August 20, 2024 • 47 mins
There is A LOT of made-up stuff on the internet that gets passed off as true. But once in a while something truly odd comes along. Here are three stories of real mysterious events in the internet’s recent history that are yet to be fully explained.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
It's just us.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
There's no Jerry there maybe never was camp and this
is stuff you should know. Camp What Camp? Oh? Camp?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Inside joke?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, Jerry's at camp right now.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Can I do a quick CoA at the head here?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
The things we're going to be talking about today, folks,
Internet mysteries times three. There are a lot of people
who get very into this stuff, specifically you know, the
three things we're talking about, as with most Internet mysteries,
but we are certainly not going to get into it
in the detail that will satisfy you if this is
(01:01):
something that you have researched a lot have been super into,
because you know, they're getting about fifteen minutes apiece, and
you know, just give us a break. We're doing our
best to kind of cover it in a short amount
of time.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, for sure, I think that was a good CoA.
That was like a true bonafide CoA.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, because I've answered the question that you're probably going
to want to email, which is how could you not
talk about blank?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Right exactly? We're going to talk about as much as
we can. And like you said, we got three amazing
unsolved mysteries of the Internet to discuss. There's plenty out there,
but in my book, these are probably the three best.
I think.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Ooh, all right.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I mean there's a lot out there, and I don't
I'm saying I'm excluding true crime obviously. These are just
oddities that have not been solved at this point, maybe
never will be solved, but probably could be at some point.
You never know.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Well, now we're just eating into our cicada.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
So let's talk first, I guess, then yes, about Cicada
thirty three oh one, shall we?
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Sure? This was a series of three puzzles that were
put out starting January fourth, twenty twelve, then a year later,
same date on the thirteenth, and then again same date
on the fourteenth on four Chan, and then eventually some
clues would come out on Twitter, but they were posted
(02:29):
online under the banner thirty three oh one and have
since become known as Cicada thirty three oho one because
many of the messages and clues ended up containing an
image of a cicada.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, kind of like a stylized line drawing of a cicada.
I've seen it compared very much to like the moth
on the Silence of the Lambs poster.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Especially the first image had a cicada, and cicadas are
important because they come out every a certain number of years,
but those years are always prime numbers. It's very interesting.
And in that first message that they sent out, they
posted it on four Chan, and the post said, Hello,
we are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them,
(03:15):
we have devised a test. There is a message hidden
in this image. Find it and it will lead you
on the road to finding us. We look forward to
meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Good luck. Cryptic, it was super cryptic, but it definitely
caught the attention of people. They posted it on the
right social media platform. Four Chan was a great one
(03:36):
to post it on to get the attention of people
who would want to do this, and the whole thing
spread pretty quickly. People have obviously immediately started trying to
figure out what the hidden message was. Staganography is what
it's called hiving a message inside something else, usually an image,
And it turns out there's all sorts of tools out
(03:57):
there on the Internet that you can use to decode
stuff like this, and some people just kind of said
about getting busy with it as some people.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Say, yeah, and one of those kids, I assume you
read the Rolling Stone article or no.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I don't know. I don't think so. No, not for
this one.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Okay, they had a really big, super long one that
talked to two of the guys who were teenagers at
the time, who were the I mean, I think probably
some of the first people that solved it. I'm not
going to go on record and say the first, but
one guy would only go by tech t e KK
and another guy's name was Marcus Wanner and they would
(04:40):
eventually hook up online. But initially this kid tech as
a fifteen year old, learned that when he copied that
image as a text document and notepad that you got
what you would expect, which is a wall of text,
but part of it was readable text that said Tiber
Claudius Caesar says, and then it had a bunch of
(05:04):
alphanumeric text. He knew that the Caesar cipher is one
of the oldest ciphers, one of the oldest kinds of encryption,
which is a substitution cipher, where like this, I don't
know if the Caesar was literally as one bs two,
but you can apply it to different you know, numbers,
And he knew that Caesar was the fourth emperor, so
(05:25):
he substituted four letters down from each of the letters
that followed and discovered a hidden message. Yeah, a website in.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Fact, Yeah, that was the thing. So one of the
reasons why the Cicada thirty three to h one puzzles
captured the attention of some really smart and capable people
is because they were multi layered. Like if you wanted
to unlock one puzzle, you had to kind of go
off over here and unlock a couple of other puzzles
to unlock the key that you would take back to
unlock the first puzzle. Essentially, it was multi layered, multi
(05:56):
step process. And this was no exception to it that
that that cipher that you had to decode from the
first image took you to a website, I guess an
imager image of a duck that just said only decoys
over here, and so you would think you just went
were sent intentionally done a blind alley. No, there was
(06:17):
another hidden message in there, even though it didn't say
that there was one, and so people would decipher that
it turned out that there was an encoded book. Uh.
And then you could also find a link to a
subreddit and there were more passages from that book, and
it turned out that book was a Welsh ar theory
and legend. And another reddit post contained some Mayan numerals
(06:38):
that you had to decode. That became a key that
you could use to analyze the Arthurian legend with. And
then you got another solution or another hint I guess
to use from that point on. And what it said
when you use that that that key to decode the
Arthurian legend, it said, Hey, here's a phone number, give
(07:00):
us a call.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yes, all this to say that some super smart nerdy
people were doing some super smart nerdy stuff. Yeah, having
a good time figuring this stuff out. And when they
eventually got that phone number and called it, they got
a message that said, very good, you have done well.
There are three prime numbers associated with the original JPEG image.
(07:24):
Thirty three oh one is one of them. You will
have to find the other two. Then multiply all three
of these numbers together and add a dot com at
the end to find the next step. Good luck, goobye.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, And I didn't read the Rolling Stone profile, but
another solver I think he was profiled in a National
Poster or Telegraph article the same is Joel Erickson. He
was from Sweden. I'm not sure how old he was
at the time, but he figured out that probably the
other prime numbers were the dimensions of that image five
hundred and nine pixels by five hundred and three pixels,
(07:59):
and it turned out he was right. So he multiplied
all those that took the answer, put a dot com
on the end, and it took him to a website
that had a countdown clock and a picture of a cicada,
so he knew he was at the right spot. He'd
multiplied correctly and guessed correctly, and when that clock finished
counting down, the website updated and there were a bunch
(08:21):
of GPS coordinates that were posted.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
All of a sudden, Yeah, and all of a sudden,
it's had fined our symbol at the location nearest to you. So,
all of a sudden, this thing jumped from the Internet
out into the real world with real physical coordinates, and
it turned into kind of a scavenger hunt. There were
fourteen telephone poles all around the world America France, Japan, Poland, Russia,
(08:46):
Spain and other places, and all of a sudden, like
you would, I mean, if you could afford to and
had the time, I guess you would go to the
one closest to you find that telephone pole flyer and
that had a QR code it again with a picture
of that cicada, and that led to another cicada image
with another riddle, and this one contained some poetry. I
(09:11):
think it was from cyberpunk writer William William Gibson's poem
Agrippa that was from nineteen ninety two. And if you
applied the key that they originally came up with to
that poem, it led to another puzzle that would eventually
lead to a website. Wow.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, the website was the end. And so there's the guy.
Joel Erickson made it to the website. By the time
he got there, it had been shut down for a
couple of reasons. One I think it was shut down
a little under a month, and I guess they had
posted on that website that they were disappointed that some
people were collaborating, and they said they wanted the best,
(09:50):
not followers, so they stopped the game. But apparently in
the meantime they had some people had solved it and
gotten to the site, because a month later on that
reddit subreddit that they've been posting Arthurian legends and mining
codes on, they said, we found the intelligent individuals we
were looking for, right, So, but the fact that Joel
(10:12):
Erickson made it to that site, that was it, Like
he solved everything. He's considered a solver. He just got
there too late because he heard about this after other
people who started before him did.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yeah, like Marcus Wanner and tech exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And Marcus Wanner is one of the few people who's
known to have made it past that site or gotten
to that site within the timeframe the alloted timeframe, and
actually was in communication with the people who were behind
Cicida thirty three to ZHO one. He still has no
idea exactly what they were doing or what they wanted,
(10:49):
but based on the interview that they subjected into and
some of the interactions he had with them, he guess
that they are some sort of hacker collective that is
very much interested in promoting internet privacy and internet freedom.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah, it sounds like they may have been looking for
code breakers, because they gave him a private test of
creating a decryption mechanism right, and he failed that, I guess,
or wasn't able to do it, so they, you know,
they got rid of him.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I had the impression he blew it off.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Oh really, I saw that he didn't wasn't able to
do it.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, he just didn't deliver the goods. But I for
some reason, one of the readings I had about him,
it just made it sound like he was just like
he lost interest. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Oh interesting. So to be clear, I believe what we
just described was just that first puzzle, right, and you know,
we don't have the time to get into the rest
of the puzzles. And I don't think I think the
first two were solved. I don't think anyone ever solved
the third really before they permanently just removed every reference
to it. I think about a month after that final
(11:59):
puzzle was removed, they did post a message on four
Chan once again that said we have now found the
individuals we sought, sort of like that original message. Thus
our month long journey ends. You're undoubtedly wondering what it
is that we do. We are much like a think tank,
and that our primary focus is on researching and developing
techniques to aid the ideas we advocate liberty, privacy, security.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, and you could tell it was written by a
computer person because there's like very little punctuation and lots
of run ons and all that, so it seems legit.
