June 12, 2021 • 37 mins
Legends of sea monsters are as old as humanity, and some ancient cultures even credited them with creating the universe. Learn more about humanity's attachment to seeing monsters in the deep in this classic episode.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. It's December and podcast time. This is Chuck
and we're talking about how sea monsters work. This is
a great episode from back in the day. I remember. Boy,
this is hard to believe almost six years ago. Time
is really flying, everybody, I'm getting old. This is a
fun podcast episode though, how sea monsters work? Right here,
(00:21):
right now, Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. There's guest
producer Noel. There's Nicola Tesla. It's Stuff you should know.
(00:45):
There's Johnny and Scott. Are those yourmasin? Eric? No, that
was Sigmund the Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No?
Once again the brief cultural divide that expans between us.
Was that from the seventies or earlier? Yeah, it was
one of the Sid and Marty Croft shows, HR Puffins stuff. Yeah,
Sigmund the Sea Monster and Johnny and Scott wear his buddies. Yeah,
(01:06):
he was like a you know, he's a dude in
a suit. I reckon, but he would he looked like
a big blob of kelp. I'm sure it's total nightmare
fuel with eyes. That was cool. Sid marty Kroft man
their sensibilities scare me. Yeah. I went to the place
once in Atlanta. You know, they had down at the
Omni which is now Phillips Arena. They had Sid marty
(01:27):
Croft World or whatever, and I went down there once
and looking back now, it was like a drug fueled
indoor amusement park. You're like, why are there so many
twenty year old here? Yeah? I never really put without kids. Yeah.
Uh yeah, I'm sure. I say this every single time
that we talk about Sid marty Croft. But you've seen
the Mr Show State of Drug Achusets. Yeah, that's one
(01:51):
of the best. I mean, it's hard to pick out
for Mr. Show, but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's
top five easy. Yeah. And that seems sea monsters they're
gonna get you soon? Is that from a show? Okay?
From this show? So, Chuck, are you familiar much with
sea monsters when you were researching this where you like
(02:12):
everybody knows all this sort of half and half? Yeah,
I felt similar. There were a lot of stuff, a
lot of things in here that I hadn't heard of,
And the extra research we did too yielded some new insights.
But one of the things that stuck out to me,
and I guess it's probably the thesis of this whole thing,
is that we've been seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've
(02:36):
been talking about sea monsters for millennia, and we still
are like, have you heard of the Montalk Monster? Yes?
Did you see pictures of that thing? Yeah? I remember
when it came out. Okay, I just heard of it yesterday. Yeah. Oh,
I feel bad for not sharing that with you. It's awesome.
Yeah that in the two thousand eight um what was
the beach? It was around Montalk. Yeah, but there was
(02:59):
a specific beach, ditch planes beach. This girl and her
three friends found this washed up Montauk monster, And I
think what's funny is they still there's a trend here
in naming these things sensationally throughout history, and we still
do it. Because they could have called it like a
decomposed raccoon, but they called it the Montalk Monster. And
(03:23):
the jury is not out. It is a decomposed raccoon.
Yeah they I mean, they pretty much think so. But
it's not like you can't prove that. I mean, they
have like a line of biologists from mont talk to
Manhattan saying it's a raccoon. It's a raccoon without its fur,
which makes it look awesome. I've heard some other paleo
zoologists say like it maybe a sheep, though I think
(03:45):
it is too small, or other animals. But it's definitely
not a monster, a sea monster. No. But this is
two thousand and eight we're talking about, and some weird
thing washes up on a beach, and around the world
people hear of the Montauk mons except for me. Yeah,
did you see the East River Monster? I heard that
one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly a pig, but
(04:06):
it's still kind of cool looking. But still they named
it the East River Monster, and not a pig. That
was you know, I don't know how the pig got there, right,
the pig of East River or something like that. Yeah,
it's probably like, you know, somewhere in Chinatown a pig
was no good and that thing in the river that's
what they do. Yeah. Um. Also in two thousand and six, Um,
(04:27):
there was one in Russia. I didn't see where, but
on a beach. Uh, something washed up and they said
sea monster and it turned out to be a beluga whale.
Carcass greatly decomposed, but it looked weird. It didn't look
anything like a beluga whale. But the point is is
still in the twenty one century, whenever the sea spits
something up, we're like, this is a monster. Clearly, obviously
(04:52):
this is a monster. And then biology just come along
and say it's not a monster, but it's this weird thing.
Or sometimes they say this is new. Yeah, it's not
a monster, but this is new. And this is the
point finally that I'm trying to get to, is that
the oceans, the seas cover seventies percent of Earth's surface, right,
(05:15):
That's a lot of hiding places. And I think humans
have known and still no intuitively that there's a lot
of stuff down there that we don't know about. We
don't know what it is. But over time we've science
has replaced superstition enough so that while we still know
there's stuff out there that we don't know, we don't
think of his monsters, So our mindset has changed somewhat.
(05:35):
But ultimately, the sea is this place of unknown, unknown
organisms that we're still learning about. What's the of the
deepest seas are still uncompletely like unresearched and Undiscovered. Well,
James Cameron just took away a little percentage of that
with his deep sea dive. He took away a bit
(05:57):
of my soul with every movie he's made. Terminator to
you like Terminator too, I didn't see that one. Yeah,
it was pretty good. Huh, Yeah, I think that was
that was a good one. Have you not seen Titanic?
Did you know that the there was an alternate ending
for it, where like they kept the diamond or or
(06:18):
ument where something like the titan Tanic didn't sink, right,
it worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton
ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's
what it was, I think. Um. Speaking of recent sea
monsters though, which is not a sea monster, but did
you see the footage of the anglerfish? That that's another
(06:40):
great point. Yeah, some of these deep sea creatures look
like creepy monsters. I mean, the the anglerfish is one
of the scariest looking things I've ever seen in my life.
Creepy and uh it's real though, It's just you know,
science is It's not like, oh, what is this thing?
They know what the angler fish is, but they lived
so deep I think until recently it had never been
filmed in its habitat until like this year, until like
(07:04):
three weeks ago. Yeah. Um, apparently it wasn't until nineteen
seventy five that we ever photographed a whale underwater. Really yeah.
Interesting two thousand six, I think, um or nineteen seventy
six we discovered the mega mouth shark. Uh. There's like
the sea just coughs up new life to us. That Yeah,
(07:26):
where we slightly more superstitious we would have called monsters.
So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But
it goes back, like really really far, and looking at
the different kind of monsters we came up with really
kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it
goes back. I mean pretty much since people were writing
stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster,
(07:48):
like the ocean is always just enthralled folks. I think
the Mesopotamians had the goddess uh Tiamatt. It was a
sea monster. Well she was, yeah, and she was their
creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back
in Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from, That's
where the universe came from. Was Tiamat right. And then
(08:09):
eventually as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, Um, she became what's
known as the Chaos monster, and she was slain by
a male hero as and then the world was created
from from that. But originally she was just a benevolent
creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here.
Not all of the sea monsters. That depends on the
(08:30):
culture and the religion. Uh, some of them were benevolent.
I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. Uh.
The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So even in the Bible, right,
and this is a question of mind, dude, is do
do don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamatt are
one and the same. And in the Old Testament it's
(08:53):
the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesopotamian gods, saying, don't
even bring that here, like you created the world, I
slay you. Yeah, I am God. Well, I mean there's
a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament
and other religions, and some people take great offense to that.
