The Sirius Problem, Dorothy Eady, Ötzi the Iceman & MK-ULTRA

This week on The Oddities Department, history gets cosmic, reincarnated, frozen, and deeply classified.

In Episode 23, Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre true stories from the stranger corners of science, history, mystery, and government decision-making.

First, Lindsay looks up at The Sirius Problem, where the Dogon people of Mali, a hidden companion star, French anthropology, ancient knowledge, and modern skepticism all collide in one of the weirdest debates to ever escape an academic journal. Is it astronomy? Is it anthropology? Is it cultural exchange? Is it space fish? Depends who you ask, and unfortunately, everyone is asking loudly.

Then Gavin takes us into the strange life of Dorothy Louise Eady, the little girl from Edwardian England who fell down the stairs, was declared dead, woke back up, and spent the rest of her life insisting she remembered ancient Egypt. She would grow up, move to Egypt, work near the Temple of Seti I, become known as Omm Sety, and build an entire life around a home she should not have known how to miss.

From there, Lindsay drags us into the Alps for Cave Man Carbs, where Ötzi the Iceman shows up frozen, tattooed, arthritic, murdered, and somehow still not done becoming everyone’s problem. What begins as one of the oldest cold cases in human history eventually leads to ancient microbes, questionable science, and the deeply unsettling possibility that archaeology sometimes ends in bread.

And finally, Gavin opens the file on MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s very real, very documented program of mind-control research, non-consensual drug experiments, LSD, safe houses, destroyed records, and reckless disregard for human life. It is not a conspiracy theory. It was the conspiracy.

 This episode has everything: suspicious stars, reincarnation, ancient Egypt, dead pharaoh romance, glacier murder, bad knees, yeasty bread science, LSD experiments, government secrets, safe houses, brothels, shredded records, and just enough chaos to make it worth the listen.

Listen to The Oddities Department anywhere you get your podcasts.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Did you by chance notice that there are loaves of bread in almost every exhibit in the museum?

SPEAKER_06 0:15

Alright, before you panic, everything is under control, I swear.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

The T-Rex has bread in his teeth. All of the guns in the outlaw exhibit have been replaced with baguettes. Elmer looks ridiculous, but he sure smells damn good. That one's done.

SPEAKER_06 0:34

Ooh, I love fresh bread. Uh, I would take the tour before you devour that sourdough. Did the printer just print a bread label?

SPEAKER_02 0:46

I did make tasting notes. Nothing is as it seems around here, even the bread.

SPEAKER_06 0:53

Most definitely the bread. And you've got flour all over your face. Just be glad that it's not yeast. And I'm afraid to ask any more questions. For your sake, stay afraid.

SPEAKER_07 1:07

Stay very afraid. Welcome to the Oddities Department, where history gets strange, science gets stranger, and humanity continues to prove that confidence is not always the same thing as competence.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

I'm Lindsay.

SPEAKER_07 1:23

And I'm Gavin, and this is episode 23. Tonight's tour begins in the observatory, where one very bright star, one very hidden companion, and one suspicious little question have been quietly making everyone weird for decades.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Then we travel to Egypt by way of Edwardian England, where a little girl takes a fall, wakes up changed, and spends the rest of her life chasing a home she should not remember.

SPEAKER_07 1:51

After that, we head high into the Alps, where something very old has been waiting on the ice. And science does what science does best. It asks one question too many.

SPEAKER_02 2:02

And finally, we step into MK Ultra, where fear puts on a government badge, locks the door, pours a drink, and calls whatever happens next national security.

SPEAKER_07 2:14

Please enjoy your visit. Stay within the group, and do lower expectations for humanity accordingly.

SPEAKER_06 2:20

Grab your flashlights, check your footing, stay behind the rope, and follow us. There is no shortcut through this tour.

SPEAKER_07 2:27

We're going to start this tour by going into the observatory. We will be looking up to the sky, to the reverent cold abyss of the outer reaches of the universe. A place that should have inspired awe, wonder, and mystery. But instead, inspired arguments, and without any doubt, aliens. Space pigeons, you say? Space pigeons. This is Exhibit 127, The Sirius Problem. Alright, Gavin. Today we're talking about a star, which sounds significantly less exciting than what we're actually talking about. Because somewhere between a remote region of Mali, a French anthropologist, a hidden companion star, and a guy who wrote a book about alien visitors from Sirius, somewhere this story completely lost control of itself. And honestly, that's part of why I love it. The claim itself is simple. According to reports published in the twentieth century, the Dogon people of Mali possess knowledge about a star that should have been invisible to them. Humans have known about Sirius forever. It's the brightest star in the night sky. The claim involves Sirius B, a faint companion star hidden beside Sirius. A star so difficult to observe that astronomers didn't confirm its existence until the nineteenth century. And according to the story, the Dogon may have known things about it. Specific things. The kind of details that make scientists raise an eyebrow and UFO enthusiasts kick open a door. Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to establish something. This isn't one of those stories that appeared on the internet three weeks ago. The Dogon are real people. The researchers were real anthropologists. The publications were real, the debate is real. It's been going on for decades. The problem is that nobody agrees on what the debate is actually about.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Yeah, I'm confused.

SPEAKER_07 4:30

As you should be. It's not gonna get much better on the confusion from Kevin. Oh I love that for me. Some people think that it's a story about astronomy. Some people think it's a story about anthropology. Some think it's a story about cultural exchange, and some think fish like aliens traveled across interstellar space to share astronomical knowledge with humanity.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yes, that part.

SPEAKER_07 4:58

As you can see, the conversation remains focused and productive. Now, personally, I think we should start where every good story starts. At the beginning. Before the books, documentaries, before the aliens, and most importantly, before History Channel executives started breathing very heavily, let's start with the star itself. You know it happened, mouth breather. Absolutely. What do you mean aliens?

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Ancient aliens? Oh my god.

SPEAKER_07 5:34

If we're gonna spend the next hour talking about Sirius B, we should probably figure out what the hell Sirius B actually is. It's basically the star that started the fight. So let's talk about Sirius. We need to understand why astronomers gave a fuck in the first place. And believe it or not, Sirius has been making humans look up for a very long time. You know the one, it's the brightest star in the sky. Not one of the brightest, the brightest. Egyptian priests tracked it, Greek astronomers wrote about it, sailors used it for navigation, humans have been staring at and using Sirius for so long. Is Sirius by chance the North Star?

SPEAKER_03 6:19

That's a really good question, Gavin.

SPEAKER_04 6:21

Or am I an idiot? If you're an idiot, I'm an idiot. No, I am an idiot.

SPEAKER_07 6:30

Nope.

unknown 6:31

Nope. Nope.

SPEAKER_07 6:32

Sirius, the dog star, brightest, polaris, and current north star, the anchor, the northern sky. Moderately dim my ass. So have we in fact been looking at Sirius thinking it was the North Star the whole?

SPEAKER_02 6:46

I would not do well out in the wilderness without a compass, apparently.

SPEAKER_07 6:50

I'm gonna die you guys. I'm so serious. Look at it. It's right there.

SPEAKER_02 6:56

I will not know what is up from down, left nor right, north nor south.

SPEAKER_07 7:01

North, south. Up, down, I don't know. North is up, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 7:07

I do know how to make a compass out of a sewing needle and a leaf.

SPEAKER_07 7:11

You better fucking hope you have a sewing needle with you in the middle of some wood.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

That would be my first problem.

SPEAKER_07 7:22

Onward ho. Onward, you ho. I mean ho. Sorry for derailing you. Can you imagine us just high lost in the woods? We would be dead within 48 hours, but we probably have a great time doing it.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Oh, definitely. I would eat everything.

SPEAKER_07 7:41

Sustainable? Let's find out. Look, a mushroom. That's a completely different type of story. Uh alright, where could I why did I use so many words? God. Okay. Ancient Egyptian priests tracked it. Greek astronomers wrote about it. Sailors used it for navigation. Humans have been staring at Sirius for so long that entire civilizations built stories around it. If celestial stars had an ego, Sirius would be unbearable. For most of human history, that was the entire story. There was Sirius. Very bright. Very important. Moving on. Then astronomers noticed something very strange. In the early nineteenth century, Sirius wasn't behaving exactly the way they expected. I mean not dramatically, just enough to be annoying. And one thing I've learned about scientists is that they can tolerate almost anything except a number that refuses to behave. The reality doesn't match the math, and somebody is going to lose sleep. Astronomers eventually concluded that Sirius wasn't alone. Something was affecting its motion, something invisible. Something with enough mass to tug on Sirius through gravity. Which meant there was probably another object there. The problem was nobody could see it. Imagine standing next to a stadium spotlight and trying to spot a flashlight. That's basically the challenge astronomers were dealing with. Eventually, advances in telescopes allowed observers to detect the hidden companion, and it was named Sirius B. Because Sirius B is what astronomers call a white dwarf. A white dwarf is basically a corpse of a dead star.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

I resent that sentiment.

SPEAKER_07 9:42

It feels personal. I love thinking that there are just star corpses floating around the universe.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

That's what I will be after I die.

SPEAKER_07 9:54

Hey. Except for like one minute body part that I plan on putting in a jar in your honor.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Fair.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

I think technically we are all just star corpses.

SPEAKER_07 10:05

To some extent, in some capacity, yes. Agree. That leads to the whole spoon theory, and that leads to the whole multiple lives, different timelines. We're all the same person, just rein yeah. You just wait.

SPEAKER_06 10:19

You just wait, put a pin in it.

SPEAKER_07 10:23

Did I just foreshadow something that I have no idea about? Nice. Noted. Okay. Ooh, I'm so excited.

unknown 10:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_07 10:33

Stars spend most of their lives converting hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion. Eventually, they run out of fuel. They shed their outer layers and leave behind a dense stellar core. That leftover core is the white dwarf. Now here's the part where astronomy starts sounding like it was written by a fantasy author. Sirius B contains roughly the same mess as the sun. The entire sun. But it's squeezed into something that's only slightly larger than Earth. If you sit with that for a second, the sun is about eight hundred sixty-five thousand miles across, and Earth is about eight hundred. Nature looked at all that mess and said, Yeah, compact it. That sounds terrifying. This next point is also terrifying. Because if astronomers estimate that a teaspoon's worth of white dwarf material would weigh several tons. That is mind-boggling. The mind has been boggled. At that point I stop asking questions and simply trust the astrophysicists. Not because I understand them, because I don't, but because they have calculators and I do not. Now there are three things I want you to remember about Sirius B. Get your mental pins out. There's just three. One, it's hidden. Two, it's incredibly dense. And three, it orbits Sirius in a cycle of roughly fifty years. That's it. Those three details are the entire reason that this exhibit exists. The original mystery starts with a hidden star, extraordinary density, and a fifty-year cycle. Because decades later, a French anthropologist would publish accounts describing beliefs that seem to contain those same puzzle pieces. And suddenly a star became everybody's problem. But before we get there, we need to leave astronomy behind for a minute and travel to Mali. Because if we're going to talk about the Dogon, we should probably meet the Dogon. So here's the people at the center of the mystery. One of the strange things about this story is that people at the center of it get often pushed to the background. The mystery arguments and documentaries will become famous. Meanwhile, the actual Dogon are standing there like uh hilaire, we're still a major part of this story. The Dogon are an ethnic group living primarily in modern day Mali, a country in West Africa. Today there are hundreds of thousands of Dogon people, and their history in the region stretches back centuries. They're best known for their like remarkable cliffside villages built along a sandstone cliff system that runs for nearly a hundred miles across the landscape. No shit. And when I say cliffside villages, I don't mean villages next to a cliff. I don't mean a nice view. I mean villages built into and around massive cliffs.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

That sounds fascinating.

