, yeah, loosely speaking, this is this is one of the things I thought about a lot in younger days. I always thought, where's the bottom of the continents? You know what I mean? Where can you walk? Like if you could walk on the ocean floor and you could see, oh, there's where the floor has kind of a corner and the wall there that's well, that's you know North America or that's Australia. You would find it in the abyssopologic zone.
That's that's the place from which sprang the continents. But it's still not the bottom. It's just most of the bottom, right because just like the non water covered surface of the planet, there are peaks, there are valleys in the ocean. We call these trenches.
Yes, the hatel Pelagic zone that lies down way way down nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet to thirty six thousand, one hundred feet. Now imagine that, what do we say the average was around twelve thousand, thirteen thousand feet.
That's correct, twelve four hundred and fifty feet.
So now we're way way down there, and the pressure in these areas is insane. It's more than eleven thousand, three hundred and eighteen tons per square meter. Or essentially, think about this the equivalent of one person trying to support the weight of fifty giant jumbo jets. You know, there's we all know somebody who can bench press one jumbo jet, but imagine doing fifty.
Yeah, it's impossible. It's you know, it calls to mind the old mythological figure of Atlas holding the world atop his shoulders, and mythology plays a huge role in today's episode as well. The actual depth here gets tricky because it depends on, you know, the trenches or the valleys
in the area. Of course, the Marianas Trench, which is the deepest area of the ocean to ever be explored by humans, sits at we would it's almost it's definitely thirty five seven and ninety seven feet deep, but that might not be the entire story, because again we don't there's a ton of stuff we don't know about the ocean. Just for comparison, like we did with Burj Khalifa, the tallest mountain in the world, on the on Earth's dry surface is Mount Everest that stands at twenty nine and
twenty six feet. So this means that the deepest ocean trench, as far as we know, is deeper than the tallest mountain on this planet is high. There's even with scale comparisons, this quickly becomes mind boggling. We're just telling you this to give you the map, the lay of the land. Now we have to talk about the things that live within this strange, strange world. Estimates show that somewhere between fifty to eighty percent of all life on Earth is found under the ocean.
And we'll tell you about that life right after a quick word from our sponsor.
And we're back now over the commercial break. I'm sure many of us had adventures, perhaps some of us are on the ocean right now, and you're probably wondering, hey, fifty to eighty percent, that's a hell of a range. Hasn't somebody done any kind of more robust research on this?
They were probably also thinking, wow, should I really be out right now? Especially? I mean I am on the ocean kind of isolated, but still, but yes, Ben, I mean, really, we keep talking about this is just given the sheer size of the oceans of the seas what we're talking about here, it's impossible to know exactly how many different species live out there and all the different types of species,
right and humans. The scientists people who've been studying this for you know, hundreds and thousands of years, estimate that between a third, maybe two thirds of the things that live in the oceans have yet to be classified. Maybe they've been spotted a few of them once or twice, but they haven't actually been you know, written down and cataloged as hey, this is another new species, but even more just have never been seen.
Yeah, that's interesting. I love that you point that out there, Matt, because we know that there are tales of plenty big fish stories abound, but having something scientifically classified means that someone has been able to fit it into a taxonomy of some sort. This is related to these other things that we know, and this is kind of where it lives and what it does before it dies. So we we might not know sixty six percent of that easily.
We do know for sure two things. First, we know that populations of undiscovered maritime animals are probably in decline the way that populations of discovered and classified maritime animals are Secondly, and pretty disturbingly, we know that we don't know everything that's out there, but we have a wealth of scientific research and a wealth of historical allegations, if you want to call folklore something a little more spicy.
And what's interesting about all of humanity's research into the world beneath the boats is this, It quickly descends into legend, into mythology. Sailors have been reporting tales of gigantic sea monsters since pretty much the first time human beings got onto boats, got into the ocean, and then made it back to land alive.
Just think about the first time someone saw a whale, The first time someone saw a whale while on a ship. WHOA, That must have been mind blowing. And because you have no way of imagining even what it is when you observe a creature, a sea creature like that. And that's kind of what we're going to be talking about here, the early visions of something underneath the water that we don't know what it is.
Can you imagine being that first part to see the whale and then immediately after being stricken by awe and majesty of it all, thinking man it sure would be cool to murder that thing with a plenty stick.
