X-Files Science Part II: Bugs, Hybrids and Hypnosis

But if you listen to the episode that we released earlier this week, you will know that we are doing a two parter on the science behind the X Files right right right, And if you didn't catch our last episode on the science of the X Files that was part one, you should probably go back and listen to

that one first. It came out earlier this week because our our first one, we're the we introduced the concept of the X Files for people who aren't fans of the show, who haven't seen it themselves, so you can sort of follow along. In fact, we just got done being on periscope and somebody asked us who they wanted to know. I've never seen the show before? Can I still listen to these episodes? And the answer is absolutely yeah. We really hope they will be interesting anyway, but especially

so if you're a fan of the show. Even if you're not a fan of the show. We hope there are enough interesting ideas to to keep you on the hook through this whole discussion. So, uh, if you want to go back and check out that first episode first, we recommend that. If not, and you're here and you just want to listen, feel free to continue because we're gonna roll on in. We've got We're gonna talk about

bugs and insects and the X Files. We're gonna talk about how hypnosis, which I know is one of Joe's favorite topics, and the X Files, and we're gonna talk about the possibility of alien hybrids. Right. Yeah, So just to revisit the impetus for doing this episode. We're doing it because the X Files are coming back, and I believe it's Sunday, January. They're coming back to television and we're going to get a new X Files mini series with Jillian Anderson, with David Duchovny, all the gangs, getting

all that together. Mitch Pleggy, I hope so playing Skinner. Oh he's there. He's got a big old beard. I can't wait. Is he bringing his muscles? He's probably been working out for the last six month. I love Mitch peleggy Um. And we want to mention also the top one more thing about how we brought in a bunch

of sources on our research this time. But but our primary resource over this past couple of episodes has been a cool book called The Science of the X Files by Gene Cavelos, who is an astrophysicist and mathematician now a science and science fiction writer. So this is a really fun book. It's been a lot of help to us. It was written in so we we've had to check on a bunch of things and and and see what

needs a little bit of updating. But but that's been a big help, And I think we should get right into it because I am just jones in to talk about bugs. Yeah, I mean, insects are clearly a big theme in the X Files. They show up all over the place. We've got classics from the first season with Darkness Falls were the copper Phages, which is one of my favorite episodes, which is all about cockroaches invading us well Town and uh. And then of course the general

myth arc of the show has been easy galore. These feature pretty prominently in the movie too, write So I really wanted to talk about darkness falls. But unfortunately, I don't know if there's all that much great to say about the science behind it. So the basic idea of the episode is that Mulder Scully and some tag alongs go into the woods where there have been some people disappearing, and they get assaulted by photophobic wood mites that kill

people by cocoon ing them in the forest. I believe Tightus Wellover, the actor Titus Wellover is one of the one of the tag along's. I don't know who that is. Oh, he was in like dead Wood. He's in a bunch of stuff. He was in Transformers Age of Extinction. Oh, well, I remember that one. Who did he play in that? He was like the bad FBI agent who wanted to be mean to Optimus Prime. I don't remember. If you saw him, you'd know him in a minute. He's a

character actor that's been a ton of stuff. Did he get killed by the wood mites? Yeah? Okay, so yeah, Well, we eventually find out that these that these attackers are some sort of might or something grows in the trees and they are allergic to light. So you can protect yourself by surrounding yourself in light. But of course a lot of the plot of the episode hinges on the fact that Molder and Scully have a generator that's running out, and can they keep the lights on long enough to

survive through the night. But these things kill their victims. I don't know if they kill them by cocoon ing them or just they kill them and then cocoon them. But there's there's I think there's a part where live people are pulled out of a cocoon, so it seems a cocooning process that kills. I got the impression that like, once they're cocoon to, their bodies get desiccated somehow by these by these bugs. So I wanted to find out if there were any really cool, real science facts about

bugs that kill by cocoon ing. And there are no real killer wood mites that I know of. But one interesting thing I did find was not about an insect, but about a spider that kills insects with cocoons. So this was This was a July two blog post found by a science writer named Ed Young, who's a writer I like. I follow him, and he he talks about this group of spiders called the ellbrids, which use their silk line and these are his words, as a murderous

garbage compactor. Okay, alright, so I'm kind of imagining that does this. Does the silk from their their web kind of cut through the enemies as its as it constricts, it crushes, crushes them to death. So most spiders kill with venom, and those that spin webs they use their webs for like locomotion dropping down from something, or for

traps to catch insects in. But a scientist named William Epperhard from the University of Costa Rica noticed that the librids spend more than an hour wrapping their prey in more than eighty meters of silk. So they catch an insect and then they just started wrapping and they just keep going and wrapping it, Yeah, wrapping it and wrapping it.

One species in particular, called philippin Ella vicina, uses so much silk at such great compression that it crushes the insect inside, making quote its legs break and its eyes buckle inwards. So this sounds like some kind of like medieval torture device like that that would be used to get people to talk somehow. Yeah, it's the spider version of the scavengers daughter. Yeah, exactly Scavenger's daughter was what

I was thinking of. So okay, so darkness falls. Maybe these are like we never I don't think see what these insects actually look like other than just like a haze of green. Yeah, they just kind of show up as dots and a lot. But but maybe they're tiny, tiny green spiders that we've very strong cocoons that squeeze

the life out of their victims. I don't think it's very plausible, but but imagine if I mean, one thing that's certainly true is that spider webbing is spider silk is incredibly strong for its size, you know, it's it's very fine. But for for how fine it is, it has amazing tentsile drength. And so maybe if you've got a whole whole bunch of arachnids working in tandem to cocoon a person like this with super high compression, I don't know, could that cause injury? Maybe I'd like to

I'd like to imagine it could. Yeah, maybe that's where they're going to the episode. But they just didn't have the budget to quite show the incredible eighty meters silk per victim. Then again, I don't know if if the cocoon ing in the episode really compresses the victim all that hard, it seems like that. I think you're right, they get dried out or something like that. Yeah. But another episode that has some really really great bug science

in it is War of the copper Phages. Yeah, where the copper Phages is written by one of our favorite X Files writers, Darren Morgan. He only wrote like four or five episodes, but they're like all my favorite episode. Yeah. Yeah.

And in this one, you know, general premises, Molder goes to a small town in which cockroaches are swarming all over people and killing them, and he's coming up with all these various ways that he thinks that the cockroaches are doing, usually supernatural or or or fantastics in some way. So one of the things we should mention in the title is, well, what is the term copper phage means? Well, a copper phage it means one who feeds on excrement,

because cockroaches eat their own and other species. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a lovely term. So cockroaches aren't the only copper phages, but they are. They are a type of copper fage. I've I've heard that some of our coworkers here at How Stuff Works are copper phages. That is inappropriate. I've got a great insult for somebody next next time. Somebody's got a got a really obnoxious grin that this will get past the sensors. So you could you tell

them they have a copper phaging grin. That's great? So okay, So this episode basically, you know, they run around trying to come up with all these ways, and it's everything from like the copper phages that cockroaches are aliens to their tiny little robots, right, and and Scully basically debunks every single thing he comes up with over the over

the phone. It's great. Yeah, Scully in the episode, molders exploring this town and doing all chasing down all the leads, and I think scullies at home eating ice cream quick, right, she just she talks to Molder on the phone and debunks all of his theories over the over the lines. Yeah. So here's what we do know about cockroaches though, in the possibility of them swarming all over us and killing us, right,

