Science Gone Wrong: The Bizarre and Terrifying Experiments History Forgot
Science is supposed to cure disease and improve life, but sometimes confidence goes off the rails. Today, we are taking you on a tour through history’s wildest moments when science went completely off the rails, including incidents where confidence reached levels of blowing up a dead whale, dropping cats out of planes, and poisoning an entire generation.
Join us as we explore the terrifying line between discovery and disaster. Join us as we dive into bizarre and unethical experiments, from psychology horror shows that spiraled out of control to so-called "miracle" substances turned deadly. Join us as we discuss the chilling details of the Radium Girls, whose agonizing sacrifice ultimately forced the development of crucial occupational health and safety laws. Join us as we unpack the dark lessons learned from the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. This episode proves that sometimes, what we don't know can truly hurt us.
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TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00]
Marker
Mandy: Science is supposed to make life better, right? It's supposed to cure disease, improve technology, and help us understand the world around us.
But sometimes science gets a little too confident and things get a little weird. I'm talking like, blow up a dead whale. Drop cats outta planes and poison an entire generation levels of confidence from psychology experiments that spiraled into horror shows to miracle substances turned deadly. Today we're taking you on a tour through some of history's wildest moments when science went completely off the rails.
Marker
Mandy: Hey guys, and welcome to the Moms and Mysteries podcast, a True crime podcast featuring myself, Mandy, and my dear friend Melissa. Hi Melissa.
Melissa: Hi Mandy. How are
you?
Mandy: I dunno why I was so sing songy today.
Melissa: I just edited one of our episodes and it was the same like kind of cadence, like a different kind of cadence. So now I'm just excited to
see what comes up
every week. This
is awesome,
Mandy: I know. Well I try to make it a little different. Some people hate that we have the same [00:01:00] boring intro week after week. Boy do they let us know.
Melissa: having it
till the day we die.
Mandy: Exactly.
Melissa: for
editing, and that's all I can
say.
Mandy: Exactly. Alright, I am super excited to get into this episode. It is a little bit different, I would say this falls more into the mysteries category, but an even, I guess there aren't really even mysteries now 'cause they've pretty much been solved, but these are some really interesting cases of things that have gone horribly wrong. Some things that absolutely should have been a crime, um, in some way.
And, as we get into it, you'll see exactly what I mean. So it's August, 1971 in Palo Alto, California. This was really peak time for bell bottoms and anti-war protests, but Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who was a Stanford University psychologist, had something else on his mind. He wanted to understand how ordinary people behave in a prison environment.
He really was trying to study how power, control and authority can shape the human mind, which I do agree [00:02:00] is a fascinating study, but right off the top, you can see how it could be unethical
Melissa: great.
Mandy: for sure.
So he puts out, uh, a newspaper ad that reads, quote, men needed for a psychological study of prison life, And then from more than 70 applicants, he chose 24 of them. They were all college age men, and all of them were considered mentally stable, emotionally healthy and normal. Half of these men were assigned to be guards of this fake prison experiment, and the other half would be the actual prisoners. So this guy, Dr.
Zimbardo, he didn't go and rent out a real jail for his study. He actually built a jail right there in the basement of Stanford psychology department, which is crazy that Stanford allowed this. This is like honestly wild to me. so they built a full on jail. They installed bars, they replaced office doors with steel locks.
They set up a solitary confinement closet and they even assigned a warden's office. [00:03:00] So these volunteers who would be playing guards, got uniforms. They got whistles and mirrored sunglasses so that, you know, no one would be able to see their eyes through them. But that anonymity was the gasoline on the fire of this power struggle that ended up ensuing. So these prisoners were told to wait at home for the instructions, and that's when Dr. Zimbardo really added a little feeder. He asked the Palo Alto police to actually go and arrest these people.
So on a regular warm August morning squad, cars pulled up to quiet suburban houses and neighbors watched as real cops handcuffed college kids on their porches, read them their rights, and tossed them into the back of squad cars. They were then booked at a real police station. They were fingerprinted, photographed, and blindfolded before being driven to the Stanford basement, which had now been rebranded Stanford County Jail.
Melissa: So inside the men were stripped naked and they were issued smocks with ID numbers. No names allowed, [00:04:00] just numbers. Their ankles are shackled with small chains, and they're told when to eat, when to sleep, and when to speak. Meanwhile, the guards, and these are the same guys who just two days ago were playing foosball in the student union are told to keep order however they see fit. So there are no rules really beyond don't physically harm someone, and Zimbardo tells them Your job is to maintain law and order, and that's it.
There's no script, there's no oversight. Just a bunch of 20 somethings with mirror glasses and really too much free time. By the second day, the prisoners had
already had enough.
Mandy: Can you imagine? it.
only took two days. They were like, wait a minute. Like, no, this is not,
Melissa: Yeah,
like number one, how did you get to be a
garden?
I'm here as a prisoner and I don't even like this number that you've assigned me. Why can't I use my name like that? The, the taking away your humanity. Even like taking away
your name is such a big deal,
really,
and why they do it [00:05:00] in these kind of things.
