April 15, 2025 • 10 mins
Wild ideas are on the agenda today as we stroll through another hallway of the Cabinet.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
Humans are incredible engineers. We've rarely met an engineering problem
we couldn't solve. But as I'm sure you've heard before,
sometimes humanity gets so caught up in whether it can
do something it forgets to ask whether it should. Such
was the case in the late nineteen sixties when the
US government became aware of a sunken Russian submarine and
stopped at nothing to retrieve it from the bottom of
(00:57):
the sea. The K one submarine sunk sometime around March
of nineteen sixty eight for reasons that will never be known.
All the CIA did know was that the Russians were
conducting a massive search and rescue operation in the Pacific Ocean,
fifteen hundred miles north of Hawaii. Once the Russians gave up,
an American sub moved in using special cameras. The Russian
(01:19):
vessels didn't have. The American sub revealed the K one
twenty nine was intact at the bottom of the ocean,
and if recovered, could provide the CIA with Russian missile
technology and codebooks filled with secrets. But of course this
would be no easy retrieval mission. The sub was sixteen
thousy five hundred feet down. It was one thing to
have an American sub take pictures, but having divers searching
(01:43):
the debris at that depth was out of the question,
and the wreck of the sub was so big it
would take some incredible machinery to recover it. The deeply paranoid,
ethically dubious CIA of this time was not willing to
let the opportunity slide, though, and so they embarked on
a multi million dollar project to design a vessel capable
of pulling K one twenty nine from the bottom of
(02:05):
the sea, codename Project Azorian. They would need a cover story,
and so the CIA reached out to none other than
eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to lend his name to the project.
The CIA would call their ship the Hughes Glomar Explorer,
and Hughes would tell the public that it was his
ship being constructed to use in deep sea mining operations.
(02:27):
The CIA then hired a team of engineers, swearing them
all to secrecy and even keeping some in the dark
as to the true nature of the vessel. The Explorer
was an engineering marvel. At six hundred and eighteen feet
in length. The ship had the largest moon pull ever constructed,
which is an opening at the bottom of the vessel
that allows submersibles to be deployed or in this case, retrieved.
(02:49):
Two doors would open at the bottom of the ship,
releasing Clementine, the name for a giant claw that was
to be lowered to the bottom of the sea to
retrieve K one twenty nine. Clementine was attached to massive
lengths of steel pipe that could be slowly doled out
to lower the claw farther and farther down. The whole
apparatus was capable of lifting over twenty one million pounds,
(03:11):
but halfway through the construction process, the engineers realized that
they had made a mistake. To put it in simple terms,
the ship wasn't big enough to support the claw and
was likely to break in half during the operation. The
CIA had to spend even more money and make the
ship even bigger. The problem with this the ship was
now too big to fit through the Panama Canal, and
(03:33):
so once it set sail from the east coast of America,
it would have to travel all the way around South
America to reach its target. The ship was finally completed,
costing the American taxpayer nearly three hundred million dollars. It
began its long journey to the Pacific in nineteen seventy three,
nearly getting delayed in Chile by a revolution there, but
ultimately making it to its target without issue. The process
(03:55):
of actually lowering the claw Clementine took weeks. Once it
finally reached the K one twenty nine at the bottom
of the ocean, the claw successfully grasped the sub in
its pinchers, lifting it from its longtime resting place, But
as the sub was slowly lifted back up over thousands
of feet, disaster struck. Parts of the claw failed, snapping
(04:16):
off and allowing a majority of the sub to fall
back to the ocean floor. The steel just wasn't strong enough.
The crewmen had to settle for lifting the remaining piece
of the sub up into their ship and heading home.
It's unknown what exactly the CIA learned if anything from
the recovered piece of the sub. They actually intended on
authorizing a second mission to return to the site and
(04:38):
try to recover the rest, but before that could happen,
American journalists finally caught wind of the project and leaked
details to the public. The general consensus seemed to be
that another recovery mission wasn't worth the cost, and so
most of K one twenty nine remains where it came
to rest at the bottom of the ocean, and any
secrets it might have held are lost to time. Curiously,
(05:01):
the Russians have never made attempts of their own to
recover the sub, a sign that nothing of value is
really on board, or just an admission of a pretty
big truth. Sixteen thousand feet of water is a pretty
safe way to hide a secret. It's a well documented
(05:31):
fact that pregnancy can bring on some pretty intense food cravings.
