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In Research Of

In Research Of

William Blake Smith

The show where we watch the 1970s TV show "In Search Of..." and look at possible explanations the producers didn't consider.
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Top 10 In Research Of Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best In Research Of episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to In Research Of for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite In Research Of episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

In Research Of - S04E01 - Tidal Waves

S04E01 - Tidal Waves

In Research Of

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01/31/23 • 108 min

Additional background material on this episode is available for Patrons. Jeb and Blake wade into the first episode of season 4 of In Search Of... to learn a thing or two about tsunamis. (Yes, the producers actually said that they called it "tidal waves" because if they'd used "tsunami" Americans wouldn't have bothered to find out what it was about. I remember being taught the "new" term during my basic education. -B) Lots of good footage, interviews, reenactments, and science in this one!

Nimoy Fashion - Henley Shirt (we assume he's wearing pants below the cut?)

To me, it looked like an AARP-style drug ad.

The J.K.K. Look Laboratory (in honor of Mr. James K. K. Look - who's death in pursuit of scientific data is honored in the naming) There is shockingly little about Mr. Look on the net and he certainly seems like he deserves at least a Wikipedia page.

Hokusai's famous "wave" - and yes, he really did pioneer "tentacle porn," but I'm not linking to it - nor judging.

This is only a simulation. If this had been an actual podcast, this guy would have tried to sell you some Bombas Socks or a subscription to Wondrium.

NOAA monitoring lab

Ed Bernard

Steven Froehlich

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In Research Of - S01E13 - Learning ESP

S01E13 - Learning ESP

In Research Of

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01/06/20 • 90 min

Wherein Jeb and Blake discuss the 13th episode of In Search Of... and fail to learn any ESP.

Watch this ISO episode on YouTube.

Notes:

Edgar Mitchell (Wikipedia)

Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Science

Phenomena by Annie Jacobson (history of Gov't research into Psi)

Zener Cards

Nimoy Fashion Alert:

One possible explanation of JJ's "psychic" powers is that he may have seen the images from the lens reflection.

Joseph (JB) Rhine mentioned as creator of the experimenter. I know this is just a TV demo but a big problem w/ these tests is controlling for stuff like that might give away the card selection.

Duke article on Rhine, including how he got involved in the Exorcist case and missing persons.

SPR article on Rhine.

Discussion of Rhine's motivations as being religious in style, but scientific in content.

David Ossman (Firesign Theater) on Spoonbending from Lawrence Kennedy, an excerpt from Dr. Firesign's Follies.

Robert Monroe of the "Monroe Institute" - home of the waterbed farm lab.

The American Society for Psychical Research.

UC Davis' Dr. Charles Tart

David Zink (from the Tiwanaku finale of the episode)

Night Gallery Commentary:

Percy Rodriguez (samples of his voice power) - wikipedia entry

An article discussing Rod Serling & Jack Laird on Night Gallery

The Sixth Sense TV show that was inserted into Night Gallery feed on syndication

Also Mentioned:

Jason King - the character (and TV Show) that inspired Austin Power's fashion sense. His show was a spin-off from the series that first featured him, Department S.

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In Research Of - S01E10 - Atlantis

S01E10 - Atlantis

In Research Of

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12/18/19 • 65 min

Sharon Hill (Scientifical Americans) joins Jeb and Blake to talk about the Atlantis episode of In Search Of... Watch original In Search Of episode on YouTube. This is a kind of a disjointed mess of an ISO episode, so our notes are kind of all over the place as well. But here's a bunch of highlights and additional reading from our own prep notes for the show:
  • We'll be covering Easter Island in a terrific upcoming episode, but it has nothing to do with Atlantis.
  • Olmec heads don't weigh anything like what is claimed.
  • The Tiwankau text about "long before the Pyramids" stuff comes from nazi-sympathizer Arthur Posnansky whose "15,000 years ago" dating has been picked up by many alt-archaeology researchers.
  • Thera/Santorini is a beautiful place that suffered a devastating disaster ( 1642–1540 BCE ). When not being called "Atlantis" it spends a lot of time as photographs in Greek restaurants.
  • Antikythera Mechanism is from within 200 - 50 BCE. Plato wrote the Atlantis story more than 100 - 200 years before the device was even made. It has nothing to do with Atlantis.
  • Dr. Maxine Asher is a controversial choice for "subject matter expert." Her views may not have been known by the ISO producers? Weird ramblings about Catholics, Jews, 12 Noahs, Psychic Powers, and academic fraud are just some of her career highlights.
  • The Piri Reis map appears again. It does not show Antarctica. Nor Atlantis.
  • The Edgar Cayce people make an appearance. Their group is called the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE).
  • The Bimini "Wall" or "Road" is discussed. It looks manmade but was created by natural processes. Other geological features that look manmade include The Giant's Causeway.
  • We talk a bit about Peter Tompkins and mentioned: The Secret Life of Plants Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle
  • Oldest reference I found saying that Peter Tompkins might have been the voice in that weird call was from this 2003 post by "Gian." This comports closely to words written on The Quester Files site - by Gian Quasar, whom I presume is the same author. (Note: Blake and Jeb are both highly skeptical that Tompkins is the voice.)
  • The Mochica artifacts (and the troubling assertion that their art represents proof of a post-Atlantis diaspora) are presented. There is no evidence that this is true, and Jeb is suspicious that some of those artifacts shown are forgeries.
Nimoy Fashion Alert:
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In Research Of - S03E07 - Siberian Fireball
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07/30/21 • 133 min

