Mothman Prophecies screenwriter and fellow podcaster Richard Hatem (!!!) joins us this week to tunnel down into some of the weirdest stuff on the Internet. First up, the Fresno Nightcrawler, followed by a sketchy Las Vegas ghost hunt email scam, and finally a lively discussion about whether “James” the YouTuber actually found a flying, radioactive metallic pill in the desert, or if he’s creating the world’s most tedious ARG.

Bizarre leggy creatures first appeared on surveillance footage in early 2000s Fresno — not biological, not mechanical, but…kind of cute?

The cognitive dissonance of watching something that looks “so janky and fakey” while simultaneously looking completely real

Also: Yosemite National Park footage, a sighting in Poland, another in Billings Montana in 2020, and the “Carmel Area Creature” in Ohio

A “$5,000 ghost hunt contest” at El Cortez Hotel in Vegas is actually just an email scam

But actually lots of hotels and casinos in Vegas are haunted (and some theories as to why)

The Venetian’s Whispering Hallway

MGM Grand/Bally’s Flickering Ghosts

A (probably) Canadian named James posted over 40 YouTube videos since last month about finding a shiny metallic pill-shaped object in the desert

A very small but very dedicated audience

The object is magnetic, burned his hand (he says), weighs 15.8 pounds, has crude markings, causes lights to flicker (??), and allegedly moved itself 10 feet from sawhorses to the ground when he wasn’t watching

The Geiger counter subplot

Is it real??? (Probably not, but we don’t know!)

How younger generations’ first instinct is to post online and crowdsource help rather than calling authorities — a counter-argument to what might look like performative attention seeking to old people like us

Inevitable comparisons to the Dear David thing on Twitter eight years ago (which resulted in a movie deal)

Richard Hatem’s anecdote about how the Blair Witch Project got the smartest and most effective gorilla marketing campaign in Hollywood

And in the epilogue (for paid subscribers only):

Mallory’s existential fear that we’ll eventually discover some kind of “God formula” that solves all the mysteries

How and why people closest to paranormal phenomena sometimes go insane and die, i.e. Keel’s paranoia in Mothman Prophecies, and Blake Smith’s fear of becoming vulnerable to cults like Heaven’s Gate

The great atheist hypocrisy - how materialist skeptics claim their worldview is rational while it’s really just their own “comfortable smugness” and personal opiate

Wanna hear it? Head over to godsghostsUFOs.com

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