X-Files Science Part I: Mutants & Parasites

The X Files is coming back on January. This isn't a commercial. I didn't get paid by Fox to do this January. I think it's a Sunday Joe and I are crazy X Files fans. We basically talked about the X Files. I would say at least once a day with each other. Yeah, we've referenced in on the show a decent amount of times too. And I think that's been basically because pretty much since we took over as as hosts on the show. I think we've both been going back through the back catalog of of the X

Files on Netflix. My wife Rachel and I have been watching them and it has been so much fun. Yeah, I'm the same. I've been rewatching them along with comal Non Johnny's podcast, The X Files Files, uh and just loving every second of it. But um so, this is our two part X Files extravaganza where we're going to

talk about the science of the X Files. Really kind of the perfect angle for stuff to blow your mind, right, because it's weird, it's interesting, it's sort of about the strangeness of reality, and and it hits all of our big themes here. I'd i'd say what we do on this show is science the bizarre and big questions and mysteries, and that's sort of what the show is all about, though within with an admittedly conspiratorial kind of angle. If you're not familiar with The X Files, we hope you'll

still be able to enjoy this episode anyway. So just to give a brief set up of what the show is, there are two FBI agents named Molder and Scully. Molder is David Duchovny. Scully is Gillian Anderson Jillian or Gillian Jillian. I think it depends because uh, you know, she's she's I believe, like half British or something like that, So maybe it's Gillian when she's on The Fall and Jillian when she's on Hannibal. I'll just have to call her Scully.

So Molder and Scully are are investigating paranormal phenomena for the FBI. And Moulder is a true believer. He believes in whatever you could believe in. He believes in its psychic powers, alien abductions, pyrokinesis, whatever it is. Yeah, he's

on board. And Scully is a skeptic. She's a scientific skeptic, and she always wants to come up with an explanation of phenomena based on what we actually know about science, rather than referring to unproven phenomena that are just sort of speculative, like alien abductions, and is usually trying to find some kind of empirical way to figure out what happened, and whereas Moulder just goes with these hunches. And let's be honest here, like nine times out of ten, mulders

hunch is current. It's more than nine times out of ten, it's every single time we were we were struggling to think of an episode where the skeptical viewpoint turns out to be correct. It never does, you, I think there's a couple and the Scullies character. Along the way. As she has exposed somewhere and more of this stuff, she becomes less of a skeptic and more of like she's willing to believe as long as there's quantifiable evidence available to her, well as one should be. I mean, that's

sort of the spirit of skepticism. It's not that you should never believe, but you shouldn't believe until until you've got a good reason to. That reminds me at my desktop here at work on my laptop that I'm reading off of now, it's that picture of Scully, and it says, our lady of skepticism. She is. She is a wonderful patron saint and a good guiding light for us on

this show. Because while, as we've said on the show The X Files, it's pretty much always the paranoia a mole or the aliens or whatever that turns out to be true, what we do on stuff to blow your mind is often look at strange phenomenon and try to understand what a scientific explanation for that phenomena is or

could be. Yeah, I think if Scully was born like twenty you know, years later, she would have been a great podcast host rather than at the I Agent, she probably would have found herself working at How Stuff Works.

She's very she's very taciturn um. So we should mention at the top here that we have one primary resource, uh, that we're using on these episodes, and we we'd like to give a shout out to that, especially that we're gonna bring in some other sources to but our but our best resource on this was a book by Gene Cavelos called The Science of the X Files. It was published in Gene Cavelos is an astrophysicist and mathematician now a science and science fiction writer. And I was, I've

been enjoying this book. It's great, isn't it. Yeah, it's a well researched book. One thing about it though, is that it was written in nine and playing of science has changed since then. So we'll also be trying to update and incorporate new sources to go along with some of the leads that she established in this book, which by a large the double check whether the facts that she said in nine were either still accurate or maybe

there had been some new scientific discoveries since then. Yeah. Yeah, And there was another book there there were two books that were published in the nineties about the science of the X Files. It was such a popular show, then it makes sense. The other one is called The Real Science of the X Files Microbes, Meteorites and Mutants. And unfortunately we couldn't get a hold of a copy of this, and you know, I stupidly was like, oh, yeah, I'll just download one of these to my Kindle or something

like that. Note they're not available on Kindle. They're out of print. But luckily the local library here and we we live in while I live Indicatur, Georgia, you're in Atlanta now, uh, but it had a copy, so I was able to reserve it and we've been sharing it and it's you know, I gotta say, not only is it great for these episodes that we're going to do about the science of the X Files, but there are topics in there that she just kind of casually brings up that I'm like, oh, this is great fodder for

future episodes of stuff to blow your mind. So I think we're marked that for later. Yeah, this is a rich resource for us. Well, I think we should actually get into some of the topics. Some of these, uh, some of these episodes of the X Files and what we can say about the science behind them or the not so scientific concepts behind them. Uh and and at least find some kind of foothold in the real world.

So if we're going to start, we've got to start with what is probably the most recognized monster of the week for the X Files, and that is, of course, the Flukeman. If you have never seen the Flukeman, pause this right now. Yeah, going google Flukeman and look at a picture of this monster. I love this monster design. It looks to me, I've said this before, like a toilet paper mummy that gotten wet and has lipstick on. So it's got this occurring open mouth with red lips,

creepy eyes, and then this kind of like melted white exterior. Yeah. I posted a photo of Flukeman to our Facebook page yesterday as sort of a hint as to what we're going to be working on this week, and there are a lot of people who engaged with it and either got really excited about because they recognized it from the X Files or they condemned us to tell because they were just yeah, yeah, So the premise of Flukeman, the episode that Flukeman appears in is called The Host and

I believe it's right at the beginning of the second season. Um, and so we're gonna try not to spoil the show, but also the show is like twenty years old at this point. You know, we're gonna basically describe to you the premise of these episodes pretty quickly and then dive into the science of of of how they work. Right, So, the premise of the Host the Host episode is that there's a creature that arrives in the United States. I

believe it comes over on a Russian oiled hanker. Yeah yeah, or it's or maybe it's a freight or it's our ship crossing the the ocean. It comes from a Russian ship, and it is believed to be coming from Chernobyl. I believe it's always like either toxic, like a combination of like sewage and like radioactive waste from Chernobyl in this ship or something. Why are they bringing that across the ocean. They're probably just going to dump it in the ocean, man, right,

they want to dump it off the coast of New Jersey. Well, sure enough they do. And or well, actually it begins with this guy gets dragged into the sludge because the flukeman is in there, right. But then there seems to be a phenomenon emerging after this of something going on in the New Jersey sewers, right right. Yeah, So there's basically this creature that's crawling around in there. It's emerging, and it's either feeding on humans or it's biting them

and infecting them with their parasitic young. And there's this infamous scene from it where there's a guy who was bitten by it, uh and and he's in the shower and he just starts coughing up flukeworms and it's so disgusting. I mean even now, like I rewatched it recently and it's pretty disgusting. I can't believe that they got away with it at the time. Eventually, the implication is that this is some sort of strange mutant hybrid of it's

like a fluke and a human somewhere in between. Somehow the radio activity affected the regular flukeworm flatworm, which is also known as a trematode. Uh. These are basically parasites that feed off hosts. They're real things, and they usually attached themselves to our well in human cases to our internal organs, but you can find them occasionally attached to

your exterior as well. So there's a human liver fluke right, Yeah, it's called Clinarcus senensis, and this is one of the ones that Cavellos mainly focuses on in her examination of flukeman. But this is a flatworm that wants to get inside your body and make a comfortable little nest in your liver. It's real and it is, you know, as with many of the parasites that we've covered on stuff to blow your mind over the years. Yeah. It's goal is to go through a reproductive cycle and a life cycle within

a host, right, hence the title the host um. So this particular flukeworm, it only becomes an adult once it gets inside a human being and is in our bile duct or another. Not just a human being, Yeah, any mammal. And the way that they get in us is by eating fish, by us eating us eating, So the mammal eats the fish that carries the fluke. The fluke gets in you and says I've done it. I've made it.