But it's so crazy, like how something that simple is, you know, really can affect you. So they barricaded their cell doors with mattresses and they started shouting that they refused to follow orders. It was part rebellion, part desperate protest. But of course, somewhere in their heads, they still know this isn't real. But the guards, they take this as a declaration of war. They blasted the prisoners with fire extinguishers. They forced them outta their cells and they stripped them naked, The guards confiscated mattresses, tore up blankets and forced everyone to do pushups as punishment. The atmosphere shifted from this college experiment to an authoritarian
nightmare.
Mandy: So one guard who was nicknamed John Wayne, by the others, started acting like he was really auditioning for a war movie. He developed kind of a swagger about him, and he was barking orders and inventing new punishments for the prisoners of the experiment. He told the prisoners to sing, to [00:06:00] clean toilets with their bare hands and to chant their ID numbers until their voice is cracked.
Dr. Zimbardo and his team watched all of this go down from hidden cameras, and they were in a separate room, and at first, as they're watching all of this, they're just thrilled, which I don't know why, but they were thrilled. They think that they're witnessing raw human emotion and behavior. What they're actually watching is people being traumatized in real time,
Melissa: Just play sweet Caroline. Everyone has the most realistic behavior and you know, responses.
When you play that and do the
da, da, da, da,
Mandy: Yeah,
Melissa: you
didn't need a prison experiment.
Mandy: right. But within just 36 hours, one prisoner had a full blown breakdown. He was screaming, sobbing, and literally begging to leave. Dr. Zimbardo did release him, but he told the others that he was a troublemaker who couldn't handle prison. And so it was just really sending this message that like, if you resist, or you know, if you crash [00:07:00] out, you're gonna be labeled as weak and we're all gonna make fun of you.
So the next few days kind of descended into absolute madness. Some prisoners became really passive. They just got quiet. They were compliant, and they seemed pretty broken. But others started acting out. They were being defiant and clearly out of a fear of what was actually going to end up happening to them.
But they were definitely not just sitting down and taking it lightly. One of the prisoners went on a hunger strike and the guards responded by locking him in solitary confinement and they would bang on the door just to like antagonize him and they would mock him and just. It's, it's wild to think about this happening, like to a real prisoner, but it's even crazier to think about these things.
Like these are just like volunteer
Melissa: Yeah.
Mandy: like that are going through this like actual traumatizing experience.
Melissa: So here's the part that really sends chills down your spine. These weren't real criminals or sadistic guards, as Mandy was saying. They're literally students, and yet, within less than a [00:08:00] week, cruelty became normal, and even Zimbardo started slipping. He stopped being a scientist, and really he started acting like a warden. he was ignoring red flags, encouraged this order and he justified everything as data. The only person who saw how wrong it had gotten, and I would like to point out it was a woman, is Christina Malo, a graduate student and Zimbardo's girlfriend. When she visited the basement and saw the conditions, she was horrified and she told him, what you're doing is terrible, and these are people that confrontation actually snapped him out of it. So this experiment that was originally meant to last two weeks was shut down after just six days So when the smoke cleared, or maybe we should say when the fluorescent lights flickered off for the last time, 24 normal young men walked out of that basement, changed forever. The prisoners had nightmares and panic attacks for weeks, and the guards tried to justify their [00:09:00] actions saying we were just playing our roles. but the line between play and reality had vanished long before the final day. Zimbardo for his part became both famous and infamous. He published papers claiming the experiment proved that situational power, not personality, drives cruelty. That under the right circumstances, anyone can become an abuser. And he wasn't wrong, but he also wasn't completely right.
Mandy: Over the years, other researchers poked holes in his findings. They said the participants actually weren't acting naturally at all. They were trying to please the experiment, and they argued that Dr. Zimbardo encouraged aggression, whether subtly or not, by telling the guards to be tough.
But still, the Stanford Prison Experiment became legendary. It appeared in textbooks, documentaries, and even in ethics courses. It inspired movies and even comparisons to real life tragedies like the abuse at Abu gr prison in Iraq. Dr.
Zimbardo himself later admitted, he got caught up in the [00:10:00] role, and that the power, the illusion of all of it, um, it really changes people faster than we like to think in this case. Like they had to shut this experiment down in six days, and that's how little time it took for people to actually start cracking.
But the question remains, did the experiment reveal human nature or did it just create it? But either way, the fallout changed the rules of research forever. Institutional review boards now scrutinize any study involving people and informed consent is non-negotiable. You cannot manipulate or traumatize participants in the name of science.
Thank goodness.
Melissa: Yeah, Do you know what this kind of reminded me of? ' I'm gonna bring TikTok up again. Mandy,
there's a
guy on TikTok, there's a guy on TikTok that's doing like, every day he's saying something about women that he just didn't know. like actual period blood wasn't used in pads, like to do testing and stuff. All these different things that like Women weren't even involved in a lot of the research So anyway, I love him. I love what he's doing. It's really interesting. But what it reminded me of is there was a show called Boys and [00:11:00] Girls Alone. It was a British show and it took kids, it's back from 2009.
