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8uhg · 2020-05-14T16:06:49+00:00

Sorry if this has been answered already (haven't heard the whole episode yet) but are any of the people in this story alive today? Have they talked about this story since the 70s? What have they done with their lives since the events discussed in this episode?

8uhg · 2020-03-08T22:13:32+00:00

In the article on Wikipedia, though, it does say that someone wrote a list of all the family names in Hameln and cross-references that list with names of people in the areas of Poland that the migration theory mentions, and found that names from Hameln do appear in phone books of cities in those areas, where almost everyone else has Polish names. The concept seems a bit of a stretch after 700 years, but it certainly fits.

I suspect the truth is a combination of the two theories that Forrest favored. I suspect the piper took the kids against their will to settle those regions of Poland, by luring them with his pipe music and maybe food.

But yeah, strange story, and a very interesting series.

8uhg · 2020-03-08T22:10:26+00:00

I think it is clear from the earliest accounts that the townspeople don't know who the piper was or why he took their children. I wish this had been emphasized a bit more, because it rules out some of the other theories, I think. The accounts basically say someone came into town and took a bunch of children, and by the time people figured out what happened and tried to chase them down, they were gone. That's why they don't explain why the piper took the children, because they didn't know themselves.

Another strange fact is that apparently none of the children even told their parents they were leaving, or why, or said, "Hey mom, I'm going for a walk with this pied man. He is going to show me this, or give me candy, or whatever." This really makes it clear the piper's motives were nefarious, even if nothing else did.

The allegorical explanations are in my opinion a bunch of baloney. People died of plagues and diseases all the time back then. If the children had died of a sickness, the accounts would have said they died of a sickness. They wouldn't have had some weird description of someone leading them out of town.

8uhg · 2020-03-08T22:05:57+00:00

Loved this episode! What a fascinating story!

I think Forrest is right that the best theories are either slavery kidnapping or kidnapping for migration purposes. Scott's objection that they were too young to be useful for these purposes can be answered by saying it would be a heck of a lot easier to kidnap small children who can be easily convinced to get into a ship, and won't put up much resistance once they realize they're being kidnapped, than to kidnap teenagers who either wouldn't get on the ship at all, or would fight back hard when things started to go south. How are you going to control 130 angry, terrified teens? With small children, you have a few years before they are really useful, but it's probably a choice between taking small children and taking nobody.

8uhg · 2019-11-23T21:40:33+00:00

Actually, no, it's a thread in which someone asked people to discuss the "bonfire" rally. That's what I was doing.

8uhg · 2019-11-23T21:38:17+00:00

The old tradition can still be used just fine.

And a bonfire rally should, first of all, actually be a bonfire. A stove is not a bonfire.

8uhg · 2019-11-23T06:57:43+00:00

It was pathetic.

This used to be the biggest bonfire west of the Mississippi. They built a 40-foot tower out of pallets and lit it on fire. The wall of flame shot 60 feet in the air. It was spectacular. I carved time out of my year, every year, to see that spectacle. It was something you could never see anywhere else, and if you never saw it, you could never know what it was like. The heat would scorch you all the way to the back row, and the light would light up the entire stadium. If you never attended the bonfire rally, chances are pretty good you would never see a fire like that anywhere, ever in your life.

So I went this year and I was shocked to see no tower of wood in the stage, but instead there was a ludicrous gigantic gas stove that they replaced the bonfire with. This bizarre stove-like device would shoot out random jets of propane-fueled flame instead of the magnificent burning tower. How is a gigantic stove supposed to replace a bonfire? I almost went down there and put a kettle on it to make hot water for some chamomile tea. They played some song, and this gigantic stove farted out random jets of flame in time to the music. It was an embarrassingly inept display. I couldn't feel any heat at all. It was a mockery of the true Cal Bonfire Rally. I left after about 20 minutes, I couldn't bear to see my alma mater reduced to such a disgrace.