SPEAKER_07 13:46

I kind of want to go, but I'm scared of heights, man. Like I would like to take a digital virtual tour if possible.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

We can put you in a harness. We're gonna need a bigger harness.

SPEAKER_07 14:04

But ultimately, it's the kind of place where you look at a photograph and immediately wonder whose idea stairs were. Seriously, look up the pictures later. The Dogon are also known for their art, masks, ceremonies, wood carvings, architecture, and incredibly rich spiritual tradition that blends history, mythology, religion, symbolism, and community identity. And that's important. Because when people hear the word mythology, they sometimes think, oh, fake stories. That's not what mythology is. Mythology is how cultures explain themselves. It's a framework for understanding reality. And every culture has one. Some are just older than others. Now, one of the central figures in Dogon cosmology is a creator deity known as Ama. From there, the stories become complex, symbolic, and deeply interconnected. There are accounts involving creation, order, disorder, spiritual beings, ancestors, and figures known as the gnomo. Now this is where I want to be careful, because the Nomo are about to become very important. Not because they're aliens, but because sometimes people later decided that they might be aliens. Those are two very different statements. The Nomo existed in Dogon traditions long before anybody wrote books about visitors from Sirius. Remember that. It is gonna matter. One thing that struck me while reading about Dogon cosmology is how sophisticated it is. Not necessarily scientifically sophisticated, symbolically sophisticated. The same way Greek mythology is sophisticated. The stories connect to each other, the symbols connect to each other, everything exists within a larger framework. This wasn't a random collection of folk tales somebody made up on a rainy afternoon. This was an actual living worldview. When anthropologists eventually arrived to document Dogon traditions, they weren't collecting isolated facts. They were trying to understand an entire system of belief, and that is considerably harder. It's the difference between learning a few words in a language and then becoming fluent. Anybody can memorize words or facts. Understanding the context is where that work begins. And that brings us to a French anthropologist, Marcel Griol. Because whether he realized it or not, he was about to start one of the longest running arguments in modern anthropology. So let's talk about Marcel Grioll, because whether you realize it or not, almost everything in this story eventually leads back to him. Griol was a French anthropologist who began studying the Dogon in the 1930s. Over the course of multiple expeditions, he and his colleagues spent years documenting Dogon culture, religion, ceremonies, traditions, and cosmology. This is where I have to give anthropologists some credit, because imagine trying to explain your entire worldview to a stranger. The things everybody in your community understands, but nobody ever bothers to explain because they've always been there. Now imagine doing all of that across cultural boundaries, through translators, while discussing concepts that may have been passed down orally for generations. That's not an easy conversation.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Ew, and it leaves a lot of room for interpretation that may not be accurate.

SPEAKER_07 17:47

Exactly. I mean just think about us meeting new people and cracking an inside joke, like they're not gonna get it. Exactly. And how would we even explain that? Twenty-five years ago something happened and now we say this word? Over time, Grial developed relationships with members of Dogon communities and began documenting increasingly detailed accounts of Dogon cosmology. Then, according to his later publications, he received information from a respected Dogon elder named Ogotomelli. Now, Ogotomeli is one of those people who quietly changes history. Not because he like conquered a nation or anything, but because he talked. Over the course of multiple interviews, Ogotomeli shared extensive information about Dogon beliefs. He included creation stories, spiritual traditions, celestial bodies, and the structure of the universe as understood within Dogon cosmology. Years later, those conversations would become some of the most discussed interviews in anthropology, period. Because there were a few details buried inside them. Details involving the sky. Now here's the part where people start leaning forward. Among the information Grial eventually published were references to an object known as Potolo. According to his accounts, Potolo was associated with Sirius. Not only that, but it was described as extremely small and incredibly heavy. Now if you've been paying attention, your brain should have immediately set off some alarm bells. Because those are the exact characteristics that make Sirius B unusual. Small, dense, hidden, and then came another detail, a cycle of approximately fifty years. Which just so happens to be remarkably close to the orbital period of Sirius B around Sirius. At this point, I imagine astronomers reading this and slowly lowering their coffee cups. Because now we're no longer talking about vague symbolism, we're talking about very specific similarities. And that's the moment the story changed. Not because anyone had actually proven anything, but because a question appeared, a really good question. How did those details get there? Now, before we start launching theories into orbit, let's remember something important. At this point there are no aliens. No history channel narrator dramatically squinting in the distance, just field notes. That's it. The moment those field notes were published and became widely known, people started doing what humans do best. They started trying to explain them. And that's the point where things begin to get complicated. That's the point.

unknown 20:48

Right.

SPEAKER_07 20:49

Literally every time. I think every single exhibit I've done over the last few episodes has been like humans be human, and we do we do be like that sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

I'm just fascinated. Is this a coincidence?

SPEAKER_07 21:04

Now, if this story had stayed inside anthropology journals, there's a decent chance neither of us would be talking about it right now. No, no offense to anthropology journalists, but most people don't spend their evenings curled up with field notes from West Africa. The turning point came when these ideas escaped academia and entered the world of popular mysteries. And once that happened, all bets were off. Because here's the thing the serious claims are weird, but they're not impossible. They're just weird. And weird things do have a tendency to attract attention, especially when they appear to challenge what we think we know. By the nineteen sixties and seventies, interest in ancient mysteries, lost civilizations, and extraterrestrial visitors was exploding. People were questioning everything ancient monuments, religious stories, archaeological discoveries. Discoveries If there was a mystery, somebody was writing a book about it. And Enter Robert Temple In nineteen seventy six, Temple published a book called The Serious Mystery. A boy did he swing for the fences. Temple looked at the Dogon material and asked a question that was actually pretty reasonable. If these details are accurate, where did the information come from? Again, fair question. But here's where things get spicy. Temple proposed that the knowledge ultimately came from alien visitors associated with the Dogon figures known as the Nomal. And just like that, a debate that had previously lived mostly among anthropologists, suddenly found itself sharing a table with UFO researchers, ancient astronaut theories, and enough speculation to power the History Channel for decades. I love this. I do too. I get the appeal. But imagine you were like reading this theory for the first time. If you were building a mystery novel from scratch, the details surrounding the field papers would be absolutely key top tier ingredients. It's compelling. The problem is that compelling and correct are not always synonymous. Still, the idea caught on. Books, documentaries, TV shows, they all referenced it. Because somewhere along the way, an argument about field notes became an argument about aliens. That's a pretty aggressive escalation. It's like so is it Well not today. I can come up with an alien theory just about anything, including pigeons.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Pigeons. Space pigeons.

SPEAKER_07 23:51

Space pigeons. But it is. It's like hearing hoofbeats, considering horses, and then skipping immediately to interdimensional zebra diplomats. It's just jumps. I kind of want to listen to a story about interdimensional zebra diplomats now. Now don't get me wrong, the alien explanation is fun, and it's probably the most fun explanation available. But once people become focused on proving or disproving extraterrestrials, something strange happened. The actual Dogon started fading into the background. The star became more important than the people. The theory became more important than the culture. And that's usually a sign that a mystery has gone way too far away from us. While the public was busy arguing about aliens, something else was happening. Other researchers started asking uncomfortable questions, not about aliens, but about the original evidence itself. And that's when the party boopers arrive. Now, every mystery eventually attracts a particular type of person. The person who walks into a room, looks at all the excitement, and says, okay, but how do we know that? Nobody likes this person. Unfortunately, they're often very important. And in the case of the Dogon mystery, those people started showing up in force. Because once researchers look beyond the headlines, they notice something. Almost everything in this story traces back to a surprisingly small number of sources, specifically the work of Marcel Grial and his colleagues. Now, that doesn't automatically mean the claims are wrong, but it does mean that they're important. If the foundation has problems, the entire argument has problems. So later researchers started asking questions. Most importantly, were later researchers finding the same things Creal reported? The answer turned out to be sometimes. Because anthropological fieldwork is hard. It's really hard. Imagine trying to explain your family's traditions to a stranger. Now imagine doing it through translators. Now imagine all your future generations arguing about exactly what you meant. I would die. Now here's the part that cracks me up. Nobody's ever actually solved anything. The skeptics didn't completely kill the mystery, the believers still didn't completely prove it. Instead, everybody just sort of ended up where they started. Astronomers be astronomatin, anthropologists be anthropologin, UFO searchers continue being themselves, and Series B continued floating through space, completely unbothered by any of it. Which honestly is the healthiest response in this entire story. At this point, the debate had largely split into two camps. One side looked at the claims and said interesting, but probably explainable. The other side looked at the same claims and said spacefish.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_07 27:08

Distant cousins of the pigeons. Now, remarkably, these positions have remained fairly stable for decades. Which brings us to present day. Dogon are still here. The star is still here, and the mystery, depending on who you ask, is either very much alive or was solved thirty years ago. As you might imagine, those people tend not to sit together at lunch. So where does this all leave us? First of all, Marcel Grial never got to see most of the chaos he accidentally unleashed. He died in 1956, years before the serious mystery was published and long before the Dogon became permanent fixture in UFO documentaries. Which means there's a very real possibility that one of the central figures in this entire story had absolutely no idea what was coming. I don't know how the afterlife works, but if Grial is aware of the situation, he has to be at least a little confused. I would say I kind of want that to be a thing. I want to do like the most innocent observation and then die and be able to watch people just completely twist it to something else. What are you doing? What are you doing? Robert Temple, meanwhile, remained convinced that his interpretation deserved serious consideration. Over the years he continued defending his ideas, revising portions of his work, and responding to critics. And honestly, I have to respect the commitment. Whether you agree with him or not, it's the man who saw a hill and said, Yep, that's where I live now. And as for the broader academic community, most modern anthropologists remain skeptical of the extraterrestrial explanation. Not because they hate fun, but because they generally believe that there are more plausible explanations available, like cultural exchange or misinterpretation. It's not so much aliens definitely visited, it's closer to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we're not there yet. Which that's admittedly a little less exciting than spacefish. Way less. Right? Boring. Now here's the interesting part though, the Dogun didn't disappear. They're still here. They're still adapting to a changing world just like every other culture on Earth. Meanwhile, a debate about their cosmology has taken a whole life of its own. Entire careers have been built around proving or disproving various aspects of the mystery. And through it all, Sirius B continued doing exactly what Sirius B has always done. It's just been chillin', orbiting a star. Completely unaware that it became one of the most argued about objects in fringe history. Honestly, poor little guy. Imagine spending billions of years collapsing into one of the strangest objects in the universe, only to become the centerpiece of an anthropology argument. And Gavin, I think that's probably my favorite thing about this story. It's not the aliens, it's not the astronomy, not even the mystery itself. It's the sheer chain of events. A group of people in Mali share stories, a French anthropologist takes notes, a hidden star gets mentioned, a writer proposes aliens, and then half a century later, here we are, sitting here talking about it on a podcast. That's absurd. So have we solved the Dogon mystery? Absolutely not. But honestly, I don't think that's why people keep coming back to it. They come back because it's weird. It's interesting. It sits in that uncomfortable space between probably explainable and okay, wait a second. If I'm being honest, that's where most of the best mysteries live. That's enough for me. Well, Gavin, I can confidently say that we have solved absolutely nothing. Nothing. The astronomers are still doing their thing. Uh and Sirius B remains completely unwilling to comment. At this point, I feel obligated to mention that I am not an anthropologist, not an astronomer, I am not an expert in West African cosmology. Perhaps most importantly, I don't have time. I don't have credentials, grant funding, or the emotional stability that is needed to settle a debate that trained professionals have been arguing about for decades. We'll stay in my lane. My lane is finding weird things and going hmm, what's this? Personally, I like the alien version. Not necessarily 'cause I think it's most likely, but it's the most fun, and I'm only human. At the end of the day, I don't know what happened, and frankly, I don't care, and neither do most of the people yelling about it on the end of the day. I don't think anybody else does either. No. What I do know is that a conversation that started in Molly somehow turned into one of the most famous mysteries in fringe history. And that's pretty impressive. So whether you're team anthropologist, team astronomer, team skeptic, or team spacefish, thank you for joining me on this journey, my friend. Thanks for taking us on it.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Are you on Team Space Fish? Can we make shirts? I am definitely on Team Space Fish.

