Creepypasta 3: The SCP Foundation

that came to life. So we called them gods and demons, begged them to spare us, and prayed for salvation. In time, their numbers dwindled in ours rose. The world began to make more sense when there were fewer things to fear. Yet the unexplained can never truly go away, as if the universe demands the absurd and impossible. Mankind must not go back to hiding in fear. No one else will

protect us, and we must stand up for ourselves. While the rest of mankind dwells in the light, we must stand in the darkness to fight it, contain it, and shield it from the eyes of the public, so that others may live in a sane and normal world. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Bloil Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Sager, and we are

on our third episode about creepy pastas. This uh, I want to say it was this time last year that we did the first one and people really liked it, so we did a second one, and then I would say, especially this time of year, we get about an email or two a week suggesting different creepy pastas that we read and possibly do on the show. And the one that we have been hearing about the most is called SCP, and we looked into it and it fit the show perfectly.

It's almost like they designed it just for us. So I hope that the creators of SCP, the writers of these various creepy pastas, are out there listening. We love what you're doing. Yeah, SCP Foundation. SCP stands for Special Containment Procedures. Uh. It's uh. And you can find this by the way at SCP slash wiki dot wiki dot dot com, or just do a web search for u SEP Foundation or will also include a link to it on the landing bach for this episode of Stuff to

Blow Your mind dot com. It's a fabulous uh, just a catalog encyclopedia of all these weird specimens that are presented presented as if they are under scientific scrutiny. Is if these specimens are being uh investigated very cautiously by by by individuals who have scientific curiosity about the specimens but also the best interests of mankind and its sanity

at heart. Yeah, they pitched it as being kind of like that TV show Warehouse thirteen, but what I thought more of was spoilers Cabin in the Woods, uh, and and what's going on behind the scenes in that movie. Um. So, okay, maybe you have never heard one of our Creepy Pasta episodes before, so we're gonna give you a real quick intro to it, although I recommend that you go check out the ones that we've done previously. Creepy Pastas are viral copy and paste text in the form of horror stories.

They evolved from copy pasta, which is another sort of viral copy and paste text thing. They take the shape of urban legends, mainly appearing as if there's something that actually happened, uh, and they mimic first person accounts, especially scientific ones, which is why we're attracted to them because we like to on these episodes take the scientific ones and kind of extrapolate out what's actually going on here science wise. Uh. So we have a penchant for this genre.

The most popular one that you've probably heard of is slender Man. Then the genre really seems to have hit its peak into one ten, but it is still chugging along as SCP is total evidence. Oh yeah, there's a new television series that's right. Yeah. In fact, Robert and I jested an interview with Playboy magazine of all places, about this upcoming sci fi TV show, Channel zero that's all about different creepy pastas, and I guess the first one that they're gonna do is Candle Cove. They're basically

gonna take some of these creepypastas and adapt them for television. Yeah. I haven't seen it myself yet, but I've heard great things. Yeah me neither. Um. But back to SCP. So, the basic idea here is that it's a foundation that is trying to contain and protect us from all these various

entities that are sort of weird horror abstractions. Right, it's not fair, Yeah, and it's I think it's kind of I see SCP Foundation is kind of an evolution of the form because the more classic examples of pasta and creepy pasta, they're they're such I mean, they straddle fiction and reality in such a way to supposed to misinterpret them.

Like it's the kind of thing where someone is pasting it onto a message board, like an individual saying, hey, has anyone ever had a bad experience with this medication? And then someone pace as in copy and paste pasta, they paste this this, uh, this ridiculous story of something that happened to somebody, and then you're supposed to potentially

think it's real. Whereas SCP STP Foundation, it's not so much they're not really pushing the these this is real, this really happened angle but they're playing with the genre. There's still I believe anonymous entries. I think so yeah. Uh, they basically are cataloging all of these creatures, entities, whatever

they are, as if they're all in containment. And so the guidelines for writing one of these is that the articles should have an interesting idea, a reasonable containment procedure for whatever it is it's being contained, and a clear description of each entry They also operate on a rating system, which was really nice for us to be able to get like a good dive in UM. If the page is low rated, they're deleted from the site if they

receive a negative nine rating or lower UM. So these people are very focused on quality, more so than a lot of the creepy pasta sites that we've been to before. There's also a spinoff game. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but it's called Containment Breach, where you play a disposable human guinea pig that's stuck in the facility and the it undergoes a containment breach, so you're alone with all the escaped entities. I I just

really liked a lot of these. They play to the weirdness of horror rather than to the gore of some of the creepy pastas, and I that appealed to me. Yeah, I mean I. I I also love the emphasis on humor and absurdity. There's still plenty of unsettling aspects to the various specimens, but more often than not, the entries put a smile on my face or even elect a giggle. UM. Plus, there's a fair amount of a variety in the style.

Most of the top entries retain that case report format, but but there are tones shifts here and there, and uh, and some rely on visuals more so than others. There's even one entry at least STP that's entirely it's told entirely through visuals, through the sequential use of like industrial hazard signs to tell the story of a deadly but perhaps loving shadow entity that creeps in and and terrifies and potentially consumes one of the researchers. Yeah, I really

love the creativity on this site. Definitely recommend that you go visit it. So our mission today and on this episode is we each took three of our favorite specimens and then we extrapolated out scientific lessons that we can learn from them. Yeah, so view it as a celebration of step foundation materials, but also using different examples from SEP as a as a stepping stone to then discuss some equally fascinating and weird science, real world science behind

the fiction. Okay, so we're gonna start off with one of Roberts and this one is called the Sculpture. Yeah, this one's pretty cool because it not only is the idea interesting, it's also the original specimen. This was the first CP Foundation specimen to have a ride up. And I'm just gonna read from the description quote move to site nineteen. Origin is of yet unknown. It is constructed from concrete and rebar with faces of Crylon brand spray paint.

SEP one seventy three. Is an is animate and extremely hostile. The object cannot move while within a direct line of sight. Line of sight must not be broken at any time. With SCP one seventy three, personnel assigned to inter container are instructed to alert one other before blinking object is reported to attack by snapping the neck at the base of the skull or by strangulation. In the event of an attack, personnel are to observe Class four hazardous object

containment procedures. So uh. A lot of these remind me of like the premises for Doctor Who episodes, and this one immediately made me think of the weeping Angels, which are sort of a favorite on the newer Doctor Who episodes. Yeah, indeed, like this is the trope, right, the the entity that cannot move as long as you're looking at it, but if you look away, it's going to creep in with alarming speed. Another big example of this are the hedge

creatures from Stephen King's novel The Shine. Oh yeah, that's right. But one of the things The Shining movie is my favorite movie of all time. But that is the one thing from the novel I really wish had made it in there. That's right, because in the in the in the movie, the original Kubrick film, we we got this hedgemazed, and certainly that works very well within the the you know,

the that adaptation. But in the original novel, they're these hedge animals and if you look away, then you look back, and they moved closer, and they get closer and closer. And I haven't seen it yet, but you know, Stephen King made his own adaptation of it, and I believe the hedge creatures are in that. I think so. I think they kept it, but I've not seen one of these days, I'll get to it now. SCP One three, as the picture seems to illustrate, is kind of this

giant space baby from a Young smunk Meyer film. At the image is pretty crazy. Yeah, it's it's like it's it's a little bit bad, but it's also it's it's creepy to look at because you're trying to imagine this thing moving when your eyes are adverted. And they believe this is also the most popular one, right or one

of the most pop's. It's right up there on the top of the list, if not the most popular, and certainly it's been around the longest, and it is a good it's a really good like template for other U imagine for anyone creating one of these now. In addition to the head creatures from Stephen King's The Shining and the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, which which, as you pointed out, these are these on the show where ancient alien predators who resemble winged humans and they make use