Time to mature, right, time to become a man, become a fluke man, and Basically, what they do is that once they're inside a mammal, they eat the tissue and the blood close to your liver um. So this is another common X Files theme, is it? Livers are tasty? Uh yeah, we'll talk about that again later. So the fluke real flukes, release their larva into your bile duct and their hermaphrodites uh so they have both male and

female sex organs. And these larva leave mammal bodies through feces and then a snail comes comes along and eats the feces, so the larva gets inside the snail. And then if the snail is eaten by a fish or you know, some other kind of marine animal, uh, then it is infested with these larva which subsequently end up inside of us or a bear or dog or whatever.

The complicated life cycle. Yeah, and it's man. Parasites are amazing, I know, like the Robert has gushed a lot about them on the show, but I agree with them, Like they have such specialized life systems that they've evolved into to to uh connect with very particular kinds of hosts too, And yeah, yeah that's nice. Um. So here's the thing. When they get inside these fish. They're inside these cysts that they formed that are like protective. I guess bubbles

is a good way to describe them. Right, So what happens if you turn that fish into some sushi, Well, if you eat raw fish, then that cyst is inside your body and it emerges and turns into its adult form of the flukeworm. So one of the things that Cavelos notes that we we should probably mention is that the title fluke Man that's given to this creature probably is not accurate because this creature would have both male and female organs, right right, it's a Misnow, it's not

really a flukeman. It's a fluke person. But you know, here's some nerdy X Files knowledge for you. Uh my favorite and I think your favorite to X Files writer, Darren Morgan was the guy wearing the costume as this fluke creature. So he was the West toilet paper mommy with lipstick. Yeah, he had the fruit punch mouth there, I think, h I think he. You know, maybe that's why they called it a fluke man because there was

a man in it. But if I remember that costume correctly, it's not like there were human reproductive organs or anything like that, not that you could see. Yeah, so all right, the fluke larva though, would not be coughed up like they were in this episode. Right. So, fluke larva primarily exit our bodies through the digestive track and the feces. They're usually not coughed up. And this is a common thing for lots of types of parasites that get in

your body. They reproduced by by making you, so a lot of them cause diarrhea and stuff to be expelled in your feces deliberately, or they just get out kind of passively that way, hopefully to get into water supply or to be eaten by some creature that will eat your feces to make it to the next stage in their life cycle. And this is a common theme of the parasites and the X Files too. We're going to talk about ice later and that is also how that

particular creature exit your body. But yeah, even in real life with lung flukes, which are attached to your lungs, you cough up their eggs if you have them in you, but you re swallow them so they passed down through your digestive tract. It's not like you're spitting up these fluke eggs and then they hatch everywhere, right, because then

how would the snails get to them. I have to imagine it would be an evolutionary disadvantage for a parasite to exit the body coughing up huge mature worms, because it seems like that'd be so alarming other creatures would immediately want to get away from that creature. From New Hope, it works great for TV, right, like these bloody flukes in the shower, But it does parasitism is a stealth

game exactly. Yeah, and so Cavellos also notes, you know, yes, radiation does produce mutations, but probably not as dramatic a change is what we see with the fluke man. Well, this is a common thing we see in science fiction. Is sort of a very loose understanding of the idea of how radiation causes mutations and organisms like radiation can encourage the mutation, right, especially like in your germ cells. If you're exposed to more radiation, you might give birth

to children that have more mutations than average. But generally, like if you're hanging out near the near the reactor wreckage in Chernobyl, that's not gonna that's not gonna make you into a different kind of animal. It's probably just gonna kill you, right, Yeah, you're more likely to get sick, have cellular degeneration or deterioration, or just die. Yeah, And so okay, Flukeman. Actually, you know, Robert wrote about Flukeman

years ago for Stuff to Blow your Mind. If you go to the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, there's a great Monster of the Week piece that he wrote about Flukeman and flukes in general. So if you're you're interested in more about this, go check that out. And we also dug up a little bit of information, uh that apparently in two thousand nine and two thousand and ten, well after this book was written, in after the X Files was over US, flukewarm infections increased significantly.

And there's a really weird reason why. It's because people were taking a lot more river cruise trips, you know those ones where you like, you get on those um what do they call them those kinds of boats, not quite river boat maybe paddle boats, paddle boats, that's what I'm thinking of. Uh, and they started a paddle boat with that wouldn't be a cruise boat. Steamboats, I'm sure

it's a boat boat anyway, it's a pite on these boats. Yeah, they're designed specifically for you to join a sect luxurious parasite cruise. They were feeding people raw crawfish, and uh, you know, basically these raw crawfish were infected with the fluke larva like we've been talking about um. And so yeah, in the previous forty years before that, there had only been seven cases of flukeworm infection in North America, but just in two thousand nine and two thousand and ten

there were nine because of this particular thing. So I'd like to think in the last five years that these riverbrook boats have stopped giving people raw crawfish and growing potential flukeman's inside of them, one would hope so well. Of course, The Host is not the only episode of

the X Files to feature parasites. Parasites are a really common theme, especially on these Monster of the Week episodes, because I mean, it's it's fertile ground to uh to mine, I would say for the sort of mixing metaphors is a fertile ground. Mind fertile ground anyway, It's a good place to look if you want some ideas for weird ways that animals, especially mutations or aliens or something could take advantage of the human body in ways that make

a squirm. Yeah. And so another one of these episodes that addresses parasitism in a particularly gross yet maybe scientifically interesting way is called f Emasculata. Yeah, and they're more focusing on something that there's a differentiation here that we will call out in a minute. They're parasitoids, not necessarily parasites. But the premise of this episode is that I don't even remember where it was, maybe South America or something. It will wear the bug orginally came from. There's some

kind of bug. It's like a beetle, and it carries a disease that has one of these parasitoids. And yeah, they're in a prison. Somebody mails a leg of bore I think, to a prisoner that's in and this leg of bore is infected with this parasitoid. Uh. And so subsequently these two prisoners get infected as well, but they just happened to escape the prison. And so the episode is basically Molder and Scully chasing these guys across the

