Sunk Cost

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Humans are incredible engineers.

We've rarely met an engineering problem we couldn't solve.

But as I'm sure you've heard heard before, sometimes humanity gets so caught up in whether it can do something, it forgets to ask whether it should.

Such was the case in the late 1960s when the U.S.

government became aware of a sunken Russian submarine and stopped at nothing to retrieve it from the bottom of the sea.

The K-129 nuclear submarine sunk sometime around March of 1968 for reasons that will never be known.

All the CIA did know was that the Russians were conducting a massive search and rescue operation in the Pacific Ocean, 1,500 miles north of Hawaii.

Once the Russians gave up, an American sub moved in using special cameras the Russian vessels didn't have.

The American sub revealed the K-129 was intact at the bottom of the ocean, and if recovered, could provide the CIA with Russian missile technology and codebooks filled with secrets.

But of course, this would be no easy retrieval mission.

The sub was 16,500 feet down.

It was one thing to have an American sub take pictures, but having divers searching the debris at that depth was out of the question, and the wreck of the sub was so big, it would take some incredible machinery to recover it.

The deeply paranoid, ethically dubious CIA of this time was not willing to let the opportunity slide though.

And so they embarked on a multi-million dollar project to design a vessel capable of pulling K-129 from the bottom of the sea.

Codename Project Azorian.

They would need a cover story, and so the CIA reached out to none other than eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to lend his name to the project.

The CIA would call their ship the Hughes-Glomar Explorer, and Hughes would tell the public that it was his ship being constructed to use in deep-sea mining operations.

The CIA then hired a team of engineers, swearing them all to secrecy and even keeping some in the dark as to the true nature of the vessel.

The Explorer was an engineering marvel at 618 feet in length.

The ship had the largest moon pole ever constructed, is an opening at the bottom of the vessel that allows submersibles to be deployed or, in this case, retrieved.

Two doors would open at the bottom of the ship, releasing clementine, the name for a giant claw that was to be lowered to the bottom of the sea to retrieve K-129.

Clementine was attached to massive lengths of steel pipe that could be slowly doled out to lower the claw farther and farther down.

The whole apparatus was capable of lifting over 21 million pounds.

But halfway through the construction process, the engineers realized that they had made a mistake.

To put it in simple terms, the ship wasn't big enough to support the claw and was likely to break in half during the operation.

The CIA had to spend even more money and make the ship even bigger.

The problem with this, the ship was now too big to fit through the Panama Canal.

And so once it set sail from the east coast of America, it would have to travel all the way around South America to reach its target.

The ship was finally completed, costing the American taxpayer nearly $300 million.

It began its long journey to the Pacific in 1973, nearly getting delayed in Chile by a revolution there, but ultimately making it to its target without issue.

The process of actually lowering the claw, Clementine, took weeks.

Once it finally reached the K-129 at the bottom of the ocean, the claw successfully grasped the sub in its pinchers, lifting it from its long-time resting place.

But as the sub was slowly lifted back up over thousands of feet, disaster struck.

Parts of the claw failed, snapping off and allowing a majority of the sub to fall back to the ocean floor.

The steel just wasn't strong enough.

The crewmen had to settle for lifting the remaining piece of the sub up into their ship and heading home.

It's unknown what exactly the CIA learned, if anything, from the recovered piece of the sub.

They actually intended on authorizing a second mission to return to the site and try to recover the rest.

But before that could happen, American journalists finally caught wind of the project and leaked details to the public.

The general consensus seemed to be that another recovery mission wasn't worth the cost.

And so, most of K-129 remains where it came to rest, at the bottom of the ocean, and any secrets it might have held are lost to time.

Curiously, the Russians have never made attempts of their own to recover the sub.

A sign that nothing of value is really on board, or just an admission of a pretty big truth.

16,000 feet of water is a pretty safe way to hide a secret.

This show is sponsored by American Public University, American Public University where service members like you can access high-quality, affordable education built for your lifestyle.

With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, APU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

Their preferred military rates keep tuition at just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's tuition.