cockroaches breed very quickly. We know that we know anybody who's encountered a cockroach in their home is going to be aware of this stuff. They run very fast, especially for their their size. And we know that they carry bacteria easily because the bacteria in their feces, which let's remember they eat, remains viable for a long period of time. Uh. And yes, some people like myself are allergic to cockroaches. Yeah,

especially if they're exposed more often to them. So now is that allergy like allergic to their bites, are allergic to I don't know, some kind of particle dispersed in the air. Yeah. I believe that it's remnants of their exoskeleton. So how do I expand this? I had an allergy test done last year where they basically do that thing where they line up your arm and they shoot little uh injections of particles into your your skin to find

out what you're what's your allergic little allergens exactly? Skin wheel responses, Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And they do it on my well, at least in my case, they did it on my arm and on my back, and cockroaches were one of the like forty things. Uh and it and it welled up. So I don't know, I haven't been exposed to that many cockroaches. So I don't know where this particular trait came from, But what what use are you supposed to make of that information? It's like, well,

don't get in the bathtub full of cockroaches. I think it's like more along the lines of this is an allergen that if you if you live in a place where there are known to be a lot of cockroaches and there's just no way that you're going to get rid of them, should move you, should or take medicine or you know, um, one of the things they pitched

me there with that therapy. I don't know if you've heard of this, the allergen therapy where they slowly expose you more and more to the thing that you're allergic to. Way they like inject you with it with injections with cockroaches. Well, I mean it's particulate matter. Yeah, yeah, I don't know that. They have like a bag of cockroaches in the back and they're just like grinding them up with a mortar past they put them in there and put a little

in the syringe. Oh man, well, I can only imagine, given all the things that I was found to be allergic to, how disgusting that that mixed bag. But anyways, yeah, so people are allergic to them. But here's the thing. Cockroaches don't usually swarm, right. We don't find like hundreds of cockroaches swarming on a live person and just devouring them like they seems like. They don't usually move towards you either. You flip the lights on and they almost

a yeah. Usually what it is if you see a large group of them moving at one time, Usually what that is is that they've found a suitable home, like let's say a sewage plant, right, Uh. And the cockroaches, an individual cockroach can release a pheromone that will alert other roaches to its location and to say like, hey, look we've got this whole hotel we can move into now, right. Um. So there's that. And I also want to mention something

else that we've talked about. Uh. I know you've talked about on Forward Thinking, one of our other shows here. It's a show that Joe does with Jonathan Strickland and Lauren Vogel Bomb about future science. Um. And I talked about it on a on another one of our shows called Stuff of Genius, which is that you can actually control cockroaches by putting backpacks on them, these little tiny backpacks that have electrodes that connect to their brain. And uh,

there's a there. There actually was a kickstarter uh two years ago that would allow you to use your phone once you've hooked up a cockroach in such a way in order to basically drive the cock roach around right right. Uh. And this technology was actually developed by a guy named

Dr Isao Shimu Yama at the University of Tokyo. But the kickstarter was basically coming up with a way to to make this sort of a do it yourself science kit for kids, I guess, although I'd be terrified at the idea of kids just like trying to stick electrical probes into a cockroach's head. Uh. Anyways, it's totally possible to do this. And one of the reasons why is because we're theorizing that cockroach bodies are actually one of the best ways that we might have to explore space.

So a robot cockroach or a cockroach that you're controlling with a little iPhone backpack might be an ideal way. And Molder even in this episode says something like he thinks the cockroaches have been sent from some alien civilization to to explore Earth, right right, Um, so we've already built cockroach esque robots to explore volcanoes. Uh. They dispose of minds and clean them up, and they also clean

out nuclear power plants. Yeah. I've actually heard about the idea of using roach like robots to uh to search in rubble after earthquakes for surviving. That seems like a good idea as well, right yeah, yeah, So well, the reason why is because there are multiple legs in the way that they're you know, nervous system is set up, they offer both stability and mobility. Uh. And they also

have centralized and decentralized control systems. So the central controls of their legs, you know, it governs all their legs, their whole body's movement, but they also have de central

control on each leg, allowing it to act independently. So I can see now why like malder you know, if malder knew this, I don't know if he was familiar with the that doctor's research at the time, but that he would think, oh, yeah, maybe this is like a little uh probe for an alien civilization or something like that. Maybe that's how will probe other civilizations in the future

will send spaceships full of robot cockroaches. That makes a good point, and that actually ties into something I know I've said on this show before, and it's an opinion I've held for a while now that when we encounter an alien civilization, I don't think we're going to meet them. I think we're going to meet their technology. Right, whatever they send, they're much more likely, I mean much more likely,

like I actually know. But my my gut feeling is that what would be more probable is that they would send feelers out throughout the galaxy, that there would be sort of unmanned probes, so weaponized bees I think is our best transition next, right, Yeah, this has been a recurring theme in the show. That's a lot of fun. Actually, it's it's in the movie. It's in some classic myth

Arc episodes like Herren Vulcan, Zero Sum, and Uh. The bees appear sometimes as vectors for the intentional spread of a disease like smallpoxox is a big theme in the X Files. Yeah, but they also sometimes appear as what appears to be just a direct attack weapons, stinging people to death. So they you know, they float into town and sting the enemies of the conspiracy to death like

this mobile cloud assassin, which is a decent idea. They're multifunctional, and I wanted to look into the possibility of using bees like this as a weapon in the ways envisioned in the X file. And this has actually come up. You reminded me before we came in here. This has come up on stuff to blow your mind before. When we were talking about wolfsbane and aconite. I guess I theorized that you could have a bee pollinate an aconite flower and and then potentially sting to somebody and spread

the aconite. And we actually had a listener right in and say that that is absolutely not possible, with a good explanation of why they did, and we addressed it in a listener mail episode. But yeah, so, yeah, there there are many diseases that are spread by insects. That's fairly obvious. Virus is spread by arthur pods or often known as arbor viruses, and these they tend to be spread by blood sucking insects that bite or puncture the

host animals skin like mosquito or fleas or lice or ticks. Yeah, uh, and not by stinging insects like bees. So I would say that in principle, it doesn't seem impossible to engineer bees that deliver a virus via their sting. But I couldn't find any examples of anything like this in the real world. And uh, and I couldn't really imagine also why this would be done, because just let me back up and get into it a little bit here, Okay,

I'm with you. So spreading smallpox is a good way to kill lots of people if that's your goal, as as the cigarette smoking man or some other conspiracy commanding figure, if you want to cause terror havoc can kill millions, you could You could use a bioweapon. You could spread a very deadly germ like small box, the small boxes, the very ola virus. It's highly contagious and and it and it kills lots of people. I remember reading a stat that it kills like one in four people who

get it. So what does Cavelos have to say about bees and smallpox in her book, Well, she says, you know, she's thinking about the question, could be be engineered to inject a virus like smallpox in its sting? And she speaks to a doctor w K y'all click and y'all click says, basically, scientists can never rule out anything. It's kind of a vague answer just through the whole thousands of years worth of research right out the window. But I guess that's that's an appropriate point with this topic,

because there's nothing. There's nothing that says it would be impossible to get a virus into the venom gland be But it just doesn't seem like it doesn't seem probable. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the best way to go about it either. So Cavela speculates the bees and the X Files are the species APIs smell of Fera scuta lata, which is the African honey bee, often sometimes known in the alarmist press as the killer bees. Yeah, and this

was right at the height of the X Files. This was I think when the hysteria about killer bees man America was really can you remember this in the at least the news stories killer bees. Yeah, they're gonna they're gonna come and they're gonna I believe they were supposed to come up from the South, right, and they're gonna