There were kids between the ages of eight and 11. They put girls in one house, boys in another, and like let them go crazy. So you could do literally whatever you wanted. They're supervising, but they only intervene. Like adults only intervene if somebody's gonna get hurt. The girls like first day, they've got like chores.
Everyone's got their, you know, things that they're doing. They're making meals, all this stuff. The guys are like putting knives into walls and painting all over and like it's
total anarchy over
there.
And they're like.
Mandy: fascinating.
Melissa: It's so good. And the boys are like crying at some point. 'cause they realize they don't have anything to eat and everything's gone wrong.
And the girls they're like kind of catty fighting with each other. But that's it. So it's interesting to me that this was an all male study because again, like I said, with a TikTok guy, women weren't included in studies for a long time. And so I wonder if, thank God they didn't do this [00:12:00] experiment, but I really do wonder if an all female version of this would've gone the same way,
just in general.
It's just
something that came up
Mandy: Yeah,
Melissa: we've been discussing it. But yeah, it's, I don't know if you've never seen it. It's actually
very, very,
very
interesting. Um, yeah,
Mandy: I would really get into.
Melissa: Yeah.
Mandy: Awesome. All right. We have a few more stories to get into for you guys after a quick break to hear a word from this week's sponsors.
Marker
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Marker
Melissa: And now back to the episode. So if you thought watching a bunch of college students lose their minds in a fake prison was unsettling. Wait until you hear about the people who thought you could read your personality
just by rubbing your skull.
Mandy: I immediately know,
Melissa: Immediately. No,
I,
have am I? I [00:15:00] have a
very lumpy skull.
I
have like calx on my head. I don't need
another way for
science to make me
feel bad
about myself.
Mandy: exactly.
Melissa: So this is the idea of Phenology, which is the 19th century favorite pseudoscience at its peak. It was taken seriously by doctors clerics reformers, and it was used to justify everything from criminality to race hierarchies. The next story begins in Vienna in the late 17 hundreds. So we have this guy Franz Joseph Gaal. He's a physician with an obsession. He believes that the brain was not a single mush of thoughts, but a patchwork of organs tied to mental faculties like language, morality, acquisitiveness and that those organs when well used would push outward on the skull, thus the bumps on your head. Thus, personality, I am filled with personality if that's how we're judging it. So in his [00:16:00] 1808 work, the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system Gall laid out the foundations GA's method was to examine criminal and mental patients, measure their skulls and look for correlations. He asserted that the skull shape mirrors the brain beneath it. that the more developed a trait, the
more pronounced the bump above
it.
Mandy: Okay, but would it not be kind of freaky if this was actually real?
Melissa: I, yeah. And I don't know Mandy, I'm very worried about everything going on in my head. I have like a slope on the
back of my head.
I
don't, I
think my mom didn't lay me the right way.
Mandy: You would've been like a chronologist dream patient.
Melissa: I really would. I, oh my gosh, this is not good. I'm getting scared. Johann spur Heim, once GA's student, actually popularized the idea. So he split off from Gaul, he toured Europe and to England, and became the movement's best salesman. GA's brain localization idea did have a kernel of truth. [00:17:00] Different brain areas do specialize, but that leap Your skull shape could reveal character, had really disastrous logical gaps. Skull thickness, trauma, variation. None of that mapped cleanly to behavior so soon.
This doctrine took on a life of its own spurs, Heim, and others expanded. This organs list to
self-esteem, combativeness, secretiveness, benevolence, hope ideality, and dozens more. And these faculties got plotted on charts.
So between 1820 and 1870, phenological Society sprouted up in Britain. The Edinburg Phenological Society was founded by George Comb and his brother Andrew. And their influence was huge. They lectured, they published, they collected skulls, and they made maps of the
mind, which is a wild sentence
that
starts strong and gets crazy and then ends fine. So in America, the Boston Phenological Society [00:18:00] launched in 1832, riding this wave of public fascination, Ologists gave readings in parlors at medical fairs and lecture halls, and it was seen as I moral, As well as medical science. Ology claimed to reconcile science and faith.
So you could study the mind physically, but you could also hold religious beliefs. many enthusiasts used it to preach self-improvement, better child rearing and moral
reform.
Mandy: By the mid 19th century, phonology was everywhere. People lined up in parlors. They were offering their heads up to be read, and they would purchase phonology busts and charts and handbooks. They paid money for readings that were supposed to tell them their aptitudes and their weaknesses, and even who they should marry, which you kind of, I'm like, alright, even if it was real, I feel like now you're taking some liberties with this one.
Melissa: Is it like a Ouija board where they put their hands on your head and they
just go around to do the letters of the
Mandy: Right. Are you a fortune teller or a doctor? What's [00:19:00] happening right now? but these people would just sit in a, in a chair and the phenologist would run their fingers, you know, over their head. They sometimes would use calipers tape measures all over the skull. They would just make notes of where you have a bump, you know, and say, Hey, you have a bump right here.
