875: I Hate Mysteries

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Speaker 3 A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Speaker 3 From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm Mike Sriskandaraja filling in for Ira Glass.

Speaker 4 Calm bodies. Calm voices, calm minds.

Speaker 3 It's calm for now.

Speaker 3 In the second grade classroom in Cold Spring, New York, there are about a dozen kids sitting close around a rug, knees touching.

Speaker 4 Let's listen to the sound of the bell.

Speaker 3 These kids are getting ready for a very particular lesson. It's one that I heard about from my coworker, Nadia.

Speaker 3 I asked my wife, who's a teacher, and she knew about it too.

Speaker 2 So we're going to do it.

Speaker 3 And a friend of mine says he still remembers this lesson from when he was in third grade.

Speaker 3 It stuck with him.

Speaker 3 And I wanted to see this rite of passage play out for myself.

Speaker 4 All right, so the game we're going to play today is called What's in the Box. Have you played this game before?

Speaker 3 It's a guessing game that's kind of famous here. Miss Maria, the director of the Manitou School, holds up a white cardboard box about the size of a shoebox.

Speaker 4 So I have put something in this box.

Speaker 4 And you can't break it by shaking it, so you can shake it, you can move it, and we're going to pass the box around, and you're going to tell me what you think is in the box, okay?

Speaker 2 The kids seem amused.

Speaker 3 They want to try. Sorry? She passes the box to the child on her left.

Speaker 3 The kid shakes it a little.

Speaker 3 Uh

Speaker 2 Legos.

Speaker 2 Uh

Speaker 2 a stapler?

Speaker 2 Uh maybe

Speaker 2 mobiles and

Speaker 5 mobiles and balls.

Speaker 2 Mobles and balls.

Speaker 3 As the box makes it around the 13 students, strategies start to emerge.

Speaker 3 One thoughtful little girl in purple glasses and snow boots shakes it real hard. That doesn't get her any closer.

Speaker 3 The next time around, she takes off her own beaded necklace, shakes that close to her ears. Then she closes her eyes and shakes the box.

Speaker 2 The rattles are different.

Speaker 3 Feels like it's time to bring in a dedicated professional in the answers getting business and the kids allow it. Can I shake the box? You guys don't mind? So I pick up the box and they're right.

Speaker 3 It's about the weight of a toy, maybe the size of a fist or two, with smaller things rattling inside that object.

Speaker 3 Eureka.

Speaker 3 Okay, um

Speaker 3 is it like a toy car with gumballs in it?

Speaker 4 That's a really good guess.

Speaker 3 But not good enough.

Speaker 3 Three times around the class and nobody has guessed it.

Speaker 3 At this point, the kids are done. They're ready to find out.

Speaker 3 And that's when Miss Maria does something the kids do not see coming.

Speaker 4 Cool. Well, thank you for playing.

Speaker 4 I didn't say I was going to tell you what it was.

Speaker 4 The game is about guessing. It's not about knowing.

Speaker 3 She doesn't tell them.

Speaker 3 She was never going to. Miss Maria takes the box away.
And the kids are stunned. No more tries? No answer.

Speaker 2 That's it?

Speaker 3 They're not sure what to make of it.

Speaker 3 Now, if hearing this makes you mad, If you're thinking, hey, that is not what school is about. School's about finding answers to your questions.

Speaker 3 Miss Maria agrees, but she thinks this is important to learn too.

Speaker 3 She wants them to learn how to endure the discomfort of not knowing. She's trying to prepare these kids for life and that's the case she makes to them.

Speaker 4 And sometimes we all have things that we can't know. Sometimes because

Speaker 4 Miss Maria won't open the box, but more often because it's just impossible to know, right?

Speaker 4 Like your parents can't tell you certain things, or you can't get into somebody else's head, or you just can't know the reason for why something happened.

Speaker 4 So learning to live with that discomfort of not knowing is a really important thing.

Speaker 4 And that's part of what we were practicing here today.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 3 But the box is right there.

Speaker 3 Just behind Miss Maria, on the floor.

Speaker 3 The answer is inside.

Speaker 3 Just like all the other answers that powerful forces in our world are withholding from us. These kids and this journalist aren't having it.

Speaker 3 Miss Maria's worthy lesson is overcome by a much stronger human impulse.

Speaker 3 The desire to know what's in the box.

Speaker 6 We want to know what it is.

Speaker 4 Is it important?

Speaker 6 What's it?

Speaker 4 Why would you keep wondering?

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 I would want to know what it is.

Speaker 5 No, we don't want we don't want it. I need.

Speaker 4 Oh, you need to know it.

Speaker 5 And I get sick when I'm wondering.

Speaker 6 You get sick? And I don't like surprises. I'm allergic to wondering.

Speaker 6 I'm allergic to wondering.

Speaker 3 Miss Maria tries to bring the class back from the brink of anaphylactic shock.

Speaker 3 They talk about techniques to deal with the discomfort. They stand up and try to shake their body loose of the tension.

Speaker 4 Do you feel better? No. Having shaken it off like a buck? No? No.
No? You feel better when you open the box.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 Apparently, this is not an uncommon reaction. Miss Maria told me years ago, she remembers when an entire class worked together to steal the box.

Speaker 3 The most trustworthy kids told her there was a plumbing emergency in the girls' bathroom, while another classmate snuck into the office, Ocean's 11 style.

Speaker 3 The heist was foiled.

Speaker 3 And then the box was moved to a secure location.

Speaker 3 And just earlier today, Miss Marie was showing some of the teachers the mystery box before class.

Speaker 3 They made their guesses, and then she caught one of them trying to sneak a peek.

Speaker 3 The mystery, it can get to you, not only if you're seven, but especially if you're seven.

Speaker 3 These kids, they see the future, an inscrutable world of infinite, unanswerable questions, and they say, no.

Speaker 3 Miss Maria is just leading this lesson. The regular classroom teacher wants to have kids who aren't freaking out and distracted the rest of the day.
She would love this to end.

Speaker 3 So, in a shocking turn of events, Miss Maria caves to the mystery.

Speaker 4 You're gonna feel better when I open the box.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Here we go.

Speaker 4 This is the big reveal.

Speaker 3 She opens the box and shows the kids what's inside.

Speaker 9 Oh my gosh, I would never have guessed.

Speaker 2 But you?

Speaker 3 You can wait a little longer, right?

Speaker 3 Today, we'll hear people who stare at the giant question mark and plunge themselves deep into the unknown. What lies on the other side? You want to know? Do you really want to know what's in the box?