kill everybody in Texas first or something. Yeah, I think the the idea is that they were introduced to South America from Africa, they became an invasive species when they got loose and they spread up from the south over the continent, and that they were they were super dangerous. I think that was overstated. They can be dangerous in

that situation. Uh, what I've read is that their venom isn't any more dangerous than that of other bees, but they are reportedly more aggressive in their swarming and stinging behavior. So they're just more likely to get really worked up

and keep chasing you in attacking. And that that lines up with what we see of like the be attacks in X files pretty much like like I think I remember, like somebody walks into a room full of them and they just all immediately attack with this person, right, And so what happens when a bee stings you, Well, there's one particular type of bee in the colony that stings you. It's it's not going to be the male drone or the queen that's usually stinging you, but the female worker

bee and her stinger is a modified ovipositor. So it's the same organ that in a queen becomes the the egg laying organ. But in these in these sterile sisters, in the in the sterile worker bees, it turns into these barbed needles that stab you as the bee furiously pumps in venom. And then usually the worker bee dies after this within a couple of hours, So it's literally

the tiny death. So yeah, you can you can imagine why it would seem appealing as a as a sort of infectious agent delivery system because it's literally injecting you kind of like a hypodermic needle if somebody wanted to inject you with smallpox. Yeah, but bees don't get smallpox, and even if they did, it probably wouldn't infect you for a sting because it's not delivering. It's not just designed to do that. It delivers the venom. I believe this was what the our listener who wrote in about

the aconite. It's just along the same lines of reasoning that even if it digested it, it's it's not the like organ isn't even connected to the rest of its uh system. Yeah, so bees are not a good candidate for delivering smallpox. But that does not mean you can't use bees as weapons. In fact, there is a fascinating history of humans doing this very thing. I checked out this book called Six Legged Soldiers Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, and this book is

really interesting so far. I look forward to reading the rest of it. Lockwood chronicles many historical claims of insect warfare, or to give it an academically respectable name, entomological warfare e W. And generally. Lockwood mentions that there there are three basic ways you can use insects to attack people and and cause havoc. One is what we've been talking about, the transmission of pathogenic microbes. Throwing bodies with plague ridden fleas over the walls of a city or something like

that would be an example there. Or you can use them for the destruction of crops and livestock, and that's a big one and a lot of people don't think about it. Or you can use them methods of destruction. You can use them for a way they show up in in the X files. Also just direct attacks on humans,

you know, sick um bees. And he he notes that in this last in this last item, just direct attacks on humans, bees are pretty good soldiers because when you think about other war animals like dogs and elephants and horses. They all, as higher mammals, have a self preservation drive that makes them, in Lockwood's words, quote, prone to desertion

in the midst of combat. Yeah, it's the survival instinct. Yeah, But a swarm of attacking worker bees does not have that preservation instinct, and they've evolved in a very different way from mammals with teeth and claws. Worker bees are sterile. They don't reproduce, so they don't particularly value their own survival, but they viciously attack in defense of the one among them who can reproduce, the queen. So if something bad happens to the nest, they will self sacrificially fly out

and attack to protect the queen. So this is interesting because I just got done working on a piece for How Stuff Works about how you can epo genetically control ants, and when I was talking to the lead researcher on this, she was telling me that they're also looking into research

with bees in similar ways. And by using the royal jelly that's fed to the queen bees, you can sometimes you know, potentially manipulate the bees into thinking they're protecting the queen when they're protecting somebody else maybe maybe that's the science behind this. Wow, So this really you really could to be army in this way. Theoretically, this is I don't want to the Well, the researcher I spoke to hadn't done this, but she was hypothesizing. It's fun

to dream. Okay. So Lockwood speculates that people throughout prehistory possibly used bees as weapons and and he gives the example that early human combat might have sometimes involved hurling bees nests or wasps nests at a group of enemies. So this is like before we figured out fire, it was like maybe not fire, but before we had But I'm just imagining, like, how are we gonna attack them? Just grab that pile of bees and throw it at him. Well,

he has some interesting suggestions. So he says this would be an effective way of say, you have a bunch of enemies, an enemy tribe that's hiding inside a cave or a hut or some enclosure, and you know it's risky to run in there at them, but what if you could drive them out by hurling a bees nest grenade out. Lockwood notes that there's not much physical evidence

of this, so it remains mostly speculation. Though an interesting one to think about what what weapons would have been available to people in prehistory, And so he's thinking through this and he's like, well, you know, with the technology available to them at the time, they could have probably done this by say, harvesting a bee or wasp nest

at night. If they approachiate during the nighttime, the insects are slowed down by cooler temperatures, or if it's people who have mastered fire, they can use smoke to calm the bees, and then they could insert the bees into a woven basket or sack and then just kind of like throw it open inside the enemy's cave exactly. Or

you could plug the openings up with mud or grass. Okay, wow, that probably wouldn't kill the people that you're attacking, but it would be well maybe unless there are these pekiller bees that were speaking about earlier, but well maybe, But a lot of times the point of using bees as direct attack is not to kill the enemy because election but yeah, it's sort of it's a terrorizing or terrifying idea. You know, it depresses the enemy, it causes fear, panic,

and and it causes bad tactical maneuvers. I'll get into that in just a second. I believe that this is something that you can do in that video game BioShock. Yes, I'm pretty sure, right, yeah, you can throw bees at your enemy and then they all start panicking. So once historians start making records of ancient warfare into mo logical warfare definitely appears on the scene, including bees and wasps. For example, Lockwood says that the Tiv people of Nigeria

developed what he refers to as a bee canon. So this was bees loaded into a large hollow horn which could be pointed facing the enemy in battle and then shake into release swarms in the opposing forces direction. And according to a book I found called World History of Bee Keeping and Honey Hunting by Ava Rain, it's also suggested that if if the enemies were close enough, the Tiv soldiers would try to pour sweet smelling powder on their enemies, and the idea was that this would attract

the bees. Okay, Another really interesting ancient use of this is that Lockwood mentions that in the Mayan sacred text popel Vu, it tells of a Mayan battle strategy that involved building a fake warrior dummy with a head made out of a hollow gourd covered with a head dress, and when the enemy rushed in and smashed the heads of these dummies, they would discover not only that they

were not real people, they were traps. The hollow gourd heads were filled with stinging insects, either wasps or bees, and then they just angrily swarm out an attack. This would cause a chaotic retreat, and during the route the Mayan warriors would run in and fall upon the fleeing enemy and destroy them. So a cigarette smoking man, a student of history, this is where he proposed the great

usage of bees for the alien invasion. Well, you know, the X Files is one of the earliest examples I can think of of people talking uh tying government conspiracies into the the end of the Mayan long Calendar, you know, which they supposedly said it was in two thousand twelve. Yeah. Yeah, And we've talked about bees before on on the show

Brain Stuff that you and I both write for. There was an episode that our colleague Lauren Vogelbaum did that was about colony collapse disorder, and I'd be curious how you might people to incorporate that into X Files conspiracy mythos. Uh Yeah, I'm sure I bet it will show up in the new series. Maybe what do you want to be let's put money to Well, we'll find out if it does. We'll find out in two weeks, right, So a couple more interesting facts about bees in the ancient world.