United States to make sure that they don't spread this plague. Okay, now, what kind of infection is this is it is? It? Does? It kind of outwardly resemble a bacterial infection or something. It's super gross. The attacks the human immune system, causing pustules to form on your skin nice and and that leads to death within thirty six hours. But the way that it spreads is the pustules erupt So these the gooey pustules pop stuff everyone people, which subsequently get more

larva on the people. Yeah. Um, so, first of all, this episode presents the idea that this is an undiscovered species that nobody has ever heard of before. Uh, and you know, I believe that, they say, you know, that's why we were totally unprepared for this as a potential health problem. Yeah, it's that is a hundred percent possible. Yeah,

there are tons of species that we don't know exists. Yeah, at the time when this book was written in there were somewhere between one point five and a hundred million. That's how like vague it is. They don't know undiscovered species Usually there's small things like ants or beetles like that in this case, right, but the rainforest in particular is home to an incredibly diverse set of species. So that's why it's particularly difficult for us to catalog all

of them. And I know there have always been scientists trying to update the estimate. You know what, what's the number? We suspect to someday be able to find numbers of species on the Earth that are unknown. So it seems that the most recent estimate that I could find, at least came in twenty eleven. There was a study that estimated that Earth has almost eight point eight million species in total, and we've only discovered about a quarter of

that eight point eight million. Uh So like there, I think their estimate was something like one point nine million have been found. But then this is the funny part, right The study says, well, we could be off by about one point three million species, uh and that this number could anywhere be anywhere between seven point five million and ten point one million total species. So it's you know,

again like super vague abroad reach. But yes, it's possible that there's a bug out there somewhere in South America that we don't know about, right, Well, I mean that's certain that there are bugs we don't know about. The question is like, could we discover something that really surprises us and I think that that's plausible. Yeah, we could absolutely. Uh. So there's about two hundred and fifty thousand or somewhere

between two hundred fifty five hundred thousand species of parasitoids. Um. The example that they gave in the book was the scuttle fly. That's kind of one of the more well known ones. It lays its eggs in the head of a fire ant, uh and when that hatches, it kills the ant. And then that's not enough. It uses the ant's head as a little cocoon, so a safe place for it to mature in like a like a cradle ant head cradle. And yeah, we know about wasp parasitoids

that can take over ants. They can take over spiders and all kinds of other insects and they either end up like draining their their life from within, or they take their their resources, or sometimes they even you know, we've talked about like a zombie type insects before on the show. They'll they'll take over these animals, sorry, these insects and force them to defend the parasitoid. Yeah, it's

not pretty. So almost all of these parasitoids are what we understand as arthur pods right, uh, and these they sometimes use other arthropods as their hosts, which is even that's like imagine if a like a little person climbed inside of you and was the parasite inside of you. If yeah, like a like a like a tiny little humanoid with arms and legs just climbed down your throat and was the parasitoid inside you and then maybe burst out a week later. Why isn't that an episode of

The X Files. Well, I haven't written it yet, yeah, um, but so yeah, so we've got you know, they're not necessarily all adapted from a million physiology. This is what we were talking about earlier about how these things are so fascinating, right because they're adapted very specifically for the species that they live in conjunction with. Okay, so, but this parasite, in particular, the F masculata, and I think F that stands for like a genus name, So that's

like would imagine the name of the species. Here we're dealing with. What does Cavela say about about it in the end? Is it is it similar to anything in reality? Yes? So she says that it's similar to the blow fly, which is another parasitoid that we're you know, somewhat familiar with. Uh. They don't actually kill their hosts. They burrow into wounds. These are blowflies. They burrow into wounds and their larva

eat dead flesh. But did the wounds explode, Not to my knowledge, but I believe with blowflies, like, aren't blow flies the type of larva that we're used to clean out wounds during Like I think it was like World War One or World War two, Like you could you could put their larva in an open wound and it would clean out the necrotic flesh that was there. Uh. And obviously you wouldn't want to leave it there because then they would hatch. But they but they were used

actually for that function. Yeah, I mean maggot therapy is a is a type of therapy that has been used and I think in some cases still is used. They eat the necrotic flesh and they leave the healthy flesh alone. So Cavellos makes a distinction though, and I think that this is a good one that m ski a lot of isn't necessarily just the beetle, right, and it it's

two beings. It's the beetle and then it's a parasite virus that exists in the beetle and that grows inside the human body, suppressing the immune system and causing these wounds which the bugs subsequently lays its eggs inside. So she thinks that it's like a two parter here, that there's more going on, and that scullion molder don't quite have the biology right um, and that the virus needs to bug needs the bugs to spread in the same way that the bugs would need the virus to reproduce.

So in that way, it could be kind of like a like a composite organism. Like right, if you look at a lichen you know about like lichen or you know, there are really two different organisms that have combined so closely together that they've formed a sort of super organism. Lichen Is is made of algae and then also made of fungus, and they they've just become so depending on

one another that they're now like a single organism. Well, that's a great segue into our next X Files Monster of the Week, which is another parasite of a kind, but it's a fungus parasite in particular, this fungus lives in volcanoes. Yeah, so that would make it probably some kind of extreme of file. Right. So we're talking about the episode Firewalker, which is it's I don't know, it's not one of my favorite ones, but the science is kind of interesting in it, and it had guest stars

Bradley Whitford, which I really enjoyed. He's like the crazed scientist who's left over from this mad exploration to the volcano. So Bradley Whitford is the guy from the West Wing who would do all those cute walking talks. Yes, that's him, that's him. He was also on that other Aaron Sarkin show was a Studio sixty on the Sunset Strip. I don't know, I never saw it was a studio with a number. I just don't remember the number. I'm I'm annoyed by the cute walking talks. But I did like

him in Cavin in the Woods. Oh yeah, he's great in that. Yeah. So the idea here is that he's a scientist with another group of scientists that are studying a volcano. They have a like robot called Firewalker that they send into the volcano to do like examinations. The robot gets these fungal spores on it and then it comes back and infects everybody, and the fungal spores grow inside the lungs of these people and then burst outward, releasing more spores infecting more people. We're kind of seeing

a theme, yeah, the bursting. Okay, so the idea of an organism that lives under extremely high heat conditions is kind of strange because heat is one of the ways that we think of as being most dependable to kill off any organisms we don't want on sure. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, you want to sterilize silverware or surgical instruments or something like that, you heat it up, and we

typically think, well, nothing's going to survive, but that's not true. Uh, and hopefully there aren't any extreme of files on our surgical instruments. But yeah, Scully says something to that effect in the episode. She's like, well, nothing can survive inside of volcano. This is her skepticism, nothing can survive inside of volcano. But you know, Cavello's points out extremophiles could, uh,

they grow best actually in these extreme conditions, right. So, well, the kinds that are adapted to really temperature exactly, and those are called thermophiles. We know about kinds that live near underwater volcanic events or next to pools of boiling water. And yeah, some even lived inside volcanoes. Are never heard of that before. Yeah, this is what you know, she mentions in there, and uh so, okay, here's the thing. Though, the heat range established in that episode of the Firewalker

Robot is a hundred and forty three to three hundred degrees. Now, I do feel pretty certain that no organism, no matter what, could survive three hundred degrees. Yeah, And this is where Cavellos kind of works around this is that she hypothesizes that it might not actually be an extreme a file this particular fungus and she but she's got an answer. She's got kind of like before with the idea that uh fm esculata is two beings instead of one being.