of time paradoxes. They move swiftly, but only if nothing is looking at them, and apparently if two weeping angels look at each other at the same time, they get trapped in their stone forms. But then, on top of these sational examples, there's Ninja Cat from YouTube. It's exactly

the same premise. It's it's uh, somebody pointing their camera at this cat is peeking around a corner at them down the hall, and then the camera moves away for a second, moves back, and the cat is peeking around a closer corner, and they move away, and then when they come back, the cat is even closer. But just like the hedge creatures of the Weeping Angels or this particular SEP specimen, you never actually see it move. It just gets closer and closer and closer to much right

on you. No, I haven't seen that one, but that sounds like it would be very amusing. Yeah, it is, it's it's it's wonderful. But this last example, ninja cat. Uh, given that it's a natural world predator as opposed to another worldly when it raises, the question, does direct line of sight, direct eyesight even protect a prey animal such as a human from a predator such as a tiger or a jumping angel or a hedge monster. Yeah, it's a it's a wonderful question. And uh, and indeed we

have some answers to that. So eye contact is of course something that creepily transcends species. And and I mean it's creepy enough with with humans, right, it's weird to humans lot gazes and there's this sense of connection, sense of openness for an attempt to dominate. Numerous studies have revealed that that it that it has various influences over

trust persuasion. A two thousand eleven study even show that eye contact can serve as an invitation to mimicry, which which has an impact on the way we learn, but also potentially on how people with autism struggle to grasp when they're expected to copy the actions of another person. Oh yeah, yeah, certainly. I mainly think of the sort of quote science of eye contact because I used to teach public speaking, and it's a big part of that,

like how much eye contact should you have with your audience? Um, where should you be moving your eyes through the audience? Would you just stare at one person? Obviously not. So there's a lot of there's a lot of rules to it to be an effective public speaker, right. But but related to that, there's there's also this mix of a continuing study into how uh, direct eye contact influences are are speaking abilities, but also there's a fair amount of

sort of folk mythology about yeah. Well, for instance, the whole idea that you should make direct eye contact when trying to convince somebody of something you see it in a speech or whatever. There was actually a two thousand thirteen University of Freiburg study that found that direct eye contact makes skeptical listeners less likely to change their minds. I believe it. So it's just it's like, oh, you're you're boring into me with your with your ideas and

your creepy eyes. I'm just gonna shut you out. I remember, I don't have them in the notes here, but I remember reading studies that like have quantified the exact amount of seconds that human beings can look at each other in the eyes before it becomes so uncomfortable that they just immediately shut down. Yeah. But the crazy part though, right, is that that if you've ever made eye contact with a dog or a cat or a zoo animal, then

you felt that inner species connection as well. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I look, that's funny that you you bring that up, because you know, I have two dogs. I hang out with them all the time, and uh look them in the eyes all the time, a lot longer than a human and I would be able to look each other in the eyes. But I think it's because the dogs are connecting differently, but it still means something to them. Yeah.

I have the same experience with our cat, who like who I know, you know, I do not this cat, especially, I do not anthropomorphizes too much, like she's she's a monster who attacks my feet, and uh, it just came around at the long wrong point in our lives. I mean, I love her, she's wonderful, but she's kind of kind

of right. Both my cats are similar, but you make eye contact with them and it's like, oh, it's like, I know that we have totally different minds and totally different brains, totally different views of the world, and yet right now we're sharing this profound activity. You're staring into eyes and you have no word for eyes. All right, you can just go down the rabbit hole on it.

But at at the basic right, like the bedrock here, is that when you when two creatures make eye contact, there's this idea that one has been seen, that one is being seen, that one is your you're know, not hiding from that other creature, the other creature is aware. And then what comes next. So there are two main distinctions in what should come next? First matching up the with with the idea of the weeping angels and uh

and topiary animals and sep one. See, there's this reality that certain creatures depend on stealth to acquire their prey. And if if they know that you see them, that is going to take away their advantage. They they are stealth hunters, they are surprised um predators, and if they don't have that surprise, then they may back off. And I can't help but think of these attacks in um an x COOM terms video games. That was I was

immediately thinking of video game. Different video game. But yeah, when you're trying to sneak up on somebody, Yeah, or d n D as well, where you have a bonus. Uh, there's a damage bonus or an attack bonus to a sneak attack, like in video games. Like Yeah, if it's a video games role playing, if the stakes are high enough,

that surprise attack can make all the difference. Uh. But but but you know, within the game it's still a game, right, Well, for predators it's uh, it's even more important because first of all, nothing beats a sure thing, right or even a near sure thing. If an attack, but if an attack does not go as exactly planned, a number of consequences can occur. So the prey might get away, in

which case you've lost energy, you've lost time. Other prey in the area might be alerted to your presence and they're frightened away, We're still an alert prey animal could have the chance to counterattack and inflict damage, and that kind of injury can prove deadly. Cheatahs, for instance, rarely

go after larger prey like an austria. There are some very interesting examples where they do develop strategies to to do that, but for the most part they don't because while to pay off for catching that off striach is wonderful if you get if they get injured, it basically can mean starvation because they are a high speed predator and a limping cheetah is not going to eat. Yeah. This reminds me of a video that I shot here for work a couple of weeks ago about killer whales

and humpback whales. There's a similar thing going on, and that killer whales trying to sneak up and take out humpback whale calves. But now humpback whales have started to fight back. Uh, to the point that humpback whales will actually interfere with killer whale attacks on other animals, like they're saving seals from killer whale attacks. Uh, and go watch the video. But there's a lot of science to it, trying to figure out what's going on there exactly to

this point. The killer whales are expending all this energy and then the humpbacks just basically pummel them down to make sure that they stay away, and they're basically teaching them a lesson like don't go after our children. Yeah, and certainly I have a hard time sympathizing with the

mammal eating killer whales. They got to eat somehow. But but then you have the fish eating killer whales where in my household, my four year old is very is very into into nature right now, and he likes killer whales, but he's very firm that he only likes fish eating. Yeah, despite the fact that the there's a particular to tie back into viewing prey killer whales that that prey on seals will do this thing called spy hopping, and my

son's very intrigued by that. And this is where they will they'll they'll they're they'll poke their heads out of the water kind of like peek over the top and see what their prey is up to. Well, maybe if that seal just made direct eye contact with the killer whale, it would swim away. Yeah, that's right. Now, that's one possibility, right, if you know, if you know that the predators after you just make eye contact with it at all times, it's great, but you're that's going to be quite a

resource drain. You can't constantly be on the lookout for predators. So the next best tactic, of perhaps the better tactic, is to fool your enemies into thinking someone's watching you all the time. And we actually see countless examples of this uh in the evolution of eye spots across various species. So these are just you know, dots on a creature that look like eyes. Now, to be clear, not all

eye spots are there to mimic watching eyes. Sometimes they're there to fool a predator and attacking a less vulnerable part of the animal. You know, don't attack my head, attack my rump, or they play into mate selection. But in some cases, yes, eye spots definitely serve as anti predator adaptations. And we also see examples of the strategy's

effectiveness outside of natural adaptation. For instance, in India, you have individuals who happen to live and work in Bengal Ti tiger country and they've long reported success with these wooden human masks that they wear in the back of their heads with wide open eyes. That the idea here is that the tiger will try and self attack them, but it sees this face staring back at them, and so they realize, oh, well, my percentage, my percentage to

hit is less, I'm not going to take the risk. Um. And and you know, various animal species have evolved eye spots that in many cases they serve to protect them from creeping predators, as I already mentioned. Uh. Currently there's this really cool project Australian conservation biologist Dr Neil Jordan's is experimenting with the use of painted on eye spots painted and then just black paint into grazing cattle. And the idea here is to protect them from lion attacks,

because lions end up attacking cattle uh. And then the humans counterattack at least all this violence, and then the lions are already endangered anyway. It's a bad situation for everyone. But so far he has reported a fair out of success with this. Say he holds a position with the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust and he recently held a ten week trial of the strategy painting eyes on one third of the sixty two cattle herd, three unpainted cows wild wound up as lion chow, but none of the eye

cows fell to bradation. So, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, But didn't we do it? Now we do? And this was it? You? Who? Yeah? So why it's in your mind? Yeah, I remember this from a couple of weeks ago. So yeah, we have a small video out there that you can go check out at how stuff works. Now they're going to do a follow up on it. Hopefully we'll see the results of that in the the weeks and months ahead.