Yeah, you have murder it. It might be a lot of food perhaps, you know, that could be a motivation.
One of the first encounters where it was if what we know about humans remains true, then probably one of the first encounters was somebody seeing it while they were on the shore from a distance and then finding it was edible. Maybe one washed up on the shore, which could happen even before the day's widespread sonar.
Absolutely, So let's get into some of the specific examples of strange reports of gigantic things within the water.
Now.
The first one we're going to talk about here is something called Leviathan. This is probably a word you've heard before. For me, I got it from magic cards and of the Bible. It's a fantastic word. It's been used in the past to describe all kinds of different purported massive sea creatures. Leviathan was described in the Bible as a giant, primordial,
sometimes multi headed sea serpent of sorts. It makes six appearances in the Old Testament, and according to Biblical scholars, in some places within the Bible, Leviathan the word refers to an actual physical creature, and other times it functions more as a symbolic representation of God's power or wrath, which you know, those two different things. Many times are where arguments lie within translations of the Bible. I was wondering, guys, could I just give you a couple different descriptions of
some of the Greek mythology descriptions of sea monsters? Just really fast?
Please? Can you slow it down a little bit, Matt, not too fast. I want to be able to keep up.
Oh okay, Well, I'm gonna give you a quote of a monstrous fish from those written in fifteen fifty five by Olus Magus. Quote. Their forms are horrible. Their head's square, all set with prickles, and they have long, sharp horns round about like a tree rooted up by the roots. They are ten or twelve cubits long, very black, with
huge eyes. The apple of the eye is of one cubit, and it is red and fiery colored, which in the dark night appears to fishermen afar from underwaters as a burning fire, having hairs like goose feathers.
What is that describing, Matt? That doesn't sound like any living sea creature that I'm familiar with.
It's describing a giant monster fish.
Yeah, that's what I thought, just making sure I was keeping up. Okay, all right, I'll yet.
But it's thought that perhaps what was actually seen there was a giant squid, just due to other descriptions.
Well, but it's got, it's got. It's got horns like trees. Though, what on a giant squid has horns like trees?
I don't know.
What's a cuba. That's a big measurement, right, I mean, I know it's like an ancient form of measurement, but it's like like a yard, right or something along those lines.
I believe we've talked about that in a couple other episodes. Exactly what a cube it is in the measurement.
Oh, it's like the length of your arm. Yeah, from your elbow to your to your fingers.
Okay, yeah, just one more here from the Odyssey, if you guys are cool with it, there's a sea monster called the skila or skia Skyla. Maybe I can't I can't remember from my days of learning about Greek myths, but here's here's the quote. Her legs and there are twelve are like great tentacles, unjointed and upon her serpent necks are born six heads like nightmares of ferocity and triple serried rows of fangs and deep gullets of black death. Half her length. She sways her heads in air.
Oh, deep gullets of black death.
I like that one, really creepy. But again it sounds a little bit like it could be a giant squid that was observed and just there was no understanding of what it was.
And so there are multiple, multiple examples. You know, typically in the West, we tend to think of things that occurred in the Atlantic or Mediterranean or Middle East, you know, from Middle Eastern cultures, Phoenicians and so on. One example from Nordic folklore would of course be the Kraken. I think a lot of us were waiting for the kraken to show up. This was a cryptid before the word existed,
wreaking havoc from Norway to Greenland. But the vast majority of people of Nordic people believed in this thing, and many thought they had seen it. Its imo was to attack vessels with its tentacles wrapping around a ship, and if unable to pull the ship down, this creature would begin circling the vessel, creating a maelstrom or a vortex that would drag the ship beneath the waves. Legends said the kraken could devour the entire crew of a ship
in a single go. One of our first documented allegations of this creature's existence dates back to a story written in eleven eighty CE by a King Zvere of Norway. And this is I want to point out here, and I think I talked about this in a previous episode.
The idea of a.
