Sheeple Chase 6 - [Unreleased] Magnus Opus

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Speaker 1 Recording?

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 Okay, three, two, one.

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to Sheeple Chase.

Speaker 1 Sorry, hang on.

Speaker 1 Hey, we talked about this. If you're going to be in here when I'm recording, you've got to stay quiet.

Speaker 1 We good?

Speaker 1 Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to Sheeple Chase, the conspiracy theory podcast, one reviewer called A Great Sleep Aid on Overnight Flights. I'm Georgie Barker.
And I'm Celia Ripley.

Speaker 1 So Georgie, what deep conspiracy cuts do you have for us this week?

Speaker 1 Well after the giant hairdos and massive cocaine piles of new Coke last week, I thought I'd change pace with something a little weirder.

Speaker 1 We've all heard tales about psychic children, mind control, and otherworldly beings, but what if they weren't just stories?

Speaker 1 And what if there was a group dedicated to uncovering these mysteries only to hoard their secrets right under our very noses? Georgie?

Speaker 1 Today we're going to be talking about the Enigmatic Magnus Institute, a supposed research centre for ancient philosophy and science, but which many people believe was up to something much more sinister.

Speaker 1 Celia?

Speaker 1 Oh, um.

Speaker 1 Cool. Are you all right? Do you need to check on Jack? No.

Speaker 1 No, I'm fine.

Speaker 1 You sure? Yeah. I'm fine.
Let's get this one done before he wakes up.

Speaker 1 But before that, let's hear a word from our sponsors.

Speaker 1 Good to go? Yep.

Speaker 1 So, the first record I can find of the Institute is in a footnote of the minutes of a meeting of the Royal Society which lists it as having been founded in 1818 Edinburgh by a guy called Jonah Magnus.

Speaker 1 After that, it seems to disappear until 1826, where it turns up in a Manchester rate book owned by the Magnus family. Sorry, listen book?

Speaker 1 Oh, it's basically a log of every property in an area and how much tax needs to be paid on it.

Speaker 1 The Magnus Institute's listed as owned by the Magnus family, who seems to be mill magnates with more money than ethics, but it's categorised under other.

Speaker 1 Which means

Speaker 1 something.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not like there was a drop-down menu of categories.

Speaker 1 People would write in saying what a building was for, but that means whoever did the survey asks Jonah Magnus, what type of building is it? And he just says other, which is weird.

Speaker 1 Maybe the survey guy was just a bit of a jobsworth. I've definitely had days where I'd just write other on a form rather than think about it.
Maybe.

Speaker 1 But it's also weird that the Institute was mentioned by the Royal Society, but there's no record of the Institute publishing anything or even hosting a lecture.

Speaker 1 What's the point of a scientific institute that doesn't do any science? Tax Dodge? Maybe, but then why would Charles Babbage bother to name-check Mr.

Speaker 1 Magnus in Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, accusing him of squandering his passable intellect on fancies of sorcery, alchemy, and worse?

Speaker 1 Sounds like he was jealous of all that tax dodge money.

Speaker 1 Perhaps if all this was just about the founder, but the weirdness lasts all the way into the 1990s with Daily Star headline, Big Bang Theory, Twelve Boffins Dead in Research HQ blow-up. What's that?

Speaker 1 The Manchester Evening News and The Times both reported on the explosion, which seems pretty weird for an institute dedicated to other.

Speaker 1 Sure, but from what I could gather, it was just an old office building. Old carpet tiles and faulty strip lighting that probably led to an electrical fire or something.

Speaker 1 You already know about this one?

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 read something on it a while back, that's all. Well, it sounds like you missed all the juicy bits.
It seems the fire service took six six hours to arrive.

Speaker 1 There was an inquiry, but it never went anywhere, as nobody from the Institute was ever heard from again.

Speaker 1 Because they'd died.

Speaker 1 Look, Georgie, I grant you the historic stuff could be interesting, but focusing on the fire like this just seems a bit. What?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Ghoulish?

Speaker 1 Why don't we have another word from our sponsor? Sure.

Speaker 1 Something you want to talk about? Not really. Celia?

Speaker 1 Look, I'm sorry I said it was ghoulish, but I'm not super comfortable with this one. Why not? We talk about deaths all the time.
What about the dead celebrities episode you did?