Speaker 3 Stay with us.

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Speaker 3 It's this American Life, today's show. I hate mysteries.

Speaker 3 Act one,

Speaker 3 the Mastablasta digging up Mount Shasta. That hole is deep cause it has to be.

Speaker 3 A while back, filmmaker Elijah Sullivan decided he was going to get to the bottom of a very strange event that happened in his hometown.

Speaker 3 Timber workers going through a national forest found an incredibly deep hole in the ground. Nobody could tell who had dug it or why or what they were looking for.

Speaker 3 Everyone in town had a theory and some of those theories were really wild.

Speaker 3 Elijah could not stop thinking about this hole. He'd been working on a documentary about it for about nine years when someone got in touch with him who claimed to be one of the diggers.

Speaker 2 Here's Elijah. His name was Brett.
He said that, depending on certain circumstances, like the Statute of Limitations, he was open to talking.

Speaker 2 He told pieces of the story before over beers, so I got him a beer, an old one from the fridge.

Speaker 12 Okay, that still tastes good. It's been in my fridge for like three years.
I'm not afraid of a skunky beer, man.

Speaker 12 Do you feel like

Speaker 2 launching into the story now?

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yeah.
You want to say that? Yes, sir. All right, ready? Yes.
All right.

Speaker 2 For the next two hours or so, over a skunky beer, Brett told me his tale. The story I had been waiting so long to hear.
The story of the whole.

Speaker 2 It started in 2009, right after the Great Recession. Brett was just out of high school, living in Northern California and looking for work.

Speaker 2 As a kid, he said, he had never really fit in and had been kind of heading down a bad path. But he loved the outdoors.

Speaker 2 He'd worked for the California Conservation Corps and later trained to fight forest fires, which he was excited about. But his crew wasn't getting called up.
He spent months looking for other jobs.

Speaker 2 Then he came across this listing on a message board.

Speaker 12 And I looked and there was a job opening opening and it said building a fence line in mount shasta

Speaker 12 so i call the number and uh guy answers and he goes uh how old are you and i tell him i'm like i'm like 19.

Speaker 12 he's like oosh uh you have your own tools your own gear gloves boots i'm like yeah he goes how fast can you be in mount shasta and i'm like well i'm in reading i can make it in like 45 minutes around there and he says okay go to this hotel and a guy is going to meet you in the lobby he'll give you a room you'll meet up with the work crew in the morning and then go out and build this fence And I'm like, all right, cool.

Speaker 12 Sounds good. So I put the last $40 I had to my name in my gas tank and drove my truck up to Mount Shasta.

Speaker 2 Mount Shasta is this 14,000-foot snow-capped stratovolcano near the Oregon border with a small town nestled at its base. I've lived there basically my whole life.

Speaker 2 Brett arrived in the evening, pulling into a hotel in Mount Shasta City right off of the freeway. As promised, there was a guy waiting for him.
He seemed like the foreman of a crew.

Speaker 12 And I think he had to have been around like late 20s, maybe like 27, a younger guy in shape, covered in tattoos,

Speaker 12 very forward, very disciplined. And

Speaker 12 he just walked out and he was wearing basketball shorts and flip-flops. And he goes, here's your key, this is your room.

Speaker 12 Meet the guys in the parking lot at this time in the morning. And I'm like, okay.

Speaker 2 Finally, a job. Not only a job, but it paid well.
And it got him out of Reading. They even gave him his own hotel room and a per diem.

Speaker 12 The next morning I wake up, there's a van, everyone's got milk jugs of water and stuff like that. And I meet up with them and they're all bullshit.

Speaker 12 And I can tell they've been doing it for a little while, but I didn't know how long. And so I get in this van with these complete strangers and we start driving up towards the mountain.

Speaker 12 And I remember driving back roads and then we pull over in the middle of nowhere and there's a trail at the tree line. And I get out and we start walking and I'm like,

Speaker 12 where are we going? We're building a fence. So we start walking and walking and walking.
And eventually I'm like, all right, guys, where's the fence? And I get laughed at.

Speaker 12 And I'm like, what's going on? You know, like, what's going on? And they're like, they told you a fence. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I can string a fence.
And they go, that's funny.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I got told I was putting a barn up. And another guy said something else.
Another guy had said something else. And I'm like, okay, now I'm far from home.

Speaker 12 I'm walking what feels like a couple miles down this trail into the wilderness, but guys, I don't know. And they're laughing at me, telling me I've been lied to about why I'm here.

Speaker 12 And that's when we got up on the hole.

Speaker 2 The hole. The mouth of it was enormous, at least 10 by 12 feet, and it was deep, like a vertical mine shaft without any wooden beams holding it up.
Just sheer walls.

Speaker 2 Off to one side was a huge pile of dirt. Above there was a steel cable with a pulley strung between trees.

Speaker 2 A few feet down was a boulder, the size of a small car, sitting on a ledge, and then a ladder leading down into the darkness.

Speaker 12 I remember looking in the hole, and everybody's getting ready, and I'm asking what's going on. They're like, we're digging.
And I'm like, for what? And he's like, well, we don't exactly know.

Speaker 12 We were told if we found something weird, that we pull it out and we're going to give it to Joseph.

Speaker 2 Joseph was the guy running everything. Brett said he looked like a Flatlander, meaning not from the mountains.

Speaker 12 And he completely stood out because all of us were blue-collar workers and we're there in boots, jeans, cut-up shirts, and he was in a full suit.

Speaker 12 Had dress shoes, full suit, up to the nines, and he'd walk that trail with us every single day, completely dressed.

Speaker 2 Somehow, all this weirdness-the guy in the suit being lied to, digging for something mysterious-Brett says he just kind of went with it. Maybe because he was surrounded by adults who had accepted it.

Speaker 2 He told me he didn't want to be the young guy asking too many questions, and also he needed the money.

Speaker 2 Workers disappeared down the hole to work in pairs. They used pickaxes to loosen dirt and fill five-gallon buckets.
Brett was told to stand at the edge of the hole and to hoist the buckets up.

Speaker 2 A plunge into the hole seemed likely to prove fatal, so Brett tethered himself to a tree just in case. The simplicity of the work was satisfying, even validating.

Speaker 2 He'd been on trail crews before, so he knew more about this kind of work than most guys. For example, before Brett got there, the crew had run into a boulder in the hole and hadn't known what to do.

Speaker 12 The main boulder, they had dug around at one point, and I remember asking, why didn't you go through it?