Creature devouring an entire ship might seem outlandish now, but we have to remember the average size of a ship was much smaller back then. So what would have been considered a big ship attacked and justid by a fish is you know, it's not as big as the megayachts of today. But still these people, again, there are people. They're as smart as anyone listening today in twenty twenty, right, the brain, the hardware hasn't evolved all that much. So we have to ask, if these things are so dangerous,
why would you mess with them at all. In the case of the Kraken, it's because there was enormous profit or potential for profit. The Kraken was accompanied by large, large, ginormous schools of fish that would follow it around, and when it surfaced, when it breached the water, fish cascaded off the creature's back. And that meant that if your boat was around, all you had to do was literally have a net in the water, and then you could get more fish than you would in months otherwise.
Pretty cool. That's a kind of a net positive sea monster side effect. I'd be good about that. Oh man, I didn't even catch that, but no, you know, the krakend definitely sounds like a giant squid.
Now, yeah, we see a lot of descriptions of tentacles, you know what I mean. We see a lot of descriptions of a pretty agro, pretty big, many armed thing. And of course, at this point, finally getting to say this on air, Hail Hydra, shout out to the myth of old More on that later, but you know, that's another that's another Greek myth I believe in the story of Hydra. The idea is that you lop off one one head. It's a multi headed beast. You lop off
one head and two grow in its place. It's also done a lot for the Marvel cinematic universe, which I'm sure is what the Greeks were thinking about when they.
Wrote that, No question, they were laying the groundwork. So next we have something from Japan, a creature, a sea wrecking creature known as the Umi Bozoo that was rumored to attack, specifically in calm waters, where it would rise up, creating this kind of self contained maelstrom and described as a black phantom with two huge eyes. Okay, just phantom. I'm picturing like ghost shaped, you know, So let's just again,
We're gonna come back to this two huge eyes. And in the lore of the time, this Omi Bozou was thought to be a spirit of some sort rather than an actual corporeal creature, and the only way to escape this thing was to kind of almost like distract it like a cat, you know, with like a like a mouse toy or like a feather. But they would use what they referred to as a bottomless barrel, and I had to offer Mike ask Ben to clarify what the hell that is. And it's it's pretty simple when you
think about it. A bottomless barrel is a barrel with no bottom, a cylinder. You take out both ends and it becomes bottomless and infinite, and it would just like be all, what the hell is this? I got it? Oh my gosh, and they need to sail away while it's confused.
That's the thing about folklore, right, we see the truth but told slant. As Emily Dickinson would later go on to note, what's odd about this and what differentiates this folklore from a lot of other folklore throughout human civilization, unlest it's human and pre human civilization, but no spoilers, that's a different episode, is that the folklore here does have often provable I will say provable seeds of the truth. There's the little grain of sand that makes the pearl
of legend. Research shows the ocean has indisputably been home to enormous dangerous creatures in the distant past. It's home to enormous dangerous creatures now, of course, but it was also home to things like the meglodon.
Oh yes, the ma That was a big old shark three times the size of a great white with teeth as big as your hand. Hope they're really extinct?
Oh man, I don't know, Matt. I kind of hope they're still around, not around me specifically, but just like out in the world megalodonning even look.
You said to yourself, the populations of sea creatures are declining. What's that megalodon doing other than just slurping up sea creatures or mashing them violently with its teeth that are the size of fists.
My heart goes out to sharks. They're amazing animals if you look at the mechanism of their evolution and adaptation, and also their existence seems very stressful to me, since they the way that their gills are structured. They can't act, they can't stand still. They always have to keep moving
and forcing water through the gills. It's stressful. But even if a megaladon was around now, it would not be the largest creature the ocean is home to proven like kaiju size things, right, like the blue whale is sorry, dinosaurs officially the largest single animal ever confirmed to exist.
Ever.
Ooh, by the way, you guys, I remember there was an episode a while back where space whales came up and I was trying to wreck my brain, like where have I seen space whales? And I said, I thought it was as artists French artist Mobius, and then I thought it was maybe Salvador Dali or something, and a listener wrote in and said it was actually from an episode of Futurama. I wish I remember the listener's name, but if you're hearing this, thank you listener. My brain
was eating itself over that one, basically. But yeah, it's true. And you know I've mentioned that I'm also I have an abiding fear of large things that lurk beneath the depths, and that I often have had dreams where I feel myself as this speck in this massive ocean with like huge unseen things kind of lurking about, and then like a whale will come up under me and just sort of scoop me up and it doesn't eat me. It's just more of this kind of fear of its sheer size.
