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Oh goody, it's not just me who only wears Vessis (except for when I wear flip flops). And blames Simon for that. Never ever thought I'd spend $100+ on shoes... but these are WELL WORTH IT. The dry socks club is the best!
We know that you're the one secretly locked in the basement and the vessis are the only thing protecting you from getting trench foot on the damp floor
I grew up in Nova Scotia in the 70's -80's. One summer evening me and several friends were hanging out and talking outside. The topic of conversation was nuclear war, when I looked up into the sky i saw what looked like a missile burning up slowly through the sky. Turns out I and my friends witnessed Skylab breaking up and entering the atmosphere that night at the very moment we were discussing nuclear war. That freaked us all out, and I will never forget it.
The best theory that I've heard is that an abnormally large bolt of lightning struck the island which has a very high metal content and has several abandoned mines now filled with highly conductive salt water just below the surface, this created either one massive, or several large arc flashes around the island. Arc flashes are incredibly bright, can create sonic booms and often leave witnesses with spots in their vision.
But, there's a problem with that explanation, why has it never happened since? The conditions aren't different now, and weren't in the intervening years since this event.
@@geofthompson3844 It could be that conditions haven't been quite right for a bolt large enough to penetrate the earth and rock of the island since then. There weren't any large booms like this before they happened either, and quite frankly nature is still twitching in ways we have no explanation for.
This works and counting how rarely it happens I’m not surprised it hasn’t happened again. A lot of things in nature literally only happen when the conditions are exactly right to the point they dot the I’s and cross the T’s. And first hand reports are your best friend for matching up the facts
@@geofthompson3844 It happens something like one every couple million lightning strikes, mostly over the ocean. Often enough that Los Alamos sent a couple of scientists to poke around because they were getting annoyed with all the Vela satellites alerting on them.
Ball lightning (or, at least, the phenomena that are known as ‘ball lightning’) is a real thing. Nonetheless, I am very impressed by Deniz’s script once again. He’s a very talented wordsmith. I don’t think any other writers on this channel have gotten Simon so close to actually accepting that some things might actually defy understanding.
When you discredit one plausible theory (ball lightning), and leave out another plausible theory of what might have happened at Bell Island, it's not surprising most viewers find the incident unexplainable. A lightning superbolt fits the evidence perfectly, and is relatively well confirmed as the cause of the Bell Island boom.
Common misconception is that lighting goes down from the clouds. But often it goes up from the ground. Three basic types of lightning, air to ground, ground to air and air to air, (cloud to air typically). Ball lightning is the later type but it’s still quite mysterious. Often it come up from swampy, (alkaline earth) or mined areas.
From Wikipedia it says it was a superbolt which are well documented, got to say this is the worst thing I seen Simon do, the script was shite, disappointed, funny just yesterday I was recommending Simonsbath channel to people on that chapter (another good channel) then I watch this :(
I'm surprised the writer of this episode didn't mention the (relatively well confirmed theory) that it was a lightning superbolt. It's a rare occurrence, but it has been observed in nature many, many times. It fits all the evidence pretty perfectly. And coincides with a lot of the eyewitness testimonies as well.
The writer of the episode seemed to dismiss natural phenomenon out of hand. I did a little bit of research on my own, and you're correct, the superbolt theory is not only plausible, but highly probable. Super bolts can be a thousand times brighter and more powerful than a normal lightning bolt Here is a UA-cam link for a short 2 minute video explaining the phenomenon; it's more plausible than any thing Deniz came up with. ua-cam.com/video/gZ4pqAnEWhk/v-deo.html
As I recall, superbolts have only very recently been confirmed. Much of the reporting on the Bell Island Boom was likely done decades ago before anyone knew about superbolts, so I suspect the writer just didn't come across the superbolt idea when doing his research. But it _is_ given as the most likely cause in the Bell Island wikipedia page.
@@jmmahony Wikipedia, isn't always the most reliable source, but it's a pretty damn good place to start to familiarize oneself with a topic. And when Wikipedia mentions a superbolt being the most likely cause of Belle Island explosion, and it's not even mentioned in the video, one can't help but wonder how thoroughly the topic was researched. Deniz also failed to mention that Bell Island is about 15 miles away from metropolitan St John's which has a population of 200,000 people. It's an important fact that adds much needed context to a video that goes out of its way to emphasize the remoteness of the island. Bell island being within walking distance of hundreds of thousands of people makes it a lot less likely the phenomenon was a result of a government experiment.
@@MrGouldilocks Yeah, I noticed this as well given I've read about this incident in the past. Makes me wonder how well researched other videos on this channel that I took at face value given I knew little to nothing about the subject.
Ball lightning is well attested. Your description of the damage caused is exactly what I found when a house I was living in was struck by lighting via the telephone wire. I wonder if the chicken coop was covered in chicken wire?
I have actually seen ball lightning .. as it travelled slowly across an icy lake on a very very cold night .. it made the popping noise and then a boom. Nothing like what happened on the island happened to me that night .. but it did seem like some sort of super bolt /ball lightning happened that night
I was gonna say ball lightning has been discredited by researchers because they can't recreate it or haven't observed it themselves. However this is a very similar situation to rouge waves and giant squid where both were considered fake not too long ago. Rouge waves in particular are very similar in how they were described for centuries with some evidence in the damaged ships yet researchers refused to budge until a dashcam (or bridgecam if you will) of a ship caught the rare event and it was impossible to dismiss. Hopefully we get something like that will this to settle the matter
Except it's not well attested at all. There's more video "evidence" of Bigfoot and aliens. None are credible. Always potato level cameras.....I wonder why....
Back in the mid 1970's, I was helping my sister renovate a basement apartment in her house. A new breaker box had been installed, and we were furring around it to put up a barn board wall. A thunderstorm had been approaching, but seemed still far off. Suddenly there was a flash of light with a simultaneous intense thunderclap as a tree right outside was struck. A glowing bluish softball-sized orb emerged from the masonry wall above the breaker box and began to float silently along the ground wire (which ran just under the ceiling), through an interior masonry wall. We watched it disappear into the wall and then emerge on the other side, turning the corner at the front of the house. It continued to follow the ground wire to the point where it was attached to the water main, halfway above the floor. There was a soft *pop*, and it disappeared. We just stared at each other for a few seconds.
Imagine my thoughts…I’m in my 70s. A friend’s Daughter once asked me if I could help with her History homework. Being a specialist in Ancient Greece, I said sure…then she told me they were studying the 1960s. I suddenly felt VERY old.🖤🇨🇦
Yeah 35 is actually very young. Just become an adult. But I do remember feeling weird when turning 30. So I think people are freaked out by the round numbers. Life is short... reason why people think there old at 35 is the same reaction a dog would have at turning 5 if it could think. We live a short meaningless life and it would have been better if we were never born.
Sorry to say, but my wife and I both saw ball lightning happen right in front of our car. Weren't expecting it so no video (and this was in the 1990s so didn't have that option on our phones). Still, we both watched it shoot across the road mere feet in front of us. There was a buzzing noise followed by a popping sound just as it disappeared. It was truly an incredible and amazing experience.
One theory is just that it was an exceptionally powerful lightning strike, so a huge discharge reaching from the ground to the sky which does match the description of gathering static in the building suddenly being released. People like to think that random disasters must have a conscious cause, because the fact that nature will just eff you up at random is far more terrifying.
I'm surprised they did not mention this. The so-called "super bolt" appears to be a popular explanation. It seems like we would hear of these more often though too, unless they are mostly over the ocean. Earth is a wild place.
@@GarthritisScientists have, over the last several years monitored and measured rare lightning bolts that are up to 1000 more powerful than normal lightning bolts. These " superbolts" tend to occur in the northern hemisphere, in non summer months. The bolts typically strike water, so people aren't usually affected by them; but it's possible a bolt struck the water very close to Bell Island. 1,000 simultaneous lightning strikes fits the evidence and eyewitness testimonies quite well.
Hey, I tried watching this but he legitimately cannot keep on track with the story, I'm at 11:05 and he's talking about atmospheric and oceanic weapons or some shit. can you just give me a Tl;DR on what the f*cking mystery is?
@@alexdenommee3219 A place called Bell Island had a weird event many years ago that included a large booming noise and balls of light. There was a lot of government investigation (including the USA), because it was picked up by military satellites. They never came to a solid conclusion about what it was, so lots of conspiracy theories were born to try and explain “The Bell Island Boom”. Most people think it was ball lightning, or a weather phenomenon called a “super Bolt” a different form of lightning.🖤🇨🇦
4:30 - Chapter 1 - The story of harbingers 18:25 - Chapter 2 - A mild case of doomsday 33:50 - Chapter 3 - The much bigger picture 43:15 - Chapter 4 - It wasn't aliens
As soon as you said "Canada is weird"...and then followed it up with cold, and maple syrup... One thing popped into my head. You HAVE to do an episode on the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist from our strategic maple syrup reserves... I think you might have touched on it in another episode, or I thought you should have being a parallel to another theft.