She's got an interesting hypothesis that contradicts what Scully comes up with. Um. She says that it's unlikely that it would be a fungus in particular, right because they the fungus wouldn't be able to survive. But perhaps that is the spore of a fungus that doesn't live in the volcano but near the volcano, and the scores were blown

along to where the firewalker was maybe exiting the volcano. Okay, well, I mean that makes it easier to Yeah, so maybe it's not an extreme a file necessarily, but they just kind of blew onto this robot or whatever. But um, it opens up a possibility. Well but wait, hold on, if you can say that, it's like, you know, oh well, wait a minute, what if these aliens didn't really come

from space come from space? They came from can to death. Yeah, I mean it's true, and that, you know, we get to the Canadian aliens in season seven of the X Files. But no, I agree with you. You're right, it's a little weird. But I like that where she's going with this because it opens up the possibility of talking about Um.

One of the problems with these extremely files is that like, yeah, they can exist in these extreme environments, but then they wouldn't necessarily also be able to exist, for instance, in the human lung. Right, So I did a little bit of looking up here to see, you know what, what's the possibility here of these fungus spores blowing around on

a volcano. And sure enough, there have been fungal spores that have been discovered on the volcanic desert of Mount Fuji and Japan, so not inside it, but like, you know, the outside volcanic area around it. So Okay, it's theoretical that theoretically possible that one of these fungus has a spore it gets blown up, uh maybe to the lip or top of the volcano where Firewalker robot is roaming

around the and then gets on it there. Well, I believe I remember in the show was going around in these caves, these like hot caves that were lava tubes. I guess, oh, yeah, on the volcano, so that might be a different kind of environment too. But yeah, I think we've you know, established probably not possible for it to exist in a volcano. But you know, she's come up with her best possible answer as to how this fungus could have ended up this, especially this unknown fungus, right,

how it could have ended up on this robot. I mean, what is it? What does it live on? If it's in a kind of dark, super hot environment. Well, most thermophiles consume sulfur of some kind or another, and they say in the episode of Firewalker that this thing eats hydrogen sulfide um So it's interesting though, because if the fungus fed off sulfur, how would it still grow inside human lungs? Right, Like, we don't have a ton of sulfur in our lungs. But Cavellos again finds an answer

for that. She says, well, actually, and some of the amino acids in our body, there are sulfides in there, so maybe it would be like somehow pulling the sulfides out of the amino acids. The problem with that, though, is that within a moist lung environment, if the fungus was producing sulfur dioxide, that would turn into sulfuric acid inside our lungs, which would you know, pretty much kill

its human host. So Firewalker not so great at the at the adapting spectacularly to exist with its host, right, doesn't sound like it's it's been really thought through as well. Maybe I'd be curious to see who the different writers were on these parasite episodes and how much research they did. So. The other thing that's really unique about the Firewalker life form.

I know that the robots called Firewalker, but I guess we're calling this creature Firewalker as well, right, is that they say in the episode that it's silicon based, silicone based rather than carbon based, So almost all life as we understand its carbon based. I think all life we

know about on Earth is carbon based. I mean, scientists have talked about astrobiology for a while, has talked about, well, could there be life forms on another planet that are based on a different kind of atomic structure than that on Earth? Because you know, we all are, right, we all have DNA, you know, or even even viruses that you know don't have all of the characteristics we would think of as as being life necessarily still are carbon based,

and silicon is this proposed atom. It's like, well, you know, maybe silicon based molecules could be the basis for some other kind of biochemistry that's different than the biochemistry and life on Earth. And I've read some criticisms of that. I think some people I think that's very implausible. I mean, you never really know for sure. Well, there's the classic Star Trek episode where they meet the silicon based alien Horta.

I've never seen. That's basically empirical science. Yeah, I haven't seen it either, but it came up when I was researching the possibility of silicon life forms. So Yeah, you're right. Carbon is the most conducive form for life, right because it can easily form bonds with other atoms, it's flexible, it can form thousands of different compounds. Those can be

broken down, and they can facilitate different processes within an organism. Right. Silicon, however, is called it's known as tetravalent, so the bonds it creates are either too strong to be broken down or too weak to hold together for these particular processes, so they don't form compounds with what's called handedness. Uh. And the the analogy that Cavelos uses here, which I like, uh, is that you think of a right hand trying to

wear a left handed glove. That's basically what it's like with silicon trying to attach itself in a particular way with enzymes in order to facilitate life. Uh. I mean yeah, that that's another good point about the matching nous. I mean, would a silicon based life form, even if it could exist,

could it possibly parasitize a carbon based life form? And would the carbon based life form even have the kinds of molecules available silicon based life form would need for its metabolism and and much like how they're you know, speculating, Well, if you have this sulfur dioxide creating thing in your lungs, it would just make sulfuric acid. Also, the the products that would be emitted from these silicon life forms wouldn't

necessarily work out, right. So, well, this is a thing that comes through in a lot of these sci fi scenarios about parasites is that typically parasites don't want to kill their hosts. I mean, you always have killing in in the in the science fiction because it ups the anti You know, if it just kind of made you feel sick and then you've got better, that wouldn't be such a dramatic story. But but yeah, I mean a parasite that kills its host is kind of doing bad job, right, Yeah,

So I think about it this way. Okay, So carbon life forms they oxidized, right, We oxidized and unite oxygen. Maybe during burning it becomes a gas like carbon dioxide. We emit carbon dioxide. But if silicon oxidizes, it becomes a solid silicon dioxide, which is also known as silica, which is sand. Right, So imagine this creature. I guess

it's just coughing up sand. Constantly. Um so. Yeah, So that's one very simple reason why it probably couldn't support life, although I'm sure somebody with an interesting enough imagination would be able to envision a sand breathing creature of some type. Well, actually sandworms of dune. I think Robert and I in an episode we did about about alien life forms in

the shapes they could take. We talked about sand based life, like a life that that had this silica basis, and we referenced the Stephen King short story Beach where yeah, it seems to have sentient sand dunes as a life form. So this next X Files episode, which is yet another parasite, and this is this is the last parasite. Yeah, and it's well at least the last one we're going to cover here. There's probably hundreds of bears the X Files. But this is another classic X Files episode. It's I

think it's the best episode of the first season. It's one of my favorites. It's called Ice. It's basically the movie The Thing. Yeah, it's an homage to the Thing. Uh. And they're basically paranoia worms that get inside you. And in fact, last night I I rewatched the episode in preparation for us to record this because I was just I really like that episode. It's got some great moments from other character actors. Felicity Huffman shows up in it.