SPEAKER_07 32:45

Hell yeah. That would actually be good merch.

SPEAKER_02 32:50

Team Spacefish. I think those details are just a little too on the nose. Right? How would they know unless the space fish told them?

SPEAKER_07 33:03

Exactly. And I figure if something is that important in my life, a space fish will come down and tell me too. So what's the point in worrying? It's all fine. Exactly. Between space fish and emotional support pickles, I think it got a good thing going.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

You might need another emotional support pickle after this one. Are you ready for exhibit number one hundred and twenty eight? I am. I'm so excited. This exhibit is one hundred and twenty eight. Dorothy Louise Edy In the year of our Lord, nineteen oh seven, as the sun climbed to its zenith over the vast and storied British Empire, our tale finds its beginning in the heart of old London. It was a season of unparalleled grandeur, an Edwardian summer where the reach of the crown extended to its furthest horizons, and the ancient dust of the Nile settled upon the polished drawing rooms of the English gentry. Ooh, sounds very fancy. The metropolis was utterly bewitched, gripped by a most peculiar and profound fascination known to all as Egyptomania. Ooh from the stately architecture of the West End to the curiosities displayed in every in every parlor. The mysteries of the pharaohs permeated the very fabric of British life, casting a spell of antiquity over the modern age. In other words, the Brits are obsessed with Egypt, and as old Britain does, it has shoved its wee little dick in Egypt's massive cookie jar.

SPEAKER_07 34:35

That was a very agitating mental picture. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 34:38

You are welcome. In a bustling, densely populated seaport on the coast of England known as Plymouth. Ever heard of it? I have. Which is north of the hoe, east of Devil's Point, and west of Ugborough Beacon.

SPEAKER_07 34:56

Can we go? Can I put a house right in the middle of all of those places? Come to my house and rot smack dab in between the middle of that hoe, Devil's Point, and Ugborough Beacon. Can't miss it.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

And here lies a modest home in a middle class neighborhood with a rather ordinary family, included in which a small child of the age of three plays atop a set of grand stairs. Hm, quaint. The child's name is Dorothy Louise Edy. An unassuming child normal by most accounts, and this all takes place on an entirely normal afternoon. Until it wasn't. Uh oh. Little Dorothy is inching closer and closer to the edge of the staircase. Don't do it. No one is watching her play. No one even knows she's about to lose her footing and go thud thud thud all the way down. As over tea kettle, little Dorothy had a great fall. As she tumbles to the bottom landing, her little body goes still. Hearing the commotion, her parents rush to her side. She's not responding to any attempt to snap her out of her concussed state. Oh my, is she dead? Oh golly. Her parents call the family doctor, and the man in the white coat rushes to Dorothy's aid. He examines Dorothy, checking for any signs of life, a breath, a pulse, and then he delivers the news that no parent should ever have to hear. There is nothing that he can do. Dorothy has succumbed to her tumble. Dorothy, by all accounts, is dead. Av for one hour the air in that modest home in Plymouth, England was stagnant. For one hour not a peep was peeped. A blanket of silence swept over the home, and then Dorothy takes a breath. The fuck zombies once again call out for the doctor. The man in the white coat enters the home once more because naturally one does not declare a child dead, leave the home, then get called back because the dead child has decided to resume breathing without having a few professional questions for yourself and the whole of medical science, of course.

SPEAKER_07 37:01

Probably the forefront of his mind was like fuck, what did I miss?

SPEAKER_02 37:05

God damn it. Well there she is, alive. She's unconscious, but she's certainly alive. They didn't even resort to using tobacco smoke. She revived alive all on her own.

SPEAKER_07 37:17

Well, thank goodness for that.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

Some odd hours later, Dorothy awakens from her unconscious sleep state. Her parents are so greatly relieved. Except Dorothy has not entirely awoken, not yet, at least. Because this little girl who wakes up after that fall is not quite the same little girl who went down those stairs. In the weeks and months after the incident, Dorothy begins to change. She's having dreams, but not ordinary childhood dreams, not the kind of nonsensical dreams about wooden toys and zoo animals or whatever Edwardian children dreamed about. Oh no. Dorothy is dreaming about temples. She's having vivid dreams of stone columns, gardens, desert sand, sunsets, priests, rituals, and a place she insists that she knows. A place that she misses. A place she calls home.

SPEAKER_07 38:08

I I see movies that start like this. I don't think this is gonna be good.

SPEAKER_02 38:13

She also developed what was called foreign accent syndrome, an extremely rare medical condition in which patients develop speech patterns that are perceived as a foreign accent that is different from their own native accent, without having acquired it in the perceived accent's place of origin.

SPEAKER_07 38:30

I have seen real life instances of that on YouTube.

SPEAKER_02 38:35

This is a real thing. Such conditions are usually a result of stroke, but can also develop from head trauma, migraines, or developmental problems. This condition was brand new to the medical journals and was actually first described that very year in 1907. Medical jargon aside, all of this would be unsettling enough if Dorothy were a grown woman with a shelf full of occult books, and all too much free time on her hands, but Dorothy is three years old, and three year olds are not generally known for their deep emotional attachment to ancient temple architecture.

SPEAKER_07 39:10

Yeah, right, you're just not hanging out with the right kind of three year olds, Gavin. That's fair.

SPEAKER_02 39:16

I try to avoid hanging out with three year olds at all costs.

SPEAKER_07 39:20

Hang out with them sometime, they will shock you.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

At this moment in time in Edwardian England, there is no framework for childhood illness like this particular case. Science may understand what caused her strange accent in dreams, but not quite how to fix it or cure it. Dorothy never does give up the ghost. She maintains that she is homesick for a place she has never seen. And she tells anyone who will listen about her home away from home, about the temples, the gardens, the priests, about Egypt. But Dorothy has never been to Egypt. Her parents have never taken her to Egypt. She does not live in a household of Egyptologists or archaeologists, or even historians. She should not be homesick for a place she's never even seen. But she is. Aliens Aliens. These claims even get her in a bit of trouble during Sunday school. One Sunday her teacher requested that her parents keep her away from class going forth because she had compared Christianity to ancient Egyptian religion. She was also expelled from a Dolwich girls' school after she refused to sing a hymn that called on God to curse the Swat Egyptians. I like her. Even her visits to a Roman Catholic church were cut short because it reminded her of the old religion, and Dorothy and her parents were interrogated by a Roman Catholic priest. So her parents do what parents often do when children misbehave or act out of line, they distract her. They redirect her. They tell themselves it's just a phase. Surely she'll grow out of it. But a phase it was not, because Dorothy Louise Edy does not grow out of it. She grows into it. Yes. About a year after the fall, Dorothy's parents decide to take her to the British Museum. Meant to be a nice family outing, a sensible excursion, a very casual, normal nineteen oh seven family thing to do, nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps they think if Dorothy sees a few old statues and dusty objects behind glass, this whole Egyptian fixation will satisfy itself and settle down. Which is adorable.

SPEAKER_07 41:44

Fair enough. I like your evaluation.

SPEAKER_02 41:49

Approved. Continue. Dorothy runs up to the statues. She wraps her little arms around them and she kisses their feet. She cries, she laughs, she speaks to them like they're old friends. Rule number one never let a child near ancient artifacts, even if child says she knows them. Particularly if said child says she knows them. Museum visitors are looking directly at Dorothy, wondering what this child is blubbering on about. Her parents are mortified. And little Dorothy, she's not embarrassed at all, because Dorothy is not having a meltdown, she's having a homecoming.

SPEAKER_07 42:28

Aww she's probably so excited though.

SPEAKER_02 42:32

I know. Then she sees a photograph on the wall. The museum lights shining down on the Temple of Seti I at Abidas. A black and white image of ancient ruins sitting out in the Egyptian desert. Dorothy points to it and says with absolute certainty there is my home. Her parents quiver. But where are the trees? Where are the gardens? It's almost as if she remembers some very specific details, as if something is missing. As if the ruin is not the place itself, but the bones of something she once knew alive. Her father takes her hand and leads her out of the museum, and I imagine he does so with the tight grip of an embarrassed man baby.

SPEAKER_07 43:18

Hey, even modern times, people are doing that parental walk of shame after a tantrum in a store.

SPEAKER_02 43:23

Like absolutely done that. Once they arrive home, they bury the day's events under twenty tons of sand. Over the next several years, Dorothy's obsession deepens. She begins describing what she calls visitations, a presence, a voice, an entity she names Hora. Now this is the part of the story where any reasonable person would pause and say, All right. This is where things are getting a little far out in the weeds. I can't say that I do not disagree. And yes, they are. Absolutely heading out into the weeds. According to Dorothy, Hora is a kind of spiritual guide, a messenger, a voice from the world she believes she came from. And over the course of roughly a year this presence tells her the story of her former life. Dorothy says her name was Ben Trishit. She was not English. She was not modern. She was an ancient Egyptian priestess at the temple of Seti I. According to Dorothy's account, Ben Trishit's mother died when she was very young. Her father could not care for her, so he gave her to the temple to be raised by the priests. That part matters because in Dorothy's telling, the temple was not just a sacred place, it was childhood. It was her family. It was a place that took her in when the world did not know what to do with her. And when you look at Dorothy's own life after that fall, you can see why that story might matter to her. Bentricia grows up in service to the gods. She learns rituals, prayers, temple customs, sacred duties. She belongs to Abidos. Then one day she meets Pharaoh Seti I. Seti was not just some dusty name on a museum tag, he was a king, a builder, a war maker, and the father of Ramesses the Great. This was the man whose face was carved into stone so the future would have no choice but to remember him. And according to Dorothy, that man wanted Pentrishit. Oh they began an affair. Ho a secret affair, a full year. Love affair. She's growing older at this point by the time the disc has manifested.

SPEAKER_07 45:48

I still imagined a toddler and I was like, girl, don't even talk about that.

SPEAKER_02 45:53

A wildly dangerous affair because Ben Trishit is supposed to belong to the temple and to the gods, not to a king, even if that king has every priest, soldier, scribe, and sculptor in the country acting like the sun comes up because he allowed it. But according to Dorothy, the affair happened. Then Bentrishit became pregnant. And now we have a problem. Not just a little problem. This is a priestess carrying the child of a pharaoh, which is the kind of scandal that does not stay in one room. The kind of scandal that gets legs, borrows a horse, and rides straight into political disaster. Pentrishit is brought before the high priests. She is questioned. They want to know the father, and she refuses to say.

SPEAKER_07 46:40

Damn right.