If you want a “Canada is weird” story, read about the Principality of Outer Baldonia. A bunch of drunk fisherman declared sovereignty on a tiny island and declared war on the USSR, which made them big mad. Paul Gross made a movie in the early 90s called Buried on Sunday which was definitely inspired by those events.
You want a largely unknown aspect of "the Unknown", records of which have mostly been destroyed and most of what remains are *still* classified either by the US or Canada: When it comes to the lives ruined by the CIA Mind Control experiments with things like LSD, MK ULTRA, nothing can be compared to the work at McGill University in Quebec! The doctor hired by the CIA would do things like dose people with LSD *non-stop*, put some people in chemically induced comas while they tried to "subliminally" fuck with their heads and putting people in absolute sensory deprivation and restraining them to a bed! All three of these "tests" went on for weeks in some cases, months for most, and in a few cases we know of, years. To say nothing about the insanely intense Electro-shock therapy given out like candy! None of the "test subjects" where given any sort of advance knowledge before signing up. And the number of people reduced to shells of their former selves, some unable to function at all is staggering, and entirely too many taking their own life in the aftermath. Dark AF, yeah, but if you want chilling mysteries from Canada, I feel like few things can trump that!
The "pops" make perfect sense as sonic booms. Especially at night it's super hard to judge size, speed and distance, and the glowing orbs could easily be afterburners. Even when not going supersonic anyone who's been to a fast jet airshow display will have felt that reverb in the chest from them. Personally, I suspect either the US or Canada was doing night-time low flying training and quietly stopped after getting complaints, using Concorde as an excuse to mask the shift for probably operational security reasons. Militaries are paranoid because they know people are literally spying on them.
This is exactly what military pilots say about the UFO's they're constantly spotting especially over the ocean. Except of course, then the orbs start coming TOWARDS them which is... obviously not an afterburner. There's definitely some sort of weird spycraft in the air, whether it's one of our countries, or it's alien, nobody will know until it's declassified.
@@michaelmurdock4607 to be fair, here in the UK we have had definite sonic booms which the RAF says very specifically “this was not a sonic boom from an RAF plane”. This is read as “and we’re not allowed to tell you it was the Americans just down the road from where it was heard” - they have several bases housing aircraft ranging from F-15s to, back in the day, the SR-71.
As a fellow Newfoundlander, I can attest that we also downplay things too. Tragedy is part of our history, and we can pick up and move on from tragedy pretty quickly. Personally, I was born in in Burin in the early 1980s, and growing up I've never heard of this story until very recently via the internet.
reading reviews it sounds like more people do not like them than actually like them. on top of that they have major issues with the soles wearing out early... it is essentially a neoprene boot with fabric on the outside. Shipped directly from the factory in china that seems to have major quality control problems, none of which justify the $105 price tag. You are not paying for the quality, you are paying for their advertising and positive reviews.
Not my type of shoe since I mostly wear boots and I would agree they are overpriced. I know people that swear by them though. My main point is that this type of show is probably harder to get sponsors for compared to some of the other channels. At least it isn't Raid Shadow Legends.
Simon in regards to a meteor making a crater, nope. Airbursts like the Tunguska blast or the recent Chelyabinsk one in Russia heat up and basically explode high up and its the sonic boom and pressure wave that finally hits a few seconds later that can flatten areas or leave damage but no obvious mark. There is a place in Canada you may like to do a project on which is a sky monitoring system called he Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory or (CAMO)
Hello everyone! I wrote this episode about a month ago and would like to share with you some insights and additional information I have gathered since then. 😊 - A very popular theory (which I could not include in the episode given the word count) is “weather manipulation experiments”. Artificially controlling the weather is not science-fiction, but an active field of research. Some people speculate that the Bell Island boom may have been the result of "cloud seeding" or similar methods of intentional weather alteration. - There are contradicting reports regarding the US investigation. Numerous sources state that the so-called men in black seized many items regardless(!) of their owners' permission. In retrospect, I think this version of events is more accurate. - Bell Island is very foggy, but not THAT foggy. 🤓
Thanks that was very interesting. I wonder if anyone has investigated the possibility of gas such as methane escaping from the disused mines? There is a whole village here in the UK that had to be moved because of such a phenom.
I was a little surprised that you dismissed ball lightning like that, so I did a bit of googling about it. I found a lot of reputable sources claiming that the scientific consensus is more in favor of ball lightning as a real phenomenon than not, but that nobody really knows what causes it. I'm curious what resources you found that led you to liken ball lightning to "the wrath of Zeus." Not saying you're necessarily wrong or anything. I just don't know that much about the subject and I'm having a hard time finding sources supporting your position, so I figured you'd know where to find them better than I would. :)
@@johnlemon252 Hey John! Just for the record: Plasma obviously is a real thing and it can be created in a lab. So I'm specifically refering to the idea of "stable ball lightnings" that can float around the way they alledgedly can. Those do not exist. Even in a lab, plasma will immediately disperse. I am very open to changing my stance on this issue once evidence (other than anecdotal) is presented. As for my sources, I asked two physics teachers I happen to know, as well as reading through several websites (which I cannot recall exactly, as I've written this episode over a month ago. But I think I mostly went on sources cited by German Wikipedia (as I am from Germany)). To my understanding, there is only somewhat unreliable eyewitness reports to go on. Again, I am happy to change my mind once reliable evidence emerges. Maybe I will write a whole episode about them, though! There seems to be demand to explore this further! :-)
I have personally seen ball lightning during a tornado when I was a kid. The tornado hit the transformer at the end of the block and what looked like an electrical tumbleweed rolled down the street about half a block before dissipating. I acknowledge that this is not the same as a spontaneous ball of lightning in the middle of the sky, just saying it's not as "wildly theoretical" as it may seem.
@Paul Weeldreyer Except they don't. All the cameras the world has, but only 2 crappy videos for it. There's more video "evidence" of Bigfoot and aliens.....
I live across the bay from this island, grew up looking across at it I can see it from my house, when the mines were open there were 20K odd people, but after the mines closed they never fully recovered economically. There's still a few thousand left it's not abandoned by any means, but definitely many in poverty nowadays. I used to work at the hospital a few years ago (yes there's a hospital on the island) and I took the ferry back and forth every day, my brother in law still does to work in one of their 2 schools. After crossing a 20 minute ferry they're only 10 minutes from the capital city of the province. If it wasn't for the ferry they are not nearly as isolated as the description here implies. Although it may seem really isolated to many, by Newfoundland standards it is not. Beautiful place and kind people, I loved my time there if it wasn't for having to rely on an unreliable ferry. Can say I've never seen a wandering chicken besides one small homestead there, handful of free range cows have crossed the road 😂. Lots of cats but they are taken care of as a TNR colony. I have heard some of the locals talk about this occurrence though!
My dad moved back to Bell Island to retire almost 20 years ago, like quite a few others who had left over the years. I was conceived there, but my parents moved to the mainland (Canada - haha - not Newfoundland) along with most of their siblings (24 between them - that's like a hundred cousins I have - I know!) when the mines closed. I did live on the island for a few years when I was quite young and it was like a ghost town there then. When my dad moved back I was working online in Asia and thought it'd be easy to do the same from the island for a spell. It was in fact easy, mind the time difference. Experienced 4 seasons in the 6 months there from March to September - lol. Oh - you'll recall when the ferry service went on strike back then. What a mess~ I dearly miss home . At least it's easy to FaceTime now and know they're doing well. ~From, Still in Asia~
Yeah, anyone that spent 30 seconds looking at a map would realize that Bell Island isn't remote... at all. It's like 15 or 20 miles away from quite a large population center of about 200,000 people in St John's. This whole episode was poorly researched; it feels like neither Simon nor Deniz bothered to look at an actual map when formulating theories. It's hard to believe militaries would be conducting dangerous, unpredictable experiments within walking distance of major metropolitan cities.
@@MrGouldilocks yes I agree. With the location of Bell Island being fully surrounded by Conception Bay, anything of that magnitude would have been seen by the nearly quarter million people living all around it, from Portugal Cove all the way around to Bay de Verde
Ya, everyone back home knew about bell island. I was an hr 45 from St. John’s and we even went on a field trip to the mine back in da day. Before I left the province I also visited the island again and the fish n chips place right next to the ferry slaps.
Ball Lightening is thought to be real by many scientists, but they don't have an explanation for it. They have been able to recreate it in a few liquids but not in air, a team at the Max Planck Institute has replicated Ball Lightening in the lab by discharging a high powered capacitor in a tank of water.
The shockwave from a supersonic travel is continuous with the object in motion, not just when it initially breaks the sound barrier. It’s constantly breaking the sound barrier. The boom goes on until the velocity decreases sufficiently.
Ball lightning is more likely to be a real, yet extremely rare phenomenon. A few years ago a research team managed to get a spectrogram of ball lightning in China, and it revealed that the sphere was made of ionized elements commonly found in soil.
Wow, I can't believe you're doing a video on Bell Island. I actually live in Newfoundland. First you do a video on one of my suggestions and now you're doing one on my home province!