So yeah, in this episode Ice, what happens? We have Molder and Scully flying up to this Arctic research station because it seems that all of the people on the

station have killed each other. And well, yeah, the cold open begins with there's dead bodies everywhere, and there's two guys left and they're about to kill each other, but then they turn their guns on themselves and each of them kills themselves and they keep saying over and over again, we are not who we are, something like to that effect, right, yeah,

something like that. Yeah, And so Molder and Scully and a team of other people get there, and this team is kind of important because then we can we can play the factions in Paranoia game. And they discovered that this Arctic research station had come across what was it,

a frozen meteorite. Yeah, well they were they were researching and drilling down into ice that was inside a meteorite crater I believe, Okay, Yeah, and so it was it was many thousands of years old, and they came across this organism that they brought back to the research station with them. That's a tiny worm of some sort, and essentially what happens is the worm gets into people and

turns them paranoid and they started killing. Yeah, and it's like all these other parasites that we've been talking about out it it enters its host inside a larval form. In this particular case, it's it's real gross. It moves around on the back of your neck and somehow attaches to your hypothalamus. You can see it's scuttling around under the skin. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's not pretty. Uh, And there's I had forgotten about this until I rewatched it

last night. But one of the ways that they can tell if you're infected with the worm as you start getting these like little black nodules growing under like your armpit and stuff like that. Uh. But yeah, they say that it's uh, it stimulates the chemical act of colon that's in the hypothalamus and that this causes the hosts in this case to exhibit extreme paranoia and then subsequent violence. So that's why all the other scientists all killed each

other and themselves. They're infected by this worm, and it's a paranoia worm. So let's set aside the alien stuff for a second and just say, is some kind of terrestrial paranoia worm visible at all? Well, it's probably not an extreme aphile like we're just talking about earlier, right with Firewalker, because again, how would it be able to survive in both these extreme cold conditions and then also

in the relative heat of the human body. It wouldn't be adapted for both, right, So it's probably of terrestrial origin, even though Molder immediately is like, oh, this is from matter space, it's an alien It was in a meteorite.

We have to document this. It's proof of alien life, right, right, But the Cavella says in her book, sell you, Ule Molder, it's probably actually terrestrial origin since it's evolved in particular to be a parasite with mammalion hosts, right, or I mean, I guess the possibility is that this meteorite is from a planet where there are hosts that are just like dogs and humans, because it also infects a dog in

the episode. Right. Okay, Well, as we've talked about in the other episodes, one of one of the things that's common to these worm infections in the body is that they need to get out of your body to pass on to the next host somehow, and typically they're going to do that through the most attractive method of feces, as we said earlier, right, and yet again in this episode,

like with the flukeman. Uh, it's it's well, it's not entirely spelled out, but we know at least one person gets infected from a bite, so that somehow the larva of this worm or in the saliva of the dog that bites a guy. He's the pilot in his name is Bear. Uh. And Bear gets bitten by the dog and then he gets infected, he gets paranoid and he starts attacking everybody. Right, Uh so yeah, why why doesn't it just go the good old right out the digestive system,

tried and true parasite method. Instead it's this bite thing. And the other problem with this, right is that you're even if you're provoked into violence, you're not necessarily going to always bite your victim. Yeah, it seems like they're I don't know, relying vaguely on the notion that this is adapted to an animal that bites when provoked, though humans don't necessarily do that. I mean, I guess if you imagined it was adapted to mammals on Earth, a

lot of mammals probably bite when provoked. Yeah, And I think that the writers were probably thinking along the lines of rabies, sort of like a combination of a tape worm in rabies here and that like it would be spread by a bite, uh or or in the episode that I had forgotten this but rewatching it last night, they just at some points just take the worm and shove it in somebody's ear, and that's how they get infected, which is also gross. It reminds me Raphicon. It reminds

me exactly of that scene. So what's what's this stuff you said that the worm produces that causes the paranoia and violence? Would would that actually work? So it's it's again it's a setal coline uh. And it's supposedly it's interacting with that hypothalamust trying to trigger our fight or flight mechanism, right, which would lead to the bites. I guess. Uh. But like I said, in the episode, they're they're shooting guns at each other, they're punching each other. So I

don't know if that does the worm any good. The acetalcoline, it has a way more complex relationship with the human body than just making you violent or paranoid. So, uh, you know the research that Cavelos pulls out, she says that toxins like saren like saren gas, Yeah, they can break that down and they can cause similar effects of paranoia,

but it very low doses. At high doses acetalcoline, however, it just basically stimulates your body's parasympathetic system and it slows down functions like your heartbeat, blood pressure, and ultimately leads to respiratory paralysis. So again, like the I don't know. And there was another aspect in the episode that I noticed last night that they didn't really talk about even in caveluss book, which is that this thing like exists specifically in ammonia, like it's evolved to be an ammonia

dwelling worm. And there's some implication that there'd be a connection the ammonia and the aceticcoline. I that doesn't particularly line up, so I guess we'd have to go no, Uh, this thing couldn't exist in the ice as it did, right, and also be did not exist in the ice and be it and be a parasite that could infect humans and other mammals, and then the acetacoline. It would have to have a very refined way of accessing that within the hypothalamus in order to get those specific, violent paranoid

reactions out of people. Yeah. I think this is a thing that you see in science fiction writing a lot is they'll take a supposed fact about a neurotransmitter or some kind of hormone or chemical that they know of that's active in the body and kind of oversimplify what it does or overstate a correlation. You've probably read some stuff along these lines. For example, with the hormone oxytocin. Remember people say, oh, this is the love hormone, it makes you be in love, and you know that that's

not exactly accurate. It's much more complex than that. It causes complex cascading effects, and it is involved with other hormones and combinations of things. It's just not as simple as this one neurotransmitter causes this macro behavior on the on the large scale exactly. So I think we can safely scratch ice off as being something that we should be terrified of making its way into the human population.

From watching this X Files episode, so with that, I think we need to take a break, but we when we come back, we're going to transition away from parasites and talking about some other strange science of the X files. Perfect. Hey, everybody, So one great resolution that you could make for the new year is to maximize every minute and every dollar you have for your small business. And we have a very easy way for you to do that. It's stamps dot Com. Think about how much time you've wasted going

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before you do anything else. Click on that microp owned at the top of the homepage and type in stuff that stamps dot com into s t U F F. Alright, so we're back. We're moving now from parasites into another classic X Files A way to come up with a villain for a Monster of the Week. It's a mutant, right of course, and some of the most famous ones are mutants. We've got Tombs who we're going to talk about from the classic episode Squeeze and uh, of course

Leonard Betts. We gotta talk about Leonard Betts. That's one of the most famous X Files episodes. Uh. And I learned this from listening to Comin on Johnny's podcast. But apparently it was the most watched episode of all time because it happened to air like right during a Super Bowl, like right after a super Bowl. Well, it's not a bad one to do exactly. Yeah. So let's just established right up front from Kveliss book and also just from

general science about mutations. Uh that that you know, the possibilities here are about inheritance evolution and how mutation could alter instances of I guess we would consider them natural selection, right ull, sure, Yeah, I mean, mutation is an inherent

part of evolution. It's it's how random change occurs, but mainly it's beneficial traits that are bred into this particular species, right right, Well, all kinds of mutations occur, and most of them have no effect whatsoever, or they are slightly detrimental, but natural selection tends to mean that those mutations are

eliminated over time. And so if you have a mutation that makes you worse at surviving, obviously you're less likely to pass that gene onto your kids because you won't be having any kids, or you'll have fewer kids than the one with the beneficial gene or at least without the negative gene. But are are we likely to encounter mutants in the real world, as in mutants with these big noticeable powers that powers fundamentally change, Yeah, how they

interact with their environment? You're gonna meet somebody who has wings. No, you're not, because in one sense, yes, we're all mutants. I mean we all inherit some amount of mutation from our parents germ cells than our selves. Of course continue to mutate throughout life, but in the most relevant sense, we're not going to be able to mutate to have wings, or mutate to become goo and then reform into a human, or have any of these other huge macro mutations and mutations.