Speaker 12 And them looking at me kind of weird, and they're like, well, how would we go through it? We've tried. I'm like, well, how'd you try? And we brought a battery-powered jackhammer up here.

Speaker 12 I'm like, how'd you in the wheelbarrows and carrying? And I'm like, no, no, no, no. You drill into it using leaves and feathers and you split the rock in multiple sections and it'll break.

Speaker 12 And once his eyes lit up, I'm like, okay, this young kid might know a few things.

Speaker 2 Anytime anyone had an idea to improve their digging operation, Joseph, the guy in the suit running things, would head down the trail back into town for supplies.

Speaker 2 He had a credit card, which Brett called the magic card.

Speaker 12 Joseph was like, I've been given this card, whatever we need to make this happen, I will swipe it. And he was swiping that card.
Infinite money to make this happen.

Speaker 2 Brett quickly fell into a routine. He would ride up the mountain every morning, tie himself to the tree, pull buckets all day, then go back to his hotel.

Speaker 2 The others would go to the bar or to get food, and Brett would just go to the gas station or back to his room. Then they would start again in the morning, week after week.

Speaker 2 With every bucket he pulled, you watched the hole get deeper. One day, it was finally Brett's turn to work in the hole.

Speaker 12 They kept that shaft very square. I mean, you could look up at the top of the hole and see the iron veins.
When the sun would come over, the top

Speaker 12 beautiful. When the sun would come over and the light would shine into the hole, you could see iron veins all the way down the sides.

Speaker 2 Maybe the adventure made it easier not to think about the bigger questions, like what they were doing there. Speaking up might have meant going back to Reading.
At least he was outside.

Speaker 12 Like, nature's my thing. I'm peaceful, I'm calm, I'm happy.
And

Speaker 12 maybe that was how I justified part of it. You know, it was good for me to be up on that mountain every day.

Speaker 12 And maybe that's what it wasn't just being naive, it was overlooking circumstances because I was out there every day.

Speaker 12 Going up and down the trail was, you know, it was like the seven dwarves. We were laughing, tools over our shoulders, jugs of water.
You know, they had milk jugs.

Speaker 12 I had this little smart water bottle that I'd carry with me.

Speaker 12 And laughing, it was constantly like somebody would say something down the line and you'd be walking and turn your head back and, you know, get back in the conversation, get up there.

Speaker 12 And I started making friends a little bit with people. There's a couple guys in the crew that were cool to me, kind of took me another wing, cooler, older guys.

Speaker 12 And for me at that time, like trying to find my place in the world and like a bunch of older guys being like, this kid's the kid. And I was like, I'm in, let's do it.

Speaker 12 You know, like that praise went at that time in my life went a long ways for me, you know.

Speaker 12 So that smoothed over the edges quite a bit in the beginning. But it didn't last forever.

Speaker 2 As the summer wore on, the adventure wore off. The deeper they went, the harder it was to dig.
Sometimes the hole would fill up up with bees.

Speaker 2 As it got deeper, they had to add things to reach the bottom.

Speaker 2 There was a rope to get into the hole, then a chain leading to two ladders tied together.

Speaker 2 Brett occasionally would help with the digging, but mostly he was above ground, pulling the buckets up, which meant he had a bunch of time to be around Joseph.

Speaker 12 I had a feeling that

Speaker 12 Joseph was not the one calling the shots. He was the representative for somebody.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 I would ask questions a little bit on who was running this and very circular conversation.

Speaker 12 Was not getting a lot of answers. Joseph used to get these phone calls.
You know, we would go a couple of days without finding anything.

Speaker 12 And then he'd get a call on a cell phone, an old flip phone back then. And

Speaker 12 you could just tell his demeanor would change. Phone would ring.
He'd pull the phone out, take a breath, walk like 10 feet out in the woods, and he'd have this phone call.

Speaker 12 And you'd see him in the bushes. It's not on the trail.

Speaker 12 He's standing in bushes in nice leathers, flat shoes, and in a suit, kind of like pacing around in circles a little bit, kicking the ground, and lots of nodding.

Speaker 12 And he'd come back and take a deep breath, like, and then try, like, okay, guys, let's keep going. It's like, we haven't stopped.

Speaker 12 Like, so there was definitely some type of driving force that he was getting from the organization he worked with. It was almost a

Speaker 12 don't come back unless you find it.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 we started getting worried, especially when we knew how important this thing that we didn't know what it was was to them.

Speaker 12 That

Speaker 12 what happens when we find it?

Speaker 12 You know,

Speaker 12 when the older guys started getting scared, that's when it started coming out to me.

Speaker 12 Because there were moments where Joseph wasn't necessarily totally with us walking up the trail, and that's when we started having these conversations.

Speaker 2 there had been so much time to think to imagine where this was going what they were doing why they were doing it brett wondered if the people funding it had some mining license that was about to expire that would explain why they were in a rush but not all the other weirdness like whatever we're doing is is shady at least i don't even know if the word illegal was thrown around but this is shady And that's when I found out a couple of guys were like, look, I'm going to bring a gun up with me.

Speaker 12 I remember one of them was like, dude, if we we find it, what if they kick us in the hole?

Speaker 12 I'm standing next to that hole all day long. There's already guys in it.
There's a gigantic boulder on the edge.

Speaker 12 I think it was a chain was holding it in place, maybe.

Speaker 12 All of us were in the hole, around the hole.

Speaker 12 It would have been very easy to push us in.

Speaker 2 Brett started to think about bailing.

Speaker 2 I asked Brett why he hadn't before.

Speaker 2 Part of it was that he just wanted to know what they were digging for. The answer to the mystery.
Now he wasn't so sure he wanted to know.

Speaker 2 Anytime they found anything that might be something, it was carefully inspected by a guy named Koki.

Speaker 2 Brett said Koki was an old Navy vet, more of a blue-collar guy like the other workers, and reminded Brett of his grandfather. Everything they found in the hole went to Koki.

Speaker 2 And at some point, they started finding these rocks. Kind of sizable, maybe twice as big as a basketball, and they all looked similar.
Cokie Cokie would crack them open, they weren't allowed to look.

Speaker 12 And then, towards the end, it was like we were finding more of it. And then I can't remember if it was mostly one day where he pulled a bunch out.

Speaker 12 But I just remember pulling buckets in here and do jail

Speaker 12 and then trying to get them out, handed them off. They get pulled over that little platform built up by the dirt we had pulled out.

Speaker 12 And Cokie had turned his back to us. We kind of looked away.
He split a couple of them.