The ancient Greek military writer a Neus Tacticus wrote in an influential work in the fourth century b c. Called How to Survive under Siege, which sounds like a good read. That's a that's a surviving watching that Stephen Sagal movie. Touche. Uh No, No, he gives this cool tactics. So he says, if you're in a city this under siege and the army outside is digging tunnels under your walls to get into the city, you should you should meet the tunnels and chuck some bees and wasps down into the tunnels

with the enemy soldiers. These guys just have bees like at the ready. Though it seems like like they've just got like pockets full of bees. Well they did it first because another thing that Lockwood points out in his book is that the Romans used bee hives as a

common catapult payload. So they put beehives in a catapult and then throw it at enemy fortifications, and he says that they did it so much that it might have contributed to a documented decline in the number of bee hives found in the Roman Empire towards the end the late period in the Empire. Well, you can't say they weren't creative. But to bring it back to smallpox, if we're talking about warfare today, just using bees as direct attack weapons is not going to be especially powerful compared

to lots of other things you could do. A violent, terrorizing attack you can do with bullets, bombs, poison gas, and other chemical weapons. The only reason I can imagine a modern conspiracy would want to use bees as a direct attack weapon is maybe just for effect, because it's like a weird and frightening image to hurt enemy morale. Yeah, well, I mean I think in the X Files, the idea was that it was something that you just wouldn't even suspect was a weapon, Right, that's kind of part of it. Uh,

they're all around us man, Yeah exactly. Or that you'd already been stung and infected with the smallpox virus and you didn't even know it. Uh, yeah, I don't know. Uh, it sounds to me, like, based on what you've what you've said that it would have been far more effective for them to just use mosquitoes exactly right, Yeah, I think it would be much more effective if they were going to try to engineer an insect delivered weapon against

the people of Earth. It would make much more to use mosquitoes or fleas as a disease vector, or to introduce a crop destroying pest like you know, locusts or med flies or something to just ruin all of our food crops. And so if you're the cigarette smoking man,

that is the more fruitful pun intended avenue of attack. Okay, well, why don't we take this opportunity to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about one of the one of the most disturbing episodes of The X Files that I've ever seen and I think happened in the show's history. Okay, we're back. So we are going to talk about very briefly, the episode of The X Files called Home. Now, if you haven't seen this one, it's I would say it's the darkest episode

of The X Files I've ever seen. Oh, it was so disturbing. I mean, there are parts of it that are kind of funny in retrospect, but when you're actually watching it, it is messed up. It is like, it's like they let the Texas Chainsaw Massacre uncensored onto network television. Well, one of the things I love about about this episode is that, yeah, it's definitely influenced by Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is too bad Robert doesn't hear with us because

we know that's one of his favorite movies. But also that you don't actually see any of the violence. It's all implied, it's all off camera, but it is. It just it is shot in such a way that it sticks in your head and your imagination fills in the blanks. I think Fox actually apologized for this episode, right, Yeah, I didn't like it was so disturbing that after they aired it, they were like, are bad, We're never going

to do that again. Well, so, the essential premise of Home is that I don't even remember where they are what stayed there, and I guess it doesn't matter. But there's this uh family that lives off sort of in the middle of nowhere in this small town, and and it turns out that they are all the children of closely related parents who have a high incident of genetic disease. Right, so they're all kind of like, uh, well, they're all ancestral relatives, but they're also sort of crazy and it's

unclear like how they're all related in some ways. Right, Yeah, I think this is playing on the old trope that if you know, if closely related relatives reproduced together, that their offspring will will be messed up in one way or another. Well so, yeah, so Cavelos actually like took a look at this because Home is one of those pretty I would say it's like one of those up

there popular best of episodes of the X Files. Whenever you look at those lists of like top ten, top twenty episodes, I think a lot of people just enjoy the perversity of the idea that an episode like this was aired on Fox in the I I have to say that I really enjoyed it, you know, recently watching it, I think it holds up to any of our model

in horror movies, even you know, twenty years later. But um so Cavelos looks at this and she finds that, yeah, when you have related couples, each of them carry the same negative recessive traits, right, which makes the chance that

their child will inherit two copies of those traits even higher. Right. So, at the time this was in when Cavelos wrote the book, eleven point seven percent of offspring from first cousin marriages have a physical defect or had a physical defect, whereas eight point five percent of unre related couples, people who you know, were not cousins or brothers, sister u had these similar physical defects. Okay, so that seems like the

difference isn't actually all that huge, yeah, exactly. But she goes on twenty percent of children that are born from incest, so father daughter relationships or brothers sister relationships die in childhood, and thirty three percent suffered disabilities. So it seems somewhere along there that there's a there's a discrepancy between the definition of a physical defect and disability, right, because the

percentages are a little different. Those are probably not the terms that we would use today to be sensitive about. I agree, Yeah, that's what's used in the literature of the time, exactly. And and too she calls out too, in particular Mechel Gruber and new Lexova syndrome, and they're both mentioned in the episode. I believe there's a scene

where they find this is gruesome. In the episode, they find a dead baby I think, right, and Scully is like testing it and she just finds that it's got all of these UH diseases, all these genetic diseases inside and just say something like it's got like every every every inherited disease you can have or something. Um. So, both of those mechel Gruber and new Lexova are caused by recessive genetic traits and this you know, the traits.

Traits that go along with this include small malformed heads and actually missing parts of the brain or spinal cord. And there are even some cases where there's a skin covered sack on the back of the head that has a malformed portion of the brain in it, along with deformed limbs. And that kind of lines up with what we saw of the little the baby monster that they find, and that's dug up right, the actual UH. I guess

family and home are human looking, right, Well. I wanted to take a look into this and see how it lined up with today's numbers. And there's a great article over on Ion nine that's called why in breeding really isn't as bad as you think it is. I gotta love Ionine with those headlines types that's clicking. Yeah, um, so they said, and this was relatively recently. I want to say, in the last two or three years, cousins breeding go from a point one percent chance to a

twenty chance of a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis. So I think that this is what cystic fibrosis is probably what Cavellos was referring to back in the nineties as quote physical defect right, um, and that's very different from the numbers above. Uh. They also cite in that piece that there's a guy named Alan Biddles at Australia's Murdock University and he specifically studies incestual birth defects. He studied it for thirty years. Can you imagine that that's your

line of study. You go to work every morning and you're looking at that. He says, he's the expert on this.

He says, there's a two percent risk of birth defects in the general population, okay, but there's a four percent chance in first cousin relationships, so you automatically say two for okay, So there's double the risk of birth defects, right, Well, or you could look at it the other way, is what they say in this ion Ion article that there's only a nineties six percent chance that these children are born healthy. Right, So maybe it depends on how you look at It's like a cup half empty, half full

kind of thing, right. Um, So of children born from first cousin relationships are just fine. But biddles found that only one point two percent of them suffered from an increase in infant mortality rates. So that's significantly lower than what Cavellos was reporting back in the nineties. Huh yeah, um, And this is a good opportunity for us to bring up what a chimera is. Be familiar with this from mythology, the chimera. The chimera, well, I mean the chimera I

believe combines different types of animals into the same animal. Yeah, it's a good D and D monster. It's a part lion, park goat, and part dragon. But in the scientific sense, it's a it's a genetic condition, right, the exactly you've you've incorporated the genome of multiple different individuals into one body. It's an organism that has two different sets of DNA usually originating from the fusion of different zygoats or eggs. Yeah,

that's basically how you defined it. And and it's important to denote here a chimera in a human chimera is not to be mistaken for a mosaic. A mosaic is when an organism contains different populations of cells from a single zygot or egg. It's also not a hybrid. And this is important because we're gonna talk a lot about hybrids later and chimeras will come up again. Hybrids contain

genetically identical cells from two different species. Okay, So the reason I bring this up is Cavelos talks about the possibility, well maybe, uh, maybe all of this ancestual relationship in the family and home led to them being chimeras. So they have the tissues of multiple genotypes. Uh. And and so there's this idea that they've got the DNA of two different people. Uh. And it's possible that a fertilized twin egg was absorbed by its sibling uh And that

these can then incorporate twins of different sexes. Right, So you could be a male twin of a female twin. You could absorb your female twin and Cavelas actually talks about instances where this has happened and the person grows up and they find part like reproductive organs and weird places inside their bodies from a totally different gender than what they they were born to. H Yeah, so who knows, maybe that's something that was going on with the home

people in there. They're crazy Texas Chainsaw Masca Ranch. Okay, now I think it's time for us to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when we come back, we will be going into the depths of the human mind. You know, there's one great resolution you can make for the new year, and that's to maximize every minute and every dollar for your small business. Now we actually know an easy way to do that, and