And it's true. The blue whale is absolutely massive. I mean, you're gonna know it when it comes up under you in the ocean, or when you see it, hopefully from the safety of like, you know, one of those tours, those boat tours. One hundred people can fit into its mouth, not its guts, its mouth, its heart is the size of a small car, maybe maybe not even a small car. Ben, what do you think a medium car like a like a mid sized suv.
It's it's a car. They could comfortably seat four to five people.
Got it, okay?
And the beat of that heart can be detected from two miles away. But we've got some other things on the list of massive underwater dwelling creatures, things like sperm whales, the whale shark, the basking shark, and of course our pal and yours, the giant civic octopus. Not to mention the lion's main jellyfish, which can reach more than one hundred and twenty feet or thirty six point six meters in length.
But the lion's main is mostly creepy tentacles, right or not? Tentacles creepy? Are they called tentacles in a jellyfish? They're tendrilsl Yeah, yeah, terrifying lion's main tendrils. Those really freak me out. Did jellyfish give you, guys the same kind of feelings when you're thinking about swimming in the ocean.
I think they're beautiful to look at in an aquarium tank, but yeah, I mean they definitely because they're they're stingy boys, right, I mean, they will mess you up and then you got to pee on yourself.
Not all jelly hashtag. Not all jellyfish right are poisonous, but I personally I love them. I think it's like watching a cloud underwater, or you know, a nebula through a telescope. Also, jellyfish, at least one tiny species of jellyfish occupies a top ten position and Bend's list of top ten animals because it's functionally immortal. You remember that one matt it grows up and then if it's injured or something, it returns to a juvenile phase and lives
its life again. We did an episode on real life immortality a number of years ago now, and there is real life immortality at least for some animals, and they're all pretty crappy versions of immortality.
But yes, I will say the jellyfish outside of their waters, they don't hold up so well. They're super blobby and like like a thing that you'd want to step over on the beach, and if they are stingy ones, you definitely would want to step over them. But it just goes to show how specifically adapted they are for life in the ocean. As the case with all of the creatres we're talking about today, they don't they cannot hold up outside of the water.
But some of those mental wars are very difficult to detect, and they've got really long tendrils, and you would never know who's there and it could kill humans. Okay, maybe I just have a weird thing with jellyfish.
Well well, also, that's not to sound like a jerk, but one of the reasons I really wanted to hit the idea of specificity of adaptation is should humans be under the water?
How far should we be.
Under the water? You know what I mean, Like if you're I don't want to like victim blame or anything, because I know life is crazy and everybody's the main character of their own story. But the maybe maybe jellyfish and attacking leviathans are a sign that we should we shouldn't go too far into the depths. I mean, the more you think about it, it makes sense to ask could there still be enormous creatures out there in the brine.
One of the things we talked about off air as we were diving into this episode was Jules vern Of course, his famous eighteen seventy novel twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Don't think too much about the unit of measurement there just to enjoy the poetic title. There's a quote here from vern that applies to this episode, and it's this, either we do know all the varieties of beings which people our planet.
Or we do not.
If we do not know them all, if nature still has secrets in the deeps, for us, nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans of other kinds, or even of new species.
So could sea monsters be real? Well, we'll dive right into that after a quick sponsor break.
Here's where it gets crazy, and it does get crazy. Could the monsters be real? This genuinely depends on how you define monster. If we're talking about monsters, as in creatures of monstrous size, then our odds of finding one understandably go down. But they don't go down as far as you might think, because we still have a lot to learn about the ocean. But we're learning more about it now than ever before.
Yes, that is correct. Numerous governments and their militaries are able to detect the movement of very large objects from far away when it comes to things submerged in the ocean, and as we talked about in our episode we covered not that long ago about sonar and its effects on marine animals. Earth's oceans essentially have like roaming detection networks in the form of submarines, which is very very true,
and commercial shipping vessels. And there's also purported technology that maybe the US military and other militaries have miked up the oceans to a large degree. So there's affirmed.
I think it's confirmed.
I think it is confirmed too. I know it is confirmed at least from the US's side, but I wonder how many other countries have something similar in place.
I mean, yeah, that's a very good point, Matt. And we essentially have some form of roaming detection networks. They're meant to detect other works of humanity more so than other animals, but they work. That's why we spent billions building them, and we still have found huge, occluded disturbing things.