Others don't what that that It's not no, this is
(09:17):
the word of God, period. There is no crossover. That's
just coincidence. Um, two leagues under the sea. I think
Jules vern this quote is pretty cool. Uh. In eighteen
seventy he wrote that great, great book, and he said,
either we do know all the right varieties of beings
which people our planet, or we do not. If we
(09:40):
do not know them all, if nature has still secrets
in the deeps, for us, nothing is more conformable to
reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans
and other kinds of even new species, to which the
character receiving that monologue said the yeah, but it just
it kind of plays to the point, um that if
(10:01):
there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains,
are deep in the jungles are deep under the sea
because people would have seen them. So it makes it
exotic in uh, sort of grabby as a means of
religion or literature, you know lore. Right, Plus the Jules
Verne was writing in well, this is eight seventy when
he wrote twenty Leagues under the Sea, So this is
(10:23):
a time when a lot of the old myths and
legends and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So like, yeah,
that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, But
it's not actually a kraken. It's an orfice. It's it's yeah,
or it's a it's a giant squid. And and here's
(10:45):
you know what it does and how it reproduces. And
because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah,
that's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're
a fan of mythology, they are. There are tons and
tons of cool stories about secrete hers and sea monsters,
all kinds of monsters. Uh, namely one actus named by
(11:05):
the Romans. King Cepheius I had a wife named Cassiopeia
and they ruled Ethiopia apparently, and she said, you know what,
my daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs.
And of course, um She's like yeah, I said it. Yeah.
And Setis was like, all right, well, I've got a
dog like head and I'm part fish, and I'm gonna
(11:26):
come up and kill your daughter beside kill kill Cetis. Yeah.
And Perseus, of course is always saving the day. So
he apparently was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he
just chopped off, flying around and uh it just happened
to pass by. Uh was it? Persephone who was about
to be eaten and Dromeda Andromeda and said, all right,
(11:49):
I'll take care of setis on my way home. My
swords bloody already Harry Hamlin, who was Yeah, I never
saw the remake of that. Did you see that? No?
Not didn't either. I just remember released the Crack and
yeah it was a buzzword. Yeah that's right. Le Neeson
has a knack for buzzy movie. Uh lines of dialogue
(12:12):
because that very particular set of skills was also a
big thing for months, four different movies. I was just
in the one Are you sure? Yeah, taken, Yeah, it
was pretty good movie, by the way, Sure sure. I
did not see the sequel though, Taken to Electric Googleoo. Yeah,
I thought it was weird when he started breaking. He's
(12:32):
doing the worm, but like not even very well. I
would have thought they'd get like a body double who
was like a professional dancer. Well he he did not
have a particular set of skills when it came to
being on the cardboard. So chucky. You're talking about Perseus
(13:06):
slaying Cetus. Yeah. Um. Homer's Odyssey was also another great
book of legends and mythology. Yeah, and there were some
sea monsters in it. Yeah, sila or skilla and uh
suis charybdis Uh. These two point out an important and
(13:31):
ongoing um feature of some of these stories, which are
that maybe they might symbolize something else real. Yes, either
a sea monster or in this case, maybe a dangerous
reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common thing, I know,
the cracking. Also, the most dangerous part about the cracking,
supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right, So, um,
(13:56):
this is kind of a this is one thesis on
why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory, yeah,
a you know, a tale told of of warning. Right,
So that quote or that description of scylla is described
as having twelve ft six heads atop long sinuous necks
(14:17):
and mouths bristling with rows of shark like teeth. Well, um,
that's probably a reef, right yeah, and then sure just
lay on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated
the waters. There, probably a whirlpoole. Right, So it's a
story saying maybe don't go there exact exactly. Did you
read that thing on nuclear semiotics, dude, Let me tell
(14:40):
you about this for a second. Okay, there is this um,
this whole exploration that's trying to figure out how to
express Say so, like, if you have nuclear waste and
you need to put it away for ten thousand years
and to keep people away from it for ten thousand years,
you have to figure out a way to warn people
(15:02):
away from it for ten thousand years, Well, how could
you possibly do that? Godzilla sign? That's one idea. There's
a lot of other ideas, and this whole thing is
called nuclear semiotics. And one of the ways, too, probably
the most agreed upon way, is to create this thing
called a nuclear priesthood, which is this group of learned
(15:23):
people who know the secret of this nuclear waste site
but purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away,
so to add some sort of like superstitious danger or
something to the site that will get passed down and
passed down, so eventually the people surrounding the area live
around it will know like, you don't want to go there,
(15:45):
You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear
radiation anymore, but this folklore will get passed along and along,
and they're saying like that may be the best way
to pass along information. And that's exactly what um. What
the idea one interpretation and of what sea monsters are is.
It's like a ghost story too. You know, you don't
want your kids to go in that decrepit house with
all the rusty nails. Tell him a scary old lady
(16:07):
lives in there, or to play near the water. You
don't want the you don't want a carp to take
you away. It's really just manipulating your dumb kid pretty much.
It's not doing dangerous things, right exactly. Yeah, And it works,
and it's a way and over time it's gotten passed down.
So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like
(16:28):
you said, the krack in um possibly being the giant squid,
or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right, Yeah,
There's always been stories of the kraking terrorizing ships off
of Iceland and Norway. And the kracking is noted because
it is huge, like one point five a mile to
a mile and a half wide, and uh, you know,
(16:50):
the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid.
If you see a if you're a sailor back then
and you don't know about biology and things yet, and
you see a uh an eyeball pop out the size
of a human head, it might make you think that's
a big cracking seamonster exactly. So then if that gets
embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide,
(17:11):
with legs as as large as a sailing mast, capable
of pulling down a ship, well, I mean it gets
the point across the people back on land, like, wow,
that was a really big monster that you guys saw.
How big do these squids get? They get to like
forty forty three ft forty forty ft long. There's something
even bigger called the colossal squid that's so much bigger.
(17:33):
It's its own um species, I believe um and it
lives just in the Antarctic. So it's probably not the
basis of the cracking. It's probably just a regular old
giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look look at
those things right exactly. They're scary looking, they are very scary,
and they're very very big. Plus Also, the idea of
the crack and may have first come about before sightings
(17:55):
of giant squid. They may have been taken from whalers
who found like crazy scars on whales who may have
found like bits of tentacles, like huge tentacles in the
whales stomachs, things like that, and to be like, what
did this come from? Yeah, the beak, because they did
find a giant squid once, but the sailors cut it
up and used it for bait, but they preserved the beak,
(18:18):
and that just fueled the legend even more and more.
So that's the that's Another interpretation of sea monsters is
that they came from misunderstood or embellished sightings of actual
sea organisms that were familiar with. Now, so it's the
same thing, we just changed the name. Sure, well, you're
a sailor, you're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because
(18:41):
you've been out at sea for too long, licking toads,
maybe looking toads. You may be uh, physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Um,
and you see a giant squid, you might write in
your journal that I've seen the cracking. It makes perfect sense,
you know, and it spreads and take shape over to time.
Scurvy going on. The krack is not the only one.
(19:04):
Um that's probably based on something real, the like sea serpents.
So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many headed sea serpent.
It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said, Oh no,
I'm sorry it was It was in the the Old Testament.