SPEAKER_02 46:41

None of their business Absolutely. Naming Seti would mean dragging the pharaoh into a religious political scandal and possibly a dynastic mess wrapped in linen and set on fire. So Ben Treshet makes a different kind of choice. She takes her own life. That is the story Dorothy says Hora gave her a dead priestess, a forbidden love, a pregnancy, a secret, a suicide. And a little girl in London who wakes up after a fall with Egypt lodged in her chest like a splinter. Unbelievable. That's crazy. Then Dorothy starts writing. And not little doodles either. Not pretend symbols, not the usual child drawing where a dog has six legs and everybody politely pretends that it's lovely. Here put that on the fridge, we love it. Dorothy starts writing in hieroglyphics. Or at least that's the claim. People say she wrote in accurate ancient Egyptian. They say the grammar was correct, and they say the vocabulary matched the period. They even say she produced page after page of text in a language she had never formally been taught. That's crazy. That is a huge claim. I'm not going to sit here and pretend every part of that story is nailed down with courtroom certainty. What we can say is that Dorothy believed it completely. I do at this point. From childhood onward, she behaves less like someone with an interest in Egypt and more like someone trying to recover a life that had been interrupted. Her parents tried doctors, they tried religious guidance, they tried pressure, they tried normalcy, they tried the classic parental strategy of absolutely not, we're not doing this. But Dorothy kept going anyways. At this point, Egypt was no longer an interest and it wasn't a hobby. It was not a childhood fascination with pyramids and mummies and little gold trinkets from the gift shop. It was homesickness. As personal problems go, that is a bit outside the pamphlet.

SPEAKER_07 49:00

Can you imagine just being a child and having all of these just adult mournful sorrows no one can understand that. No.

SPEAKER_02 49:11

But here's the thing, Dorothy's parents want their daughter back. Not the child talking about temples and gods and a dead king, they want their daughter, the one they had before the staircase incident. And that is the sad little knot in this whole story because from their perspective, something happened to Dorothy that day. She fell and she died, or nearly died. Or came close enough that everyone in that house believed death had already taken her, and when she came back, she came back with somebody else's memories. And they tried to save her from them. They forbid the topic. They remove Egyptian material from the house. They push her towards school and church, friends, work, respectability, and all of the usual pieces of a normal English future. And Dorothy tries to comply, she really does. She goes to school, she gets jobs, she attempts to live the life her family wants for her. But Egypt never quite leaves her. She dreams of abidos. She dreams of Seti. She dreams of gardens that no longer exist. By her twenties, Dorothy has to make a choice. She can stay in England and live a respectable life that feels like a lie, or she can go to Egypt and find out whether this impossible thing inside her is memory, madness, trauma, or something the rest of us do not have language for. There is heat, harbor noise, dust, so much light, language moving around her and the smell of river and stone and the city. For everyone else, Egypt is just a place. For Dorothy, Egypt is a door that is opening. She eventually finds work with the Department of Egyptian Antiquities. She does not have the polished academic credentials one might expect. No formal Egyptology degree, and no tidy little pedigree for the men with pipes and notebooks to admire. What she does have is years of obsession, a mountain of self taught knowledge, and a relationship with Egyptian history that is either deeply scholarly, deeply haunted, or possibly both. I like both. She works as a draftswoman. She sketches artifacts, she copies inscriptions, she assists with translations, she helps archaeologists document what they find. And the people around her begin to notice something. Dorothy knows an awful lot. Yeah. And not in the annoying kind of way where someone reads one book and starts ruining dinner. She knows the kind of details that make trained scholars glance sideways and wonder where exactly this English woman picked up all of this information. She knows about temple layouts, she knows ritual details, she knows minor deities, she knows old names and old practices. Some people think she's brilliant, some think she's eccentric, some think she's a fraud, and some probably decide not to worry too much about it. Because whatever else she believes, she's very useful. Eventually, Dorothy gets to Abidus, the temple of Sedi I. Her home, or at least the place she believes was once her home. When she walks into that temple, she does not move like a tourist. She moves like someone returning to a house after a very long absence. She knows where things were supposed to be. She talks about the gardens, she talks about rooms and ritual spaces. She describes the temple not as a ruin, but as a living place. This is where Dorothy Edi becomes inconvenient. If she were only strange, the world could dismiss her. If she were only mystical, scholars could call her eccentric, pat themselves on the back for being rational and go about their business with their little brushes. But Dorothy was not only strange, she was helpful. She contributed. She became a part of their work. According to the stories told about her, she was right often enough that people had to take her seriously, even when they did not believe her explanation for how she knew what she knew. This is the part that makes this story even more interesting, not because it proves reincarnation, it absolutely does not. It is interesting because it puts a small, irritating pebble in the shoe of certainty. And I do enjoy when certainty has to limp a little.

SPEAKER_07 54:04

Exactly, and I'm sorry, with as much evidence that's been presented so far, I'm that's proof to me. I believe it. Enough proof for me.

SPEAKER_02 54:14

Exactly. I sign me up. Over time Dorothy becomes known as Om Seti, which means mother of Seti. She lives near the temple of Seti I at Abidus, and for decades that becomes her world. She guides people through the site, she assists scholars, she documents inscriptions, she preserves knowledge, she becomes one of the people you go to if you want to understand that temple, even if you do not know what to do with the rest of her story. And yes, she continues to insist that she is the reincarnation of Ben Trishit. She says that Sedi visits her often, not exactly as a ghost, at least not in the sheet over the head kind of way. She describes him more like a presence, a memory with weight, a love that somehow outlived its own century. She talks about the conversations she's had with him, she talks about being with him. She describes a bond that sits somewhere between religion, romance, memory, and whatever strange room the human mind keeps locked at the end of the hallway. The archaeologists around her learn to live with the contradiction. By day, Omceti is a colleague. She is competent, knowledgeable, and useful to the work. By night she is a woman in love with a pharaoh who has been dead for three thousand years. At some point, people just sort of let her be. Because what else are you going to do? Exactly. Tell the woman who just helped you with a temple inscription that her dead boyfriend isn't real? Good luck with that, Professor Tweet Jacket. Also, she may know where that garden was. So what are we supposed to do with Dorothy Edy? That is the problem. People want a clean label for the display case. Fraud, genius, mystic, scholar, eccentric, patient, priestess? Pick one. Print the plaque and move on. But Dorothy does not sit neatly in any of those boxes. Perhaps she studied obsessively from childhood and absorbed more information than anyone around her realized. That is entirely possible. A child with a fixation can become a grown woman with an archive in her head, and Dorothy had decades to feed that obsession. Perhaps the fall did change something in her brain. That also is possible. A traumatic injury at three years old could have shaped the way she understood herself, her dreams, and her memories for the rest of her life. Perhaps Egypt gave her mind a structure for something she could not explain otherwise. It gave her a language, a place, a name, and a story. That does not make her foolish, that makes her human. We all build meaning out of whatever pieces were given. Dorothy was just handed way stranger pieces than most people. I like her pieces. I like her pieces. Perhaps she secretly researched things and presented them as memory because memory sounds more powerful than scholarship, and that too is entirely possible. People have lied for a whole lot less. Right. But if Dorothy Edy was running a con, it was a strange little con with very little sparkle in it. She sure as heck did not become some glittering celebrity mystic. She did not build an empire either. She did not spend fifty years swanning around Egypt in silk while gold were rich people threw money at her. She lived modestly. She worked, she stayed close to the temple, she gave her life to the palace. So yes, maybe there is a rational explanation, and there probably is, but the rational explanation still has to account for the fact that Dorothy turned this belief into a lifetime of real work. Whatever was happening inside her, she used it to study, document, preserve, and contribute. And that's where this story gets harder to laugh off. Then there is the last possibility. The one nobody sensible wants to touch with their bare hands. Maybe Dorothy was telling the truth. Maybe she really remembered another life. Maybe Bentricia died in ancient Egypt and woke up in Edwardian London inside the body of a little girl who had just fallen down the stairs. The problem, of course, is that that is impossible. Except Dorothy spent her entire life acting like it was not. And this is where she becomes difficult, not because she believes something impossible. People believed impossible things every day and half of them still managed to get elected to something. Dorothy is difficult because she took that impossible belief and used it to do something real. Dorothy Edy eventually dies on april twenty first, nineteen eighty one. She is seventy seven years old, and by then she has spent most of her life in Egypt. She wasn't visiting, nor dabbling, she wasn't chasing some little spiritual hobby for attention, she was actively living there, working there, serving the temple she believed had once held her first life. She is then buried at Abidis near the temple of Seti I, which is exactly where she wanted to be. There is something terribly beautiful about that, whether you believe a single supernatural word of this story or not. Dorothy spent seventy four years believing something no one could prove and no one could quite dismiss. And she did not apologize for it, she did not outgrow it. She built an entire life around it. A strange life, yes. A difficult life, absolutely, but a useful life. A devoted life, a life that made sense to her even when it made almost no sense to anyone else.

SPEAKER_07 59:46

Wow. I love everything about that exhibit, Gavin. I was emotionally invested, and I will probably go down just the entire rabbit hole tonight before bed.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:01

It is a fascinating story.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:03

Like she died in the 80s. There's probably people alive that remember her like being their tour guide.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:08

There has to be Yeah, 100%. Videous. Videous. She definitely overlaps with our existence, which is kind of neat.

SPEAKER_07 1:00:19

I immediately want to go find out if there's any of her like sketchings, prints of her actual sketchings, for me to purchase if if money.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:29

I also wonder if any more children have fallen downstairs and have reincarnated as Dorothy.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:36

I also wonder if scientists have thought about purposely pushing three-year-old children downstairs to see if they could recreate the phenomenon.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:49

As funny as that is.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:06

Are you a mystic?

SPEAKER_05 1:01:07

Am I a mystic? Last episode I was an edgelord, and now I'm a mystic. I'm gonna need so many plaques.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:18

Well, rumor has it, you have another exhibit for us.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:22

I do. I do. I have my designated number of exhibits. Alright, let's jump right in to exhibit 129. Caveman Carps. After your Elmer McCurdy episode last week, I've decided it's my personal mission to lovingly one up you. Now, for anyone who missed it, Elmer died in 1911 and somehow his buddy continued having adventures until the 1970s. That's a pretty hard act to follow, because any story that can be summarized as humans made increasingly questionable decisions with a corpse for sixty years is operating on a level that most stories simply cannot reach. So I had to try. So today I bring you another mummy. Another mummy. Another mummy. Only this one has been dead for over five thousand years. Oh damn, you've been on a lot of adventures. Does a long time. Now, when I first started looking into this story, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting. Frozen guy in the mountains, ancient archaeology, maybe a little survival history, you know, educational. Instead, every single time I learned something new about this man, the story got weirder. The kind of strange where you stop reading, stare at a wall for a minute, and ask yourself if the scientists are okay. Because over the last thirty years, researchers have become absolutely obsessed with this guy. Can you hear the dog chewing?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:01

So you're telling me this mummy was discovered at least thirty years ago? Yes.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:09

But he had been dead for over five thousand.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:13

My flabbers are gasted.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:15

He he had a very boring waiting period there for a minute. So they've studied just about everything about him, from his weapons, clothes, tattoos, right down to his health problems, his final meal, and his DNA. At this point, I'm pretty sure if Otsy had a favorite color, there's a graduate student trying to write a dissertation about it. And honestly I get it, because this isn't just an archaeological find, it's a literal time capsule, a complete human being frozen in time for five thousand years. For context, this man was already dead before Stonehenge was built. He was already dead before the Egyptians built the pyramids. He was already dead before writing had spread across much of the world. Somehow we pretty much know everything about him, or at least we think we do. What started as a simple archaeological discovery slowly turned into one of the oldest murder investigations in human history. Murder Murder And after reading, I tell you right now that this poor man simply cannot catch a freaking break. So let's talk about his bad days. The first bad day he had was sometime around thirty three hundred BC. The second bad day was in nineteen ninety one, when two hikers stumbled across him sticking out of a glacier. And the third bad day? Well we'll we'll get there. By the end of this exhibit, you are going to understand exactly why I said humans have a habit of making increasingly questionable decisions with corpses. Yep. That tracks.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:05