It checks out.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
So who is it an SA or CIA or somebody.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
A lot of people say that that it was an
elaborate scheme to recruit, you know, cybersecurity people and hackers
from like the dark reaches of the Internet. Somebody said
that doesn't really make sense because they posted on four
Chan and this was the era of Snowden, so they
probably wouldn't have wanted people from four Chan at the time.
(12:58):
That's not true. Leaked in twenty thirteen, and the first
puzzle was twenty twelve, so it's possible it was the government.
Entirely possible, but there were some other aspects of the
whole contest that suggests it might have been otherwise, Although
some of this seems to have been purposely deliberately misleading, right,
(13:19):
Like there was a poster named Wind from Michigan and
she was kind of joining in like these this collaborations
on different sites until somebody figured out that she seemed
to deliberately be giving out misleading information. And then there
was a claim on Pastebin from a somebody who said
that they were an ex Cicada member, that they were
(13:41):
a military officer from a non English speaking country that
had been recruited by a superior and that he said
Cicado is actually a left hand path religion disguised as
a progressive scientific organization, and that it was comprised of
very smart people who weren't happy with the way the
world was going, so they wanted to trasform humanity into
the Nietzschean uber minch.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Well, I did see stuff about religion. I saw some
people positive that it was Julian Assange there. I mean,
there's all kinds of fun theories out there on who
it might have been. I think the one thing is
pretty clear it I feel really, really strongly that it
probably wasn't just some like somebody having fun doing some
(14:26):
cool scavenger hunt mystery puzzle thing on the internet, like
it seemed like it was probably some kind of legit recruitment.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I agree, But I think my money's on a hacker collective,
whether white hat or black hat, I don't know, but
a group of hackers.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Does that mean good guys are bad guys?
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (14:45):
I don't know all this terminology.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Well, I mean it's pretty straightforward. You know, you can
guess you just did.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
All right, there you go? Did I pacitize?
Speaker 2 (14:52):
You did? You made it onto the next riddle?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Did you just text me a wooden duck?
Speaker 2 (14:58):
That's right? Just here, I say, we take a break.
Can we move on to the next mystery of the Internet?
How about that?
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Oh, tension builds.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Stuff you should know, Josh, And shock stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
All right, So mystery number two, and I'm shocked. I've
never heard of this one as a music guy. Had
you ever heard of it?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yes, I don't remember exactly where, but I'd never really
researched it until we started researching this. So for all
intents and purposes, not really.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Okay, we're gonna be talking about what's become known as
the most mysterious song on the Internet. And this was
a song that sometime between eighty two and eighty four
a guy named Darius s recorded in Germany on the
north coast, the coast of Germany.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Josh, there's no such thing. I mean, some sort of
landlocked border.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I think I think so reference to Old Bearer by
the way. But yeah, this guy did what all of
us did in the early eighties, as we would sit
around listen to the radio and record songs from the
radio onto our cassette deck so we could take them
on the road with us. And he was doing this.
Had a big mixtape of all these things from you know,
(16:29):
the people that you would expect to hear from in
nineteen eighty four, about twenty five of them. He wasn't
sure who the songs were, and it sounds like he
figured out who all of those songs came from. Save one.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, I think so, I don't. I think that was
the only one that he did never figure out. He
called those unknown ones his unknown pleasures. A joy Division
reference right, because most of this music was post punk
new waves. And this song, this most mysterious song on
the internet, is no exception. It sounds like a Rolling
Stone writer put it. It has a rigid beat and
(17:03):
dry monotone vocals and sounds like a synthpop hit you
would have heard in a dance club in the eighties,
which is true, like all of that is true, But
it also it has like a strong guitar riff like
early Joy Division. It kind of has a little bit
of that, but it's also more produced than that, and
(17:23):
the vocals, the lyrics and the vocals are incomprehensible except
in little snippets that you hear just enough that to me,
the fact that you can't fully understand what the person's
saying and it's so open to interpretation, I think that's
what starts to suck people in the most.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah. Probably so. The only thing I'll disagree with about
the Rolling Stone is that it sounded like a hit.
I don't think the song's very good.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Oh really, I find it I wouldn't say good, but
I find it definitely catchy.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
I mean, it's okay, and I have been walking around
singing it, and so it must be a little catchy.
But compared to the music of that era, and this
is just my dumb opinion, I think it sounds like
what I think it is, which was a fairly amateurish
Eastern Bloc person recording a song. Okay, it sounded a
(18:15):
little bit like, you know, the rest of the music
of the era.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
So the thing is, I don't know if we've said
entirely yet, no one on the planet seems to know
what the song is, what the name of the song is,
or who the artist is, who created this, what the
band is or the solo arts whoever, not a single
person on the planet, And you might be like, well,
you know, maybe you just haven't looked deep enough. Wrong.
(18:40):
People have looked into the depths of nineteen eighties Germany
using all sorts of different tools to analyze the song digitally.
I mean, like, people have really dug into this. And
the other thing about it that makes it so impressive
that it remains mysterious is that people have been searching
for who made this song since for twenty ten. Let's
(19:02):
tell them about that story, shall.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
We, Yeah, you mentioned using you know, modern tools. One
of the one of the mysteries from Darius was he
was like, I guess, in this German accent, which I'm
not gonna try good said, I'm not even sure you
know for sure that I taped it from this program
on the in day oar Heintz station in Germany, the
music for young people program that he listened to. He's like,
(19:25):
because I recorded stuff from other stations and other programs.
But they have since proven that proven that basically using
spectrogram analysis, they actually pinpointed it and said, no, there
was a ten kilohertz line that this station used as
like a modulation scheme that isn't found on other stations.
(19:49):
And they found that that modulation line in that song.
So there was like, at least we know it was
definitely from Inda our hes.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Right, So they figured that out. They also figured out
that it was at least from nineteen eighty four because
the technics deck is it technics are techniques.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
I always said techniques, but who knows? That may have
been wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Okay, the tape deck made by technics or techniques, you know,
the brand that he was using to record off the
radio wasn't made until nineteen eighty four, and you might think, well, okay,
it could be nineteen eighty five eighty six. The song,
the other songs that are on this tape, which are
known as Cassette four, were songs from XSTC The Cure.
(20:32):
I could not, for life of me find what songs
they were, but everybody seems to be satisfied that these
ecstasy songs and Cure songs and other songs that were
played on that were recorded on the same tape came
out in nineteen eighty four or right before nineteen eighty four.
So the guess is that this this was taped off
(20:52):
of the radio between nineteen eighty three and nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Yeah, and you know what, there's people that have time
on their hand in technological wherewith all that we don't have,
I'm calling on somebody somewhere to find and make a
playlist of cassette four and put it on your whatever
your favorite streamer is.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Yeah, I can't believe it's not out there.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Actually, I bet that's a bangin playlist.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I'll bet it is too. So back to the story,
the initial story of where this all came from. Darius,
he apparently was content with just putting a question mark
next to the song or in the song's place on
the track listing on the cassette, but his sister was
not satisfied with that. His sister, Lydia, who just goes
(21:40):
by Lydia h in this Rolling Stone interview, she always
really wanted to know who made this song. I don't
know if obsession is the right word, but it was
certainly something that drove her to some extent, and as
the Internet kind of blossomed and grew, I think in
starting in two thousand and seven, she started sharing it
on the Internet. There's a couple of sites that she
(22:02):
put it posted it on initially, one a Canadian site,
another German site that are kind of the crowdsource people
to say what song is this? And that was the
start of baffling internet users with this song.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, and that's where I would have expected an answer
if there was one. It's on YouTube. You can listen
to it. They people on YouTube and other places to
have tried to decipher the lyrics as best they can.
It seems pretty clear that it's probably a foreign or
at least, you know, a non American speaker foreign to us.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
But people are pretty sure it's in English.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
No, it's definitely in English. Okay, I mean, I think
it's clearly in English. Great are people debating that?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
No?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
I don't think. Okay, you can't get all the words.
You can get a lot of them. Like the Wind
is the title that a lot of people have put
on it, because you know, the very beginning of the song,
it's like the wind. But is it I don't even
know if it's saying like the wind. It almost sounds
like something again, but I can't even tell that part Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
So there's a bunch of names for the song, which
the official generic name for it is TMS the Mysterious
Song or the most Mysterious song on the Internet, but
people call it blind the Wind, locked away. Some people
think that's what he's saying instead of like the wind.
