The Bathysphere: William Beebe Descends

of the last episode. So he was an American naturalist, explorer, author. Uh. He lived from eighteen seventy seven to nineteen sixty two, and uh, he was He was a very interesting fellow, just to put him mildly. Before there was Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan or even Jacques Cousteau, there was William Beebe, who some writers have called the first celebrity scientist. So he he traveled around and lectured, he wrote books, he recruited, we received quite a bit of media coverage,

and he was actually in writing books. He was a good writers. This thing that helps. Yeah, he was a good popularizer of science. He was a great science communicator. Before this was really that much of a thing. Yeah. I often think of Darwin as a great science communicator, but yeah, Beebe really took it to the next level, especially as we'll talk about in a minute, by employing all kinds of people to help spread the message of

scientific discoveries in ways that are easily digestible to the public. Yeah. So he he was an ornithologist at the New York Zoological Society and uh he he actually left college before completing his degree in order to to to work, uh for for the society. But he just he's one of these guys who just seemed to really just ascend once he you know, once he hit the ground working he was he was have ended up being becoming the founder

of the Society's Department of Tropical Research. And he conducted he conducted research, it's worth noting across two world wars and the Great Depression, Like that was the time period, the trying time period, a time when most of the energy in the world seemed to be aimed at either

conducting warfare, surviving warfare, surviving economic depression. Uh. But he was able to successfully carry out a great deal of research and uh and then communicate the Department of the Tropical researches work as well, and to do this he enlisted not only scientists but also historians, writers, and artists. And by this I mean he took artists with him on his expeditions, generating some really captivating artwork, and b B himself sketched the creatures that he saw in the depths.

I mean it's really kind of surprising, however, though, that that, given that he was such a celebrity at the time, uh, that that we don't see him celebrated as much in pop culture today. Like he's certainly again he's remembered. It's not like he's forgotten and lost to history. But you would just think that he would have more of a like a tesla status today. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I

will say that again. Before we went to this recent exhibit at the American Museum and Natural History of New York about the Unseen Depths of the Ocean, had some stuff about BB before that. I think maybe I was a little bit aware of him, but didn't really know anything. And that's crazy because his life and his work was so interesting. Yeah. I mean, for starters, he influenced the number of notable people, um for instance, EO. Wilson who we've discussed on the show before. Uh has has pointed

to William B. B as someone who inspired his scientific career. Yeah, there are a lot of interesting things about Bebe's legacy. One cool one that does get mentioned sometimes is the fact that he was criticized during his life for hiring and mentoring female researchers, which a lot of irritable sexist establishment scientists of the time thought was an indication that his work was not serious or was unprofessional. Uh. But

of course they were wrong, right. Bbe helped give a leg up to great scientists like Joscelyn Crane, who studied, among other things, invertebrate ethology, so the behavior of invertebrates, with a special focus on fiddler crabs, and also the explorer and research scientists Gloria Hollister, who pioneered lab techniques for preparing marine specimens, and she herself actually performed dives in the capsule that we're gonna be talking about more

in this episode of the Bathosphere, the steel ball that finally took us down into the depths. Some of the females he employed were also artists as well. There's actually a wonderful New York Times article that came out, uh, just last year about an exhibition of various works from this period that I recommend everyone check out it. If you just look for William Bbe Department of Trapical Research illustrations,

you'll find it. And there's some just some fabulous illustrations that say that the bathosphere descending into the depths with strange creatures swirling around it. Yeah, if you get a chance, you should look up illustrations. Especially I would say of the artist Elsa Bostelmann, who she was one of the artists who accompanied his research, and she sketched and painted what bb And and his companion, notice Bartan saw in the deep from the bathosphere, which we're gonna be talking

about more later. But her work is just beautiful and weird and superb. It's uh, it's excellent science art. Yeah. For reasons that will become obvious. Uh, as we proceed of photography or certainly film was just not an option aboard the bathosphere, so they had to depend on sketches, uh. And and also just you have to consider the time

during which all this have taken place. For instance, one of his dives was actually broadcast on NBC Radio, which is a testament to the popularity of his work, but also just shows you the limitations of the visual technology at the time. Now, of course, another great weird note in pop culture is that BB's elaborator Otis Barton, who was his his co pilot in the Bathosphere and one of the people, I think the designer, the main designer of the Bathosphere, made a movie, made a movie based

on what they did. Yeah, Titans of the Deep. And if you look at the poster art for this film, and I'll try to include it on the landing page for this episode, is stuff to blow your mind. It creates certain expectations of the content. Yeah, I will say it's so it's supposed to be like a documentary film, right that they made it as a documentary apparently, And even though it's like BB is mentioned on the on the poster, it's really apparently. BB wasn't himself super involved

in the production. Yeah, I've seen it actually described as more of like an action movie or an exploitation horror movie. I couldn't. I couldn't find this movie, so I don't I didn't get to watch it, Yeah I would. I was not able to find, uh, even any footage from it or a trailer or what would pass for a trailer.