So one thing that was tough for us to not spoil in the Hear of the Fat portion of today's show is that the source of many many sea serpent and sea monster myths across the across the centuries turns out probably to be based in a real thing. The colossal or the giant squid. Today it's known as Architathus Dukes.
It's as old, like rumors of this are as old as the first days of sailing, honestly, but for centuries the only proof we had was really creepy, really circumstantial, disturbing stuff, nearly unidentifiable carcasses wash ashore, the lone survivor of a shipwreck shows up with you know, like with missing crew members and a nineteen foot tentacle that's rotting
in the sun. And then we find, you know, giant known creatures, especially sperm whales in the in the era of whaling, right you know the movie Dick Days and Beyond. You would find whales that had scars, like gigantic sucker marks that were wrought by some unknown animal. Or you would find these gigantic beaks. They looked like kiju beaks.
They looked like the beaks of a squid that no God would ever put on this planet, right, because these are very religious people finding these two And it wasn't until maybe in your lifetime, fellow conspiracy realists, that scientists finally got a photograph of a real life krackt and that was just like one blurry paparazzi under the sea's photo.
You know that was yeah, that was alive, right, it was, Oh, there's one swimmer. I wasn't a carcass, it wasn't some remnant. It was an actual thing swimming around. And then think
about this. It wasn't until the you know, the Mayan Apocalypse, I'm sorry, twenty twelve when we acquired actual video footage of a live giant squid existing in its in its environment, because there was there was another time earlier than that where a giant squid was I believe caught essentially and pulled up to the surface.
By the Japanese fishing vessel.
That was the one we were just talking about, right, was that two thousand and six? Maybe I think something around that time where one got pulled up from from the depths to the surface, just in the act of a large fishing operation. But yeah, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen as well, we acquired actual video footage of a giant squid and it was creepy.
And you know, if you guys ever seen that Noah Baumbach movie The Squid and the Whale, it references a diorama that you can see at the Museum of Natural History in New York of a massive sperm whale essentially doing battle with one of these kraken like creatures. And it's pretty epic to look at. Still on display there as far as I know.
Yeah, it was there last time I went. I love that museum. It's I don't know. A lot of that museum is dark when you get into the exhibits. I like dark museums. These creatures like dark areas of the water. They live in very deep areas of the ocean. As far as we can tell, again, we know very little about them. They're anywhere from thirteen hundred to three thousand feet down. We know that they can grow larger than some whales. The only predator of theirs we know about
is the sperm whale. We don't know how large these things can get, yet we know that they are stronger than an elephant. We know that a bite from their beak has enough force to sever steel cables. This means that if one of these made it to the surface in the days of wooden boats, that boat would In short, well, it's a family show, so I'm just going to say they would be very deep trouble.
Yeah, well, what if your ship has a steel hull, It doesn't seem to matter. These daily can go through anything.
You could puncture that. Yeah, just stay on their good side.
I mean.
The craziest thing about this, it's a real life sea monster. It fits some of the qualities we described, right, and.
We know so.
Very little about it. We still have a lot of questions about large sea animals that everybody's kind of familiar with. Right, There's a lot of stuff we don't understand about whales. We know even less about these things. As recently as June of twenty twenty of this year. Last month, as we record this, we learned new stuff about these monsters. A juvenile version of them washed up on the shores of South Africa. This is not the first time it happened,
but this creature was already thirteen feet long. That's baby size for these guys, right. It's a mini me of a giant squid. But it was just about two years old. We also don't know how long they live. We don't know how big they grow while they're alive. And they're not the only thing out there. I mean, I I say we go full Lovecraft. Let's point out that the ocean is also home to giant deep sea worms. And when we say giant, we mean giant. They also glow in the dark.
So you know, these guys well as individuals, wouldn't necessarily be considered in the same league. Yeah, that's a sea punt as well as the rest of these animals that we're talking about today. They're called pyrosomes and their free flow voting tunicates. They're also known as the unicorns of the sea. But they're they're pretty big, you know, they're big enough for a human to ride, but they also
kind of create these massive swarms. They're soft and delicate, like some sort of like feather boa perhaps, And again, like bend off Off, Mic pointed out that these are really in kind of on a technicality, sea monster by default. That's because each of the worms is actually a colony of a thousands of individual creatures, and the individuals themselves are super tiny. It's almost like they operating this crazy hive mind type situation.