It may have been the Mesopotamian god, That's what I said. Yeah,
but Leviathan always just sort of a catch all word
(19:26):
now for any like large, unknown, huge creature. Yeah, and
apparently it's in Hebrew it just means whale. Yeah, um,
which again is probably a whale. Well yeah, it could
have also been a sea serpent. So sea serpents are
there are their own things. Um, the uh, the Norse
had a legend of the your moannder there's a warm
(19:48):
loot in there and everything, and that was apparently, um,
one of Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah, that was the baby
that was created when Loki, his brother, and a woman
named on Garboda I guess, had um the sex of
the gods and created this creature, a sea serpent that
(20:09):
wrapped around the globe supposedly. Yeah. Yeah, and um, that's
just one example of a sea serpent, huge sea bound snake.
And there's a lot of suggestions of what accounted for
sightings of sea serpents. Yeah, huge things of floating kelp
seen in the distance. Um, schools of porpoises, Yeah, along
(20:30):
the line together. There's one thing though, that could have
accounted for all sightings of sea serpents. It's called the
or fish. Did you see this thing? Yeah? It is
huge and Um, if an or fish was was swimming
in the water, it could be undulating up and down
and it looks like little spiny humps coming in and
out of the water, so that that makes sense. Sure
they get up too, I think, um, thirty or forty
(20:54):
ft Yeah, they can. I mean, there's there's plenty of
photos of you know, like tend duds on a beach
holding one up right, because it takes ten dudes. It's
not like they all want their hand on the little
fish exactly, you know. And these aren't photoshoped either. There's
all kinds of stupid fake pictures too. But or fishes
are huge and they look like big, slimy kind of
(21:15):
serpentine fish. And then chuck mirror people were another kind
of universal Um, I guess sea monster myth. That's a
That's another thing that stuck out to me, is there
where there are legends around the world from cultures that
are separated by space. And time that had similar stories
(21:41):
um without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that
a lot of these people cited similar things and came
up with similar myths and legends to explain what they
were seeing. Probably the mermaid is you know, if you've
seen Splash, you think, what what a neat thing to
find a mermaid. But mermaids were not um looked upon
(22:01):
kindly because they would yeah, and this article points out
they would at the their best, they would just forget
that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die.
And at the worst they would do so on purpose
and take the men down under the water and lights
out for you. Tom Hanks, Yeah, sorry Tom Hanks for
the rest of your career. Darryl. His career was pretty
(22:23):
lousy after Splashing it Well, uh yeah, what um she
Daryl Hannah though in the movie would she was not
a bad mermaid because she uh kissed him and gave
him breath? Right, Well, it's the Hollywood ification of the mermaid.
Ladward or like aerial from a Little Mermaid and that
(22:46):
dirty dirty DVD cover Oh yeah, I guess it was
VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it went to DVD,
probably those Disney guys board board and yeah, sure, yeah,
I get bored and blame so um. The whole Mr
creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which
(23:08):
apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north
that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Yeah, Orkney,
I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland it's
underwater now called dog Land that was around ten or
twelve thousand years ago. That's like this really fertile Neolithic
artifact area. It's pretty cool. Dogger Land, that's what it is,
(23:30):
not dog Land. So um. They had their own things
called carpis chuck. And what's interesting about the carpi is
that the kelpie I was thinking harpies, kepies exactly, but
this is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which are
actually horses that live in the sea that can sometimes
(23:54):
change into humans, so they're kind of mer creatures. But
every every lake in Scotland has a kelpie. This is
supposedly associated with it, including lock Ness And it wasn't
until the early eighteenth century that NeSSI became like a
c creature that we think of her today when some
dinosaur bones please use sare bones were found around Lockness
(24:16):
saying well, this is what the Lockness monster is. Right
before that, it was just a kelpie. We could probably
do a full show on Nessy. Just think the fun
of it, um was has been pretty much disproven um
unequivocally of course, because there is no Lockness monster. But
I just think things like that are neat And when
we did one big Foot, it's more about just the
legend in the war around it Unlockness. Did you ever
(24:40):
see the documentary that what's his name did Verna Hertzog? No,
I didn't know he did one of those. It was
I think it was he did a mockumentary, but not
like a Christopher Guest mocumentary, just bow documentary waiting for Nessy,
Waiting for Nessy um where it just looked like he
wasn't remember any of where he was searching for the
(25:01):
Latinus monster and saw, you know, caught it on camera.
But it made it, he made it seem real. I
think it was Runner Herzog. It was good, of course,
you know it sounds a little dishonest for Werner Herzog. Well,
I don't. I don't think he was trying to pass
it off. I think you kind of see this. Yeah,
I'll look that up at may not be him, but
someone did that, and it was kind of cool because
if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my god,
(25:23):
there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like something
on on cable? Nol says it was her talking. Okay, yeah,
I mean it probably played on cable at some point.
Nold talks a lot more than Jerry does. Um, so
chuck there. That brings us to our third interpretation for
where sea monster legends came from people finding dinosaur bones. Yes,
(25:46):
and we'll talk more about that right after this break,
all right, Dinah, Josh, Yeah, let's hear it. Oh well,
(26:08):
so I said that NeSSI became this kind of sea
monster around the time of please Asaur. I believe that's
what it was. Um skeleton was found around lock nests.
They said, well, this is this must be one of
Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that that
a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent.
(26:29):
You mentioned um the Chinese having a legend of some
sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three
ft long. Um oh no, I'm sorry about a foot long.
The Guizoo dragons, and they were basically marine reptiles called
keasaurs shui. They they but they were lucky. Like if
(26:52):
you found one of these skeletons, you kept it because
it was a little sea monster skeleton that you got
your hands on, and it would bring you a good fortune.
That's right. And I know what earlier we were talking
about just the early explorers, and uh, you can't fault
some of these dudes because they were, you know, as
this one article you said, they were literally an unchartered
(27:14):
waters and it was before the rise of science, and
all they had heard were stories in folklore and anytime
you saw if you ever see a map, c map,
oceanic map from there, it's gonna have some sea monsters
drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it was
a time when before there were you know, before observational
(27:37):
data came along. We pretty much was sort of like
the Internet today. You pretty much just rewrote earlier history
books over and over until they finally got a little
smarter and say, you know what, maybe we should really
observe something and then write about it. For real and
this didn't really lead to any anything more substantiated, you know,
well for a while, sure, but um it was they
(28:01):
called a transitional era in this article, which I think
kind of sums it up. Yeah, these were early scientists,
early naturalists, who were trying to get a handle on
what the heck they were looking at. Um, but they
still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature
like a whale. Right, and then it's similarly a natural
(28:22):
um biological illustration of a mythical creature like a ce bishop.
So the ce bishop was this thing that was supposedly
caught and taken to the King of Poland because it
was this fish like creature that had like a meter
and robes like a bishop, and apparently you could also
(28:44):
talk and refuse to eat, and when it would make
the sign of the cross and everything. And later on
somebody said it probably didn't talk and make the sign
of the cross. But if you look at a squid
a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's
got the hat and in some of its flappy skin
that's kind of like the robes, you know, So maybe
(29:05):
that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously, to this.
We're talking like the sixteenth century. There was a pretty
much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land
had an an analogy in the sea. Catfish, dogfish, seahorse,
all that stuff, and uh, in some cases they were right,
(29:26):
there are catfish, there are dog fish because we call
them that sea monkeys right, the sea horse to um.
