Space Weapons: Rods From God

heard of. Yeah, and we're talking about weapons here, a crazy weaponized scheme that this will disguise ultimately doesn't really hold any water, but but it's a It just shows to what extent we'll we'll think about what are our greatest technological achievements and then how can we use those

as a grandiose means to reign death on our enemies? Yeah? Yeah, and I will get into it, but I can sort of understand the justification for guys sitting around the room trying to come up with all these grizzly ways to destroy one another. Before we get into that, though, I want to remind our audience that we are periscoping every week now. So we did our first episode last week as of this recording, and we are going to be

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sort of jibber jabber on the side. Last time we shot from within the podcast studio, we you know, will hopefully be able to talk to you about what we've recorded this week, what we're recording next week, behind the scenes stuff, get to know with stuff. Uh yeah, so

check it out if that's your thing. And in addition to that, we have heard and uh you know this may or may not be true, but we've heard that if your iTunes reviews are if you have a large quantity of them, and obviously I would assume if they're positive that it helps your rankings and iTunes for other people to discover your show. So if you listen to us on iTunes, if you have time, leave us a

review and help that algorithm out. And also, we just found out yesterday that we are now available on Google Play as well, so if you're using an Android device or or something else, I believe you can download or stream right through Google Play. Now. Yeah, yeah, it's exciting, another great way to check out the your favorite episodes. So let's get into Let's let's get into the meat of this episode though, which is something that's referred to

as Rods from God. And I know that sounds like a horrible title for our pornography film, but it is actually a space weapons system that has been devised and has not actually been built to my knowledge. But but the the idea is basically as simple as this um

space is already weaponized. Okay, so we know, like the Corona was launched in the early nineteen sixties, is the u S is for spy satellite so they could gather information on the Soviets and their military arsenal uh Global Positioning System, the GPS that we use in our cars and on our phones that was originally designed to offer

navigation and timing for the U. S military. So the idea here is that because space is becoming a an area that is getting weaponized not only by the US by but by other large nations like you know, uh, former Soviet Union. We'll talk about China in a second, these military teams are actually assigning the goal of trying to find out other ways of developing technology for both range and accuracy from space in the same way that

they did for land, sea and air. So space is becoming a war zone and weaponized, right, And that's where Rods from God came from. Yeah, a k A. Project thor or. This is the more technical title that I like, hypervelocity rod Bundles, not to be confused with pro wrestler Rod hypervelocity bundle, um who I couldn't help but created my own head when I was reading this, uh, but hypervelocity rod bundle. And it all comes down to just

this single stupendous idea. As a as a superpower, I have the ability to put things into orbit and then bring them back down again, which is just god like in terms of human technology. So god like is this power that I don't even need to use a weapon. Theoretically, I could just put some tongusten up there. I could put some steel up there and then just drop it on you, and it's reintrigud alascity would be enough to take out an enemy encampment, to dig down into a

bump bunker and blast that out. Doesn't even need any explosives or munitions, just a big beam of steel. We're literally talking about telephone pole sized bars of tungsten or the other one that is proposed as uranium, and I'll get into that in a minute, but that you just drop, uh like handing a bus to god Zilla getting him to throw it a well. One of the alternatives you

wrote was death pennies from Heaven. I mean, the idea here is essentially the same principle as that old urban myth of the Union throw a penny off the Empire State Building and it kills somebody, right, So it's the same kind of principle here that that the idea being that they would take two satellites, they'd launch them into orbit. These two would work together several hundred miles above earth. One of them is for targeting and communications back to

the ground. The other one carries a bundle of twenty foot long tungsten rods that are one foot in diameter, so these are pretty big. Between the time that somebody on the ground says, uh, drop the rods, it takes fifteen minutes for them to hit their target. They followed a speed of thirty six thousand feet per second, and when they hit they have the same destructive force as a meteor strike. So that's essentially what we're talking about here. Uh.

The math goes like this. The energy is greater the higher the orbit that you drop them from, right, but so is the fall time. So in order to get the energy the same energy of like a high explosive munitions, you would need a material speed of three kilometers per second, and to do that you have to at least get up to an altitude of forty four hundred and sixty kilometers.