Jeb and Blake consider the possibility that the Tunguska Event was caused by an extraterrestrial atomic craft. An old friend returns. A SciFi icon cameos. Atoms are split.

Mr. Leonard Nimoy!

Charles Cole

Ronald Oriti

And Dr. Isaac Asimov

News about Golden Globes scandals

Asteroid Monitoring (NASA)

Tunguska in Pop Culture (Wiki)

Basic coverage of Tunguska and theories (Wiki)

Leonid Kulik

Thomas R. Atkins (A Fire Came By) Amz Author's Page (Affiliate Link)

The Jomon Period (Japan) and some amazing Jomon Masks (3D Print)

Henry Gris ("Psychic" author and early member of Hollywood Foreign Press Association)

Alexey Zolotov

Permafrost Links:

Finally - and I'm definitely not recommending this video to you - but am sharing it because it might be the disturbing thing you're looking for. Rabies in a Human Patient (1960) - Warning, Disturbing Imagery

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In Research Of - S01E07 - Earthquakes

S01E07 - Earthquakes

In Research Of

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11/25/19 • 48 min

Jeb Card and Blake Smith are joined by "spooky geologist" Sharon Hill to talk about this classic season one episode of In Search Of... that considers various methods to predict earthquakes, and what we might expect if a large quake hits the San Francisco area.

Watch this episode of In Search Of... on YouTube.

Nimoy Fashion - once again speaking to us from a Los Angeles rooftop.

Around the 9 min mark, we mistakenly say the Bay of Fundy is in Newfoundland. Nope - it's between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. ( Does everything in Canada have to have "new" in its name??) Thanks to Stephanie J. Lahey for this correction!

1964 Alaska Earthquake (Wikipedia)

2011 Earthquake/Tsunami (Disturbing Footage)

1936 Hollywood Movie about San Francisco Earthquake

Tallest tsunami ever recorded.

VLBI - Very Long Baseline Interferometry

Quasars for VLBI type research (NY Times)

1989 Double-Decker Collapse (Wikipedia)

Clips from 2015 San Andreas starring The Rock

Listener Darren Bennett advises us that the 1982 "Syzygy" disaster referenced in the show as The Jupiter Effect. It was written by John Gribbin, a science writer who has apparently subsequently regretted it. (He's still alive and still writing science books - but tried to distance himself from his own book in a July 1980 issue of New Scientist.)

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In Research Of - S01E11 - Psychic Detectives
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12/23/19 • 46 min

Jeb and Blake join Leonard Nimoy and a group of St. Louis clairvoyants as we go in research of psychic detectives.

Watch this episode of ISO on YouTube.

A quick thanks to Shane Gower for his helpful blog post from 2015 about this episode.

  • 1970s Famous psychic Peter Hurkos is featured during the introduction.
  • Hurkos was vouched for by Andrija Puharich, after being challenged by James Randi. Puharich was a major figure in Ancient Aliens, Remote Viewing, and New Age culture in the US.
  • "Psychic Detective" has changed meaning over the 20th century from detectives who investigated the paranormal into detectives who were themselves paranormal.
  • IMDB and Wikipedia say that Sylvia Browne is in this episode. Jeb and I could find zero evidence to support that assertion. She appeared neither on-screen, nor in the credits. Furthermore, the episode took place in St. Louis and involved local psychic investigators but Browne had left Missouri for California in 1964 according to her obituary:
"She eventually began giving readings to others and, 10 years after moving to California in 1964, she formed the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research."

