Listener Mail: Christmas at Tannhäuser Gate

to Blow your Mind dot com. A brief announcement before I get to your messages. Rob and I both are going to be out for the rest of this week and also part of next week, so we've got some vault episodes in the pipeline for you until we're back. All right, I'm going to kick things off with an excellent response to our episode on rakings by our listener Chad,

and for a refresher on the ratking episode. A ratking is the common name for a group of rats joined by the tail, usually with their tail tips tangled in a large knotted ball, and dozens of ratking finds have been reported from especially Central and Eastern Europe since the sixteenth century, and a few have been preserved in museum collections, though there is still some debate about whether ratkings occur naturally or whether they are all the work of hoaxers

like the Fiji Mermaid or other manipulated biological remains. A couple of the best sources we looked at concluded from various lines of evidence and reasoning that ratkings probably do occur naturally in the species Rattus ratus, the black rat, if not in other rats, and it happens when the rats tails become stuck or frozen together while the rats are huddling in their nests during cold weather, and then from the natural movement of the rats, the tails end

up tied in an inescapable knot. And I think I said at the end of the episode that I am basically persuaded that rat kings probably do occur naturally along these lines, but that at the same time some questions still remain, such as why do the reports of them only go back to the sixteenth century. That is kind of strange if they occur naturally, And so there are also still some reasons to be skeptical. But anyway, onto

Chad's message. Chad says, in the rat king episode, y'all suggested one particular sighting was unlikely to be fabricated because the people probably hadn't heard of ratkings, had no obvious motive, and let some of the tails loosen. Now I think I need to pause in the message here and respond to this part directly for a couple of reasons. One is that in the case in question, and Chat is talking about the rat king of saru Estonia. In the

case in question, these were not our original observations. They were observations made by the author of a journal article that we were talking about. And I'll mention the full citation again in a minute. But the second clarification I would make is that the way I understood it, the author of the paper did not cite the things you just mentioned as like the main reasons for thinking that

ratkings occur in nature and are not all man made. Instead, these observations were meant to elaborate on the author's judgment that there was no particular reason to suspect falsification in this case, And I guess the distinction I'm making there is that in addition to examining the physical evidence, the author was also saying, there's nothing about the people who found this rat king that would obviously suggest they're pulling a hoax. Of course, they still could be pulling a hoax.

It's entirely possible. I think the author's stipulating that, you know, there's no clear evidence pointing to that interpretation, the way there would be if they were obviously seeking fame and money, or caught tampering with the evidence or something like that. But I want to continue with Chad's message here because I think it makes some really great points. Chad goes on that made me think of James the Amazing Randy, who spent a lifetime disproving supernatural claims. In his book Flimflam,

he listed quote twenty hallmarks of paranormal chicanery. These seem relevant. One, it is claimed that the subject does not seek money or fame, and thus no motive to deceive exists. The assumption made is that only money and notoriety are plausible motives.

Ego and just plain fun are not thought to be sufficient. Two, the subject parentheses a child peasant or a sweet little old Lady is said to be incapable of the techniques required, lack of sophistication precludes deception, and three faults discovered in the story or performance tend to prove the phenomenon is real. It is agreed, since a clever trickster would not make

such basic errors. And then in summary, Chad says, I don't know if rat kings are natural or man made, but humans can be ingenious when it comes to fraud. So thank you for the message, Chad. And yes, I strongly agree with all of these points, though I think they apply to the rat king in question to different extents. So one thing to point out is that ratkings are different from most of the types of claims of like

supernatural or paranormal phenomena that Randy investigated. You know, he would look into people who claim to have powers of telekinesis or remote viewing and things like that. In ratkings, even though they are rare and bizarre, they do not seem incompatible with any known laws of nature, and whether or not they occur naturally, it seems perfectly plausible in principle that they could be created by ordinary physical mechanisms. So you don't have to posit like another layer of