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enter stuff. Okay, we're back. So Joe, I gotta ask you, after going over home and the science behind incest and birth defects, is there any way that I can just scrub my mind clean of this? Is? Can I forget, just push this out of my head? Nope? Probably not really. But if if you're I've seen this many times on the TV show are you Are you sure? This is

one of my favorite things that happens on the TV show. Okay, So imagine somebody wakes up in a field and they've got this field where lay no, the field where you died? O the fielder I died? Yeah, that was really bad X files joke. They wake up in center field on on a baseball stadium. Uh. And they wake up and they've got some missing time. They've got a problem. Oh no, some time disappeared from my life and I and I can't figure out what happened. I have no memory of it.

What is Mulder recommend? Well, I'm gonna go with the regression hypnosis. That's right, Thank god, I have deeper regression hypnosis. I'm still only catching up. I'm up to the beginning of the fifth season and he's already done this four times. Uh, and that's per Those are four episodes, I want to say. In jose Chunks from Outer Space, it's at least three

times in that episode he does it. Yeah. And jose Chungs, which is probably my favorite episode, hose Chungs from Outer Space, he does it to the same girl at least three times. And so what what is the idea of regression hypnosis? Well, as depicted in the episodes, and we're going to distinguish between what happens on the X Files and what might

happen in real life. On the episodes, you've got a hypnotist or some kind of therapist who practices hypnotism, who puts somebody into a hypnotized state, so they'll tell them to relax and and say some kind of like patterns of words that put them into an altered state of consciousness, and then the person gets kind of dreamy and starts remembering things. Wait a minute, they in the hypnotist says

where are you now? And the person under hypnosis says, I'm being lifted up above the ground and I'm floating through walls in a spacecraft and I'm laying there while the aliens do experiments on me. And this is what happens in the show pre Beviously, this person had no memory of an event, and then suddenly, by being hypnotized, they have access to memories that weren't available to them

consciously before. Yeah. This is um connected to the Satanic panic that was happening around the eighties as well as the same kind of thing. Robert and I talked about it in the episode we did on Satanic Panic. I believe the book that popularized this was called Michelle Remembers, Yeah, and it very much the same idea, except for instead of aliens, it was demon worshippers. Nice. So, in the early nineteen nineties, when Chris Carter was first developing the

idea of the X files. He got into the work of the Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mac, And Johnny Mac was deep into the study of alien abductee experiences at the time. I think he got into it in the nineteen eighties. So Mac worked personally with more than two hundred different people who claimed to have experiences of alien abductions. He interviewed them and he tried to understand with their experiences and the effect of abduction experiences on personality, consciousness,

and worldview. And the interesting thing is altruistic, I guess. So. Uh. Mac was a respected academic and psychiatrist before he embarked on this alien abduction research. So he wasn't. He wasn't somebody people thought of as a kuk, at least not before this. But his work drew a lot of controversy. He was even investigated by the Harvard medical faculty at one point, who were afraid that he was causing harm to his patients by confirming the reality of their delusions.

So so what was his attitude really too? Yeah, yeah it was. It was he just like a shyster or no, I don't get that since at all, But he but he also it's hard to pin down exactly to what extent he believed in the reality of the alien abductions.

For example, he gave a quote to the BBC where he it sounds like he's trying to avoid the hurance of having gone full Molder, so he he says, he says, I would never say, yes, there are aliens talking to people, but I would say there's a compelling, powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way. That's mysterious. Yet I can't know what it is, but it seems to me that it invites deeper, further inquiry. So I mean,

that's a respectable point of view. I guess you're just saying, like, well, here's an interesting phenomenon. Lots of people claim to have experienced something I don't really understand, and I don't know. I've said this before in the Satanic Panic episode and other episodes where we talk about people having kind of out of body experiences as such. Uh that it's not that I don't believe, but I do believe that they believe.

You know, in a lot of situations, it's so real for them it doesn't matter whether it was real or not it's it's affecting them regardless. But despite that quote, I've read in other places, and I've seen videos of Mac talking like on on TV interviews and IT conferences where he kind of comes off as committing a little more to the reality of alien abductions than that quote

would lead you to believe. So it seems like he he was sort of presenting maybe some different kind of levels of confidence in the reality of alien abductions at different times. So back to Chris Carter. Chris Carter, of course, I don't know if we established he created the X Files. Yeah, And so Carter claims that in the early nineties, Mac invited him to sit in on a regression hypnosis session with somebody who claimed to have had an alien abduction experience,

and Carter found this experience very disturbing. It really stuck with him what he saw, and I'm sure inspired a lot of these things and the X Files where we see people undergo regression hypnosis. But but what was regression hypnosis really as practiced by Mac and the people who endorsed it. Well, Mac wrote a book. It was called Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, and in max own words, it quote describes a clinical map of the abduction territory.

And I read through some parts of the book to see what mac had to say about the experiences, and he sort of describes typical features of his interviews with adductees or experiencers as he likes to call them. And while I think he maintained that the majority of his research was based on sort of standard face to face conversation, just talking to people, interviews, conscious memories, he did employ

the use of regression hypnosis to get new details. He liked to call it instead of hypnosis, he called them relaxation exercises. So he describes that this was like where he'd he'd go through a series of patterns where he encouraged the subject to focus on breathing and relax all the parts of the body and visualize a safe space, and then have the subject mentally returned to that safe

space periodically. Sounds like yoga. That sounds like shivasana, what I do after I cool down after a yoga session. You know, I've noticed before some some mimilarities between what people describe from the experience of hypnosis and what people describe experiences of yoga or meditation, And so there seemed to be some similarities there, and maybe in introducing very mildly altered states of consciousness just by intentional relaxation of

the body and the mind. Yeah, and so anyway back to mac during the session, once he got people into these relaxation exercises, he would attempt to help the patient regress, to go back into memories that have been repressed by the conscious mind and recover new details, like what what are we recovering here? Because I keep thinking about this. Are you familiar with the comedian Kyle Kanane. No, well, I've heard the name. He's one of my favorite comedians

that he is. His latest album, he has this bit where he talks about repressed memories and using hypnosis to bring them back, and he jokes because he's like, I wish I could repress memories. He says something on the lines of, oh you can repress memories. Tell me how, wizard? So I want to I want to know what are they? What are they bringing back up? Other than well, I mean, the idea of repressed memories goes way back in in psychology.