But all that kind of It was a rough time
for science. It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah,
because you know, like you said, things were mistaken, like
a whale and a walrus might be a monster when
(29:47):
it's just a whale or a walrus. And there were
all kinds of tails that you know, when it's repeated
over and over, you get the sense it is just
one of those like urban legends back then, right, I
guess it wasn't urban back then, though, what would it be?
Just a seafaring legend um of whales being mistaken for islands,
(30:08):
and like a ship will land on the whale and
build a you know, and route down basically get off
the ship and build a fire, and then the whale,
I guess who was just chilling out at the surface says, hey,
there's a fire on my back, and I'm gonna take
your boat underwater and swallow you hole. I'm a whale
to be aware of the you know, whatever they called that,
whatever culture called that particular whale exactly now we just
(30:31):
call it a whale. And again it was probably end
on their backs. It was an embellished story, but there
they it was based on the sighting of a whale
before they called it whales. And back when everybody lied
about everything, they saw another culture that found dinosaur bones
and created their own legends. Where the Lakota and Dakota
su Yeah, sure, they came up with something called um
(30:55):
the um um tahila la. Yeah. I think that's about right,
from from dinosaur bones found around the Missouri River. Yeah,
and that was a water creature. Well, they were very
evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another,
and so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with
them thunder beings. Yeah, but I looked it up. It's
(31:16):
basically thunderbirds, gotcha. What they knew is that it wasn't
a tonka, that's a buffalo, right. Yeah, they were pretty sure.
You know, um, that's apparently where the legends of the
psych the Cyclops came from. From Native Americans from no
from um finding like old like elephant bones, elephant skulls,
(31:39):
the huge cavity in the middle, like well, clearly there
was a race of giants that just had one eye. No,
they were elephants. You know. We often joked like they
were done back then. Of course they weren't. They were
just trying to figure it out. It's like to make
stuff up. They didn't have TV or anything back then,
and a lot of this stuff was was um legend
(32:02):
to keep you know, voters from going in a maybe
a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or to keep
the children away from the water. And like the ghost
story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh, nuclear semiotic?
Nuclear semiotics, man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually,
Roman Mars has a nine invisible about that one. Yeah,
(32:24):
nice nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat ineffective. I imagine we'll find
out in ten thousand years. I guess. So, um, what
else do you got anything else? I don't have anything
else on sea serpents. Um, just take a look at
the angler fish video and tell me if you came
upon that. And see, we also didn't point out that
this was before deep not even deep sea exploration, like
(32:46):
This is before underwater exploration. People are just riding around
on the top of the ocean. So we're fascinated with
it and we've gone to the depths that we can attain.
At this point, it's just pretty deep. I wish I
would look that up. I don't know how deep we
can go. How deep James Cameron can go. Oh he
goes deep, buddy. But um, think about back then, man,
when they couldn't Like, you're not scary, that would be right,
(33:10):
when these strange creatures are Like you see a giant squid, yeah,
and you're just partially seeing it if you can't see
it underwater. Do you have no idea before the Diving
Bell even like there was? Or the Butterfly? That's right, Yeah,
you like that one. I finally saw that movie, by
the way, hardcore man. It's good though, Yeah, really good. Uh.
(33:32):
If you want to know more about the diving Bell
and the butterfly or about sea monsters, you can type
those words into the search bar how stuff works dot com.
And since I said search parts time for listener mail,
i'n call this uh Opah is German for grandpa. I
thought it was Greek for like good times. Maybe I
(33:54):
don't know really, yeah, bah, well, I'm sure those are
just three letters together, might be something Greek. But like
my brother in law, Carston, his German and his grandfather
was I'm sorry his father. His grandfather was Opa, but
his dad was native Germans, so my nieces called him Opah,
(34:15):
as does this Lady's I'm writing in specifically about your
whaling podcast. Oh how appropriate with a family story that
Lucy relates. My great grandfather Opa left Germany when he
was fourteen pre war to work as a sailor, came
to the US and was a member of the U.
S Coast Guard. One day, he was part of a
team that was clearing a harbor of some old sunken chips.
(34:35):
To do so, they use the sophisticated method of throwing
dynamite into the water to blast the wood of art
and then gathered the debris. His team wrote out in
a fourteen foot rowboat to gather up the wood shards
and noticed the blast had killed the fish they floated
to the tops of the crew brought them into the
boat as well. Waste not, wantnot. As they were going
about their business, they came across a sixteen foot hammerhead
(34:57):
shark that had floated up. Clearly it would be a
great source of food, so despite their small boat, they
pulled it aboard. I think you see where this is headed. Well,
As it turns out, the blast is strong enough to
kill small fish, but only stunned larger animals. The sharks
slowly started to gain consciousness in the row boat, and
being confused and out of water, was not pleased. It
got to the point that it was thrashing about in
(35:19):
the boat, threatened to destroy the boat and likely injured
or kill the crew members. So in the midst of
this chaos are able to flag down a sailor on
a larger vessel proceeded to shoot the thing to death
while that was still in the boat. Um, all of
the crew members were safe and they still got to
feast on hammerhead shark. But now I had a much
more exciting story. Uh, and you mentioned in the whaling
(35:39):
podcast Old timmy whaling crew members were deployed in small
boats to get the whale and were often injured and killed.
I thought you might find this interesting, and I was
hoping that you could give a shout out to my
sister Rachel. You turned me onto your podcast in two
thousand nine. She lives in France. We don't get to
see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh and
Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is uh
(36:00):
Wendy Bear. She is a registered dietitian. And Wendy and
Rachel Uh thanks for listening and for spreading the word
and for being uh sisters. Way to go being sisters. Yeah,
thanks for writing in, Wendy. Yeah, yeah, thanks Wendy, Um
and Chuck. This is our last episode of two thousand
and fourteen. Oh man, the longest year. So we want
(36:23):
to say happy new year everybody, and I want to
say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife, you me.
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the rights free version. No,
that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh it's a good one,
so it's not rights free. Yeah, so happy birthday you me.
Happy New Year to all of you great people out
(36:43):
there in podcast land. We'll see you next year. Stuff
You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody. It's December and podcast time. This is Chuck
and we're talking about how sea monsters work. This is
a great episode from back in the day. I remember. Boy,
this is hard to believe almost six years ago. Time
is really flying, everybody, I'm getting old. This is a
fun podcast episode though, how sea monsters work? Right here,
(00:21):
right now, Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. There's guest
producer Noel. There's Nicola Tesla. It's Stuff you should know.
(00:45):
There's Johnny and Scott. Are those yourmasin? Eric? No, that
was Sigmund the Sea Monster. Did you watch that show? No?
Once again the brief cultural divide that expans between us.
Was that from the seventies or earlier? Yeah, it was
one of the Sid and Marty Croft shows, HR Puffins stuff. Yeah,
Sigmund the Sea Monster and Johnny and Scott wear his buddies. Yeah,
(01:06):
he was like a you know, he's a dude in
a suit. I reckon, but he would he looked like
a big blob of kelp. I'm sure it's total nightmare
fuel with eyes. That was cool. Sid marty Kroft man
their sensibilities scare me. Yeah. I went to the place
once in Atlanta. You know, they had down at the
Omni which is now Phillips Arena. They had Sid marty
(01:27):
Croft World or whatever, and I went down there once
and looking back now, it was like a drug fueled
indoor amusement park. You're like, why are there so many
twenty year old here? Yeah? I never really put without kids. Yeah.