I've seen this movie before.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:09

Have you? Wait for it. So today we're talking about Oatsy, the Iceman, one of the best preserved human beings ever discovered, one of the oldest murder victims ever investigated, and the star of a story that somehow gets weirder every single year. So let's head into the Alps. We're gonna rewind to September of 1991. I was just a baby. Two German hikers, Helmut and Erica Simon, are heading through the Otzel Alps along the border of Austria and Italy. Now before we go any further, I need you to understand that this body was found at over 10,000 feet in elevation. If I am Ever found at 10,000 feet elevation, please investigate. I did not go willingly. That is twice as high as our local mountain. I normally would be very excited to be twice as high, but not in this context. It depends on the kind of mountain, you feel me? So, these hikers are making their way across a frickin' glacier when they notice something sticking out of the ice. At first it doesn't even register as a complete body, just parts of one a shoulder, a head, an arm, enough to realize that they are looking at a dead guy. Not enough to realize that they're about to accidentally stumble into one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the twentieth century. Because naturally, they assume exactly what anyone else would assume. Some poor climber died up there. Which is tragic, you know, call the cops, get him recovered, let his family know, sad story, the end. Nobody, not the hikers, not the rescuers, not the authorities, look at this frozen corpse and think, ah, yes, a gentleman from the copper age. So rescue crews arrive and start trying to get him out, and unfortunately, because everybody thinks they're just dealing with a relatively recent death, they treat it like a recovery operation. Oh no. They are using tools to chomp away at the ice. They're just trying to free the body, and in the process they accidentally damage parts of it. Or maybe not even accidentally, maybe they just don't care. Does sound horrifying until you realize that there was absolutely no reason for anyone to think this guy was older than most civilizations. So they recover the body and transport it for examination. At first, things continue exactly as you'd expect. Then somebody starts paying attention to his gear. His clothing and tools are strange and everything about him just feels a little off. Not fake or suspicious, just wrong in a way that nobody can quite explain. Eventually, scientists run radiocarbon dating. Normally, when archaeologists date something, they buy it a drink first.

SPEAKER_09 1:08:28

Just kidding.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:30

Normally when they date something, the answer isn't usually dramatic. Maybe it's a few hundred years old, maybe a thousand, you know, old, but manageable. This time the results came back and basically punch everyone in the face. Because this man did not die just a few centuries ago, he died more than five thousand years ago. Entire civilizations rose, flourished, collapsed, and vanished while this guy was still laying in the same patch of ice. And this changes the story completely, because now this isn't a rescue operation gone wrong, this is archaeology. This is big archaeology. Can you imagine the face of the archaeologist that saw the carbon dating report for the first time? Oh holy shitfuck, okay. The obvious question becomes, how in the world did a body survive that long? Because normally nature is very efficient. You die and a whole team of unpaid employees immediately gets to work. Bacteria, insects, and weather show up. Everything starts breaking down. Nature loves recycling. There are historical exceptions here. Shout out to the Carboniferous Forest. But Otsy got stuck in what was basically the world's most exclusive freezer. After he died, his body ended up in a rocky depression high up in the mountains. Snow covered him and then ice formed around him, and for thousands of years he stayed locked away from almost anything that would normally destroy a body. Instead of decomposing, he was preserved. Enough that scientists could still study his skin, organs, clothes, equipment, even what he had eaten before he died. And honestly, that last one breaks my brain just a little bit. Imagine solving a murder from five thousand years ago and still being able to check what the victim had for lunch. So for over five millennia, people walked those mountains without knowing he was there. Empires came and went, entire languages appeared and disappeared, human beings went from copper tools to landing on the frickin' moon. And through it all, Otsy just stayed put, waiting, completely forgotten, until a glacier melted at exactly the right moment, and two random hikers happened to look in exactly the right direction. Which means there's a very real chance that if conditions had been just a little bit different, he still wouldn't be found. Considering some of the things that happened after scientists got their hands on him, that may have been the better outcome. So now scientists have this incredible discovery on their hands, a five thousand year old human being who somehow arrived in the future with his receipts still attached. Naturally they start asking the obvious question Who the hell was this guy? And this is where I think things get pretty interesting, if they have not been already. So the first thing they figured out was his age. He was around forty five when he died. Now today forty-five isn't particularly old. You've got plenty of life ahead of you, but in the Copper Age, forty-five was basically enough experience to start every sentence, you know, with back in my day. This man had seen some things, and judging from his body, those things had been fighting back, because researchers quickly realized that Otsi was not exactly in peak condition. Now don't get me wrong, the guy was tough. You don't spend your life crossing mountains on foot if you're a fragile. But his body had clearly collected a few complaints over the years. Scientists found evidence of arthritis, old injuries had healed, new injuries were showing up. The general medical consensus seemed to be that Otsy woke up every morning and made a noise when he stood up. You know the one. That involuntary that escapes your body before you're fully conscious. Personally, mine son of a bitch, while my cracking knees and back set the beat for the day. But really, I guess I find that comforting, because no matter how the world changes throughout history, apparently your knees eventually file for independence. Then things got weirder. Researchers discovered evidence that he had Lyme disease. I know that's not the biggest revelation in the story, but I laughed when I learned it. Because ticks are just tiny little assholes that have been ruining lives for millennia. Some things are just timeless, I guess. Well fuckers are on their shit. Motherfuckers hate 'em. Then, scientists started looking at his tattoos. These tattoos are fascinating. Not because they're cool, they're they're really not. No offense, Otsy. Most of them are just lines, little groups of marks, nothing flashy, nothing decorative, just simple patterns scattered around his body. But they are not random patterns. Many of them appear in places where he also showed signs of pain or arthritis, his lower back, legs, joints, areas that had clearly been giving him trouble. Which led to some researchers wondering if these weren't just tattoos in a modern sense at all. What if they were a treatment? What if somebody five thousand years ago was basically trying ancient pain management?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:21

Interesting.

SPEAKER_07 1:14:23

I've heard of worse parallels in modern times. Like that makes sense to me. People have always been trying to solve the same problems. Back pain isn't exactly a modern invention. I just love the image of some copper age healer looking at Otsy and saying, Well, let's see if this works. Because that's pretty much how all medicine starts. Have we thought about stabbing you repeatedly over and over again where you hurt? Let's try it. Now, while scientists are learning all of this, they're also studying what he was wearing, and this completely shattered my mental image of prehistoric people. I expected random animal skins, you know, a blanket, a poncho, a vaguely caveman looking situation. Nope, this man was properly dressed for the environment. His clothing wasn't just practical, it was clever. There were layers made from different materials, different animal hides for different purposes. Everything was designed around staying alive in the mountains. The biggest surprise for me was the shoes, because the shoes were actually good. Not like good for five thousand years ago, just good. Researchers recreated them and tested them, and the basic design held up surprisingly well, which is one of my favorite recurring themes in history. You find out some ancient person solved a problem thousands of years ago and your reaction is basically, oh, you were smarter than I gave you credit for. Otsy probably had skills that would absolutely embarrass most of us. If you dropped me in the Alps with this equipment, I'd last six hours. Eight if there were snacks. And then researchers got to his gear, and that's where they realized something important. Otsy was not a poor, at least not by the standards of his world. Because among his belongings was something incredibly valuable, something that would have immediately signaled status. A copper axe. Bougi. Boshi, you fancy Otsy Now today that doesn't sound particularly exciting, although it kind of does a little bit. You could buy an axe at a hardware store, but five thousand years ago? A completely different story. This was expensive. Prestigious. That axe raises a question that becomes very important later. Because if somebody was carrying one of the most valuable things in the region, why was it still there when he died? Remember that question, because it turns out to be one of the biggest clues in the entire mystery. So let's talk about what happened to Otsy. Because for a long time everyone thought they already knew. The explanation seemed obvious. The guy was found frozen on a glacier. Case closed, he froze to death. What are the odds that a frozen guy died from something other than freezing? The odds are pretty good, apparently, because once researchers started taking a closer look, the story began falling apart, like one of those crime documentaries where every twenty minutes somebody discovers a new piece of evidence and suddenly the husband looks very suspicious. At first, scientists noticed injuries that seemed a little odd. Then they found cuts on his hands, fresh cuts, the kind of cuts you get when somebody's trying very hard to introduce you to a knife and you strongly disagree with the idea. We're not talking about a guy who simply got lost in the mountains. We're talking about somebody who'd been in a fight, a recent fight. In two thousand one, researchers performed more detailed scans and discovered something nobody had noticed before. An arrowhead was lodged inside of a shoulder. I cannot overstate how funny it is that scientists spent nearly ten years thinking they were studying a frozen hiker before eventually discovering a whole ass arrow in him.

SPEAKER_08 1:18:30

That is quite a big miss.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:32

No not the arrow though. So at this point the investigation takes a hard left turn. Suddenly we're not asking how did he die, we're asking who shot him, and more importantly, what the hell was going on up there? The arrow entered from behind and damaged a major artery. Researchers believe he likely bled to death relatively quickly, which means that sometime during his final hours somebody shot him in the back and left him to die on a mountain. Even if that was the only piece of evidence, we'd still have a mystery. But remember those cuts on his hands? Those aren't random. They suggested he'd already been involved in some kind of struggle before he was shot.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:17

Oh defensive wounds.

SPEAKER_07 1:19:19

Mmm So, we're getting a completely different picture. This wasn't a guy peacefully hiking through the Alps when somebody took a pot shot at him from a bush. Something had already happened. Scientists found traces of blood from other individuals on some of his equipment. Not just his blood, other people's blood. Which is where I start imagining the giant conspiracy board, red string everywhere. Researchers are literally losing sleep. And this is what makes this story so frustrating. We're incredibly close to the truth. Close enough to see the shape of it, but we can't quite grasp it. Do you remember the copper axe? The expensive one? That one would have been a status symbol. The thing basically screamed, Holy shit, this guy is important. The killer left it behind. If your goal is robbery, that's the first thing you take. Instead, the axe stays. The rest of his tools and supplies stayed with him.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:22

They just wanted him dead. No, they had a grudge to settle.

SPEAKER_07 1:20:28

Whoever killed Otsy was not interested in his stuff. They were interested in Otsy.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:35

And the plot thickens. I wonder if Otsy had it comin'.

SPEAKER_07 1:20:41

He had it comin' all along. So now we start looking at motive. Maybe this was revenge. Maybe somebody had a score to settle. Maybe it was political or territorial. Was this a premeditated ambush of death? Dun dun dun dun dun dun Remember, these were real communities with trade networks and relationships. People weren't wandering around in isolation bonking each other with clubs all day. But then there's a theory that gets my brain wheels a spinin'. What if Otsi wasn't simply running away? What if he'd already won? We have evidence of a fight. We have blood from other people. He definitely got some hits in. What if he survived some violent encounter, escaped into the mountains, and thought he'd gotten away? What if he was almost safe? Like the end of a chase. You should have seen the other guy.

unknown 1:21:41

Right.