I can hear it actually, as a matter of fact,
(23:31):
and I can't remember what the line is, but there's
other lines in there that make it sound like he
is talking about being locked up. Check it in, check
it out, take it in, take it out, disco woman.
There's a lot of different names for this song based
on what people think this guy is saying, because no
(23:51):
one can say what the lyrics are. No one knows.
You can't do it, and it's beware there because there's
madness that way. If you really start paying attention and
trying to figure out what the lyrics are, friend, you
are going to end up with a new hobby you
may or may not want.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Yeah, they've gotten in touch with that original DJ who said,
you know, I don't know what that song was. I
certainly don't remember playing it, no recollection of it whatsoever.
This was a time, obviously, when Germany was split in
half or maybe not technically half by the Cold War,
(24:29):
and you know, the DJ DJs were like, you know,
we would get like tapes thrown over the wall at
us that we didn't even know what they were, but
they were they were just music that people wanted us
to hear and play. Here's my theory, Okay, Ockham's Razor Man.
It's a song that someone made and they died, and
no one knew they made it.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I guess that is probably the simplest solution. Yes, it's
just no one, no one knowing that that person made,
no one recognizing that person's voice. I mean, this is widespread, Yeah,
and it's possible just the right person hasn't heard it yet.
I don't know, but I kind of tend to agree
(25:11):
with you. I think that's probably what happened. It was
an obscure East German or Eastern Bloc musician who managed
to get their tape out. And I mean that's not unprecedented.
Tapes went both ways through the Iron Curtain during the
Cold War. There's a really great documentary called Chuck Norris
Versus Communism that came out in twenty fifteen, and it's
(25:33):
about how people smuggling in American action movies into Romania.
They think essentially led to the downfall of Nikolai Chuchescu
and his regime because people kind of saw how life
could be. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah? Did Chuck Norris win?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah? He won because there's no more communism in Romania
as far as I know.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Do you know what would be great? I mean, I'm
fifty three years old, I'm in way into music, and
I've gone down some rabbit holes about music. I had
never heard of this before this week. Like, you know,
maybe the person who made it literally has never heard
this whole mystery. In that year, someone's like, hey, that
was me.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
I know. I think that a lot of people would
be really sad and when that happened.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah, then just keep it to yourself, buddy. If that's
the case, everyone likes a mystery a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So, let's talk about a couple of couple more things
that people have done for this investigation. I mean, you
said spectography, right, am I saying that correctly?
Speaker 3 (26:34):
I don't know spectrograph Yeah, spectrography.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
I think so it sounds right, jeez. So in addition
to that people, and in addition to getting in touch
with Paul Baskerville, the DJ who hosted that show in
nineteen eighty four. People have gotten in touch with the
archivist at that radio station and gotten a full list
of playlists for every single episod of that radio show.
(27:01):
This song does not turn up on it. Don't forget, though.
They've proven that it was played on this radio station.
So they started looking at playlists for other radio shows.
They've gotten a substantial number of them. Still hasn't turned
up on any playlist anything that could be this song.
And then someone else essentially pinned the song in between
nineteen eighty three and nineteen eighty four because they believe
(27:24):
that the synthesizer that was used was a specific type
of Yamaha a DX seven that was not available until
nineteen eighty three. In that nuts that people have done all.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
This, That one's the most believable because that's just how
keyboard nerds are.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
But sure, yeah, I just think that's super cool that
people have just tried all of this different stuff and
it still is just not budging. It will not budge.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Yeah. And again, if that guy's out there, just you know,
let that be your own little secret. And maybe that's
the case. Maybe this person knows this and they just
think this is awesome. And you know who knows that's
why it's a great mystery.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
His friends and family are like, why are you always
tittering to yourself? It's so weird?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Why are you talking about the Wind?
Speaker 2 (28:11):
So if you haven't heard the song, it's worth going
to check out. Just look up the most mysterious song
on the Internet and you will find it, for sure,
although you can also look up like the Wind and
mysterious and all that stuff and it'll turn it up.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
Yeah, And to be clear, I don't think it's like
a bad song. I just think it's not like is
it didn't become a big hit for a reason.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, I think hit is a little overly generous too.
I'm with you. But you could still have turned it
at like an eighties club on like bish wave night,
for sure.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Yeah, there was plenty of worse music than this then.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Or sure, but there was also a lot of really
good music too, like the Wind.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
A Way Disco Girl.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Okay, well, I think we reached the end of the
most Mysterious song on the Internet. That our second of
our three mysteries of the Internet, And we'll take a
message break we'll come back and we will reveal the
third after this stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
You should know, Josh and shock stuff. You should know.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
We're back, and you know, dude, this could be a
whole other show for us. Just three mysteries per week,
fifteen minutes of pop.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
You like that, huh? I don't know.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
It's kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Careful way you say this, Do you have time on
your hands like that?
Speaker 3 (29:47):
No? No, no, I quit my other show for a reason.
You as well.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
We need to edit that part out, man. I don't
want the wrong people to hear that and be like, hey,
that's a great idea.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
All right, take it away, my friend.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Oh okay, here we got. We're talking about what, in
my opinion, is one of the top three great mysteries
of the Internet. Yeah, I think I agree, the Mystery
of John Tider. I believe that's how it's pronounced. I've
only ever seen it written down. I've never heard anybody
say it out loud. But I've heard that name for
a long time. Because this is an ancient Internet mystery,
(30:20):
and as a matter of fact, it turns out it
seems to pre date essentially the Internet, or at the
very least it was. It finds its origin off the
Internet through fax machines and the radio no less.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah, and this is another one that a lot of
people have gotten really into. Like I went on Reddit
and was kind of looking at some stuff, and it
broke my brain such that I was like, all right,
we're gonna we're gonna do our best to give a
little overview here.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah, I think something about the the most mysterious song
on the Internet. It seems far more wholesome and less
dark for some reason, getting sucked into the John Tider
mystery seems like you could really just go crazy essentially.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Well, the first one was either like I six or CIA,
this one is possible time traveler in Civil war, and
the middle one was like a cool synthpop hit.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Yeah, so let's just tell him a little bit about
John Tighter. Okay. John Tighter is a Internet based that
no one's ever seen or spoken to him in real
life poster who claimed to be a time traveler from
the year twenty thirty six in America, an America that
had been racked, like you said, by civil war that
(31:33):
had gone on for a while but was ended by
World War three, which presumably that brought America together again
and that it seems like the American economy has completely
collapsed and everybody's much more family and local community centered.
Andy said that the average day in the life in
twenty thirty six outside Tampa, Florida, where he's from, is
(31:55):
like a day on the farm, and you might be like, wow,
that's pretty descriptive. That is the tip of the iceberg
of the information that John tier willingly gave out as
a time traveler on the Internet starting in nineteen ninety
seven or eight, and then in two thousand again.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
Yeah, he said the US had been divided into five
zones and that time travel had been invented, had been
invented two years previous, in twenty thirty four. But let's
back up to where this started, because it all started in,
like you said, pre internet, in a very kind of
unlikely way, I think, by somebody sending a couple of
(32:34):
faxes to a radio show Art Bells Coast to Coast
AM and this was read on the air, and then
a couple of years later posted basically the same thing
online on the Time Travel Institute site, which is a
site that's been around since ninety seven dedicated to temporal sciences,
(32:57):
and the user's name was time travel under scre or zero.
So like we said, time traveler from the future and
started saying things like, you know, there were six components
to the time machine. That was an onoard or on
board caesium clocks, twin micro singularities which are tiny, very
(33:19):
tiny black holes, that he traveled using a stationary mass
temporal displacement unit powered by two topspin dual positive singularities,
producing a typical offset tiplar sinusoid. And it was put
in the back of a sixty six corvette. Yeah, very
back to the part that gets me very back to
(33:41):
the future.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
The thing about John Tier and the posts that he
posted are that this stuff that is this what sounds
like gibberish is actually not at all made up. For example,
a tiplar sinusoid refers to a theoretical type of time
travel that was proposed in the seventies by physicists named
Frank Tipler, and he essentially figured out mathematically that if
(34:05):
you could take two huge masses many times denser than
the sun, say two black holes, and pull them out,
spaghettify them essentially, and then spin them really fast like
billions of rotations a second, you would what you would
do is essentially pull open space time and open essentially
(34:26):
a portal to somewhere in the future, possibly somewhere in
the past, possibly galaxies away from where you started. And
again this is hypothetical theoretical, but this is not something
that the average person is walking around in their head
like that. The Tiplar sinusoid exists. So I'm just impressed that.