And with 24-7 mental health support plus career coaching and other services, APU is committed to your success during and after your service.

Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military.

That's apu.apus.edu slash military.

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It's a well-documented fact that pregnancy can bring on some pretty intense food cravings.

Women have reported desires for everything from pizza and ice cream to stranger food combinations like pickles with peanut butter or chocolate cake with ketchup.

And then there was Mary, an 18th-century servant girl who allegedly developed a craving for rabbit meat, a craving so powerful it altered her mind, the unborn child she was carrying, and eventually all of England.

The story begins one afternoon in April of 1726 while Mary was weeding a field outside her village near London.

Mary was several months pregnant at this point, but as a poor servant girl in the 18th century, taking time off from work wasn't an option.

So she was down on her hands and knees pulling weeds and trying not to think about how uncomfortable she was when she looked up and spotted a rabbit.

Now, rabbit meat was expensive at the time.

and Mary had three hungry kids and a husband at home.

So she didn't think twice.

She took off after the rabbit and and almost had it in her grasp before it slipped under a fence and disappeared into the woods.

To say that Mary was disappointed would be an understatement.

That night, she lay awake imagining all of the delicious meals the creature could have become.

Braised rabbit, poached rabbit, rabbit pie, rabbit stew.

Her mouth just watered from the thought of it all.

And over the next few weeks, that craving only got worse.

Mary begged her husband to buy her rabbit meat, but with his business struggling, they just simply couldn't afford it.

A short while later, Mary suffered a painful miscarriage.

Afterwards, she expected the cravings to fade, but they only got worse.

She continued to dream and obsess about eating rabbits until one day she fell strangely ill.

At first, no one knew what was wrong with her.

Then the cramps started, followed by full-on contractions.

Mary, it seems, was going into labor.

which didn't make sense because she had already lost her baby.

Her family sent for the doctor, a man named John Howard, but by the time he arrived, Mary was already done.

She presented him with a thing she had birthed.

It wasn't a human child, but several infant rabbits.

Horrifically, most of the animals came out crushed or in small pieces and were all stillborn.

Howard examined the fragments but refused to believe that Mary had produced them, at least until she went into labor again.

Over the next few days, she delivered batch after batch of dismembered bunnies.

He documented the births and stored the parts in jars for later study.

In between the frequent birthing sessions, though, Howard wrote letters to England's top scientists, who flocked to the village to see the phenomenon for themselves.

Eventually, the king's personal physician was sent to investigate.

He was so impressed by what he witnessed, he published a statement declaring that the rabbit births were a genuine medical phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Mary had become a celebrity.

Her story made national headlines, sparking heated debates between skeptics and believers.

Those who were convinced pointed to the theory of maternal impression, which holds that a mother's thoughts can physically alter the body of the unborn child, resulting in marks or birth defects.

To many experts at the time, there was little doubt about what had happened.

Mary's cravings for rabbit flesh had turned her child into the object of her obsession.

It's a disturbing thought, and fortunately impossible.

Today, the theory of maternal impression has been resoundingly discredited, and the same can be said for Mary's story.

You see, her husband and and some accomplices were eventually caught smuggling rabbits into her room.

They'd been cutting the animals into pieces themselves, and Mary had been, well, putting them where babies come from.

They'd hoped all the attention would make them wildly rich, but instead they became the subject of ridicule and scorn.

And while they managed to avoid any criminal charges, they never profited a dime from the incident.

Mary eventually faded into obscurity, but the doctors who vouched for her weren't so lucky.

Several careers were ruined, and trust in the medical community plummeted.

For years to come, the nation's scientists were viewed as gullible fools, so eager to prove their unfounded theories that they would convince themselves of the impossible.

And that criticism may have been warranted.

It shouldn't have taken a medical degree to know that women don't give birth to rabbits.

But that didn't stop Mary Toft from giving birth to a hoax that most people would describe as harebrained.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting curiositiespodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

This show is sponsored by American Public University.

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With online courses, monthly start dates, and flexible schedules, APU is designed for busy professionals who need education that fits their lives.

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