SPEAKER_07 1:21:42

I will see their defensive wounds, bastards. It was like somebody was desperately trying to put distance between themselves and whatever happened below. And then one arrow. That's all it takes. One shot. The end. Just a mountainside and silence for five thousand years. Honestly, if this story happened today, there would already be seventeen documentaries, books, Netflix specials, and I'd probably be in there just making things worse. We don't know what happened in the hours leading up to his death, but we know enough to say one thing with confidence. This was not a hiking accident. This was murder. Murder blatant murder. But somehow, that's not the weirdest thing that happened to him. So let's talk about his last day. One of the things I love most about this story is that scientists don't stop at figuring out how Otsy died. They immediately turned around and asked, Okay, but what was he doing before that? This is where archaeology starts feeling less like science and more like stalking. Because somehow these people managed to reconstruct parts of this man's final day. One of the biggest clues came from something that sounds incredibly boring. Pollen. I have a hate hate relationship with pollen, but let's find out. Pollen is basically nature's version of location data. Different plants grow in different places, elevations, and seasons. When scientists started looking at the pollen trapped inside Otsie's body, they realized something interesting. He hadn't been hanging out in the mountains the whole time. Shortly before his death, he'd been down at lower elevations, and then he moved back up, which immediately raises questions like Hey Otsie, what you doing? Traveling, hunting, booty call? We may never know. But hopefully it was the last one.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:42

Get it, Otsy.

SPEAKER_07 1:23:45

And then scientists took a peek inside of his stomach, which is weird but useful information to have. Otsi's stomach basically preserved a snapshot of his final meal, and unlike the image I had in my head of some desperate survival ration, this man absolutely threw down before he died. His last meal was loaded with meat and fat. Researchers found evidence of ibex and red deer along with grains from eincorn wheat. Basically, if you stripped away five thousand years of history and put it on a wooden cutting board in a trendy restaurant, someone would call it rustic and charge thirty eight dollars for it. The thing that really stood out to the researchers was the fat. A lot of fat. Which isn't that strange when you realize that this guy was crossing mountains on foot? You don't do that on just a kale smoothie. The meal makes perfect sense for somebody preparing for serious physical activity. And honestly, that's one of the parts that gets me. This wasn't like a designated final meal, at least not to him, as far as he knew it was lunch. And now I can picture him, a middle aged guy with bad knees, eating a meal, adjusting his gear, getting ready to keep moving. He was probably just trying to get through Tuesday, which I like to refer to as the armpit of the week, just so you know, I will die on that hill. Now, unfortunately for Otsie, his Tuesday got progressively worse. Poor Otsie. Poor Otsie, leave the man alone. Leave him alone. We have enough information to know something important happened, but not enough information to know exactly what that is. And honestly, that's probably why people are still obsessed with Otsy. Most ancient people disappear into history. Their name may survive if they're lucky, or maybe they're just a skeleton if they're not so lucky. Otsu gave us something much rarer. He gave us a glimpse. Just enough to remind us that five thousand years ago people were still people. God, I hope I don't die in such a way that I'll be a glimpse. Poor future humans would be wondering if a package of top ramen and beer were a typical diet.

unknown 1:26:06

Oh no.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:08

Ooh, how interesting. Carbohydrates and pops. Standard daily diet.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:17

Why are there so many carbohydrates? Now, if the story ended here, it would already be incredible. But humanity is not done with Oatsy. Not even close. Because eventually people started noticing something strange. And depending on how superstitious you are, before we move on, I need to take a brief detour into one of my favorite categories of nonsense curses. Because nope, not because I necessarily believe in them, but because humans absolutely cannot resist inventing them. You could discover a haunted spoon tomorrow, and within forty eight hours there would be a Facebook group dedicated to its supernatural powers. It's who we are, as a species. And naturally, one of the most famous mummies in the world would eventually get assigned to a curse, because of course he did. Now, to be completely fair, the story starts out a little weird. Surprising. Over the years, several people connected with Otsy's discovery died. Just enough that newspaper headlines started getting excited. One researcher died in a car accident, a mountaineer involved with the recovery died in an avalanche, a filmmaker who made a documentary about Otsy later developed a brain tumor. Even Helmut Simon, one of the hikers who originally found the body, died after falling in the mountains years later. And the media did what media do, they lost their goddamn minds. If you're keeping score at home, none of the reasons for these deaths are particularly impossible. But logic has never stopped a good curse story. Anything other than the unforgettable reality that sometimes bad things happen for no cosmic reason whatsoever. A curse feels better. But here's the thing, as entertaining as the curse is, it actually distracts from something much stranger, because while journalists were busy talking about supernatural revenge, scientists kept studying Otsy. Year after year, decade after decade, and every time they looked closer they found something new, a new clue, a new piece of information. Honestly, you'd think we'd done gotten everything there was to get. The man had been investigated more thoroughly than most modern crime victims. Surely there was nothing left to discover. Surely, right? This is where I need you to understand that the next part of the story is completely real. Gavin, this is fact. Because after thirty freaking years of studying a five thousand year old murder victim, somebody had an idea. An idea so ridiculous that if I told you at the beginning of this episode, you would have assumed I was making it up. So let's talk about the thing that I refuse to believe is real, even though it is. By this point, scientists had spent decades studying Otsy. They reconstructed for the most part his entire existence, down to what he wore, how he died, and what he ate. And this is where science once again proves that if you give very smart people enough time, they will eventually become deeply unsupervised. Because researchers That is my preferred state of being as well. Deeply unsupervised. Researchers began looking at something that had received less attention than the previous information. His microbiome. Now before your eyes glaze over it, let me explain. How was uh old sea poopin'? How was how how's your shit, sir? Probably full of fat and other shit. Your microbiome is basically the microscopic ecosystem living in and on your body. Bacteria, yeasts, and microbes. An entire invisible world that spends every day riding around inside you without paying rent. And because Otsy was so incredibly well preserved, researchers were able to examine some of those ancient microorganisms, which, don't get me wrong, is very fascinating. Scientists are incredibly interested in ancient microbiomes because they offer a glimpse into what human health looked like before modern diets, antibiotics, processed foods, and all the other weird things we've introduced into our bodies. This makes sense. It is totally reasonable, I have no notes. But as things often do, things take a turn. Researchers found several strains of cold loving yeast associated with Otsy and the environment that preserved him. Still science.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:10

Cool. Cool cool. Cold loving yeast.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:14

Cold loving yeast. The cold, you say. But then somebody asked a question.

SPEAKER_08 1:31:22

What does this tell us about ancient life? This is where shit always goes sideways.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:27

It's about to go sideways, buckle up. The question that researchers asked appears to have been, can we bake with it? No.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:38

Well, can you sure?

SPEAKER_08 1:31:41

Should you?

SPEAKER_07 1:31:42

No, you should not bake with it. So we agree on how much distance we have traveled from archaeology at this point. We have left archaeology. Archaeology is gone. We passed archaeology about three exits ago. And now we're in the kitchen. We are indeed. That strange wilderness where scientists are staring at microorganisms connected to a five thousand year old murder victim and wondering whether he would make good sourdough. And somehow their answer was yeah. Yeah. At this point, I imagine there had to have been a meeting. An actual meeting with grown-ups and degrees and grant funding. Somebody had to stand up in a room and present this idea. And not one person in that room said guys, maybe let's not bake the mummy. Instead, they all apparently nodded and got right to work. You cannot convince me that these scientists do not reside in a legal state and that they were not high as a freaking kite. So the Stoner researchers revived and cultured these ancient cold adapted yeasts. They created starter cultures, they tested them, and eventually they baked bread. Real bread. An actual loaf of freaking bread. At this point I had to put my phone down and walk away for a minute because I just spent hours reading about a copper age murder victim. I was emotionally prepared for murder. I was prepared for archaeology. I was not prepared for surprise sourdough. Nobody warned me, and the best worst part, by all accounts, the bread was delicious.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:34

One of my favorite quotes, and I feel that this applies here, is from the Jurassic Park franchise. From Dr. Ian Malcolm. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

SPEAKER_07 1:33:53

Fallet, valid applause on my end. Um I honestly thought that you were going to quote the T-Rex and just go that also would have been a valid and applicable quote, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:12

Did they eat the bread? They did indeed eat the bread. Did I spoil it?

SPEAKER_07 1:34:21

No, no. It just outlines that we're not talking about a failed experiment. We're talking about successful mummy bread. There is now a version of reality where someone took a bite and thought, damn, that is excellent. And you and I both know that humanity was never gonna stop there.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:43

Oh god, what's the idea?

SPEAKER_07 1:34:44

I immediately pictured I immediately pictured some artesianal bakery in Portland, a chalkboard sign out front, talking about handcrafted, small badge, 5,000-year-old microbial heritage at $24 a loaf. Don't ask me why all the employees are wearing suspenders. I do not know. Not only that, the people are lined up around the block. Then the influencers arrive. Oh my gosh, you guys. Today we're trying ancient copper age somerdale. My gut health has never felt more connected to prehistory. This bread healed my relationship with my inner child. I honestly have no doubt that Gwyneth Peltro would be in that mix somewhere. Oh absolutely. She would monetize immediately. Oh okay, but honestly, beneath all the jokes, the science is genuinely fascinating. These studies help researchers understand ancient ecosystems, ancient microbes, and how humans have changed over time. What we've lost, our minds, and what we've gained. Wait, probably. It is real science. It is a very important science. It's just impossible for me to separate that from the fact that somebody looked at a prehistoric murder victim and somehow arrived at a bakery. And that's why I saved this part for the end. Because if I told you at the beginning, you told me what to shut the fuck up and know, like go find actual facts for me. But here we are, after 5,000 years, Otsy is still teaching us new things. Which means the third worst day of Otsy's life may have happened sometime around 2026. Because after surviving an ambush, freezing in a glacier, and becoming one of the most studied human beings in history, somebody eventually turned Bardovis biological legacy into an artesianal sourdough. Honestly, that is the most bougie human ending imaginable.

SPEAKER_08 1:36:45

I'd say so, damn. Would you eat it? I would probably try a bite.

SPEAKER_07 1:36:49

Yeah, me too. Fuck us. We're the problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:56

I would try a bite and then I would preserve a bite.

SPEAKER_07 1:37:00

Save it for later. Save it for 5,000 years. For my collection. And I I think that's why Otsy fascinates people. Not because he was extraordinary, but because he wasn't. He wasn't some king or conqueror, and as far as we know, he was just a man trying to get through his day. A guy with bad knees, decent gear, and somewhere to be. All these years later, we still don't know all the dates, because despite of all of our technology, all of our scans, research papers, and incredibly questionable decisions involving ancient corpses, the biggest mystery remains unsolved. Who the hell was after him? Why did they kill him? And what happened on that mountain? For all the ways science lets us peek into the past, history never gives us the whole picture, we only get fragments. One frozen man who accidentally became and fragments of bread in and around my mouth. So one frozen man who accidentally became one of the most studied human beings in history. Not bad for a guy who spent five thousand years minding his own business. Thank you for joining me on this journey to the Alps. If you've learned anything from this exhibit, let it be this. If archaeologists find your body someday, be very careful about what microorganisms you leave behind.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:30

I can say with almost 100% certainty that they will not want any of my microorganisms.

SPEAKER_08 1:38:39

Are you sure what what kind of gear do you have on you? On me? Well, I have a vape and a chapstick.

SPEAKER_07 1:38:51

Worth studying in my opinion. What is this petroleum based material that he's carrying around with him? This is worth more than gold. He was rich. We've sessed friend. This man was far wealthier than anybody else in the entire universe. Beeswax. Bees?

