Catching On

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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.

Are we truly alone in this universe?

This question can mean many different things based on the tone in which it's asked.

If asked in a tone of hope and wonder, it makes us reflect on the majesty of the universe, infinite space and possibility among the stars and all that.

But it can also be asked in a tone of apprehension or fear.

Loneliness is comforting in a sense, because that would mean that no intelligences beyond our own are scrutinizing the planet from dark void of space.

Anxiety about extraterrestrial invasions is well over a century old.

First, we looked to the heavens and saw gods.

Then, as the industrial age took over post-Enlightenment, we looked to the heavens and saw another version of ourselves.

And in the H.

G.

Wells book, The War of the Worlds, Britain at its colonial peak is itself colonized by a force whose technology far strips their own.

Even then, the fear of extraterrestrials was just a fantasy.

It wasn't until the mid-20th century that these fears seemed to be coming true.

First, the Roswell incident in 1947 triggered a wave of speculation about spacecraft from another world.

Then, over the ensuing decades, many individuals throughout the world started sharing their own strange stories.

The earliest UFO encounters were spiritual, optimistic.

But starting in the 1960s, something changed in the character of these stories.

They started to become more sinister.

In 1961, the husband-and-wife couple, Betty and Barney Hill, told a story of their own encounter with aliens, but their story had a gap in it, a lapse in memory seemingly explained by alien technology.

For a brief time, the aliens had taken both of them aboard their ship and studied them like animals.

More and more stories of this kind proliferated over the decades.

Abductions became terrifying, scientific, and more.

The concept of probes, implants, bodily invasion all became fodder for the study of aliens, stoking the imagination of a public that had been absorbing alien invasion movies since the 1950s.

In 1985, a woman named Kathy Davis claimed that in the midst of several abduction experiences, she had been impregnated with a hybrid child, half alien, half human.

Over the years, experts and entertainers have argued about the veracity of the alien abduction reports, but no one has argued that the fear these stories produce is very real.

The creatures of nightmares don't need to exist in physical space to provoke the imagination.

So, it's perhaps unsurprising that enterprising business people sought to make a profit off this fear.

In the mid-1990s, a Florida-based insurance brokerage began providing insurance policies for people who were concerned about the risk of alien abduction.

A largely sarcastic enterprise, this insurance provider issued $10 million policies that would pay out at a rate of $1 per year.

A few years later, the London-based brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams and Parson started issuing policies of their own.

These policies insured customers against not only abduction, but impregnation as well.

This claim could be purchased regardless of your sex as the possibilities of alien technology remain unknown.

And this British company wound up selling thousands of these policies, but only came close to paying out twice.

Once for an Enfield man who in 1996 claimed a $1.6 million policy, showing as evidence a claw left behind by his abductors.

The second time, however, it gave them pause.

You see, sometime in the 1990s, the cult known as Heaven's Gate purchased $1 million policies for each of its approximately 30 members.

And this very nearly backfired in Goodfellow's face when the entire cult died in ritual suicide in 1997.

Wary that someone would come to try to collect over $30 million, the brokerage paused any new policies for a time.

Since then, they have resumed their policies and have never paid out a single one.

We turn to insurance to protect ourselves from unseen accidents and tragedy.

The most unpredictable of these are also known as acts of God.

Even though most insurance policies cover acts of God, it seems that aliens require a higher burden of proof.

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I think we can all agree that we live in a chaotic universe, and sometimes it can feel like we are powerless in the face of tragedy.

But as history loves to remind us, there is no problem so great that a human being

can't make worse.

For proof, look no further than Justinian I, a late Roman emperor who reigned during the 6th century.

Now, the title Roman Emperor deserves massive air quotes here because Justinian came to power over 100 years after the city of Rome was sacked by Germanic tribes.

By the time Justinian was crowned in 527, the empire was in the late stage of its long, slow collapse.

While the western territories had virtually all fallen to different armies, the weakened eastern half had reformed around Constantinople.

Now, like a lot of people of his day, Justinian was obsessed with the past.

He talked constantly about returning the empire to its former glory, something a lot of people thought was impossible.

To accomplish his lofty goals, he levied heavy taxes, which he used to raise armies and revitalize long-dead trade networks.

Feeding his armies required massive amounts of grain, which he purchased largely from Africa.

Justinian's early military campaigns were surprisingly successful, and he was actually making some headway on rebuilding the empire when disaster struck.

It came in the form of an inconspicuous but deadly stowaway, Yersinia pestis, also known as the bubonic plague.

The microbe was carried by rats or some people think the fleas or other animals which traveled within the grain supplies that Justinian imported.

In 541, they caused an outbreak in the Egyptian port of Pelusium.

If Justinian had acted quickly, he might have stopped the disease in its tracks, but he ignored the warnings, and within a year, the plague was in Constantinople.

Now, I should note that this wasn't the first bubonic outbreak in history, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.

Scientists believe the bacteria has been killing humans since around 3000 BCE.

Meanwhile, the most famous outbreak of bubonic plague is known as the Black Death, which didn't hit Europe until the 14th century.

All that said, Justinian's outbreak in the 6th century was special because of how far and how quickly it spread.

His armies and their supply trains carried the disease across three continents, resulting in the first plague pandemic.

The effects were disastrous, especially for Constantinople.

At one point, the capital was losing 5,000 people a day.

Justinian had his soldiers dig massive pits to hold all the bodies while other corpses were dumped onto ships and just pushed out to sea.

Justinian himself fell ill sometime in 542.

We don't know how badly he suffered, but for most people the bubonic plague wasn't pretty.

Early symptoms included fever, swelling around the groin armpits and neck, and dark boils and pustules.

This rapidly progressed to delirium before most victims fell into a coma and then died.

Not Justinian, though.

With treatment, he managed to survive.

And while you might think that the brush with death would cause him to refocus on eradicating the disease, that's not what happened.

After recovering, Justinian was more determined than ever to reclaim Rome's former glory.

He continued to raise taxes despite the fact that the economy was cratering and most people couldn't even afford to eat.

And instead of using the money for the public, he poured the funds into his military campaigns, which of course furthered the spread of the pandemic.

The epidemic took almost a decade to fade away and outbreaks continued for the next few hundred years.

While estimates vary, somewhere between 25 and 50 million people were killed, roughly a quarter of the empire's population.

As you might expect, that level of loss caused Justinian's trade networks to collapse, foiling his military exploits.

He had dreamed of returning the Roman Empire to its former glory, but wound up hastening its demise.

But at least historians give credit where credit's due.

To this day, the pandemic of 541 is remembered as Justinian's plague.

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.

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