But you can definitely get a say of the vibe they were going for if you just look at the poster, which of course has like a vague whale shaped sea monster with this big saw toothed face and then a

dude with a harpoon poise to hit it. It looks in composition like the much later poster for the movie Journey to the Seventh Planet, which is this nineteen sixty two sci fi barbecue about a bunch of astronauts who fly out to explore Uranus and then get this They essentially end up with a d intellectualized version of the plot from Solaris and the movie stars of course, John agar Ah, yes a frequent a frequent name for anyone's who's ever plunged the depths of of B movies from

that era. But if you look at this poster for Journey to the Seventh Planet, it's I don't know if it was actually inspired by Titans of the Deep, but they look very similar to me. I also found an image this is an advertisement. But it turns out even Otis Barton, who accompanied William BB in the Bathosphere, he is famous enough at the time to appear in a camel advertisement for Camel cigarettes where you see him featured there and he's saying, I smoke as many camels as

I like. They don't give me jittery nerves. Camels have a have a swell taste, mild and yet with rich, mellow flavor. I smoked them all in the bathosphere. Yeah, I don't. I do not think the bathosphere is a good smoking environment. Two packs per dive. Well, we've been teasing it enough. I think maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back, we should

discuss the bathosphere itself. All right, than alright, we're back, alright, So I will refer you to an image like a photograph of the bathosphere on the landing page for this episode is stuff to blow your mind dot com. But we're also going to describe it for you here, so no need to pull the car over. What happ you

depending on how you're listening to us. So as you're trying to imagine the bathosphere, it's probably best to dismiss some of your more modern and TV friendly notions of exploratory submarine means, because the bathosphere was less of a submarine and more of just a death trap. Right. It's like, would you like to get inside a bowling ball and go to the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, a steel ball that men climb inside and then it is lowered into the ocean depths. Let's let's ask some questions. Does

this have a propeller? No? Does it have fins? Does it have robotic arms? Does it have really anything on the outside other than just a steel sphere? I mean, basically, it is a steel bowling ball that men climb inside through what what Bby referred to just as the door, and then it has even door is a little misleading, right, Yeah, I mean it's not really a door. They got in through a hole that was then bolted shut, right, See,

its sealed shut like a like an iron casket. And then it has these three, uh the three portals that they look out off. It look kind of like stubby eyes talks. So, Robert, how big was the bathosphere that the two people got into? Well, here's a here's a quick quote from Baby from his biography Half Mile Down, which which we're gonna refer to a lot. If if if we read a quote quote from Baby in this and we don't fully attribute it. It's from half mile down.

Baby says. It was not as tall as a man, measuring only four ft nine inches in diameter, but its walls were everywhere an inch and a quarter thick, and it weighed five thousand, four hundred pounds. A first casting had weighed twice as much, but it would have been too heavy for any of the winches available in Bermuda. And was jumped. Now about this steel ball. If you don't have an intuitive sense of numbers to physical scale, I want to pause for a second and dwell on

how tiny this is. You can buy beach balls bigger than this undersea exploration vessel. That's crazy. You included a picture here on our notes showing what a sixty inch beach ball looks like next to presumably an average sized individual. I guess this is probably a tall guy, but but still imagine two of him inside of it. That's unbelievable. And that's bigger than the bathosphere was. This was this

thing was tiny. People like they were crammed inside. But there was a reason it had to be that small, right, Yeah, Because, as William J. Broad points out in his book The Universe Below, the smaller the sphere the greater strength of its walls. If you had more space in there, you need thicker walls, which would of course mean increasing the weight of the thing. So yeah, we run into the problem with with with the winches that we've already discussed.