You're ambitious. You have a depression here. You know, there's something else going on that it's just why?
Right. Exactly.
But some charts also included tables that had these numeric scores on them, and this supposedly scientific look at your brain Gave the whole thing gravitas, even though the foundation was very flimsy. phenologist faced pushback and critics said the readings were subjective and just kind of hand wavy and full of confirmation bias. But in 1818, Peter Mark Rogert, criticized the lack of objectivity.
But the believers still pushed on. Some chronologists responded by introducing calipers and they attempted to really quantify the measurements they were taking, [00:20:00] but the error margin and the skull variation of every different person and this measurement subjectivity kind of re, you know, it was a problem for a long time.
So across the Atlantic, the idea of phenology went global, but it became entwined with racial pseudoscience as Chronologists claim that European skulls were quote unquote superior. And they used these readings to justify colonialism slavery, and. What they said were civilizing missions. So the idea that skull shape conferred moral and intellectual hierarchy was deeply wrong, of course, but it was widely accepted by many people at the time.
At the University of Edenburgh, their skull room still holds over 1500 skulls, many of which were actually collected during the heyday of phonology. Some of them were taken unethically from colonized people, and oftentimes without their consent, that legacy of scientific racism still haunts institutional [00:21:00] collections.
Phonology also touched politics when President James a Garfield was assassinated and his defense called Chronologists to testify about his skull shape and mental characteristics. This movement had really permeated every level of society all the way up to who we would even consider the elites and people who are in charge.
Melissa: Thankfully though science eventually caught up, anatomist and neurologist showed that skull shape does not correspond reliably to brain structure. The skull is not a perfect shell over the brain. Skull thickness, injuries and variation I'll break this link. GA's idea that bumps equal mental faculties really collapsed under scrutiny. By the late 19th century phonology was largely discredited in medical circles. It was relegated to being quack medicine carnival sideshows, and spiritualist parlors. But still, it hung on especially through novelty devices. So enter the psychograph. A [00:22:00] phonology machine invented in the early 20th century. It was patented in 1905. It measured 32 points on your head and claimed to output personality scores. These machines were installed in theaters and department stores.
It was gimmicky and fun, and kept the bump reading illusion alive and well in the 1930s. Though discredited its influence really persisted people internalized the idea that physical traits like skull shape and head size meant character. that belief actually fueled eugenics, racial hierarchies, and even modern forms of pseudoscience from IQ tests misused to revivalist racial science. As late as the 20th century, some academics and popular writers revisited phonology, not as a science, but as a cautionary example, how we can be seduced by the facade of
measurement and authority.
Mandy: I think that's actually such a great point, there's a lot of things that might seem scientific and people will fall for them or believe them because they have [00:23:00] charts and graphs and documentation and it makes it feel like it's a legitimate science. so I do think it's a great cautionary example of how like, sometimes common sense should, take, should override.
Like you shouldn't just believe everything that you see at face value or just because somebody has data points or statistics on something. and especially now in this day and age, we know that every you, you have to question everything you see on the internet for sure. I'm glad the internet wasn't around when Phonology was around because I feel like that combination of things would've been really bad.
Melissa: one TikTok for me
to fall all into
it and
Mandy: For sure.
Melissa: all over the
place.
Mandy: Yeah. So after centuries of people poking at each other's heads and calling it science, you'd think that we'd learn a little humility. Spoiler alert, we did not because next came a century long experiment that basically turned earth itself into a test subject all in the name of a quieter running engine.
Melissa, I know I haven't, you probably also have not given much thought to how society finally figured out that our [00:24:00] gasoline should be unleaded. Most of us, I would, maybe not. Most of us, a lot of us have grown up with nothing but unleaded gasoline and have just accepted that it's common sense. Not to put lead in there, obviously, but of course there's a whole story about why that is and how that even came to be.
So on December 9th, 1921 in Dayton, Ohio, scientists at a General Motors lab had poured a teaspoon of TEL, which is Tetra Ethel led into a test engine, and the result was, it suddenly went quiet. The knocking sound was gone. That backfire and pinging noise that, you know, pistons make when they're running or firing, uh, went away.
And this breakthrough really felt like something big Engineers who were chasing performance believed they had found a miracle. Thomas Midgley Jr. Who was working under GM's, Charles Kettering, became the name behind this additive and GM Standard Oil, and DuPont formed the Ethel Corporation to produce and market the leaded [00:25:00] fuel.
They spun this narrative for press, really, that said, lead will require engine and boost performance. What many overlooked was that? The toxicity of lead was already very well known and documented. Chemists and physicians had warned that lead exposure damaged organs, but yet the industrial momentum prevailed.
Within a few years, severe problems started to emerge. In 1924, refinery workers at standard oils bayway plant in the infamous loony gas building, exhibited neurological symptoms such as tremors, delirium, memory loss. There were people collapsing, and five people died. So the building earned its nickname for all of its horrors.