Women have reported desires for everything from pizza and ice
cream to stranger food combinations like pickles with peanut butter
or chocolate cake with ketchup. And then there was Mary,
an eighteenth century servant girl who allegedly developed a craving
for rabbit meat. A craving so powerful it altered her mind,
(05:52):
the unborn child she was carrying, and eventually all of England.
The story begins one afternoon in April of seventeen twenty six,
while Mary was weeding a field outside her village near London.
Mary was several months pregnant at this point, but as
a poor servant girl in the eighteenth century, taking tiba
from work wasn't an option, so she was down on
(06:13):
her hands and knees pulling weeds and trying not to
think about how uncomfortable she was when she looked up
and spotted a rabbit. Now, rabbit meat was expensive at
the time, and Mary had three hungry kids and a
husband at home, so she didn't think twice. She took
off after the rabbit and almost had it in her
grasp before it slipped under a fence and disappeared into
(06:34):
the woods. To say that Mary was disappointed would be
an understatement. That night, she lay awake imagining all of
the delicious meals the creature could have become. Braised rabbit,
poached rabbit, rabbit pie, rabbit stew. Her mouth just watered
from the thought of it all, and over the next
few weeks that craving only got worse. Mary begged her
(06:54):
husband to buy her rabbit meat, but with his business struggling,
they just simply couldn't afford it. A short while later,
Mary suffered a painful miscarriage. Afterwards, she expected the cravings
to fade, but they only got worse. She continued to
dream and obsess about eating rabbits until one day she
fell strangely ill. At first, no one knew what was
(07:14):
wrong with her. Then the cramp started, followed by full
on contractions. Mary, it seems, was going into labor, which
didn't make sense because she had already lost her baby.
Her family sent for the doctor, a man named John Howard,
but by the time he arrived, Mary was already done.
She presented him with a thing she had birthed. It
wasn't a human child, but several infant rabbits. Horrifically, most
(07:38):
of the animals came out crushed or in small pieces,
and were all stillborn. Howard examined the fragments but refused
to believe that Mary had produced them, at least until
she went into labor again. Over the next few days,
she delivered batch after batch of dismembered bunnies. He documented
the berths and stored the parts in jars for later study.
(07:59):
In between the frequent birthing sessions, though, Howard wrote letters
to England's top scientists, who flocked to the village to
see the phenomenon for themselves. Eventually, the King's personal physician
was sent to investigate. He was so impressed by what
he witnessed he published a statement declaring that the rabbit
births were a genuine medical phenomenon. Meanwhile, Mary had become
(08:20):
a celebrity. Her story made national headlines, sparking heated debates
between skeptics and believers. Those who were convinced pointed to
the theory of maternal impression, which hold that a mother's
thoughts can physically alter the body of the unborn child,
resulting in marks or birth defects. To many experts at
the time, there was little doubt about what had happened.
(08:42):
Mary's cravings for rabbit flesh had turned her child into
the object of her obsession. It's a disturbing thought and
fortunately impossible. Today, the theory of maternal impression has been
resoundingly discredited, and the same can be said for Mary's story.
You see her husband, as and some accomplices were eventually
caught smuggling rabbits into her room. They'd been cutting the
(09:05):
animals into pieces themselves, and Mary had been well putting
them where babies come from. They'd hoped all the attention
would make them wildly rich, but instead they became the
subject of ridicule and scorn, and while they managed to
avoid any criminal charges, they never profited a dime from
the incident. Mary eventually faded into obscurity, but the doctors
(09:27):
who vouched for her weren't so lucky. Several careers were ruined,
and trust in the medical community plummeted for years to come.
The nation, scientists were viewed as gullible fools, so eager
to prove their unfounded theories that they would convince themselves
of the impossible, and that criticism may have been warranted.