Ball lightning has been reproduced in a lab. It'’s a ball of supercharged ionized particles. I imagine if they did a lot of mining on this island there would be a lot of ore dust scattered about. Combine that with the steady offshore winds blowing over the island and you have a giant electrostatic charge generator. This seems like the perfect conditions for ball lighting to form.
This is the first time iv heard of "video evidence" of ball lightning, but also the first time iv heard of it being compared to science fiction considering many mainstream physicists and atmospheric scientists say the science is sound for it to be possible to happen.
I believe I saw a video from Mexico City or another Mexican city that had CCTV on their news and they showed this interesting type phenominon. Worth a search here.
"trust the science" yeah the same people had doctors and scientists literally experimenting on people.. trying to turn LSD into some sort of mind control drug... they did it in the US and in Canada. the government does not have your best interest at heart. deal with it.
So ball lightning is one of those science quagmires because while we can model it... Meteorological science is based on lab replication. Lightning in general has always been a really sticky subject there as it not actually possible to generate the same amount of energy in any sort of economic fashion. And while you can take arcing and humidity experiments to base its path on the unique confluence of things that need to happen for ball lightning is ABSURD and there is no lab on the planet that has the infrastructure to generate lighting from a pseudo atmosphere in order to test this. This is why the team at max Planck use a water tank as the resistance of water is much lower than air.
Ball lightning can be replicated and is very real, the issue is the circumstances needed for it to happen naturally are exceedingly rare. So much so that it;s rare enough to be easily discounted as unbelievable.
Hello The Original Og Whistle! It's really awesome to watch and listen to this story! Thank you so much for all you do! I am from here in Nova Scotia and many, many stories were told and talked about over the years of this "Bell Island Boom ' even here. We're South of NFL. I live about 30 minutes from Halifax inland and when we moved up here into the country from the city; folks talked of the Boom. Word had spread widely back in the day. I was around 7 or 8 back (currently 39) when I remember the older people saying, "Do You Remember?" Thank You again Simon
Sorry to be "that person," but the O in OG stands for original, so saying original OG is a bit redundant, lol. Again, I'm sorry - I can't help myself, I'm a grammar nerd.
Lots of foggy/misty movies are filmed in Louisiana because in fall we have very foggy, warm and humid days that look super cold but are 75 to 80 outside. Movies from the Twilight series and The Mist by Stephen King are some examples.
Thats where my grandmother's family comes from and we tend to go there every so often. Beautiful place, really worth a visit. My great grandfather worked in the mine there.
I don't know man.... I feel like any of the lightning theories holds a lot more credit than Deniz or Simon are giving it. I know empirical evidence is not worth a lot, but bright flash, electrical damage, eye witness reports, air cracking sound, and no lasting damage to the landscape besides the trees. And, I'd be interested in hearing the kid's updated testimony later in life.
Simon: "Canada is weird" Me: "No. we're not." Proceeds to go to an ad for a Canadian company selling waterproof sneakers Me: "Ok, maybe we're a bit weird. But also quite brilliant!"
Clearly didn't pay enough attention to anything. Another Canadian thing I love. Quite brilliant, indeed. Brilliant and weird? Two of the best qualities, if you ask me!
Simon as a Brit not knowing about Grog is kinda wild. Despite knowing how little he knows in general it always blows my mind. Always refreshing to know he's just a regular person.
I live relatively nearby. I had a friend who was obsessed with this place. Became convinced he had found the holy grail. Also, Newfoundland is a big rum drinking place exactly because of Caribbean trade! Fact boy knows things he doesn't even know! "The ol black rum's got a hold on me like a dog wrapped around my leg.."
@@labhusky3 heh, Great Big 'Ead you means....Dat stuff is for the "come from away's" , mainlander tourists and folks who "Heard Newfie music dat one time I was half soused". By the way , I think Screech is a trick we plays on outsiders.....🥴 Long may yer big jib draw, an all dat.
As for the chickens it's not only shock, spooked birds quite often fly/jump and in the dark quite likely to crash into things breaking their own necks.
Yes, that might explain SOME deaths, but this seemed to affect not only the chickens in the coop(s) but the feral chickens that were not inside buildings and didn’t really have anything to run up against.
it apparently killed every single chicken on the farm and in the town, and they had no visible injuries, except for blood coming out of their beaks. those chickens didn't die from running into things, the electromagnetic pulse literally fried their brains
@@dyamonde9555 yeah everyone here keeps saying it was ball lightning.. saw some interviews of locals a few years back (the interviews were old videos) and they were all convinced it was some sort of EMP
In the late 1980s my son and I had an encounter with ball lightning and it was terrifying. We were driving home on a farm road at 50 MPH when the lightining formed in front of the car. It didn't look like a regular lightning strike and lasted 30 - 45 seconds. I almost left the road stopping the car. It finally let out a flash and a boom then disappeared. We had never heard of ball lightning and had to research what we had seen. I never want to do that again, and I'm the girl who likes to sit out and watch lightning storms!
my grandma (one of the most trustful and honest people I’ve ever met) she saw ball lightning it went onto her stove and then fizzled around and then went out. I do believe ball lightning is an extremely rare phenomenon that hasn’t been observed yet, it cannot cause a gigantic ‘emp’ and kill dozens of chickens. This is something else
Everything up to the big Boom reminds me of my time living in Santa Cruz, CA. I moved away in the past year, but I lived there for 5 years before. While I was there, we would hear very loud explosion sounds on a nightly basis. Sometimes multiple times in a night. It was infuriating, because it made it hard to get a proper night's sleep. I thought it was just some kids blowing off some kind of M80, but with a lot more bass. Eventually, the city put out an announcement informing people that they are aware of the explosion sounds and are unaware of the cause. They asked anyone with information to report it to the local police. I have no idea if they ever figured out what the cause was. In my experience, they did sound like explosions, not really fireworks (there were no whistling sounds and it wasn't a popping sound). The direction was never the same, and there were never people screaming in terror or anything like that. They were very loud.
Having lived in Boulder Creek for 10 years and San Jose for 25 years I have spent quite a bit of time in Santa Cruz as well. The atmospheric phenomenon that occurs in the greater San Francisco Bay Area has had maddening effects for several cities, perhaps most famously the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View blasting their concerts sounds up in the air and then bouncing right back off the clouds and aback to the ground, giving people dozens of miles away being able to hear the show perfectly loud and clear. The intermittently loud booming surf around Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay at night is probably able to reflect around the region in the same fashion. On Late night stays at Bonny Doon beach I would hear some particularly loud surf sounds depending on the weather , perhaps from some huge waves such as at Mavericks.
Concorde did boom over land, I heard it in my childhood but also again shortly before she was taken out of service, over Reading, UK, during the WOMAD festival I was at with 10,000 + other party goers. It was quite exciting PS I forgot about hearing a controlled detonation in March this year, on holiday with friends on the South Coast. We were woken by a loud boom, followed by a vibration. I went back to sleep, thinking it was a vivid dream. Turned out they'd found an unexploded WW2 bomb on the beach, about 3 miles away. They did a controlled detonation early morning before news crews and tourists could flock to the area.
My impression is that the Boom could easily be explained by a meteor exploding in the atmosphere. The damage on the ground including the holes in buildings is fragments from the exploded meteor striking. If there was a lot of upper atmosphere static the ionizing trail from the burning meteor could initiate a huge lightning strike, which could have struck a power grid cable injecting millions of volts into the power system of the island, causing widespread electrical damage. If the meteor had a large ice or dry ice content, its possible fragments from the explosion would have reached the ground as a pulse of vapour, or quickly evaporating ice leaving damage but no recognisable debris. Even iron meteors leave tiny fragments that can be very hard to find. The only real mystery is why this doesn't seem to have been offered as an explanation that is more credible than ball lightning.
The sonic boom is heard in an area around the plane any time it is above the speed of sound. It is not just when the plane first exceeds it. Very common misconception.
My family and I live by an army base in the US. It’s known as the home of field artillery. Yesterday they were practicing using normal artillery and a C-RAM. The neighbor kids came to me and asked about the noises. One was convinced that the army only uses “nukes” and was wondering if they were the cause of all the noise. While another was convinced they only use tanks 😂😂. It was so difficult convincing them otherwise.
I lived near an Army base back in the 1970s. We got used to all the artillery noise, and cracked jokes about it, like the time my sister dropped her purse and hit the ground at the same time a loud explosion went off.
I used to live next door to Fort Carson in Colorado Springs and they did artillery and firearms practice at literally all hours. I don't begrudge the military for training at odd hours to maintain a level of readiness, but ffs it got frustrating, having it sound like an active battlefield with gunfire, artillery, and attack helicopters flying overhead, then the bugle over the PA system at 6 am every morning. I swear, I never slept more than two consecutive hours the entire year I lived there. Good to know the Army's getting trained up though.
I really want to see Simon going nuts over any TLC or History style documentary they try to pass off. Like a solid 20 minutes of him losing his shit. It would be a fantastic BB episode
I would totally watch Simon doing a History Channel pastiche for an hour. Common, well-understood concepts being attributed to ghosts and aliens? Sign me up, Fact Boy! Maybe an April 1st special?
