Season 06 Episode 27: All That We See (Pt.3 of 3)

their way through the debris and puddles. A sudden crack had the three of them gasping in fright. Keel whipped the light round toward a darkened corner, just in time to see the back end of a rat scurrying away. For Connie and Keith, it was just too much to take. Deciding they'd gone far enough, they stayed back close to the exit as Keel ventured on alone deeper into the building. Having searched most of the ground floor, Keel found a

step ladder and climbed up to the next level. He pulled himself on to the gangway above and continued making his way cautiously along it, careful not to make a sound while listening out for any sign of movement. Sadly for him, however, the place appeared completely deserted. Neither Connie or Keith had seen anything either by the time Keel made it back to them, and so together they made

their way out of the building. But as they were approaching the door, Connie froze and her face crumpled in fear, hearing the skin crawling scream from outside the building. The rest of the group could only watch John in terrified anticipation as they waited for those inside to emerge from the building. A flash of torchlight from inside the entrance was quickly followed by the appearance of John, Keel, and Keith in the front doorway, holding Connie up between them.

Tears were streaming down her face. She saw it again, cried Keel, as he and Keith helped Connie out of the building. Mary Higher rushed at once to her niece's aid and led her straight to the car, while Keel, with only one thing on his mind, dashed straight back into the power plant. Sadly for John, after scouring the place for a second time, he was again left disappointed to find nothing of interest inside. When he exited the building.

A few minutes later, however, he was surprised to find the others huddled together by a fence toward the back of the sight. Mary Hire explained excitedly that they'd just heard something heavy and metallic crashing to the ground when some one spotted a silhouetted figure running away from the back of the building. They thought it might have been Keel in trouble, only he'd been inside the whole time and had heard nothing. My ear, cried Mary Mallet, suddenly

shattering the silence. I think it's bleeding. Keel shone the torch at her head, and sure enough, there was blood seeping out of her ear. With no idea what an earth could have caused such a thing, and out of concern for the young woman, Keel suggested they call it a night, and so one by one they headed back to their vehicles and made their way back home. As Keel followed the others toward the highway, however, he couldn't

stop thinking about what had just occurred. Was Mary's bleeding ear the result of some kind of atmospheric pressure change directed at them by the apparent entity. A clue perhaps that there was far more to this than the misidentification of a mere bird. Frustrated and dissatisfied at having missed the major drama of the night, key Or knew he couldn't give up yet, and so he promptly turned his car around and headed back alone into the thick of the TNT area. It was long past midnight, with only

the faintest crescent moon visible in the sky. As he drove through the narrow dirt roads, his eyes peeled for any sign of strange lights or movement from above. Drawling a small stretch of road deep into the area, Keel was suddenly overcome by an intense surge of fear, But as he continued driving forward, the feeling quickly abated, almost as if the fear had been triggered by his proximity

to something. John pulled the car over to the side of the road, and after seeing nothing untoward, he decided to try an experiment. Keel turned the car around and headed back toward the spot where the fear had first risen up. Sure enough, at the moment he passed it again, the fear came shooting back, disappearing again swiftly as soon as he went beyond it. He pulled the car over again, and this time I tried it on foot. Keiel's breath swirled thickened fast in the head lamps as he stepped

slowly toward the spot ahead. As he later recounted in his two thousand and two books The Mothman Prophecies. Now he was on foot, Keel was apparently able to feel the fear steadily building as he drew closer to whatever was causing it, until finally the sensation completely engulfed him. Keel then took a few steps back, and once again

the feeling quickly subsided. He looked out for a moment into the darkness of the black mass of trees and distant hills that surrounded him, just about visible in the moonlight. What on earth could this be, he thought to himself. Was it an accidental confluence of ultrasonic waves, perhaps affecting his nervous system, or could it be something more deliberate

that someone or something near by was targeting him? Though may be far fetched, such a notion, he thought, might also account for Mary Mallet's bleeding ear earlier in the night. Keel then stared out at the empty stretch of road ahead of him, with the sudden undeniable, feeling that he was no longer alone, Turning quickly on his heels, he

promptly made his way back to the car. The following morning, John returned to the same spot, but by then whatever had been influencing his senses appeared to have long gone, and there was no sign of the infamous moth man either. Satisfied he'd found all that he could, he then headed back to the mc daniel's household in Point Pleasant and made his goodbyes to Linda Scarborough and her family before

making his way to Mary Hire's office. Having been impressed by her open mindedness to the events, Keel asked her that she keep him updated on any other strange incidences that might occur, and with that he said his goodbyes

to her too, and returned home to New York. As nineteen sixty six drew to a close, the bizarre events that had so enthralled and disturbed the inhabitants of Point Pleasant only weeks before were all but forgotten about as families across the country settled in together to celebrate Christmas.