This corresponds roughly to about twelve minutes falling time, and that I think they probably added another three minutes for you know, I'm assuming communications and mechanics of the technology and such, But that's how this idea works. You're literally dropping telephone pole pulls of metal on people on your targets, and it just hits so hard that it will supposedly

just create this incredible explosive impact digging down into the earth. Right, And like you said, the idea here is that if somebody like you're, you know, Osama bin Laden style target is in a deep underground bunker, this is the way that you get them without radiating the entire land around them. Yeah, and again it comes back to that it's very reminiscent of the myth of the penny off the top of the Empire State Building, which again, as you pointed out,

wouldn't kill anybody. It's it's only a gram. It tumbles as it falls, so there's too much air resistance for it to do any damage. But even still, if you were to throw a fifty gram nut off the Empire State Building a roll of pennies, which is certainly more like a rod um a bullet now you're talking, that could actually kill somebody. And so that's the basic idea here is just an epic death pennies from having kind

of scenario. And the other so I mentioned uranium. So the tungsten and uranium, with the two materials that were specifically listed. I originally wrote about this on a sister site for How Stuff Works called Stuff of Genius, and one of the readers they're actually suggested that titanium would be better. And I don't have any inkling about materials sciences, so you know, I'd love to hear from the listeners

on what they think on this. But they were saying that basically, tungsten is flammable, so of course it's going to burn up on re entry, which we'll talk about later, and uranium is reactive. Uh So it seems to defeat the purpose because the gist here is that you want to have the same explosive impact as a nuclear weapon without leaving behind radiation, right, and essentially having that kind of high powered explosive weapon without actually having to use explosives.

Now we're talking about guys sitting around thinking up ridiculous high tech ways to tosh out some death. Who thought this one up? So this is guy named Jerry Cornell, and you out there may be familiar with him because he's primarily known as a science fiction author. I was gonna say, that's that's this name ring a Bell from Path to Sci Fi section Perusals. Yeah. So Cornell, he's an engineer. He's a science writer. He's primarily known for

science fiction. H He has degrees in experimental statistics, systems, engineering, psychology, and political science. He worked for Boeing in the nineteen sixties and the idea was that he was going to help develop the aerospace industry. But this is where he came up the idea with dropping metal from outer space to kill people. Um. I don't know if that was, you know, on his action item list from a meeting or something, but this is where it came up. So

the idea is a kinetic energy weapon. That's kind of the herm that's used for these style weapons. It's been around since something called the Rand Corporation proposed placing rods on the tips of I C B M s way back in the nineteen fifties. And we'll get back into that later because that seems to actually be the more plausible method of kinetic energy deployment. Yeah, attaching to the front of an intercontinental bollistic missile. A little bit more

about Jerry Parnell. I want to get into though, before we get into to the rest of the science behind Rods of God. So he's, like I said, he's best known as a sci fi novelist. I haven't read any of his books, but I'm really curious about them. He maintains a pretty active blog. Uh. He attracted attention from politicians in the eighties. Ronald Reagan actually applauded a tract that he wrote that was called Mutually Assured Survival as

space age solution to nuclear annihilation. And then he and Newt Gingrich actually teamed up and worked together on a novel that is so far unpublished. I want to read this though. It's called The Faction, and here's the premise. The Yakuza worked together with big corporations to overthrow the government, and the way that they do it is by using kinetic kill type weapons. They use Rods from God. So he's repurposed his own idea for for this novel that

he's working on with Nuke king Rich. Unfortunately, he suffered a stroke in he's still writing. My understanding is that he's still active, but not as much as he used to be. By the way, and I have not read this, but apparently he wrote the novelization of the movie Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Oh wow, Which that's so? Is that the one that has a nuke in it as a central theme? Is that the one with the undergo cool letter ground stuff. Um, I always get them

mixed up. I later escape from Planet of the Apes, the one where they go back in time and they actually two Apes come to present day America and they end up trying to convince like Congress or something like that that they shouldn't uh, you know, proceed with war. Yeah, that was I timed out before they really got to that point. In my viewing, this one would be the third. I've just looked it out. Yeah. The first one that's

