Boo_ep603

[TRANSCRIPT]
0:00:00 - (Jethro): World War I was in full swing in 1916. And that's a happy thought.
0:00:07 - (Kat): Yeah.
0:00:08 - (Jethro): The Germans had rolled out a new, terrifying, state of the art weapon in the uboat. Now, that's weird, because I always thought the U boat was, like, a World War II thing, but. But no, it actually debuted in World War I.
0:00:20 - (Kat): Okay.
0:00:21 - (Jethro): The uboat was an abbreviation for the name Untra sibut under Seaboat, which literally means exactly that. And these monsters trolled the ocean, wreaking havoc in the Atlantic. On September 5, 1914, the HMS pathfinder was sunk by SMU 21. The Pathfinder became the very first ship to be sunk by a submarine using a self propelled torpedo.
0:00:46 - (Kat): So far, I'm confused about why you think I would like this story.
0:00:51 - (Jethro): Well, hopefully, your attitude will change as I get into this a little bit more.
0:00:55 - (Kat): Okay. I know that you love war.
0:00:57 - (Jethro): I love history. We've discussed this, and that includes military history. Of course.
0:01:04 - (Kat): I won't get into it, but I think it's very interesting that you're talking about weaponry. Okay.
0:01:09 - (Jethro): During World War I, 373 german submarines were built. Throughout their terrifying reign on the high seas, uboats sank ten battleships, 18 cruisers, and many more smaller vessels. This, of course, just during World War I. They also destroyed 5700 merchant and fishing vessels. This totaled over 11 million tons of vessels and killed about 15,000 sailors and an undetermined number of civilians.
0:01:39 - (Kat): When you think about events like this and ships being destroyed, you know what you never think about? The fact that probably that's just litter now.
0:01:49 - (Jethro): Yeah. So the uboats roamed far and wide on the Atlantic during World War I, not just off the coast of Europe. In fact, in 1916, a merchant marine ship that was flying allied colors was sunk by a german uboat off the coast of Antarctica, somewhere between the deception island and Elephant island in the South Shetland archipelago. And you might recognize the name Elephant island that became the desolate refuge for british explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew that same year.
0:02:21 - (Jethro): Shackleton, 1916. That's after their ship, the endurance, was lost in an ice pack. So it's a pretty remote, foreboding area. And the uboat sunk this merchant vessel, and it was believed that everybody on board, the entire crew, went down with the ship. The cargo, of course, was lost. It was thought to be carrying medical supplies and food to the western front. So this is 1916. Two years pass, it's now 1918.
0:02:50 - (Jethro): The incident had long since stopped dominating world headlines, and a civilian craft was traveling in the area when they noticed a single person standing by himself on an uninhabitable tidal island. And that's weird on so many levels. First, a tidal island is exactly what it sounds like. It's an island that is exposed at low tide only, but submerged at high tide. This tidal island was located off the northwest coast of the antarctic peninsula. So it's just one guy standing on an island by himself.
0:03:28 - (Kat): Very surreal.
0:03:29 - (Jethro): The question, of course, was, how did this guy end up standing on a tidal island?
0:03:34 - (Kat): I would think the question would be, am I hallucinating?
0:03:38 - (Jethro): Well, yes. They're so close to the Antarctic. The ship drew near to the tidal island. They launched a rescue boat and retrieved the man. Once on board, he told them his name was Edward Allen Oxford and that he was a british imperial citizen. He claimed that he had been on that ship that was sunk by the german U boat two years prior. However, the odd thing is he insisted that it had only been about six weeks since the ship went down.
0:04:09 - (Kat): What?
0:04:10 - (Jethro): Yeah. He said, I've been on an island for six weeks. When my ship was torpedoed, I spent six weeks on the island. Now, the man wasn't dressed in a way that one would need to dress in order to survive in Antarctica for six weeks, let alone two years. Obviously, this created a great deal of confusion among the crew. How did he manage to survive for so long in such harsh conditions? And why did he claim only six weeks had passed and not a full two year period?
0:04:43 - (Jethro): And how did he end up on an island that was only above water at low tide?
0:04:48 - (Kat): Right.
0:04:49 - (Jethro): Strange story. He insisted that he had walked over to the tidal island at low tide from a larger, nearby island moments before he was discovered. And he insisted that this other island was warm and tropical and had plenty of wildlife and vegetation that kept him alive.
0:05:07 - (Kat): What?
0:05:08 - (Jethro): And no such island existed. We're talking about right off the coast of Antarctica. So this just added to further the confusion of the situation. And he continued to insist that only six weeks had gone by and that he had survived on a tropical island until one day, when the tide was low enough, he walked across to the tidal island and he said it got a lot colder. And then he saw this ship coming. Although no one could explain how he survived, his story was so unbelievable that they just declared him insane.
0:05:43 - (Kat): Right. But still, I mean, regardless of what he's saying, how did he survive? That's weird.
0:05:50 - (Jethro): Yeah, exactly. That's my point. But rather than try to answer a difficult question like that, they said, nah, he's crazy, and they institutionalized him in a mental hospital in Nova Scotia, and he spent a good deal of time at this convalescence facility. Now, while he was there, he met Mildred Constance Landmeyer, and they fell in love. She was a nurse with the Canadian army medical Corps. He was there for 18 months.
0:06:19 - (Kat): Are we sure?
0:06:20 - (Jethro): Oddly, he said it was only a weekend. But no, he was there for 18 months. And when he was released, he and Mildred got married and they moved to West Quebec. Oxford had a cousin that owned a dairy farm there, and he helped his cousin with farm chores. But it turned out that he didn't really like it. He wasn't much of a farmer, so he later became a forester, working in the canadian lumber camps. This required him to travel a great deal, and he was often away from his beloved Mildred, sometimes for several months at a time. But his love for her was strong, and he wrote to her constantly.
0:06:57 - (Jethro): And he would write to her to not only express his undying love for her, but he would also extensively record his memories from the time that he was stranded on what he still insisted was a tropical island somewhere off the coast of Antarctica. And he never wavered in his story and his belief that it was true. And there was never a contradiction in any of his descriptions of his experiences there. And in all, he wrote over 200 letters to his wife containing various aspects of this incredible island that he lived on.
0:07:30 - (Jethro): So how did this story come to light? Recently, inside the house in Quebec that they once resided in, the current owner discovered his letters, and so they started researching this story to see if there were any hard facts that could back up what this soldier had written in his letter.
0:07:49 - (Kat): Right.
0:07:50 - (Jethro): And it wasn't long before they did, in fact, discover official imperial records that were well over 100 years old that confirmed that an Edward Allen Oxford was on a merchant marine ship. And indeed, that ship was torpedoed. And indeed, he was recovered nearly two years after the ship went down in the Antarctic and he was declared insane and institutionalized in Nova Scotia. There's no rational explanation for how this guy survived as long as he did in such a deadly environment for as long as he did.