It's almost like a parallel of the problems of shielding from radiation in space, right, Like, you want to send up a spacecraft that will protect the astronauts with really thick shielding in the walls, but you've got a problem with getting so much mass up into space that you know, you could have all these really really thick walls. It's

like a parallel to that. You know, you you could have really really thick walls to make sure you're super protected from the pressure and you've got enough room to move around, but it gets harder and harder to get you down into the depths and back up safely if you do that. Yeah. So this was designed by bb an American engineer Otis Barton, who already mentioned, and it featured three viewing portals, and these were This was not glass. You couldn't just look out just normal glass because it

needed to withstand the pressure. This was fused quartz eight inches in diameter and three inches thick, and the fittings again, they looked like stubby eye stalks. It's like a three eyed monster. Yeah, and quartz was used because it was the quote strongest transparent substance known and it transmits all wavelengths of light. Now, earlier we mentioned the door that wasn't really a door. What does BB say about the door?

He describes it as a quote round four hundred pound lid that quote had to be lifted on and off by a block and tackle and fitted snugly over ten large bolts around the manhole. The ladder just big enough to permit the passage of a slender human body. Bebe was a very slender guy, we should point out. I've seen pictures of him and he is spind lee. Now, on top of that, let's discuss some of the other

attributes of physical attributes of the bathisphere. It had a single external light, just one thousand wats and one light, and you flipped it on or off from inside. And the sphere was lowered on a single steel, non twisting cable nearly an inch in diameter with a breaking strain of twenty nine tons, or a dozen bathispheres Okay, So they wanted to be real safe because of course, if

that cable breaks, you're in a world a hurt. Yeah, you're you're done for, and you have to worry about more than just the what happens if the cable breaks, So you have to worry about, well, what if they're stormy weather, et cetera. Now you mentioned there's a light on the thing, so that means they got to get power down there somehow. Yeah, So they had an additional cable that carried both the electrical power and the telephone wires. Oh,

telephone wires. So they had to have some way to communicate with the service, right, I assume they couldn't just tug on the cable. Yeah, I don't think that would work. But but yeah, this is this is kind of the limits of their connection to the surface. They had electricity coming down, and they had that telephone wire. They did not have an air tube coming down. But of course

they had to breathe. So the bathmosphere included oxygen tanks with automatic valves up that provided uh, the atmosphere, and then they just had trays of chemical setting out. I believe it was soda, lime, and calcium chloride. Yeah, and this was to absorb moisture and carbon dioxide because you don't just need fresh air to breathe in, you need to scrub the carbon dioxide that you're breathing out. Yeah.

I would, I would just want to drive home. How I mean, it's an amazing invention, but how dangerously crude it can it can feel. It reminds me of there was the Night film? Was it The Voyagers? Explorers? Yes, where the kids build this kind of spaceship that sets inside a like a magic force field sphere. But they just build it, right, They just constructed from what they have at hand, And there's a there's a similar vibe

with the bath Isphere like that. There's just it's just so ballsy to imagine climbing in this thing and to the death. I mean, it is a large ball. It is a it is a steel ball. Yes, and even though it holds two divers and is essentially a two man crew. Uh. BB says that the total crew required to support this thing, uh, most of which you're going to be members on the surface. Uh, it comes to around twenty eight people total, so two under the water,

above the water. All right, So let's say you're William Beebe, and you're like, Okay, I've got a steel ball to Diane, Um, where where are we going to put this down in the water. Well, they set their side some the deep seas off the coast of Bermuda, Uh, specifically a circular area about eight miles in diameter near non Such Island, and here the depth reached about a mile. The first dive occurred in nineteen thirty. By June eleven, nineteen thirty,

they've reached the depth of feet or four ds. In in in n four they reached three thousand feet or nine d and that was, of course, by far the world record. That they went much lower than anybody had ever been able to explore before. Yeah, they were really breaking new grounds with this. Now, the bathosphere greatly improved humanity's ability

to explore the depths UH. But again it was it was ultimately a risky vessel to use, and it was soon replaced by safer designs, including the bath Escape, which positioned a traditional bathosphere beneath a large float, and even the likes of the modern Deep Sea Challenger famously piloted by James Cameron that boasts a pilot sphere position beneath the rest of the vessel. So you can think of post bathosphere designs as just basically being the bathosphere attached

to a larger system of flotation submarine submarine. Basically like, let's attach this to a submarine that has power, that has the ability to to to raise and lower itself within the water. But the bathosphere was was just the sphere, just the this uh, this steel container for the humans to descend in. Having your own power really does seem to make a difference, right, I mean, there's a huge difference between being in a submarine that can move and