Planet of the apeses we know and love it. Second one is Beneath the Plant of the Apes is a few of us know and love. But I love it because it has those more locky in creatures that live underground and worship the bomb. This would have been the third one he wrote for the So, so keep in mind that the guy who came up with this idea and that the US government has actively worked on, and also the weapons industry has has actively worked on, also

happened to work on the Planet of the Apes franchise. Uh, and So in particular, in the last decade alone, there's been two big reports that are public and have been written about this. The first was in two thousand three and it was the U. S. Air Forces Transformation Flight Plan. And then in two thousand two that RAND Corporation again, uh, they wrote a report called Space Weapons Earth Wars, which were probably gonna reference a lot in this because we

read it for the podcast. Um and I'll link to some of these resources on the landing page of this episode, at least the ones that are easily accessed by everyone. So this is a concept that people are taking seriously. They're they're doing the math, they're doing the science. They're trying to figure out can we drop these telephone polls on our enemies and destroy them without irradiating them. And

there's one other benefit to this too. The other benefit is that weapons like this wouldn't technically violate the nineteen seventy two Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. So if you put them up and you were dropping them in the way that we're we've described, I think you could you know, work your way around that. Now, I want to point out that just just as this relates nicely to dropping

pennies off the mentire state building. There have been a number of missile weapons that achieve the same ends, though in a smaller scale. You know, make a payload go up, bring it back down. Uh As for achieving enough altitude that the descent speed weaponizes the payload, well, we have a couple of interesting examples from the twentieth century. Um in World War One that you saw air dropped fletchets, which were essentially just look like metal arrowheads that were

dropped out the same ideas. So you dropped them from an airplane, they can achieve enough velocity to do some damage when they hit. Those are the things that the X Men archangel shoots out of his wings. Yet yeah, I feel like they flashettes show up his um as immunition and the sci fi properties as well, Like I think Gibson deployed them. Roment idea of using them as kinnecticut like railguns or something like that is popular because again the ideas of it's moving fast enough, there's enough

kinetic energy you don't need explosive energy. Additionally, there's something called lazy dog bombs, and these are developed in World War Two and deployed in Vietna and Vietnamic Korean wars, sometimes called buzz bombs, sometimes called lawn darts, because essentially that's what you're talking about, a bunch of small, unguided

kinetic projectiles. They're not technically bombs. Often they're dropped in clusters, sometimes for a mounted casings underneath the wing of an airplane, other other times supposedly just hurled out in a bucket, you know, very very loose, very Hey, we're up here just by virtue of being in the air at a certain altitude, we have the kinetic advantage by throwing these

things out. So the idea itself pretty simple. But when you take it up, when you take it up to an orbital level, that's where you get some real, essentially cosmic destructive possibilities. Yeah, and so this kind of reminds me, I know, this is like an actual explosive munition, at least as my understanding. But around the time of the beginning of the war in Iraq, Uh, there was a lot of attention being paid to the Daisy Cutter. Do you remember that it was a specific kind of like

bunker buster type weapon, uh. And I think the attraction was that, like it was so incredibly powerful that it could defeat our enemies, and yet it wasn't as horrific as like the nuclear bomb right in off exactly, yeah, shocking off. So I think this is the same sort of principle, although it's kinnectic and not explosive. UM and I do want to take a second here too as

an aside. These are different from what you may have heard about in the news lately, being referred to as anti ship ballistic missiles or a s b M. S UM. These have been They were something that the US actually tested in the nineteen sixties and had two successful flights with the Soviet Union developed them in the past, but more recently, in January of two thousand and fourteen, China conducted a test of a hypersonic glide vehicle that was

designed to carry missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers. UH. This thing flies at mock ten. It isn't the first time that they've developed an a s b M, but it's thought to be like the stage, the second stage of their program essentially, UH and the idea is that it's very similar to this. It launches an I C b M up into outer space and then sends that back down at mock ten, so there's no satellite up there. It just launches it up and brings it back down.

And the ideas that one of these things would hit an aircraft carrier and just completely take it out, and that uh they move. I think the idea here is like that they move so quickly, uh faster than actually like traditional munitions, that they're difficult for anti air defenses to take down. So there's some concern about that. But

this is not the same not the same thing. Okay, alright, well we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to get into the feasibility of rods from God's and this is where it gets a little more fun and ultimately where everything falls apart. All right, we're back, Yeah, so let's talk about how feasible rods from God actually are. It's nice a bunch of guys sitting around in a room smoking cigars, talking about sci

fi ideas on how they could kill each other. Then let's get down to the nuts and bolts of this thing. So first of all, uh, there's some scientific reasons why it wouldn't work. Uh. One is vaporization. So the thing that that we see with with meteorites. Yeah. Uh so

even a giant tungsten rod would probably vaporize on impact. Um. There's been some ideas that, like you could attach to retro rockets to each one of the rods that would slow their re entry slightly, but some the calculations basically say that if you did that, the non explosive rod would then be no more effective than the commit conventional munitions that we already have it And you're kind of betraying the spirit of the thing, right, because the whole