SPEAKER_04 1:39:16

What are bees? They've been extinct for millennia. For real. Petroleum, that has also been gone for many, many, many years.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:28

That was fascinating. I had a hard time piping up because I was just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, at every turn.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:35

Squirrel!

SPEAKER_05 1:39:36

Squirrel.

SPEAKER_07 1:39:37

Yeah, no, that one kept me highly entertained. That one was not a struggle to research. I was like, are you kidding? What? No swee.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:45

It's nuts because after you really got into the book of it, I knew everything I knew all of that already. I've watched documentaries about him. But last little bit, though.

SPEAKER_07 1:39:59

That one was relatively recent.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:01

Recent.

SPEAKER_08 1:40:02

And humans be doing some wild shit.

SPEAKER_07 1:40:06

Ah. I did read that they were thinking about culturing a yeast specific to make beer, champagne, other fermented drinks. Like caveman kombucha, man. Like, let's go.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:19

Caveman kombucha. I can eat the butter of that CK. You gotta read that CK? I don't think I could drink the caveman kombucha. I think you could.

SPEAKER_07 1:40:31

And I think I could talk you into it. Peer pressure is a force to be reckoned with.

SPEAKER_08 1:40:41

That's fair.

SPEAKER_07 1:40:42

Alright, Gavin. Now that we've talked about 5,000-year dead man bread, what what do we have for your next exhibit? Oh boy, this one is uh Oh, it's something.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:56

I like something. Exhibit 130. MK Ultra. Now, some of you may have already seen the movie. Um I have not seen the movie. And I stumbled upon this exhibit actually because of one of its little operations. And we're just gonna get into it.

SPEAKER_07 1:41:19

I have a very, very basic understanding of MK Ultra. I have a general foggy idea, but yeah, no official facts. I'm s excited.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:29

Well let's clear it all up for you. I'm scared. Okay. Alright, this exhibit is not a conspiracy theory. This exhibit was the conspiracy. A real documented conspiracy brought forth upon its citizens by our very own government. Shocker. A government who conspi against its own peoples.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:53

Double shocker.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:54

And like most government nightmares, it did not begin with a villain laughing maniacally in a dog room. It began with panic. It is nineteen fifty three, and the United States of America is not sleeping too well. As the Cold War settled into its frigid grip over the globe, the United States of America found itself gripped by a particular brand of terror. Not the terror of nuclear annihilation, though that was certainly on the menu. And not the terror of Soviet tanks rolling through Western Europe, though that kept plenty of generals awake at night. I bet. No, my friends, this was a different kind of panic entirely. This was the terror that somewhere, in some secret laboratory behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet scientists had cracked the code to the human mind, that they had figured out how to control thoughts, erase memories, implant loyalty, and turn ordinary people into programmable weapons. They had, in short, figured out mind control. Ba pa In other words, the United States government became convinced that brainwashing was real, and that the enemy had it, and that the only reasonable response was to start experimenting on its own citizens to catch up. Which brings us to a building in Langley, Virginia, the Central Intelligence Agency. Ever heard of her? I have indeed. Otherwise known as the CIA. America's premier spy organization, tasked with gathering intelligence, conducting covert operations, and apparently, as we are about to discover, running a two decade-long program of non-consensual drug experiments on vulnerable populations.

SPEAKER_07 1:43:35

I grew up in the wrong era. But then it would have been consensual, and it might have ruined the whole fight. That's true.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:42

Well, this program had its own name. MK Ultra. Why did they name it that?

SPEAKER_09 1:43:49

We have no idea.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:50

Oh, it's just like Operation Mincemeat. They just pulled it out of a hat. And it was, without exaggeration, one of the most comprehensively bizarre things the United States has ever done. Which given the competition is saying a lot. It really is. The man who authorized MK Ultra was named Alan Dulles. Alan Welsh Dulles, to be precise, director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. A man who believed with the kind of confidence only available to people who have never been told new by anyone with actual authority that mind control was not only possible, but achievable. And that if anyone was going to achieve it, it should be him. Dolis had reasons for his paranoia. During the Korean War, American prisoners of war had returned home saying strange things. Confessing to war crimes they had not committed, praising communism, behaving in the eyes of military intelligence like they had been reprogrammed. The term that was emerging was brainwashing. The fear was that the Chinese and the Soviets had developed techniques, psychological, chemical, or both, that could break a person's will and rebuild it in whatever shape they wanted. The evidence for this was to be generous thin. So in April of nineteen fifty three, Alan Dulles authorized a new program, a classified research initiative into mind control, behavior modification, and chemical interrogation. The goal, as outlined in the authorization memo, was to develop techniques that could control human behavior through covert means. The oversight was essentially non existent. Of course it wasn't. The ethical review process was, for lack of a better word, a joke. Ethics? Who is she? And the man Dulles put in charge was a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Which is where things go from troubling to completely off the motherfucking rails.

SPEAKER_07 1:45:53

I mean I don't mean to assume based on his name, but here I am, assuming.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:58

Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist, a folk dancer, a goat farmer, a man who grew his own vegetables and believed in living simply, also a man who spent the next twenty years trying to turn LSD into a weapon. Gottlieb was brilliant by all the counts. He had a club foot, a stutter, and a deep, almost spiritual belief that the human mind could be unlocked, reprogrammed, and controlled if you just found the right chemical key. And he believed that key was LSD.

SPEAKER_07 1:46:30

Lyserg Lysergic That is the longest word I've ever seen in my entire life.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:40

Lysergic acid diethylmide. Ever heard of her?

SPEAKER_07 1:46:52

No, but mushrooms are magic. She's the bread. But what if we derived ergot from fungus that grows on sourdough?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:04

Thank you for reading my mind exactly. We literally just turned into cavemans.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:15

First synthesized in 1938 by a Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffman, who accidentally dosed himself in 1943 and experienced what he later described as a remarkable and terrifying journey through his own consciousness. Yeah don't say. First time?

SPEAKER_07 1:47:34

Albert, we need to have a little bit of a sit-down here.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:38

By the early 1950s, LSD was being widely studied in psychiatric research. Some researchers thought it might help treat alcoholism, depression, and trauma. Sidney Gottlieb thought it might help the CIA erase someone's personality and replace it with a new one. I get the parallel. So he started testing it on everyone. On anyone. On people who had no idea what was happening to them. Rule number one, if your plan involves secretly dosing people with powerful hallucinogens to see if you can control their minds, your plan is bad and you should stop. Yep. Gottlieb did not stop. He instead expanded his experiments. One of the first places MKUltra set up shop was inside American prisons. What could go wrong? Because if you're going to run unethical drug experiments, why not target people who were already locked up, already powerless, and already invisible to most of society? The CIA partnered with researchers at facilities like the Federal Narcotics Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, and they offered prisoners a deal. Take these drugs, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, whatever we're testing this week, and in exchange we will reduce your sentence. Or we'll give you access to the drugs you were already addicted to, or we will just make your life slightly less miserable while you're here. These were not volunteers in any meaningful sense. These were incarcerated people, many of them struggling with addiction, being told that if they participated in experiments they did not understand, they might get something in return. This, folks, was in fact not consent. This was hereditary exploitation dressed up as research. Yeah. Some of these experiments lasted for weeks. Oh my god. Prisoners were dosed repeatedly, sometimes for seventy-seven consecutive days, to see what prolonged exposure to hallucinogens would do to the human brain. Oh my god. And the researchers took notes. I bet they I bet they did. Lots of notes. The prisoners had no idea what they were a part of, and the CIA kept on experimenting, because nobody was there to stop them. Prisons were not the only place MKUltra found its test subjects. Program also contracted with mental health institutions across the United States and Canada.

SPEAKER_07 1:50:05

Uh was that to provide mental health support to the prisoners by chance? What? Did they contract with mental health institutions so they could provide adequate mental health and support of the prisoners that they were dosing with drugs? Well shit.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:20

I had a brief glimpse of the. You know, I was like maybe there's a redeeming bit in literally any of this, but uh I guess. All right. I love that so much.

SPEAKER_07 1:50:38

It's like they contracted with mental health, that's like uh surprising, but very nice of them.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:45

These were psychiatric hospitals, places where people went because they were struggling, vulnerable, and desperately in need of help, and the CIA saw them as opportunities. Oh. Researchers were given grants to study behavioral modification and what they penned as psychic driving. One of the most notorious was Dr. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. Cameron believed he could depattern the human mind, essentially erase a person's existing personality, and then rebuild it from scratch. His method involved putting patients into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time, playing recorded messages on a loop and administering electroshock therapy at levels far exceeding standard medical practice. His patients had come to him for help with depression, anxiety, and trauma. And they left with gaps in their memory, unable to recognize their families, unable to remember basic facts about their own lives.

SPEAKER_06 1:51:47

So they left with depression, anxiety, and trauma. Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:54

Some of them never recovered. It just so happened that Cameron was funding these experiments by means of MK Ultra. The CIA knew what he was doing, and they kept paying him. Because the goal was not to heal people, the goal was to see if you could break a mind and rebuild it. These people were not enemy combatants. These people were psychiatric patients. People who had trusted doctors to help them, and the government turned them into test subjects. Enter Operation Midnight Climax.

SPEAKER_04 1:52:28

That doesn't sound so bad. That sounds like it could be a good time.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:34

Which, somehow, both the most absurd and the most cruel thing MKUltra did. Son of a bitch. And yes, that was the name. Operation Midnight Climax. A name that sounds less like a classified CIA program and more like a low-budget spy porno.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:53

Exactly. A good time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:55

So here's what happened. The CIA decided they needed to test LSD in real-world conditions. Not in a controlled laboratory because Oh no. Or in hospital rooms with doctors or consent forms or observation protocols and some basic gesture towards human dignity? No, no. That would be far too reasonable, and apparently reason had already left Langley in a hat and dark sunglasses. They wanted to know what would happen if someone was dosed without their knowledge in an ordinary social setting. How would they behave? How would they talk? Would they reveal secrets? Could they be manipulated? Could they be steered? Could sex, drugs, fear, confusion, and vulnerability be blended together into something useful for espionage? So the CIA, in its infinite immoral wisdom, opened safe houses in San Francisco and in New York. Now when I say safe houses, do not picture some bare government room with one metal chair, a flickering light bulb, and a sad cup of coffee. No, this was way worse. And this was by design. The best known San Francisco safe house was at two two five Chestnut Street on Telegraph Hill, in an apartment with a view of the bay because apparently even the CIA can appreciate good real estate. Why wouldn't they? The man running the operation was George Hunter White, and George Hunter White was a whole character. A former journalist, a narcotics agent, a man who loved booze, guns, sex workers, and the feeling of being important in a room where nobody was allowed to ask too many questions. For this little project, he used the alias Morgan Hall, which is exactly the kind of fake name a man picks when he thinks he's being mysterious, but is actually just a monster in a fancy suit. Agent White called the San Francisco apartment the pad, which tells you a great deal about the kind of men in control of this entire operation. Inside, the place was staged to feel like a brothel by way of a middle aged government agent's idea of European seduction. There were heavy red curtains, flowers, mood lighting, Toulouse Latrec posters, French cancan imagery, photographs of women in bondage or domination poses. It was supposed to look rich, decadent, and just dangerous enough to make a man forget he had a wallet, a wife, or basic survival instincts. According to one agent who saw it, it did not look rich, it looked cheap, which feels right because was in fact not a bluey red light district sex palace, but instead a really terribly decorated film set. It's probably a casting couch in the corner. You know what I mean? Pretty much. The CIA had essentially built a little theater of sin in the name of national security. Behind the scenes, the apartment was wired for surveillance, microphones hidden in the walls, some were disguised as electrical outlets, tape recorders were set up inside of vases. The room featured a built-in two way mirror, a design choice suggesting the CIA surveyed every sleazy motel in the country and decided to give the aesthetic a federal upgrade. And last but not least, what would a secret CIA brothel be without sex workers? Exactly. Just an apartment, of course. But these working women, paid by the CIA, were much more than just furniture. They were a very useful tool because in order to seduce men into an experiment they didn't know they were a part of, you need to introduce one important ingredient boobies. Big old boobies. And Agent George White and his accomplices were not exactly the lingerie wearing kind of guys. They needed a way to lure men out of the bars and into the pad. In order to entice a workforce of women who were already hiding in the shadows of law enforcement, they needed some leverage. They needed to be able to offer something worthwhile, so they paid them and offered protection from the law. So let us step outside into the streets of San Francisco. Inside the outside we go, because that is where the trap actually begins. A man is out on the town, probably in North Bend, drinking, looking for company, minding his own questionable business. He meets a beautiful busty woman, and my my is he interested. There is nothing especially unusual about that part. A conversation starts, a few drinks, perhaps, then an invitation. A walk back to the apartment on Telegraph Hill, the drinks are poured, the evening continues, and at some point that man is dosed with LSD. And that is the important part.