But uh, you know they're gonna use GPS, cattle trackers, etcetera to really see how effective this, uh, this strategy is. But it does drive on the fact that, yes, there are predatory creatures where they know that you're watching, they will back they will back off where they will they will they will hold off their attack. However, that doesn't mean the direct icon atack with your specimen is always

a good thing. There are also plenty of examples where it will force violent actions out of the other species. I mean, essentially, you're making eye contact with another animal if they are if if if they might see you as prey, they're going to hold off their attack. But if they think that you were the predator, they think you might be the aggressor, they may just go ahead and counter attack. So dogs, for instance, they key into human eye movements. Have been a number of studies about this.

They're able to track our eye movements and infer intent. And this has also been documented in in other species primates, goats, dolphins, seals, even some tortoises. But of course dogs that are that feel especially threatened can actually be provoked into attacking the eye contact. UM and I imagine anyone who's ever spent a lot of time around dogs, especially around a dog that is nervous, is already feels threatened. Like you most adults, I think, no not to just go and like get

in its face and stare at it. However, according to a two thousand seven New Zealand Medical Journal report, UM this I have. This actually can also be one of the reasons that the young children are the ones who are often victims of dog attacks. When you have one of these threatened animals. I mean, on one hand, yes, the child is going to be smaller more on the dog's scale. There's more of a possibility for for for

more grievous injuries because of the attack. But also they say that a child is going to be less likely to avert their gates. So this is like the Kujo lesson of science, right, Like Kujo is a different situation. But I can't remember back to that book or the movie if there's points where they just make direct eye contact with it. Yeah. Now, but there's a kid, right, it's the mom and the kid. Yeah, they're like stuck in a car. I think I never read or saw it,

so I can't. I can't comment too much on Kujo. However, I did see the movie Congo, in which they're a number of human guerrilla interactions, and that's of course in a well known case as well, like if you encounter a guerrilla in the wild, don't make direct eye contact with it because you're going to enrage it. And uh, and this is this is actually you know, pretty well proven in fact back in two thousand seven, Uh, the Rotterdam Zoo engage in a wonderful reversal of the aforementioned

tiger fooling masks. They they gave all these these visitors to the zoo shades like little paper shades that look like averted eyes, so they're they're super goofy looking because oh yeah, there's pictures here that notes wow. Okay, so it looks like you're looking the other direction, but you're looking straight at the gorilla, so that the gorilla doesn't want like run towards the because because people were you know,

you're there to see the gorilla. You stare at the gorilla and at the stair guerrilla stares back sees you staring. Then then it's gonna enrage the gorilla. It's gonna upset the animal, et cetera. Uh So, even discounting actual human guerrilla physical interaction, you don't want these creatures to be disrupted more than than they already are artificial environment. Yeah, especially in the wake of the whole Harambe incident, this seems like something that would make a lot of sense

for most suits to implement. Yeah, but I will to go back to SCP one seventy three would not make sense, I think, to where these in the presence of that specimen, because that would mean even though you are making direct eye contact with it, it thinks you are not, and it might attack and strangle you. Yeah, it seems like what you should do with SCP one seventy three is paint your body or your clothes with eyeballs all over it that's pointing directly forward, so just in case you blink,

it still thinks that you're looking at it. Yeah, I would. I would imagine that would be a decent addition to the containment procedures procedures. Yeah cool, all right. Well, the first one that I have is SCP eight seven, and it is also referred to as the stairwell. The entity itself is just a platform staircase of thirteen steps that has a platform in the middle that rotates a hundred

and eighty degrees to another staircase. Right, So it's two staircases like we we know from the apartment buildings, but the bottom one just leads into total darkness, and after one point five flights of stairs, the staircase limits your visual range. Even if you bring a light source with you, it won't always work. In fact, any light source that's over seventy five watts has its excess light absorbed by

the stairwell. Subjects have reported hearing distressed children uh when they're on the stairs below the initial platform and on into the darkness, and the staircases depth seems to be unmeasurable and infinite, so it reminds me of House of Leaves. I was just thinking, Uh, sometimes however, explorers who have gone, you know, very far down the stairs, they all of a sudden run into a face with no pupil, no nostrils, and no mouth. So it just kind of pops up.

It's like the jump scare of this of the stairwell. Um doesn't seem to hurt people. It just goes and then it sounds like something he would encounter the Miyazaki films. Yeah, yeah, it does. It looks like it too. Yeah. They have a little image on the on the Sep. Eight seven page.

So all right, this one fascinated me and made me think about light absorbtion and want to understand a little bit more about how it worked, so I could try to extrapolate out maybe what's going on with a staircase, because again, it is a staircase that goes to a lightless darkness that may be haunted and possibly inhabited by a weird Miyazaki exactly. Yeah, yeah, so what's the deal.

How is light absorbed? Well, Uh, the way that light is absorbed can be used to identify different types of gas in space because atoms and molecules absorb it at specific wavelengths. So how the spectra of light is absorbed can tell us a lot about the energy levels of the atoms and molecules that were observing, or about the number that are present. So perhaps this staircase has a some unique attributes regarding its atomic structure. Let's consider atoms

for a second to try to figure this out. They've got a positively charged nucleus that's made up of protons and neutrons, and they're orbited by negatively charged electrons. Usually the number of protons and electrons are equal, so the atom has a neutral charge. Now I'm going to skip a lot of physics here. Okay, there was a lot to read about this, and I think it's it's over my head and I don't want to bore our audience.

But if an atom has energy added to it, that can excite it by removing an electron, This is a process called ionization, and excitation is temporary though. When the atom drops back to its ground state, it gives off excess energy, which is usually like Okay, so this is how light can be generated. Each atom emits a unique fingerprint on the light spectrum, and so that's how we're able to identify these different gases based on their atomic

structure what elements they might be. Now, visible light is a type of electromagnetic radiation. Light is composed of photons, and photons are just packets of energy that move at the speed of light. But if they're stopped, they cease to exist. So if a photon strikes an atom, it can give up its energy under the right circumstances, and in this process, the photon ceases to exist and the electron gets excited. This is absorption. This is when light

gets absorbed. Okay, absorption occurs at specific energies in specific wavelengths, and this is how we identify these gases that light is passing through in space. Depending on what they are, certain wavelengths will be removed from the light, which results in dark lines. That's what they're referred to within the spectrum. So let's apply this to s c P seven. Again, this feels like a doctor who episode to me, like like this creeping darkness and they're trying to figure out

how to get past it. So I looked into the math of figuring out how many photons are admitted per second by a seventy five watt bulb. It's possible to figure this out as a chemistry problem. That's beyond our scope here. I'm not gonna walk all the way through the math, but I found someone else who did the answer for us, and I think it's three point one

one four eight six e plus nineteen photons per second. So, based on what we know about light absorption on the atomic level, it sounds like the stairwell has some kind of element and it maybe it's a gas that absorbs photons. Above that level of three point one one four eight six e plus nineteen, then something changes about the stairwells atoms so they no longer absorb light and they create

dark lines in the spectrum. Maybe the electrons in this darkness area are just returning to their ground state, or is there something altering the wavelength of light as it's entering this area. So another possibility is the Doppler effect. This is the phenomenon of a shift in the frequency or wavelength of light caused by motion at its source right, So this can shift the spectrum towards blue or red ends,

creating different hues within light. It doesn't seem likely to me that this is the case, because it would mean, first of all, that there's something in the stairwell that would be moving the light source. You'd think you'd be aware of that. Maybe it's maybe it's the distressed children or the Miyazaki monster, but but you don't seem to see it at that point. The other reason is, even if blue and red war shifted, you'd still have visible

light from the remaining photons. This seems to create total darkness. So so, based on what you've said so far, it sounds like the best case here is some sort of gas combined with maybe some sort of meta material that's coding the just the structures it's themselves. I think so, yeah, I think that's my best guess that was at what is going on here with the stairwell now, regarding the weird face and the sound of the distress child and

the infinite stairwell, I'm I'm at a total loss. My My best guest there is maybe because the stairwell is infinite, the generated photons from the light source can't reach its end even at light speed because it's infinite. But I'm not sure My best guess though, is what you just said that there's there's something going on with the amount of photons that are generated per second, uh, and how much can be absorbed by whatever material is in there.