idea is I have all this technology and I can use it to destroy up drop a big chunk of metal lining. If we're putting rockets on that, then we're kind of getting back into the area of just creating a space missile. Yeah, and it's going to be more expensive to which is another drawback that the physics just wouldn't work. High velocity impact would limit the actual penetration depth. So remember, like you know, part of the idea behind this is to bust bunkers, right to get those underground

uh headquarters, I guess that are usually unreachable. If you look at high speed photography of a bullet impacting steel at one kilometer a second. And remember, to achieve the rod from god uh impact, you have to hit three kilometers per second, but just at one kilometer a second, Apparently the jacket fragments right off of the bullet and leaves a small crater on the on the steel that it strikes. So the idea here is that like there would be probably a similar effect on a larger scale

that the rods would chatter vaporized. They might leave a little bit of a crater, but for the most part, it wouldn't have the explosive impact that they're looking for. In fact, the Sandy A Laboratory, which I didn't know about until doing this research, it's a national security nuclear weapons testing facility. They've actually confirmed predictions about this UH looking that at that even the hardest materials will max

out their penetration capabilities at one kilometer per second. So you go any faster than that, the tip of the rod will probably liquefy. Uh. It will cause the penetration depth to fall off, and then you get this situation where even if they're delivered from low altitudes, they would only deliver one ninth of the destructive energy per gram force. As a conventional bomb. So again, what's the point of that where we're totally losing the spirit of our beautiful,

uh death dealing device exactly. Yeah, And also keep in mind too that even if the entire rod doesn't vaporize, the tip would probably deform or something like that, which would change their flight path considerably and you end up striking a nearby town or something rather than the bunker that you're trying to strike. Yeah, because each rod would need to follow eight percies nearly vertical flight path they

wanted to reach its target. Again, assuming you don't have any kind of thrusters on there that are turning into a missile more of a guided missile anyway. So I mean it's difficult enough to figure this out without factoring in a rod it's partially disintegrated or warped due to

all this re entry friction. Yeah, and so this is the thing like for me, like again, not knowing a lot about material science, I'm wondering why tungsten is the metal that they chose for the proposal, given that it's flammable and it's you know, going to be just on re entry alone, probably gonna catch on fire. So I'm not quite sure, there must be a reason, though, I would think, or maybe maybe it's literally just like a

sci fi novel pitch and just in with it. Uh So, Actually to get to the you know, the the actual proposal in that Rand Corporation Space Weapons, Earth Wars, the authors suggest that one way that they could address this is by quote extruding material through pores in the nose tip of the rod for evaporation. Another option, they pitch is abletative cooling, where the outer layer would be designed

to melt away on purpose. But again, then you get that thing where the nose potentially deforms, and then you know, it's just completely unpredictable where this thing is going to hit. Yeah, you again, we just see it at time and time again. Here, with just the basic physical design, it sounds like it'll be a simple, yeah, procedure, a simple design. But even then you have to tweak it. It's like, all right,

we gotta put thrusts on it. It needs the tip needs to use and it needs to be reflective, and and what what next? It needs to crew. All this stuff essentially makes it untenable. Not to mention that there's something called the absentee ratio for the satellites that are circling around in orbit carrying all these rods. So because satellites circled the planet every one dred minutes, they won't

always be in position to hit their target. So yeah, I remember that whole thing, like, oh, yeah, you just call it from the ground fifteen minutes later boom, right, But no other side of the exactly, You've got to wait for it to actually be in position to hit the target. And satellites as we have them right now can't really change their speeds that easily or maneuver around in orbit because there's no atmosphere, so they might not

even work because of this. And then you know, there's also the whole idea of like if you're up in orbit again, like you have to break the atmosphere for re entry, so you need some kind of thrust too. Yeah, that's one thing that's important to keep in mind is that, yes, you have to use all of this energy and effort to get something into orbit, but then you also have to use energy and effort to get it out of orbit um at least to get it out of orbit

along the timeline that you're looking at to weaponize the thing. Yeah, and the satellites as well. Here's another like the whole reason why this isn't feasible, the satellites would probably be vulnerable to ground based attacks. Right, So let's say, uh, China puts one of these up in the in the in orbit and it's floating around there. We're going to be able to detect that and we'll probably be able