The industry responded very defensively. They claim that lead related incidents were just anomalies, and they insisted that the levels of lead in gasoline were totally harmless. It was safe, and they mounted studies really to dispute any health claims. So the Ethel Corporation insisted that this [00:26:00] additive was harmless when it was diluted, and there was nothing to be concerned about.
By the mid 20th century, leaded gasoline was ubiquitous. It was the default for virtually every gasoline pump, and its toxicity was invisible, but the danger was very real.
Melissa: In subsequent decades, the hidden cost became undeniable, led from exhaust particles settled into soil houses and playgrounds. Children ingested or inhaled lead dust, and their developing nervous systems absorbed it. The result was a diminished iq, behavioral disorders, attention deficits, and lifelong cognitive injury. In the 1970s, pediatrician Herbert Needleman linked low level lead exposure to reductions in children's IQs by analyzing lead content in their teeth. his findings. challenged prevailing assumptions, industrial actors, and some scientists resisted, but pressure mounted simultaneously. [00:27:00] Chemist Claire Patterson attempted to measure the Earth's age using lead isotopes. He realized that atmospheric lead from gasoline contaminated nearly all of his samples. His environmental crusade exposed how pervasive lead pollution had become. So cities across the United States exhibited classic lead patterns. Neighborhoods near highways, factories or dense traffic showed far higher blood lead levels in children in Cleveland. For example, studies found that leaded gasoline contributed heavily to lead exposure, especially in low income and marginalized communities. Public health advocates and researchers began declaring that there was no safe threshold for lead exposure. Every increment mattered. By the late 20th century, Some epidemiologists proposed that following lead levels partially explained major drops in crime rates. In the 1990s, the lead crime hypothesis became widely discussed. [00:28:00] Activists formed campaigns to ban leaded gasoline In the uk, they had something called the campaign for Lead Free air or clear, and it helped push government reforms in the us. The 1970 Clean Air Act empowered the EPA to regulate emissions, including lead, but the phase out encountered fierce industry resistance, oil and automotive firms argue, cost engine wear, compatibility and lack of substitutes.
And of course, as you'd imagine, they lobbied hard with every new regulation
came pushback.
Mandy: The turning point came in 1973 when the US EPA issued rules phasing out leaded gasoline. The auto and oil industries really resisted, but technical demands like protecting catalytic converters really made lead incompatible with modern cars. In 1975, leaded fuel was banned for vehicles equipped with catalytic converters.
In 1986, the US mandated a [00:29:00] 91% reduction in lead additives, and finally, on January 1st, 1996, leaded gasoline was banned for on-road vehicles in the us. I think that was probably the craziest thing to me was that it was only in 1996 that they finally banned lead and gasoline.
Melissa: Absolutely wild. 'cause I, I, my whole life
have only thought of unleaded
Mandy: Me too.
Melissa: Never, I'd never even thought there could have been a, a leaded version because I was just not old
enough. But 1996,
I
Mandy: That means that we were exposed to leaded gasoline.
We were exposed to leaded gasoline when we were children.
Melissa: So now it's the bumps and it's
the lead.
Mandy: I know I was honestly just shocked by that whole thing.
globally phase outs really kind of dragged. Many developing nations continued using leaded gasoline, and over two decades, the United Nations Environment program coordinated a global campaign to retire leaded fuel In July of 2021, Algeria, who was the final country who was producing leaded gasoline, [00:30:00] finally phased it out in July of 2021. So for the first time
in nearly a century, no driver can legally pump leaded gas anywhere in the world. So estimates now suggest that the ban prevents 1.2 million premature deaths per year, along with countless health damages that have been averted.
Yet the legacy of contamination still remains soil old infrastructure, residual lead in many inner city environments still exists. Health consequences also endured. We've seen lower IQs, increased hypertension, kidney disease, fertility problems, and mental health disorders. Some analysis attribute millions of psychiatric diagnosis including depression, anxiety, and A DHD to historical lead exposure, which is actually a topic that I would like to go down and do a little more research on, because I really never, that's not one that I have ever heard, um, you know, people connecting anything to like historical lead exposure, but that's a really fascinating [00:31:00] theory.
I don't know why I just found that whole, that was just very interesting to me learning about unleaded gasoline and how it,
Melissa: Yeah,
Mandy: how we got here.
Melissa: absolutely. So from a global environmental disaster to one very localized one, This next story proves that sometimes bad science isn't done in a lab at all. Sometimes it's done on a beach with a half ton of dynamite. So on the central Oregon coast, a massive eight ton problem washed ashore on November 9th, 1970. So this was a 45 foot sperm whale. It was dead and it was already rotting. and attracting a crowd of sight seers. The stench they said was stank. Really? And it was
Inescapable.
Mandy: I can't, I, I feel like I don't even want to try and imagine it any longer than I just did. 'cause
Melissa: Yeah,
Mandy: sick.