Uh yeah, I'm sure. I say this every single time
that we talk about Sid marty Croft. But you've seen
the Mr Show State of Drug Achusets. Yeah, that's one
(01:51):
of the best. I mean, it's hard to pick out
for Mr. Show, but that's definitely up there. Yeah, that's
top five easy. Yeah. And that seems sea monsters they're
gonna get you soon? Is that from a show? Okay?
From this show? So, Chuck, are you familiar much with
sea monsters when you were researching this where you like
(02:12):
everybody knows all this sort of half and half? Yeah,
I felt similar. There were a lot of stuff, a
lot of things in here that I hadn't heard of,
And the extra research we did too yielded some new insights.
But one of the things that stuck out to me,
and I guess it's probably the thesis of this whole thing,
is that we've been seeing sea monsters for millennia. We've
(02:36):
been talking about sea monsters for millennia, and we still
are like, have you heard of the Montalk Monster? Yes?
Did you see pictures of that thing? Yeah? I remember
when it came out. Okay, I just heard of it yesterday. Yeah. Oh,
I feel bad for not sharing that with you. It's awesome.
Yeah that in the two thousand eight um what was
the beach? It was around Montalk. Yeah, but there was
(02:59):
a specific beach, ditch planes beach. This girl and her
three friends found this washed up Montauk monster, And I
think what's funny is they still there's a trend here
in naming these things sensationally throughout history, and we still
do it. Because they could have called it like a
decomposed raccoon, but they called it the Montalk Monster. And
(03:23):
the jury is not out. It is a decomposed raccoon.
Yeah they I mean, they pretty much think so. But
it's not like you can't prove that. I mean, they
have like a line of biologists from mont talk to
Manhattan saying it's a raccoon. It's a raccoon without its fur,
which makes it look awesome. I've heard some other paleo
zoologists say like it maybe a sheep, though I think
(03:45):
it is too small, or other animals. But it's definitely
not a monster, a sea monster. No. But this is
two thousand and eight we're talking about, and some weird
thing washes up on a beach, and around the world
people hear of the Montauk mons except for me. Yeah,
did you see the East River Monster? I heard that
one was a pig. Yeah, it's clearly a pig, but
(04:06):
it's still kind of cool looking. But still they named
it the East River Monster, and not a pig. That
was you know, I don't know how the pig got there, right,
the pig of East River or something like that. Yeah,
it's probably like, you know, somewhere in Chinatown a pig
was no good and that thing in the river that's
what they do. Yeah. Um. Also in two thousand and six, Um,
(04:27):
there was one in Russia. I didn't see where, but
on a beach. Uh, something washed up and they said
sea monster and it turned out to be a beluga whale.
Carcass greatly decomposed, but it looked weird. It didn't look
anything like a beluga whale. But the point is is
still in the twenty one century, whenever the sea spits
something up, we're like, this is a monster. Clearly, obviously
(04:52):
this is a monster. And then biology just come along
and say it's not a monster, but it's this weird thing.
Or sometimes they say this is new. Yeah, it's not
a monster, but this is new. And this is the
point finally that I'm trying to get to, is that
the oceans, the seas cover seventies percent of Earth's surface, right,
(05:15):
That's a lot of hiding places. And I think humans
have known and still no intuitively that there's a lot
of stuff down there that we don't know about. We
don't know what it is. But over time we've science
has replaced superstition enough so that while we still know
there's stuff out there that we don't know, we don't
think of his monsters, So our mindset has changed somewhat.
(05:35):
But ultimately, the sea is this place of unknown, unknown
organisms that we're still learning about. What's the of the
deepest seas are still uncompletely like unresearched and Undiscovered. Well,
James Cameron just took away a little percentage of that
with his deep sea dive. He took away a bit
(05:57):
of my soul with every movie he's made. Terminator to
you like Terminator too, I didn't see that one. Yeah,
it was pretty good. Huh, Yeah, I think that was
that was a good one. Have you not seen Titanic?
Did you know that the there was an alternate ending
for it, where like they kept the diamond or or
(06:18):
ument where something like the titan Tanic didn't sink, right,
it worked out well in the end. No, Bill Paxton
ended up getting in on throwing the diamond away. That's
what it was, I think. Um. Speaking of recent sea
monsters though, which is not a sea monster, but did
you see the footage of the anglerfish? That that's another
(06:40):
great point. Yeah, some of these deep sea creatures look
like creepy monsters. I mean, the the anglerfish is one
of the scariest looking things I've ever seen in my life.
Creepy and uh it's real though, It's just you know,
science is It's not like, oh, what is this thing?
They know what the angler fish is, but they lived
so deep I think until recently it had never been
filmed in its habitat until like this year, until like
(07:04):
three weeks ago. Yeah. Um, apparently it wasn't until nineteen
seventy five that we ever photographed a whale underwater. Really yeah.
Interesting two thousand six, I think, um or nineteen seventy
six we discovered the mega mouth shark. Uh. There's like
the sea just coughs up new life to us. That Yeah,
(07:26):
where we slightly more superstitious we would have called monsters.
So that's pretty much the explanation of sea monsters. But
it goes back, like really really far, and looking at
the different kind of monsters we came up with really
kind of reveals a lot about our mentality. Yeah, it
goes back. I mean pretty much since people were writing
stuff down, somebody was writing about some kind of sea monster,
(07:48):
like the ocean is always just enthralled folks. I think
the Mesopotamians had the goddess uh Tiamatt. It was a
sea monster. Well she was, yeah, and she was their
creator goddess originally. So if you go far enough back
in Mesopotamian lore, that's where the world came from, That's
where the universe came from. Was Tiamat right. And then
(08:09):
eventually as Mesopotamia grew and evolved, Um, she became what's
known as the Chaos monster, and she was slain by
a male hero as and then the world was created
from from that. But originally she was just a benevolent
creator goddess. Well, and we'll see as we go through here.
Not all of the sea monsters. That depends on the
(08:30):
culture and the religion. Uh, some of them were benevolent.
I know the Chinese revere their dragons and sea monsters. Uh.
The Old Testament had its Leviathan. So even in the Bible, right,
and this is a question of mind, dude, is do
do don't you think that the Leviathan and Tiamatt are
one and the same. And in the Old Testament it's
(08:53):
the Hebrew God slaying the old Mesopotamian gods, saying, don't
even bring that here, like you created the world, I
slay you. Yeah, I am God. Well, I mean there's
a lot of crossover with stuff from the Old Testament
and other religions, and some people take great offense to that.