So the stairwell is is generating something a field, some kind of gas. Okay, Robert's got another one here. And if you have also listened to our Frankenstein episode that's been released this week, this will be familiar. It is the homunculous, yes, and I'm gonna try not to repeat myself on the two episodes too much here, So if you have any questions from any about Homunculi, tune into our Frankenstein episode as well. So this is SEP thirty

and here's the description. Sep thirty appears as a hairless, genderless, grave toned humans, seventy one centimeter in height and weighing twelve to British stones in antiquated measure. It's solid blue eyes, lacked discernible irises or pupils, and remember and resemble small cut sapphires. SEP thirty possesses an androgynous voice with a pronounced English accident, not currently identifiable as specific to any

modern region. It is able to converse, read, and write in Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as two additional languages that have not yet been identified, despite SEP thirties insistence that they should be quote common knowledge. STP thirty also demonstrated knowledge of physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, and horticulture roughly equivalent to that of a seventeenth century academic.

In addition, SEP thirty has demonstrated knowledge of these topics along research lines that do not appear in the historical record. These alternative or entirely unknown approaches to research in the natural sciences are one source of SEP thirties utility and consultation. Okay, so this immediately reminds me. You know the hell Boy universe right? Oh? Yes, what Norman Roger Roger. Yeah, it immediately makes me think of Roger the homunculus. Uh uh.

If anybody out there is not familiar with hell Boy. In that universe, there's the bpr D, which is very much like the SCP actually uh and uh. Roger is one of their discoveries, but he's also an agent. Uh. And he's he's a homunculous yeah, and that's that is Uh, that's what we have here in Sep. Thirty an ammunculus homunculus. Uh, that does seem to have a level intellivigence and alchemical understanding that surpasses what typically passes for an amunculus in

most texts. Again more in common with with rod Or, who is very much an intelligent individual. Well, I like the idea that these things are built and then they're effectively immortal, so they're hanging around for a long time. They're just absorbing knowledge like a sponge. So of course they'd be smart. Yeah, if you let one one live long enough. So homuncular are one of my favorite subjects. They're mean, creepy, weird little goblinoids that are made by wizards.

I mean, what's not to love. Um, it's an artificial humanoid created through alchemy, which again is that sixte through eighteen century hodgepodge of occultist lower superstition and pre scientific chemistry. So it's not quite a human. Uh, the creature is a rational animal as it as it often was described. And uh, you know, another fictional page and humanity's dream of mastering life and death. But one of the cool things is that you when you start getting into the text.

Of course, you get into any alchemical text, and there's all sorts of weirdness and absurdity um and as well as stuff that seems to be code for for other secrets.

It gets, you know, very byzantine. But the one one that I was looking at in particular is the liberal of the Libra of a cad the Book of the Cow, and it lays out some rather grotesque and confusing instructions in the art of do it yourself, homuncula brewing and m Makey van der Gluck's Abominable Mixtures, the liber Vock in the Medieval West, or the Dangers and Attractions of Natural Magic really lays out some excellent commentary on what it all means. That sounds like the kind of book

that you would find at Hogwarts Academy in the library. Indeed, So I'm just gonna briefly roll through, uh the recipe that is presented for the creation of a moncula. Do not attempt this at home. You can, but you're gonna reach the point where the ingredients do not exist, so good luck with it. Uh So, yeah, you're gonna create one homunculi. You're gonna need a magicians semen. Okay, you're gonna need animal blood. You're gonna need need a cow, you can need us. You need some sulfur, a magnet.

But here's where it starts getting complicated. First, a large glass or lead vessel, all right, it's gonna be a little expensive. Then you're gonna need green tutuia tutilla, which is a sulfite of iron. Right, you're gonna hunt around for that. And oh yeah, you're gonna need the sunstone, which is a mystical phosphorescent elicks sir. This is always the case with alchemists, Right, It's like, here's a bunch

of like stuff that you put in this casserole. And then oh yeah, you need this magical item that nobody knows where it is yet, like a philosopher's by the way, you're gonna need the Philosopher's stone, or you know what, or some other magical album that doesn't quite exist. Right. See it mixed the semen in the sunstone, and you inseminate a cow. You carefully plug the animal up with the sunstone, You smear the animal with with the blood

of another animal. You place the artificially inseminated animal. Then inside a dark house where the sun never shines. Makes sense. Then you feed the cow exclusively on the blood of another animal. Then you prepare a powder of the ground sunstone, sulfur magnet, and green tutilla, and then you stir with

the sap of a wide willow. Now at this point the text indicates that the cow should give birth and resulting unformed substance should be placed in the powder that you just prepared, which will cause the amorphous blob to grow human skin. And then you have a newborn humunculus and a large glass or lead container, depending on which one you used, and the creature will become crazy hungry

in this time. So you need to feed the blood of its decapitated mother for seven days, and in this time it should develop into a fully grown, tiny, grotesque humanoid with some fragment of a human soul. All right, I think I think I just got the idea for a season five of Monster Science. How Dr Anton Jessup can introduce the homunculous. You gotta do it like a cooking show. It's like as if a Guy Fieri is making a homunculous. Oh, I bet he has. I bet

he has made one before. Uh. The crazy thing though, is that, you know, we get wrapped up in these ideas of the creation of life, you know, the Frankenstein myth that we uh we we discussed at length in our in our other episode this week. But the creation of the homunculi is not necessarily a means, you know, it's not necessarily the end product. The idea then, is that now that you have this homunculi, you're gonna use

it to create other things. So you're essentially going to render it down and and use it in other recipes. So in the in the text that I mentioned earlier, they say, quote, if it is placed on a white cloth with a mirror in its hands, uh and uh, and suffumigated with a mixture of human blood and other ingredients, the moon will appear to be full on the last day of the month if you need to get around at night, like maybe you need that for another spell.

I don't know. If it is decapitated and it's blood is given to a man to drink, the man will assume the form of a bovine or a sheep. But if he is anointed with it, he will have the form of an ape. So this is like some searcy one oh one stuff right here. Now, this is where

it starts getting potentially useful. If the homunculus is fed for forty days in a dark house on a diet of blood and milk, and then it's guts are extracted from its belly and rubbed onto someone's hands and feet, he may walk on water or travel around the world. And the winking of an eye kept alive for a year and then placed in a bath of milk and rainwater,

the homunculi will tell things that happened far away. Now that that's your Homunculi horror movie right there, Like you base it around that premise, and then somebody stumbles across the dark house and they mess up this experiment. It does create an even more horrific view of alchemy, like not only are they creating horrible little abominations, but then you're tormenting the abomination to pull off various other sorceress schemes.