Speaker 2 Brett says, for the first time, Joseph and Cokie's faces lit up.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 12 I think they sent us home. And we never called it early.

Speaker 2 Brett went back to his hotel. What just happened?

Speaker 12 I thought I was coming back the next day. I just was like, if we found what they're looking for, why are we leaving it?

Speaker 12 So that's why I went back to my hotel room, laying in bed, really like, what's going on? Like, if I got myself into something.

Speaker 12 And that's when I got the phone call in the middle of the night.

Speaker 2 It was the crew lead. He said he would give Brett $200 to drive up the the mountain with him and gather all the rocks they had found in the hole.
Just the two of them, right now. Brett agreed.

Speaker 2 He told me it was stupid of him to go, but he thought, let's get this done, and then the job will be over with.

Speaker 12 We loaded up my truck and went up the mountain middle at night. It would have been around midnight.
I parked my truck at the bottom. We busted out one rubber-made trash can.

Speaker 12 And he looked at me and he's like, this is what we're going to do. We're going to put this trash can in between us.
We're going to take our belts off. We're going to loop it through the handles.

Speaker 12 And each one of us is going to put our belt on our shoulder. and we'll take as many down as we can.
We hiked up there and that's what we did.

Speaker 12 We went to the pile of rocks that were ranging from like here to about here and we put as many in there as we could and we do this shoulder test. Pick it up.
We can get it off the ground.

Speaker 12 And if we could, it was like, all right, buddy, let's go. And we went down the trail, loaded my truck, came back up, did it again, over and over and over again, aching.
And we kept a pace.

Speaker 12 And we made lap after lap. I mean, just bleeding sweat coming down that mountain.
And by the time we were done, my back of my truck was full. I had an old A9 Chevy.

Speaker 12 And I flattened my leafs and I blew out my brakes on the way down. I barely made it down that mountain without losing control at the bottom.

Speaker 2 The two of them drove the rocks to a rental storage place. Joseph was there waiting.
So was a U-Haul truck.

Speaker 12 Then it was really solidified that this is done. Because when they cracked the back and I saw they had wooden framed the inside for one little cradle for each rock, and they were ready to go.

Speaker 12 Like, I don't remember driving, I don't remember the drivers getting out, I don't know who was driving them.

Speaker 12 Um, and we picked those rocks up, we put them in there, and Joseph shook my hand, and he was happy. He was happy, stress was off, whatever stress was on him, he had accomplished it.
And then

Speaker 12 I had heard, I either overheard or he told me that they're going to Florida and they left.

Speaker 2 Brett didn't realize until an hour or two later that they hadn't paid him the 200 bucks.

Speaker 2 Later that summer, timber workers stumbled across the hole while marking trees. It was in a national forest, and it's illegal to dig without a permit.
The hole looked to be about 60 feet deep.

Speaker 2 I spoke to one ranger who said it was the damnedest thing he had ever seen in his Forest Service career. The Mount Shasta Herald ran an article in October, U.S.

Speaker 2 Forest Service Investigating Hole on Mount Shasta. The article had a photo of the hole.
At the bottom was Brett's bottle of smart water.

Speaker 2 Gawkers kept gathering to look at the hole, so the Forest Service filled it back in.

Speaker 2 By the time I saw the spot, a few years later, the trail had faded, but the trees still had scars from the cable, and there was a five-gallon bucket lying around.

Speaker 2 Every time I visited, it was in a different spot, and one day it was gone.

Speaker 2 At the time, all we had was wild speculation. There were three plausible theories.
The first was gold.

Speaker 2 I heard rumors about an underground river of gold, maybe a treasure map purchased in a bar, but I talked to the geology instructor at the local community college, who pointed out that Mount Shasta was actually a volcano, and volcanoes don't have gold in them.

Speaker 2 So that theory was out.

Speaker 2 The second was Native American artifacts. Unfortunately, this is incredibly common in the U.S.

Speaker 2 I asked some state police officers and experts on investigating looters, but nobody had heard of looters digging 60 feet straight down. So the looting theory was out too.

Speaker 2 That leaves the third theory. It's something we locals discuss the most.
But Bret isn't from here. He didn't hear about it until midway through the dig, when he went home for the weekend.

Speaker 2 He was drinking beer with some friends on their porch and telling them about the job he was doing on Mount Shasta.

Speaker 12 And I start getting into the details of it and everybody gets kind of quieter and quieter. And I hear this noise from above me because it was a multi-story, I think it was two-story apartment complex.

Speaker 12 I hear it, oh, and then like footsteps moving.

Speaker 12 And then I hear it running through one of the apartment complexes, coming down the stairs, and it was this really spun-out woman that came out holding a book.

Speaker 12 So she goes, Sorry, I've been listening to everything you've been saying, but this is what's going on.

Speaker 12 And she hands me this book about Mount Shasta and starts going through the pages and finds this chapter on Saint Germain.

Speaker 12 And she goes, Do you know what this is? And I'm like, no, and she's like, okay, and I started reading it. And that's when it clicked.

Speaker 2 The Count of St. Germain was a real historical figure from the 1700s.
Some people believed he was immortal.

Speaker 2 An American mining engineer named Guy Ballard claimed he met Saint Germain in 1930, here on the mountain. Ballard said he was hiking, and Saint Germain appeared multiple times.

Speaker 2 once offering him a crystal cup filled with a clear, sparkling liquid. This encounter inspired Ballard and his wife Edna to found a New Age religion called the I Am Activity.

Speaker 2 That's two words, I am, all caps. Ballard died in 1939, but the I Am activity still has members all over the world.

Speaker 2 Around the same time Guy Ballard says he met Saint Germain, a book was published called Lemuria, Lost Continent of the Pacific.

Speaker 2 It had a chapter that claimed there was a hidden city under Mount Shasta, inhabited by some of the last remaining members of a sunken continent.

Speaker 2 People have been looking for the entrance of the city ever since. The book is not related to St.
Germain, but added to the myth of the mountain.

Speaker 2 Not everyone comes to Mount Shasta for La Muria or Saint Germain.

Speaker 2 Some are just looking for purpose, or community.

Speaker 2 My parents were seekers. They moved us to Mount Shasta from Massachusetts when I was six.

Speaker 2 So to me, this made total sense. that the hole had something to do with all these stories.

Speaker 2 Eventually, I tracked down and spoke to three other people who had helped dig the hole.