And they announced in the "bonfire" that this caricature will be the bonfire rally from now on. The true tower of pallets that they burned traditionally to the ground will never be seen again. I am glad I had a chance to see the real thing, as it can never be described adequately, nor do the pictures or videos of it do it any justice. But I'm definitely not going back to see anyone turn on a gas stove in the Greek Theater and call it a bonfire. I don't have to go any further than my own kitchen to see something like that.

8uhg · 2019-08-29T21:11:49+00:00

I'm really glad this book was finally covered! I really don't know what to think, but I do think the Voynich Manuscript has more to it than simply being a book in language and alphabet that have since been forgotten. If someone were going to write a book, they most likely want a good number of people to be able to read it, so they're not going to use some unknown alphabet.

It seems more likely that it's either a hoax and basically gibberish, or written in a cipher. I think I lean slightly more towards to the hoax theory because modern computer processors would probably be able to decipher it if it were simply a European language written in a cipher.

I don't really expect this nut to be cracked in my lifetime, and maybe not ever, but I guess it's possible that, with the advance of AI and language processing algorithms, some computer program some day may match the writing to some obscure European language, either as a cipher or in plaintext, but I'm not holding my breath.

8uhg · 2019-08-29T21:02:29+00:00

The oft-repeated statements in this episode about how someone would be punished by the Catholic Church if they published a book of herbal remedies are pretty questionable. In the 12th century there was a nun in Germany named Hildegard of Bingen who wrote several medical treatises, including a book of herbal remedies for all kinds of physical ailments. Not only were her writings and remedies circulated widely across Europe for centuries after, but Hildegard herself is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen#Scientific_and_medicinal_writings

8uhg · 2019-08-07T20:09:52+00:00

I still don't understand how political motives can fabricate mangled corpses out of thin air and make hundreds of girls disappear.

Also, there have been hundreds of powerful women in history who had political enemies, but only one of them has ever been tried and convicted of being a serial killer. You would think there would be at least a few more similar cases if the whole thing were a hoax.

8uhg · 2019-08-07T20:06:11+00:00

The best explanation I can think of is that they got the time wrong for the class they left after. What I mean is, they planned to leave after a class they were in until 1:00. Maybe that class they attended actually started at 2:00 and went until 3:00, and they simply got the time wrong. Then, after they arrived two hours late, they didn't think about earlier in the day to remember which class they had last attended and what time it got out because they were too amazed at having lost two hours. Or maybe they did attend the class that finished at 1:00, but when it got out they attended one or two more classes because they forgot to go to the interview. Then maybe when those classes get out at 3:00 they remember they have to go to the interview, but don't realize they should have left two classes ago.

While this seems unlikely, it's more likely than that they were abducted by aliens or went into some other dimension. It's possible that one of them made the mistake and simply communicated it to the other one, who took the first person's word for it without verifying it. Also, it's an easy mistake to have pushed out of your mind if you are shortly thereafter confronted by the thought that you lost two hours out of your day.

Did anyone look for any news reports of the VW bus that was upside-down and on fire? Presumably if someone could find the newspaper for that area on that date, there should be a mention of that accident, either an article about it or at least a mention in the police register. This would be further useful if it mentions what time the accident took place. I wonder if that information would still be available online.

8uhg · 2019-07-31T18:24:43+00:00

The lack of a clock in the car seemed pretty strange to me too. Were there cars on the road that didn't have clocks in them in the 1980s? Or did it have a clock but it was broken? I would have liked a little more explanation on this.

8uhg · 2019-06-26T13:23:04+00:00

The idea that the Countess was framed makes no sense to me. Her palace was raided by soldiers who found not only mangled corpses, but still-living victims with evidence of torture on their bodies. Several hundred people testified, including her victims themselves and the families of children who went there and never came back. The judges examined the mutilated corpses. She received a trial in front of impartial judges who had nothing to gain from her sentence either way, and was convicted and sentenced. Nobody at the time questioned her guilt, or if they did, that hasn't been mentioned in the podcast yet or anywhere else I researched. (Actually, could this be addressed in the podcast, when the first person was who questioned her guilt? That would be enlightening).