0:08:23 - (Jethro): And why did he say it was only six weeks now? That could have been because he was slowly going mad. He lost track of time or whatever. That would also explain his belief that there was a tropical island nearby. He could have been hallucinating. Clearly understandable. Nobody has been able to explain how a man torpedoed in the Antarctic in sub zero temperatures with no food and inadequate clothing, survived for two years on his own.
0:08:52 - (Jethro): It's a mystery. My source information mysteriesunsolved.com and Wikipedia, that was super interesting. Fascinating, isn't it? If what he was saying was true, it's like he stepped into some sort of a portal or something. Or maybe it was a time shift. Maybe it was a period of time that he somehow managed to get back to when the island or that land mass in the Antarctic was actually in some kind of a subtropical region before the polar.
0:09:23 - (C): That's.
0:09:23 - (Jethro): Yeah, I'm going with that one.
0:09:24 - (Kat): Oh, wow. I mean, my guess would be that somebody had helped him, like he was on a ship or something. And he had been kept warm and clothed and such for a period of time until he was then deposited on the tidal island.
0:09:40 - (Jethro): I guess maybe. I mean, that's physically possible. Seems a little bit unlikely. Far more unlikely than a time portal.
0:09:47 - (Kat): Sure. Hawaiian religion or the Kapoo system is polytheistic. Pele is the goddess of volcanoes and fire and the creator of the hawaiian islands. They call her Madame Pele or Tutu. Pele.
0:10:03 - (C): Polytheist.
0:10:04 - (Jethro): Is that what you said?
0:10:05 - (Kat): I said polytheistic. Is that not.
0:10:07 - (Jethro): No.
0:10:08 - (C): Yeah, polytheistic.
0:10:09 - (Jethro): Do you remember the comedian emo Phillips?
0:10:12 - (Kat): No.
0:10:12 - (Jethro): From a long time ago. He was weird, but brilliant. And he was the king of the surreal one liner.
0:10:20 - (Kat): Kind of like Stephen Wright.
0:10:22 - (Jethro): Kind of, yeah, very much like that, but just weirder. He said, monotheism is a gift from the gods.
0:10:36 - (Kat): Anyway, there's a belief that Pele can change into human form. And that's reported that she likes gin. So it's said that you can appease the goddess of volcanoes by tossing a bottle of gin into the volcano.
0:10:52 - (Jethro): Just pouring your Tom Collins out over the rim.
0:10:55 - (Kat): Speaking of which, we went to dinner last night and I wanted something a little spicy because we were at a mexican restaurant, but I didn't know what to order. So I got a Tom Collins with jalapeno syrup.
0:11:08 - (Jethro): Yeah, gin and jalapeno syrup.
0:11:10 - (Kat): It was not bad.
0:11:11 - (Jethro): It really was surprisingly good.
0:11:12 - (Kat): I liked it.
0:11:13 - (Jethro): You should name it. You've invented a new cocktail.
0:11:15 - (Kat): Have I? Okay, I'll think about it. Maybe I'll call it Pele. Anyway, in November of 1992, Paramount Pictures was in the process of making the Sharon Stone thriller sliver. Do you remember that movie?
0:11:27 - (Jethro): I do, yeah.
0:11:28 - (Kat): The IMDb page called it an erotic thriller. But I've already said that Sharon Stone is in it. So erotic would make it kind of redundant. Am I right? Right. I'm sorry. Anyway, the end of the movie had to be recut a few times because test audiences didn't love the ending. And one of those endings involved a helicopter apparently flying into a volcano. So paramount needed a volcano and location scouts identified Killauea in Hawaii, one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, and they said, this is it. This is what we want.
0:12:03 - (Kat): So they sent director of photography Michael a. Benson, and a photography assistant, Chris Duddy, with pilot Craig Hosking, to capture the necessary footage. Wow.
0:12:14 - (C): That's a dangerous shoot.
0:12:16 - (Kat): Indeed. These three had all worked together several times before, and they described themselves as being kind of like a family. As they flew over the cone, Chris took out the offering of gin and tossed it in. But the fierce winds coming up out of the cone kept the bottle from going in, and it crashed into the side of the cone. Mike chuffed Chris because the opening is, like, 2 miles across, and he was like, seriously, dude, what?
0:12:46 - (Kat): Anyway, Michael said, it's okay. She'll get the idea. Meaning Pele would understand that they tried to get her her nip, and that would be good enough. The three flew over the cone to get the shots and then landed to preview the footage. They decided that what they got wasn't long enough, and they wanted another shot. So they went back into the air, over the rim for the second time, and the pilot and then his passengers felt an rpm decrease just before the helicopter warning signals started going off.
0:13:22 - (Jethro): Oh, my God. Were they over the open cone of oh, my God.
0:13:26 - (Kat): And they were experiencing engine failure.
0:13:28 - (Jethro): They had no more gin.
0:13:30 - (Kat): They had no more gin. Though I'm guessing they wish they did. This happened so suddenly that Craig didn't have time to radio for help, and the helicopter crashed through the plumes of steam and noxious fumes into the puo vent on the hot crater floor and sheared into two pieces.
0:13:50 - (Jethro): Oh, my God. Why have I not heard about this?
0:13:53 - (Kat): Incredibly, all three survived.
0:13:56 - (Jethro): Wow.
0:13:57 - (Kat): Though there was incredible confusion, as you can imagine, and they didn't know because of the fumes and such, that they had landed inside the crater. The helicopter missed a steam vent by a couple hundred yards, and the pilot had narrowly missed a lava pool nearby as well. The electrical system was shot, and they were unable to radio for help.
0:14:19 - (Jethro): That's one of the reasons why I.
0:14:21 - (C): Really am uncomfortable with the idea of.
0:14:23 - (Jethro): Flying in a helicopter. In a plane, I can entertain, perhaps, this misguided notion that if I lose engine power, I can still coast in.
0:14:32 - (C): There's always the chance that you can.
0:14:35 - (Kat): Coast in Tom Hanks style.
0:14:37 - (Jethro): Well, hopefully not Tom Hanks style, but.
0:14:39 - (Kat): I mean, sully, not castaway.
0:14:41 - (Jethro): Okay.
0:14:41 - (C): Gotcha.
0:14:42 - (Jethro): Yeah.
0:14:43 - (C): Yes. Absolutely.
0:14:44 - (Jethro): Sully, not castaway. But I've seen video footage of helicopters going down, and you're spinning all the way down.
0:14:52 - (Kat): Anyway, the crew's in the midst of a cloud of vogue, which is volcanic smog, which, according to the US Geological Survey, is 99% water vapor, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. The remaining 1% is comprised of hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, and hydrogen fluoride.
0:15:14 - (Jethro): Not good things.
0:15:15 - (Kat): No. So their eyes are stinging, their lungs are burning as they try to breathe, and they realize as their feet are burning and they look up that they are inside this crater. The men started to climb the rim, but the interior wall, the higher you get, is steeper. It's kind of like a bowl. So it's a more shallow incline at the bottom and toward the top is more steep.
0:15:44 - (Jethro): Like an exponential curve.
0:15:46 - (Kat): Yes.
0:15:46 - (C): Well, let me ask you this. Did anybody know, did they file a flight?