Speaker 2 One of them said they'd been paid by a believer in Saint-Germain and described what they were looking for as gold plutonium. He said something about it being used to power Lemurian cities.

Speaker 2 The other two diggers mentioned uranium. None of it made sense, but it always pointed back to the stories about the mountain.

Speaker 2 I did try to contact the IM activity a couple of times, but the person who answered the phone told me that my message probably wouldn't be returned. It wasn't.

Speaker 2 After that last scary night on the mountain, Brett drove straight home to his mom's in Reading.

Speaker 12 I just couldn't believe all this had happened. And then plus, I hadn't slept.
And I got back. I hadn't been telling my mom what I'd been doing.
You know, I told her I was working. And I remember...

Speaker 12 I called my dad.

Speaker 12 My mom is a sweetheart, and she's always been the one that's let me run a little crazy, but has been like my stone and my dad is a lot like me and I started telling what I had been doing and he got upset and I remember that was the final thing where it was like when he got was like you cannot do stuff like that like you have to realize what you just did and I'm very happy you're safe

Speaker 12 But that could have gone very bad and like you can no longer go through life being naive like that

Speaker 12 and I was happy I remember I picked up my skateboard

Speaker 12 my friends and spent like a week off gassing just letting all that go and then once you're out of that mindset, you're not around those people, then you start realizing, like,

Speaker 12 what were we really doing? Like, what did I let someone talk me into?

Speaker 12 Am I liable for anything?

Speaker 12 And that's why it was really chilling when I got that phone call. I can't remember how long it was.
I'm trying to think.

Speaker 12 It was after the summer. Maybe it was around the fall.
And I had a call came through that I didn't recognize the number and answered it, and I recognized the voice instantly. That stoic

Speaker 12 man of few words voice telling me we're going back.

Speaker 12 And I remember being like,

Speaker 12 Good luck, because I'm not going.

Speaker 2 After that, Brett joined the military and rarely comes back to the area. Like many before him, he had come down from the mountain with a wild story.
He still thinks about it.

Speaker 12 There are times when

Speaker 12 I'm out elk hunting or something, I'm breaking brush off trail, and I'll see,

Speaker 12 I'll come up over a hill and you'll see a false summit or a goalie in the ground or something like that. You start seeing my brain will put shit together.

Speaker 12 When the landscape's just right and the sun hits, you know, I'm on the right slope. And

Speaker 12 yeah, things in the environment, the landscape start piecing together, and I can picture it again.

Speaker 12 That'll be with me forever.

Speaker 2 If you met Joseph again,

Speaker 2 would you have anything you'd want to say to him?

Speaker 12 Man, I'd ask why.

Speaker 12 I'd take everything I just said and I'm like, am I right? Is this what you were doing? Is this the motivation?

Speaker 12 Was it this church that is all the things, these little details that I put together from things you've said, things I've heard, things I saw? Like,

Speaker 12 what weren't you telling me?

Speaker 12 And then the next thing is, what did we find?

Speaker 12 Because I saw it.

Speaker 12 Didn't seem like something that was worth doing what we did.

Speaker 2 Am I wrong?

Speaker 2 I wondered about those things too.

Speaker 2 A strange final footnote to this story is that the Forest Service did find the person they think is responsible for the whole.

Speaker 2 Their local Forest Service law enforcement officer, Carmen Kinch, told me she did a bunch of sleuthing and figured out what hotel the workers had been staying in, and from the hotel, the name of the person who had paid for the rooms.

Speaker 2 She said the person said they had been looking for gold and paid a fine, but couldn't give me the person's name.

Speaker 2 And without a name, I haven't been able to find any core records, though I tried for years.

Speaker 2 These days, I'm not looking so hard anymore. I've had to accept that you just don't always get to the bottom of everything.

Speaker 2 Sometimes when you open the box, inside, there's just another box.

Speaker 3 Elijah Sullivan. His documentary is called The Whole Story.
It's showing at film festivals and he's looking for a distributor. Special thanks to Benjamin Bombard who told us about the documentary.

Speaker 3 When we were putting together today's show, we heard from lots of people who have mysteries in their lives that they can't get out of their head.

Speaker 3 And one of them came from Lauren Peterson, who read a story with a mystery in it that stuck with her.

Speaker 9 So for years,

Speaker 9 I have been plagued by a New York Times article by Katie Weaver, whose writing I love,

Speaker 9 where she went to a glitter factory and toured the glitter factory.

Speaker 3 And while Katie was on this tour, the glitter factory spokesperson said, you'll never guess which industry buys the most glitter. And then wouldn't tell her.

Speaker 3 No matter how many times the reporter asked, the spokesperson said, we can never tell you.

Speaker 9 And for years, I have been desperate to know

Speaker 9 who is this secret consumer of glitter. What could it possibly be?

Speaker 3 You need to know.

Speaker 9 Need to know.

Speaker 9 And I think the piece came out around Christmas, I want to say. So this was also the number one topic of conversation among my family and extended family for that entire Christmas.

Speaker 9 Everything we thought of, you know, it either didn't seem like it would be big enough or there was no reason that they wouldn't want us to know. Like if it was cosmetic, why couldn't

Speaker 9 they say that on the record? So it can't be that, but is it like, why is your toothpaste so sparkly? Could it be, is it the fluoride or is it glitter from the glitter factory?

Speaker 3 Her wife thought it could be the U.S. military.
She'd heard they drop metallic material from planes sometimes to scramble radar. How many people were in on this?

Speaker 9 My mom is one of eight, so that's a big family on that side. We definitely talked about it, plus some friends.

Speaker 9 I have a group text where every once in a while one of us will put forward a new theory to this day. So let's say we're looking at 20 people who I'm regularly bringing this up to.

Speaker 9 I once brought it up to someone who I was sitting next to on an airplane.

Speaker 9 I occasionally will just go back and look at the Reddit forums where people are trying to figure out the answer. Like, what could it possibly be?

Speaker 3 And what if I told you we have the answer?

Speaker 9 I, my jaw dropped.

Speaker 9 How did you find out?

Speaker 3 Would you just open your phone and type in the word glitter mystery?

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah, I will. And not for the first time, I might add.

Speaker 9 Okay, when you Google glitter mystery, the very first thing that comes up after DAI is the mystery of the largest glitter purchaser has been solved.

Speaker 3 The post is a link to a 2019 podcast that broke the news of the mystery buyer. There's a long Reddit discussion about the answer.
but somehow Lauren had never seen it. So I told her.

Speaker 3 The largest buyer of glitter is

Speaker 3 boats.