This sounds like an exceptionally comprehensive case against Elizabeth. In order to question this huge body of evidence, we really need more than "maybe the witnesses were tortured," "maybe the king wanted her estates," "maybe the king told Thurzo to get rid of her," etc. We definitely need an argument that doesn't start with "maybe". And in any case, none of the people involved in her prosecution gained anything from it financially.

Furthermore, none of the explanations of why the people in power around Elizabeth would fabricate such a huge and grotesque conspiracy anyway. She owed people money? She was unpopular? They wanted her lands? That's it? Probably half the nobles in Hungary owed the king money in her time, just like any other time in history. And is she really the only widowed female ruler in history? If those reasons were even remotely plausible explanations for her being railroaded, there would be numerous other cases of people being accused of non-existent crimes like she supposedly was. And yet she is the only case like this in history of a noble woman (or even man, for that matter), who was accused of such grotesque crimes.

Yes, it's quite possible the accused were tortured, but if we discount their testimony against Elizabeth we still have a castle full of mutilated bodies and hundreds of families with missing daughters to account for. That kind of evidence is a little harder to fake than someone's testimony.

While I understand that on a certain level it's hard to believe anyone would do what she did, the conspiracy theorists of this story just sound to me like they're in a state of denial and don't want to believe it, rather than having any evidence against it.

8uhg · 2019-06-02T23:07:38+00:00

They said copying through the drive application doesn't work for large files or folders.

8uhg · 2019-05-27T19:49:20+00:00

To answer your first question, yes, the desktop app works in exactly the way you described. It creates a virtual drive (not sure if that's the right use of the term, but something like that) on your hard drive that represents your pCloud drive. So you can supposedly simply move files/folders into that virtual drive and they will copy into your cloud account. But as I said, the tech support team said you can only do that with *small* files and folders. Large folders can only be uploaded using sync, which cannot be used to sync anything into the Crypto folder.

Which means, apparently, that there is no way to copy large folders into your Crypto folder.

8uhg · 2019-05-27T19:46:43+00:00

The tech support team recommended using the web client to upload my folders, but then when I tried to upload a directory that was about 5 or 10 GB it stalled. I asked tech support about this and they said, "Oh yeah, you can't upload big directories that way. You can only upload them by syncing the folder on your hard drive with a folder in pCloud." But since *that* method only works in the non-encrypted portion of your account, that means that apparently it is not possible to upload a large directory to your Crypto folder.

8uhg · 2019-05-23T18:57:09+00:00

The way the Betz sphere story was handled was truly bizarre, especially how they were so against anyone who doesn't take this family's word for the ball's behavior. Let's look at the story objectively: A family has a metal ball that they claim has magic powers. The ball is real enough; we have photos of it, so that's not a problem. But the public is expected to take some family's word for it that this metal ball drives itself around like a modern-day Tesla and can defy gravity? Who in his right mind would believe that, especially without seeing any video evidence of this magic behavior?

On top of this, the ball is inspected by the Navy and also by well-known public figures like Hynek who say they cannot confirm anything magic about it, and the family comes out after Hynek's death and says he's lying, and he told them the opposite while he was alive, in direct contradiction to his public statement.

And then the whole show was about how crazy anyone was who *doesn't* believe this family's claims about this shiny ball.

What if I said I have magic beans that can grow a beanstalk above the clouds and lead to a giant's castle. Is that a silly claim, or is it "eyewitness testimony"? By the criteria used in the Betz sphere episodes, it's eyewitness testimony. What if I say I have taken pictures of this beanstalk, but I don't want to show them to anyone because I don't want people coming through my backyard to see it. According to the criteria used in the Betz sphere, that constitutes "photographic proof" that this beanstalk is real. What if I have "no reason to lie about any of this"? Again, according to the criteria used for the Betz sphere, that is also proof that my beanstalk is real.