Oh yeah, well it gets back to what we talked about in the Frankenstein episode, the ethics of creating life from nothing. So yeah, it is we've discussed in that Like we have this base the idea, you know, the basic human ability to to imbue on living things with life. You know, you paint a picture and then that picture becomes the thing to a certain extent. So we kind of create communcula every day, but it takes something like the true mythic communculus or SCP thirty to drive home

just how weird that really is. All right, So my next one is a far step from a homunculi, although well we just don't know, because this is SCP fifty one, which is cataloged as unknown because no one knows what it is, and in fact, no one can remember that it even exists. Half the time, no one can describe what it is or its appearance. Somehow it erases any memory of itself from a subject's mind. They can't describe it. Even those who try to sketch a copy of a

photograph are unable to remember what it looks like. Watching it on closed circuit cameras causes amnesia, and it's basically called the self keeping secret. No one remembers how it was brought to SCP or who built its containment room. There's a lot in the in the file on it on the containment unit in the very particular ways it has to be contained. But the most important thing is that all personnel have to stay at least fifty meters from the center of the room. Otherwise they just forget

that it exists. Oh I, I love this. It's very It sounds like something Borhees would have come up. You know, it's like it's a paradox. It's the thought experiment. Even those who talk about it, just the act of talking about it seemed to forget that it existed shortly thereafter. Okay, so what's the possible scientific tieing. Well, we can look at amnesia or how to erase memories, and there are a lot of ways to erase human memories, and in fact, we're making a lot of headway with it right now

in modern science. But let's do a quick look at amnesia. What is it. Well, it's a loss of memory from physical or psychological conditions. Usually we're talking about a head trauma, but sometimes disease or emotional trauma contributes to it as well. Now, given the circumstances of SCP fifty five, I'm assuming it has to do with emotional trauma, Like it's so emotionally traumatizing to look at it or even talk about it or think about it that your brain just just erases it.

But I don't know, UM, or could also be reaching in with spores or something. They don't mention any traces of physical signs, but that is possible as well. It could be a disease, or maybe it's some kind of physical manifestation that's localized to a fifty meteor radius. I don't know, UM, But SCP fifty five doesn't seem to be causing what's known as anterior grade amnesia because people can form new memories. People with anterior grade amnesia cannot

form new memories. Retrograde amnesia seems to be what's going on here. That's when you're impeded from retrieving your previous memories. If it's any kind of psychogenic amnesia, then it could be dissociative or it could be like a fugue state, possibly as a result of post traumatic stress disorder. So I'm thinking again, it's causing such emotional stress that people

just completely forget about it. The reported symptoms, however, don't seem to indicate that the creation of a dissociative identity is going on here, So it's not like you go in and you see it, and you create an entire identity while you're seeing it, and then you're unable to recall the memories of your identity that interacts with SCP fifty five. It's probably not ahead trauma like I was saying, because we think there would be Yeah, there'd be evidence

unless it's electric. But even electro convulsive treatments usually lead to interrograde amnesia and not retrograde. So okay, you could possibly treat this as memory loss with drugs that use active neuroep and nephron, But would the subject recall immediately shut down their memories? Again, I don't know what if they took the drugs though. What if they took drugs that limited their perception skills while they were in contact with SCPT, so maybe then they'd be able to remember it.

I'm not sure. Um. I looked to an article called wiping the slate? Is playing with memory humane or is it just wrong? From psychology today? And it's it covers the the broad spectrum of ways in which we're able to start erasing memories. Today, scientists have been using behavioral conditioning and drugs that alter memory consolidation on the molecular level to erase memories. They can delete memories and rats, but we haven't really figured out how to target specific

memories yet. And there's three ways that they're doing it. Propran and All is a beta blocker that they use, and it can weaken the link between the facts of a memory and its emotional impact by blocking adrenaline and other substances that ignite our fear response. Another possibility is zeta inhibitor peptides. So what happens with these is they inhibit our p k M zeta enzymes so that they

can't maintain or strengthen long term memories in our brains. So, for instance, rats that are injected with this will walk right into shock rigged obstacles that they've previously learned to avoid. Uh. The last one is that our amygdala's seem to be able to be overwritten by genetically disarmed herpes. UH. It infiltrates and cripples the neural networks and a human brain, but the current human application seems very far fetched to be able to like isolate specific memories such as SCPT.

Could be an alien with some sort of space herpes maybe, or or maybe it's just emitting propaninal or zeta inhibitors. Who knows. Uh, let's look a little bit more at us. We've talked about this on the show before, especially with relation to PTSD and the use of m d m A to treat it. Because PTSD memories remain horribly intense, they're considered a disease of how memory works and in

the sense that they can't be forgotten. So PTSD subjects are actually often counseled to share their memories to try to help in the act of forgetting. But this actually rarely seems to help. However, I will acknowledge through our m d m A episodes that does seem to help them if they take m d M A and then they go through counseling. Uh, because the m d m A helps them forget by associating those memories with trust

and a lack of fear. As we've talked about in that if you haven't listened to it, I highly recommended our our two parter on m d M A and the science behind it. This would you know thinking of it? Of of this entity the specimen SPC fifty five as an as a potential alien creature that emits some sort of psychoactive substance. Yeah, like clearly it's it's not emitting m D M A. But that would be a wonderful

set out for some sort of science fiction. And maybe it's before and alien just to be in its presence without like a containment suit used to know, pure euphoria and bliss. Right. Well, yeah, it automatic, it's like a like like using pharama. Oh you know what it's like. It's like um, David Tennant's character on Jessica Jones. It creates trust and yeah, the Purple Man, I believe Killgrave. Uh yeah, it's like he's emitting uh something that makes you trust him and have a lack of fear, total

lack of fear. But I don't know if that's what's going on with that. CP fifty five could be uh, memories themselves. Let's remember this. No, I didn't mean to do that as a pun. They're not packets of data, they're not constant. The very act of remembering changes a memory itself. This model has been shown at a molecular level by neuroscientists, so therefore, memories can be altered by other chemicals, specifically that those that inhibit proteins sin the cysts.

So if new proteins can't be created during the act of remembering, the original memory ceases to exist. So maybe a SCP fifty five is suppressing protein creation. This would make sense because based on what I've covered in the past on potential memory erasure, like memories become susceptible to to tweaking, to treating, or erasure when they are recalled. Like if everyone I always think of memories is like

a clay sculpture. It's in a drawer, and anytime you get it out, that's when you end up changing the shape with your hands just by remembering it, and then you put it back in the drawer. If it's in the drawer, it's harder to get to. But if you retrieve it, if you're retrieving the memory, if you're engaged

with the memory, then it's susceptible. Well, the thing about SCP fifty five that makes it difficult to quantify this way is it somehow mimetic, because even the very mention of it like that somehow passes on this possible protein inhibition to other people, so they forget it too, Like if you've never even encountered it and I tell you about it, you'll forget about it. Uh So, perhaps the act of speaking about it somehow is passing along the

protein suppression. I don't know, like you get infected with this protein suppression and then speaking passes that along to another person. Not sure what's going on. If you couple the drugs mentioned that I mentioned above U with what's known as reconsolidation memory therapy, you can get very specific about which memories you want to erase. In fact, if you inject a protein synthesis inhibitor in rats before they're exposed to reconsolidation, they can be trained to forget all

their fear associations with something. So maybe what's going on is SCP fifty five reconsolidates your memories about it while it's also emitting either protein inhibitors or one of these chemicals. It's basically providing you with therapy about it while you're interacting with it. And depending on the ultimate nature of it, maybe this is a beneficial thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Like it's like, I know I'm horrible and you can't really

comprehend me without going mad. So I'm gonna meet you halfway here, right here, I'll give you some drugs, and I'll also talk you through it. Uh. There's a study where a team at Ricken m i t S. Center for Neural Circuit Genetics. They were able to alter bad memories in mice using something called optogenetics. They inserted genetically encoded light responsive proteins into cells so they could pinpoint where in the mouse's brain a negative memory was formed.