Speaker 3 Boats?

Speaker 3 Yeah, boats.

Speaker 3 They use it for their paint.

Speaker 3 Sparkly?

Speaker 9 I mean, I guess they are.

Speaker 9 Why don't they want us to know?

Speaker 9 Why does it have to be a secret?

Speaker 9 And not like, so not like military grade boat.

Speaker 9 Like just regular, regular boat.

Speaker 3 May I ask you, are you happy that you know?

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 9 Such a disappointing answer.

Speaker 9 And I kind of wish I still thought that the U.S. military was glitter bombing other nations.

Speaker 3 Everything that glitters is not boat,

Speaker 3 but a lot of it is.

Speaker 3 Lauren was not the only person disappointed in the answer. On Reddit, there were even people who worked in the marine paint industry who knew they used lots of glitter.

Speaker 3 But they were also hoping the answer was something else.

Speaker 3 Mysteries are like that. Once you have the answer, the sparkle disappears.

Speaker 3 The biggest glitter buyer was originally uncovered by the podcast Endless Thread. We reached out to GlitterX, the company profiled in the New York Times story.

Speaker 3 They declined to confirm if their biggest buyer is Boats. They are still committed to the mystery.

Speaker 3 Coming up, did we just become best friends? Or am I being kidnapped? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Speaker 11 Support for this American Life and the following message come from ATT.

Speaker 11 Whether you're calling your parents to say happy anniversary or checking in with your kids before bedtime, staying connected matters.

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Speaker 3 It's this American Life. I'm Ike Srees Kundaraja sitting in for Ira Glass.
Today, I hate mysteries. Stories of people grappling with the unknown that's right in front of them.

Speaker 2 Act two,

Speaker 3 who are the people in your neighborhood?

Speaker 3 The mystery that I want solved most urgently right now is what happens when the full force of the federal government arrives on my block.

Speaker 3 I happen to live in a neighborhood in New York City that is half foreign-born. Given the national tour of Border Patrol, ICE, and sometimes the National Guard, it seems like they could come here.

Speaker 3 They just closed their operation late last week in Chicago, Operation Midway Blitz. According to DHS, they arrested 5,000 people in the Chicago area.
Immigration arrests didn't stop after that.

Speaker 3 They're just not at the rate they've been at in the past two months. We can get some sense from videos on the news and social media about what happened in Chicago.

Speaker 3 People dragged out of cars, chased into daycares, neighborhoods tear gassed. But what is it really like to live in a neighborhood like that day to day?

Speaker 3 So we called one of our former colleagues, Michelle Navarro. She grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, a Mexican part of town, and she still lives there.
Here's Michelle.

Speaker 3 She changed some of the names in this story.

Speaker 10 I've been getting this question a lot. Friends from out of state have been hitting me up, asking me, are you good?

Speaker 10 They want to know what it's like here. They want to know if the videos and the things they've read are how it's actually playing out.

Speaker 10 I haven't known what to say.

Speaker 10 I had to go back through my phone to know what just happened. because it's been hard to remember.

Speaker 10 I've been scrolling back through my text messages, through the half sentences I wrote in my notes app, the videos I saved on my phone.

Speaker 10 I need them to remember my own life, because I don't even know.

Speaker 10 They launched Operation Midway Blitz in early September. That is when they started to bounce between neighborhoods.

Speaker 10 Back of the yards, Brighton Park, Gage Park, Little Village, Pilsen, Little Village, and Back of the Yards again.

Speaker 10 In a little over a week, more than 500 people were detained. It was a free-for-all, a purge.
There's no other way to describe it.

Speaker 10 And when they take people, they vanish. They're out as a family at Millennium Park on a Sunday.
They're waiting for the bus, taking the trash out, selling tamales.

Speaker 10 Then, men in ski masks and mismatched tactical gear appear.

Speaker 10 And then, they're gone.

Speaker 10 My phone is like a catalog, an archive of how we tried to keep living our lives. This is what I found.

Speaker 10 Scrolling back to the early days to when they started grabbing people from the street, there's a text confirming my nail appointment at Jessica's Nail Spa.

Speaker 10 Wednesday, September 17th, 2025, 5:30 p.m.

Speaker 10 See you soon, Michelle Navarro.

Speaker 10 I remember that day. That weekend, I was hosting a party for my roommate's birthday.
I'm used to being welcomed to the nail salon with laughter and loud Spanish love ballads. I'm a regular.

Speaker 10 They usually tease me.

Speaker 10 Let me guess. Red, square tip.

Speaker 10 But this time, when I approached the salon and I pulled on the door to find it locked, I watched their heads lift in unison. I saw relief when they realized it was just me.

Speaker 10 I know all the women who work here. We usually ask each other about work, about boyfriends, about family.

Speaker 10 This time we didn't. We waited, as we always do now.
to see who was going to bring it up first.

Speaker 10 It was them.

Speaker 10 They tell me they think about it all day. They heard ice was spotted in the Marshall's parking lot that morning, about a block over, where they often leave their cars.

Speaker 10 It's where they must walk to after work.

Speaker 10 I asked my Neltech, Sara, about her daughter and her son in hopes of something lighter. She begins to tell me a story about her son's elementary school.

Speaker 10 She says that during class, Kids could hear the screams of someone being taken right outside of the school building.

Speaker 10 The school administration later wrote to those parents that someone, not connected to the school, was detained outside by federal agents.

Speaker 10 They reassured parents that students would be safe in class and that parents would be safe at drop-off and pickup. But the next day, out of about 30 kids in her son's class, only three showed up.

Speaker 10 She stops filing my nails. She looks up at me.

Speaker 10 What do you think I should do? Should I send them to school?

Speaker 10 For that moment, I imagine she's my mother, that I'm her eight-year-old son, seeing massed militarized men taking her away.

Speaker 10 I tell her, if you're scared, don't take them.

Speaker 10 The following morning, while I'm getting ready for work, I wonder if she's dressing her children for school, or if she plans to take my unqualified advice.

Speaker 10 It's all I can think of for the rest of the day.

Speaker 10 The most surprising thing about massed men running around your neighborhood and terrorizing your people is realizing that the world doesn't stop. You still have to clock in for your job.

Speaker 10 You still need groceries. You still have to make small talk.

Speaker 10 Another text I found in my phone with a guy from Hinge.

Speaker 10 October 22nd. He wants to get coffee and Pilsen this weekend, but we're having trouble finding a time that works.