Nimoy Fashion Alert: First Sweater Sighting!

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In Research Of - S01E20 - The Loch Ness Monster
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03/03/20 • 102 min

Jeb and Blake are joined by Daniel Loxton, co-author (with Donald Prothero) of Abominable Science!, and the regular author of the Junior Skeptic portion of Skeptic magazine. It's a deep dive into Loch Ness to look for the creature(s) said to inhabit the lake.

Watch this episode of ISO episode on YouTube.

Discussed:

Robert Rines, Inventor & Lawyer

Robert Rines - Appreciation from MIT

Academy of Applied Science

The Rines Photos critiqued by Darren Naish (the Tetzoo blog & podcast)

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

The "real" Dinsdale footage

The Water Bailiff (Alex Campbell) is the first journalist who covered this story.

Loch Ness A. Shine video for Google Maps

Ness Toyota commercial with Shine

Jeb's own video of wake ness monster

Nimoy Fashion:

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In Research Of - S01E06 - Killer Bees

S01E06 - Killer Bees

In Research Of

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11/17/19 • 57 min

Jeb Card and Blake Smith discuss the In Search Of episode: KILLER BEES. Will aggressive Africanized honey bees destroy the world? Is every problem a metaphor for colonialism? Tune in and find out!

Watch episode on YouTube

I've attached some relevant articles from the time, one on bees and one on ISO. Also, I've set the episode to "Explicit" because of all the sexy, sexy bee talk.

Radioactive Wasps (Correction: Location was at HANFORD not HANSON site - corrected here, but I'm not cutting out my joke about Hanson. -B)

Jeb mentioned Japanese Giant Wasps - those are described here. (They're wasps, only giant - and from Japan. That's good marketing in the name.)

Jeb was right to bring this beastie up in conjunction with bees. From the Wikipedia article:

In Japan, beekeepers often prefer European honey bees because they are more productive than the endemic Japanese honey bees.[citation needed] However, it can be difficult to maintain a captive hive of European honey bees, as the giant hornets are devastating to the bee hives.[citation needed] Once a Japanese giant hornet has located a hive of European honey bees, it leaves pheromone markers around it that quickly attract nest-mates to converge on the hive. An individual hornet can kill forty European honey bees per minute, while a group of 30 hornets can destroy an entire hive containing 30,000 bees in less than four hours.[4] The hornets kill and dismember the bees, returning to their nest with the bee thoraxes, which they feed to their larvae, leaving heads and limbs behind. The honey and bee larvae are also taken to feed the hornet larvae.

Another correction - I think I called them "hornet killers" or something similarly stupid, but I was talking about the very large American "Cicada Killer" wasps. But that's not what Jeb was talking about (see above). The Cicada Killer is big enough to - you guessed it - kill a cicada. They're not as insanely beefy as the Japanese hornets, but they're big beefy units.

Frequently on-screen expert Dr. Norman Gary is a Bee Wrangler for Hollywood, working on Candyman, X-Files, etc.

Dr. Gary playing clarinet covered in bees.

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In Research Of - S01E09 - Martians

S01E09 - Martians

In Research Of

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12/09/19 • 53 min

[Note: Sadly, one side of the recording was lost due to massive Skype issues and some portions of this episode had to be reconstructed. This is why there are places where the audio sounds quite different. This appears to be the only episode of the season where this happened, but my apologies for the audio sounding inconsistent. -Blake]

Jeb and Blake discuss "Martians" - wherein the In Search Of team examines the possibility that the planet Mars once had (or still contains) life on its harsh surface. The Viking missions as well as many Mars-related pop-culture topics are discussed.

Watch the ISO episode on YouTube.

A lot of the material in this episode dealt with the Viking program.

The surprisingly lengthy introduction to our solar system embedded in the 1953 film War of the Worlds.

A Trip to the Moon (1902) - colorized, restored, 720p

Space 1889 - The early "Steam Punk" roleplaying game

William Graves Hoyt's book Lowell and Mars

Missing from this episode (but expected) Italian astronomer: Giovanni Schiaparelli

The Difference Engine - by Gibson & Sterling (What if Babbage's Difference Engine had worked?)

Fantastic Planet - French Animated Film

The Silurian Hypothesis - Jeb mentions as an aside, lots to read there.