0:15:51 - (Jethro): I mean, were they there by themselves.
0:15:53 - (C): With nobody knowing that they had crashed?
0:15:55 - (Kat): People knew where they were flying. People knew the job that they were doing that day, but it happened so.
0:16:01 - (Jethro): Quickly, they weren't able to radio for help.
0:16:03 - (Kat): That's correct.
0:16:03 - (Jethro): Holy shit.
0:16:05 - (Kat): Now, while this interior wall is very steep, it's also made up of volcanic rock, which is very sharp and crumbles very easily. So each step that they made threatened to cut them and also create a rock slide. Chris had climbed ahead, but he got stuck at a point in the crater that was nearly vertical and the thick gases obscured their view. So they were having a really hard time keeping track of each other.
0:16:33 - (Kat): Craig decided that he was going to return to the helicopter to try to get the radio to work, because he realized that climbing out seemed very unlikely. So the three were now each on their own, Chris ahead, Michael in the middle, Craig back at the helicopter. Now at the bottom of the crater, Craig is suffering from a lack of oxygen because that's where all of these noxious gases and fumes are settling.
0:16:59 - (Kat): He found a small hill that when he stood at the top, there were gusts of fresh air that would come occasionally so he could breathe, but he didn't know when they were coming or how often. So he's like, trying to breathe, getting garbage air, trying to breathe, getting garbage air, trying to breathe fresh air. And once he got that fresh air, he would bolt back to the helicopter and try to get this radio to work. But he could only stay there for as long as he could hold his breath or as long as he could stave off passing out.
0:17:32 - (C): Oh, my God.
0:17:33 - (Kat): So it's back to the fresh air, back to the helicopter, back to the fresh air, back to the helicopter, and eventually, he was able, using the wiring from the camera battery, to get the power back to the radio and tell rescue workers what had happened and that they desperately needed assistance. I bet you heard that one.
0:17:56 - (Jethro): So he macgyvered the shit out of that radio.
0:17:58 - (Kat): Yeah, he did. I mean, literally, there was stripping of wires and he.
0:18:03 - (Jethro): I think that. I think we're living underneath a family of elven cobblers.
0:18:10 - (Kat): All right, we're just going to pretend that the tapping is the sound of bubbling lava.
0:18:16 - (Jethro): Okay.
0:18:16 - (Kat): That's a great idea. Every time you hear it, think it's.
0:18:18 - (Jethro): Lava, it's like we have our own Foley artist on. So lava's getting closer.
0:18:24 - (Kat): Craig was able to yell to the other guys that help was coming, but that he was unable to breathe. And then they didn't hear anything else from him. So that was kind of scary.
0:18:34 - (Jethro): Yeah, for sure.
0:18:35 - (Kat): Because the vogue is so thick that they can't see each other. They're barely able to hear each other, and now they're not hearing Craig at all.
0:18:45 - (C): That must have been terrifying. I can't even imagine the level of sheer terror they were all feeling.
0:18:51 - (Kat): So finally, rescue workers arrived. Over 4 hours. At this point, Craig had been in the crater, and eventually they were able to lower the helicopter enough so that Craig could scramble aboard.
0:19:04 - (Jethro): Oh, my God.
0:19:05 - (Kat): But the other two men, obscured by the dense volcanic fog or Vogue, were left behind. Plus, they weren't able to see what had happened with the helicopter. They still hadn't heard Craig. They thought that Craig had expired and that the helicopter just took off. Chris at this point, still clinging to the side of the crater wall above, and Michael has come to rest on a ledge below, and they are hoping to hear the helicopter return.
0:19:34 - (Kat): Unfortunately, the weather kept getting worse. The wind and the rain kept the helicopter from returning for hours. And then it's night now. The light from the lava below keeps the vogue kind of illuminated. And so there's this weird, eerie light everywhere. But never nice light, never comforting light.
0:19:56 - (Jethro): No, you're going to die light.
0:19:58 - (Kat): Michael can hear the gurgling of the lava. Their throats are closing up because of the gases. It's not a good situation. So by midday on Sunday. That's right, the next day, Chris had decided that he was going to die either way, so he might as well try to climb the rest of the way out. And if he dies that way, at.
0:20:18 - (Jethro): Least he's doing something right, keeping his mind off things.
0:20:21 - (Kat): Right. So as he's trying to climb out, the rescue team has returned. They're wanting to do a land retrieval. At this point, the helicopter thing, they decided wasn't working. So they've sent people up in their outfits, their snazzy little rescue outfits. They are taking ropes and kind of just tossing them down the side of the crater, hoping that maybe they'll land near one of these men.
0:20:48 - (Jethro): They're fishing for cinematographers.
0:20:50 - (Kat): That's exactly what they are doing, because they can't see them and they can't really hear them.
0:20:54 - (Jethro): No.
0:20:54 - (Kat): So they're just hoping, they're just tossing.
0:20:56 - (C): Try over under that ledge.
0:20:58 - (Jethro): That's where cinematographers feed.
0:21:01 - (Kat): So at one point, Chris can see a rope that they've tossed. It's about 10ft from him, and he knows that he's not able to climb over to it. So he's yelling, he's like, over to the left. More over to the left. They pulled up the rope. In addition to the rope that they're tossing down, they also have, like, this rescue package with water and a blanket and such that they're tossing down. So they toss that down.
0:21:31 - (C): Who needs a blanket in the mouth of a volcano?
0:21:34 - (Kat): Actually, at night it got very cold. It did, it did. It's all around. Not great, basically. So they toss that down and it falls past Michael. He thinks it's his friend Chris, plummeting to the bottom of the crater. Chris can see a rope that they've tossed and it's like 6ft from him. And so he's like, all right, well, I'm going to try to jump for it. And he tries to jump for it just as they're pulling it back up.
0:22:05 - (Kat): It's awful. No, you can imagine it's terrible. So he's like, all right, well, whatever. So he starts climbing and he looks up and he can see this shaft of light kind of illuminating what he thinks is pathish. And he's like, I think I can climb this way. So he starts climbing and he's making progress, unfortunately, because, again, of the rock, he has to shove his arms into this broken rock, gravely stuff, and his whole arms are getting cut up because he's shoving his arms. That's the only way he can get any traction.
0:22:42 - (Jethro): It must be like climbing over a.
0:22:45 - (C): Huge pile of broken glass.
0:22:47 - (Kat): It's awful. Eventually, he gets to the top and he's yelling to the rescue workers, like, I'm here, help me launch myself over the lip of this crater. And there's no response. And so he's like, all right. So he figures out, okay, if I jam my arms in like this, and if I haul myself up this way I can launch over. So he is able to get up outside of the crater. He's there, and there's no rescue team.
0:23:14 - (C): But was there a bottle of gin? Because he really could have used it after that.
0:23:19 - (Kat): No. The rescue team, unfortunately, had had to evacuate. Because the weather got so bad. So he's there, but he doesn't know where to go. He doesn't know where he is. So he just starts, like, tootling. And he finds himself back at the rim of the crater. He has just walked in a big circle, and then he's like, okay, well, try to go this way. And then he notices that there are orange cones in the distance.