Then they used lasers to manipulate the neurons in the mouse brain so it forgot that memory completely. Another team in ten use xenon gas as an anesthetic on mice to modify their memory consolidation, and that inhibited their n m d A receptor brain activity in their brains, again reducing fear reactions. So this is something that science is

playing around with a lot right now. And every article I wrote read about it was like, yeah, it's not eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, YadA, YadA YadA, But it seems like lasers, drugs, protein inhibitors, zenon gas, you name it. There are a lot of ways to biologically alter our brains so we forget things. So SCP fifty five could be any combination of things. Uh that you could either use chemicals or lasers or whatever. I'm gonna go though with that, it causes such emotional trauma that

you don't remember it. The big question is how is it transmittable? Like, how does anybody out there? I'd love to know, how could something like this be a transmittable um memory erasure? How about this? Maybe it's not so much transmitted. What if this is this entity you is is something that has already been experienced by everyone, and therefore it's not so much that you're introducing me to

the idea of it, but you're reintroducing it. And and any reintroduction to the specimen either it's it's actually now you're either an actual encounter or just discussion of it of course ends up self deleting. So like what if it you know, what if it's God and you see this God right before you're born and then then you enter this world, so everyone has a as a as an existing memory, or maybe if you want to go even more fanciful and psychedelic, like everyone has like a

race memory of this entity. Right, yeah, yeah, that would make sense as well. Well, it's currently under containment, although probably thirty seconds after Robert and I uh finished talking about this We'll completely forget about SCP fifty five. We're going to talk about SCP to five eight four. Yes, SCP to five eight four. And this one, like like the last specimen we looked at, it's interesting because it

represents a paradox. Here's the description. SCP to five eight four is a species of snake that has been classified oxy Uranus or a boris. SCP four has no head or tail, as its body forms a continuous closed loop. Otherwise, SCP fours tissue and anatomy is completely normal, safe for

its circular spine, circulatory system, and digestive track. SCPO S four is able to achieve locomotion, but has no brain sense of sight, hearing, taste, or smell, and thus is only capable of reflective movements to flee from danger after injury or move towards warmer areas. Otherwise, instances tend to remain still or spin in place. So I'm just imagining it's a circular snake body with no head, no tail, but when it moves it is just kind of rolling

around like a hula hoop on the ground. Basically, yeah, imagine a snake who hoop, Yeah, and that's what this thing is. So the description goes into state that it doesn't it doesn't breathe, It depends on an unknown energy source. Again, it has no brain. Yeah, and uh, the detective it's digestive tracks seems to cycle the same matter continuously, but it's somehow able to gain metabolic energy with each cycle without without expending any of the nutrients. And it reproduces

via as osmosis into two hoops. So, uh, what we have here is they've actually got a room full of these things. It's not just one, I guess, or at least they have, you know, and given point, I don't know if they sell them in the SEP gifts. Maybe the SEP employees use them as hula hoops for their kids. They only keep one in the containment solid a time because they're kind of like troubles right in that sense. They seem to have no they lack the necessary openings,

right Yeah. Yeah, there's no obvious reproductive capabilities. Yeah. So so what we have here, and one of this is I think interesting, is that you basically have an imaginative sci Fi send up of the mythical or a boris the tail consuming serpent, which has been a potent symbol since ancient times. I mean, you see examples of it

from you know, neolithic cultures, you see it in ancient Egypt. Um. It kind of it basically emerged in ancient times as basically a symbol or a motif, and then as human culture advances, we end up applying all sorts of different reads to what it might mean. Uh. Plutarch, for instance, when when it came around his time, he described it as like this, he said, quote it feeds upon its own body. Even so all things spring from God and will be resolved into the Deity. Again, so interpretations vary,

they get increasingly more complex and spiritual. UM in Hinduism or a boras symbolism is sometimes ties in to Kundalini energy with the Kundalini serpent um. You see it in South American art um. You see it in the a Gnostic beliefs. The aura borus is the soul of the world. It's um. So it goes from just being this idea, almost this kind of primitive childlike idea of like what if a snake bit its own tail, where the snake try to eat its own tail, and then it evolves

into this paradoxical idea of something without beginning or end. Yeah, it's um. I've always thought of it as being both like a symbol of the circle of life, which I guess you could see SCP two five eight four is being a perfect representation of. But but it's also like representative of just like the quixotic nature of doing things over and over again and expecting different results. Yeah, that's true.

It kind of depends what your your take on infinity is because you can look at the oora borus, Oh, that poor snake, it's constantly being eaten eaten, or you can say, oh, that's snake, he's really got it made. It always has a meals never hungry, because it also never the glass half full kind of situation. Because I guess you can look at it too and say that the ara borus never vanishes in the araborus doesn't blink

out of existence because it cannot digest itself. Fun fact from our X Files episode Agent Scully has one tattoo and it is the Ora boros. Oh where does she have the tattoo. It's on the back of her neck, I think, And there's some implication that she may be immortal because she has it. Really well that that again there are ties to undying nature. Uh, as we saw in that Plutarch quote. Um. You you also see other sort of mythical and folklore creatures that coming from time

to time. There's the hoop snake, which was a creature from the lumberjack folklore of Wisconsin and Minnesota during the nineteenth and twentieth century, the centuries the fearsome critters as they were called, and this was a snake that would bite its own tail and roll around on ground like

a like a who um. But we also see some interesting scientific examples, so you'll you'll obviously you'll occasionally run across tails of auto cannibalism and snakes of snakes actually biting or trying to eat their tail, particularly when you're dealing with snakes in captivity. But you but you also have a few animals that engage in or a boris like actions. So there's the South African armadillo girdled lizard that actually bites its own tail, curls up and uses

the bite to keep hold of its tail. So it's a beautiful little creature. It doesn't roll around like this, but it just uses its way to protect itself. But bite onto its own tail, like maximizes its defensive capabilities. Yeah, and then you'll find other lizards and animals that curl up and sometimes even roll, but don't actually bite under their tail. For instance, mount Lyle salamanders, they'll curl up and roll downhill, but there's no biting or But back

to the specimen here. So it becomes difficult to try and imagine how this creature could actually exist because it's um it's an impossibility. It's a self sustaining system, a perpetual motion a machine. Uh, And of course perpetual motion design machines cannot exist because of friction and energy dissipation. Like you can't make a machine that will work forever without having some energy input coming along and and charging

it back up again. Likewise, even if you took out breathing concerns lack of a brain, if you just had this hoop snake creature like this specimen, and it had a meal in its belly going round and round like how, you couldn't draw on that meal forever. I mean, even if it were an everlasting god stopper, right, it would could not sustain itself unless the meal and its belly was like a wormhole opening up to a like a

food world. But no, these are similar questions, like you can't have the same meal digestive eternally it's right, and they're diminishing returns and uh. And likewise, spur if it just says that one thing and it's belly, it's not, I mean, how would that possibly work? Yeah, some kind of food is being teleported into its belly from somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, we're faced with maybe another SCP is responsible for there

you go. If there's some sort of an SCP mouse that is eternally regenerating, perhaps through a wormhole, then this creature eats it at some point. But then how does how does it eat? It doesn't have a mouth it would have. That's the wonderful nature of it. Is just a complete paradox. Yeah yeah, um, well, it's certainly worth thinking about as an exercise and understanding anatomy, and and

definitely energy consumption to that's for sure. I guess the only the only answer I can get for SP eight four is that it might be God to go back to polutar. This might be a manifestation of the mystery of the divine. Mmmm. That is worth chewing on literally. I wonder what SCP for tastes like chicken. Probably probably Yeah. Well, speaking of the ethics of science, that leads us to our last s CP specimen to thirty one, which is

referred to as Special Personnel Requirements. I really like this one because it leads us to talking about the Millgrim experiment and a lot about the ethics and sort of point of scientific experimentation. Here's the description of SCP two thirty one. It's a it's a girl, possibly a baby, that has to be subjected to something called the mon Talk procedure. Now we're never told what the details of