Ball lightening exists. Our cottage was hit by it when I was young. Loud bang, electrics go out, then this ball of electrical light floated in through the window. It moved across the lounge and hit the wall a couple of times. Each time there was a loud bang like a gunshot. It then left again. In the daylight the wall had two large holes where the ball had hit. I lived in Jersey, (the ORIGINAL you might say) and just after 9pm every night we'd get the sonic boom from Concorde. And yes, it shaked the house.
😮 That's amazing! That's exactly what I came to the comments section to hear about people who had ball lightning experiences. Thanks for sharing maybe now Simon will understand they're not fictional 🙄
It sounds like a meteorite air burst. Similar to, but much smaller than, the Chelyabinsk event in Russia 2013. No crater, a loud boom, and detected by the Vela satellite. Was disappointed Deniz didn't includes this as a possible explanation.
Yeah, I'm going Concord + coincidence of "small Tunguska". And given the seemingly documented electromagnetic effects, how is the brain of a kid close to the center going to react?
I know I'm a little late to the party, but I regularly hear loud booms in the smallish South Texas town where I live. They sound like large artillery firing and seem to come from different directions and distances relative to where I'm at. Occasionally I'll hear people around town talk about them, but it usually devolves quickly from a genuine discussion into "mUsT bE aLiEnS, LOL!" A bit of context- there are quite a few petrochemical plants in the area and an air force base about 15 miles away, so I've just kind of always assumed it's related to one or both of those, though the booms don't really sound like a sonic boom and seems way too loud and close to be industrial. Fast forward to about 3 months ago, I was driving to work during a thunderstorm and as I turned onto the road where I work, I saw a basketball-sized spherical explosion. Then I heard it, the EXACT same boom that I've been hearing occasionally for years. It wasn't a low grumble or even a crack like thunder, it was a loud, deep, short "pop" like a cannon firing. I thought maybe a transformer blew, but when I drove by the next day there was nothing there. No wires, no transformer, nothing. It was just an explosion in thin air. Was it ball lighting? I suppose it could've just been a regular lightning strike, but if it was, it was unlike any I've ever seen or heard before.
This reminds me of the phenomena we experience occasionally in North Carolina. I've personally experienced a very huge boom once or twice. No damage was reported as far as I know, just rattled nerves. I know good and well that they weren't sonic booms. I'm a former Air Force brat and have heard sonic booms many times. Plus North Carolina has several military bases and artilery ranges so we know what those sound like. The booming phenomenon doesn't happen often, maybe once every several years or so. It tends to be more concentrated at the coast especially around the Cape Fear region, though there have been instances much further inland closer to Raleigh. There have also been reports of these booms from places like New York state, India, Bangladesh, etc. A common name for it is Seneca gun(s) from Lake Seneca in NY. Some of these reports go back to at least the 1800s which definitely eliminates the explanation of sonic booms. A couple of possible explanations have been gas pockets rupturing and air bursts from meteors. Would be cool if y'all could do an episode on it.
This is the first time I have heard anyone question or dismiss the existence of ball lightening. It is a rare, but well known weather phenomenon acknowledged by meteorogists. There's a ton of scientific evidence of its existence, and lots of theories about what it consists of and causes it. I saw one of those fly across my neighbor's kitchen floor once. Back then I didn't know what it was, so it scared me silly. But all three of us who were in the kitchen at the time saw it. We smelled it, too. It was a stingy, unpleasant smell, and it left marks on the kitchen floor. Science is real, guys.
Agree with Simon's initial assessment. This has all the hallmarks of a high altitude EMP detonation. The birds were killed by infrasonic shockwaves, a phenomenon which has been observed a lot. Infrasound would also explain the hallucinations.
When I was growing up as a child in the 70s near Whidbey Island Navel Air Station we'd hear sonic booms frequently. As the sign says "Please pardon our noise it's the sound of freedom"
I'd like to see Simon spend a few minutes on Wikipedia and with a map to get a baseline understanding and gain some perspective before reading the scripts. He spent the vast majority of the video believing the event was caused by military experiments, even though Bell Island is literally surrounded by a quarter of a million people, making it a very unlikely target for dangerous unpredictable government shenanigans. Bell Island is like 15 mi away from the provincial capital of Newfoundland, St John's; not exactly the remote, desolate island the script portrays it to be.
For your information yes Newfoundland is a very big rum drinking place... We have the most bars per capita in Canada, and probably the biggest Saint Patrick's Day celebration west of Ireland.... However we do drink cocoa as well... With rum in it
I have actually seen something that I would call ball lightning, over a frozen Canadian lake, it was New Year’s Eve, we had been out snowmobiling and headed to my cabin for a celebration, note I was sober that night and had been for 8 years, I remember after a day long trail ride and speed running over the lake , when we went back to the cabin we noticed a bit of static electricity when taking off our outerwear. Anyway sometime after midnight I noticed the lights maybe about the size of large beach balls. Moving across the ice .. they made a cracking noise. I went in to get my snow gear on and to run out and. Heck to make sure it wasn’t people with lights ( you always investigate on cold nights in the lake ) but before I could go out I heard the hat sounded like close by shotgun shots and the lights were gone.
as a canadian I can say were very weird compared to our neibours mainly due to our small population vs our dense wilderness and A LOT of serial killers, many yet to be caught. edit: strange that bell island doesnt use a fog horn though, I live in vancouver and we recently had some intense fog for days and I enjoyed the calm humming as two ships anchored in the harbour blew their fog horns one after the other alternating at two different tones. it was really quite lovely
I grew up on the Fraser, fog horns are common even though there isn’t that much fog compared to where I now live in the Maritimes. Yet I never ever hear a fog horn here except near one lighthouse and it sound high pitched and weird. I live near a major harbour for lobster boats too. Believe me, the fog you see here it seriously intense. It blocks out the sun black fog, happens in any season and temperature, won’t ‘burn off’, and can last for days. No horns :(
Statistics show that there are at least six active serial killers hunting vulnerable indigenous women in the West, particularly centered on the "Highway of Tears". I'm not talking about "over time". I mean, presently, all at once. Given that we only know about these half dozen active deadly predators from statistics, it should be obvious that local law enforcement don't have a handle on this in *the least*, let alone a full understanding of the entire picture. There's a reason we have a length of roadway called "The Highway of Tears", a nickname cruelly appropriate. Edit: This is nothing like a conspiracy theory. I cannot give details, but I have high level sources who happen to be a data analytics experts who confirmed the strength of this statistical hypothesis. One of the experts I showed the analysis to, once they were finished with their assessment...broke down crying.
i grew up in fog horn territory myself and i loved the sound of them, especially all tucked up in a warm bed! don`t hear them much now a days, definetly miss them
I saw a segment on this on a series called The Extraordinary and what the scientist think killed the chickens was electrical discharge. Their coop they were kept in was wire mesh and apparently chickens are more susceptable to electric shocks than people. Also in the program powerful electical discharges were thought to be the culprit. The boy was knocked off his bike by the boom and found himself staring up a a bright orb that vanished over a time. He rushed home. Electrical items in the house were fried and there were photos shown of how the fuses in the consumer unit in the house had been fired across the hall where they were embedded in the plaster. The cause of all this mayhem. I am definitely with the vast majority of people who believe the military were dicking about. I mean, if you ask thee military if they were conducting experiments that were causing mayhem with people on an island they would hardly say, 'Yes, we fried your electronics, killed your chickens and scared the living shit out of you.' Definitely a case of 'No, no, not us. We did not cause this problem. It's all a case of mass hysteria caused by he locals eating too many berries.'
Simon: Nuclear weapons aren't beyond my comprehension! Also Simon: Spends an hour demonstrating absolutely no grasp of how large and damaging a nuclear blast is. And WOW was this episode poorly researched.
Maybe an idea for a future episode, based on an interest in stories from the Cold War. It may be totally BS but the legend I grew up with included a story about SALT agreements that ended pretargeted missiles, which included a disclosure of the targeted cities. The small Texas panhandle town I grew up in was supposedly more highly targeted than any other location in the US
I live nearby Bell Island. Over 2000 people live on it currently. The government was offering incentives at the time for people to move away, but it's not like it was a ghost town. At the time, there would have still been fishing going on.
I like the ball lightning theory...I'm pretty certain it exists. There is one case where a orb passed through the fuselage of airliner. It was seen floating inside the aircraft. Photos of the grapefruit size hole in the planes side are online.
I wonder if this was a case of Upper-atmospheric lightning, UAL generally only happens at extreme high altitude, but hypothetically it can happen closer to the ground. Google the term for a quick shock because it has been photographed and is very much real. It can also release the energy equivalent to small nukes when it goes off, and as others below have mentioned lighting superbolts are another possible explanation.
By the way, ball lightning is a bit more plausible than you make it out to be, just never scientifically observed. It's theoretical, and sometimes used as an explanation for UFO sightings (vs aliens, which is more likely? Though it could always be secret experimental aircraft).