Others don't what that that It's not no, this is
(09:17):
the word of God, period. There is no crossover. That's
just coincidence. Um, two leagues under the sea. I think
Jules vern this quote is pretty cool. Uh. In eighteen
seventy he wrote that great, great book, and he said,
either we do know all the right varieties of beings
which people our planet, or we do not. If we
(09:40):
do not know them all, if nature has still secrets
in the deeps, for us, nothing is more conformable to
reason than to admit the existence of fishes or cetaceans
and other kinds of even new species, to which the
character receiving that monologue said the yeah, but it just
it kind of plays to the point, um that if
(10:01):
there are undiscovered things, they're always high in the mountains,
are deep in the jungles are deep under the sea
because people would have seen them. So it makes it
exotic in uh, sort of grabby as a means of
religion or literature, you know lore. Right, Plus the Jules
Verne was writing in well, this is eight seventy when
he wrote twenty Leagues under the Sea, So this is
(10:23):
a time when a lot of the old myths and
legends and monsters were being subsumed by biology. So like, yeah,
that monster that you saw, that thing does exist, But
it's not actually a kraken. It's an orfice. It's it's yeah,
or it's a it's a giant squid. And and here's
(10:45):
you know what it does and how it reproduces. And
because it's being studied, it's not just being feared. Yeah,
that's a good point. The Greeks and Romans, if you're
a fan of mythology, they are. There are tons and
tons of cool stories about secrete hers and sea monsters,
all kinds of monsters. Uh, namely one actus named by
(11:05):
the Romans. King Cepheius I had a wife named Cassiopeia
and they ruled Ethiopia apparently, and she said, you know what,
my daughter Andromeda is more beautiful than all the sea nymphs.
And of course, um She's like yeah, I said it. Yeah.
And Setis was like, all right, well, I've got a
dog like head and I'm part fish, and I'm gonna
(11:26):
come up and kill your daughter beside kill kill Cetis. Yeah.
And Perseus, of course is always saving the day. So
he apparently was flying back carrying Medusa's head that he
just chopped off, flying around and uh it just happened
to pass by. Uh was it? Persephone who was about
to be eaten and Dromeda Andromeda and said, all right,
(11:49):
I'll take care of setis on my way home. My
swords bloody already Harry Hamlin, who was Yeah, I never
saw the remake of that. Did you see that? No?
Not didn't either. I just remember released the Crack and
yeah it was a buzzword. Yeah that's right. Le Neeson
has a knack for buzzy movie. Uh lines of dialogue
(12:12):
because that very particular set of skills was also a
big thing for months, four different movies. I was just
in the one Are you sure? Yeah, taken, Yeah, it
was pretty good movie, by the way, Sure sure. I
did not see the sequel though, Taken to Electric Googleoo. Yeah,
I thought it was weird when he started breaking. He's
(12:32):
doing the worm, but like not even very well. I
would have thought they'd get like a body double who
was like a professional dancer. Well he he did not
have a particular set of skills when it came to
being on the cardboard. So chucky. You're talking about Perseus
(13:06):
slaying Cetus. Yeah. Um. Homer's Odyssey was also another great
book of legends and mythology. Yeah, and there were some
sea monsters in it. Yeah, sila or skilla and uh
suis charybdis Uh. These two point out an important and
(13:31):
ongoing um feature of some of these stories, which are
that maybe they might symbolize something else real. Yes, either
a sea monster or in this case, maybe a dangerous
reef or whirlpools. That's a pretty common thing, I know,
the cracking. Also, the most dangerous part about the cracking,
supposedly is the whirlpool that it creates. Right, So, um,
(13:56):
this is kind of a this is one thesis on
why sea monsters developed. It was as an allegory, yeah,
a you know, a tale told of of warning. Right,
So that quote or that description of scylla is described
as having twelve ft six heads atop long sinuous necks
(14:17):
and mouths bristling with rows of shark like teeth. Well, um,
that's probably a reef, right yeah, and then sure just
lay on the opposite shore and periodically swallowed and regurgitated
the waters. There, probably a whirlpoole. Right, So it's a
story saying maybe don't go there exact exactly. Did you
read that thing on nuclear semiotics, dude, Let me tell
(14:40):
you about this for a second. Okay, there is this um,
this whole exploration that's trying to figure out how to
express Say so, like, if you have nuclear waste and
you need to put it away for ten thousand years
and to keep people away from it for ten thousand years,
you have to figure out a way to warn people
(15:02):
away from it for ten thousand years, Well, how could
you possibly do that? Godzilla sign? That's one idea. There's
a lot of other ideas, and this whole thing is
called nuclear semiotics. And one of the ways, too, probably
the most agreed upon way, is to create this thing
called a nuclear priesthood, which is this group of learned
(15:23):
people who know the secret of this nuclear waste site
but purposefully come up with a folklore to warn people away,
so to add some sort of like superstitious danger or
something to the site that will get passed down and
passed down, so eventually the people surrounding the area live
around it will know like, you don't want to go there,
(15:45):
You'll get killed. It has nothing to do with nuclear
radiation anymore, but this folklore will get passed along and along,
and they're saying like that may be the best way
to pass along information. And that's exactly what um. What
the idea one interpretation and of what sea monsters are is.
It's like a ghost story too. You know, you don't
want your kids to go in that decrepit house with
all the rusty nails. Tell him a scary old lady
(16:07):
lives in there, or to play near the water. You
don't want the you don't want a carp to take
you away. It's really just manipulating your dumb kid pretty much.
It's not doing dangerous things, right exactly. Yeah, And it works,
and it's a way and over time it's gotten passed down.
So that's one interpretation of sea monsters. There's also, like
(16:28):
you said, the krack in um possibly being the giant squid,
or I shouldn't even say possibly, it's probably a giant squid, right, Yeah,
There's always been stories of the kraking terrorizing ships off
of Iceland and Norway. And the kracking is noted because
it is huge, like one point five a mile to
a mile and a half wide, and uh, you know,
(16:50):
the cracking is, like you said, most likely a giant squid.
If you see a if you're a sailor back then
and you don't know about biology and things yet, and
you see a uh an eyeball pop out the size
of a human head, it might make you think that's
a big cracking seamonster exactly. So then if that gets
embellished into something that's a mile and a half wide,
(17:11):
with legs as as large as a sailing mast, capable
of pulling down a ship, well, I mean it gets
the point across the people back on land, like, wow,
that was a really big monster that you guys saw.
How big do these squids get? They get to like
forty forty three ft forty forty ft long. There's something
even bigger called the colossal squid that's so much bigger.
(17:33):
It's its own um species, I believe um and it
lives just in the Antarctic. So it's probably not the
basis of the cracking. It's probably just a regular old
giant squid. But you've seen giant squids. Look look at
those things right exactly. They're scary looking, they are very scary,
and they're very very big. Plus Also, the idea of
the crack and may have first come about before sightings
(17:55):
of giant squid. They may have been taken from whalers
who found like crazy scars on whales who may have
found like bits of tentacles, like huge tentacles in the
whales stomachs, things like that, and to be like, what
did this come from? Yeah, the beak, because they did
find a giant squid once, but the sailors cut it
up and used it for bait, but they preserved the beak,
(18:18):
and that just fueled the legend even more and more.
So that's the that's Another interpretation of sea monsters is
that they came from misunderstood or embellished sightings of actual
sea organisms that were familiar with. Now, so it's the
same thing, we just changed the name. Sure, well, you're
a sailor, you're drunk. Maybe you may be hallucinating because
(18:41):
you've been out at sea for too long, licking toads,
maybe looking toads. You may be uh, physically ill, sleep deprived, fatigued. Um,
and you see a giant squid, you might write in
your journal that I've seen the cracking. It makes perfect sense,
you know, and it spreads and take shape over to time.
Scurvy going on. The krack is not the only one.
(19:04):
Um that's probably based on something real, the like sea serpents.