Speaker 10 He works at a factory nearby. He texts me that ICE agents are outside his job job and he's covering for coworkers without papers.
He keeps having to change the time. I tell him, no worries.

Speaker 10 He texts, they just grabbing people and waiting for people to leave work. So now we're telling the night shift to stay home.
I hate it here.

Speaker 10 We never met up that weekend.

Speaker 10 Everyone is talking about rules, but there doesn't seem to be any. Our mayor, organizers, and legal advocates have said that ICE and Border Patrol can't do a number of things.

Speaker 10 They can't go on private property. They can't go on city property.
They can't throw tear gas in our neighborhoods, right outside of people's homes. But they continue to do so.

Speaker 10 Four days after the start of this operation, they shoot and kill a man in Franklin Park. Not long after, just two miles from where I live, They shoot a woman five times.

Speaker 10 The Department of Homeland Security keeps talking about people who broke the law, who are here illegally, who committed crimes.

Speaker 10 But they target all of us, anyone who is brown, anyone who speaks Spanish, or just lives here. If you get picked up, you could spend a day or a week in detention.

Speaker 10 So we can't let people outside by themselves anymore. Even those of us with papers, with legal status, are on high alert.

Speaker 10 They roll up on us in parking lots, on people's front yards, outside of schools, schools, and ask,

Speaker 10 are you from here? Are you from here?

Speaker 10 Other moments from my phone. On October 4th, there's a video from my friend Bianca.
We've all been friends since sixth grade. Bianca's a realtor now.
She's in her car, in between showings.

Speaker 10 She says, guys, this is so sad. Families who I sold houses to last year are calling me now.
asking me to put those same houses back in the market. They're heading back to Mexico.

Speaker 10 A home in the United States was a dream they finally realized. They were just crying of happiness not that long ago, she says, and now they have to let it go.

Speaker 10 October 25th.

Speaker 10 An invite to Gabby's annual Halloween party. She called it a Halloween to remember.
After a few hours into the party, I look around and ask where Yasmin is. Gabby looks at me.

Speaker 10 Yasmin can't come out right now.

Speaker 10 Oh shit, I forgot. She's undocumented.
I felt so stupid. I felt so careless.

Speaker 10 Before the end of the party, Gabby makes sure each guest leaves with a goodie bag, which contains two pieces of chocolate, Skittles, a whistle you can wear around your neck, and a small home printed booklet instructing you on what to do when you spot ice.

Speaker 10 Form a crowd, stay loud, the cover says. Code one: ice nearby.
Blow in a broken rhythm. Pre, pre, pre.

Speaker 10 This alerts the community that ice agents are in the area. Code red: blow in a continuous, steady rhythm when ice is attaining someone.
The last page reads: protect each other, always.

Speaker 10 Happy Halloween, I guess.

Speaker 10 I look back at my call log. There's a list of calls in quick succession one day at 1:26 p.m.

Speaker 10 to my mom and then to her neighbors.

Speaker 10 I remember exactly what these calls are.

Speaker 10 I'd seen a post that ICE was two blocks away from my parents' house. I called my mom.
I know, she said, there was non-stop honking about 20 minutes ago.

Speaker 10 That's a thing now: people honking to alert everyone that ICE is right here, and cars follow behind them until they can't.

Speaker 10 Where's dad? I asked. He's working.

Speaker 10 My dad calls me later on his way home from work. I tell him our neighbors are safe.
Then I say, Dad, you can't go to the swap meet anymore.

Speaker 10 The owner had said he wanted to keep people safe, but he didn't. More than 20 federal agents took 15 people.

Speaker 10 That's my dad's spot. It's where he goes for random parts and hardware.
But I told him no more Swaparama.

Speaker 10 He agreed he'd find a different place to do his shopping.

Speaker 10 October 20th. Ice got to my dad anyway.

Speaker 10 There's a text from my sister at 10.46 a.m.

Speaker 10 Ice trimmed out on Luis. I don't know who he's with.

Speaker 10 Luis is my sister's husband, and he works landscaping with my dad. I wrote on all caps.
Where right now?

Speaker 10 My mom messages me. La migra la yego a tu papa.

Speaker 10 My dad was shoveling someone's front lawn. When he looked up from his shovel, ice was right there, the agents just a few feet away.
Four cars stood in the middle of the street.

Speaker 10 One of the agents gripped his coworker's shoulder.

Speaker 10 Do you all have papers?

Speaker 10 They all said they did.

Speaker 10 They think that because no one tried to run, the agents let them continue working.

Speaker 10 So they did.

Speaker 10 Going back through these messages now, I forgot how mad I got at my sister. I was alarmed.
My sister seemed to move on quickly when she learned Luis and my dad were fine, which I found annoying.

Speaker 10 I kept asking her, where are they now? Are they together?

Speaker 10 Had they called the rapid response hotline to report ICE presence in the neighborhood, taken down license plate numbers, or makes and models of the cars?

Speaker 10 Information that could help other people at risk in the area.

Speaker 10 My sister texts, I am telling you what I know. I am working, and they are working.
I don't know how much communication you think I'm getting.

Speaker 10 My reply, bro, this is a stop work matter.

Speaker 10 Five weeks into the operation, I saw a cheap flight out of Chicago to New York. I decided to take it, get away for a few days.
Part of me felt guilty for leaving.

Speaker 10 Part of me felt like I should take the chance before it got worse.

Speaker 10 I spent the weekend with my friends in their living rooms, going on walks, to dinner.

Speaker 10 Nothing about their lives had changed. It was unsettling.

Speaker 10 I told them how my body tenses up now when I hear a long car horn, how I look into car windows for masked agents, and that when we get a community alert reporting ICE on our phones, we think of every person we know who lives or works around there, how we text and call immediately, or show up, worried that the other person won't be there.

Speaker 10 I told them that I wasn't a special case, that this is what everyone I know feels.

Speaker 10 Outside of Chicago, it was easier to answer the question, what it's like there. From outside, I could see how much we've adapted, how different everything is now, how extreme things have gotten.

Speaker 10 It's what I could see going back through my phone, that this thing has bled into every single corner of our daily lives, our commutes, our jobs, our families, our dates and parties, and every single conversation.

Speaker 10 One last moment I found going through my phone. A text from my relative.

Speaker 10 She wanted me to know that Ice was at the corner by the Pizzeria, where our cousin works. My cousin is the last one in my family who hasn't gotten his papers.

Speaker 10 I jumped off the train and took one going the other way. I ran down the street.
If Ice was here, then I had just missed them.