this are, but it sounds awful. Uh. Most of the detail in the description goes into the requirements for the personnel that are attending to s C. They have to undergo heavy psychological testing. They have to be unmarried, have no children, and express total loyalty to the SCP, and if they express any sympathy to the subject, they're immediately

transferred off the project. When they're on site, they wear helmets to conceal their identity and voice, and basically STP two thirte whatever it is, is strapped down all the time except for when they're subjected to this horrible procedure once every twenty four hours. The subject doesn't actually seem

to be that important to the entry. The story goes that they're the seventh child born out of some kind of cult organization, that the first six subjects were its siblings, and they were killed in various results from this procedure or the containment this mon Tauk procedure. The personnel that work on this are told that if they don't subject SCP two one to this horrible mont talk procedure, it will result in the end of the world. So some of the personnel also have their memory is altered, maybe

by SCP fift We're not sure. Uh, but they basically forget that they ever performed their duties in relation to this project. This pop culture wise, immediately made me think of Stranger Things. Now. I don't want to I don't want to spoil Stranger Things at all, but uh, you know, the original title for the show was montalk Um, So I wonder I don't know which came first, s CP to thirty one or the TV show, or maybe they're somehow connected, like maybe the anonymous author is one of

the people behind Stranger things. But um, yeah, the show was originally called Montalk and Uh, the idea of this secret project that's working, you know, doing terrible unethical things to a girl, it's interesting. It brings us right around to the Millgrim experiment. The reason why is one of the things they say about this SCP is that all of the personnel have to pass the Milgram experiment, meaning

that they have to take it all the way. Uh. If you are unfamiliar with the Milgram experiment, it is one of the most controversial and highly publicized psychological studies ever conducted. I would say, yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely up there. We've we've touched on it in past episodes before. Um, it's anytime you see a list of like the the most the weirdest, most unethical experiments, it tends to show upright at the top. Yeah. So if you've never heard

of it, this is how it goes. It was performed in nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty two, and it was designed to measure the extent to which ordinary people would inflict pain on other people when they are instructed to do so by an authoritative figure. It was very controversial because the people were putting these situations without informed consent, and it was influenced by accounts Milgram heard of Nazi atrocities.

He wanted to measure how willing the average person would be to obey institutionalized authority, and he actually received a grant from the National Science Foundation to do this. Conducted the experiments at Yale from sixty one to sixty two. Now you may have heard of this in relation to the phrase the banality of evil. It's often attributed to this study, but it was actually coined by Hannah Arrant in her book Aikman in Jerusalem. She was reporting on

Adolph Aikman's trial in nineteen sixty one. Aikman was a Nazi commander who helped orchestrate the Holocaust. Now, Arrant's theory was that Aikman was an associopath. He was just an average person following orders. Milgram speaks to these ideas in his book Obedience to Authority, which is sort of the publication of his his results, but he published it much later,

I let's say, like ten years later. So basically, the question raised by the experiment is could basically any office uh be a part of some atrocity chain who were just in the in the position to to receive those orders exactly. And this is how the experiment worked. There were three people in each situation, a supervisor, a learner, and a teacher. However, the only subject that was actually under scrutiny was the teacher. The other two people were

just actors. The teacher was uninformed about the true nature of the experiment, and the supervisor would tell them that what they were doing was determining whether punishment in the form of electric shocks would promote learning. So usually the person playing the role of the learner was in another room and the teacher was seated in front of an apparatus that would pretend to shock the learner with somewhere

between fifteen and four hundred and fifty volts. The teacher was then instructed to give a long multiple choice test to the learner, and every time they had an incorrect answer, the teacher was supposed to administer the shock, upping the voltage fifteen volts each time. No one was actually shocked in this experiment. The learner just pretended that they were

being shocked until it reached three fifteen volts. They would scream and you know, pretend like they're in agony at volts though, they would just stop making sounds like presumably they passed out or something. And I think a lot of these instances they were in a separate room and they couldn't see each other if they refused. If the if the learner refused, the experiments stopped, but the supervisor usually would direct them to just keep continuing. Otherwise they

would keep going until they reached four hundred and fifty volts. Uh. Now, let's be clear, the truth was always revealed to the teacher afterwards. They always told them what was actually going on um And the results were as such, sixty five of the participants kept going all the way to four hundred and fifty volts. None of them insisted on stopping before three hundred volts. Whether or not Milgram used women or men in this experiment did not change the results.

But when the physical proximity increase, the obedience factor decreased slightly, meaning when the teacher and the learner were closer to each other, they were less likely to go all the way with the shocks. This one is where it gets really scary. When a teacher was joined by actors posing as other teachers, their conformity rose all the way to

n So. Okay, the reason why we all know about this experiment is it's been highly criticized for its ethics, specifically that it did not supply the subjects with informed consent and it exposed them to overly stressful and embarrassing situations. Milgram, however, defended it, and he said, look, we've got this survey. It's an exit survey that we do with with everybody that's done it, of those people were glad to have participated. Some of them even said by doing the experiment it

made them more ethically sensitive. Now, we talked about this in the Frankenstein episode. We were sort of pretending what if Frankenstein had to apply for an i RB. This is one of those studies that led to the Belmont Report and having to have IRB approval before you do any kind of scientific experiment in an institutional stucause, you don't want to conduct an experiment that is putting people

through the emotional ringer. Yeah, unless that mean, unless there's full uh you know, knowledge of it going in, which which is part of the experiment is that they did not have that noted exactly. Uh. This is why the American Psychological Association formulated its principles for research with humans. This is why it requires all research to receive approval

by RBS. UH. In fact, uh an I RB did approve social psychologist Jerry M. Berger to obtain permission to partially replicate the experiment, but he stopped at a hundred and fifty volts when the actor began to scream. However, his results up until that point were similar to millgrooms. So this is something that's worth considering. And in fact, I want, once upon a time pitched a show here at out stuff works that would would be entirely about

studies like this. This study could never be done legally today, and that's that's a good thing. I think we can all agree on that. And yet it is incredibly influential on our understanding of human psychology. Our overall knowledge of things has has uh improved, I think you could say based on this study. So what other lessons have we learned from unethical science? And what lessons are we missing? And then let's get back to this SCP, like, what

is it ultimately about? I don't think it's about the girl. It's more about the personnel, right, It's about the horror that is this great social significance of what human beings are capable of. Well, and supposedly they're saving the world. Yeah, exactly, that's what they're told. Yeah, and that's where it gets really interesting. There's there's a couple of studies here I want to get into. Uh. I have two studies I want to talk about that are related to Millgram that

have recently been published. The first is called why People Kill, and it was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Uh. It reminds us as well of another infamous case, the Stanford Prison Experiment. In nineteen Yeah, if you're unfamiliar with that, one psychologist Philip G. S Embardo randomly assigned Stanford University students to play roles as prisoners and guards. Within days, the people who are playing guards were abusing the prisoners.