So the Leviathan was a sea serpent, many headed sea serpent.
It was a Mesopotamian god, like we said, Oh no,
I'm sorry it was It was in the the Old Testament.
It may have been the Mesopotamian god, That's what I said. Yeah,
but Leviathan always just sort of a catch all word
(19:26):
now for any like large, unknown, huge creature. Yeah, and
apparently it's in Hebrew it just means whale. Yeah, um,
which again is probably a whale. Well yeah, it could
have also been a sea serpent. So sea serpents are
there are their own things. Um, the uh, the Norse
had a legend of the your moannder there's a warm
(19:48):
loot in there and everything, and that was apparently, um,
one of Thor's bigger headaches. Yeah, that was the baby
that was created when Loki, his brother, and a woman
named on Garboda I guess, had um the sex of
the gods and created this creature, a sea serpent that
(20:09):
wrapped around the globe supposedly. Yeah. Yeah, and um, that's
just one example of a sea serpent, huge sea bound snake.
And there's a lot of suggestions of what accounted for
sightings of sea serpents. Yeah, huge things of floating kelp
seen in the distance. Um, schools of porpoises, Yeah, along
(20:30):
the line together. There's one thing though, that could have
accounted for all sightings of sea serpents. It's called the
or fish. Did you see this thing? Yeah? It is
huge and Um, if an or fish was was swimming
in the water, it could be undulating up and down
and it looks like little spiny humps coming in and
out of the water, so that that makes sense. Sure
they get up too, I think, um, thirty or forty
(20:54):
ft Yeah, they can. I mean, there's there's plenty of
photos of you know, like tend duds on a beach
holding one up right, because it takes ten dudes. It's
not like they all want their hand on the little
fish exactly, you know. And these aren't photoshoped either. There's
all kinds of stupid fake pictures too. But or fishes
are huge and they look like big, slimy kind of
(21:15):
serpentine fish. And then chuck mirror people were another kind
of universal Um, I guess sea monster myth. That's a
That's another thing that stuck out to me, is there
where there are legends around the world from cultures that
are separated by space. And time that had similar stories
(21:41):
um without possibly interacting. So it makes you think that
a lot of these people cited similar things and came
up with similar myths and legends to explain what they
were seeing. Probably the mermaid is you know, if you've
seen Splash, you think, what what a neat thing to
find a mermaid. But mermaids were not um looked upon
(22:01):
kindly because they would yeah, and this article points out
they would at the their best, they would just forget
that you can't breathe and drag you underwater till you die.
And at the worst they would do so on purpose
and take the men down under the water and lights
out for you. Tom Hanks, Yeah, sorry Tom Hanks for
the rest of your career. Darryl. His career was pretty
(22:23):
lousy after Splashing it Well, uh yeah, what um she
Daryl Hannah though in the movie would she was not
a bad mermaid because she uh kissed him and gave
him breath? Right, Well, it's the Hollywood ification of the mermaid.
Ladward or like aerial from a Little Mermaid and that
(22:46):
dirty dirty DVD cover Oh yeah, I guess it was
VHS cover. They probably corrected that before it went to DVD,
probably those Disney guys board board and yeah, sure, yeah,
I get bored and blame so um. The whole Mr
creature had root in the Nordic areas and Scotland, which
(23:08):
apparently there's parts of Scotland that are so far north
that they consider themselves Nordic rather than Scottish. Yeah, Orkney,
I think. And there's a whole part of Scotland it's
underwater now called dog Land that was around ten or
twelve thousand years ago. That's like this really fertile Neolithic
artifact area. It's pretty cool. Dogger Land, that's what it is,
(23:30):
not dog Land. So um. They had their own things
called carpis chuck. And what's interesting about the carpi is
that the kelpie I was thinking harpies, kepies exactly, but
this is not carp or harpies. They're kelpies, which are
actually horses that live in the sea that can sometimes
(23:54):
change into humans, so they're kind of mer creatures. But
every every lake in Scotland has a kelpie. This is
supposedly associated with it, including lock Ness And it wasn't
until the early eighteenth century that NeSSI became like a
c creature that we think of her today when some
dinosaur bones please use sare bones were found around Lockness
(24:16):
saying well, this is what the Lockness monster is. Right
before that, it was just a kelpie. We could probably
do a full show on Nessy. Just think the fun
of it, um was has been pretty much disproven um
unequivocally of course, because there is no Lockness monster. But
I just think things like that are neat And when
we did one big Foot, it's more about just the
legend in the war around it Unlockness. Did you ever
(24:40):
see the documentary that what's his name did Verna Hertzog? No,
I didn't know he did one of those. It was
I think it was he did a mockumentary, but not
like a Christopher Guest mocumentary, just bow documentary waiting for Nessy,
Waiting for Nessy um where it just looked like he
wasn't remember any of where he was searching for the
(25:01):
Latinus monster and saw, you know, caught it on camera.
But it made it, he made it seem real. I
think it was Runner Herzog. It was good, of course,
you know it sounds a little dishonest for Werner Herzog. Well,
I don't. I don't think he was trying to pass
it off. I think you kind of see this. Yeah,
I'll look that up at may not be him, but
someone did that, and it was kind of cool because
if you buy into it, then you're like, oh my god,
(25:23):
there it is. Are you sure this wasn't like something
on on cable? Nol says it was her talking. Okay, yeah,
I mean it probably played on cable at some point.
Nold talks a lot more than Jerry does. Um, so
chuck there. That brings us to our third interpretation for
where sea monster legends came from people finding dinosaur bones. Yes,
(25:46):
and we'll talk more about that right after this break,
all right, Dinah, Josh, Yeah, let's hear it. Oh well,
(26:08):
so I said that NeSSI became this kind of sea
monster around the time of please Asaur. I believe that's
what it was. Um skeleton was found around lock nests.
They said, well, this is this must be one of
Nessie's relatives. Apparently that wasn't the first time that that
a dinosaur led to the idea of a sea serpent.
(26:29):
You mentioned um the Chinese having a legend of some
sort of dragon, little tiny dragons that measured about three
ft long. Um oh no, I'm sorry about a foot long.
The Guizoo dragons, and they were basically marine reptiles called
keasaurs shui. They they but they were lucky. Like if
(26:52):
you found one of these skeletons, you kept it because
it was a little sea monster skeleton that you got
your hands on, and it would bring you a good fortune.
That's right. And I know what earlier we were talking
about just the early explorers, and uh, you can't fault
some of these dudes because they were, you know, as
this one article you said, they were literally an unchartered
(27:14):
waters and it was before the rise of science, and
all they had heard were stories in folklore and anytime
you saw if you ever see a map, c map,
oceanic map from there, it's gonna have some sea monsters
drawn on it, even as just decoration. So it was
a time when before there were you know, before observational
(27:37):
data came along. We pretty much was sort of like
the Internet today. You pretty much just rewrote earlier history
books over and over until they finally got a little
smarter and say, you know what, maybe we should really
observe something and then write about it. For real and
this didn't really lead to any anything more substantiated, you know,
well for a while, sure, but um it was they
(28:01):
called a transitional era in this article, which I think
kind of sums it up. Yeah, these were early scientists,
early naturalists, who were trying to get a handle on
what the heck they were looking at. Um, but they
still perpetuated legends like they might have a real creature
like a whale. Right, and then it's similarly a natural
(28:22):
um biological illustration of a mythical creature like a ce bishop.