0:23:46 - (Kat): And the rescue workers had left kind of a path of orange cones. So he follows the cones down to their camp. And he finds where they had set up camp the night before. But there's no one there, because, again, they had had to evacuate. But there was a bottle of water and an oxygen tank. So he gets to the bottle of water, and you can imagine what it must feel like. To not have been able to drink anything for a day.
0:24:13 - (Kat): When you're in the middle of a volcano. No big deal. But he's unable to drink water because his throat is so swollen and closed up from the fumes. So he grabs the oxygen tank, and he heads, and he's just trying to find people at this point. This is 27 hours after he entered the crater. Chris is eventually spotted by a helicopter. And he tells the rescue team that Michael is still alive and inside the crater.
0:24:42 - (Kat): Unfortunately, again, the extreme weather means that they can't make another rescue attempt that day. So Michael, now believing that both of his friends are dead, not knowing if anyone is coming for him, spends a second night, cold night, inside an active volcano.
0:24:59 - (C): It must have been really hard for him to hold on to any hope at this point.
0:25:04 - (Kat): And hold on to any rocks. True at this point. Yeah. So because the previous attempts had failed at rescue, the production company hired another helicopter to try to rescue Michael. So the next day, this is 47 hours in the volcano.
0:25:22 - (Jethro): Holy shit.
0:25:23 - (Kat): Michael heard a helicopter. He eventually is able to see the shape of a helicopter through the fumes. And he can hear a pilot yelling, don't do anything stupid. I'll be back in 15 minutes. So I can imagine that felt a lot more than 15 minutes, by the way. And the helicopter returned. But because of the noxious fumes, the helicopter can only hover over the opening of the cone for 20 seconds at a time.
0:25:54 - (Kat): So it can scootle over, drop down a basket, which is kind of like a net basket. It's a basket made of net. Drop down the basket blindly. Wait a bit. Pull it back up. No one. Okay, move the helicopter away from the opening of the vent.
0:26:10 - (Jethro): Oh, no.
0:26:10 - (Kat): Now they come back. They drop down the basket blindly. Wait a bit. See if maybe someone hops in. Pull it back up. No person. Okay, scootle away from the opening of the. They had to keep doing this over and over and over again until eventually the basket was close enough for Michael to get inside.
0:26:29 - (Jethro): Can you imagine if they dropped it down and then pulled it back up and then dropped it down again? And it's further away from where he was, and he's watching this and he's going, no.
0:26:39 - (Kat): Yeah. It's like that rope thing all over again.
0:26:42 - (Jethro): All over again.
0:26:43 - (Kat): Well, at one point, they had dropped the basket down, and it caught on a rock, and they thought that was the weight of Michael. So they pulled it up. I'm sure they were just as nervous. Well, maybe not just as nervous, but they were very nervous. So they were pulling it up, all excited that they had got him. And nope, there's no one inside. At this point, you don't even know if he's alive. And they're just dropping down this basket.
0:27:06 - (Kat): Yeah. So they pulled Michael out of the Vogue just in time, because at this point, he is on the verge of death. After they landed, he was reunited with his friends, who he thought had perished already. You can imagine what that was like. And he was sent to Hilo Hospital's intensive care unit. As he was being lifted to safety, Michael said, I turned back to Madame Pele, and I said, you didn't beat me. You didn't get me, which gives me goosebumps a little bit. But, I mean, to be fair, they failed with the bottle of true.
0:27:42 - (C): I mean, yeah, she was pissed.
0:27:43 - (Kat): Now, all three men still work in the film industry. Michael Benson, though, chooses to no longer capture aerial footage.
0:27:53 - (Jethro): Yeah, I don't blame him. I'm with you on that one, Michael, 100%. Did they ever make this into a movie? Because this is great stuff.
0:28:02 - (Kat): I don't know.
0:28:03 - (Jethro): I mean, these guys make movies, right?
0:28:05 - (Kat): You'd think it would be kind of top of mind.
0:28:07 - (Jethro): You'd think.
0:28:07 - (Kat): So, Craig, the pilot, still does aerial work for the movies. Apparently, he's, like, one of the most sought after helicopter pilots for the film industry.
0:28:18 - (Jethro): That's something.
0:28:18 - (Kat): Yeah.
0:28:19 - (C): Wow. That is a great tale.
0:28:21 - (Kat): I got my information from film stories, Tampa Bay Times, the New York Times, Variety, and episode eleven of I shouldn't be alive.
0:28:33 - (C): All right, so it's my turn.
0:28:34 - (Kat): Yeah.
0:28:35 - (C): Here we go. Quote the first half hour of the hour long flight from Lima to Pukalpa was uneventful. We were served a sandwich and a drink for breakfast. Ten minutes later, as the flight attendants began to clean up, we fly into a huge thunderstorm, according to this account that I found in Readers Digest. Quote, suddenly, daylight turns tonight. Lightning flashes from all directions. People gasp as the plane shakes violently.
0:29:06 - (C): Bags wrapped gifts and clothing fall from the overhead lockers. Sandwich trays soar through the air and half finished drinks spill onto passengers heads. People are screaming and crying. I see a blinding white flash over the right wing. I don't know whether it's a flash of lightning or an explosion. I lose all sense of time. The airplane begins to nosedive. From my seat in the back, I can see down the aisle into the cockpit.
0:29:32 - (Kat): Oh my gosh.
0:29:33 - (C): My ears, my head, my whole body are filled with a deep roar of the airplane over everything. I hear my mother saying calmly now. It's all over. We're falling fast. People's shouts and the roar of the turbine suddenly go silent. My mother is no longer at my side and I'm no longer in the plane. I'm still strapped into my seat on the bench at an altitude of about 10,000ft. I'm alone and I'm falling. My free fall is quiet.
0:30:04 - (C): I see nothing around me. The seatbelt squeezes my belly so tight that I can't breathe. Before I feel fear, I lose consciousness.
0:30:13 - (Kat): What? Is this a real thing?
0:30:17 - (C): This is a real thing. The day after her high school graduation, 17 year old Julianne Kolpke fell from the sky nearly 2 miles, still trapped to her airplane's seat into the Amazon rainforest. And she survived.
0:30:34 - (Kat): Oh my God.
0:30:36 - (C): Now, this was suggested to me by one of our freaks, Lisa from Washington state, I believe. And it was weird. We talk about coincidences a lot. I just finished reading this woman's autobiography.
0:30:50 - (Kat): Oh, really?
0:30:51 - (C): The book is called when I fell from the sky. Here is Julianne's story. She grew up in Lima, Peru, before moving at 14 to the peruvian rainforest where her parents, Maria and hams Wilheim Kopki, established the Panguana Ecological research Station.
0:31:09 - (Kat): Oh, wow.
0:31:10 - (Jethro): Which is really cool.