to shoot it down. Yeah. Yeah, we've been able to bust satellites for a while, so that's yeah, that's not even an issue. So then to improve efficiency there, they'd have to launch even more satellites, which costs even more money. And these things are not cheap but crazy expensive. So okay, how expensive is it? So we know from NASA that it costs ten thousand dollars per pound to put something

into orbit, no matter what the object is. Right, So somebody actually broke down the math and I brought it here for us today. If one of these rods weighed point one tons and there were three tons of propellant on it to stop its orbital motion, basically to give it the thrust to get through, because that the wise, it's just going to continue to orbit. H That means that launching one rod would cost thirty million dollars and you need at least ten rods per satellite. So this

is just insanely expensive. Uh. And like we said, there's just you know, a lot of feasibility shoes science wise, strategic wise, and then it's just incredibly expensive. Yeah, cost a ton of money. And you're you're ultimately going to have to do so many things too. You're gonna have to turn that rod into a into a guided missile anyway to make it work. So why I just use a guided missile? Yeah, absolutely, And that's one of the proposed solutions, right to just use an I C d

M instead. Yeah, And ultimately it goes all the way back to that nineteen fifties rand proposal. So the idea there was that they would attach the rods to uh intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are the I C b M s that you know, only a few nations actually have access to that launched missiles around the world. The downside

is that these could be detected a lot easier. So I was saying earlier about how like the kinetic drop makes it so that they're so fast that they can it's a lot harder for them to be detected by anti air defenses. Um. But so here's some more math for you to get the one kilometer per second speed that would be needed an acceleration of thirty times that of gravity. So this is something that a nominal solid

rocket motor could probably provide. It would take three point three seconds over a distance of one point six five kilometers. So that actually doesn't sound like all that much, right, especially compared to what we've just been talking about with dropping these telephone polls. But this would only cost us a hundred thousand dollars or less, plus the cost of a terminal guidance system. I don't know how much of those run for nowadays, where it's like an iPhone, Yeah,

I think it's as the next box one. Yeah, uh so it's cheaper, sounds like it would probably work better. I think the disadvantages the speed factor, and and then also that it's not coming downward exactly, it's coming at an angle, right, so that possibly would lead to less penetration.

I'm not quite sure. Um. But the other proposal from that space weapons Earth wars proposal, I would love to just be a fly on the wall for the writing process of that, Like the people sitting around just putting that together for the RAM Corporation, there's no bad ideas in brainstorming space weapon. So their ideas to try conventional ordinance that delivered from space, so basically just space bombing

space rockets. Um. So the idea here is that they would have the direct destructive force, but it would be outward instead of downward like I was talking about earlier. They'd be slower, but they wouldn't erod uh. And they would require explosives in fusings. And here's the problem with that that they'd have to survive the impact, right, but then they'd also have to be able to determine their depth penetration before they exploded. Getting back to that bunker

busting exactly. Yeah, the ideas that these got to drill underground, so and again they're more susceptible to terminal defenses than kinetic weapons would be. So when you put it all together, Rods from the Gods, Operation thor whatever you want to want to call it, kinetic strike force, raw, kinetic strike force, rod bundles, Uh, it just doesn't make a lot of sense,

but it's such a captivating idea. And again I think it comes down to just the idea that technology, our technological advancement could be such, our power could be such that it would be akin to having a slingshot, Like, right, the the slingshot is the technology. The thing that goes in the sling shot needs to be nothing more than

a pebble. Yeah, absolutely, I think. I think the attraction here is like we're just harnessing the physics of the universe essentially, right when having to build the specific devices designed to kill I mean it is, but but you know what I mean, Like you could put other things up there too and drop them and they would kill people as well. It's just they wouldn't be able to

do it with precision and range. Yeah, I mean statues of Walt Disney, um, you name it, giant oscars, I guess something of statutes for some reason, just lots of statues. A statue of Lenin, a statue of Darth Vader. There's something kind of nicely space opera about that. I can imagine being the merciful Us using rods from God and each rod is just a statue of me. Well, I'm glad that you brought that up, actually, because this idea, having come from a sci fi writer, has actually worked

its way into a lot of our popular fiction. UM two I can think of. I first heard about this reading the War and Ellis comic Global Frequency, which was adapted into a television show. So he had clearly read about it somewhere, and UH decided to incorporate it as like a I think a terrorist group had access to one of these. The other one I believe the second G I. Joe Live Action movie, the premise was that

they were going to use kinetic weapons. I saw that on the airplane going to or from China, so it's pretty distracted at the time. Yeah, but yeah, there was some sort of rods from God, I think, so yeah, yeah,

and I'm sure there's others. Joe brought up something he I was talking to him about this before we went to the studio, and he said that he thinks that in the Mass Effect games and universe that there's like a similar netic velocity kind of idea behind UM A lot of the weapons, not just like ship to ship weapons, but also the like guns that weapons. I think, so yeah, yeah,