So the ce bishop was this thing that was supposedly
caught and taken to the King of Poland because it
was this fish like creature that had like a meter
and robes like a bishop, and apparently you could also
(28:44):
talk and refuse to eat, and when it would make
the sign of the cross and everything. And later on
somebody said it probably didn't talk and make the sign
of the cross. But if you look at a squid
a certain way, it looks a lot like, yeah, it's
got the hat and in some of its flappy skin
that's kind of like the robes, you know, So maybe
(29:05):
that's where the sea bishop came from. Simultaneously, to this.
We're talking like the sixteenth century. There was a pretty
much a widespread belief that whatever you found on land
had an an analogy in the sea. Catfish, dogfish, seahorse,
all that stuff, and uh, in some cases they were right,
(29:26):
there are catfish, there are dog fish because we call
them that sea monkeys right, the sea horse to um.
But all that kind of It was a rough time
for science. It was still getting its footing. Well, yeah,
because you know, like you said, things were mistaken, like
a whale and a walrus might be a monster when
(29:47):
it's just a whale or a walrus. And there were
all kinds of tails that you know, when it's repeated
over and over, you get the sense it is just
one of those like urban legends back then, right, I
guess it wasn't urban back then, though, what would it be?
Just a seafaring legend um of whales being mistaken for islands,
(30:08):
and like a ship will land on the whale and
build a you know, and route down basically get off
the ship and build a fire, and then the whale,
I guess who was just chilling out at the surface says, hey,
there's a fire on my back, and I'm gonna take
your boat underwater and swallow you hole. I'm a whale
to be aware of the you know, whatever they called that,
whatever culture called that particular whale exactly now we just
(30:31):
call it a whale. And again it was probably end
on their backs. It was an embellished story, but there
they it was based on the sighting of a whale
before they called it whales. And back when everybody lied
about everything, they saw another culture that found dinosaur bones
and created their own legends. Where the Lakota and Dakota
su Yeah, sure, they came up with something called um
(30:55):
the um um tahila la. Yeah. I think that's about right,
from from dinosaur bones found around the Missouri River. Yeah,
and that was a water creature. Well, they were very
evil water serpents that would eat anything, including one another,
and so the thunderbirds would come and do battle with
them thunder beings. Yeah, but I looked it up. It's
(31:16):
basically thunderbirds, gotcha. What they knew is that it wasn't
a tonka, that's a buffalo, right. Yeah, they were pretty sure.
You know, um, that's apparently where the legends of the
psych the Cyclops came from. From Native Americans from no
from um finding like old like elephant bones, elephant skulls,
(31:39):
the huge cavity in the middle, like well, clearly there
was a race of giants that just had one eye. No,
they were elephants. You know. We often joked like they
were done back then. Of course they weren't. They were
just trying to figure it out. It's like to make
stuff up. They didn't have TV or anything back then,
and a lot of this stuff was was um legend
(32:02):
to keep you know, voters from going in a maybe
a particularly dangerous part of the sea, or to keep
the children away from the water. And like the ghost
story and the nuclear what's it called? Oh, nuclear semiotic?
Nuclear semiotics, man, everybody go look that stuff up. Actually,
Roman Mars has a nine invisible about that one. Yeah,
(32:24):
nice nuclear semiotics. Pretty neat ineffective. I imagine we'll find
out in ten thousand years. I guess. So, um, what
else do you got anything else? I don't have anything
else on sea serpents. Um, just take a look at
the angler fish video and tell me if you came
upon that. And see, we also didn't point out that
this was before deep not even deep sea exploration, like
(32:46):
This is before underwater exploration. People are just riding around
on the top of the ocean. So we're fascinated with
it and we've gone to the depths that we can attain.
At this point, it's just pretty deep. I wish I
would look that up. I don't know how deep we
can go. How deep James Cameron can go. Oh he
goes deep, buddy. But um, think about back then, man,
when they couldn't Like, you're not scary, that would be right,
(33:10):
when these strange creatures are Like you see a giant squid, yeah,
and you're just partially seeing it if you can't see
it underwater. Do you have no idea before the Diving
Bell even like there was? Or the Butterfly? That's right, Yeah,
you like that one. I finally saw that movie, by
the way, hardcore man. It's good though, Yeah, really good. Uh.
(33:32):
If you want to know more about the diving Bell
and the butterfly or about sea monsters, you can type
those words into the search bar how stuff works dot com.
And since I said search parts time for listener mail,
i'n call this uh Opah is German for grandpa. I
thought it was Greek for like good times. Maybe I
(33:54):
don't know really, yeah, bah, well, I'm sure those are
just three letters together, might be something Greek. But like
my brother in law, Carston, his German and his grandfather
was I'm sorry his father. His grandfather was Opa, but
his dad was native Germans, so my nieces called him Opah,
(34:15):
as does this Lady's I'm writing in specifically about your
whaling podcast. Oh how appropriate with a family story that
Lucy relates. My great grandfather Opa left Germany when he
was fourteen pre war to work as a sailor, came
to the US and was a member of the U.
S Coast Guard. One day, he was part of a
team that was clearing a harbor of some old sunken chips.
(34:35):
To do so, they use the sophisticated method of throwing
dynamite into the water to blast the wood of art
and then gathered the debris. His team wrote out in
a fourteen foot rowboat to gather up the wood shards
and noticed the blast had killed the fish they floated
to the tops of the crew brought them into the
boat as well. Waste not, wantnot. As they were going
about their business, they came across a sixteen foot hammerhead
(34:57):
shark that had floated up. Clearly it would be a
great source of food, so despite their small boat, they
pulled it aboard. I think you see where this is headed. Well,
As it turns out, the blast is strong enough to
kill small fish, but only stunned larger animals. The sharks
slowly started to gain consciousness in the row boat, and
being confused and out of water, was not pleased. It
got to the point that it was thrashing about in
(35:19):
the boat, threatened to destroy the boat and likely injured
or kill the crew members. So in the midst of
this chaos are able to flag down a sailor on
a larger vessel proceeded to shoot the thing to death
while that was still in the boat. Um, all of
the crew members were safe and they still got to
feast on hammerhead shark. But now I had a much
more exciting story. Uh, and you mentioned in the whaling
(35:39):
podcast Old timmy whaling crew members were deployed in small
boats to get the whale and were often injured and killed.
I thought you might find this interesting, and I was
hoping that you could give a shout out to my
sister Rachel. You turned me onto your podcast in two
thousand nine. She lives in France. We don't get to
see each other frequently, but whenever we do, Josh and
Chuck always come up. That's us. So that is uh
(36:00):
Wendy Bear. She is a registered dietitian. And Wendy and
Rachel Uh thanks for listening and for spreading the word
and for being uh sisters. Way to go being sisters. Yeah,
thanks for writing in, Wendy. Yeah, yeah, thanks Wendy, Um
and Chuck. This is our last episode of two thousand
and fourteen. Oh man, the longest year. So we want
(36:23):
to say happy new year everybody, and I want to
say happy birthday to my sweet and lovely wife, you me.
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. That's the rights free version. No,
that's the Stevie Wonder version. Oh it's a good one,
so it's not rights free. Yeah, so happy birthday you me.
Happy New Year to all of you great people out
(36:43):
there in podcast land. We'll see you next year. Stuff
You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!