And that's just another example where if you put all
(34:48):
this stuff together and all of the how different and
complementary and very infrequently contradictory. The the information that John
tier gave out was it's I see how some people
who believe that time travel is possible consider John Tighter
an actual time traveler. Okay, I don't, but I could
(35:13):
see how people do. It's just so convincing, Like the
stuff he says is so convincing, and he seems to
have no agenda whatsoever. That's the other thing.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
I'm not so sure about that part. But he would
go on to talk you know again, you know, he
was a US soldier in Tampa living on a river
in a treehouse, and said that he was there on
an official mission. He was supposed to he was, you know,
sent back in time by his I guess the army
(35:45):
or the US government. But he stopped off for a
personal personal reasons in two thousand, basically to get family
pictures that were lost during the Civil War, mementos, to
visit his family, that kind of thing, right, But the
official mission that he was sent back for, supposedly by
the federal government, was to go back to Minnesota in
(36:06):
nineteen seventy five to get an IBM fifty one hundred,
which was the first portable computer. And his grandfather supposedly
worked on developing this thing, and so that's why he
was sent back to get this computer so they could
debug legacy computer programs that they you know, they were
(36:27):
obsolete and they couldn't work with anymore because they didn't
have this old working computer.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Right, and what the So that's cool, that's an obscure computer. Again,
most people aren't walking around with awareness that the IBM
fifty one hundred ever existed. But even more than that,
John Tiger said that the reason they wanted a fifty
one hundred is because it had a specific unique component
to it. It apparently could run other programs written for
(36:52):
like those huge mainframes, and that that was the reason
they needed it in the future and that IBM had
actually kept us quiet. And it turns out that's true.
The I think the Rochester, Minnesota Post Bulletin got in
touch with one of their local residents who worked on
the IBM fifty one hundred in the mid seventies, who confirmed, like,
that's absolutely true. There was this little quirk that was
(37:16):
peculiar to the fifty one hundred, and IBM did not
publicize this at all. So it's just so bizarre that
this person knew that and that that was the reason
that they were sent back into the future. I mean,
come on, dude, Like, think about how creative that is
if the guy's just a hoaxter.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Yeah. So he goes on to and this is a
very key thing is he went on to say, by
the way, the mini World's theory of physics is correct,
which means that you know, for every possible different outcome,
the universe splits into different versions to accommodate those outcomes.
(37:56):
He's like, that's all true. So the fact that I'm
saying he didn't say this part, but the fact that
he talks about the George W. Bush election sewing discord
and there being an uprising in a civil war in
the two thousands. The fact that none of that happened,
he said, that's just because that I went back in
(38:17):
time and changed the outcome. So basically, anything I say,
you can't prove wrong.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
That's one part of it. Yes, he was saying, like,
because his very presence would change it, and that he
came from a different timestream himself. The other implication of
that is that he can't possibly create a paradox. Even
going and visiting his family and I read his three
year old self in two thousand would not create a
(38:44):
paradox because he comes from a different timestream, did not
exist in this timestream until he hopped over to it,
So there's no paradox for him being there and meeting
him himself as a younger kid. Right again, Really genius
details that. So I feel like I'm coming off like
I'm trying to convince listeners to believe that this is real.
(39:06):
That's not the case. If you do believe it's real, great.
I'm just so thoroughly impressed with the creativity behind every
component and facet of what John Tyder said that it's
just I'm just in awe agog even you could say.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
So as the thing gained steam over the years, he
finally eventually made a post in March two thousand and
one that said, this is you know, the last post
I'm going back to twenty thirty six, Smell you later,
And he wrote this big, long, kind of fairly deep
philosophical take on what he learned and what he saw,
(39:48):
and also the fact that he had already been talking
about the fact that like, by the way, people in
the future don't think you're too great, and that you
guys haven't been doing the right things and you kind
of screwed everything up for the future. So he kind
of writes this kind of nice long thing at the end,
(40:09):
which was just ended with farewell John. You know, there's
a lot of symbolism going on, Like I encourage people
to read it in full because it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
It is. It is very cool, But he basically says, like,
here's why I'm leaving and why I won't be back
or recommend anybody come back here either, because you guys
don't take care of one another. Like he talked about
how people who with stranded on the side of the
road with car trouble, people just drive past him. Nobody stops,
and he asked his family that he was visiting why
(40:36):
people don't stop, and they were saying, it's too dangerous
to stop and pick somebody up. You never know if
they're going to kill you. And they need to learn
the lesson about making sure you don't run out of
gas in the first place. And he's just like a
gast at this at how people treat one another in
America in the early two thousands, and in that farewell thing,
(40:57):
he said, make sure you keep a gas can with
you for when your car dies on the side of
the road. And I'm going back to this time and
place where you know, community and family is absolutely everything.
A utopia if you will a bit, But he didn't
talk it up like a utopia. It sounded like it
was probably you or I would consider it hard living,
(41:18):
but to him, it was fastly superior to the kind
of lifestyle that we live pre Civil War here in
the United States in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Yeah, So this is one that a lot of people
have tried to solve over the years. I feel like
it's been solved. Yea personally, signs you know, were there
were people that got on the web and started I'm
looking at metadata, and like, what's it called when you
can pinpoint where something came from? Oh, I can't think
(41:53):
of it now, a pinpointing. No, something to deal with
your computer and where where it was posting from anyway. Yeah,
but there's another word for it. I know this is
people are just yelling at me. But long story short,
both the metadata and this method of pinpointing that a
(42:15):
website called hoax Hunter conducted this investigation pointed to this
area of Florida in both cases, so that really narrowed
it down. And then I believe they also found a
registration to like an LLC or company with the word
Tighter in it that all it had was a PO
box from that same area of Florida. And so they
(42:39):
basically think that it is. There are three brothers, the
Haber brothers. For my money, it's Larry or his younger
brother John, and not the older I think older brother,
Maury Haber.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, so Larry Haber exists, Maury Haber exists. I've seen
that John Haber does not exist. But the Habers do
seem they certainly have something to do with this, because,
like you said, they run the John Tighter Foundation and
Larry Haber claims to be the legal representative of k Tighter,
John Tighter's mother. She doesn't seem to exist either. And
(43:15):
it's possible the whole thing was just a hoax carried
out by these guys. Totally possible. But what's interesting is
I turned up another article that interviews in part a
guy named Joseph Matheny who's a multi media artist, who said,
we were the ones who started this whole thing by
sending those facts to art Bell, and we stopped after that,
(43:36):
and apparently some coast to coast fans took up the
mantle and carried it on from there a couple of
years later. So two groups that weren't communicating or working
with one another were inadvertently collaborating, or one was collaborating
with the other later on to create this whole hoax
that was the John Tider mystery.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Now where did you see that the youngest brother didn't exist?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Well, I know that Larry Haber. I believe it was
Larry who said I don't have a brother John. And
I think I saw somewhere else that John is not real,
that there's not a Haber.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Interesting because I saw stuff quotes from John. But like
I think it's one of those things where you can't
trust anything you're reading at this.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Point exactly one, because again Larry Haber is saying that
he represents Kay Tighter, and Kay Tighter doesn't seem to exist.
Like there's a lot of people. Again, people have not
met these people. Everything has been on the internet, so
it's there's no telling who is involved, who isn't involved,
who's real, who's not real. It's fascinating in that regard.
(44:44):
So there's multi layers to what makes this whole mystery
just so great.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Yeah, well, I mean they're on the internet, those two guys.
I mean, at least the two guys are. Yeah, and
like one of them is a very well to do
business person, and I don't know, it's very interesting.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Yeah, the Habers definitely exist, Larry and Maury, possibly John,
but I saw he doesn't, right, I understand. Okay, Well, no,
I was wrapping it up for everybody else, I know,
you know, gotcha. I think that's it, right, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
I got nothing else, I mean but a deep sense
of unfulfilled you know podcast duty edom.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Right, I'm with you on that. Since Chuck said duty edom,
of course, that means he's just Unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
I'm gonna call this tomato fun fact from Brian Kreebol
or maybe it's Crybol. In Germany it would be Kreebel,
but who knows. Hey, guys, In this also episode, you
mentioned that when Europeans first encountered tomatoes, they thought they
were deadly because they remember the night Shade family. I
forget where I learned this, but this idea was initially
fueled because some of them were actually killed by eating tomatoes. However,
(45:54):
it was not the tomatoes that killed them. They were
eating them off lead plates, and the acid from the
tomatoes does all some of the lead. Jesus then consumed
along with the tomatoes, thus killing some. This is what
led to the belief that tomatoes were poisonous and persisted
throughout Europe for a little while. One little bit of
(46:14):
hubris for a group that thought they knew everything there
was to know and that they were a step above
the indigenous communities.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Burn Who is that from?
Speaker 3 (46:25):
That was from Brian.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Brian, That's awesome, Thank you very much. I've definitely never
heard that one, so thanks for filling that out for us.