And creatures that survive into adulthood tend to have extremely small or almost non existent impacts on the body. And the way species change over time is through the accumulation of mutations, not through one gigantic mutation that makes you massively different. Alright, so let's get into Leonard Bets then. So the premise of the Leonard Bets episode uh is basically that this is a guy with a mutation in

which all the cells in his body are cancerous. Right, yeah, So well we don't get there first, right, First, Heason E. M T who gets his head cut off, that he survives the decapitation exactly, so he gets his head cut clean off in an ambulance accident. Leonard is fully decapitated, and later his headless body gets up, flees from the morgue and gets busy trying to regrow ahead. Okay, and I believe the way he does that is by like taking a bath in iodine. Right, Yeah, he gets into

some iodine. Don't know why. I don't think even Cavello has had an idea about why iodine, But he gets into it. He gets into a bath. Yeah, and a bath of iodine is creepy, I guess. It leaves these weird brown stains on him, and so that looks creepy enough, I guess. But and he eventually regrows ahead through powerful cancer,

the powers of cancer. I mean to say, he is, actually, we find out, made of cancer and eats cancer and eats cancer, and so he's he's participating in a wonderful cancer economy that allows him to regenerate not only lost limbs, but a lost head. Now, it's not uncommon to hear discussion about the extremely brief, momentary survival of decapitation, but that's usually talking about the head of surviving decapitation, not

the body. So, for example, there there are legends that the heads of people like Charles, the first of England or or Anne Boleyn appeared to try to talk after they were severed from the bodies of the people. Yeah,

I've heard that. We did an episode of the of the show What the Stuff video show that Joe and I write for, and I wrote about the Worst Ways to die and decapitations were in there and that those legends showed up right, And so the debate sort of continues about whether severed head can can experience consciousness beyond a second or two. Maybe they do, maybe they don't,

But like we said, that's the head. The really weird thing about the story of Leonard Bets in this episode is that the body survives decapitation and his body gets up and walks away from an ambulance crash. Yeah, walks home, I think, or maybe walks out of the morgue somewhere to take. Walks to the iodine store and says, give me all of you, like a whole. Yeah. And the best part of the dumbest part of this episode, Multa walks in s he's a bathtub full of iodine and

doesn't bother to look in it. He's just like, okay, cool, it turns around, it walks out, and then this guy's body emerges with a newly grown ahead. Whenever I see a bathtub full of iodine, I reach in. Yeah, exactly, that's what you should always do. You take like a broom handle, just stick it in there. See what's going on. So this might be kind of obvious, but it's probably

worth saying. Why does a decapitation kill you? Obviously, the brain, especially the brain stem, is sort of the command center for the impulses that control the body. So without the command center, you can't breathe, you can't digest food, you can't perform directed movements of the muscles. It's kind of like taking the CPU out of your computer. You're just nothing much is going to happen. Then, of course, on top of that, you've got for the body itself, you'll

have catastrophic blood loss. So many blood vessels carry blood up to the head and it's a very high pressure. It's gonna pump it up there, right, So you're gonna

get a nice like Quentin Tarantino blood squirting effect. Yeah, when you cut the head off, you're just gonna gush blood out, have immediate loss, immediate massive loss of blood, and that massive sudden loss of blood and blood pressure means blood can't get to all the lower body tissues to supply them with nutrients, and they're just they're out of luck. And then of course the final thing is you can't eat without a mouth. Yeah, I guess that's

a problem. So it's pretty obvious why creatures like us can't survive decapitation. But one of the weirdest facts is that some animals sort of can not forever. But I want to talk for a second about cockroaches. Now. I found this great old Scientific American article from two thousand seven that spoke to several experts about cockroach decapitation. So you can cut a cockroach's head off and its body

doesn't immediately die. That's I mean people out there, I'm I just kind of genuinely generally don't like cockroaches, But there's people out there who are like definitely afraid of them. That's got to really squip them out. So cockroaches don't have blood vessels and high blood pressure like we do. So you cut a cockroaches head off, it doesn't gush all of its important fluids out immediately. A cockroach has an open circulatory system. This is what it's referred to,

so it doesn't have blood vessels. It's just kind of a it's just kind of a bag of juice. And when you get it, when it gets its head cut off, it doesn't all gush out. It can just kind of like seal itself off and then it's it's it's still okay. Basically being called blooded, cockroaches don't need to eat as much as animals like us, so they can also survive decapitation much longer without eating, you know, because the head isn't there to eat, so the body can kind of

hang around for a while. You could also just like maybe take a like a slurry ivy and just plug it right into the decapitated head part, just feed it that way. According to this Scientific American article I read, there have been experiments in the lab, but yeah, they there's this entomologist named Christopher Tipping at Delaware Valley College and Doylestown, Pennsylvania at least at the time, and and he'd done a bunch of cockroach decapitation to study. He

did it very carefully, I'm sure he did. And then they got some dental wax to seal up the wound after they cut the head off off and this prevented them from losing all their fluids. Yeah, and they said that the bodies without the head lasted for several weeks in a jar. Wow weeks. Yeah, these things live for weeks without their head. So imagine this like performing this experiment on human being. You cut its head off, you see it with dental wax, and then you put it

in a giant jar. Now, the body doesn't necessarily even the cockroach body doesn't necessarily do a whole lot without the head. Uh, But insects don't necessarily control all of their body movements with the brain alone. They were still able to do some things because they have these clumps of ganglia throughout the body tissues which can act sort

of like simple local mini brains. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why cockroaches and this is something else we could cover in a cockrotch episode, But why they're such a great model for building robots off of actually because their legs and limbs act both centrally from you know, like a central nervous system. But then each one has its own independent movement and it's almost like it has its own little brain. That's not the right way really to put it. It's not the right metaphor, but uh,

they act independently of the central nervous is. Yeah. One of the crazy things that was in this Scientific American article is that apparently roaches need their whole body in order to remember things. So you can also cut a roaches head off in the head can continue to live under lab conditions, but the head without the body won't remember things that the roach could remember before it got its body cut off. Oh that's interesting, Okay, some memories

stored there. So there are some animals that might sort of be able to live without a head for a little while and that and that's pretty creepy on its own. Now, what about regrowing ahead as Leonard bed steps. That sounds like kind of a tall order because right exactly, Uh, it's it's not exactly a head in the way we think of. But there is an excellent little animal called snail fur that I read about. They can regrow its head in a way, though, like I said, it's not

like a skull with a brain in it. It's it's this tentacled upper part of the animal. Snail fur are these tiny stalk like animals that look like living hair and You can find them growing on hermit crab shells, and they give the hermit crab this look like it's a crazed insect, and a clown wig. It's this this hilarious pink clown wig. And sometimes fish come along and

bite off the heads. They just chop off the end of the stalk of the snail fur that has its little tentacles, and then the stalk grows it's tiny tentacled head back in a couple of days. And it does this using retained embrion stem cells that detect the head is missing and then grow to replace the lost tissues, which is kind of amazing. But then again, it's not a head like our head. Yeah, but then again, there are some interesting possibilities about what humans could be able

to regrow. I mean, obviously we know that if you cut a human's arm off, they don't grow an arm back, but some animals do. And we also know that we our genome has the knowledge about how to grow an arm, how to grow a leg, and how to grow ahead. Because it's done it before. This has already happened to you once. The question is why won't it do it again? Well, um, you look to like salamanders or newts for an answer to this, right, So they regrow limbs all the time.