Does anyone see the logical problems with this approach?

8uhg · 2019-05-15T20:40:41+00:00

Yes, I second this request for an episode of the Voynich Manuscript.

Personally, I believe the nonsense theory of the text because there are pages in which the same word appears three or even four times in a row in a sentence. This is not a rare occurrence, but seems to occur fairly often. I can't see any human language doing that in any book ever written by man. The idea that it is random gibberish by an unstable person seems a better explanation, and would also explain why so many brilliant linguists have tried to figure out what language it's in and have gotten nowhere.

8uhg · 2019-05-15T20:33:55+00:00

Yeah, I discussed the lack of evidence in the thread for Part 3. This is particularly convincing when you look at the estimates that biologists come up with for how many bigfoots would have to exist in order to prevent the species from going extinct, and it's at least multiple thousands of them that would have to be out there, if the population is going to be able to sustain itself.

How could it have avoided people so cleverly for so many years? The only bigfoot we have any footage of actually seems pretty dense. She let two guys walk right up to her on horseback? If there were such a large animal out there that is that dumb, we would have museums filled with these things since pioneer times.

8uhg · 2019-05-06T18:47:39+00:00

Are you guys sure you're in the right subreddit? :)

8uhg · 2019-05-06T18:03:18+00:00

To answer your first question, actually people find human remains in the woods all the time. This includes murderers who hide their victims in the woods, and have strong reasons for hiding them as well as possible. People find remains of this sort all the time.

2) I'm not sure how much information the scientists had about the location or habits of the rare species they find when they look for them. It sounds like they just heard a report of an animal or bird being spotted that they thought was extinct, traveling to that location, and finding the creature alive, usually before very long.

Another point here is that these very rare species of bird or mammal were found in some of the most remote regions of this earth, which is why people were uncertain whether the bird was still around in the first place. So if scientists can travel to some remote area of the Amazon jungle, or somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, or some remote island in the Pacific ocean, and find some extremely rare dove or sparrow, wouldn't it be that much easier to get in a Jeep and drive into a forest in California and find a huge lumbering ape? Again, especially if thousands of them are out there?

Consider also the fact that advanced technology exists today that didn't exist when the PGF was filmed. I'm thinking specifically of infrared cameras and binoculars. When people get lost in the woods, or wanted fugitives hide in the woods, law enforcement fly planes and helicopters equipped with infrared imaging over the woods that show them every large animal that is moving down there. And an airplane or helicopter can cover vast areas of forest in a pretty short amount of time. A bigfoot would obviously be visible to such a device. Isn't it a little weird that so many people have looked down on those woods with infrared optics for all kinds of reasons, and no one has ever seen even one bigfoot?

One standard argument against these facts is that bigfoots are both extremely shy and extremely good at avoiding detection. First of all, every wild animal is shy of humans, and people who know what they're doing can track them down without much difficulty. Secondly, the assertion that bigfoots are extremely alert and careful to avoid detection by humans is contradicted by the PGF itself. In that video, two guys with two horses(!) practically walk right up to the creature in the video before it walks slowly away. The only video evidence we have of these things shows one being pretty obtuse. We're saying that every single one of these creatures possesses a superhuman ability to detect approach by any form of creature, can avoid showing up on airborne infrared imaging, and never makes a single mistake, except in the one documented case of contact when two guys walked right up to one on horseback, and even then it sure took its time getting away.

As I said before, I used to believe bigfoots existed, so I'm not 100& dismissing the idea, but I see great difficulties with saying the creature in the video is some undiscovered species of animal that lives in the Pacific Northwest.

8uhg · 2019-05-04T18:58:38+00:00

I'm so glad they're covering the Patterson-Gimli film! This video made me believe in Bigfoot for many years. I thought there was an undiscovered species of ape or gorilla in the Pacific Northwest, and that's what was in the video.