For Mary Hire and John Keel, who later became good friends, those first peculiar sightings in November nineteen sixty six proved to be just the beginning in a series of increasingly bizarre and strange events said to have taken place across the region over the next year. As Keel outlines in his own book on the subject, the Mothman Prophecies. As mentioned earlier, an extraordinary array of apparent UFO sightings, animal mutilations, and visits from shadowy men in black seemed to emerge

in the wake of those first mothman sightings. Mary Higher continued to write to Keel throughout that period to fill him in on any unusual events that she came across. As time went on, these unusual events seemed to occur with increasing frequency, all of which left the both of them with the unnerving feeling that it was all leading to something, and that something terrible was going to happen. And then, just over a year since the first apparent

mothman sighting, it did. In the evening of December fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven, the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River joining the towns of Point Pleasant and Gallipolis, was loaded with Christmas shoppers and motorists heading home from work when the structure suddenly buckled under the weight and collapsed. In total, forty six people, mostly from Point Pleasant and the surrounding area, lost their lives In the aftermath of

the tragedy. Keel couldn't help but wonder if, perhaps everything, from the apparent UFOs and even the so called mothman themselves, had simply been trying to warn us about it. What then, are we to make of the whole Mothman mystery. In the absence of any irrefutable empirical evidence, as is often the case with tales of UFOs and the apparent sighting of strange, improbable creatures, we are left with only anecdotal

eyewitness accounts with which to discern truth from falsehoods. Most would not unreasonably conclude that any reports of winged humanoid creatures or the appearance of seemingly unearthly mechanical crafts in the sky, due to the sheer unlikeliness of it, were due to the witnesses being at best mistaken in their interpretations,

or at worst they were deliberately lying about them. What often intrigues me about these kinds of stories, perhaps more than whether or not the phenomena is what some claim it to be, is the way in which the number of reported sightings of something unusual, be it a supposed alien craft or indeed the Mothman, appear to escalate the

more popular the story. Once something has captured the imagination, it seems more people seem to then find it in the things they are looking at, or rather, in some cases, whether we are able to see something or not is simply only a matter of perception. Perceptual narrowing is the way in which our brains will ignore certain information in our environment in order to better focus on other types of information, much like the invisible guerrilla experiment, as discussed

earlier in the episode. Writing in Scientific American in twenty sixteen, neurologists Susanna Martinez Conde explored a number of studies that show how human infants younger than six months can see things that adults cannot. One study conducted in two thousand and two revealed that babies under six months old were actually better at telling different monkey he faces apart than

adults were. Another study conducted by a team of psychologists led by Jile Yang of Chow University in Japan, shows that up until the age of five months, human infants have a much broader sensitivity to the effect of light on an object, being able to detect subtle variations in images and color that are invisible to adults. In other words, when we age, as our sense awareness narrows, we essentially

become blind to other realities. The beneficial side of this narrowing of perception is that it is likely a useful evolutionary tool that helps us to better survive our environments. I wouldn't go as far as to say it would account for our inability to see alien technology, yet if it did, such a notion would be entirely consistent with the basic fact of our everyday reality that, due to the limitations of our singular perspective, much of the world

is continually hidden from us. Or, as neurologist Susanna Martinez Conde so eloquently put it, there may well be such a place as reality out there, but it's not a place that any of us have ever been. The emergence of color is a perfect case in point. That babies are able to distinguish shades of color that we don't see as adults is because we perceive an object not as it is, but as our brains interpret it. For us, more profoundly. This has nothing to do with color at all.

The color of an object does not exist in and of itself. The material that makes up a green rubber ball, for example, isn't green unless something observes it to be. So. When light hits the ball, depending on its molecular structure, certain wavelengths will be absorbed, while others will be reflected through the mechanics of the eye. It is this reflected light, and not the physical object, that we then discern as

a color. Moreover, the color of the ball as it appears to us at any given time is completely dependent on how much light it is exposed to and how much our brains compensate for the difference. And since there is no set, universal measure of what is the right amount of light to shine onto a ball in order to discern its color, there is no one universal set

color of anything. The twenty fifteen viral phenomenon of the dress, in which people seem unable to agree on whether a stripy dress in a photograph was black and blue or in fact gold and white, is a perfect example of this conundrum. So what then, of the ball itself? Philosopher Emmanuel Kant made the distinction between phenomena as being something as it is described and comprehended by our senses, and nomina as being the object as it exists independently of

our senses. If a ball, for example, were to hit us on the head, we would reasonably say that it was something that we could physically interact with. But defining what that ball is exactly it's a little more complicated, As anti realist philosopher Hillary Lawson pointed out while debating the Strangeness of Things twenty seventeen for the Institute of