I mean, Freud talked about repression of of memories. You know that you would you would hide memories of traumatic childhood experiences that really influenced who you are. But I think you didn't have to be like a strict Freudy and to believe in repressed memories. I'm not sure how much science there is behind the idea of a repressed

memory now. I think that's highly debated. But anyway, what Max said he would do is that he claimed the value of regression and hypnosis is not necessarily to get people to recall like whole experiences that they never otherwise remembered, but to sort of flesh out the details have already

established memories, and also for therapeutic purpose. We've seen this on plenty of television shows before, Like you were in a bank when it was robbed, but you couldn't at the time, you didn't necessarily pay attention to all the details of what certain people were wearing. But if we use hypnosis, we can make you go back to the president of that event exactly. And that's what he advocates.

So in one sense, I would say the kinds of regression hypnosis we see on the X files are probably not even an accurate portrayal of what the advocates of regression hypnosis would say they do, so it's it's not even accurately showing what the people who think it works would say. Even though Chris Carter participated in this, well, I don't know what participated. You watch she sat there,

But but you bring up a good point. Is there any reason to think it's a good way to get accurate information about what happened in the past, and if only details, I couldn't find any reason to think that this is a good way. Mac gave some defenses, so I'm gonna I'm gonna give some of his defenses of

of regression hypnosis. In Appendix A of the book I mentioned earlier, the one about his clinical work with the people who claim to have had abduction experiences, he defends the quality of the memories brought back through regression hypnosis by saying they met three criteria. Number one, he said that the memories that that were brought out through regression were usually against self interest, meaning that they were like more embarrassing or more damaging to self regard of the patient.

Thus this he's sort of arguing for this, I think that they wouldn't have a motivation to fabricate these memories. It's kind of like flattering to the person, kind of like when you've got that roommate in college who drank too much of the night before and did something really bad, right, and then they say, oh, I blacked out. I don't

remember any of that. Oh, I guess it could be kind of like that, But it would be like saying if you didn't believe what he was saying until he started saying things that were really not flattering to his self in right, and then you can be like, oh, this probably did happen to ted, because you know, he's admitting that he pooped in his pants. Okay, yeah. Yeah. The second criterion is that he said that the memory is recovered through aggression are more consistent with independent reports

of other abductees. So once he do a regression on people, they started giving details that sounded a lot more like what all of the other people reported in their abduction stories. This was similar with the satanic panic stuff as well. Yeah. Yeah. And then the third criterion he gives is that memories brought up through regression tend to cause a much stronger

emotional affect and bodily reaction in the subject. People really see seemed to be having strong feelings about what was going on in the memories recovered through their regressions, and so I think that bait. Even despite these defenses, I would have a persistent concern about the idea that hypnosis or any similar like relaxation exercise is going to recover accurate information that was not previously available to you if you didn't already remember it. Why is this exercise bringing

these memories back? And why don't we have or physical evidence that these memories are better than the memories you consciously remembered at first? Look? Okay, but what would you say to using regression hypnosis to recollecting one of your past lives? This comes up in an episode of The X Files. I mean, this is all this episode I

was joking about them. Yeah, exactly the field where I died where I But I think Mulder remembers being what somebody's in a Civil war soldier or something like that, and some other women who who they're currently like pursuing that's part of like a terrorist seller or something like that.

Is was his wife. I believe Sully was like his general. Well, yeah, this is where some of these accounts get way fishier than the ones I've already talked about For example, there is a writer named Alexa Clay and she grew up with John Mack. He was her mother's partner. And she had an interesting article on mac that I read, and I want to read a quote from her article, she says, I remember one summer evening at a beach house on

Martha's vineyard, when I was about eleven. We all watched as John regressed my aunt back into a past life. She lay on the couch recalling an incident in which she was a forest ranger who witnessed the death of a few people during some kind of avalanche. My aunt later told me she was fully conscious of the experience, but couldn't control what she was saying. It was like she was watching herself tell a story. John later tried to hypnotize my brother so that he wouldn't be afraid

of spiders. It seems like two very different things. They're recollecting your past life as a ranger and not being afraid of spiders. Yeah, and so I gotta say, um, you know again. Just we end up working on a lot of different things here at how stuff works on brain stuff Ben bowl in our colleague, from stuff they don't want you to know did an episode on hypnosis and how it works and whether it works, and and

you know there is some legitimacy to hypnosis. I don't wanna. Um, yeah, I think say that that you know it doesn't work at all. You should go watch that episode. It's a nice, like little three four minute summary of of how it works. And we've even had some hypnosis experts come on and say that they're really happy that, you know, we broke down the actual science of it. But in this case, I think this is a little bit beyond what it's capable of. Yeah, I think this is a common thing.

I mean, based on my understanding, I think hypnosis is capable kind of like meditation or yoga or something of introducing a mildly altered state of consciousness where your your brain is just kind of working a little bit different than it normally normally would. But I don't really see much evidence that it really has these these dramatically powerful effects of people like this would claim. Um, So you think like maybe Mac was kind of a figure I'm

thinking of Philip Symore Hoffman and the Master. No, No, I don't get that feeling, because in his writing end to Speech, Max seemed to me like he was an extremely smart, thoughtful, even a wise person. But I read his reasoning for accepting a lot of the subduction testimony and it just doesn't sound very convincing to me. It seems like he was a smart, thoughtful, good natured guy who wanted to believe. Do you think though? And you just hit on the prime X Files slogan he wants

to believe. I want to believe. Do you think though? That he would have believed in alien human hybrids if one of his patients pulled that memory up. Well, a lot of patients did talk about things like that, did they really? Yeah, this is a common feature of alien abduction reports, especially at the time. I don't I don't know. It seems like alien abduction reports have sort of dropped off in in recent years as far as I can tell.

Maybe I'm wrong about that, but maybe it's just that there's not as much coverage on them because the media landscapes changed too. Yeah, it could be. But at the time Mac talks about working with a lot of people who would say that the alien would say, take uh, sperm samples from them, or take eggs from them, or implant them with with eggs or in some way have

some kind of reproductive interaction with the person. Well, that is a perfect segue for us to talk about our last and I think probably one of the things that The X Files is known most for topic wise, which is the alien hybrid conspiracy, right, mixing aliens and human beings together in some way or another. Yes, this is one of the biggest overarching plot points in the whole series, is that, oh man, it gets so convoluted by the end,

who knows what's actually going on? But without spoiling too much for the people who haven't actually seen the series yet, basically there's there's a running theme of aliens wanting to hybridize or create some kind of some kind of blended offspring with Homo sapiens on planet Earth, or to maybe go somewhere else, or to maybe take over the Earth, or who knows what. So alien human hybrids. Is there any reason to to track with the science on this

that's offered by the show? Is there anything to it? So? Here's the thing about the show is that, I mean it was on for nine seasons, right, and over the course, they had so many different rationale and scientific explanations for what was going on with the hybridization that it was all over the place. I completely lost track of it. Yeah, if you try to add it all up, it doesn't really make sense in terms even of the fictional construct

of the show. Right, But um, Cavelos takes all these ways and she breaks them down one by one, and there is some viability to some of these ideas, although obviously we don't have alien DNA that we can be experimenting with, so she's working along the lines of what we know about genetics in general. Okay, Um, so she has five ways the show proposes that you can make a hybrid and alien human hybrid. Let's try to go through these and not get too bogged down. Sorry, one

quick question before we breathe through these. Uh, this does have to assume, right that the aliens would be DNA based. Yeah, sure, yeah, you really just there's no way you could hybridize with an alien species that wasn't DNA based. Yeah, that's absolutely