Melissa: that big of
something
that's like not a
whiff,
that's like, mm oh, too many. Too many, [00:32:00] too much. So the question though, for local authorities was purely logistical. How do you get rid of a putrefying marine giant. So that responsibility fell to the Oregon State Highway Division, which doesn't actually make any sense. And they were hilariously in charge of
coastal beaches at the
time. That
would be a very good
time to be like, that is not my
job
description.
Mandy: beach patrol. Highway
Melissa: Not my job title. There is nothing. so their engineer, George Thornton, later complained that his colleagues had conveniently. G deer hunting during this time, leaving him with this awful task. Bearing the whale would be too complicated. The carcass was really just too large and cutting it up was voted against because imagine the hours, imagine how nasty that would be and how much was involved in dismembering. Eight
tons of decaying flesh
Mandy: Hard pass.
Melissa: hard pass. You know, our friend Rebecca, she actually is a [00:33:00] volunteer in New York state.
So when a whale comes off shore, she like goes and helps with whatever it is they're gonna do with
it.
Um, I
Mandy: yeah.
Melissa: she loves whales, but um, yeah, so she's done that before. She sent me a picture and I was like, that's crazy. So I don't understand, like, I still do not understand how Highway Patrol got involved in this. At
all.
Mandy: They didn't have any Rebecca's back then, I guess.
Melissa: I guess not. So they ended up deciding on this plan that was really unorthodox, but it was also very, very American. cue the Eagles flying overboard as we blow it up with dynamite. Um, so the idea was that the resulting pieces would be small enough for scavenger animals like seagulls and crabs to dispose of it. So, Thornton lacking any precedent whatsoever. chose 20 cases of dynamite, which is a half ton of explosives, or roughly one case
for every ton of whale,
Mandy: I [00:34:00] wonder how they mathematically work that out,
Melissa: honestly. I mean, you just gotta be like, what if it was like, okay, it's five cases, five doesn't actually sound like enough to get. This done, I think like 20
is like, we mean business.
That's a, we mean business number. Mm-hmm.
Mandy: left. Yeah.
Melissa: But we'll get to it. There's an explosive expert named Walter Umen Hoffer who, I mean, was he an explosives expert or did he like take toll booth money? Like, uh, you know, out on the highway? Who knows? We don't know. There's, there's no way to tell, but he's there all day. And later he claimed that he told this guy, Hey, 20 sticks of dynamite. That'll do you good. Not 20 cases, but he was like, no, I'll take the cases. So on November 12th, 1970, with news cameras rolling and a crowd of spectators watching from a distance that they deemed to be safe, they detonated the charge. What followed became a textbook example of [00:35:00] government decision gone spectacularly, grotesquely wrong, and this blast was huge.
It momentarily vaporized the whale in a cloud of smoke and flame. The crowd cheered thinking it was a success, but then
the thudding started.
Mandy: Oh boy,
and you can only imagine what the thudding was. So once the whole, you know, boom of this explosion kind of quiets down, now people can hear the sound of raining debris and it could only be chunks of whale blubber that are some like. Big ones like the size of desks even. Um, and these pieces of whale are being hurled hundreds of feet through the air.
Melissa: Imagine getting knocked in the head by Yeah,
Mandy: it's worse than a horror movie. Or even just being anywhere nearby and like, or what if you didn't even know they were doing this and you're just like sitting on your porch like a mile away and all of a sudden here comes like whale guts, like raining outta the sky.
Like what in the world? [00:36:00]
I don't even know. So,
Melissa: that the, I think that the Highway Patrol did this on purpose to be
like, take us off this. This is
not for
Mandy: yeah. Well also in like 1970, I feel like we had a lot more knowledge back then. Like you should have known that blowing up an animal was not gonna be like a clean. Uh,
I just, wow. I don't know. I have no words for that. So the cameraman for K-A-T-U-T-V in Portland, his name was Doug Brazil. He was, you know, filming this and his, his camera lens was covered with Phish guts and a news reporter named Paul Linman reported the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.
Melissa: That is, we're moms and mysteries with Melissa and
Mandy, but that is too
much
alliteration for
me.
Mandy: was like,
honestly, though, how did he even come up with that on the spot? Like, I'm so impressed with Paul right now.
Melissa: He
done
good?
Mandy: He really did. But the worst victim of the flying blubber wasn't a person, [00:37:00] thankfully, but an inanimate object. It was a car. A massive 300 pound slab of this blubber traveled a quarter of a mile and crushed the roof of a brand new 1970 Oldsmobile 88 sedan.
That Oldsmobile actually belonged to Walter Uen Hofer, the Barry man who tried to advise Thornton on the proper amount of explosives that he needed.
Melissa: I could not believe that.
That is
Mandy: I know.
Melissa: wild. I would be so ticked off if I, that was that man. He's tried everything to make this work
and it came after him.
Mandy: Well, to make matters worse, he had actually just bought the car from a local dealership,
and the dealership's motto was, get this come to us for a whale of a deal.
Melissa: No, I
would think I
Mandy: It's too perfect. I know. It's too perfect. I know.