The way that they do it is by differentiating their cells underneath the wound, by basically making the cells go back to like an embryonic state, like cancer cells. Right. Uh, So, you know, maybe there's some plausibility there with the whole cancerous aspect of Leonard Bets. But you know, as they grow, they recognize whether they have a normal or abnormal neighbor around them, and that's how those sentiment or a new

cells regrow into the right kinds of things. Right, That's how they know how to grow into a hand or a finger or whatever you need. And they're mainly guided by fibroblast cells. But then of course, there there's the question of if an organism could regrow its head, would that still be you? I mean, if you could get your head cut off and then grow a new one back,

would that really be you growing a head back? Or would that just mean you were dead and then a different person that's basically a clone of your body grows a new head. Yeah, I mean, I think the sci fi implication of the Leonard Bets episode is that his consciousness is like stored in every cell of his body, and so he can lose his head and then re grow it and remember everything because like every cell contains

is I don't know, overall memory. Well that's obviously ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, that much more than that sounds made up than being made of cancer and growing a head back. Uh, this

whole concept of Leonard Bets being made of cancer. I mean, there's a reason they invoked this in that, like we said, there is a sort of similarity or association between the kinds of stem cells that differentiate into body cells and then become a new arm or become ahead or something when you're when your cells are dividing and you're growing and cancer cells because cancer cells are cells that that

grow rapidly. They have uncontrolled cell division. And the other issue with them is that they don't differentiate into the body tissues that we would normally use. And normally a cell divides and it's a type of cell that is dedicated to making a certain kind to body tissue. It's the you know, a muscle cell or a liver cells what its role is, right, Yeah, the cancer cells are more they're just kind of glop they're saying, no, I don't want to be a brain cell. I want to

be just some cancer, right. And in fact, for cancer cells to continue to grow to like tumor, suppressing genes usually have to be damaged as well the genetics that we have that keep those cells from growing into tumors. So you're looking at either genetic damage, like a mutation like where I guess assuming Leonard bets hash or something that's epigenetic, right, something that's external that changes the expression of those genes. But Leonard Betts, Yeah, I don't know

if that exactly works out. Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is that Leonard bets body cells couldn't really be cancer cells because he has a body. I mean, if his body were may just be a pile of it would just be cancer. I mean, part of the whole thing, like we're saying about cancer cells is that

they don't make useful normal cells. And so if he's got muscle cells to move around and brain cells to think with, and cells for digesting food and all the other cells that make a body, then that seems almost by definition not cancer. Well. So okay, So in Cavello's book, she has a hypothesis for this. She says that she thinks that the pathologist that looks at Leonard Betts cells

and says, oh, they're all made a cancer. That the reason why is because you can mistake some kind of cells basically for kids, like if you just look closely at the cells instead of outwardly at the at the macroscopic effects exactly. Yeah, and that like the distinctions would be if they're crowded together because of their rapid division, and then also if they have a small skirt of cytoplasm around them. So you know, she posits that maybe this person, the pathologist just saw that and went, but

it's cancer. Okay. So we've pretty much, I think debunked the idea that Leonard Betts is going to be a functional mutant, right right, unless he's a cockroach in disguise, ye I I just even then, I don't know that it adds up necessarily, but we this is a good opportunity for us to move from Leonard Betts, who was the most watched episode of the X Files, to probably the most famous other than the flukeman Uh mutant of the X Files. And this is of course Eugene Victor

Tombs from the episodes Squeeze and Tombs another mutant. Yeah, so Eugene Victor Tombs is played by Doug Hutchinson. You you might remember this guy from a Lost or from the Green Mile. He's he's a uh ubiquitous creep in Hollywood. He always shows up playing a creepy looking guy. And he shows up in the third episode of The X File, so he's very early on and he sort of establishes

the monster of the Week model. I would say he plays a serial killer with creepy, glowing yellow eyes who has this recurring pattern where he hibernates in a cocoon made of newspapers and bile for thirty years and then wakes up. He kills five people and eats through livers. Then he goes back to hybrid. So that's back to the old that that livers is and good that some

of those parasites love the liver. The fictional X Files pars I saw a story saying that they came up with the idea for him to eat livers after Chris

Carter rates some fuag raw. That's true. It might not be true, but that that's the story at least, So anyway, he stalks his victims using a pretty amazing power, and that power is to squeeze himself into and through tiny openings, for example, a six by twelve inch chimney, a six by eighteen inch ventilation shaft in an office building, and at one point he even seems to be trying to come up through a toilet sewer pipe, but if I recall correctly, he is thwarted by a childlock on the

toilet lid, which is got to be the most interesting way a serial killer was ever prevented from doing his duty. So how how realistic is this could even if you were a mutant, uh, you know, which is basically what they just say in the episode. They're like, oh, it's I think this guy's a mutant who has been living for hundreds of years or whatever, right, and of course he's right. Well, you know. Cavelos in her book points to this famous circus contortionist with the Jim Rose Circus

side show act, known as the Armenian rubber Man. And I found a photo online of this guy from a show he did in the nineteen nineties where he's playing an electric guitar with his legs behind his head. So he's very, very flexible and can fit through tiny openings

and stuff. This guy, according to Cavelos, could fit his whole body through the frame of a tennis racket, and not through those huge tennis rackets we used today, but those like tiny old tennis rackets you see people using in old movies, which that's this oval about eight inches by eleven inches, so that's tiny. So for Toombs is early stunts with the six by twelve inch chimney and the six by teen inch ventilation shaft. This might be a case where no superhuman mutation is required, just simply

pushing the limits of human contortionist mobility. Somebody might be able to do that, right, Yeah, yeah, well somebody who's a contortionist, somebody who's either practiced this or has some kind of physiological abnormality that allows them to squeeze their bodies.

But but is there any sort of inherited condition that can make you any more squeezeable than even the average contortions born born Eugene Victor Tombs leave out the eating livers part and the sewer pipe, which I'm gonna get back to, so maybe sort of Cavello's points to a condition known as Ailer's dan Los syndrome. And I went and look this up, and there are actually many different

types of Ailer's dan Los syndrome. What they have in common is that they affect the body's connective tissue, like the collagen that your body generates to form ligaments and connecting tissues in between bones and muscles and things like that. And all the different types of this disorder affect the joints and the skin, and they're associated with what's known as hypermobility, which is unusually mobile joints, both large joints and small ones, so like your knees and your fingers.