0:31:12 - (C): After two years of accompanying them on research trips to the jungle, Julianne returned to Lima to complete her high school. On December 24, 1971, Julianne, again 17, and her mother boarded a flight in Lima bound for Pucalpa, the city with an airport closest to Panguana. They were going to visit her father for Christmas now, in her own words. And again, this comes from Reader's Digest. I spend my vacations in Panguana and my school days with classmates in Lima. My mother preferred to fly earlier, but a school dance and my high school graduation ceremony are on December 22 and 23rd.
0:31:52 - (C): I begged my mother to let me attend. She said, all right, we'll fly on the 24th, Christmas Eve. The airport is packed when we arrive in the morning of Christmas Eve. Several flights had been canceled the day before, and hundreds of people now crowd the ticket counters. It's about 11:00 a.m. Interestingly enough, we gather for boarding. My mother and I sit in the second to the last row on a three seat bench.
0:32:18 - (C): I'm by the window as always. My mother sits beside me. A heavyset man sits in the aisle seat. Mother doesn't like flying. She's an ornithologist and says it's unnatural that a bird be made of metal. So the first half hour of the hour long flight from Lima to Pukalpa is uneventful. We're served a sandwich and a drink as the flight attendants began to clean up. We fly into this thunderstorm. Now, according to an article I found on CNN, it was actually fairly recent, I think three or four years ago. She recounts more of what she recalls from it. The airline, Lansa, L-A-N-S-A had already lost two aircraft in previous crashes. Julianne said, we knew the airline had a bad reputation, but we desperately wanted to be with my father for Christmas, so we figured it'd be all right.
0:33:08 - (C): The flight was supposed to last for less than an hour, and for the first 25 minutes everything was fine. Then we flew into heavy clouds and the plane started shaking. My mother was very nervous. Then to the right of me, I saw that bright flash and the plane went into that nosedive. My mother says, this is it. An accident investigation later found that one of the fuel tanks of the Lockheed electra had been hit by a bolt of lightning and had torn the right wing.
0:33:34 - (Kat): Oh, wow.
0:33:35 - (C): Off the plane. So she said, we were heading straight down. Christmas presents were flying all around the cabin. I could hear people screaming as the plane broke into pieces in midair. Kopki was thrust out into the open air. Quote, suddenly there was this amazing silence. The plane was gone. I must have been unconscious and then came to in mid air. I was flying, spinning through the air, and I could see the forest spinning beneath me like green cauliflower like broccoli, is how I described it later on, because she was falling into the friggin Amazon jungle.
0:34:12 - (Kat): Right. I think that the idea that it was quiet is the most upsetting for me.
0:34:20 - (C): She lost consciousness again while she was still falling. She fell nearly 2 miles.
0:34:28 - (Jethro): 10,000.
0:34:28 - (Kat): How long does it take to fall 2 miles? I mean, the math's got to be there.
0:34:33 - (C): Yeah, I'm sure.
0:34:34 - (Kat): Siri, how long would it take to fall 2 miles? Here's what I found. So one source says about 40 seconds. The other source says about 60 seconds.
0:34:46 - (Jethro): 50 it is.
0:34:47 - (Kat): Yes, that seems right.
0:34:49 - (C): Okay. Wow, that's fast. So she's falling for 2 miles into the jungle canopy and survives with only minor injuries. 91 other people aboard the flight died. She was the only one to survive.
0:35:05 - (Kat): Oh, that's a wonderful, terrible thing she said.
0:35:10 - (C): She's not a spiritual person and has tried to find logical explanations for why she survived. Quote, maybe it was the fact that I was still attached to the whole row of seats.
0:35:21 - (Kat): So that, like, protected her body.
0:35:23 - (C): Yes. And it was rotating so much like a helicopter that maybe it slowed the fall to the ground.
0:35:29 - (Kat): Oh, God, I bet she threw up.
0:35:31 - (C): Also, the place I landed had very thick foliage and that might have lessened the impact. In any case, she survived with only minor injuries. Her collarbone was broken, her right eye swollen shut. She was suffering a concussion and had some gashes on her arms and legs.
0:35:48 - (Kat): I imagine you'd get a concussion. Yeah, I got a concussion from headbanging once. So that's hardly falling 2 miles out of the sky.
0:35:57 - (C): Was that at the Pantera concert?
0:35:58 - (Kat): No, it was at a headbanging contest.
0:36:00 - (C): I didn't realize that that was officially sanctioned. Did you win?
0:36:05 - (Kat): No.
0:36:05 - (C): Oh, God.
0:36:06 - (Kat): Amber got second place.
0:36:07 - (C): So she regains full consciousness on the floor of the Amazon jungle early Christmas morning.
0:36:13 - (Kat): Wow.
0:36:14 - (C): She said, I didn't wake up until about 09:00 the next morning. Her watch was still working, so I must have been unconscious the whole afternoon and night. When I came to, I was alone. Just me and my row of seats. Now, her mother was strapped next to her. That seat was empty. She told Vice magazine I had a serious concussion, so I couldn't sit up. My eye was swollen. I was lying beneath my seat and I wasn't strapped in anymore.
0:36:42 - (C): I could see a bit of forest, but also a bit of sky. I knew that I'd survived a plane crash. The concussion and the shock only let me realize just basic facts.
0:36:53 - (Kat): Right.
0:36:53 - (C): She couldn't find the strength to get up. So she just laid on the floor of the jungle for about twelve more hours before attempting to seek help.
0:37:02 - (Kat): I mean, I would imagine that your body has just experienced so much. It's not letting you intentionally. It's saying, whoa, you need to stop.
0:37:12 - (C): Just lie here for a bit. Yeah, she said. I feel dizzy again. I lie exhausted on the rainforest floor. After a while, I manage to rise to my knees, but I feel so dizzy that I immediately lay back down again. I try again. Eventually, I'm able to hold myself in that position. I touch my right collarbone. It's clearly broken. I find a deep gash on my left calf, which looks as if it's been cut by a rough metal edge, but strangely, it's not bleeding.
0:37:41 - (Kat): Did that have something to do with the intense spinning in the air, too? I know. Maybe when they're separating. Centrifugal.
0:37:50 - (C): It's like a giant centrifuge. It does not say. She said she got down on all fours and she was searching for her mother. I called her name, but the only other voices I could hear were the voices of the jungle.
0:38:04 - (Kat): Oh, my goodness.
0:38:05 - (C): Now, she was lucky in many ways, not the least of which the fact that she had lived in the jungle for years with her parents and her parents had taught her how to survive in the jungle.
0:38:14 - (Kat): You're going to want to get that leg gash covered.
0:38:17 - (Jethro): Yeah.
0:38:17 - (C): She said that she was working really hard to extract that knowledge from her brain rattled head. She knew that. She knew what she needed to do, but she was having a hard time extracting the information from her concussion fogged head. Suddenly she said, I'm seized by intense thirst. Thick drops of water sparkle on the leaves around me. I lick them up. I walk in small circles around my seat, aware of how quickly you can lose your orientation in the jungle.
0:38:46 - (C): I memorize the location and the markings of one tree to keep my bearings. I find no trace of the crash near me. No wreckage, no people. But I discovered a bag of candy that had fallen from the plane, so I eat a piece.