Ummmm ball lightning is a genuine, real and exceptionally rare phenomenon that does occur and has been replicated in labs (specifically University of Alabama’s electrical engineering department). Just thought someone should know
The way Simon says Newfoundland it’s sounds more like newfinland😂😂😂 and as someone who was born and raised in Newfoundland, it’s kind of funny yet also slightly annoying
Same here but let’s be honest, very few people who aren’t from here/have lived here say it correctly. Most of my coworkers are on the mainland and I’ve had to give them lessons lol
@@melanie7601 We moved from Bell Island to the States when I was 10. When the principal at my new school there asked, "So you're from NewFUNlund?" I was like "No, I'm not! Confusing days and months ensued~
The principle thought that comes to my mind is a copper meteorite - get an air blast similar to the Chelyabinsk strike in 2013, explain the beam of light leading to the blast that a bunch of witnesses report, and most critically of all, a lump of a conductive material passing through the magnetic field at that sort of speed would build up one *hell* of an electric charge, thereby (possibly) providing an explanation for the electrical weirdery (might also explain the way that the blast seems to have atomised and dispersed - em fields collapsing within the shattering meteor could accelerate the shards in all sorts of fun and interesting ways - any surviving findable bits could also have just carried on into the sea).
Multiple times though and at night only, and only in that isolated area? Maybe there's some sort fluke where a line of them hit earth in a perfect timing that matched the Earth's rotation.and angle etc, but that's nearly as doubtful as God existing.
@@shaneebz5292 I'm strongly leaning towards the pops and the boom being very much separate events/phenomena - if they were linked then yeah, you'd be right.
@@shaneebz5292 The sonic boom explanation for the prior "pops" was most likely correct, except instead of Concord it was probably military jets. When I was a kid I lived fairly close to NAS Fallon prior to the ban on going supersonic over inhabited areas, and the descriptions of the pops sounds a lot like the sonic booms I heard. Also, remember that the "pops" were heard all the way up and down the eastern seaboard, which makes that phenomena much wider spread. That points to a more common/down to earth explanation for the pops much more likely (like a sonic boom from military jets), and makes the "boom" happening at Belle Island much less coincidental.
I live in Newfoundland, I can see Bell Island from my window. Bell island is a beautiful place but such a waste of money. Their ferry system sucks and breaks down all the time. People are then flown back and forth on a helicopter. Costing taxes payers thousands upon thousands of dollars and just over 2000 people live there.
Ball lightning does exist. I've seen it once, decades ago, while driving through a storm in Cleveland. I doubt, however, that it could cause the extensive damage in this case.
the ball lightning didn't cause the damage, whatever caused the damage ALSO caused the ball lightning. it was just an accompanying phenomenon. and yes, i agree that those lights were probably ball lightning.
Canada isn't weird, it's full of some of the nicest people on the planet. Well, at least until you have them put on skates, hand them a stick, and drop a puck on the ice. Then they turn into vicious and bloodthirsty savages. It's ok though, we all have something...
Very true. Especially in Montreal, very warm people. I have fond memories of my one visit to Montreal when I was 5, especially of this bakery that made bread shaped like a turtle. The citizens of Toronto however…less said of my experience there the better. I really want to visit Montreal again.
@@OrdinaryDude I visited Vancouver many years ago when I was a baby. Apparently I ate my parents scallops and some chocolate dessert when we visited it. I also been to Seattle once when I lived on the West Coast (Los Angeles). It was quite cloudy from what I remember.
An EMP test sounds like the most likely explanation. Governments did in fact test weapons of mass destruction dangerously near inhabited areas during the Cold War. The Soviets did so in Kazakhstan and the local population was affected by the radiation for decades after. And in the case of Bell Island, government never having fessed up to it seems plausible given that the existence of EMP weapons hadn't been disclosed publicly at that time.
I am glad I made productive decisions about my finances that changed my life forever. I am a single mother living in Vancouver Canada, bought my second house in September and hoping to retire next year at 50 if things keep going smoothly for me
The thing with ball lighting is similar to the rogue way. No one thought they could possibly exist until it did and was seen. Just pointing this out because it could exist but does not happen enough to be seen. Lots of things never existed until they did and they surprised a lot of people. Never discount anything in nature, it is highly unprintable. Just my thoughts though.
One thing about my father, who was much older then average I would have to say, he would NOT lie. He stressed this in my upbringing, saying he would hate the liar more then the thief! That said, he told me of his encounter with ball lightning in our old home that we called up-north, or the home place. His father finished the farm house in 1910, the year that dad was born. While at some time in the past the Rural Electric Association ran power to the farm, the house was never wire nor connected to the grid. In fact I grew up the first 9 years of my life with no running water or power in our home. According to dad, they had just added another old house onto the back of the house grandfather built, he, a couple of his brothers and grandfather were sitting in the new addition of the house, what became the living room playing poker over a barrel with cardboard over the top making a sort of card table. The weather in Southern North Dakota was stormy as it often was, and the only light in the room was provided by a hurricane lantern that they had with them on returning from chores out in the barn. The cards were flying, and the bottle of whisky made it's round when the entire room was light up so brightly that the men covered their eyes with their hands as the brightness hurt their eyes. There was a ball of light that appeared to come down the hole left for a chimney when the house was added to the old home place. He said it glowed there for nearly a minute then just sort of shot out a window and was gone. That was when I began to believe in ball lightning because as I say, dad would NEVER lie. I lost dad in 1972 may he rest in peace. I was sad that he never lived on a few more years to see me succeed as a police officer. When he died, I was a Sergeant in the US Army, and had finished my tour of duty in Vietnam. That did make dad proud, while he never served, he always had respect and a great interest in the Army.
According to Wikipedia, Bell Island sold vast amounts of iron ore to Germany before and after WWI and WWII. Germany was not happy when they were cut off. They sent Uboats to try to gain control of the island, however, that never happened and it is believed that the Germans didn't set foot on the island. The Uboats did manage to sink at least 4 ships with lots of coal in and around the island. Some of these merchant ships were armed in case of attack. When they sank their ammunition and weapons went down with them. The Canadian Royal Navy began recovering this stuff and detonating it at a safe distance. But.........what if the explosives went off on route to those safe spots?😮
Denials scripts and Simon's voice and reactions are an unbeatable combination. I rarely watch/listen to anything for a straight hour, but couldn't walk away from this. Bravo!
bell island is a cool place! ive been, its a iron mining colony off tthe coast of st johns, newfoundland. its actually got restaurant's, a mine tourist attraction, ferry ride, and amazing cliffs and picture perfect. its not barren and isolated, but was untill the mid 1950-60s. also, st johns is known for its fog. its literally like a wall in the movies
Bit of a nitpick about Concorde: It had four engines, not two. And it was supercruise-capable, meaning it didn't need afterburners at cruising speed, although it used them to accelerate to cruising speed, so it's possible they were on when it was close to the Canadian coast. Then again, it would have been flying at altitudes of 40'000ft or more at this point, making it unlikely it would have been perceived as an "orb of light". I still think Concorde is the explanation for the "Pops", but not for the alleged orbs. I think those can probably just be disregarded. People claim to see "orbs" all the time, in connection with any unusual event you can think of. So I don't think they need to be explained to begin with.
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Because of Simon I now wear Vessis.
These shows are now my everyday shoe thanks to you, you legend. Thanks for all the discount codes ☺️
@@jasonbouvette1077 s a m e
And I am obsessed lol
Oh goody, it's not just me who only wears Vessis (except for when I wear flip flops). And blames Simon for that. Never ever thought I'd spend $100+ on shoes... but these are WELL WORTH IT. The dry socks club is the best!
We know that you're the one secretly locked in the basement and the vessis are the only thing protecting you from getting trench foot on the damp floor
I grew up in Nova Scotia in the 70's -80's. One summer evening me and several friends were hanging out and talking outside. The topic of conversation was nuclear war, when I looked up into the sky i saw what looked like a missile burning up slowly through the sky. Turns out I and my friends witnessed Skylab breaking up and entering the atmosphere that night at the very moment we were discussing nuclear war. That freaked us all out, and I will never forget it.
I would have pissed myself 😰
I remember that happening. Neat that you guys witnessed it happen.
That would have scared the piss right out of me. Wow.
I live in northern Sweden and when you get darkness 19 hours a day things like this are quite easy to spot.
Skylab is falling
The best theory that I've heard is that an abnormally large bolt of lightning struck the island which has a very high metal content and has several abandoned mines now filled with highly conductive salt water just below the surface, this created either one massive, or several large arc flashes around the island. Arc flashes are incredibly bright, can create sonic booms and often leave witnesses with spots in their vision.
But, there's a problem with that explanation, why has it never happened since? The conditions aren't different now, and weren't in the intervening years since this event.
I initially agreed with this, but I would expect this to happen more than once. This does still explain most things.
@@geofthompson3844 It could be that conditions haven't been quite right for a bolt large enough to penetrate the earth and rock of the island since then. There weren't any large booms like this before they happened either, and quite frankly nature is still twitching in ways we have no explanation for.