reality in order for rat kings to exist. You know that they could totally be created by just like rats huddling in their nest and then maybe urinating, and then the urine freezes and their tails stick together, and then they move around a lot, and this ties their tails in a knot. That's a normal, ordinary mechanism. It's still a good question whether this does in fact happen in nature,

but nothing seems all that implausible about it. And because of that, I'd say, for me personally, like before we look at any of the specific evidence for or against them, the baseline probability of rat kings occurring in nature is a lot higher than that of other things Randy was investigating, like people being able to see through sheets of solid

lead or levitate objects with their minds. So anyway to come to the case in question, these considerations that Chad mentions came up when we were talking about the rat king of Saoru, Estonia. This was an alleged find from a village and I think southwestern Estonia in two thousand and five, which was discussed in a paper by an author named Andre Miluton published in two thousand and seven in the Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Biology

and Ecology. And after investigating the remains of the animals and the history of this find, which was found on a farm in this village of Saru, the author of the paper concluded for a number of reasons that the rat king was most likely a genuine natural biofact and not a hoax constructed by the farmer who found it. And I guess I'll go through some of the claims raised by the author that were singled out by Chad

and then compare those to the points raised by James Randy. So, first of all, the author mentions that the farmer claimed to have never heard of ratkings before, and that the farmer did not seek or receive any financial reward for

the find. But James Randy, he says, you know, believers often say this about people who claim they have psychic powers, or that they communicated with Bigfoot, or any number of other weird and unlikely claims, and it doesn't actually prove all that much because even if it's true that the person is not profiting from their claim in terms of fame or money, sometimes that's not even true to begin with. But even if that is true, people have obscure motives.

People do things to amuse themselves, to see if they can get away with it, to get attention on a very small scale, or maybe just because they truly believe in the underlying phenomena they're trying to provide evidence of and they want others to believe it as well, and they think that perpetrating a hoax will further that belief in something that they ultimately do think is real. You know, you've got to do a hoax to show people the truth.

There are all kinds of motives people can have for deception, and we should be humble in accepting that it might not be obvious to us what a person's most inovation would be. So in the case of the Saru rat king, I think that it would be relevant information if we saw that the farmer who found this ratking was clearly trying to leverage their find into money or fame. But the fact that they're not trying to do that provides only minimal information about whether the rat king is natural.

The second issue Chad raises is that quote the subject is said to be incapable of the techniques required, lack of sophistication precludes deception. I guess the way I would see this applying to ratkings is the author of the paper pointing out that it is impossible to tie up the tails of living rats without anesthesia without making them go to sleep with the help of drugs which most people would not be able to pull off. Most people would not be able to esthetize all these rats and

glue their tails together. I think this is a more solid point, especially since, as far as I'm aware, for the first f few hundred years during which rat kings were originally reported, there were no widely known and reliable methods of veterinary anesthesia. I looked into this a little bit, and I think that's the case. Though if you have evidence to the contrary, please write in with it. I'd

be interested in that. But anyway, also remember the conclusion I mentioned in the rat king episode from those very sad, unfortunate experimental rat king studies, and that conclusion was that tying the tales of dead rats together does not work. It does not create the kind of not ball in

the tail that rat kings are reported to have. And also many rat kings are reported to contain animals still alive when they're found, So these would have to be created by people who are tying together the tales of living rats, and to do that you pretty much would just have to put the rats to sleep somehow, and

that would take modern techniques in pharmacology. So while I do take Randy's general point that we shouldn't be too quick to judge a superficially unsophisticated person as being incapable of pulling off a clever fraud, in this case, I think the physical and pharmaceutical requirements for creating a rat king are a kind of big hurdle to get over, especially historically, I guess, less so in the modern day, and while it wouldn't be impossible to do today, it

would be difficult under what the author calls farm conditions. So this is not conclusive about the sorry rat king doesn't prove its real, but I do think this is a stronger piece of evidence that makes a fraud seem less likely. And then third Chad says quote false discovered in the story or performance tend to prove the phenomenon reel. It is agreed since a clever trickster would not make such basic errors, and I think this one is a