0:39:00 - (Kat): Oh, wow.
0:39:01 - (C): Rescue planes and search crews were unable to locate the crash site. Initially, Kopki was stranded in the jungle alone.
0:39:08 - (Kat): That's terrifying. The Amazon is nothing to fuck with and she doesn't have any idea how deep into the forest she is. I mean, she only has a general idea of how long they've been flying for. So they must have been about, what, halfway? There's so much unknown there. That's terrifying.
0:39:29 - (C): She's 17.
0:39:30 - (Kat): You don't know where that candy came from. You're just guessing that it came from the plane. That's creepy.
0:39:37 - (C): She remembered that her father said if she got lost in the jungle, to find a creek and follow it, because that will lead to a stream and a stream will lead to a bigger river, and that's where you'll find help, of course. So the day after the crash, she found a creek and started to wade downstream. It was pretty tough going. The only food she had was the candy and some insects that she found along the way. And her wounds became infected, of course, the cut on her arm. After a few days, she said she could feel something was inside of it. Yeah, she said, I took a look and it was full of maggots.
0:40:13 - (Kat): Yeah.
0:40:13 - (C): I was afraid I'd lose my arm.
0:40:15 - (Kat): But they actually would keep it clean. Right. Isn't that a good thing? Because rather wouldn't they keep the infection from taking hold?
0:40:24 - (C): I don't know if that's because they.
0:40:26 - (Kat): Eat the dead stuff. Right.
0:40:28 - (C): I know that there's some sort of medical treatment that involves that and or leeches.
0:40:33 - (Kat): Why would you have to bring that up?
0:40:35 - (C): It's funny to me that you're okay with maggots, but leeches bug you. She said that the hole in her arm was about the size of a €1 coin and there looked to be about like 50 maggots in there.
0:40:49 - (Kat): Holy shit.
0:40:50 - (C): She didn't know how that was possible, that so many could get crammed in there. So she continued to travel downstream and she discovered some wreckage from the plane. She found some of the crash victims.
0:41:01 - (Kat): Oh, jeez.
0:41:02 - (C): Quote. I found another row of seats with three dead women still strapped in. They had landed headfirst and the impact was so hard that they were buried almost 2ft into the ground. I was horrified. I did not want to touch them, but I wanted to make sure that my mother wasn't one of them. So I took a stick and I knocked a shoe off of one of the bodies. The toenails had nail polish on them, and I knew it could not have been my mother because she never wore nail polish.
0:41:30 - (C): So she continues through the rainforest. She wades down the jungle streams that are infested with crocodiles, of course, and.
0:41:36 - (Kat): Piranhas and devil rays, also great for keeping infection away.
0:41:41 - (C): At one point, to avoid the piranhas, she created like a makeshift raft out of some logs and pulled her way down the stream. She was quite ingenious, she said. I tried to follow the rivet closely, but there were often tree trunks lying across it or dense undergrowth that would block my way. But little by little, the rivelet grows wider and it turns into a stream which is partly dry, so that I can easily walk beside the water. Around 06:00 it gets dark and I look in the stream bed for a protected spot where I can spend the night and I eat another candy. On December 20 eigth, my watch stops for good, so I try to count the days as I go. The stream turns into a larger stream and then finally into a small river. Now it was rainy season and there was barely any fruit to pick, and I've eaten all my candy. I don't have a knife to use to hack palm hearts out of the stems of palm trees, nor can I catch fish or cook roots.
0:42:37 - (C): I don't dare eat anything else. Much of what grows in the jungle is poisonous. So I keep my hands off what I don't recognize. But I do drink a great deal of water from the stream. So she's trying to count the days, but she's not really sure how many days it's been. She thinks it was December 29 or 30th, either the fifth or the 6th day. She hears a buzing, a groaning sound that immediately turns her mood into euphoria.
0:43:02 - (C): It's the unmistakable call of the hotsun, a subtropical bird.
0:43:07 - (Kat): I love the hodsen. We've talked about the hotsun.
0:43:09 - (C): They're amazing, this bird.
0:43:11 - (Kat): And they smell like butt.
0:43:12 - (C): I bet the smell was great for her. It's a subtropical bird that nests exclusively near open stretches of water where people settle. At her home in Panguana, she heard that call often, so she knew she was getting closer to a large river.
0:43:27 - (Kat): See, that's really interesting. Knowing that they only settle near to where people settle. That's fascinating.
0:43:34 - (C): So she picks up the Pace. She follows the sound. Finally, she's standing on the bank of this large river, but there's nobody in sight. She says she can hear planes in the distance and she's thinking that maybe they're search planes that are looking for wreckage or survivors. But the sound just fades away and it gives her the impression that she's just being abandoned, that they've given up. It was a feeling of total despair and anger. But she did not give up. Where there's a river, there were people. There had to be people close by. She continues her trek. She encounters Caymans, which are alligator like reptiles.
0:44:11 - (C): She sees devil rays. She sees plenty of piranha. Sure, each night when the sun sets, she looks for a safe place on.
0:44:19 - (Jethro): The bank to try to sleep.
0:44:20 - (C): Mosquitoes, of course, are just terrible. About ten days into her ordeal, she's just floating in the water. In the evening.
0:44:28 - (Kat): How is she still alive? This is incredible.
0:44:30 - (C): She finds a gravel bank. That looks like a good place to sleep. So she dozes off for a few minutes. And when she awakes, she sees something that she knows doesn't belong there. It's a boat. And she thinks that she's hallucinating.
0:44:42 - (Kat): Sure.
0:44:43 - (C): So she closes her eyes and looks back. And it's still there. It's a boat. She swims over and she touches it. She says, only then can I really believe it. So she finds a trail. She follows this trail. She's very weak. It takes her up a hill and it takes her a few hours. When she gets to the top, she sees a small shelter, but no people. It's a shack in the middle of a forest. She's certain that the owner of the boat will emerge at any moment. This is her hope.
0:45:09 - (C): But it gets darker. And so she spends the night there alone. The next morning, at least.
0:45:13 - (Kat): Like inside the shack.
0:45:15 - (C): Yes.
0:45:15 - (Kat): So that's nice. That's a relief in some ways, I imagine. Got to be something.
0:45:21 - (C): She wakes up. There's still nobody there. It begins to rain. She stays in this shelter. She wraps herself in a tarp. She finds a can of diesel. And she takes the diesel and she pours it on her maggot wounds to kill the maggots, which is something that, again, her father had taught her.
0:45:39 - (Kat): That's incredible. Incredible. I keep saying that, but honestly, as.
0:45:42 - (C): Twilight approaches, she hears voices. She thinks she's imagining them, but the voices get closer. Three men come out of the jungle and they stop in shock. And she says, I'm a girl who was in the Lansa crash. She said this in Spanish. My name is Julianne. Forestry workers discovered her on January 3.
0:46:02 - (Kat): Oh, my gosh.
0:46:03 - (C): Eleven days in the rainforest, 1111 days. And she was delivered to safety again. 91 people, including Julianne's mother, died in the crash. She was the only survivor. She was reunited with her father, where she learns more information about the plane crash. And as time went on, she discovered that her mother had survived the impact of the crash, but was so badly injured that she couldn't move and she died days later.