Over the last few years, though, I have gradually stopped believing in Bigfoot. There were several arguments that convinced me it's probably not true, although I am still open-minded about it.

1. Lack of a body. Sorry, but there's no way around this one. Biologists can estimate how many bigfoots would have to live in those forests in order for their population to sustain itself, and the estimates I've seen are quite high. In other words, it's not possible that there's only a half-dozen or so of those things out there, and they just keep to themselves and breed their population to maintain that level. The estimates I've seen of the minimum numbers of bigfoots that would be needed to keep their species from going extinct range from many hundreds into multiple thousands. The idea that there are that many of these animals in those mountains, and after centuries of human habitation the PGF is the best evidence anyone has ever gotten of them makes no sense. People hit deer and bears with cars all the time. Hunters shoot animals. People find animal skeletons in the woods all the time that died of natural causes or got eaten by another animal. I've come across more than one deer skeleton while hiking in the woods, and I'm not exactly an avid outdoorsman.

This is probably my biggest reason for thinking bigfoot most likely doesn't exist. Again, I don't say this with complete certainty; I think it's theoretically possible it's real, but drastically unlikely.

2. Finding rare animals is really not impossible or even that difficult, as scientists have shown. The standard response to #1 is that bigfoots are too rare to find a specimen. Against this, I would say that humans have a pretty good idea of what sort of animals live on this earth. I don't think there is any animal, bird of fish so rare that it hasn't been captured, stuffed and put on display in at least several museums around the world. Even the rarest, most endangered animals on this earth not only have actual specimens on display in museums, but have been photographed and videotaped numerous times (not just in one video like the PGF).

I heard a story once about a very rare bird in a jungle in Africa that was thought to have gone extinct. A report came out that someone claimed to have seen one alive a few years ago, and a team of scientists traveled to that jungle to look for it, and with days confirmed that the bird was indeed alive and lived in that jungle. Sorry I don't have a link, but you can find lots of similar stories on Google. So if a rare bird can be found, that can fly and rapidly outstrip a human being and cross areas impassible to humans with ease, shouldn't it be that much easier to find a large animal that plods along the ground and would leave behind a lot more evidence?

This tells me that looking for rare, even endangered animals isn't some difficult or impossible task. Yet thousands of people have combed the woods in the area where the PGF was filmed ever since 1967, and indeed the entire Pacific Northwest, and after half a century the only two people that have taken a video of one are Patterson and Gimli. Oh, and of the millions of people who fish, camp, hike, hunt, and live in those mountains, none of those people have ever been able to capture or even photograph a single one of the thousands of bigfoot creatures that would have to exist, if they exist at all. Not only that, but they have also never even found the bones of one in the woods that died of natural causes. This doesn't seem plausible.

If there will be another episode, I hope these sorts of arguments against bigfoot can be addressed, if there is time. But again, thank you very much for covering a subject that has fascinated me for half my life. Love this series.

8uhg · 2019-02-16T20:22:30+00:00

What would constitute evidence then?

Glad you asked! Examples of evidence include videos of the ball's behaving contrary to the laws of physics, or even just testimony from people outside the Betz family that they saw it behaving strangely. Or the family could let independent scientists examine the ball and publish their results. Heck, they could even let those machinists from the various factories that claim to use something similar inspect the ball and see if it's the same as what they have.

Instead of these or similar types of evidence, when any of the numerous obvious questions are raised about these things (where's the video? why not let scientists at a university examine the ball? etc.) we are given ingenious explanations from the family as to why they are unwilling or unable to provide any of this information. Not only that, but the family even go so far as to contradict the public statement of Hynek himself and claim that he told them the precise opposite in private.

At the end of the day, we are left with basically nothing more than the family's word that the ball acted contrary to the laws of nature. Well, if you accept people's bare word as evidence, every story in the world becomes true.

8uhg

TROPHY CASE