So Umin Hofer was paid the full value of the car by the state within two days, but the ultimate irony is that most of the [00:38:00] whale was still there rotting on the beach.
Only a fraction of it had been blasted, and the remaining sections of it were so large that really, no, no one's going to wanna go near that. Not even the seagulls are gonna attempt to clean up that mess. And so the highway crew ended up having to bury all the large pieces, whatever was left of this whale.
But this incredible story was largely forgotten outside of Oregon until 1990 when Dave Berry wrote about it in his syndicated column after requiring the archival news footage of this event. And he wrote, I'm probably not guilty of understatement when I say that. What follows on the videotape is the most wonderful event in the history of the universe.
Melissa: I do love
David Berry.
Mandy: Me too, but that column and the subsequent circulation of the video on the internet turned the organ exploding whale into a viral global phenomenon. Have you ever heard of that story?
Melissa: No, I
mean,
no.
Mandy: No,
I haven't either.
Melissa: [00:39:00] it's one of those stories. It sounds
like you would've heard of it, and maybe you did,
but I feel like I'd remember,
uh, an exploding whale.
Mandy: Strange.
Melissa: Yeah.
Mandy: strange. All right, guys, we have a couple more stories to get into, believe it or not, after one last break to hear a word from this week's sponsors.
Marker
Melissa: And now back to the episode. So. Mandy, if blowing up a whale didn't convince you that humans should not be left unsupervised with science, maybe this next one will. Because in the 1950s when malaria broke out in Borneo, the World Health Organization tried to fix it. And the result was cats, not the movie, which I watched part of.
And it was terrible. It was cat falling from the sky. So the story of Operation Cat Drop, because we'd hate to call it anything else, is another classic case study in unintended consequences often used today to teach systems thinking. So it began as so many of these stories begin with the best of intentions. In the [00:40:00] 1950s, the Diac people of Borneo were suffering from a severe malaria outbreak, the World Health Organization, or who responded by authorizing a massive campaign to spray the villages with the highly effective insecticide, DDT to kill the disease carrying mosquitoes. And the spraying worked. the rates of malaria dropped, but the single action of introducing DDT began an ecological domino effect that threatened to wipe out the entire community. The DDT didn't just kill mosquitoes. It killed a species of parasitic wasps. That was the natural enemy of a type of thatch eating caterpillar. I hate when this happens. And with that predator gone, the caterpillar's multiplied exponentially devouring the palm thatched roofs of local homes. So suddenly the villagers had collapsing roofs open to the elements, but the threat was even greater than just structural damage. The [00:41:00] DDT contaminated insects like cockroaches and the hardy caterpillars were then being eaten by local geckos because DDT does not break down easily, it accumulated in the geckos bodies through bio
magnification, which we all know what
that is.
The um, I'm just gonna keep going 'cause you guys are way too smart for this.
The sickened sluggish geckos were then an easy meal for the village's. Beloved domestic cats. The cats received a lethal, concentrated dose of the poison, so the cats began to die off in large numbers disrupting the next
level of the food chain.
Mandy: With the cats gone, the natural order of the jungle was really in shambles, and an even greater threat emerged. The local rat population exploded. They multiplied completely unchecked. They were eating vital grain in food stores, and worse, these rodents carried fleas that posed a risk of plague and typhus.
Melissa: they just, this is like such
[00:42:00] a circle of Horrors. This is
Mandy: It just never ends. Like it just keeps going and going and going. So the Diac people faced a true disaster. They had collapsing homes. There was famine and lethal epidemics, all thanks to a very well-intentioned program to fight malaria. In desperation, they appealed to the British authorities. The solution was, to put it mildly, quite bizarre.
The Royal Air Force was tasked with what was essentially a massive airlift of pest control. And they carried out this mission in March of 1960. It was called Operation Cat Drop. And the Royal Air Force used giant Beverly Transport planes flying out of Singapore. they had acquired a group of cats from, I don't even know how they, they
required a group of cats from a recruitment drive from the city of Cats, which I don't know,
Melissa: the
army coming to your school and talking
to you
Mandy: Like we need cats.
Melissa: sign up. Yeah.
Mandy: I guess, yeah.
[00:43:00] So, even though the story has been exaggerated over time, um, some sources will say that as many as 14,000 cats were, you know, dropped into, you know, dropped from the sky. But the original news reports only cite 23 cats, and these 23 cats were packed expertly into wicker baskets and then also expertly parachuted into the like remote area where they wanted the them to go and attack these rodents, I guess.
Yeah.
hundreds of the locals there watch this unusual cat drop, which also they sent about 7,000 pounds of equipment down to them as well. And the mission was reported as being a success. So the new cats, which the villagers affectionately called the army of cats from heaven, got straight to work.
They were hunting the rats and they were really restoring the ecological balance that human error had so violently tripped. So it remains a legendary cautionary tale of how one small targeted action, which was in this case, the spraying of DDT can have [00:44:00] really unforeseen and cascading, you know, long-term consequences.