0:46:34 - (C): Investigators found the cause of the crash was caused by intentional flight into hazardous weather conditions.
0:46:41 - (Kat): Oh, no.
0:46:43 - (C): The years and again, this was 71. They have not dampened the horror that she feels. In a recent CNN interview, she said the events of 71 still haunt her. She said the memories are especially clear when she is confronted with current airplane disasters. When a plane goes down, it must cause so much traumatic reliving of emotions. Yeah, she says, it horrifies me. I only hope it all went quickly for those on board.
0:47:12 - (C): And her book is called when I fell from the sky, and you can find it pretty much everywhere. I got the ebook on Amazon.
0:47:20 - (Kat): Wow.
0:47:20 - (C): I also quoted interviews with her from Readers Digest, CNN advice magazine, Julianne Kopke.
0:47:30 - (Jethro): All right, lady, what you got for me?
0:47:32 - (Kat): Anne Hodges and her husband rented a house in Oak Grove community in Alabama. It's November 30, 1954, and 34 year old Anne is at home with her mother. They're just chillaxing, and she's having a little nap. She's got an afghan on her sofa, and she's all covered up with, I assume that it looks like the one on Roseanne with the little. With the flower. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, I have no idea what her blanket looked like, but that's what I picture. So Anne's having a snoozel on her couch when suddenly there arose such a clatter.
0:48:10 - (Kat): I'm thrilled that I got to use that phrase, because usually it's only once a year or so I get to use it.
0:48:14 - (Jethro): Well done.
0:48:15 - (Kat): In moments, the house was engulfed in a cloud of dust, and Anne was in pain. She'd been hit by something. So the dust started to settle, and Anne and her mother spotted a rock in their home. A doctor and the police were called to the home, and the insider article that I read said that the mayor showed up with the police chief and they discovered a hole in the ceiling where the rock had crashed through.
0:48:42 - (Jethro): Why would the mayor come to the house?
0:48:45 - (Kat): I don't know. It's a big deal, I guess. There's not a lot going on in Oak Grove in 1954.
0:48:49 - (Jethro): All right, fair enough.
0:48:50 - (Kat): But the idea that the men showed up and discovered the hole in the ceiling, like the women hadn't thought to look up, is just like. I don't know.
0:49:00 - (Jethro): Well, again, it was the 50s.
0:49:01 - (Kat): Sure. So then a local geologist was called to the scene to determine what had Anne been struck by. Turns out it was a meteorite.
0:49:12 - (Jethro): Holy shit. No. Just for a moment, let's pause and think about that. This meteorite has been bouncing around in the universe for billions of years, probably. And yet at the end of its journey, it singles out this poor woman in Oak Grove. Is that the name of the place?
0:49:37 - (Kat): Okay, well done.
0:49:38 - (Jethro): What are the ods of that?
0:49:41 - (Kat): Yeah. The meteorite lit up the sky in parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Hodges neighbors reported seeing a bright reddish light crossing the sky like a roman candle trailing smoke. The space debris then made its way into Anne Hodges home and attacked her. After first ricocheting off her console radio. Still, as you can imagine, it was.
0:50:04 - (Jethro): A bank shot as well.
0:50:09 - (Kat): Word quickly spread about what had happened, and when Anne's husband returned home from work, he found a crowd of people at his home. Anne told the Associated Press, we had a little excitement around here today. Hodges was soon hospitalized, though, and despite the fact that she had a massive mark on her side, she wasn't seriously injured.
0:50:32 - (Jethro): That's crazy. That Afghan must have had some kind of magical protective power.
0:50:36 - (Kat): I agree.
0:50:37 - (C): Was it a flak afghan?
0:50:38 - (Kat): The rock was the Silicaga meteorite, estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old.
0:50:44 - (Jethro): Okay. Yeah.
0:50:46 - (Kat): Upon the entry into the atmosphere, the meteorite fragmented into at least three pieces. One fragment is believed to have impacted somewhere near Childersburg. The McKinney fragment, which was found the next day on a nearby farm. And this piece, now dubbed the Hodges fragment, after the lady that it attacked. Now, most meteorites found by humans on earth are in the range of size between golf ball ish and fist ish.
0:51:19 - (Kat): The Hodges chunk looks to be about the size of a chipotle burrito.
0:51:24 - (Jethro): Oh, my God.
0:51:25 - (Kat): Yeah. Moving at approximately 200, Hodges meteor would have slowed a bit as it came through the atmosphere, which worked out really well for Anne, and then crashed through the roof, which again lessened the impact. And then it first hit the radio. All good news for Anne's hip.
0:51:47 - (Jethro): Don't forget about the Afghan.
0:51:48 - (Kat): And the Afghan, which I think the fact that you put an extra vowel sound in there is really interesting.
0:51:54 - (Jethro): Afghan.
0:51:55 - (Kat): I'm not saying it's just. I just think it's interesting. It's one of your many quirks that I find endearing. Mary Beth Prasinski, the collections manager at the Alabama Museum of Natural History, where the meteorite is now on exhibit, said if Anne had been lying under the radio, it would have broken her leg or her back, which I think is a weird way to put.
0:52:22 - (Jethro): It, had hit you directly.
0:52:23 - (Kat): Right. Or if it had been like 2ft.
0:52:25 - (Jethro): Over in Oak Grove, flying under one's radio is a common practice.
0:52:30 - (Kat): Is it?
0:52:31 - (Jethro): Apparently.
0:52:31 - (Kat): I don't know. So Anne Hodges became a bit of a celebrity. At first. She was really uncomfortable with that. But you know how it goes. If you see an opportunity, sometimes you just got to seize it. So she had a bunch of photo shoots. She appeared on the COVID of Life's magazine in 1954, in December with an article entitled a big bruiser from the sky. She was also invited to go to New York City to be on Gary Moore's show.
0:53:00 - (Kat): I've got a secret where the panel had to guess what it was that made her a notable figure.
0:53:06 - (Jethro): Interesting.
0:53:06 - (Kat): Do you remember that show?
0:53:07 - (Jethro): I do remember that show. Gary Moore also hosted, to tell the truth, which was a very popular.
0:53:14 - (Kat): They're pretty similar.
0:53:16 - (Jethro): Yeah, very similar.
0:53:17 - (Kat): I always thought they were so weird, though, because everyone always wears gray on those shows.
0:53:22 - (Jethro): It's because it's in black and white, sweetie. They didn't have color tvs widely available at the time, and it was cost prohibitive for many television studios to shoot in color.
0:53:33 - (Kat): Oh, my God. Anyway, now, of course, at this time in history, Americans were a little skittish about things coming from the sky, right?
0:53:41 - (Jethro): Sure.
0:53:42 - (Kat): There was concern about nuclear war. There were rumors of flying saucers. Not everyone believed that this was a meteorite. So the air force took custody of this object to verify that it was indeed a meteorite.
0:53:57 - (Jethro): Well, meteorites are valuable. Did she get it back?