And if you want to fill something out for us,
like Brian did. You can send it via email to
wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send
it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
It's just us.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
There's no Jerry there maybe never was camp and this
is stuff you should know. Camp What Camp? Oh? Camp?
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Inside joke?
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yeah, Jerry's at camp right now.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Can I do a quick CoA at the head here?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
The things we're going to be talking about today, folks,
Internet mysteries times three. There are a lot of people
who get very into this stuff, specifically you know, the
three things we're talking about, as with most Internet mysteries,
but we are certainly not going to get into it
in the detail that will satisfy you if this is
(01:01):
something that you have researched a lot have been super into,
because you know, they're getting about fifteen minutes apiece, and
you know, just give us a break. We're doing our
best to kind of cover it in a short amount
of time.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, for sure, I think that was a good CoA.
That was like a true bonafide CoA.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, because I've answered the question that you're probably going
to want to email, which is how could you not
talk about blank?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Right exactly? We're going to talk about as much as
we can. And like you said, we got three amazing
unsolved mysteries of the Internet to discuss. There's plenty out there,
but in my book, these are probably the three best.
I think.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Ooh, all right.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I mean there's a lot out there, and I don't
I'm saying I'm excluding true crime obviously. These are just
oddities that have not been solved at this point, maybe
never will be solved, but probably could be at some point.
You never know.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Well, now we're just eating into our cicada.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
So let's talk first, I guess, then yes, about Cicada
thirty three oh one, shall we?
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Sure? This was a series of three puzzles that were
put out starting January fourth, twenty twelve, then a year later,
same date on the thirteenth, and then again same date
on the fourteenth on four Chan, and then eventually some
clues would come out on Twitter, but they were posted
(02:29):
online under the banner thirty three oh one and have
since become known as Cicada thirty three oho one because
many of the messages and clues ended up containing an
image of a cicada.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, kind of like a stylized line drawing of a cicada.
I've seen it compared very much to like the moth
on the Silence of the Lambs poster.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Especially the first image had a cicada, and cicadas are
important because they come out every a certain number of years,
but those years are always prime numbers. It's very interesting.
And in that first message that they sent out, they
posted it on four Chan, and the post said, Hello,
we are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them,
(03:15):
we have devised a test. There is a message hidden
in this image. Find it and it will lead you
on the road to finding us. We look forward to
meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Good luck. Cryptic, it was super cryptic, but it definitely
caught the attention of people. They posted it on the
right social media platform. Four Chan was a great one
(03:36):
to post it on to get the attention of people
who would want to do this, and the whole thing
spread pretty quickly. People have obviously immediately started trying to
figure out what the hidden message was. Staganography is what
it's called hiving a message inside something else, usually an image,
And it turns out there's all sorts of tools out
(03:57):
there on the Internet that you can use to decode
stuff like this, and some people just kind of said
about getting busy with it as some people.
Speaker 3 (04:06):
Say, yeah, and one of those kids, I assume you
read the Rolling Stone article or no.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I don't know. I don't think so. No, not for
this one.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Okay, they had a really big, super long one that
talked to two of the guys who were teenagers at
the time, who were the I mean, I think probably
some of the first people that solved it. I'm not
going to go on record and say the first, but
one guy would only go by tech t e KK
and another guy's name was Marcus Wanner and they would
(04:40):
eventually hook up online. But initially this kid tech as
a fifteen year old, learned that when he copied that
image as a text document and notepad that you got
what you would expect, which is a wall of text,
but part of it was readable text that said Tiber
Claudius Caesar says, and then it had a bunch of
(05:04):
alphanumeric text. He knew that the Caesar cipher is one
of the oldest ciphers, one of the oldest kinds of encryption,
which is a substitution cipher, where like this, I don't
know if the Caesar was literally as one bs two,
but you can apply it to different you know, numbers,
And he knew that Caesar was the fourth emperor, so
(05:25):
he substituted four letters down from each of the letters
that followed and discovered a hidden message. Yeah, a website in.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Fact, Yeah, that was the thing. So one of the
reasons why the Cicada thirty three to h one puzzles
captured the attention of some really smart and capable people
is because they were multi layered. Like if you wanted
to unlock one puzzle, you had to kind of go
off over here and unlock a couple of other puzzles
to unlock the key that you would take back to
unlock the first puzzle. Essentially, it was multi layered, multi
(05:56):
step process. And this was no exception to it that
that that cipher that you had to decode from the
first image took you to a website, I guess an
imager image of a duck that just said only decoys
over here, and so you would think you just went
were sent intentionally done a blind alley. No, there was
(06:17):
another hidden message in there, even though it didn't say
that there was one, and so people would decipher that
it turned out that there was an encoded book. Uh.
And then you could also find a link to a
subreddit and there were more passages from that book, and
it turned out that book was a Welsh ar theory
and legend. And another reddit post contained some Mayan numerals
(06:38):
that you had to decode. That became a key that
you could use to analyze the Arthurian legend with. And
then you got another solution or another hint I guess
to use from that point on. And what it said
when you use that that that key to decode the
Arthurian legend, it said, Hey, here's a phone number, give
(07:00):
us a call.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Yes, all this to say that some super smart nerdy
people were doing some super smart nerdy stuff. Yeah, having
a good time figuring this stuff out. And when they
eventually got that phone number and called it, they got
a message that said, very good, you have done well.
There are three prime numbers associated with the original JPEG image.
(07:24):
Thirty three oh one is one of them. You will
have to find the other two. Then multiply all three
of these numbers together and add a dot com at
the end to find the next step. Good luck, goobye.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, And I didn't read the Rolling Stone profile, but
another solver I think he was profiled in a National
Poster or Telegraph article the same is Joel Erickson. He
was from Sweden. I'm not sure how old he was
at the time, but he figured out that probably the
other prime numbers were the dimensions of that image five
hundred and nine pixels by five hundred and three pixels,
(07:59):
and it turned out he was right. So he multiplied
all those that took the answer, put a dot com
on the end, and it took him to a website
that had a countdown clock and a picture of a cicada,
so he knew he was at the right spot. He'd
multiplied correctly and guessed correctly, and when that clock finished
counting down, the website updated and there were a bunch
(08:21):
of GPS coordinates that were posted.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
All of a sudden, Yeah, and all of a sudden,
it's had fined our symbol at the location nearest to you. So,
all of a sudden, this thing jumped from the Internet
out into the real world with real physical coordinates, and
it turned into kind of a scavenger hunt. There were
fourteen telephone poles all around the world America France, Japan, Poland, Russia,
(08:46):
Spain and other places, and all of a sudden, like
you would, I mean, if you could afford to and
had the time, I guess you would go to the
one closest to you find that telephone pole flyer and
that had a QR code it again with a picture
of that cicada, and that led to another cicada image
with another riddle, and this one contained some poetry. I
(09:11):
think it was from cyberpunk writer William William Gibson's poem
Agrippa that was from nineteen ninety two. And if you
applied the key that they originally came up with to
that poem, it led to another puzzle that would eventually
lead to a website. Wow.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, the website was the end. And so there's the guy.
Joel Erickson made it to the website. By the time
he got there, it had been shut down for a
couple of reasons. One I think it was shut down
a little under a month, and I guess they had
posted on that website that they were disappointed that some
people were collaborating, and they said they wanted the best,
(09:50):
not followers, so they stopped the game. But apparently in
the meantime they had some people had solved it and
gotten to the site, because a month later on that
reddit subreddit that they've been posting Arthurian legends and mining
codes on, they said, we found the intelligent individuals we
were looking for, right, So, but the fact that Joel
(10:12):
Erickson made it to that site, that was it, Like
he solved everything. He's considered a solver. He just got
there too late because he heard about this after other
people who started before him did.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yeah, like Marcus Wanner and tech exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And Marcus Wanner is one of the few people who's
known to have made it past that site or gotten
to that site within the timeframe the alloted timeframe, and
actually was in communication with the people who were behind
Cicida thirty three to ZHO one. He still has no
idea exactly what they were doing or what they wanted,
(10:49):
but based on the interview that they subjected into and
some of the interactions he had with them, he guess
that they are some sort of hacker collective that is
very much interested in promoting internet privacy and internet freedom.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah, it sounds like they may have been looking for
code breakers, because they gave him a private test of
creating a decryption mechanism right, and he failed that, I guess,
or wasn't able to do it, so they, you know,
they got rid of him.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
I had the impression he blew it off.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Oh really, I saw that he didn't wasn't able to
do it.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, he just didn't deliver the goods. But I for
some reason, one of the readings I had about him,
it just made it sound like he was just like
he lost interest. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Oh interesting. So to be clear, I believe what we
just described was just that first puzzle, right, and you know,
we don't have the time to get into the rest
of the puzzles. And I don't think I think the
first two were solved. I don't think anyone ever solved
the third really before they permanently just removed every reference
to it. I think about a month after that final
(11:59):
puzzle was removed, they did post a message on four
Chan once again that said we have now found the
individuals we sought, sort of like that original message. Thus
our month long journey ends. You're undoubtedly wondering what it
is that we do. We are much like a think tank,
and that our primary focus is on researching and developing
techniques to aid the ideas we advocate liberty, privacy, security.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, and you could tell it was written by a
computer person because there's like very little punctuation and lots
of run ons and all that, so it seems legit.