The prisoners themselves became passive. The study actually had to be called off. There's another study as well that I was unfamiliar with. Its referenced in here Muzafar Sheriff's nineteen fifty four study on how competition can escalate into conflict. He divided adolescent boys into two teams, and he pitted them against each other at certain tasks. Uh, it also had to be called off because violence started between the boys. So what's going on here? Why are we circling around

back to these projects? Because it feels like this, and this is the argument of this paper, it feels like we're at a time where we're very concerned about violence and the possibility that good people will do bad things. Right, So, think of the presidential election right now, and like the rhetoric that's being tossed around about what people are capable of and how we have to defend ourselves against them. So this kind of stuff is in the air. People

are thinking about it a lot. There's very apocalyptic thoughts in people's minds about what we're all capable of doing to one another. I mean, I would say that that is generally more of the like the standard human experience, and we in this country and in other countries, we've just been lucky to not have that being unconscious us. I think, I think you're probably right. Yeah, it's only now that we're we're having to come to grips with

this reality. Um, the studies themselves presume that people aren't born bad necessarily, but that we're all coerced or seduced, or otherwise lead into violent behavior. Now, the author of this article, not Milgram, but the author of this one. He argues this is out of date thinking as well as the idea of any kind of pure nature oriented view. So that's worth thinking about. In conjunction with this SCP, I want to give you a Millgrim quote though, to

to pause and sort of think about here. Milgrim himself said, ordinary people simply doing their jobs and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with the fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. That's

really interesting to think about. I mean think about it, not not just from this level of like Nazis committing atrocities, but like your jobs, like think about the like hierarchical structure in a job, workplace or whatever. Because it's one thing to imagine Nazis and have your your idea colored by all these story worry about portrayals of Nazis, and you can easily think oh, I would stand up for that. I would be one of the good people. But but yeah,

I think of all the smaller, mundane actions of authority. Yeah, yeah, it's it's really worth thinking about. And that brought me to um. This article called just Obeying Orders out of New Scientists. It was published in and they took the point, they said. Milgram later developed his idea of a mundane inclination to obey orders of authority into something he called a gentic state theory. This was in his nineteen seventy four book Obedience to Authority, the same one where he

talks about Hannah Aaron's finality of evil. And according to Milgram, the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in a person, all of the

essential features of obedience follow. So when you go back to this SCP, right, we've got this I don't know cultist child strapped down to a gurney and she has to be tortured with the Montauk experiment once a day basically gets back to it that the reason why is because the personnel are all willing to shift viewpoints like

this right now. The authors of this article and new scientists, they argue against Milgram's theory actually, and they cite recent historical studies that question Errant's interpretation of Aikman as well as Milgram's claim that human beings are programmed to obey authority. I just want to pause here for I never took

that to be his claim. I always thought, um that the fact that they recognize that he saw these as studies as disobedience as much as obedience, his argument to me doesn't seem to be deterministic about human nature, right that. I mean, he makes the point like at least ten percent of people, even when there's these actors involved, are going to disobey authority. Right, So it's not necessarily like he's saying this is this is it, this is exactly

what humanity is. No. Yeah, he's saying that, I mean, there's it is a silver lining, and that a certain percentage of individuals would seemingly always stand up to some sort of injustice like this. Yeah, I guess the the depressing part is when you have to ask, well, is that percentage high enough to make a difference? And even a very democratic process much less you know the inner workings of a shadowy organization that tends to weird alien Exactly, Yeah, exactly,

And that's why I love this one. It's like, you know, when you really think about it, beyond just like you know, the idea of this mysterious cultists, uh, with a experiment performed against their will every twenty four hours, there's like a lot of meat on the bone, like ethically thematically going on with just the short, little creepy pasta yeah, and and asking basic ethical questions, does like this is

saving the world worth this? This one individual injustice? Does we do do the rights of all outweigh the rights of one? Well, let's factor this in because I think this is where it gets even more complicated. Uh. Has Leam and Rich are the authors of this study from They argue, what's really going on is a balance between obedience and disobedience that's based on whether or not the person in the teacher role prioritizes the voice of the

supervisor over the voice of the learner. And to them, this reflects whether the person identifies with the cause of science or more with the plight of the ordinary citizens.

So this is really interesting to me. It's like it puts them in in one of two camps, right that the in this case with the SCP, that this science is going to save the world, right at least that's what they're told, or the plight of this ordinary girl who is being tortured by the Montauk experiment, in which case, if that's it, the order's position the experiment as being

a worthy cause that must be pursued. So the level of identification between the supervisor and the learner is really important, but so too is how much they identify with the cause of capital s science. It's very interesting, especially like

I think from our our shows sort of viewpoint. Yeah, yeah, I mean what what ultimately is driving the research and the researchers this idea that that science is this thing beyond us and then we're just near vessels for its inquisitive nature, or are we individuals engaging in a collective

effort to better the human experience and human knowledge? Absolutely, yeah, it makes I think that this is one of those things that like we can pull out and it's applicable to almost every episode we've done, right, Like, what, what's the goal of this project? What's the what's the reason are we doing this for sciences? SACA? It brings us back to cargo cult science, right or is it you know,

is it somehow affecting the ordinary man somehow? So to this end, these authors did three studies and one they used virtual reality to replicate millgram set up, and another they asked people to describe groups of other people using pejorative terms, and this range from the KKK to a family walking in the park. In their final study, they had actors perform all of Milgram's set up, so even

the teacher role was performed by an actor. When they recorded the reactions as if the actors were inhabiting these characters, and they found, once again, Milgram's results were almost exactly reproduced with these actors. So they basically found an increase in identification with science leads people to persist longer in

these unpleasant tasks. Uh. And the last thing I want to say about this, there's a researcher named Matthew Hollander, and he took the audio tapes from Milgram's study and he researched all He listened to the whole thing, like a year and a half worth of these studies, and he identified six types of resistance that were shown by the people involved with them, three of which were implicit and three were explicit. The implicit ones were silence or hesitation, imprecations,

or laughter. And some people who have listened to these tapes they interpret the laughter as being sadism, but he said, no, the laughter is just this like uncomfortablelity of obeying the orders. The explicit ones were when they addressed the learner and they would say things like are you sure you want me to continue with this? Or when they prompted the supervisor and would say is it really necessary for me

to continue doing this? Uh? And the last one was when they would just stop and they'd say, look, I'm not going to continue doing this. I'm done. Here's the really interesting thing from his study. Those who participated all the way to the end, the four fifty volts, they all used the implicit strategy is the silence, laughter, etcetera.

The participants who actually addressed the learners and tried to have a dialogue with them, they were the only people who stopped in Milgram's experiment, So that speaks something to our again the identification do you identify with the person or do you identify with the cause? Right? Yeah? And to what degree is there going to be any kind of back and forth communication over any of this? Is it just becoming a vessel for the orders? So this is to wrap it up, my one of my favorite

creepy pastas I've ever looked at. Whoever out there wrote it anonymously, bravo. Uh it really made me think pretty deeply about the ethics of what what the goals of science are, not just in terms of like, you know, the fact based stuff of like well I got to fill out this i RB protocol, you know, but more along the lines of like what's the point and what are we willing to do to get to it? Yeah?

And I think in this this is another example of how SEP foundation entries are kind of enough relation evolution of the form. Uh So instead of them just being like individual creepy bits of you know, semi wicky type material, they are little thought experiments, little paradoxes um that are

flavored with sci fi intrigue. And so I would I would definitely recommend anyone who who found these interesting to check out That website will include links on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to About Your Mind dot Com to the individual entries that we profiled here. So check those out, explore some more and if you find some then and you think to yourself, oh well these are these are perfect. If you guys do another STP episode, you should do these. You should let us

know about that. Yeah, definitely keep the messages coming about Creepy Pasta's we you know, if you keep wanting to hear them, we'll keep doing them. Uh So, let us know. Maybe it's an STP, maybe it's another creepy Pasta, but point out stuff to us and we'll look into it and maybe Creepy Pasta for the Revenge will be coming up down the road. Uh So, if you want to reach out to us, well some of the best ways or to just go to stuff to Blow your Mind

dot com. That's where we've got all our articles, our videos or podcasts, as well as links to all of our social media. Yeah, and if you're listening to your in Halloween, we also have the new episodes of Monster Science there for you. Explorations of the connections between fictional monsters and real world Science. Yeah, absolutely, I highly recommend Monster Science. My favorite thing that we do here at how Stuff Works. It's uh this is a treat to me.

This is my Christmas. Uh So, if you want to write us the old fashioned way, though, and you want to tell us about creepy pastas, maybe praise Robert for his performance and Monster Science, or you've got some experiments that you'd like us to conduct, you can always write to us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. The f