SPEAKER_07 1:57:42

I mean so far it sounds like a pretty exciting Saturday night so far.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:49

That depends on who you are, I guess. The woman keeps his attention long enough for the drugs to kick in. At first maybe he feels warm, a little strange. Maybe the room starts to tilt around the edges. Maybe the woman across from him looks too close, then too far away, then too bright, then not quite so real. Maybe the curtains start breathing. Maybe the wallpaper moves. Maybe his own hands stop feeling like they belong to him. Maybe panic starts crawling up the back of his neck and he cannot explain why. He does not know that this is LSD. He thinks it's vodka. He does not know that this was all planned. He does not know that his confusion is the entire point. He only knows that something is wrong and the person in the room with him is not explaining it. And now we move to the other side of the mirror. There sits George Hunter White, sometimes with other observers, watching, listening, taking notes, recording what they can, and yes, by many accounts, enjoying himself with a martini nearby, because obviously a secret agent experiment requires a certain level of amenities. Indeed, indeed. Extra dirty shaken, not staad. That is what is happening in these safe houses. One side of the glass had a man being drugged without his knowledge, the other side had government men treating his fear, his behavior, his sexuality, and his loss of control as data. Whiteness observers would stick around for all of the night's festivities. Even the sexy sexy time.

SPEAKER_07 1:59:37

I'm interested. Continue.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:40

This whole thing sounds awfully cucky to me. Indeed. Indubitably. And let us be clear about what kind of data they thought they were collecting. They wanted to know if LSD could make a person talk. Could it loosen secrets? Could it make someone vulnerable to suggestion? Could sex be used as leverage? Could shame be used as pressure? Could confusion be turned into interrogation? Could a human being stripped of context and control be studied like a rat in a furnished cage? That was the experiment. This is not science. This is predatory government exploitation. The men chosen for this were not powerful people. They were not senators or generals. They were not the sons of men with law firms, yachts, and surnames that opened doors. They were Johns, men picked up in bars, men looking for a long night out, men looking for schmexy time, who were then drugged without consent and studied. And I use the word studied loosely. More like observed creepily. Operation Midnight climax ran from nineteen fifty four to nineteen sixty five. For roughly eleven years the government ran a secret spy brothel. And of course, nothing ever came of it, nor any consequences for the agents who ran the operation. For years MKUltra operated in complete secrecy. The public had no idea. Congress had no idea. Even most of the CIA had no idea, which is always comforting. Nothing says healthy democracy, quite like a secret government program so secret that even the agency running it has no idea it's happening. Then in 1953, a man named Frank Olson died. Olson was a biochemist at Fort Dietrich in Maryland, a military facility involved in biological and chemical weapons research. In November of that year, Olson attended a work retreat in rural Maryland with other government scientists. At that retreat, Sidney Gottlieb spiked his drink with LSD. Olson had no idea. He's a prison Yeah. Olsen had no idea, no warning, no consent, just a drink handed to him by colleagues. Like what the fuck? Yeah, what the fuck? Afterwards, Olsen began to unravel. He became anxious, paranoid, and distressed. He told his wife he had made a terrible mistake. He seemed convinced his career was over, or that something worse was coming for him, and the CIA still did not tell him the truth. They did not say, Why, Frank, we drugged you, and what you're feeling may be the result of a powerful hallucinogen. We slipped into your drink without permission, just for funsies. No. Instead, they watched him closely. A week later, Olsen checked into a New York hotel with a CIA doctor assigned to accompany him. On november twenty eighth, nineteen fifty three, Frank Olson went out the window of his tenth floor hotel room. He died on impact. His death was ruled a suicide. I call that CIA defenestration. Yeah. The CIA told his family he had been depressed. They did not mention the LSD or MKUltra. They did not mention that his own colleagues had secretly dosed him and then watched him spiral for days. For more than twenty years his family believed the story they were given. Then in nineteen seventy five, the truth began to leak out. The government admitted Olsen had been drugged without his knowledge. President Gerald Ford invited the family to the White House and apologized. They even received a settlement from the government. But Frank Olson was still dead. Worse than that, his death did not stop the program. MKUltra kept MKUltra in. Oh my god. It expanded into more facilities, more researchers, more drugs, more people who had no idea they had been turned into test subjects. The CIA tested LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, barbituates, amphetamines, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshock, and whatever else they thought might crack open the human mind like a walnut. They tested it on prisoners, on psychiatric patients, military personnel, college students, people struggling with addiction, random civilians, people who thought they were participating in legitimate research, people who had no idea they were participating in anything at all. The goal was control. Could you make someone forget? Could you force a confession? Could you plant a suggestion? Could you turn a human being into something programmable? And after years of damage, the answer was no. No you cannot. The human mind is not a radio. You cannot just twist the dial, clear the static, and make a new voice come through. But the CIA tried anyways, for nearly twenty years. Then in nineteen seventy three, with Watergate chewing through Washington and Congress starting to ask some very uncomfortable questions, Sidney Gottlieb ordered most of the MKUltra records destroyed. No doubt, and boxes of files, experiment logs, research notes, financial records, names of subjects, victims, gone, shredded, burned, erased. He later claimed the files were old and no longer relevant, which is a fascinating describe evidence. But the destruction was not perfect. Some financial records survived. Some researchers kept their own notes, some victims remembered, and eventually the pieces that remained made their way to the church committee. In nineteen seventy-five, the United States Senate formed a committee to investigate abuses by American intelligence agencies, which is kind of funny because it's like the investigators investigating the investigation.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:29

Right.

SPEAKER_07 2:05:30

It's also the higher-ups could claim that they had no knowledge about the investigating of the investigation of the investigation.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:37

Yeah, it's that whole meme with Spider-Man, like all the all the Spider-Mans pointing at each other.

unknown 2:05:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:42

Officially it was called the Senate Select Committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities, which is the title so long it sounds like the government was trying to hide the investigation inside of the name.

SPEAKER_07 2:05:53

Likely.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:54

Yep. Most people just call it the Church Committee, after Senator Freight Church of Idaho.

SPEAKER_09 2:05:59

Uh oh.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:02

In the middle of the investigation, the Church Committee found MKUltra. Not all of it. Gotlieb had made sure of that. But they found just enough. Enough to know the CIA had run a massive program of non consensual human experimentation. Enough to know that prisoners, psychiatric patients, sex workers, people with addictions, marginalized people, and ordinary civilians had been treated like disposable material. Enough to know people had been drugged, manipulated, traumatized, and in some cases even murdered. Murdered The CIA was forced to admit what it had done. Sort of. The agency's position was essentially yes, these things happened. Yes, they were classified. Yes, maybe some lines were crossed. But it was the Cold War. Everybody was scared. And lessons have been learned. Oh at least they learned something. Lessons. That is what powerful people call it when they survive the crime, and the victim becomes the curriculum. No one went to prison for MK Ultra. Sidney Gottlieb was never prosecuted. Alan Dulles was already dead by the time any of this came out, and George Hunter White never stood trial for Operation Midnight Climax. Some victims received settlements, some families got apologies, some records became public. Some victims still never understood what happened to them. But there was no great reckoning. By the time the United States finally saw the shape of the monster, the monster had already wiped clean most of its own footprints. So this is what we're left with. MKUltra was definitely not a myth. It was a real government program run by a real government agency. Using real doctors, hospitals, universities, prisons, safe houses, and real people who were never given a choice. The CIA wanted mind control. What it proved instead was much uglier. It proved how easily abuse can be renamed to research, how easily suffering can be called data, and how easily a crime can hide inside of a budget line, a medical chart and a classified memo or a locked room. That is MKUltra. The government went looking for a way to control the human mind, and in the end, it proved something far more terrifying. You do not need mind control when you already have secrecy, money, fear, and people willing to hurt other people in the name of national security. Reckless depravity was the weapon, and they used it. And that is Exhibit 130, MK Ultra.

SPEAKER_06 2:08:29

Good lord duh.

SPEAKER_02 2:08:32

And the crazy part? There's a lot more to this than I would even be able to cover in an episode.

SPEAKER_07 2:08:39

Well, I found a new topic, uh, and I'm sure that there's plenty on it, so that is also exciting. Gavin, both of your exhibits tonight were highly intriguing. I will research them independently after the fact. Alright, so let's recap. So tonight's tour gave us glacier murder, mummy adjacent bread, staircase mysticism, suspicious stars, and government-funded hallucinations.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:06

Which is a lot to take in. But it's also educational. In the same way touching a hot pan teaches you about hot pans, right? Right. Thank you for joining us at the Oddities Department.

SPEAKER_07 2:09:18

If you made it all the way through this tour, congratulations. You survived the ice. You survived the bread.

SPEAKER_02 2:09:24

You survived the stairs. You've survived the stars. And you survived the CIA, which frankly deserves a commemorative plaque and maybe a little emotional support snack. Preferably not made from ancient microbes.

SPEAKER_07 2:09:38

Correct. We have learned nothing, but we are trying. Unfortunately, for all of us, the museum is closing for the night. But don't worry, we have more strange, disturbing, and hilarious exhibits waiting for you next time. As always, you should be excited. And appropriately suspicious.

SPEAKER_06 2:09:57

If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review the show wherever you listen. It helps other weirdos find us, and it helps keep this cursed museum open.

SPEAKER_02 2:10:07

You can also follow us on Facebook and TikTok for clips, chaos, behind-the-scenes nonsense, and whatever else falls out of the walls. We don't ask where it came from. We just check for mold, bones, and federal paperwork.

SPEAKER_07 2:10:20

Alright, let's get out of here before someone tries to feed the sourdough starter after midnight. Stay curious. Stay weird. And whatever you do. Do not assume the frozen guy died peacefully just because he's been quiet for about 5,000 years.

SPEAKER_02 2:10:35

Do not tell a woman she cannot remember ancient Egypt unless you are emotionally prepared to lose that argument for the rest of her life. Do not trust the stars just because they're pretty.

SPEAKER_06 2:10:46

And if the CIA offers you a drink, run for your life.

SPEAKER_07 2:10:50

Or buckle up for one wild ride. For science and national security, of course. I swear the government is just all red flags, red tape, and red apartment brothels.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:01

Where's the Lyelo? Alright, please find your exit. The doors will be closing in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, K Body.