really good point. It goes to the observation that even though the tail knot of the rat king loosened as the rats dried out, no one made a sub sequent attempt to tighten it, And I agree that does not actually prove all that much, except that you know it's worth flagging in the negative, as in, there was no obvious attempt made to tamper with the evidence to make it look more convincing, and it would be notable if

there had been such an attempt, but there wasn't. Though again, this in itself is not strong evidence that the rat king was natural. Now, the author of that paper we were looking at did conclude, on the basis of examining the physical evidence and relying on past where concluding the reasoning of Martin Hart, whom we also cited in the episode,

that rat kings probably are genuine. And remember another piece of reasoning that Heart offered is that they are essentially always made up of the species Ratus ratus instead of other species like Ratus Norwegicus, even in places where both species are present, suggesting something about the behavior and biology of Ratus ratus could be what allows the kings to form anyway, Coming back to Chad's point about the wisdom of the late James Randy, I agree with all these points,

and I would say, as a general rule, I think we should be careful about trying to determine what really happened in an unsolved situation or an ambiguous situation by relying on what you might call theory of mind considerations, like making internal inferences about the people involved. You know, what they know, what their motivations are, how you think they would behave in a given situation, and so forth.

In other words, if somebody tells a weird story and you're trying to figure out if the story is true, I just wouldn't place a lot of weight on evidence such as my opinion about whether the person would have a motive to lie or not, or my opinion about how a person would have acted if they were lying versus if they were telling the truth, and so forth,

so forth. That kind of stuff might provide a little bit of information, but not a whole lot, And it just it relies on unverifiable speculation about the mind states of other people. And in a case where you actually do have like physical and scientific evidence to refer to. There's just not a lot of reason to rely on

those theory of mind considerations. So anyway, thank you chat okay, I'm going to move on to some messages in response to our series called the Sunken Lands, about areas that within the last few thousand years were dry land but are now submerged in water. This first message comes from Chris. Chris says, Hi, Robert and Joe really enjoying the series on sunken Lands. Your mention of the church tower and submerged village in Italy prompted me to share the story

of vale House Reservoir in Derbyshire, UK. It was built along with a series of adjoining reservoirs in the eighteen sixties to provide drinking water to the the nearby city of Manchester and surrounding towns. Once construction was completed, the local village and its mill were flooded. I will let Wikipedia take over from here quote. The chimney at the Valehouse mill survived the construction of the reservoir and became known as the Whispering Chimney as it produced ghostly noises

during strong winds. It was demolished in eighteen eighty seven at the request of the Manchester to Sheffield Railway Company, who feared for the stability of their trains when all the passengers crowded over to one side of a carriage to see the chimney protruding from the waters of the reservoir. Thanks for all your hard work. Best wishes, Chris Well, Thank you, Chris. You know I went to this is a great story. So I went to the wiki to check out the source of that story, and unfortunately the

citation goes to a dead link. I did a little more digging. I didn't have a lot of time, but some brief digging and didn't find much on this. So if anybody listening has a good source on this chimney from the Valehouse Reservoir, I send it our way. Please contact that stuff to blow your mind dot com because that's a great story about the railway company. I would love to know more about that, all right. This message comes from Harry. Harry says, Hey, Robert and Joe. Happy holidays,

longtime listener, first time writing in. I finally have a relevant anecdote. I loved your inclusion of the Hoffiker paper and the Beringian hypothesis in the third Sunken Lands episode.