So you know, the idea is really cool. It's fun for stories, but it doesn't really it doesn't seem like it's gonna work until we spend a couple more than a couple million dollars to put these things in outer space and then drop them and see what happens. All right, So there you have it, rods from God. Uh, you know, we get a little time here. Let's call over the robot and see if we have a little listener mail. Who in the robot is founding a little more satanic

than usually? It? Is it Carney or Arnie at this time? I can never remember when he's possessed by the devil. I don't know it's Carney, but with sixes in there, somehow he felt it really weird. But yes, it looks like we have. We've received a couple of new listener mails regarding our Satanic Pack episode, which was the first episode that we did together. Yeah. Yeah, this one comes

to us from Katie. Katie writes, and he says, so, first off, id Or your podcast discovered it a few months back, and it's been my been a wave to keep my mind from um atrifying at my mind numbingly boring job as an overnight grocery stalker. I listened to the new episodes as they come out and have been slowly working my way back through the rest of them. My co worker hates me because I always stopped midway through the work, take my earphones out, and insist on

educating him on topics he has absolutely no interest in. Luckily, family members and roommates are much more accepting of my

need to tell people of my newfound knowledge. So Katie goes on to mention that she just listened to the Satanic Panic episode and uh, and she shares some some personal family stuff here, uh, which I'm not going to get into the details here, just because I'm not certain she would want to share with everyone, and some of the details are probably a little bit too much for the the average listener, but she can, she continues in the email, and say so, Obviously, when I first heard

were that this whole Satanic panic thing was most likely mass hysteria, I was personally offended by it. I didn't want to think that someone I cared about could have had it, could have such a big part of her life based on something entirely fake. I honestly skimmed the article that first brought it to my attention, got angry and closed it and never went back. When I started your Satanic Panic episode, I had a moment of thinking I should just skip it once I realized it was

what it was going to be about. But at this point, you guys had kind of totally won me over, so I decided to give it a shot. And there was one line in there, just to throwaway line, where you guys acknowledge that while they're most likely wasn't some huge satanic craze in the seventies, that there were still some people who are suffering horrific abuse. Hearing that kind of wiped out my whole personal offense at the topic, and

I was able to enjoy an incredibly interesting podcast. I honestly really like stories about mass hysterias, and this was definitely an incredibly fascinating one, more so when I could put aside my personal feelings and consider it in relation to my story. So thank you Katie for writing in uh it's yeah. I really appreciate listener mail in general,

but this in particular. You know, thank you Katie for sharing your personal story with us, but also for letting us know that you know this is something that you weren't inclined to want to listen to, but that because you know you trusted us as hosts. I'm assuming you went ahead followed us on the journey, and we're happy that you know, you learned what you did afterwards. Yeah, And I guess I have two thoughts on all time.

And first of all, and that's one of the things that's so fascinating and disturbing about the Satanic Panic scenario is that there is this pure fantasy and pure fiction and hit and mass hysteria. But the pain that that

that spiraled out from it, it was it was real. Yeah. Absolutely, I think I said that during the episode that like, I may not believe their stories, but I believe that they believe in them, and that's real enough to them that it, you know, requires us to be sympathetic as you know, emotional human beings to the things that happened to them. Uh. And and also I think it's important, you know, we tried to do this with every episode and with whatever we're talking about, whether it's Satanic panic

or dropping giant metal telephone polls from out of space. Uh, there's more than one side to every story, right, And so obviously, like you have to keep that in mind. You want to also be open to the possibilities of whatever, you know, somebody else's perspective, whether it's subjective or not. And in the Satanic Panic situation, there were hundreds of incidents. So we're never gonna know all the stories, you know, We're never gonna know that how things all matched up

with one another. But you know, by and large, I think we we covered the the hysteria part, the mass media part of it fairly well. Yeah. And I also like how Katie talked about how when we first heard about the mass hysteria aspect of about Satanic Panic, that she was offended, that she was turned off, and then