This works and counting how rarely it happens I’m not surprised it hasn’t happened again. A lot of things in nature literally only happen when the conditions are exactly right to the point they dot the I’s and cross the T’s. And first hand reports are your best friend for matching up the facts
@@geofthompson3844 It happens something like one every couple million lightning strikes, mostly over the ocean. Often enough that Los Alamos sent a couple of scientists to poke around because they were getting annoyed with all the Vela satellites alerting on them.
Congratulations to Simon for covering a topic called "Bell Island Boom" and not employing the phrases, "What a bell," or, "Bell end," even once. 👏👏👏👏
I, for one, was disappointed by the lack of puns.
Myby someone rang the wrong bell??
He was showing remarkable restraint on this occasion
Ball lightning (or, at least, the phenomena that are known as ‘ball lightning’) is a real thing. Nonetheless, I am very impressed by Deniz’s script once again. He’s a very talented wordsmith. I don’t think any other writers on this channel have gotten Simon so close to actually accepting that some things might actually defy understanding.
When you discredit one plausible theory (ball lightning), and leave out another plausible theory of what might have happened at Bell Island, it's not surprising most viewers find the incident unexplainable. A lightning superbolt fits the evidence perfectly, and is relatively well confirmed as the cause of the Bell Island boom.
Thats what I thought,
I'm pretty sure ball lighting is a real thing and there is pictures and videos of it .
Common misconception is that lighting goes down from the clouds. But often it goes up from the ground. Three basic types of lightning, air to ground, ground to air and air to air, (cloud to air typically). Ball lightning is the later type but it’s still quite mysterious. Often it come up from swampy, (alkaline earth) or mined areas.
From Wikipedia it says it was a superbolt which are well documented, got to say this is the worst thing I seen Simon do, the script was shite, disappointed, funny just yesterday I was recommending Simonsbath channel to people on that chapter (another good channel) then I watch this :(
I'm surprised the writer of this episode didn't mention the (relatively well confirmed theory) that it was a lightning superbolt. It's a rare occurrence, but it has been observed in nature many, many times. It fits all the evidence pretty perfectly. And coincides with a lot of the eyewitness testimonies as well.
The writer of the episode seemed to dismiss natural phenomenon out of hand. I did a little bit of research on my own, and you're correct, the superbolt theory is not only plausible, but highly probable. Super bolts can be a thousand times brighter and more powerful than a normal lightning bolt
Here is a UA-cam link for a short 2 minute video explaining the phenomenon; it's more plausible than any thing Deniz came up with. ua-cam.com/video/gZ4pqAnEWhk/v-deo.html
As I recall, superbolts have only very recently been confirmed. Much of the reporting on the Bell Island Boom was likely done decades ago before anyone knew about superbolts, so I suspect the writer just didn't come across the superbolt idea when doing his research. But it _is_ given as the most likely cause in the Bell Island wikipedia page.
@@jmmahony Wikipedia, isn't always the most reliable source, but it's a pretty damn good place to start to familiarize oneself with a topic. And when Wikipedia mentions a superbolt being the most likely cause of Belle Island explosion, and it's not even mentioned in the video, one can't help but wonder how thoroughly the topic was researched.
Deniz also failed to mention that Bell Island is about 15 miles away from metropolitan St John's which has a population of 200,000 people. It's an important fact that adds much needed context to a video that goes out of its way to emphasize the remoteness of the island. Bell island being within walking distance of hundreds of thousands of people makes it a lot less likely the phenomenon was a result of a government experiment.
@@MrGouldilocks Yeah, I noticed this as well given I've read about this incident in the past. Makes me wonder how well researched other videos on this channel that I took at face value given I knew little to nothing about the subject.
@@MrGouldilocks I have a question. Were these booms reported having occurred during storms? Because that might firmly confirm the super bolt theory.
Ball lightning is well attested.
Your description of the damage caused is exactly what I found when a house I was living in was struck by lighting via the telephone wire. I wonder if the chicken coop was covered in chicken wire?
Sounds spot on to me.
I have actually seen ball lightning .. as it travelled slowly across an icy lake on a very very cold night .. it made the popping noise and then a boom. Nothing like what happened on the island happened to me that night .. but it did seem like some sort of super bolt /ball lightning happened that night
I was gonna say ball lightning has been discredited by researchers because they can't recreate it or haven't observed it themselves. However this is a very similar situation to rouge waves and giant squid where both were considered fake not too long ago.
Rouge waves in particular are very similar in how they were described for centuries with some evidence in the damaged ships yet researchers refused to budge until a dashcam (or bridgecam if you will) of a ship caught the rare event and it was impossible to dismiss.
Hopefully we get something like that will this to settle the matter
Except it's not well attested at all. There's more video "evidence" of Bigfoot and aliens. None are credible. Always potato level cameras.....I wonder why....
Back in the mid 1970's, I was helping my sister renovate a basement apartment in her house. A new breaker box had been installed, and we were furring around it to put up a barn board wall. A thunderstorm had been approaching, but seemed still far off. Suddenly there was a flash of light with a simultaneous intense thunderclap as a tree right outside was struck. A glowing bluish softball-sized orb emerged from the masonry wall above the breaker box and began to float silently along the ground wire (which ran just under the ceiling), through an interior masonry wall. We watched it disappear into the wall and then emerge on the other side, turning the corner at the front of the house. It continued to follow the ground wire to the point where it was attached to the water main, halfway above the floor. There was a soft *pop*, and it disappeared. We just stared at each other for a few seconds.
As a 50 year old I find Simon's consistent claims that he is old at 35 amusing.
Imagine my thoughts…I’m in my 70s. A friend’s Daughter once asked me if I could help with her History homework. Being a specialist in Ancient Greece, I said sure…then she told me they were studying the 1960s. I suddenly felt VERY old.🖤🇨🇦
Yes. I know I am 52!
@@vickywitton1008 Yeah, I'm 82. Thirty yr old "oldsters" are very amusing.
Greetings fellow old people! 40 ancient years here!!
Yeah 35 is actually very young. Just become an adult. But I do remember feeling weird when turning 30. So I think people are freaked out by the round numbers.
Life is short... reason why people think there old at 35 is the same reaction a dog would have at turning 5 if it could think.
We live a short meaningless life and it would have been better if we were never born.
Sorry to say, but my wife and I both saw ball lightning happen right in front of our car. Weren't expecting it so no video (and this was in the 1990s so didn't have that option on our phones). Still, we both watched it shoot across the road mere feet in front of us. There was a buzzing noise followed by a popping sound just as it disappeared. It was truly an incredible and amazing experience.
One theory is just that it was an exceptionally powerful lightning strike, so a huge discharge reaching from the ground to the sky which does match the description of gathering static in the building suddenly being released.
People like to think that random disasters must have a conscious cause, because the fact that nature will just eff you up at random is far more terrifying.
I'm surprised they did not mention this. The so-called "super bolt" appears to be a popular explanation. It seems like we would hear of these more often though too, unless they are mostly over the ocean. Earth is a wild place.
Far more terrifying…and far more likely.🖤🇨🇦
@@GarthritisScientists have, over the last several years monitored and measured rare lightning bolts that are up to 1000 more powerful than normal lightning bolts.
These " superbolts" tend to occur in the northern hemisphere, in non summer months. The bolts typically strike water, so people aren't usually affected by them; but it's possible a bolt struck the water very close to Bell Island. 1,000 simultaneous lightning strikes fits the evidence and eyewitness testimonies quite well.
Hey, I tried watching this but he legitimately cannot keep on track with the story, I'm at 11:05 and he's talking about atmospheric and oceanic weapons or some shit.
can you just give me a Tl;DR on what the f*cking mystery is?
@@alexdenommee3219 A place called Bell Island had a weird event many years ago that included a large booming noise and balls of light. There was a lot of government investigation (including the USA), because it was picked up by military satellites.
They never came to a solid conclusion about what it was, so lots of conspiracy theories were born to try and explain “The Bell Island Boom”. Most people think it was ball lightning, or a weather phenomenon called a “super Bolt” a different form of lightning.🖤🇨🇦
4:30 - Chapter 1 - The story of harbingers
18:25 - Chapter 2 - A mild case of doomsday
33:50 - Chapter 3 - The much bigger picture
43:15 - Chapter 4 - It wasn't aliens
As soon as you said "Canada is weird"...and then followed it up with cold, and maple syrup... One thing popped into my head. You HAVE to do an episode on the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist from our strategic maple syrup reserves... I think you might have touched on it in another episode, or I thought you should have being a parallel to another theft.
That story is hilarious Simon would make it even funnier
He did do it, on Casual Criminalist.
I thought that was Cas Crim
If you want a “Canada is weird” story, read about the Principality of Outer Baldonia. A bunch of drunk fisherman declared sovereignty on a tiny island and declared war on the USSR, which made them big mad. Paul Gross made a movie in the early 90s called Buried on Sunday which was definitely inspired by those events.