Speaker 10 My cousin had recently told his mom, my aunt, that if they ever came in and took him, it'd be alright with him.

Speaker 10 I'm not running, he'd said. Don't say that, she responded.
She was upset that he had brought it up. My mother is upset by this too.

Speaker 10 She told me the story over the phone. Let him have his peace, I told her.
Perhaps he was just trying to prepare his mother and himself for something he couldn't control. Let him have that.

Speaker 10 I stood outside the pizzeria that day, catching my breath. I peered through the glass until I caught a glimpse of him in the back of the kitchen.
I waved and pretended I was only walking by.

Speaker 10 For once, I avoided the conversation completely, for my sake and for his.

Speaker 10 And I think we both felt relieved.

Speaker 3 That story was from Michelle Navarro. She's a writer and a producer on City Cast Chicago, a daily news podcast.
It was edited by Hannah Jaffe Walt.

Speaker 3 We just have a few minutes left in the show. We'll leave you with one last story.

Speaker 2 Act 3,

Speaker 3 Come Mr. Cab Driver, won't you turn that music up?

Speaker 3 It comes from comedian Muhammad El-Sheikhi, who found himself trapped in an uncomfortable mystery in the backseat of a cab.

Speaker 7 Most recently I decided I need to work more on my small talk. So I was like, you know what, if I do take a lift or an Uber next time, I'm going to talk to the driver.

Speaker 7 I'm going to find a topic and I'll run with it.

Speaker 7 And again, to this man's car, and like two minutes in, he starts playing music. And every song he played was something I really liked.

Speaker 2 So like, I gotta let him know.

Speaker 7 So after each song, I would say, dude, this is a great song.

Speaker 7 Or I'd say, oh, wow, look at that. He's doing it again.

Speaker 7 And I did that for a while, like 20 minutes of me doing that. And that man did not respond to me once.

Speaker 7 Well, I was like, I'm a man on a mission. I'll get to him.

Speaker 7 But then I swear to God, the music stops. And the thing he starts playing next was my stand-up comedy on the speakers and I've never been more terrified in my life.

Speaker 7 Because I was like, I didn't even check if this was my car or not. Like I left the building and I was like, this seems completely fine.
And I got in.

Speaker 7 So I had to check in from the back and I was like, hey man, hi,

Speaker 7 do you know who this is?

Speaker 7 And he was like, what? I was like, the guy doing stand-up on the speakers. Do you know who that is? And he was like, no.
And I was like, well, it's me.

Speaker 7 And he replied, well, that's good for you.

Speaker 7 I was like, oh, you're kidnapping me and gaslighting me? This is crazy.

Speaker 7 And then I really thought something bad was about to happen, but then he drove me to the location I gave him. And I did say that out loud.
I was like, oh, this is the location I gave you.

Speaker 7 And he was like, yeah, that's how this usually works.

Speaker 7 And I was like, dude, not to be rude or anything, but like, are you fucking with me? What is this? What is going on tonight? And I was like, what? I was like, are there cameras around?

Speaker 7 Is this going to be on like YouTube or something?

Speaker 7 What is going on and he was like sir I just want you to leave my car and I was like oh I'm the crazy person here oh I see how it is okay I'm the weird just so you know whatever this is you got me

Speaker 7 this will haunt me for the rest of my life I will never forget you is that what you want

Speaker 7 and then I started leaving the car I took my backpack and then I pulled my phone out of the charger

Speaker 7 Which, you know, as some of you know, doubles as an ox court sometimes.

Speaker 7 So it's been my phone connected to the speakers this whole time.

Speaker 7 And now there's a guy in New York City who thinks I'm an absolute psychopath.

Speaker 7 Because what happened was I got into this man's car, this stranger's car,

Speaker 7 and I played my own music

Speaker 7 for 20 minutes.

Speaker 7 And then after each song that I played,

Speaker 7 I said, what a great song, man.

Speaker 7 Oh, look at that, he's doing it again!

Speaker 7 And then I played my own stand-up.

Speaker 7 And then I said, hey man, excuse me, do you recognize the voice?

Speaker 7 Yes, your boy right here. It is me.

Speaker 7 You're getting a good deal here. I'll tell you that.
People usually pay to hear this voice. You're getting this for free?

Speaker 7 Are there cameras around?

Speaker 7 Is this going to be on YouTube where it belongs?

Speaker 7 I surely hope so.

Speaker 7 I have not talked to people since. since.
I think this is it for me. You guys have been an amazing crowd.
Thank you so much. Have a good night.

Speaker 3 Muhened El Sheikhi is currently on tour to see where he's performing next. Check out his website, muhenedelshakey.com.

Speaker 3 your hand

Speaker 2 I get a feeling of the number

Speaker 3 was produced by me the other people who helped put together today's show include Fia Bennon, Michael Kamate, Emmanuel Jochi, Suzanne Gabber, Sophie Gill, Tobin Lowe, Miki Meek, Catherine Raymondo, Sto Nelson, Adia Raymond, Marisa Robertson

Speaker 3 Anthony Roman, Ryan Rummery, Francis Swanson, Christopher Swatala, Lily Sullivan, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu, our managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman, our senior editor, David Kestenbaum, and our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry.

Speaker 3 Special thanks to Mark Fleming, Maria Roman Garcia, Belle Woods, Jen Tonks, Maria Stein-Marison, Aaron Mahalitz, and the second graders at Manitou School.

Speaker 3 Our website, thisamericanlife.org, please consider supporting the show as a This American Life Partner. You'll get bonus episodes.
I did one. Add free listening and more.

Speaker 3 To join, go to thisamericanlife.org slash life partners. That link is also in the show notes.

Speaker 3 Our episode, The Hand That Rocks the Gavel, was just selected by Apple as one of the best podcast episodes of 2025. That episode is all about immigration judges who almost never speak to the press.

Speaker 3 If you missed it, check it out. It was released September 21st.
This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Speaker 3 Ira is out this week, but ever since I told him about the mystery box, he's been leaving me voice messages.

Speaker 6 What is it?

Speaker 6 What is it?

Speaker 6 What is it?

Speaker 3 And to reward you all for enduring the mystery, we have a special guest to announce the contents of the box, Mr. Tori Malatea.

Speaker 3 Will you tell the people what's in the box?

Speaker 9 What's in the box?

Speaker 2 Your mama.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's a bottle of Azol.

Speaker 3 I'm Ike Sreeskam the Raja. Iroglass will be back next week with more stories of this American life.

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