It checks out.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
So who is it an SA or CIA or somebody.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
A lot of people say that that it was an
elaborate scheme to recruit, you know, cybersecurity people and hackers
from like the dark reaches of the Internet. Somebody said
that doesn't really make sense because they posted on four
Chan and this was the era of Snowden, so they
probably wouldn't have wanted people from four Chan at the time.
(12:58):
That's not true. Leaked in twenty thirteen, and the first
puzzle was twenty twelve, so it's possible it was the government.
Entirely possible, but there were some other aspects of the
whole contest that suggests it might have been otherwise, Although
some of this seems to have been purposely deliberately misleading, right,
(13:19):
Like there was a poster named Wind from Michigan and
she was kind of joining in like these this collaborations
on different sites until somebody figured out that she seemed
to deliberately be giving out misleading information. And then there
was a claim on Pastebin from a somebody who said
that they were an ex Cicada member, that they were
(13:41):
a military officer from a non English speaking country that
had been recruited by a superior and that he said
Cicado is actually a left hand path religion disguised as
a progressive scientific organization, and that it was comprised of
very smart people who weren't happy with the way the
world was going, so they wanted to trasform humanity into
the Nietzschean uber minch.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Well, I did see stuff about religion. I saw some
people positive that it was Julian Assange there. I mean,
there's all kinds of fun theories out there on who
it might have been. I think the one thing is
pretty clear it I feel really, really strongly that it
probably wasn't just some like somebody having fun doing some
(14:26):
cool scavenger hunt mystery puzzle thing on the internet, like
it seemed like it was probably some kind of legit recruitment.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I agree, But I think my money's on a hacker collective,
whether white hat or black hat, I don't know, but
a group of hackers.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Does that mean good guys are bad guys?
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (14:45):
I don't know all this terminology.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Well, I mean it's pretty straightforward. You know, you can
guess you just did.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
All right, there you go? Did I pacitize?
Speaker 2 (14:52):
You did? You made it onto the next riddle?
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Did you just text me a wooden duck?
Speaker 2 (14:58):
That's right? Just here, I say, we take a break.
Can we move on to the next mystery of the Internet?
How about that?
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Oh, tension builds.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Stuff you should know, Josh, And shock stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
All right, So mystery number two, and I'm shocked. I've
never heard of this one as a music guy. Had
you ever heard of it?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yes, I don't remember exactly where, but I'd never really
researched it until we started researching this. So for all
intents and purposes, not really.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Okay, we're gonna be talking about what's become known as
the most mysterious song on the Internet. And this was
a song that sometime between eighty two and eighty four
a guy named Darius s recorded in Germany on the
north coast, the coast of Germany.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Josh, there's no such thing. I mean, some sort of
landlocked border.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I think I think so reference to Old Bearer by
the way. But yeah, this guy did what all of
us did in the early eighties, as we would sit
around listen to the radio and record songs from the
radio onto our cassette deck so we could take them
on the road with us. And he was doing this.
Had a big mixtape of all these things from you know,
(16:29):
the people that you would expect to hear from in
nineteen eighty four, about twenty five of them. He wasn't
sure who the songs were, and it sounds like he
figured out who all of those songs came from. Save one.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, I think so, I don't. I think that was
the only one that he did never figure out. He
called those unknown ones his unknown pleasures. A joy Division
reference right, because most of this music was post punk
new waves. And this song, this most mysterious song on
the internet, is no exception. It sounds like a Rolling
Stone writer put it. It has a rigid beat and
(17:03):
dry monotone vocals and sounds like a synthpop hit you
would have heard in a dance club in the eighties,
which is true, like all of that is true, But
it also it has like a strong guitar riff like
early Joy Division. It kind of has a little bit
of that, but it's also more produced than that, and
(17:23):
the vocals, the lyrics and the vocals are incomprehensible except
in little snippets that you hear just enough that to me,
the fact that you can't fully understand what the person's
saying and it's so open to interpretation, I think that's
what starts to suck people in the most.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah. Probably so. The only thing I'll disagree with about
the Rolling Stone is that it sounded like a hit.
I don't think the song's very good.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Oh really, I find it I wouldn't say good, but
I find it definitely catchy.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
I mean, it's okay, and I have been walking around
singing it, and so it must be a little catchy.
But compared to the music of that era, and this
is just my dumb opinion, I think it sounds like
what I think it is, which was a fairly amateurish
Eastern Bloc person recording a song. Okay, it sounded a
(18:15):
little bit like, you know, the rest of the music
of the era.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
So the thing is, I don't know if we've said
entirely yet, no one on the planet seems to know
what the song is, what the name of the song is,
or who the artist is, who created this, what the
band is or the solo arts whoever, not a single
person on the planet, And you might be like, well,
you know, maybe you just haven't looked deep enough. Wrong.
(18:40):
People have looked into the depths of nineteen eighties Germany
using all sorts of different tools to analyze the song digitally.
I mean, like, people have really dug into this. And
the other thing about it that makes it so impressive
that it remains mysterious is that people have been searching
for who made this song since for twenty ten. Let's
(19:02):
tell them about that story, shall.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
We, Yeah, you mentioned using you know, modern tools. One
of the one of the mysteries from Darius was he
was like, I guess, in this German accent, which I'm
not gonna try good said, I'm not even sure you
know for sure that I taped it from this program
on the in day oar Heintz station in Germany, the
music for young people program that he listened to. He's like,
(19:25):
because I recorded stuff from other stations and other programs.
But they have since proven that proven that basically using
spectrogram analysis, they actually pinpointed it and said, no, there
was a ten kilohertz line that this station used as
like a modulation scheme that isn't found on other stations.
(19:49):
And they found that that modulation line in that song.
So there was like, at least we know it was
definitely from Inda our hes.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Right, So they figured that out. They also figured out
that it was at least from nineteen eighty four because
the technics deck is it technics are techniques.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
I always said techniques, but who knows? That may have
been wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Okay, the tape deck made by technics or techniques, you know,
the brand that he was using to record off the
radio wasn't made until nineteen eighty four, and you might think, well, okay,
it could be nineteen eighty five eighty six. The song,
the other songs that are on this tape, which are
known as Cassette four, were songs from XSTC The Cure.
(20:32):
I could not, for life of me find what songs
they were, but everybody seems to be satisfied that these
ecstasy songs and Cure songs and other songs that were
played on that were recorded on the same tape came
out in nineteen eighty four or right before nineteen eighty four.
So the guess is that this this was taped off
(20:52):
of the radio between nineteen eighty three and nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Yeah, and you know what, there's people that have time
on their hand in technological wherewith all that we don't have,
I'm calling on somebody somewhere to find and make a
playlist of cassette four and put it on your whatever
your favorite streamer is.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Yeah, I can't believe it's not out there.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Actually, I bet that's a bangin playlist.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I'll bet it is too. So back to the story,
the initial story of where this all came from. Darius,
he apparently was content with just putting a question mark
next to the song or in the song's place on
the track listing on the cassette, but his sister was
not satisfied with that. His sister, Lydia, who just goes
(21:40):
by Lydia h in this Rolling Stone interview, she always
really wanted to know who made this song. I don't
know if obsession is the right word, but it was
certainly something that drove her to some extent, and as
the Internet kind of blossomed and grew, I think in
starting in two thousand and seven, she started sharing it
on the Internet. There's a couple of sites that she
(22:02):
put it posted it on initially, one a Canadian site,
another German site that are kind of the crowdsource people
to say what song is this? And that was the
start of baffling internet users with this song.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, and that's where I would have expected an answer
if there was one. It's on YouTube. You can listen
to it. They people on YouTube and other places to
have tried to decipher the lyrics as best they can.
It seems pretty clear that it's probably a foreign or
at least, you know, a non American speaker foreign to us.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
But people are pretty sure it's in English.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
No, it's definitely in English. Okay, I mean, I think
it's clearly in English. Great are people debating that?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
No?
Speaker 3 (22:48):
I don't think. Okay, you can't get all the words.
You can get a lot of them. Like the Wind
is the title that a lot of people have put
on it, because you know, the very beginning of the song,
it's like the wind. But is it I don't even
know if it's saying like the wind. It almost sounds
like something again, but I can't even tell that part Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
So there's a bunch of names for the song, which
the official generic name for it is TMS the Mysterious
Song or the most Mysterious song on the Internet, but
people call it blind the Wind, locked away. Some people
think that's what he's saying instead of like the wind.