Yeah. Yeah, they're like a big commune, you know, and jellyfish often also or creatures of colony or hive. But these giant sea worms are also we should mention because Chekhov's gun rule. Right, we did. We did name drop Lovecraft, so we have to follow up on that. These worms are not eldritch objects of warship sleeping beneath the waves for AONs, waiting for the stars to be right. This is not a case of that is not dead, which can eternal lie and with strange AONs even death may
die kind of thing. It's not We're not at Cuthulhu level yet. But Matt Noll, while we are on the subject of waking ancient creatures, it's time to ask what about the other monsters. We have sea monster news for you.
Well, as we stated before, we've been talking about giant monsters, right that we've been describing monsters as something that is monster us in its size. But there could be something very dangerous, very frightening that isn't giant that could be discovered down below the depths. And we have some news for you. This year, scientists made a discovery that future historians will doubtlessly call classic twenty twenty. You know why. They found one hundred million year old microbes beneath the
seafloor in the South Pacific Geyer. This is a site east of Australia where ocean currents intersect, and this is considered to be one of the areas of the ocean that has the least amount of life, right, some of the deadest parts of the ocean, where it's almost there's
almost no nutrients here that animals need to survive. The scientists dug down very far, five seven hundred meters below sea level, and they found something that had been in a Lovecraftian way, slumbering since before the age of men.
Yeah, these things looked as though they were dead. And it's already a great find, you know, goscience. This is already a groundbreaking discovery to find evidence of these things that were once alive. So they brought them back to the lab. They brought the clay cores they had dug up, as you had mentioned, Matt, back to their lab where they found these microbes, and they said, oh wow, this is amazing. There was once life in this part of the South Pacific, guyer, I don't know. Let's feed them,
which sounds weird, right. It's a lot like finding a dead body and saying, let's put a sandwich by it. Let's just come on, let's put a sandwich by it. It's just between us we're all buddies here. And what happened is that these microbes, these dead bodies, got up and ate the sandwich. So what happened after that is they started reproducing, They started breeding. Something that had been dormant were millions of years just came back to life.
One of the scientists, and I love when scientists talked this way. One of the scientists said that this indicates the insane possibility. Whenever scientists used the word insane, you know what they're you know, something rocked them. This scientist said that these very same microbes must have been or may have been, probably were sitting in the same place for AONs, and that that is pure lovecrafty and stuff. Lovecraft was a terrible person, not a great writer, but
a fantastic world builder. And the idea of undersea creatures slumbering and being awoken by man, now we can say, in twenty twenty, this happened. This happened. Lovecraft is in
a way real now. And that's just the beginning. If we go back to the statistics when Matt Nolan and I talked about it at the beginning of this episode, we see some possibilities This story is and over given what little we know about the ocean, again, very little, it is scientifically indisputably true that we do not at this point know every single species of life currently living in there or you know, sleeping for dreamless dark millennia.
And given the global reach of sonar and other detection methods radar, et cetera, sure it's plausible to say we have a solid chance of detecting an undiscovered life form if it ticks a few boxes.
That's right.
It really needs to have a relatively large population, It needs to be pretty frequently on the move and spend at least some time in that smaller part of the ocean that we talked about, that metropolis that we study pretty extensively. And it also is helpful if it prais a lot on other easily detected species. But if it doesn't exhibit these traits, our odds of finding drop quite significantly.
Yeah, it's true. It's gonna be hard for us to just accidentally stumble upon something new, right if it doesn't have that large population and all those things we just listed. Does anybody else feel like it's a bad idea to awaken aon's old microbes just in case? Maybe there's something involved there that happened to help the extinction process with yes, you know life on Earth.
Yes, yes I do, I do, I do think that thing, Matt.
Hull, the dice, I you know what I mean. We are seeing this happen in other places. You know, it's not just underwater. Well I guess it kind.
Of is because under ice.