It shouldn't have taken a medical degree to know that
(09:48):
women don't give birth to rabbits, but that didn't stop
Mary Toft from giving birth to a hoax that most
people would describe as hair brained. I hope you've enjoyed
today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
(10:13):
by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
Humans are incredible engineers. We've rarely met an engineering problem
we couldn't solve. But as I'm sure you've heard before,
sometimes humanity gets so caught up in whether it can
do something it forgets to ask whether it should. Such
was the case in the late nineteen sixties when the
US government became aware of a sunken Russian submarine and
stopped at nothing to retrieve it from the bottom of
(00:57):
the sea. The K one submarine sunk sometime around March
of nineteen sixty eight for reasons that will never be known.
All the CIA did know was that the Russians were
conducting a massive search and rescue operation in the Pacific Ocean,
fifteen hundred miles north of Hawaii. Once the Russians gave up,
an American sub moved in using special cameras. The Russian
(01:19):
vessels didn't have. The American sub revealed the K one
twenty nine was intact at the bottom of the ocean,
and if recovered, could provide the CIA with Russian missile
technology and codebooks filled with secrets. But of course this
would be no easy retrieval mission. The sub was sixteen
thousy five hundred feet down. It was one thing to
have an American sub take pictures, but having divers searching
(01:43):
the debris at that depth was out of the question,
and the wreck of the sub was so big it
would take some incredible machinery to recover it. The deeply paranoid,
ethically dubious CIA of this time was not willing to
let the opportunity slide, though, and so they embarked on
a multi million dollar project to design a vessel capable
of pulling K one twenty nine from the bottom of
(02:05):
the sea, codename Project Azorian. They would need a cover story,
and so the CIA reached out to none other than
eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to lend his name to the project.
The CIA would call their ship the Hughes Glomar Explorer,
and Hughes would tell the public that it was his
ship being constructed to use in deep sea mining operations.
(02:27):
The CIA then hired a team of engineers, swearing them
all to secrecy and even keeping some in the dark
as to the true nature of the vessel. The Explorer
was an engineering marvel. At six hundred and eighteen feet
in length. The ship had the largest moon pull ever constructed,
which is an opening at the bottom of the vessel
that allows submersibles to be deployed or in this case, retrieved.
(02:49):
Two doors would open at the bottom of the ship,
releasing Clementine, the name for a giant claw that was
to be lowered to the bottom of the sea to
retrieve K one twenty nine. Clementine was attached to massive
lengths of steel pipe that could be slowly doled out
to lower the claw farther and farther down. The whole
apparatus was capable of lifting over twenty one million pounds,
(03:11):
but halfway through the construction process, the engineers realized that
they had made a mistake. To put it in simple terms,
the ship wasn't big enough to support the claw and
was likely to break in half during the operation. The
CIA had to spend even more money and make the
ship even bigger. The problem with this the ship was
now too big to fit through the Panama Canal, and
(03:33):
so once it set sail from the east coast of America,
it would have to travel all the way around South
America to reach its target. The ship was finally completed,
costing the American taxpayer nearly three hundred million dollars. It
began its long journey to the Pacific in nineteen seventy three,
nearly getting delayed in Chile by a revolution there, but
ultimately making it to its target without issue. The process
(03:55):
of actually lowering the claw Clementine took weeks. Once it
finally reached the K one twenty nine at the bottom
of the ocean, the claw successfully grasped the sub in
its pinchers, lifting it from its longtime resting place, But
as the sub was slowly lifted back up over thousands
of feet, disaster struck. Parts of the claw failed, snapping
(04:16):
off and allowing a majority of the sub to fall
back to the ocean floor. The steel just wasn't strong enough.
The crewmen had to settle for lifting the remaining piece
of the sub up into their ship and heading home.
It's unknown what exactly the CIA learned if anything from
the recovered piece of the sub. They actually intended on
authorizing a second mission to return to the site and
(04:38):
try to recover the rest, but before that could happen,
American journalists finally caught wind of the project and leaked
details to the public. The general consensus seemed to be
that another recovery mission wasn't worth the cost, and so
most of K one twenty nine remains where it came
to rest at the bottom of the ocean, and any
secrets it might have held are lost to time. Curiously,
(05:01):
the Russians have never made attempts of their own to
recover the sub, a sign that nothing of value is
really on board, or just an admission of a pretty
big truth. Sixteen thousand feet of water is a pretty
safe way to hide a secret. It's a well documented
(05:31):
fact that pregnancy can bring on some pretty intense food cravings.