I can hear it actually, as a matter of fact,
(23:31):
and I can't remember what the line is, but there's
other lines in there that make it sound like he
is talking about being locked up. Check it in, check
it out, take it in, take it out, disco woman.
There's a lot of different names for this song based
on what people think this guy is saying, because no
(23:51):
one can say what the lyrics are. No one knows.
You can't do it, and it's beware there because there's
madness that way. If you really start paying attention and
trying to figure out what the lyrics are, friend, you
are going to end up with a new hobby you
may or may not want.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Yeah, they've gotten in touch with that original DJ who said,
you know, I don't know what that song was. I
certainly don't remember playing it, no recollection of it whatsoever.
This was a time, obviously, when Germany was split in
half or maybe not technically half by the Cold War,
(24:29):
and you know, the DJ DJs were like, you know,
we would get like tapes thrown over the wall at
us that we didn't even know what they were, but
they were they were just music that people wanted us
to hear and play. Here's my theory, Okay, Ockham's Razor Man.
It's a song that someone made and they died, and
no one knew they made it.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I guess that is probably the simplest solution. Yes, it's
just no one, no one knowing that that person made,
no one recognizing that person's voice. I mean, this is widespread, Yeah,
and it's possible just the right person hasn't heard it yet.
I don't know, but I kind of tend to agree
(25:11):
with you. I think that's probably what happened. It was
an obscure East German or Eastern Bloc musician who managed
to get their tape out. And I mean that's not unprecedented.
Tapes went both ways through the Iron Curtain during the
Cold War. There's a really great documentary called Chuck Norris
Versus Communism that came out in twenty fifteen, and it's
(25:33):
about how people smuggling in American action movies into Romania.
They think essentially led to the downfall of Nikolai Chuchescu
and his regime because people kind of saw how life
could be. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Yeah? Did Chuck Norris win?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah? He won because there's no more communism in Romania
as far as I know.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
Do you know what would be great? I mean, I'm
fifty three years old, I'm in way into music, and
I've gone down some rabbit holes about music. I had
never heard of this before this week. Like, you know,
maybe the person who made it literally has never heard
this whole mystery. In that year, someone's like, hey, that
was me.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
I know. I think that a lot of people would
be really sad and when that happened.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Yeah, then just keep it to yourself, buddy. If that's
the case, everyone likes a mystery a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So, let's talk about a couple of couple more things
that people have done for this investigation. I mean, you
said spectography, right, am I saying that correctly?
Speaker 3 (26:34):
I don't know spectrograph Yeah, spectrography.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
I think so it sounds right, jeez. So in addition
to that people, and in addition to getting in touch
with Paul Baskerville, the DJ who hosted that show in
nineteen eighty four. People have gotten in touch with the
archivist at that radio station and gotten a full list
of playlists for every single episod of that radio show.
(27:01):
This song does not turn up on it. Don't forget, though.
They've proven that it was played on this radio station.
So they started looking at playlists for other radio shows.
They've gotten a substantial number of them. Still hasn't turned
up on any playlist anything that could be this song.
And then someone else essentially pinned the song in between
nineteen eighty three and nineteen eighty four because they believe
(27:24):
that the synthesizer that was used was a specific type
of Yamaha a DX seven that was not available until
nineteen eighty three. In that nuts that people have done all.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
This, That one's the most believable because that's just how
keyboard nerds are.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
But sure, yeah, I just think that's super cool that
people have just tried all of this different stuff and
it still is just not budging. It will not budge.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Yeah. And again, if that guy's out there, just you know,
let that be your own little secret. And maybe that's
the case. Maybe this person knows this and they just
think this is awesome. And you know who knows that's
why it's a great mystery.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
His friends and family are like, why are you always
tittering to yourself? It's so weird?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Why are you talking about the Wind?
Speaker 2 (28:11):
So if you haven't heard the song, it's worth going
to check out. Just look up the most mysterious song
on the Internet and you will find it, for sure,
although you can also look up like the Wind and
mysterious and all that stuff and it'll turn it up.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
Yeah, And to be clear, I don't think it's like
a bad song. I just think it's not like is
it didn't become a big hit for a reason.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, I think hit is a little overly generous too.
I'm with you. But you could still have turned it
at like an eighties club on like bish wave night,
for sure.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Yeah, there was plenty of worse music than this then.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Or sure, but there was also a lot of really
good music too, like the Wind.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
A Way Disco Girl.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Okay, well, I think we reached the end of the
most Mysterious song on the Internet. That our second of
our three mysteries of the Internet, And we'll take a
message break we'll come back and we will reveal the
third after this stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
You should know, Josh and shock stuff. You should know.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
We're back, and you know, dude, this could be a
whole other show for us. Just three mysteries per week,
fifteen minutes of pop.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
You like that, huh? I don't know.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
It's kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Careful way you say this, Do you have time on
your hands like that?
Speaker 3 (29:47):
No? No, no, I quit my other show for a reason.
You as well.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
We need to edit that part out, man. I don't
want the wrong people to hear that and be like, hey,
that's a great idea.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
All right, take it away, my friend.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Oh okay, here we got. We're talking about what, in
my opinion, is one of the top three great mysteries
of the Internet. Yeah, I think I agree, the Mystery
of John Tider. I believe that's how it's pronounced. I've
only ever seen it written down. I've never heard anybody
say it out loud. But I've heard that name for
a long time. Because this is an ancient Internet mystery,
(30:20):
and as a matter of fact, it turns out it
seems to pre date essentially the Internet, or at the
very least it was. It finds its origin off the
Internet through fax machines and the radio no less.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah, and this is another one that a lot of
people have gotten really into. Like I went on Reddit
and was kind of looking at some stuff, and it
broke my brain such that I was like, all right,
we're gonna we're gonna do our best to give a
little overview here.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Yeah, I think something about the the most mysterious song
on the Internet. It seems far more wholesome and less
dark for some reason, getting sucked into the John Tider
mystery seems like you could really just go crazy essentially.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Well, the first one was either like I six or CIA,
this one is possible time traveler in Civil war, and
the middle one was like a cool synthpop hit.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Yeah, so let's just tell him a little bit about
John Tighter. Okay. John Tighter is a Internet based that
no one's ever seen or spoken to him in real
life poster who claimed to be a time traveler from
the year twenty thirty six in America, an America that
had been racked, like you said, by civil war that
(31:33):
had gone on for a while but was ended by
World War three, which presumably that brought America together again
and that it seems like the American economy has completely
collapsed and everybody's much more family and local community centered.
Andy said that the average day in the life in
twenty thirty six outside Tampa, Florida, where he's from, is
(31:55):
like a day on the farm, and you might be like, wow,
that's pretty descriptive. That is the tip of the iceberg
of the information that John tier willingly gave out as
a time traveler on the Internet starting in nineteen ninety
seven or eight, and then in two thousand again.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
Yeah, he said the US had been divided into five
zones and that time travel had been invented, had been
invented two years previous, in twenty thirty four. But let's
back up to where this started, because it all started in,
like you said, pre internet, in a very kind of
unlikely way, I think, by somebody sending a couple of
(32:34):
faxes to a radio show Art Bells Coast to Coast
AM and this was read on the air, and then
a couple of years later posted basically the same thing
online on the Time Travel Institute site, which is a
site that's been around since ninety seven dedicated to temporal sciences,
(32:57):
and the user's name was time travel under scre or zero.
So like we said, time traveler from the future and
started saying things like, you know, there were six components
to the time machine. That was an onoard or on
board caesium clocks, twin micro singularities which are tiny, very
(33:19):
tiny black holes, that he traveled using a stationary mass
temporal displacement unit powered by two topspin dual positive singularities,
producing a typical offset tiplar sinusoid. And it was put
in the back of a sixty six corvette. Yeah, very
back to the part that gets me very back to
(33:41):
the future.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
The thing about John Tier and the posts that he
posted are that this stuff that is this what sounds
like gibberish is actually not at all made up. For example,
a tiplar sinusoid refers to a theoretical type of time
travel that was proposed in the seventies by physicists named
Frank Tipler, and he essentially figured out mathematically that if
(34:05):
you could take two huge masses many times denser than
the sun, say two black holes, and pull them out,
spaghettify them essentially, and then spin them really fast like
billions of rotations a second, you would what you would
do is essentially pull open space time and open essentially
(34:26):
a portal to somewhere in the future, possibly somewhere in
the past, possibly galaxies away from where you started. And
again this is hypothetical theoretical, but this is not something
that the average person is walking around in their head
like that. The Tiplar sinusoid exists. So I'm just impressed that.