Art and Ideas Phenomena. In our case, the idea of a ball is merely a useful metaphor its true real substance, its nominal property is not something we've ever been able to identify. Democritus, living in the fifth century BC, might say that the ball was fundamentally made of atoms. Since then, however, we've discovered that atoms are only the tip of an even more curious word of previously unknown subatomic particles and quantum level forces, with nothing to suggest that we have

uncovered the final base property that defines all nomina. Probing a little further, we find ourselves confronted with an even more complicated truth about reality. We already know of species on Earth that physically see and interpret the world in different ways from ourselves. What's to say that there isn't a sentient species somewhere else in the universe that understands and exists only in electro magnetic waves, for example, or impressions of ultra violet light, or in a manner that

we have yet to even conceive. And if we and this other species apprehend the moon, for example, in different ways, what exactly is it that we are observing when we look at the moon. Which is not to say that there isn't something there with properties that appear to us in the form of the moon, But it would certainly be problematic to claim that our version, the way we see the moon as a solid, bone colored and crater marked object in the sky, was the absolute, objectively correct

version of how the moon looks. Imagine for a moment a being whose perception was similar to that of Alan Moore's Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen series of graphic novels, who was capable of observing subatomic particles with the naked eye. For them, the world would appear to be a very different place. Indeed, perhaps this is all fine. We cannot fault ourselves for the manner in which we perceive reality

due to the way we are physically constructed. What's more, our brains and bodies do a pretty good job of keeping us alive and functioning in our broadly shared understanding of what our reality is. If we were to walk into oncoming traffic or be in need of open heart surgery, it serves as no good if we aren't able to consistently identify the object of a car or a heart. Both clearly share a solidity and existence that would have

fatal consequences if ignored. I often think, what would it even matter if, like Neo from the Matrix, we discovered we were actually living in an entirely different reality to what we thought, like a computer simulation for example. After all, little, if any, of our physical experience of life would change as a consequence. But there is one crucial problem. If this is the only perspective that we know, it tends to follow that it's the only perspective we care about.

And just as our biology will limit our perspective and hide the true nature of reality, so too does our subjective understanding of things. Distort in more subtle ways the way in which we see the world around us. Those apocryphal tales of European explorers and invisible galleons, as mentioned at the top of this episode, are meant to reflect the native people's inability to see the ships, But there is something else invisible in the stories the native people themselves.

These tales are told from the perspective of the supposedly valiant explorers discovering and mapping uncharted territory that is actually already inhabited by other people. It isn't undiscovered or unmapped at all. The apparent failure to see the ships is a partial reflection on the perceived intellectual inferiority of the

local people that have quote unquote been discovered. We'll never know for sure what Joseph Banks, for example, really thought about the people living in what is now known as Botany Bay, but we can be sure of what little importance was granted to their culture and perspective by the people who would subsequently colonize the land they lived on. It is unsettling to think of how much we are

losing when we fail to accommodate other perspectives. I often wonder about how so many of our interactions are susceptible to all two common prejudices toward one another based on our individual bias of sexuality, race, gender, class, disability, etc. That have no basis an objective fact, is our sense of masculinity and femininity, for example, a genuine biological manifestation, or purely a constrictive social construction that blinds us to

a more honest and thorough understanding of what a human being can be. You can see a similar idea explored in Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror TV series. In the episode Men Against Fire, a super soldier named Stripe played by Malachi Kirby fights to eliminate a race of feral humanoid creatures known as roaches that appear to be terrorizing the human race. Stripe, like the rest of his team, has

been fitted with a neural implant to enhance his combat capabilities. However, after one particularly tough mission, Stripes implant is corrupted, revealing to him the truth about the enemy roaches. As the implant malfunctions, Stripe no longer sees his victims as monstrous mutants that scream out an indecipherable language to one another. Instead, he sees them as they really are, ordinary human beings. The implant had been fooling him all along, so he

could exterminate them without questioning why. For a more terrifying real world example, consider the National Socialist German Workers parties virulent anti Semitic and racist campaign to affiliate the Jewish and traveler communities with rats and cockroaches. This tactic was also applied during the Rwandan Civil War in the nineteen nineties, directed toward those individuals who identify ethnically as Tutsi. It

wasn't based on any objective truth or empirical evidence. It was to construct a reality whereby killing them would be less complicated if people considered them to be less than human, and it was horrifically effective. This is a profound reflection of the practical reality in which we live. It is a place where a phrase as seemingly innocuous as to run like a girl can alter entire perceptions of expectation, a place where people can be driven to suicide because

their community has arbitrarily pathologized their sexuality. As inconvenient as it can sometimes be, we can argue that perceptual narrowing is a useful survival tool, but might our failure to

escape our perceptual limitations ultimately prove our undoing. According to philosophers such as Timothy Morton and other advocates of the theory that we are presently living in an epoch known as the Anthroposcene, our very survival may hinge on learning to do away with our human centric perspectives, especially ones that have deluded us into thinking that we are somehow