she but she knew coming back to it. And I always think about that a lot when I when we're engaging with listeners, particularly on social media, because there's always gonna be somebody who who has a reaction to some sort of article or study or material, and they're kind of defensive about it, and maybe they're, you know, they're they're a little up in arms. And I often think back to times in my own life where I've come across some new way of looking at the world, and

a lot of times there is this gut reaction. There's something that challenges your personal history, challenges your ideology, and there's a the reflex is to put the guards up, and it takes some time sometimes to come back around and open yourself up to this idea and put it put yourself in a and really in a state of

open minded vulnerability to uh, to consider it. I think that that gets down to the ethos of this show overall for Joe, Robert and I is that, like the overall quality that I'm shooting for with every episode is that we're trying to connect to that one of looking at the world and going, oh wow, I didn't know that, you know, uh, and and then thinking about the thing that you go oh wow at and kind of criticizing it, like, yeah, oh wow, it would be really cool if you could

drop metal from outer space and destroy your enemies, right, Like that's like a like a thing that it like five year old does in the sandbox, like playing with their toys. Right. But at the same time, like you kind of step back and you look at the science of it and you go, huh, well, that's a wonderful idea, probably not feasible, probably doesn't work, but look at our human imagination work working at this, or look at the wonder of science that we could even begin thinking about it.

All right, well, what is that? What does the robot have to looks like? It looks like he has another one. Another one's coming out here? Hold on. Uh, this is from Hannah and she writes in to let us know that she's a long time listener and that she had some thoughts that she would also like to share on the Satanic Panic episode. Uh. It turns out that she I'm going to read this uh verbatim. The first is

in response to your Satanic Panic episode. Robert and Christian mentioned how some teenagers may have explored Satanism to shock the authority figures in their life and find a sense of individualism, and it reminded me of a song by folk rock band The Mountain Goats. I'm vaguely familiar with the Mountain Goats. I don't listen to them a lot, but yeah, yeah, I have some friends with a real big fans. Uh. So they have a song apparently that's

called the best ever death metal band in Denton. I like the Tyble, and we're gonna have to listen to It tells the story of childhood friends Jeff and Cyrus and how their dream of becoming a famous death metal band was dashed by the adults in their lives, but all hope is not lost, says Hannah. The song ends by saying, quote, the best ever death metal band out of Denton will in time both outpace and outlive you,

followed by a couple of rousing hail Satan's. In this the hail Satan's are not so much an actual hailing of Satan's but more of a to the people that told them too. I kind of like that idea. Um, I guess I'll add on to this Hannah that I'm a big fan of the band Ghost, which is a they're associated with metal, but I think they're more kind of like a hard rock band. But the premise behind the band is that they're supposedly uh Satanists, uh and all.

The leader of the band is a guy called Papa Emeritus who dresses up like an anti pope with like an upside down cross. And I've seen plenty of pictures. Yeah, I mean, so it's all theatrical. It's all ridiculous. The lyrics to the songs are supposedly about summoning Satan and you know, worshiping him and all these things. Honestly, it's it's it's a big circus performance. That's what I love out of it. I love the theatricality and it's that appeals to me. Um So I can see why this

song would kind of do the same thing. It sounds to me like this Mountain Goats song might be about a proto version of ghost Nice. All right, Well, there you have it. Hey, you want to reach out to us, you want to see what we're up to, you want to explore some of these past episodes, see what's coming up. Head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

That's the mother ship. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, all the videos, Various blog posts links out to these social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter where blow the mind on both of those, and tumbler where

we're stuff to blow your Mind. Yeah, and don't forget, We're gonna be on periscope every Friday at noon, uh and you can interact with us directly on their last time, people were able to ask us questions right through the app, and we were able to talk right back to them, talk about things like melt movies. Some people give us suggestions for new episodes, like a one on strange weather, which sounded like it would be kind of fun to me. Uh and uh, you know you can listen to us

talk about our favorite horror movies. Uh, and maybe even some horror literature as well. Things that we you know, we probably talked about casually on the show, but aren't usually the themes of the show. Yeah, and hey, maybe one of these days we'll spend the periscope session for Joe to find, like cook those that use that recipe for cookies that he found. Yeah, great, dude, cook He's

especially we can give that spice. So one last thing, though, if you want to write into us directly, like the listener mail that we just read out loud, you can always send us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com