just hanging in a ball on a thread. Yeah, I mean just the psychological uh notion here, just the idea that they have something if I if I get tired of descending into the darkness of the deep sea, then I can just I can I can raise myself out of this. I have some level of control, and I'm not just hoping that everything is going okay up there on the surface. Now. Of course, by virtue of the fact that bb and his team went deeper than anyone ever had before, he got to observe far more than

anyone ever had before. So I think we should go into his scientific observations, and we'll do that right after this break. Thank thank alright, we're back. So William bebe the modern guilt a mesh. He and his co pilot are in the ball in the steel death trap, sinking down, down down into the ocean, deeper than anybody's ever gone before, and looking out the portholes to see what they can see. So let's talk about what they see. What did they

discover through this research method? Well, BB observed and sketched again because cameras of the day were largely useless given the conditions of the bathosphere in its environment. But he described a world quote stranger than any imagination could have conceived,

and he writes about it very beautifully. Oh yeah, and and he really brought the results between N and n b B and his team caught more than a hundred and fifteen thousand animals from two hundred and twenty species, many many of which were new to science, so they

were combining different research methods at the same time. Now, before we get into some of the specific creatures that he saw claim to have seen, uh, we should probably just talk about his experience with darkness and light, because ultimately that is the how that that's kind of the defining experience that he describes. Oh exactly, so Bb Rights quote. In the course of the half mile down, although my eyes were perfectly dark adapted, I could detect not the

faintest glimmer of light from seventeen hundred feet down. So, as far as the human eye was concerned, conditions of absolute darkness existed at these deeper levels. And then he says, from seventeen hundred feet down, animal light is the only external source of illumination. So of course they did have a light they could flip on, but they didn't want to do that all the time, right, because that would be affecting and changing the environment, So they didn't do

that always. They would try to see, often just what they could see in the dark that was self illuminated. And when you go that far down, there actually are very many bioluminescent creatures that will illuminate themselves for you to see, but they'll also illuminate the water so that you can see other animals around them. And bb Rights quote, occasionally the head of a fish would appear conspicuously against the surround black, illumined by some indirect source of unknown lighting.

Eyes especially stood out with no definite source of light visible. When teeth were thus silhouetted, I knew it was from a luminous mucus which covered them. Cheek lights flashed and dimmed or vanished, altogether showing some control other than the usual disappearance into an opaque epidermal trench. And I should mention those last quotes I provided came from a paper he published in Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences

in nineteen thirty two or thirty three. Yeah, he was extremely impressed by the display of bioluminescence as as he descended. So he noted the lights of fish, jellies and various animals that he couldn't really identify in passing, and it was something of a revelation to him. About a third of a mile down he saw something that he described as a quote pyrotechnic network and was and it was quote so delicate and evanescent that its abyssal form is

quite lost if we ever take get in our nets. So, in other words, if we were just to pull this up, you know what, what would we have. We would have maybe some shriveled mass, but we certainly would not have this floating bioluminescent thing that I'm witnessing right now. Well, in the last episode we talked about the c cucumber that turns to red kool aid. Here you would guess

turn into Buyo luminescent kool aid. And then there's this, there's this, this description of the Abyssle rainbow cars, which will come back to later on. He says, at eleven seventeen o'clock, I turned the light on suddenly and saw a strange quartet of fish to which I have not been able to fit genus or family, shape, size, color, and one fin I saw clearly. But Ourbissle rainbow cars is as far as I dare go. You other words these saying that's as far as I dare go, and

classifying it and naming it quote. And they may be anything but cars about four inches overall. They were slender and stiff, with long, sharply pointed jaws. And it's worth noting no one has ever captured a specimen quite like this, nor seen it uh. And this this is one of the mysteries that arises from William Beebe's observations. Specimens that have have not been caught or even witnessed again, and we're left to wonder what what did he see? Right?

Did he have access somehow to to seeing things no one has actually seen since then? Or was he mistaken? Did he think he was seeing something that he actually wasn't or was he making it up? I mean, I don't want to think he was making it up, but I guess we have to consider that as possibility. Yeah, and we'll we'll touch on that some of the thinking on that a little later. But but one thing we should go ahead and drive home here is that again, the bathosphere did not have an engine on it, It

did not have propellers. It was a very silent affair in a realm where we're sound truly carries and can have damaging effects, especially our modern uh our modern state of affairs with with with ships and sonar. But even just a noisy submarine would have potentially scared away various species.