an assumption that they make here. Alright. So the premise essentially of the show, the overall premise for these hybrids, is that grays, which are you know, the generic aliens that we're all used to seeing with the big eyes in the big gray heads, Right, they're the ones in the sketch artist interpretation of exactly. Yeah. Uh, those are in fact hybrids of humans and aliens. Those aren't actually

aliens in and of themselves. Uh. And there it seems to be that the reason why they're making these hybrids is so that there's a specific immunity to biological threats that might exist on Earth, to the aliens that are trying to colonize the planet. Okay, that's as much as I think makes sense of the of that part um. So okay, yes, some viruses can attack particular species, right, So, for instance, smallpox, which comes up in the show all the time, only attacks human beings. Uh. And here's a

direct quote from Kevelus his book. A virus can only enter a cell if the proteins projecting from the surface of its envelope find matching receptors on the cell. So this is important to consider as we go forward with all of these things. It's a lot like in the last episode on The X Files when we were talking about the parasites and how parasites are very specific about what other species that they they're parasitic of. Right there, they're not like the face huggers that can apparently just

get on any old animal that has a mouth. Yeah, exactly, And likewise we're going to find that this is the case with a lot of these biological threats or genetic manipulations that are being purported on the show. Uh So, I guess the premise here is that these aliens would are trying not to be susceptible to our diseases because they're not from here. But again, so why that wouldn't make sense? Right, if they're not from Earth, why would they be susceptible to a disease like smallpox which hasn't

evolved to be tailored to their anatomy. Yeah, Earth based diseases don't typically affect every species on Earth that they're very often aimed at one species, So even even more so the difference between alien life forms and Earth life forms, and even hybrids however you know they're made, would probably be susceptible to the same disease as the human beings are susceptible to, right, or or that the aliens were susceptible to so changing the receptors on ourselves, you know,

they would prevent the necessary processes from regular life happening to you know, manipulations on this scale. It messes up everything is a domino effect. Umvelos also reminds us of one other thing before we get into these five theories. She says, it wasn't until the nineteen eighties when genes

were first transferred successfully from one species to another. So that might be one of the reasons why this was such a kind of popular idea on the show at the time, right that it was just being pioneered and it was sort of like it was like science fiction coming to life. Well, there were a lot of gene thrillers in the nineties. It was an era of Jurassic Jurassic Park in the nineties was you know, the as far as I know, the first real cloning based science

fiction movie that was a big success. There might have been one before that, I can't remember, but that was like the thing that brought that to the public's attention, and that's the era of the X Files. Yeah, absolutely, all right, So our first way to create a hybrid what what would you imagine easiest way to create a hybrid Make two different animals of different species have sex

and see if they get pregnant. You did it. Yeah, breeding, it's that simple, right, But it's not that simple because, uh, the whole idea of the words species means that it's reproductively isolated. So I think there are a lot of reasons that our concept of a species is sometimes kind of fuzzy. But yeah, that that's the most common definition is these animals won't naturally in the wild and probably can't breed with each other and produce viable offspring, especially

not producing offspring that can breed through to the next generation. Exactly. Yeah, Because and I was about to get to that, is that almost all of the species, or rather the offspring that are created from any mixed species interactions, are sterile, so it doesn't lead to a lot. So a mule, for is like our best example, right, when a male donkey and a female horse get together, they have a mule, but those mules are usually sterile. We've done combinations of

horses and zebras, We've had lions and tigers, camels and llamas. Yes, those are all possible, but their offspring are almost always sterile. And humans can't produce offspring with any other species, even chimpanzees. Now chimpanzee shares ninety nine point five percent of our DNA, And there has been some speculation there is something out there called the human z. This is a popular urban legend. Yeah, that is, uh, some somewhere along the line, somebody figured

it out. There's both. There's there's speculation that it was done in Russia and in China, but that human zes were created in labs somewhere the combination of those two species. This hasn't never been proven. There's reports, but there's no evidence. Um. So that's number one breading. Okay, number two. Do you remember that episode Red Museum on X Files? And then

there's also the episodes seven thirty one. Basically the idea here is that a doctor injects children with alien substances and says, oh that these are just vitamins, just giving you vitamins, but they're really trying to make them into hybrids where they flint stone vitamins. Yeah, they tasted their chewy and sugary. So it's a serum in these episodes, and I guess the fictional science and the show says, well, the serum contains antibodies that are mixed with quote synthetic corticosteroids.

Corticosteroids how you say, well, I don't know. I mean, I have no idea of steroids and co cortico. Yeah, sure, let's go with it costco steroids. Anyways, so the show says, uh that these children are rather not the show, But Cavela says, this wouldn't make the children hybrids, but just injecting them, right, Yeah, all you're doing is you're mixing alien and human molecules together, right in a in a

similar system. So theoretically, the different antibodies that are in this serum, they may help fight off a range of diseases, but they're not. Again, they're probably not going to fight off any range of diseases that are on Earth because they're gonna be the alien antibodies are going to be adapted for diseases from wherever they're from. Yeah, okay. The other thing is that our human bodies would probably react to alien antibodies as if they were invaders, right, so

our immune system would try to destroy them. So this doesn't go a long way towards helping the hybrid possibilities either. No, I mean, our our immune system often reject sent attacks donated human tissue. If somebody wants to give you an organ that it very likely could be a problem that your immune system will not like that organ being in there, right, so aliens are probably out. Although Cavelis has she she actually brings back the cote coasteroids that we mentioned earlier.

She says that maybe that's what helped. Maybe maybe one of these X files writers did some research and thought this would work out. So Cota coasteroids are hormones, and they helped to control our metabolism, mineral balance in our inflammatory processes. Okay, they're injected specifically to decrease our immune responses.

So there's some idea here that maybe you would inject those those would lower the immune responses, which would then allow the alien antibodies to somehow coexist without being attacked by our immune system to do magic, and yeah, the magic would happen. They also, the cota steroids also elevate our moods, they stimulate our appetites. They also have pretty bad long term effects, most muscle wasting, mood swings, slow healing, weakened bones, and the formation of fatty deposits on the

surface of our skin. So you know, it doesn't sound like an ideal way to go about making a hybrid. No, not at all. So you said, are there a couple more? Ways? There are three more, all right, the Erlan Meyer Flask. Do you remember that episode in the first classic Mythos episodes of The X Files. It was back when the myth Arc episodes were exciting. As the series goes on, the Monster of the Week episodes, sometimes they're still good,

but the myth Arc episodes become more and more disappointing. Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree with you. It's funny because I go back now and almost all my favorite episodes or Monster of the Week stuff. But anyways, in the Earlan Meyer Flask, the premise there for the hybridization was that they were cloning alien bacteria that also contained an alien virus, and they were taking the genes from that virus and inserting them into terminally ill human beings.