And that's just another example where if you put all
(34:48):
this stuff together and all of the how different and
complementary and very infrequently contradictory. The the information that John
tier gave out was it's I see how some people
who believe that time travel is possible consider John Tighter
an actual time traveler. Okay, I don't, but I could
(35:13):
see how people do. It's just so convincing, Like the
stuff he says is so convincing, and he seems to
have no agenda whatsoever. That's the other thing.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
I'm not so sure about that part. But he would
go on to talk you know again, you know, he
was a US soldier in Tampa living on a river
in a treehouse, and said that he was there on
an official mission. He was supposed to he was, you know,
sent back in time by his I guess the army
(35:45):
or the US government. But he stopped off for a
personal personal reasons in two thousand, basically to get family
pictures that were lost during the Civil War, mementos, to
visit his family, that kind of thing, right, But the
official mission that he was sent back for, supposedly by
the federal government, was to go back to Minnesota in
(36:06):
nineteen seventy five to get an IBM fifty one hundred,
which was the first portable computer. And his grandfather supposedly
worked on developing this thing, and so that's why he
was sent back to get this computer so they could
debug legacy computer programs that they you know, they were
(36:27):
obsolete and they couldn't work with anymore because they didn't
have this old working computer.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Right, and what the So that's cool, that's an obscure computer. Again,
most people aren't walking around with awareness that the IBM
fifty one hundred ever existed. But even more than that,
John Tiger said that the reason they wanted a fifty
one hundred is because it had a specific unique component
to it. It apparently could run other programs written for
(36:52):
like those huge mainframes, and that that was the reason
they needed it in the future and that IBM had
actually kept us quiet. And it turns out that's true.
The I think the Rochester, Minnesota Post Bulletin got in
touch with one of their local residents who worked on
the IBM fifty one hundred in the mid seventies, who confirmed, like,
that's absolutely true. There was this little quirk that was
(37:16):
peculiar to the fifty one hundred, and IBM did not
publicize this at all. So it's just so bizarre that
this person knew that and that that was the reason
that they were sent back into the future. I mean,
come on, dude, Like, think about how creative that is
if the guy's just a hoaxter.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Yeah. So he goes on to and this is a
very key thing is he went on to say, by
the way, the mini World's theory of physics is correct,
which means that you know, for every possible different outcome,
the universe splits into different versions to accommodate those outcomes.
(37:56):
He's like, that's all true. So the fact that I'm
saying he didn't say this part, but the fact that
he talks about the George W. Bush election sewing discord
and there being an uprising in a civil war in
the two thousands. The fact that none of that happened,
he said, that's just because that I went back in
(38:17):
time and changed the outcome. So basically, anything I say,
you can't prove wrong.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
That's one part of it. Yes, he was saying, like,
because his very presence would change it, and that he
came from a different timestream himself. The other implication of
that is that he can't possibly create a paradox. Even
going and visiting his family and I read his three
year old self in two thousand would not create a
(38:44):
paradox because he comes from a different timestream, did not
exist in this timestream until he hopped over to it,
So there's no paradox for him being there and meeting
him himself as a younger kid. Right again, Really genius
details that. So I feel like I'm coming off like
I'm trying to convince listeners to believe that this is real.
(39:06):
That's not the case. If you do believe it's real, great.
I'm just so thoroughly impressed with the creativity behind every
component and facet of what John Tyder said that it's
just I'm just in awe agog even you could say.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
So as the thing gained steam over the years, he
finally eventually made a post in March two thousand and
one that said, this is you know, the last post
I'm going back to twenty thirty six, Smell you later,
And he wrote this big, long, kind of fairly deep
philosophical take on what he learned and what he saw,
(39:48):
and also the fact that he had already been talking
about the fact that like, by the way, people in
the future don't think you're too great, and that you
guys haven't been doing the right things and you kind
of screwed everything up for the future. So he kind
of writes this kind of nice long thing at the end,
(40:09):
which was just ended with farewell John. You know, there's
a lot of symbolism going on, Like I encourage people
to read it in full because it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
It is. It is very cool, But he basically says, like,
here's why I'm leaving and why I won't be back
or recommend anybody come back here either, because you guys
don't take care of one another. Like he talked about
how people who with stranded on the side of the
road with car trouble, people just drive past him. Nobody stops,
and he asked his family that he was visiting why
(40:36):
people don't stop, and they were saying, it's too dangerous
to stop and pick somebody up. You never know if
they're going to kill you. And they need to learn
the lesson about making sure you don't run out of
gas in the first place. And he's just like a
gast at this at how people treat one another in
America in the early two thousands, and in that farewell thing,
(40:57):
he said, make sure you keep a gas can with
you for when your car dies on the side of
the road. And I'm going back to this time and
place where you know, community and family is absolutely everything.
A utopia if you will a bit, But he didn't
talk it up like a utopia. It sounded like it
was probably you or I would consider it hard living,
(41:18):
but to him, it was fastly superior to the kind
of lifestyle that we live pre Civil War here in
the United States in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Yeah, So this is one that a lot of people
have tried to solve over the years. I feel like
it's been solved. Yea personally, signs you know, were there
were people that got on the web and started I'm
looking at metadata, and like, what's it called when you
can pinpoint where something came from? Oh, I can't think
(41:53):
of it now, a pinpointing. No, something to deal with
your computer and where where it was posting from anyway. Yeah,
but there's another word for it. I know this is
people are just yelling at me. But long story short,
both the metadata and this method of pinpointing that a
(42:15):
website called hoax Hunter conducted this investigation pointed to this
area of Florida in both cases, so that really narrowed
it down. And then I believe they also found a
registration to like an LLC or company with the word
Tighter in it that all it had was a PO
box from that same area of Florida. And so they
(42:39):
basically think that it is. There are three brothers, the
Haber brothers. For my money, it's Larry or his younger
brother John, and not the older I think older brother,
Maury Haber.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yeah, so Larry Haber exists, Maury Haber exists. I've seen
that John Haber does not exist. But the Habers do
seem they certainly have something to do with this, because,
like you said, they run the John Tighter Foundation and
Larry Haber claims to be the legal representative of k Tighter,
John Tighter's mother. She doesn't seem to exist either. And
(43:15):
it's possible the whole thing was just a hoax carried
out by these guys. Totally possible. But what's interesting is
I turned up another article that interviews in part a
guy named Joseph Matheny who's a multi media artist, who said,
we were the ones who started this whole thing by
sending those facts to art Bell, and we stopped after that,
(43:36):
and apparently some coast to coast fans took up the
mantle and carried it on from there a couple of
years later. So two groups that weren't communicating or working
with one another were inadvertently collaborating, or one was collaborating
with the other later on to create this whole hoax
that was the John Tider mystery.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Now where did you see that the youngest brother didn't exist?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Well, I know that Larry Haber. I believe it was
Larry who said I don't have a brother John. And
I think I saw somewhere else that John is not real,
that there's not a Haber.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Interesting because I saw stuff quotes from John. But like
I think it's one of those things where you can't
trust anything you're reading at this.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Point exactly one, because again Larry Haber is saying that
he represents Kay Tighter, and Kay Tighter doesn't seem to exist.
Like there's a lot of people. Again, people have not
met these people. Everything has been on the internet, so
it's there's no telling who is involved, who isn't involved,
who's real, who's not real. It's fascinating in that regard.
(44:44):
So there's multi layers to what makes this whole mystery
just so great.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
Yeah, well, I mean they're on the internet, those two guys.
I mean, at least the two guys are. Yeah, and
like one of them is a very well to do
business person, and I don't know, it's very interesting.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Yeah, the Habers definitely exist, Larry and Maury, possibly John,
but I saw he doesn't, right, I understand. Okay, Well, no,
I was wrapping it up for everybody else, I know,
you know, gotcha. I think that's it, right, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
I got nothing else, I mean but a deep sense
of unfulfilled you know podcast duty edom.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Right, I'm with you on that. Since Chuck said duty edom,
of course, that means he's just Unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
I'm gonna call this tomato fun fact from Brian Kreebol
or maybe it's Crybol. In Germany it would be Kreebel,
but who knows. Hey, guys, In this also episode, you
mentioned that when Europeans first encountered tomatoes, they thought they
were deadly because they remember the night Shade family. I
forget where I learned this, but this idea was initially
fueled because some of them were actually killed by eating tomatoes. However,
(45:54):
it was not the tomatoes that killed them. They were
eating them off lead plates, and the acid from the
tomatoes does all some of the lead. Jesus then consumed
along with the tomatoes, thus killing some. This is what
led to the belief that tomatoes were poisonous and persisted
throughout Europe for a little while. One little bit of
(46:14):
hubris for a group that thought they knew everything there
was to know and that they were a step above
the indigenous communities.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Burn Who is that from?
Speaker 3 (46:25):
That was from Brian.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Brian, That's awesome, Thank you very much. I've definitely never
heard that one, so thanks for filling that out for us.
And if you want to fill something out for us,
like Brian did. You can send it via email to
wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send
it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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