Honestly, I feel like this story is like a representation of like my life sometimes where I'm like, you just do one thing and then like next thing you know, everything is like spiraling out of control. But this is obviously on a massive scale.
Melissa: Yeah.
Mandy: it's interesting though that they just like, I don't understand how they just sent new cats in and how come the new cats didn't get poisoned?
Melissa: Maybe the DDT at that point had quantified in the other animals and
they stopped being so sick
and they were
like, I don't know. But you know what? If I lived in that village, you know what I would say, no thanks. Don't drop the cats. You've done enough. Get outta here. Please don't
give us any more help.
You're
literally killing us. I would imagine. I would imagine seeing those cats fall from the sky
did not feel like heaven at first.
It had
to have felt like a
nightmare.
Wild. All right, so let's shift from the absurd to the tragic, [00:45:00] because not every scientific disaster comes with parachutes and fur.
This one actually glowed in the dark, literally, and it cost hundreds of young women their lives. So during the height of World War I, a new element called Radium was really all the rage. It was a cultural miracle substance sold as a health tonic and a cure all, but its deadliest reality was in the factories. So here there's hundreds of young women now known as the radium girls. They were there employed to paint, watch faces and instrument dials for the US Radium Corporation. So this Luminous Paint was marketed under the brand name Undark. The work was considered high class. They were well paid and it was really a modern job for the time. Their job was actually to use their lips to point the fine camel hair brushes to a perfect tip after dipping them in paint. And this practice was known as lip dip paint. Some of these names are just, [00:46:00] let's go back and, you know, rework this. So the inventor of the paint and the factory supervisors assured them that the substances were harmless, even beneficial. These young women really embraced the glow, the radium powder dusted their hair and their clothing, making them shimmer. They would even paint their nails, their teeth, and eyelids with the luminous material for fun. And their bodies were glowing like Ghost in the Dark. They had no idea that they were ingesting a fatal dose of radiation every single day. And radium is chemically very similar to calcium as once it's ingested, it's quietly absorbed by the bodies and deposited deep within your bones, essentially turning your skeleton into internal radiation sources. So really, the clock was
ticking on their lives.
Mandy: Horrifying. So the symptoms started to appear a few years later. They were dental pain, loose teeth, and then a condition that's now known as Radium jaw, which is a [00:47:00] form of necrosis where the jawbone literally begins to crumble and fall away from the skull. By 19 24 50 women were gravely ill, and over a dozen had already died.
The US Radium Corporation responded with a campaign of denial and really callous cruelty. They hired doctors to attribute the women's agonizing deaths to other causes, including attempts to smear their reputations by suggesting that terminal illness that they had was syphilis, which was a sexually transmitted disease that carried a massive stigma at the time.
So yeah, they're like, it's definitely not the radiation that these women have been around. It's, it's, you know, it's an STD. So that truly horrible. But their fight for justice began in 1927 when five women, including Grace Friar and Catherine Wolf, Donahue began their lawsuit. The press who recognized the profound tragedy here called them the Five Living Dead.
The legal battle was brutal. It was hampered by legal delays, and the company's continued [00:48:00] attempts to postpone the hearings until the women died, and the case disappeared in 1928, facing massive public backlash. After seeking an adjournment, the US Radium Corporation offered an out of court settlement.
The women accepted a $10,000 lump sum, a $600 annual annuity for life, and the payment of all their medical and legal expenses. This, of course, is a meager compensation for what these women have, which is a life sentence, and they're definitely going to die from being exposed to this radium, but it was still a victory.
The subsequent case in Ottawa, Illinois was even more dramatic. Katherine Wolf Donahue, who was dying of cancer, was too frail to attend the final hearing and had to testify from a stretcher. She actually even collapsed during her testimony. She died just one day after the company filed its final appeal.
And the women, the five women that had brought the original lawsuit, actually won their case. And the agonizing sacrifice [00:49:00] became a pivotal moment that forced the development of crucial occupational health and safety laws, ensuring that no worker would ever again be told that a fatal dose of poison was safe.
stories like these ones really scare me. I've actually heard of the radium girls before. but stuff like that freaks me out to think about because. Yeah, at the time they didn't know, or they didn't, it wasn't like a known thing. But then that makes, that means that that could happen again. Something similar could happen again, right?
Like, we don't know what we don't know. And so, you know, I, I get that now we have these different safety laws and we have these different, um, you know, regulations. But that doesn't mean that like something like this could not happen again in the future.
Melissa: For sure. All of these stories, it feels
like we're not too far off from
some of them
happening again. these are all really fascinating. I knew of the Stanford Prison experiment, but I didn't know most of those details, and that just absolutely blows my mind. And I, I, I still don't know how to feel about that, but these are, these are wild stories
and [00:50:00] I'm, I'm glad we got to discuss
them.
Mandy: me too. This was a fun one. Let us
know what you guys thought of this episode and we will be back next week. Same time, same place. New story.
Melissa: have a great
week.
Mandy: Bye.