Yeah, because ice. You know, it's just just fancier water. So ice is fancy water. Great as our takeaway, please just remember that out of all this stuff we did today. But yeah, you know, you make an excellent point there, Nol, because this isn't just speculation on our part. We know that the discovery of extremophiles took forever creatures that live by these geothermal vents on the ocean floor. They are living off the energy exuded from those vents. So they're
not consuming a very well known other species. They're not moving around a lot because they have to be by those vents to survive. So with those two pieces missing, it would take us a while to find them. And this leaves us with two notes. You know, one is disturbing, one is distressing. Or when's a little more emo, a little sad. Let's go with that one. First. It may well be that we do discover some gigantic species, some real life sea monsters, sea serpent, what have you. But
we discover it after it becomes functionally extinct. We find the last of a relic population. We find that they are unable to breed. We find that the anthropist scene has signed their death warrant, and we are just seeing the dying echoes of what they once were ours.
Look at that poorant. Yep, there's only one.
Yep, look at it. The Last Kraken the new film by Wes Anderson. The Crack was played by Edward Norton.
And as it turns out, the Kraken a perfectly symmetrical creature, so that really works out for his MEAs on Sam, I.
Was really hoping you were going to say Bill Murray, but we can give with it.
Oh no, no, wait wait, change it. Kracking is Bill Murray. Uh you heard it?
Oh my god. This this can be a crossover between the stuff they do. I want you to know Cinematic Universe and the Ridiculous History Cinematic Universe, where we have a movie coming out in the December of this year for Christ called Hans about a horse that could solve math problems, played by who do we say, Daniel da Lewis two people? Yes, that's right, Finn wolf Hard as the young clever Hans, and then he grows up into a Daniel d Lewis sized clever Hans. But yeah, I love this idea. So this.
It's not as Wes Anderson cute. If this happens in real life, our species will encounter a macro level of a type of sadness known as sounder. If you guys have ever heard this, it's a it's a manufacturer word. All words are manufactured, so you know tintinnabulation. I don't care make up your own words. It's a living language.
But soundra is a really neat word that means the realization that each random passer by is living a life is vivid and complex as your own, populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and so on, story that continues invisibly around you, like an an hill sprawling deep underground, and they live a life that you'll never know existed. You might only appear once as someone passing by, or a lighted window in the dark. So not to be too waxing poetic, But how terrible is it that we
might find something right after we've killed it. The second thing we have to remember, and this is the real This is the real conspiratorial stuff here. It's a bit of a thought experiment. A lot of the knowledge that we have about the world's oceans comes from private corporations.
It comes from.
Blue ocean navies, both of which are incentivized heavily to keep secrets. So it is possible, not plausible, but possible that something might have been found already. In the cost of revealing it to the world, we're outweighed by the profit motive of keeping something else a margin right, or a promising dig or maybe you know, you're a military you've detected something, detected some big animal on its last legs. But if you tell people you discovered it, then they'll
know you have some sort of classified detection technology. And then boom, billions of dollars down the Marianna's trench.
There.
I don't think, I probably that's not happening. That's just that's it's like a comic book level, exciting world.
I don't think you're off base of there at all. Then I feel all of that specifically the classified detection tech because I want to believe that there are more efficient forms of the kinds of detection technologies that we have now that just that can't be shared. You're right for proprietary reasons.
And now again, like you say, man Matt, I really appreciate that support there or there, I say enabling. You might be enabling a little bit in listeners.
But and that doesn't mean extraterrestrial technology. It just means advanced technology.
Yeah, agreed. And while this idea of sea monsters, have to put it in a sentence, this idea that sea monsters exist, they are being hidden by you know, an oil conglomerate or a navy, a bluewater navy of some sort. While that definitely sounds like sci fi comic book stuff or fodder for an excellent screenplay, a sci fi channel screenplay, the truth is stranger things have happened out there beneath the waves. So what do you think listeners? Now we
hand you know, like the meme. You're the captain, now, so what do you think could be out there?
You have the trawler, you're in control. Yeah, honestly, what do you think is out there? Is there anything that you have seen when you've been out on the ocean, or maybe in the ocean on a dive. Maybe you've been in a submersible before. We would love to hear about your experience. Or maybe you've worked on a rig wooh, that would be cool. Tell us about that. Anything you want to mention that we've discussed on this episode, or if you want to give us a suggestion for another episode,
you can find us. We're all over social media. On Instagram we are conspiracy stuff show on Facebook and Twitter, we're conspiracy stuff.
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