So there is an argument to be made here that the bathosphere, as it's descending rather silently and at times uh an incomplete darkness, would have attracted or been or at least would not have have frightened away species that would recoil from a modern exploratory submarine. That's interesting, and that's that's a good point to keep in mind as we go on and discuss some more of the things he recorded seeing. I think if you have the ability while you're listening, you should look up some of the

artworks of Elsa bo Stelman. She was again one of the artists who was doing sketches for for BB's team, and so it would be great to have some of those in front of your eyes while we're talking here. Now, another variety of fish that BB reported seeing are the dragonfish. Now these are different than sea dragons, right quote a six inch dragonfish or still Maya's past. Lights first visible than three seconds of searchlight for identification, then lights alone.

And there seemed no reason why we should not swing the door open and swim swim out. Now I can think of various reasons not to do that, baby, but I understand that he's trying to capture his excitement here. It's the deep sea version of the thing, like you know, the sudden desire to the call of the void, right yeah, yeah, or the desire to like swerve into oncoming traffic. So he was this was his guess that these were dragonfish.

And again we have to put ourselves in the bathmosphere and imagine peering out through these tiny uh courtz lenses at at things just swimming by, sometimes lingering but maybe not, sometimes wholly visible for a few seconds, sometimes only partially visible. But he guessed that these were some variety of dragonfish. Uh, and the particular species that he was describing was unknown to science at the time, but he was familiar with

other species of stomias. Now he apparently reported seeing a six foot dragonfish as well as a marine biologist and author Richard Ellis discusses in his book Singing Whales and Flying Squid the Discovery of marine life. So to put that in perspective, uh, I believe the largest known dragonfish at the time was a mere fifteen inches in length. Wow. I mean, if you look up what dragonfish look like they are, it is terrifying to imagine a six foot

long one. It's kind of like. Uh. In fact, I would compare it very much to the discovery of the six foot long Cambrian predator Anomala carrass right. Uh. The the idea that something that creepy could get that big is really disturbing. Yeah, So these these creatures were members of the order stomaformes, which also includes the viperfish, which

Bebe also notes on his dives. Now, in the introduction UH to the novel Starfish UH, the author Peter Watts, who was also also as a marine biology background, he mentions bb having reported a seven foot viperfish. Now, I don't I don't doubt Wat's in this, but I can't personally find a reference to this particular sighting. But then again, I didn't look at all of the scientific papers that

that baby put out over the years. But but he certainly mentions viperfish in his biography and the idea if you look up a picture of a viper fish again, it's very much like like the dragonfish. This uh, this sharp tooth, long, fierce, eel like creature. And to imagine a seven foot version of this a swimming past you as you're cramped in your steel beach ball, it's just terrifying to imagine. Yeah, well, it swims up to the window to say, hey, I'm here to vash and vipe

your windows. What is that from? Oh, you don't remember that story the viper No, I think it was in It was in that book Scary Stories to Tell in the dark. I remember the book, or at least the illustration. Yeah, well, bad joke if it didn't land. Sorry, I mean, no, I no, no, I mean there's a story called The Viper about a guy who keeps calling on the phone who says like, I am the Viper and I'm coming, and somebody gets really scared because the viper is coming.

And then finally, when the viper gets there, he says he's there to vash and vipe the window because he's really the viper. Okay, now, I think the joke will work for people who know the reference that I just didn't catch it. Jokes are always better when you spend a few minutes explaining him, you know. All right, Well, let's move on to another sighting that BB reported that of the great fish, and I believe we read a little bit from this one at the top of the

first episode. Yeah, so what was this great fish? Well, he describes it. Essentially, it's just this wall of flesh passing him by in the faint light, something that he guessed to be about twenty ft long, and it could have been a number of things, So he he thinks it might have been some manner of whale and it

could have been. It could have been a sperm whale for instance, which is as we've discussed on the show in our Leviathan episode, is a large creature and it can and it can dive much deeper than the bathosphere

and can get my bigger than correct. Yes. Now, however, it's also been brought up so that it could have been some kind of a deep sea shark, because in nineteen five marine biologists managed a glimpse and photograph six gill sharks at a depth of the two thousand, four hundred and sixty ft and and so Ellis suggests that it's possible that Beebe could have seen this, or perhaps a deep sea sharks such as the greenland shark, whose