You want a largely unknown aspect of "the Unknown", records of which have mostly been destroyed and most of what remains are *still* classified either by the US or Canada: When it comes to the lives ruined by the CIA Mind Control experiments with things like LSD, MK ULTRA, nothing can be compared to the work at McGill University in Quebec! The doctor hired by the CIA would do things like dose people with LSD *non-stop*, put some people in chemically induced comas while they tried to "subliminally" fuck with their heads and putting people in absolute sensory deprivation and restraining them to a bed! All three of these "tests" went on for weeks in some cases, months for most, and in a few cases we know of, years. To say nothing about the insanely intense Electro-shock therapy given out like candy! None of the "test subjects" where given any sort of advance knowledge before signing up. And the number of people reduced to shells of their former selves, some unable to function at all is staggering, and entirely too many taking their own life in the aftermath.
Dark AF, yeah, but if you want chilling mysteries from Canada, I feel like few things can trump that!
I absolutely love this channel. Simon’s humor and personality really shine.
The "pops" make perfect sense as sonic booms. Especially at night it's super hard to judge size, speed and distance, and the glowing orbs could easily be afterburners. Even when not going supersonic anyone who's been to a fast jet airshow display will have felt that reverb in the chest from them. Personally, I suspect either the US or Canada was doing night-time low flying training and quietly stopped after getting complaints, using Concorde as an excuse to mask the shift for probably operational security reasons. Militaries are paranoid because they know people are literally spying on them.
Bell Island’s damn close to St. John’s too, and there’s a proper international airport there.
@@joshuahadams so there definitely wouldn't be sonic booms coming from them then...
This is exactly what military pilots say about the UFO's they're constantly spotting especially over the ocean. Except of course, then the orbs start coming TOWARDS them which is... obviously not an afterburner. There's definitely some sort of weird spycraft in the air, whether it's one of our countries, or it's alien, nobody will know until it's declassified.
Low level cloud creates some great light illusions too
@@michaelmurdock4607 to be fair, here in the UK we have had definite sonic booms which the RAF says very specifically “this was not a sonic boom from an RAF plane”. This is read as “and we’re not allowed to tell you it was the Americans just down the road from where it was heard” - they have several bases housing aircraft ranging from F-15s to, back in the day, the SR-71.
As a Newfoundlander, I can attest to the fact that we produce great storytellers.…and our rum is awesome.
Quite possibly a connection there.....
Yes mate
As a fellow Newfoundlander, I can attest that we also downplay things too. Tragedy is part of our history, and we can pick up and move on from tragedy pretty quickly. Personally, I was born in in Burin in the early 1980s, and growing up I've never heard of this story until very recently via the internet.
I'm also from Newfoundland, I've never heard of this either until recently.
I love that Vessi is a sponsor of Decoding the Unknown. I want this channel to thrive, definitely one of my favorite fact boy channels.
Way overpriced tho imo 😇
@@wolfgangpeter2995 most I ever spent on a pair of shoes, but I'm quite impressed
reading reviews it sounds like more people do not like them than actually like them. on top of that they have major issues with the soles wearing out early... it is essentially a neoprene boot with fabric on the outside. Shipped directly from the factory in china that seems to have major quality control problems, none of which justify the $105 price tag. You are not paying for the quality, you are paying for their advertising and positive reviews.
Not my type of shoe since I mostly wear boots and I would agree they are overpriced. I know people that swear by them though. My main point is that this type of show is probably harder to get sponsors for compared to some of the other channels. At least it isn't Raid Shadow Legends.
Simon in regards to a meteor making a crater, nope. Airbursts like the Tunguska blast or the recent Chelyabinsk one in Russia heat up and basically explode high up and its the sonic boom and pressure wave that finally hits a few seconds later that can flatten areas or leave damage but no obvious mark. There is a place in Canada you may like to do a project on which is a sky monitoring system called he Canadian Automated Meteor Observatory or (CAMO)
Actually they heat up after they explode from the insane g forces (in the thousands). Only the surface exposed to ablative forces is hot.
Hello everyone! I wrote this episode about a month ago and would like to share with you some insights and additional information I have gathered since then. 😊
- A very popular theory (which I could not include in the episode given the word count) is “weather manipulation experiments”. Artificially controlling the weather is not science-fiction, but an active field of research. Some people speculate that the Bell Island boom may have been the result of "cloud seeding" or similar methods of intentional weather alteration.
- There are contradicting reports regarding the US investigation. Numerous sources state that the so-called men in black seized many items regardless(!) of their owners' permission. In retrospect, I think this version of events is more accurate.
- Bell Island is very foggy, but not THAT foggy. 🤓
Thanks that was very interesting. I wonder if anyone has investigated the possibility of gas such as methane escaping from the disused mines? There is a whole village here in the UK that had to be moved because of such a phenom.
The 3 holes in the ground with no sign of the missing dirt may indicate that the energy came from the ground.
I was a little surprised that you dismissed ball lightning like that, so I did a bit of googling about it. I found a lot of reputable sources claiming that the scientific consensus is more in favor of ball lightning as a real phenomenon than not, but that nobody really knows what causes it. I'm curious what resources you found that led you to liken ball lightning to "the wrath of Zeus."
Not saying you're necessarily wrong or anything. I just don't know that much about the subject and I'm having a hard time finding sources supporting your position, so I figured you'd know where to find them better than I would. :)
@@johnlemon252 Hey John! Just for the record: Plasma obviously is a real thing and it can be created in a lab. So I'm specifically refering to the idea of "stable ball lightnings" that can float around the way they alledgedly can. Those do not exist. Even in a lab, plasma will immediately disperse. I am very open to changing my stance on this issue once evidence (other than anecdotal) is presented. As for my sources, I asked two physics teachers I happen to know, as well as reading through several websites (which I cannot recall exactly, as I've written this episode over a month ago. But I think I mostly went on sources cited by German Wikipedia (as I am from Germany)). To my understanding, there is only somewhat unreliable eyewitness reports to go on. Again, I am happy to change my mind once reliable evidence emerges. Maybe I will write a whole episode about them, though! There seems to be demand to explore this further! :-)
Thanks for the episode!
I have personally seen ball lightning during a tornado when I was a kid. The tornado hit the transformer at the end of the block and what looked like an electrical tumbleweed rolled down the street about half a block before dissipating. I acknowledge that this is not the same as a spontaneous ball of lightning in the middle of the sky, just saying it's not as "wildly theoretical" as it may seem.
That would have been amazing and also scary to see
High voltage can definitely cause some very strange phenomena.
Yes, I think most scientists generally agree that ball lightning is real.
Yet there's ZERO videos of it despite so many claiming it exists. There's more videos of "bigfoot", than of ball lightning. Says it all....
@Paul Weeldreyer Except they don't. All the cameras the world has, but only 2 crappy videos for it. There's more video "evidence" of Bigfoot and aliens.....
I live across the bay from this island, grew up looking across at it I can see it from my house, when the mines were open there were 20K odd people, but after the mines closed they never fully recovered economically. There's still a few thousand left it's not abandoned by any means, but definitely many in poverty nowadays. I used to work at the hospital a few years ago (yes there's a hospital on the island) and I took the ferry back and forth every day, my brother in law still does to work in one of their 2 schools. After crossing a 20 minute ferry they're only 10 minutes from the capital city of the province. If it wasn't for the ferry they are not nearly as isolated as the description here implies. Although it may seem really isolated to many, by Newfoundland standards it is not. Beautiful place and kind people, I loved my time there if it wasn't for having to rely on an unreliable ferry. Can say I've never seen a wandering chicken besides one small homestead there, handful of free range cows have crossed the road 😂. Lots of cats but they are taken care of as a TNR colony. I have heard some of the locals talk about this occurrence though!
My dad moved back to Bell Island to retire almost 20 years ago, like quite a few others who had left over the years.
I was conceived there, but my parents moved to the mainland (Canada - haha - not Newfoundland) along with most of their siblings (24 between them - that's like a hundred cousins I have - I know!) when the mines closed.
I did live on the island for a few years when I was quite young and it was like a ghost town there then. When my dad moved back I was working online in Asia and thought it'd be easy to do the same from the island for a spell. It was in fact easy, mind the time difference. Experienced 4 seasons in the 6 months there from March to September - lol. Oh - you'll recall when the ferry service went on strike back then. What a mess~
I dearly miss home . At least it's easy to FaceTime now and know they're doing well.
~From, Still in Asia~
Yeah, anyone that spent 30 seconds looking at a map would realize that Bell Island isn't remote... at all. It's like 15 or 20 miles away from quite a large population center of about 200,000 people in St John's.
This whole episode was poorly researched; it feels like neither Simon nor Deniz bothered to look at an actual map when formulating theories. It's hard to believe militaries would be conducting dangerous, unpredictable experiments within walking distance of major metropolitan cities.
@@MrGouldilocks *Bell
But, yes to what you say.
I've actually not watched the entire show yet - haha!
@@MrGouldilocks yes I agree. With the location of Bell Island being fully surrounded by Conception Bay, anything of that magnitude would have been seen by the nearly quarter million people living all around it, from Portugal Cove all the way around to Bay de Verde
Ya, everyone back home knew about bell island. I was an hr 45 from St. John’s and we even went on a field trip to the mine back in da day. Before I left the province I also visited the island again and the fish n chips place right next to the ferry slaps.