And one particular subtype of Ailor's DANLST is known as the hypermobility type, affecting up to one in every ten thousand or fifteen thousand people. Really, yeah, and the hypermobility subtype of the disease and is especially intense in causing this hypermobility condition. Where the hypermobile joints um they're not

really a superpower, but they are. They have a much wider range of flexibility and movement than normal people's joints do, but they're also prone to freak went dislocation and partial dislocation, which can be very painful and cause difficulty with many activities in life. So this is not a condition you want. So it's possible that somebody with this condition could contort themselves in such a way to make it through these very tiny openings. But let's establish this. There's two episodes

of the Eugene Tunes. The first is Squeeze and the things that you described there, that somebody might be able to make it through those things, like the ventilation shaft thing isn't all that big, but that they ca all that small that they find him in like in the parking garage in that episode, But in the following episode he doesn't totally bonker stuff like squeeze his face through like prison bars and stuff and coming up through the toilet. Yeah, you know, I mean that that's just I find that

unlikely person would be able to write, yes exactly. I mean I'll get to that in a second. Now, there are some animals that have really really amazing uh fit thruitiveness. Let's call it this trade, the ability to squeeze through amazingly small openings, and one of them would be the octopus. So I found this video it's a Bermuda Institute of Ocean Services student Raymond Decal and his advisor James B. Wood didn't experiment in November two thousand six, and it's

on tape. You can watch it on YouTube where they got this octopus to speak. The species was an octopus macropus, or the white spotted octopus. And they put this octopus in an enclosed, clear plastic box underwater, and the box had a single hole in the side where the octopus could escape, except the hole was only one inch in diameter, like two and a half centimeters. And this was not a tiny octopus. This wasn't one of those little little guys.

This species can grow up to fifteen centimeters long in the body and up to a meter long including the arms. It's hard to tell a exactly how big the particular one in the video was because it's very uh okay, yeah, but it looks at least two feet long arms included, so it's big. And it squeezes out through the hole. It squeezes out through this inch wide hole that's just tiny. It puts its whole body through. You can see the part where it's beak kind of pops through and then

after that, it's it's just going. And there's a whole other video I found that's sort of less scientific and kind of sadder of people on a boat with an octopus on the deck and I don't know how it got there. I assume they caught it somehow. And it's a very large octopus and it pokes one of its arms through a through a hole in the side of the bulwark on the boat and I guess feels water down there. Oh, I've seen this as well. Yeah, and they're yelling at it. They're like, look, it's escaping, but

it's squeeze. It's amazing watching it squeeze through this tiny, tiny slip much smaller than the octopus his body. And James b Would the guy, one of the guys associated with that first video I mentioned. He explains that this is not just extreme survival behavior for the octopus. This is not like the the Octopus equivalent of the James Franco movie where he cuts his own arm off right,

And this is normal behavior for an octopus. In an email to National Geographic for an article about this, uh Wood told them that octopuses typically live in layers with restrictive openings to protect them from predators, and every time they enter or leave their house, they squeeze through small holes or crevices. So this is just part of the octopus's normal life to squeeze through, you know, a hole the size of a quarter or something. But do octopus

pie We've had this conversation before. The octopuses do do Octopuses eat each other's livers and then live for hundreds of years in piles of newspaper. You know, I don't even know if an octopus has a liver, Probably and an octopuses eat each other that they cannibalize. Remember we we look that up for a previous episode. They are

serial killers. We established that before. In fact, sometimes when an octopus catches another octopus to cannibalize, it takes it back into its layer and then it places rocks over the entrance to the layer so it can eat with privacy. So Eugene Tombs is part man, part octopus. That sounds about right, can squeeze and it and it eats its own kind. So yeah, but of course, then again the octopus.

It's it's less impressive for the octopus to do this than for a creature like us, because they don't have rigid structures like bones, except for maybe the beak um. So no matter how flexible or hyper mobile, even if Tombs had some kind of condition that caused hypermobility and the joints, he wouldn't be able to fit up a sewage pipe because being human, he has a skull and he has a rib cage, and these structures do not flex. Yeah, if they do, I mean the purpose of the skull

is to put checked the brain from physical trauma. So assuming he did have a flexible skull like made out of flexible cartilage like the bones of a shark might be or something, he would almost definitely suffer brain damage and organ damage. Coming up through a tiny pot. Does seem to kind of have a bit of brain damage, doesn't he? In those episodes, like I remember him being

like a little, uh like unfamiliar. Maybe it's just from him being an hibernation for dozens of years, right, but he's like very unfamiliar with how things work around him and how to interact with with other human beings. But so maybe that's possibilities or it could just be because

he's smushing his brain too hard. Yeah, he sleeps every thirty years for thirty years, I guess, okay, And there's one more episode where Scully and another guy both get tattoos that cause hallucinations and talk to them because the tattoos are contaminated with ergotism. Yeah, And the reason why we feel like we have to mention these is because stuff to Biliar mind is just this year talked about

ergotism and about the hallucinatory effects of them. So we're not gonna spend a ton of time on it here because there's a whole another episode that you could go listen to it. But that is absolutely a real thing. Yeah, you should go check out the episode Robert and I did from last summer called the Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism. Uh, it is true that ergotism is a real thing, and it is not pretty, and it's not just Ergotism shows up several times in the X Files. It's not just

in that Never Again episode with the tattoos. It's also in some other episodes. As Cavello's points out, well, I mean it's a convenient it's a convenient plot point if you want to explain some violent, nightmarish hallucinations. Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, if you want to learn more about that. I don't think that you guys end up getting into why Jodie Foster would particularly be the voice of ergotism

inside your head, but as she is in this episode. Yeah, so this guy gets a tattoo and it's Jodie Foster's voice, talking trash about other women stuff and essentially just encouraging

him to do evil. But but but this is yet again like another example of the writers on X Files doing some research, and you know, they stretched things a bit here and there, but there's scientific basis to this, all right, So that's gonna have to be it for the first part of our exploration of the science of the X Files. But please come and join us again. Next time. We're gonna explore some recurring themes to the show, like monsters

based on insects and deep regression hypnosis. Yeah, we'll talk about alien hybrids and uh, all kind of big themes, weaponized bees. Oh yeah, it's gonna be fun. So if you've got questions related to this first episode or any comments or feedback, you can get in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. Those are all blow the mind and if you want to talk to us on periscope. You can try to catch us at noon Eastern Standard time on Friday's when we will be doing periscope most weeks. Yeah,

And as Robert would say, there you have it. If you want to have more of it, though, you could go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com um where we're going to have all kinds of things related to this, and the landing pages for these podcast episodes will link out to the various content that we've been talking about throughout the case throughout this episode, such as theogoutism episode or how to how to live without a head. And if you want to email us Christian, how can

they do that? Well, for that direct form of communication, Joe, you would email us at below the mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. Remember ba ba blah bla blah blah bla fire than Si