This was the paper about the so called Berringian standstill hypothesis, which argues for several reasons that the ancestors of the people who eventually spread in to populate the Americas lived in the area of Beringia, in the area sort of between modern day Russia and Alaska for thousands of years, specifically, stayed there isolated from the rest of the Asian population for thousands of years before they spread down into the

rest of the American continents. So, anyway, picking up in Harry's message, Harry says, my professor at Saint Andrew's University in the Earth and Environmental Science department, told me a story of how he met one of the authors of the Hoff paper at a conference. They mentioned the hypothesis to him, and it happened to be that he had just conducted research on modeling and proxy data in the

North Pacific. He had found that during the last glacial maximum, changes in the Couroshio Current, which makes Vancouver temperate at high latitude today, drove warm water and mild climate to Beringia. This supported the hypothesis and further explained a long time gap in the DNA evidence, Beringia could have been a haven with populations potentially blocked from moving elsewhere by continental

ice sheets for many thousands of years. Together, they managed to book time on a Bearing Sea research cruise to sonar for evidence of the civilization. In a devastating twist that partially explains why evidence of Boringia is so scarce, the notoriously bad weather of the Bearing Sea forced them to cancel part of the cruise and the research couldn't be completed. That would mean that it certainly was a standstill of a kind, even to those living at the time.

As migration has been a constant for our species, few of us could imagine living in such a constrained context. Yet such people may be the ancestors of all North American first peoples. Keep up the great work, Harry. That is fascinating. Thank you, Harry. Okay. One last message, this comes from Erin. Aaron says, gentlemen, I very much enjoyed your recent episodes on sunken lands, and it brought to mind a place not far from y'all, a Disto Island,

South Carolina. The history of the island connects with your recent episodes in two ways. First, the coast of what is now South Carolina extended far out into what is now ocean during the Last Ice Age. See this article for a map showing the approximate location of the old coastline, and then Erin attaches a link to a US Geological Survey article that does have a map that shows the

coastline going way out from where it is today. The message goes on because of this, there is a particular part of the beach in Edisto State Park where numerous fossils from prehistoric land animals can be found, particularly after a storm. I've attached a little map showing the location in case y'all ever visit. I've also attached a picture of some of our discoveries from our last visit. It

includes sharks, teeth, and other marine fossils. Occasionally, pottery, shards and stone tools from prehistoric human inhabitants of the area can also be found. I believe the red circled rock in the picture is a bit of broken pottery with some simple decoration, though please take my dilettantish identification with

a grain of salt. Second, a Disto has its own Atlantis story prior to eighteen ninety three, there was an island off the coast of a Disto called Eddingsville, and it was very chic among local planters to have beach houses there. There were even two churches on the island, Episcopal and Presbyterian. A series of hurricanes over the course of the nineteenth century washed the entire island away. The churches were moved before the island's final destruction and are

now on Edisto Island. One of them is still being used as a church, I believe, but some of the houses were destroyed during the hurricanes, and because of this. Nineteenth century brick fragments are also easy to find on the beach in a Disto state park. They are usually fairly small, but I found the big one in the third picture on my second ever visit to the beach. The golf ball is for scale. It makes a great bookend,

and of course Aaron has many pictures attached here. Finally, on an unrelated note, the Omega Man has come up a few times, including in the most recent episode. I think it would be a great film to cover on the show. The soundtrack by Ron Grainer, who did the theme for Tales from the Unexpected, which featured in one of your anthology of horror episodes is one of my favorites. Somehow it manages to be groovy and thoughtful at the

same time. Keep up the great work, guys. The release of Weird House Cinema in particular is always a highlight of my week. Best erin Well, thank you so much, erin great message. So that's going to do it for today. But thanks again to everyone who wrote in. We don't have time to feature or respond to all of the messages we get, but we do read and appreciate everything you send our way, so please keep it coming. It

really means a lot. Hey, if you're new here, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a show about science and culture, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mondays we do listener mail episodes like this one, though usually

my co host Robert is on Mike with Me. Wednesdays we release a short form episode called The Artifact or the Monster Fact, and on Fridays we feature a special series called Weird House Cinema, where all we do is watch, recap and discuss weird movies, good bad, well known, obscure. We take all comers as long as they are strange. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.

If you would like to get in touch with us to give feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stuffed blow your Mind dot com.