In Research Of

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."

• Irene Hughes makes an appearance, already a media figure when this was shot
• Phyllis Deggendorf is said to attend George Washington University which is in Washington D.C. - but actually it is Washington University in St. Louis.
• Articles about the Sally Lucas murder case discussed in the episode: Body of Sally Lucas Found (Sep 1971) Details on Sally Lucas' Murderer's trial (Anthony Damico) Damico found Guilty St. Louis Magazine article on Bevy Jaegers Details on the Criminal Trial of Anthony Damico (no mention of Psychics)

Nimoy Fashion Alert: First Sweater Sighting!

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:

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!

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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.

[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.

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...