Speaker 1 No, I know, but those were just all daft theories. This is

Speaker 1 real.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I get that, but if we're going to speculate about what's behind weird stuff, we're gonna have to at least mention some of the darker stuff. Fine.
I get it. You sure?

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's just get on with it before Jack wakes up.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Welcome back.

Speaker 1 So, we know the Magnus Institute starts and ends weirdly. What else you got?

Speaker 1 Well, the Institute remained very quiet, some would say secretive, from 1818 right through until Jonah Magnus's death in 1848.

Speaker 1 Which I'm guessing you think was some big cover-up. Somehow, I doubt that.
Oh. How did he die? He was killed by a mob.
Sorry, what?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was a mill owner in Salford in 1848.

Speaker 1 Meaning.

Speaker 1 Come on, Celia, the 1848 Chartist riots? The Second Peterloo Massacre? Peter II? Why don't you explain it? For your listeners.

Speaker 1 Uh, right, well, uh, the Chartists were a working-class movement in the 1830s and 40s who were involved in a bunch of riots, and it wasn't unheard of for mill owners to find themselves and their families as targets.

Speaker 1 And you're saying this happened to Jonah Magnus? Yeah, he was beaten to death pretty publicly.

Speaker 1 But the Institute survived, and without its founder, let's just say it started to get a little weird with it. Weird, how?

Speaker 1 There's not many records from those years, but by the mid-19th century, they'd started putting out requests for people to bring in objects believed to be arcane, occult, or esoteric in nature.

Speaker 1 Later, they asked for people who claimed to have supernatural abilities, and eventually anyone who thinks they've had any sort of paranormal experience at all.

Speaker 1 So they were into seances, like just about every Victorian ever. Oh, almost certainly.
But they also have a cameo in an early Sexton Blake story where he references this. Sorry, what Sexton Blake?

Speaker 1 He's pretty much like a knock-off Sherlock Holmes. He was a fictional detective popular with young working-class lads.
There's a reference in one of his stories to the 1884 Burning Man incident.

Speaker 1 The what? Ah, well, eyewitnesses claim they saw a flaming man running out of the Magnus Institute, but each description of the man is different. His height, age, even the colour of the flames.

Speaker 1 Who was he? No one knows. Although one local paper mentions an extensive twisting of the body that left him unrecognisable.

Speaker 1 Jesus. Yeah, it actually prompted a mini-moral panic.
What, like the Magnus Institute was encouraging women to read? That kind of thing. Nothing so scandalous.
Just a bit of devil worship.

Speaker 1 Was there any evidence? Like ritual circles, that kind of thing? Not really. Mostly people just seemed to get a bad vibe.
Oh, and Alistair Crowley worked there for a year, which didn't help.

Speaker 1 You don't sound particularly convinced. No.

Speaker 1 I want to be more convinced by this one because it's so weird and fun, but secret anti-worker devil-worshipping cults in Salford is just too far-fetched, even for me.

Speaker 1 So is there anyone who still believes any of this? Tough to say. It's big on some online forums.

Speaker 1 What isn't? True, but there are some other theories about it.

Speaker 1 Like what? I mean, some people believe it's the Mancunian equivalent of the men in black. So aliens again.
In central Manchester. Really? Aliens can be anywhere, Celia.
You should know that.

Speaker 1 But fans of the alien theory tend to be focused more on what the Institute was up to in the 70s and 80s. And what was that? Well, that was the Institute's second boom period.

Speaker 1 The New Age rise in in the 60s and 70s and all the LSD that entails meant a lot of agencies became a lot more open-minded when it came to research and the Magnus Institute was right in the thick of it.

Speaker 1 But like what kind of research? Well I'm not sure when it started but right up until it burned down the Magnus Institute ran what must have been the world's most selective gifted children programme.

Speaker 1 What do you mean selective? That's the thing. They never really defined what gifted meant.

Speaker 1 They invited loads of kids to come and be tested for scholarships, but they never said what the criteria were, and there's no record of them ever giving a single grant. Jesus, were the kids okay?

Speaker 1 I mean, mostly everyone just seemed disappointed. They interviewed kids from all over.
Imagine flying all the way from Japan with your whole family only to be told you aren't special.

Speaker 1 And parents just went for this. I suspect when you dangle words like scholarship, a lot of parents just go with it.
So what kind of tests were they being given?