0:54:00 - (Kat): I'm getting there.
0:54:01 - (Jethro): Okay.
0:54:02 - (Kat): All right. When it was time to return it, who to return it to?
0:54:07 - (Jethro): Well, it's not as if the government would ever steal anything from anybody, right?
0:54:12 - (C): So she got it back. Right.
0:54:15 - (Kat): Well, birdie guy, the Hodges landlord, thought that the meteorite should be returned to her because it smashed through her roof. Well, she's got a case there, Anne Hodges said. I think God intended for me to have it after all. It hit me. The case was eventually settled out of court, with guy getting $500 to let Anne Hodges keep the meteorite. Unfortunately, this court case lasted a bit, so by the time it was settled, the sheen had kind of gone from the event, and the couple was unable to find a buyer for the meteorite.
0:54:51 - (Kat): So the family used it as a doorstop for a while before donating it to the Alabama Museum of Natural History with the understanding that the Alabama Museum of Natural History would cover their legal fees from the gotcha case.
0:55:07 - (Jethro): Okay.
0:55:07 - (Kat): Meanwhile, Julius Kempus McKinney, who discovered the fragment on the nearby farm while driving a mule drawn wagon, sold the one he found for enough money to buy a house and a. Yeah.
0:55:22 - (Jethro): Yeah.
0:55:22 - (C): Wow.
0:55:23 - (Kat): And he didn't even have to get hit by it.
0:55:25 - (Jethro): Nope. Get himself a new team of mules.
0:55:27 - (Kat): That chunk, by the way, can be found now in Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. We might have seen the McKinney farm chunk.
0:55:35 - (Jethro): I can't wait to go back to the Smithsonian. Last two times we were in DC, the museums were closed because of the pandemic.
0:55:42 - (Kat): I'm just saying, we were going to go on a cruise for our anniversary, and we canceled it because things are all up in the air and kind of weird right now, and I stress out easily. But maybe a little toodled DC wouldn't be a terrible idea, just for a couple of days.
0:55:57 - (Jethro): Not a bad idea at all.
0:55:58 - (Kat): I'm just saying we could both say a little crazy.
0:56:02 - (Jethro): We're moving again to a new apartment in a few weeks, and we just now launched the new podcast, the Shallow end. And it's hard. It's a lot of work.
0:56:15 - (Kat): Yeah. So when a vacation ends up being more stressful than restful, what's the point? Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent. Back to the meteorite.
0:56:26 - (Jethro): Do you need a segue to get back?
0:56:28 - (Kat): Yes, please.
0:56:29 - (Jethro): Because you asked people to make you.
0:56:32 - (C): A little segue sweeper.
0:56:33 - (Jethro): And Sam, who lives in the UK, he obliged. That was done by Sam from Bristol, UK.
0:56:45 - (Kat): Oh, my gosh.
0:56:46 - (Jethro): He was introduced by his lovely partner Kaylee to the box of oddities and has powered through and is completely up to date on them. Well done. And well done on the Segway sweepers.
0:56:58 - (Kat): I love it so much.
0:56:59 - (Jethro): You did another one. Do you want to hear the other one?
0:57:00 - (Kat): We can wait until the next time we actually have a segue.
0:57:03 - (Jethro): All right. Do we need another segue now?
0:57:05 - (Kat): I'm so excited. Anne was a pretty quiet, private person, and according to Prasinski, she didn't like having all the notoriety, and she ended up developing some pretty serious health problems.
0:57:20 - (Jethro): Oh, no.
0:57:21 - (Kat): On top of that, the meteorite created problems between her and her husband, Eugene. Now, Eugene really wanted to make a lot of money off of this meteorite. And the inability to do so, I guess, made him mad. I don't know exactly how you can blame one or the other for just. It sucks, sure. But eventually, their marriage collapsed.
0:57:45 - (Jethro): Oh, no.
0:57:46 - (Kat): It turns out being struck by a meteorite wasn't great for Anne. Good news for the meteorite, though, since Anne was the only person who's ever been hit by a meteorite and lived to tell about it. The meteorite has been appraised at over a million dollars.
0:58:02 - (Jethro): Wow.
0:58:03 - (Kat): Now, this is kind of fun. Thursday is asteroids day.
0:58:08 - (Jethro): Is it?
0:58:09 - (Kat): Or asteroid day, I guess. And asteroid. I mean, if I understand this correctly, asteroids and meteorites are essentially the same thing, just in different spaces. So, like, an asteroid generally will hang out near the sun, but then the chunks of it that come off and make their way to Anne's hip will be. I'm. I think that's right.
0:58:33 - (Jethro): It would be amazing if we had the ability somehow to zoom out and chart the path. The voyage right.
0:58:42 - (C): That that meteorite, like, zoom out both.
0:58:45 - (Kat): In space and time.
0:58:46 - (Jethro): Yes.
0:58:47 - (Kat): And see where it all started. And be like, it started here and.
0:58:49 - (C): It zoomed around here.
0:58:51 - (Kat): Earth was formed and then. Fuck you, Anne. Yeah. Anyway, the earliest claim of a human being hit by a meteorite actually comes from 1677 manuscript which tells of a friar in Milan who was killed by one.
0:59:10 - (Jethro): Oh, wow.
0:59:11 - (Kat): Although it is disputed whether or not that is actually true because it comes from a text called Zeus displeased. So it's hard to really take that.
0:59:20 - (Jethro): For Zeus was cantankerous.
0:59:23 - (Kat): And finally, very ironically, across from the Hodges home was a drive in theater called the comet Drive in theater. And it had a neon sign depicting a comet falling through the sky with.
0:59:38 - (Jethro): An arrow pointing to Anne's hip.
0:59:39 - (Kat): Well, there was no arrow, but still, it's just saying.
0:59:42 - (Jethro): Maybe the meteorite thought it was a road sign.
0:59:45 - (Kat): I got most of my information from Smithsonian, from insider space, and of course, Wikipedia.
0:59:51 - (Jethro): That is a fascinating tale. And as you told it, I started to remember seeing a picture of her years ago. Did you come across that picture?
0:59:59 - (Kat): I don't know which picture you were.
1:00:01 - (Jethro): Let me see if I can find.
1:00:02 - (Kat): I have seen many pictures of her.
1:00:04 - (Jethro): With the bruise on her thigh.
1:00:05 - (Kat): Yes. There's one where she's laying in bed and she's kind of holding up her floral house dress and. Yeah. Is that the one that you're talking about?
1:00:14 - (Jethro): Right? Yeah, I think she was still lying under that afghan, too. Memory serves me. No, I mean, it shows this unbelievably.
1:00:21 - (C): Big, deep bruise on her by.
1:00:25 - (Jethro): Yeah, it was incredible.
1:00:27 - (Kat): I got a pretty sturdy bruise the other day from bumping my arm into a door frame, which happens constantly because I have no concept of how much space I take up.
1:00:37 - (C): Sure.
1:00:38 - (Kat): Hopefully that doesn't lead to the demise of our marriage.
1:00:41 - (C): I hope not.