And this is where we get these the original hybrids. You remember on the show that we're like, they looked like people, but they had green blood and in human street wouldn't have the poison blood. Like if they started bleeding, people around them would get burning on their eyes and start choking. Yeah. Yeah, and they were like strong and they could like I think one guy like could breathe underwater or something like that. So there are all these

weird abilities. So all right, Cavellas helps us break this down again again. And alien virus probably wouldn't be made of the same DNA building blocks as those of us in human beings, right, so they would be incompatible genetic let's call them languages. But they mentioned that this alien DNA contains this is in the episode, they contained two additional nucleotides or basses. And there actually are possible other nucleotides that exist on Earth than the ones that are

in human DNA. Right, but they're not used in the DNA of any organism that we know of. But if you use these in some way, it would be sort of like taking the alphabet. Let's stick with this alphabet analogy and giving it two more letters, right, so you add uh just to make believe or brand new letters to the alphabet. One day, all of a sudden, you have all these new possible combinations, right, all these combinations or even ways in which you could shorten other things

because of these added extra elements to the language. Well, they hypothesized. Cavella's hypothesizes that one of these might be used as an infectious virus. Right, so one of these different combinations of the alphabet of DNA is used to create an infectious virus that leads to this hybridization. Just getting complicated, is it's complicated? Right? Uh so, all right,

there's still compatibility problem. Like no matter how you do it, it's like if you're trying to play like an Xbox game on a PlayStation, right, it's at first we put the PlayStation game in the case of a Nintendo we game, or if you blow on it, it still doesn't work. Um. So the compatibility problem basically comes down to the protein envelopes that contain DNA, right, And in this case it would contain alien DNA. It probably wouldn't enter our cells,

but they do come up with cavelus. Again, she's always like going the extra mile, trying to help the show out to get there. She says, what if the alien DNA was placed into the protein envelope of an earth virus like smallpox? So maybe that's what this whole smallpox thing is about. It's not they're using the protein envelope of it to deliver alien DNA. That's her hypothesis. It

could potentially get the virus into our human cells. But again, the DNA would have to be like our own human DNA for it to do anything more than just physically get there. Okay, okay, but what about all this green toxic blood? I mean, why why would the blood turn green? And is that even possible through hybridization? Well, believe it or not, not through hybridization, but yeah, it is possible to use transgenics in order to give species green blood that don't have them. That has been done. Um so

in this particular instance, it's done. It's been done on fish. There's a green fluorescent protein uh in jellyfish. And if you take that gene and you insert it into fish, you know, I make I make it sound like it's that easy, you just insert it. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that. But yeah, they their blood

turns green. So this is these are like glow stick fish. Yeah, I mean I think you break them in half and then you dance with them in a brave I wouldn't break it in but I think what the reasoning was was that they were doing this to these fish that so that they could like under a microscope, see things better than they could with its regular hue. And I'm not quite sure how that works, but yeah, so there was like an actual reason. It wasn't just like, hey,

can we make this green? You know, like they were they were they were seeing like what kind of benefits they could get out of it. This also goes along with the breathing under water thing. Okay, so there's this episode It might be in the Erlan Meyer flask where like one of these hybrid guys like because there's horrible heart car chase and he crashes his car off of like a pier and lands in the water and they

can't find his body. And then it turns out like he's been for two days, he's just been sitting at the bottom of this uh bay uh. And they explain, well, it's because he's an alien hybrid. He can breathe underwater. Why didn't he swim somewhere? Well, I think I think he was injured or something like that. I don't remember the details there. But so, all right, we can't change our respiratory system with transgenics, right, But Calas hypothesizes another

way that this could be explained. All right, so crocodiles, you know that how crocodiles can survive for long periods of time underwater. Well, the way that they do that is the ions in them bind to hemoglobin in a different way than they do in human beings, and this releases oxygen even when they're underwater and they're not bringing in oxygen. Cavelos hypothesizes that if you inserted a crocodile gene into humans, we may be able to do the

same thing. So it wouldn't change our respiratory process. It would just change the way that hemoglobin and ions in our body react together. It wouldn't trade lungs for gills exactly. Yeah. Yeah, So that's number three, this kind of transgenics, I guess, is how we could encapsulate that again. You know, I don't think that you could like hybridize an alien and a human together, but you might be able to make

your blood green. Things that aren't exactly like superpowers. The fourth way, you remember back in home we were talking about chimeras, right, Well, what if we had alien human chimeras? So remember, a chimera is an organism that has two different sets of DNA and they usually originate from the fusion of two different zygotes or eggs, right, So what if we had an alien egg and human egg and we fuse those together. They're nice, So maybe then we've

got this alien hybrid. Okay, let's see where Kevels goes with this. She says, uh, well, right now, that we can make from cells of the space same species or from different ones chimeric cells. Right, We've done this with mice before. We've made a mouse that is a chimera of two different species of mouse, and that was created back in the nineteen sixty one, so this has been

going on for a while now. Chimeras, however, are not usually like fifty fifty blends of species, right, It's not like one half of you as mouse and the other half of you is shark, right, like you're you're you're. It's a little different from that. So like they've they've made goat sheep chimeras before, and those look like sheep, but they've got like the same briskly fur of goats. Okay, so it's not like it's not like I guess we're

imagining like you'd have a blend of perfect features. So yeah, she says, it's possible you could use the same chimeric techniques that you use to make these goat sheep or these these weird mice, uh, to make a human female carry an alien human human hybrid to term. But look this the science that she throws down in there. This is why I think the book is really good, but it doesn't translate well for this medium on a podcast.

It's way too complicated to get into here. I think we could do a whole episode just on the idea of chimeric fertilization and like getting a chimeric baby to term. Well, maybe we should. Sometimes it sounds very stuff to blow your mind, so it's possible. We got one more. This is the last one, and this is what she calls the fully integrated hybrid, which is in the TV show. It's along the lines of like when we see um like clones of people, right, there's like multiple like there's

multiple Joes. There's like twelve different Joes and they all look exactly like you, but they're all alien human hybrids. And she hypothesizes that this is because every cell contains DNA from both of the organisms. Okay, so that's kind of hard to imagine, but yeah, yeah, I agree, it seems like it would be pretty difficult. The idea that she's pitching here is that you would create a single transgenic or hybrid cell, right, and then from there you would use that with what we have as like modern

cloning technique. So think of like Dolly the Sheep um. So we know we can clone an animal from an embryo cell by taking its nucleus out and transferring DNA into from it into an open right. That's how it's sort of how Dolly the Sheep worked. Right, There's a transplantation of a cell's nucleus into an ovum with its own nucleus removed. So this is her pitch for this is that we would do something similar. We'd we'd have an alien hybrid cell and then we would clone a

being based off of that cell. But it's more difficult. Uh So, for instance, like with Dollars sheep, it was particularly difficult because it was adult cells. They've already differentiated. There's all different kinds of ways that you can get DNA into a cell though, and again like this this could be a whole hour long episode of stuff to

blow your mind. But we can do things like using high voltage electricity to allow DNA to enter into a cell, or we micro inject these directly into cells with tnc tiny little needles, or this one sounds like my favorite, this has been done shooting cells with high velocity microscopic DNA bullets the gene gun. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So she pitches like, those are all ways that we could potentially have these alien human hybrids. But let me go back to the beginning and say on the show, it doesn't

add up, right, they don't. They don't stick to one of these and follow it all the way through. It's just kind of a mishmash of all of these things. Uh so, maybe the aliens themselves and the X Files really haven't ironed this out yet. There, that would be a wonderful thing that I don't know, have we ever seen that in science fiction where there's just a completely disorganized attempt to attack and take over the Earth. It's just like the aliens really can't get it together. I

don't know, I don't know. Independence day, No, they're so highly coordinated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I want to see that maybe Plan nine from outer space that seems like an attempt to take over the Earth that is kind of thrown together at the last minute. Although I think you blame that on Edwood more than you could on the Aliens. Yea, I guess so. So there you have it, the Science of the X Files. We've got two episodes and I think we're looking at almost three hours worth

of science of the X Files. Goodness here for you. If you have any questions or comments for us, If you want to let us know some of your hypotheses on ways in which science modern science could apply to X Files episodes. Some of the science we're talking about here, alien hybridization, the be weaponization, whatever it is, let us know.

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