range apparently includes Bermudo's waters. Okay, now you know, one of everybody's favorite deep sea creatures is of course the Tricksie angler fish. Oh yes, because because the image of the angler fish with its large gaping mouth and sharp teeth, and then that that that strange bioluminescent lure that hangs in front of it, I mean, it's just such an amazing looking creature. And that's without even getting into it's

extremely bizarre reproductive methods. So with the tiny male, the tiny male that's like a little reproductive heat seeker that infuses with their body. We've discussed that on the show before, but he did have a run in with the angler fish. Here's another quote from half mile down quote. Another interesting fish on this trip was one which I saw by the light of our electric beam at nine feet on

the way up. It was one of the true giant female anglerfish, a full two ft in length, with enormous mouth and teeth, deep and thick, with a long tentacle arising from the top of its head. I saw no light from this, but it was distinct for a moment in the surrounding illumination. Twice its mouth opened and partially shut, and then we passed out of its life. Three of these weird fish have been taken dead at the surface, but three years of intensive trawling have given us no

hint of their presence here. For a few seconds, I was within ten ft of one, and the memory will never leave me. Yeah, I'd guess. In the steel ball in the deep, you make a lot of memories, alright. So one of the things we've discussed here is that so many, many of these sightings were can definitely be backed up. Many of these sightings were of creatures that are known to science, and we have specimens for them. But there's mystery. Yeah, I mean it is necessarily subjective reporting.

Like we said, the photography of the time could not capture things. So now if you take a deep sea subdown, you can videotape the whole thing, so you can prove what you saw when you came back. Here, we have to rely on the word of the people who were in the bathmosphere looking out right, and that led even

scientists at the time to question some of it. So if theologist Carl Hubbs, for instance, he had some issues with the reported duh bioluminescence, and he suggested in ninety three quote, I am forced to suggest that whatever the author saw might have been a phosphorescenceylinter rate whose lights were beautified by halation in passing through a misty film breathed onto the quartz window by Mr Biebe's eagerly oppressed faith.

I like the snooty voice you give Hubs there, Well, I get, I do get a very like snooty, intellectual, like stuffy academic vibe here saying who is this this science popularizer, Uh, you know, without an advanced degree, daring

to report on the secrets of the deep. Yeah, I mean, you're naturally I think a modern person is sort of naturally inclined to be on BB side here, especially because of like we see him being criticized for non legitimate reasons, like you're hiring women researchers that you know that's a nonsense. So you you kind of like naturally want to say, like, Okay, if people are coming at him with criticisms, they're not fair,

but some criticisms might be fair while other ones aren't. Yeah, I mean it comes back around to the fact that we are depending upon his observations and the observations of Otis and and in many cases one it's not like both of them saw the same thing. They're looking out of different windows. There are several cases where Baby says, oh, and then Otis saw this creature and I really wish I could have seen it, by I didn't, or likewise, it's something that only BB saw and Otis was looking

at something else. Now, in all of this, I'm personally inclined to believe beebe or at least I really want to believe him and I and I have I have not conducted in like an exhaustive analysis of his personality or anything, but based on what we've read about him and his work, he seems to be to have been a very meticulous researcher who cared about accurately presenting uh what was going on in the ocean. Well, Ellis had

an opinion on that, right, did he does? Yees? So, Ellis writes, quote, it is possible that Bebe was the only person ever to see these mysterious creatures. It is also possible that he made them up. But although he wrote very cleverly and well, there is very little in his published work to indicate that he was a practical

joker now to play Devil's advocate, though. Ellis does point out that Bebe might have possibly joked at one point about lights being those of quote a giant toadfish, and that perhaps bb having neither a graduate or undergraduate degree, wanted to quote put one over on the academics. Uh and it's it's. It's also worth noting that he would have not been the first to play such a prank.