Face on Mars & Cydonia (1976)

Pyramids of Mars Doctor Who (1975)

Pareidolia phenomena (Face on Mars is literally part of the article)

Tonight Tonight Smashing Pumpkins

Panspermia (directed and accidental)

(I couldn't help but think about the Errol Otis' view of the Myconoids in D&D when looking at A Trip To The Moon. -B)

Dr. Gerald A. Soffen (February 7, 1926 – November 22, 2000) was a Viking project scientist and Mars geologist.

Harold P. Klein (April 1, 1921 - July 15, 2001) was a chemist and microbiologist.

Leslie Orgel (January 12, 1927 - October 27, 2007) was a chemist interested in life origins.

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In Research Of - S01E21 - UFOs

S01E21 - UFOs

In Research Of

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03/09/20 • 66 min

Jeb and Blake discuss the Season 1 episode of In Search Of... on the topic of UFOs.

Watch this ISO episode on YouTube.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Kenneth Arnold and the first "Flying Saucers"

Mellen, Wisconsin case - covered by NICAP report.

Reported by Phillip Baker (and family). This is the artist sketch of what they reported:

(And this is the Legion of Doom headquarters from the animated Super Friends.)

You never know what kind of data you'll uncover when researching ISO eps:

Please see attached PDFs for related news stories from contemporary papers.

Ted Phillips doing serious amateur science while wearing the best outfit of Season 1 (IMHO -Blake). Ted's Physical Trace Catalogue is online.

Obit for Edward Zeller (1925 - 1996) the scientist analyzing samples in the episode.

Janet and Helen Kay's case comes from Medford, Minnesota. The artist sketch of their sighting follows.

The title card for this episode shows the dead grass associated with this case, but it doesn't seem like compelling evidence of a landing to Jeb and me.

We briefly discuss the difference between ground damage from alleged landings and the geometric shapes that become known as "crop circles."

The Critchfield sighting from Big Chimney, West Virginia.

According to NICAP reports for 1975:

June 12, 1975; Big Chimney, WV Shortly before 10:00 p.m. A diamond shaped object landed on a gravel road in a mountainous area. It was witnessed by four members of the Crichfield family. Four landing gear imprints were found at the site. (Sources: Center for UFO Studies case files, letter dated August 3, 1975; Larry Hatch, U computer database, citing Alan Landsburg, In Search of Extraterrestrials, p. 8)

Nimoy quotes a 1973 Gallup Poll about UFO beliefs. A contemporary write-up of those findings is attached below.

Jeb was familiar with the thermoluminescence research done in this episode, but we also reached out to Dr. Chris Cogswell of the "Mad Scientist Podcast" to talk about the process and I thought his explanation might further illuminate the matter. I quote here from November 16, 2019 correspondence:

Solid materials in their normal state have imperfections in their crystal lattice. Think about the grain of a piece of wood. The wood is solid, however the grain is not continuous necessarily throughout the wood sample. This is also true of solid materials. At the atomic scale these grain boundaries and other similar imperfections in the lattice of a crystal create areas where electrons cannot easily transport. Note that this isn’t true of metallic solids, where electrons have enough “space” to move freely throughout. The essential principle of thermoluminescence is that when a solid crystal lattice is exposed to radiation some of the electrons will become trapped in an excited state, and the amount of electrons trapped in this way will correspond to the intensity of the radiation dose the sample is exposed too. Normally after excitation an electron will de-excite and release a photon after a short period of time. However, due to the defects in ceramic crystal structures some of those electrons cannot de-excite normally, leaving behind electrons trapped in the excited state as well as holes where electrons would normally sit. To fix this, we can re-heat a sample of the solid and all of those trapped electrons will de-excite, releasing photons in the process. The test being performed in the episode is a process where a solid sample is heated in a chamber to de-excite those trapped photons. The goal is to collect the trapped photons and use those to determine the relative intensity of radiation the sample...
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FAQ

How many episodes does In Research Of have?

In Research Of currently has 107 episodes available.

What topics does In Research Of cover?

The podcast is about Natural Sciences, Podcasts and Science.

What is the most popular episode on In Research Of?

The episode title 'S04E01 - Tidal Waves' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on In Research Of?

The average episode length on In Research Of is 97 minutes.

How often are episodes of In Research Of released?

Episodes of In Research Of are typically released every 12 days, 18 hours.

When was the first episode of In Research Of?

The first episode of In Research Of was released on Sep 28, 2019.

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