above and separate from nature. The term anthropscene refers to a proposed era that dates back from present day to roughly twelve thousand, five hundred years ago, to the period when Homer Sapiens transitioned from hunter gatherers to agrarian societies. Such a time, it is believed, marks the beginning of the era when human societies began to have an inextricable impact on the planet, an impact that has left it

and everything on it in a state of peril. Morton and similar thinkers are looking for a way to avert the impending ecological crisis of our time, chiefly but not limited to climate change, by encouraging us to find a

better logic of coexistence with the natural world. One of Morton's central tenets, has laid out in his twenty sixteen book Dark Ecology for a logic of future coexistence, is the idea that all things, from inanimate rock to jungle vines, to bees to ourselves, have an equally justifiable existence and place in the universe, that their perspectives, as it were, are all equally valid, and that too often we see them merely as either the decoration of our space or

as things to be exploited. Fair Enough, if you aren't quite ready to accommodate the perspective of a rock, perhaps, however, you might consider how we are learning, with increasing horror explored to amusing but devastating effect by Simon Amstell's twenty seventeen mockumentary Carnage, that those animals we've been rearing on mass and regularly in squalid conditions for the sole purpose of murdering them for their meat may not be the dumb, unthinking,

edible meat machine genes we once assumed, or in some cases have even been taught to think they are. Instead, these living creatures existing in the exact same universe as ourselves are intelligent, sentient beings capable of cultivating relationships, who have memory and family bonds, and who also feel pain and mourn for their lost loved wants, just like we do.

It is sometimes put forward that to view other animals in this manner is to anthropomorphize them, which is to say that we shouldn't apply human reasoning to their experiences because they are not human yet. The problem with this point is that, once again, it presupposes that only if something has human qualities does its existence or manner in

which it experiences the world become valid. In a twenty seventeen study analyzing the social skills of ninety different types of cetaceans, whales, dolphins, and poor poises, evolutionary biologist Suzanne Schultz of the University of Manchester and her team discovered the not only do many of the species use tools with a complexity not previously realized, but they can also

strategize in ways not previously imagined. They discovered that some dolphins have been observed assisting humans to fish, helping to round up the fish in nets, completely unprompted on the understanding that by doing so they will be given fish in return. It was also discovered that the most advanced species of cetaceans passed down their understanding of techniques for

hunting and tool use to successive generations. They have also been observed conversing in more sophisticated ways than once thought, with regional dialects and names for individuals. Perhaps they even have a name for us. There is no reason to think, of course, that after alerting somebody to a different perspective they will care about it, And it's important to say that no one person has any authority to claim that

one perspective over another is cosmically right or wrong. How blinkered it would be too to assume that someone seeming inability to accommodate other perspectives was merely an unconscious bias. We might make the deliberate decision that it's more beneficial for us to ignore other perspectives or to remain committed

to our own interpretation of phenomena. Furthermore, to Bemoan, the human instinct of assuming a superior status above nature and other animals is to ignore the idea that this very behavior is in itself a natural process of the natural world. Some people, as much as it pains me to think about it, might enjoy killing animals, and it isn't for

me to say they are wrong to do so. Certainly it would be naive to think that alerting a friend to the fact that a pig may be more intelligent than they might have thought would be enough to prevent them from eating one in the future. And crucially, there is nothing odd or inhuman or cosmically wrong in doing this.

With all this being said, I think the question ultimately comes back to this, should or shouldn't we all try to see the world in the same way It may seem desirable to align our perspectives into one common point of view, that striving to see the world as one is the ultimate human goal, But one thing we can almost guarantee is that it would be a world in

which much would remain hidden to us. The tension and conflict of our differing perspectives for better or worse, is the human experience, as inconvenient as it may seem, the survival of our species, the manner in which we and our societies evolve, we hope ultimately into something better. Whatever that means may very well depend on the fact that we don't all see the world in the same way, that we don't all converge into one homogeneous understanding of

how things should and shouldn't be. That isn't to say that we can't find ways to align our points of view more close to work at improving our collective experience of life. But it's worth remembering that much of our shared understanding is realized not through objectivity, but through the

exchange of our uniquely individual perspectives. It is far more useful then, even at the risk of allowing for viewpoints we don't agree with, for us not to focus on eradicating different truths, but that we learn to embrace our multifaceted perspectives as an inherent trait of our species, that we learn never to turn from the strange and unfamiliar.

We cannot be expected to know, understand, and see everything instantaneously, but perhaps it is only through recognizing the potential validity of different perspectives that we are able to fully see what would otherwise remain hidden to us. In this process of becoming more aware and comfortable with the existence of different points of view, we might begin to better understand

our world and each other. Two. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help supporters, you can now do so via Patroon to receive access to add free episodes, just go to patron dot com Forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide, who can purchase through Amazon,

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