Elis points to a nineteen thirty three prank by Australian ethologist Gilbert Whitley, and he makes the point that B. B would have known that his observations were fairly safe for the fris Eevil future. So, in other words, he could have made something up and known that, Hey, if future explorers come down to the same part of the ocean, the same depth and they don't see it, that in no way disproves what I'm claiming to have seen his reports quote would it would enter the literature as they

have done, with virtually no possibility of being discounted. It is, after all, one of the basic tenets of cryptozoology that negative evidence cannot be disproved, a fact beloved by chupacabra movie purveyors everywhere. So Ellis stresses that, look, we we simply don't know. Another thousand or ten thousand dives might be required to to really prove any of this out. But he says that the very fact that that they that some of these specimens have not been seen since Bebe,

that that casts their existence into doubt. But now, also, as I think we have said before, Bebe did see some things that were not known about at the time but have since been verified. Yeah, I mean in the vast majority of the deep sea fishes he describes are confirmed by specimens uh, and in one case, the quote untouchable bathmosphere fish uh did turn out to be a species of dragonfish later found to inhabit the middle layers of the ocean where he reported them. So for many

of these great creatures, perhaps we simply haven't seen them again. Uh. The ocean is a big place and one that contains plenty of mystery. Perhaps these species have suffered or gone extinct due to the due to the damage that humans have inflicted on the ocean's highly possible yeah. Or as we've discussed, perhaps these creatures were more easily seen by the silent, motorless bathosphere as it descended through the depths. The aquatic environment, after all, is quite vulnerable to sound.

And to go back into the differences of the general methods of sampling the depths, you if you've got the Gilgamesh method and the eba zoom method, there are plenty of species that are not very easily picked up by various kinds of eb zoom methods. Like whether you're trawling with a net or trying to drag a dredge along, whatever you're doing, there's some species that just tend not

to get caught like that. Yeah. Now, one thing I do want to throw in here is that in some of these discussions of of the more mysterious creatures, it tends to it tends to fall into extremes. Right, Either he definitely saw something that we have not seen since, or he just made it up without really without really addressing the fact that there are a number of possible variations between those two extremes. I mean, it was dark

down there, it was dark. They're they're just getting glimpses of things, So I would I would order with, isn't it possible that he saw some of these things but misjudged their size, that he later remembered them a little differently? Like, I don't think it is necessary for for b B to be a prankster or a liar for him to have misreported something that he that he thought he saw. Oh, I totally agree there. Yeah, And so you know, speaking for myself, I'm not inclined to really entertain some of

these more nefarious interpretations of his observations. I was a little thrown when he saw the crack in the size of an island. Wait, that wasn't b B. I'm always confusing BB with those medieval Norwegians. Well, this does raise the question if he if he was to make something up, like why didn't he go even broader with his descriptions? But I don't know that. Again, we're getting into into

areas of pure speculation here. Well. I I like this because it sort of brings us back to the fact that we were discussing earlier and in the last episode about how we know a lot more about the deep than we used to, but we still don't know tons of stuff about the deep oceans. The deep oceans are it's almost a cliche to say now because people emphasize it so much, but it's very true. They're they're entirely

alien to us. We know very little about them. Yeah, it's it's been reported that of the ocean is unexplored. Uh and and and that's to say it hasn't even been seen with human eyes. Yeah. I know there are various ways of people disputing that figure, but suffice to say that even large portions of the ocean that are

sort of roughly mapped have not actually been seen. Yeah, as of two thousand fourteen, less than point zero five percent of the ocean floor had been mapped to a level of detail useful for detecting items such as the wreckage of airplanes or the spires of undersea volcanic events, and I've seen a higher stat in recent years. For instance, according to the Unseen Oceans exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, only ten to fifteen percent of the

CV sea floor is revealed to us inaccuracy. And in either case, ultimately we know more about the surface of Mars than the sea floor of our own planet. Part of the issue there, of course, is that we can't use satellites to map the sea floor in the same way that we can use satellites to map the surface of Mars. We have to depend on things like sonar and to to do it. Yeah, but at the same time, as we've said, we know a lot more than we used to and it's exciting that there is so much

more to learn. Indeed, and I think that's why we keep coming back to the ocean on stuff to blow your mind. We talk about the mysteries about our space, we talk about the mysteries of the inner mind, and of course we're going to keep talking about the mysteries of the ocean. I mean, there's no dragonfish in space. It's true, Like the ocean is the mysterious realm in which we know there is alien life and we keep discovering new forms. There may be dragonfish in the mind, yes, oh,

undoubtedly they're dragonfish in the mind. But but in the in the ocean, we can actually pull them up and uh and poke at them. Though how much better to go down and observe them in the natural habitat rather than pulling them up. And so that's the legacy of William bb in the athmosphere. That's right, The modern Gilgameshes should put it all right. Well, hey, be sure to

check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find this episode, the previous episode, and all the other episodes of the podcast, as well as blog posts and links out to our various social media accounts. Thanks as always to our audio producers, Alex Williams and

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