Speaker 1 There's nothing official, but according to accounts from the kids who got tested, they were straight out of a low-budget sci-fi. Behavioural stuff, cognitive stuff.

Speaker 1 One person claims they just handed her a series of items and asked how she felt when she was holding them. And they never gave any scholarships?

Speaker 1 Nope. I guess they never found anyone gifted enough.
Or there weren't any scholarships to begin with. Ah, so you stumbled onto another and, in my opinion, more believable theory.
And what's that?

Speaker 1 Academic fraud. Specifically, laundering money for the mob, which would make a lot of sense given the Institute's earlier focus on antiques.

Speaker 1 You think they were laundering money with the mob all the way back to Jonah Magnus? God, no.

Speaker 1 Most people who believe the money laundering theory reckon Jonah Magnus was actually just a rich eccentric with an expensive pet project, but then the people who came in after used it as a front.

Speaker 1 Although, it's not really clear who they were, and that doesn't really scan with how it ended so abruptly. Most real organisations don't just stop after a fire.

Speaker 1 No one even tried to claim on the insurance. So what? You think the mob were tying up a few loose ends? Could be, could be.
So is that your conclusion? You're planting your flag on money laundering?

Speaker 1 It's certainly the more believable angle. I guess.
But I still can't help thinking it's some shady government shit.

Speaker 1 As always.

Speaker 1 Look, governments were doing a lot of weird stuff in the 70s, looking into the paranormal and all that, and I can absolutely believe the British government would set up their own secretive agency to work with them on it.

Speaker 1 Doing what exactly? Remember in that contrails episode? The army base that was secretly experimenting on the public?

Speaker 1 Porton something?

Speaker 1 Porton Down, yeah. I think maybe the Magnus Institute was another one of those, a way for the government or the military to run experiments.

Speaker 1 Don't forget, after the fire, it took the firefighters six hours to get to the scene in the middle of central Manchester.

Speaker 1 By the time they got there, the building was completely annihilated, but the Greater Manchester Fire Service never released a statement statement or apologized or anything in fact the only official agency that did apparently bother to show up was this tiny civil service department called the office of incident assessment and response the what

Speaker 1 the office of incident assessment and response i think they're an arm of the office for national statistics or something there's not much public info about them so what were they doing there assessing and responding who knows you said they're civil service that means there has to be some record of what they do well according to their website they assess incidents and formulate official responses.

Speaker 1 And isn't that the most British men in black thing you've ever heard?

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 I mean, a shady government organisation turns up faster than the emergency services to deal with a fire at what is clearly a training facility for psychic children and that doesn't scream aliens to you?

Speaker 1 Yeah, probably.

Speaker 1 I was thinking of doing an episode about them at one point since they've cropped up in a few weird scenarios, but literally everything I could find about them was just incredibly boring.

Speaker 1 Just not good pod.

Speaker 1 Speaking of, I don't think this one's working. What?

Speaker 1 What makes you say that? This episode, the energy's been all over the place. I'm sure it's fine.
Are you okay? Everything alright with Jack? Yeah, it's fine. You're sure the episode isn't working?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I wanted to tie it all together, but it's feeling choppy.
I think we should call it. If you're sure.
I don't have time to record another episode today.

Speaker 1 That's okay. I could do a solo special on alien abductions, and there's a lot of things.

Speaker 1 Listen, I've got something I need to check up on before Jack wakes up, so drop me a text after. Let me know how it goes, and we'll try and sort something next week, yeah? Oh yeah, that sounds

Speaker 1 fun.

Speaker 1 Come on, you.

Speaker 11 Sheeplechase and the Magnus Protocol are podcasts distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Sharealike 4.0 international license.

Speaker 11 Sheeple Chase was created by Sasha Sienna, directed by April Sumner, and based on the works of Jonathan Sims and Alexander J. Mule.

Speaker 11 This episode was written by Sasha Sienna and edited with additional materials by Jonathan Sims and Alexander J.

Speaker 11 Mule, with audio edits by Nico Vitesse, mastering by Meg McKellar, and music by Nico Vitesse. It featured Sasha Sienna as Georgie Barker and Lorianne Davies as Celia Ripley.

Speaker 11 To subscribe, explore exclusive extras, and enjoy early access ad-free episodes, visit members.rustyquill.com or join our Patreon.

Speaker 11 Rate and review us online, follow us on social media, or email us at mail at rustyquill.com. Thanks for listening.

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