Women have reported desires for everything from pizza and ice
cream to stranger food combinations like pickles with peanut butter
or chocolate cake with ketchup. And then there was Mary,
an eighteenth century servant girl who allegedly developed a craving
for rabbit meat. A craving so powerful it altered her mind,
(05:52):
the unborn child she was carrying, and eventually all of England.
The story begins one afternoon in April of seventeen twenty six,
while Mary was weeding a field outside her village near London.
Mary was several months pregnant at this point, but as
a poor servant girl in the eighteenth century, taking tiba
from work wasn't an option, so she was down on
(06:13):
her hands and knees pulling weeds and trying not to
think about how uncomfortable she was when she looked up
and spotted a rabbit. Now, rabbit meat was expensive at
the time, and Mary had three hungry kids and a
husband at home, so she didn't think twice. She took
off after the rabbit and almost had it in her
grasp before it slipped under a fence and disappeared into
(06:34):
the woods. To say that Mary was disappointed would be
an understatement. That night, she lay awake imagining all of
the delicious meals the creature could have become. Braised rabbit,
poached rabbit, rabbit pie, rabbit stew. Her mouth just watered
from the thought of it all, and over the next
few weeks that craving only got worse. Mary begged her
(06:54):
husband to buy her rabbit meat, but with his business struggling,
they just simply couldn't afford it. A short while later,
Mary suffered a painful miscarriage. Afterwards, she expected the cravings
to fade, but they only got worse. She continued to
dream and obsess about eating rabbits until one day she
fell strangely ill. At first, no one knew what was
(07:14):
wrong with her. Then the cramp started, followed by full
on contractions. Mary, it seems, was going into labor, which
didn't make sense because she had already lost her baby.
Her family sent for the doctor, a man named John Howard,
but by the time he arrived, Mary was already done.
She presented him with a thing she had birthed. It
wasn't a human child, but several infant rabbits. Horrifically, most
(07:38):
of the animals came out crushed or in small pieces,
and were all stillborn. Howard examined the fragments but refused
to believe that Mary had produced them, at least until
she went into labor again. Over the next few days,
she delivered batch after batch of dismembered bunnies. He documented
the berths and stored the parts in jars for later study.
(07:59):
In between the frequent birthing sessions, though, Howard wrote letters
to England's top scientists, who flocked to the village to
see the phenomenon for themselves. Eventually, the King's personal physician
was sent to investigate. He was so impressed by what
he witnessed he published a statement declaring that the rabbit
births were a genuine medical phenomenon. Meanwhile, Mary had become
(08:20):
a celebrity. Her story made national headlines, sparking heated debates
between skeptics and believers. Those who were convinced pointed to
the theory of maternal impression, which hold that a mother's
thoughts can physically alter the body of the unborn child,
resulting in marks or birth defects. To many experts at
the time, there was little doubt about what had happened.
(08:42):
Mary's cravings for rabbit flesh had turned her child into
the object of her obsession. It's a disturbing thought and
fortunately impossible. Today, the theory of maternal impression has been
resoundingly discredited, and the same can be said for Mary's story.
You see her husband, as and some accomplices were eventually
caught smuggling rabbits into her room. They'd been cutting the
(09:05):
animals into pieces themselves, and Mary had been well putting
them where babies come from. They'd hoped all the attention
would make them wildly rich, but instead they became the
subject of ridicule and scorn, and while they managed to
avoid any criminal charges, they never profited a dime from
the incident. Mary eventually faded into obscurity, but the doctors
(09:27):
who vouched for her weren't so lucky. Several careers were ruined,
and trust in the medical community plummeted for years to come.
The nation, scientists were viewed as gullible fools, so eager
to prove their unfounded theories that they would convince themselves
of the impossible, and that criticism may have been warranted.
It shouldn't have taken a medical degree to know that
(09:48):
women don't give birth to rabbits, but that didn't stop
Mary Toft from giving birth to a hoax that most
people would describe as hair brained. I hope you've enjoyed
today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
(10:13):
by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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