Ball Lightening is thought to be real by many scientists, but they don't have an explanation for it. They have been able to recreate it in a few liquids but not in air, a team at the Max Planck Institute has replicated Ball Lightening in the lab by discharging a high powered capacitor in a tank of water.
The shockwave from a supersonic travel is continuous with the object in motion, not just when it initially breaks the sound barrier. It’s constantly breaking the sound barrier. The boom goes on until the velocity decreases sufficiently.
and the area of ground swept by the traveling boom is called a "Boom Carpet", which is an awesome term
Ball lightning is more likely to be a real, yet extremely rare phenomenon. A few years ago a research team managed to get a spectrogram of ball lightning in China, and it revealed that the sphere was made of ionized elements commonly found in soil.
Is Canada weird? I dunno, you'll have to ask the moose in the driveway. Not sure where squirrel currently is.
So, Simon and crew, hear me out: Every April Fools day, put out an Encoding the Unknown video. You and your team would make it amazingly funny.
He basically did on this one with how dismissive he was of factual weather phenomena!
About halfway through, I'm thoroughly enjoying this mystery!
Thanks again, Deniz and Simon and Co!!
Wow, I can't believe you're doing a video on Bell Island. I actually live in Newfoundland. First you do a video on one of my suggestions and now you're doing one on my home province!
"...a strict no-chicken-left-behind policy" 🤣
Deniz is fitting into the Blazement well 👌
the introduction for this one is almost poetry. like the writer deserves applause. holy cow!
Finally!! A mystery from my home province!! Hello from Newfoundland and Labrador!!💖
Hi from Central
Ball lightning has been reproduced in a lab. It'’s a ball of supercharged ionized particles. I imagine if they did a lot of mining on this island there would be a lot of ore dust scattered about. Combine that with the steady offshore winds blowing over the island and you have a giant electrostatic charge generator. This seems like the perfect conditions for ball lighting to form.
Yooooooooooo
This is the first time iv heard of "video evidence" of ball lightning, but also the first time iv heard of it being compared to science fiction considering many mainstream physicists and atmospheric scientists say the science is sound for it to be possible to happen.
I believe I saw a video from Mexico City or another Mexican city that had CCTV on their news and they showed this interesting type phenominon. Worth a search here.
"trust the science"
yeah the same people had doctors and scientists literally experimenting on people.. trying to turn LSD into some sort of mind control drug... they did it in the US and in Canada.
the government does not have your best interest at heart. deal with it.
So ball lightning is one of those science quagmires because while we can model it... Meteorological science is based on lab replication.
Lightning in general has always been a really sticky subject there as it not actually possible to generate the same amount of energy in any sort of economic fashion. And while you can take arcing and humidity experiments to base its path on the unique confluence of things that need to happen for ball lightning is ABSURD and there is no lab on the planet that has the infrastructure to generate lighting from a pseudo atmosphere in order to test this.
This is why the team at max Planck use a water tank as the resistance of water is much lower than air.
I had never heard of this, and I like to think I'm fairly well read on unexplained phenomena. Thanks for teaching me something new! Love this channel.
Yesss....I love when long vids hit this channel. Thanks Simon and Co. for your dedication to our entertainment and your capitalism.(Allegedly)🍻💯
Ball lightning can be replicated and is very real, the issue is the circumstances needed for it to happen naturally are exceedingly rare.
So much so that it;s rare enough to be easily discounted as unbelievable.
Hello The Original Og Whistle! It's really awesome to watch and listen to this story! Thank you so much for all you do! I am from here in Nova Scotia and many, many stories were told and talked about over the years of this "Bell Island Boom ' even here. We're South of NFL.
I live about 30 minutes from Halifax inland and when we moved up here into the country from the city; folks talked of the Boom. Word had spread widely back in the day. I was around 7 or 8 back (currently 39) when I remember the older people saying, "Do You Remember?"
Thank You again Simon
Sorry to be "that person," but the O in OG stands for original, so saying original OG is a bit redundant, lol. Again, I'm sorry - I can't help myself, I'm a grammar nerd.
Oh, great story! Thanx guy's! This show would be boring without Jen! Special thanx to her! Cheers!
Lots of foggy/misty movies are filmed in Louisiana because in fall we have very foggy, warm and humid days that look super cold but are 75 to 80 outside. Movies from the Twilight series and The Mist by Stephen King are some examples.
Wonderful to see a local story. As a Newfie I'm eager to learn more about this mystery
I just moved here a year ago and hearing this has me shook
Thats where my grandmother's family comes from and we tend to go there every so often. Beautiful place, really worth a visit. My great grandfather worked in the mine there.
I don't know man.... I feel like any of the lightning theories holds a lot more credit than Deniz or Simon are giving it. I know empirical evidence is not worth a lot, but bright flash, electrical damage, eye witness reports, air cracking sound, and no lasting damage to the landscape besides the trees. And, I'd be interested in hearing the kid's updated testimony later in life.
Simon: "Canada is weird"
Me: "No. we're not."
Proceeds to go to an ad for a Canadian company selling waterproof sneakers
Me: "Ok, maybe we're a bit weird. But also quite brilliant!"
Clearly didn't pay enough attention to anything. Another Canadian thing I love. Quite brilliant, indeed. Brilliant and weird? Two of the best qualities, if you ask me!
Yes Canadians are extremely weird with an even weirder & creepy seedy PM 👹
Simon as a Brit not knowing about Grog is kinda wild. Despite knowing how little he knows in general it always blows my mind. Always refreshing to know he's just a regular person.
I live relatively nearby. I had a friend who was obsessed with this place. Became convinced he had found the holy grail.
Also, Newfoundland is a big rum drinking place exactly because of Caribbean trade! Fact boy knows things he doesn't even know! "The ol black rum's got a hold on me like a dog wrapped around my leg.."
Screech me in, fellow Newfie
Yes b'y... I lows das da proper ting..
Yes 'by! Ee knows great big Sea! Go on now and crank up da tunes on dat one
Sorry. Had to. I miss living in Newfoundland
@@labhusky3 heh, Great Big 'Ead
you means....Dat stuff is for the "come from away's" , mainlander tourists and folks who "Heard Newfie music dat one time I was half soused".
By the way , I think Screech is a trick we plays on outsiders.....🥴
Long may yer big jib draw, an all dat.
love that song...
Don't think I have ever finished one of his videos but they do help me go to sleep. So I listen every night to pass out.
As for the chickens it's not only shock, spooked birds quite often fly/jump and in the dark quite likely to crash into things breaking their own necks.
Yes, that might explain SOME deaths, but this seemed to affect not only the chickens in the coop(s) but the feral chickens that were not inside buildings and didn’t really have anything to run up against.
And it wasn’t dark, this was during the day.
It was aliens shooting rayguns at chickens
it apparently killed every single chicken on the farm and in the town, and they had no visible injuries, except for blood coming out of their beaks. those chickens didn't die from running into things, the electromagnetic pulse literally fried their brains
@@dyamonde9555 yeah everyone here keeps saying it was ball lightning.. saw some interviews of locals a few years back (the interviews were old videos) and they were all convinced it was some sort of EMP
In the late 1980s my son and I had an encounter with ball lightning and it was terrifying. We were driving home on a farm road at 50 MPH when the lightining formed in front of the car. It didn't look like a regular lightning strike and lasted 30 - 45 seconds. I almost left the road stopping the car. It finally let out a flash and a boom then disappeared. We had never heard of ball lightning and had to research what we had seen. I never want to do that again, and I'm the girl who likes to sit out and watch lightning storms!
How scary 😮
Yet another video about something to do with my country, that I either have long forgotten about or never heard of. Thank you.
my grandma (one of the most trustful and honest people I’ve ever met) she saw ball lightning it went onto her stove and then fizzled around and then went out. I do believe ball lightning is an extremely rare phenomenon that hasn’t been observed yet, it cannot cause a gigantic ‘emp’ and kill dozens of chickens. This is something else
Everything up to the big Boom reminds me of my time living in Santa Cruz, CA. I moved away in the past year, but I lived there for 5 years before. While I was there, we would hear very loud explosion sounds on a nightly basis. Sometimes multiple times in a night. It was infuriating, because it made it hard to get a proper night's sleep.
I thought it was just some kids blowing off some kind of M80, but with a lot more bass. Eventually, the city put out an announcement informing people that they are aware of the explosion sounds and are unaware of the cause. They asked anyone with information to report it to the local police.
I have no idea if they ever figured out what the cause was.
In my experience, they did sound like explosions, not really fireworks (there were no whistling sounds and it wasn't a popping sound). The direction was never the same, and there were never people screaming in terror or anything like that. They were very loud.
Having lived in Boulder Creek for 10 years and San Jose for 25 years I have spent quite a bit of time in Santa Cruz as well. The atmospheric phenomenon that occurs in the greater San Francisco Bay Area has had maddening effects for several cities, perhaps most famously the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View blasting their concerts sounds up in the air and then bouncing right back off the clouds and aback to the ground, giving people dozens of miles away being able to hear the show perfectly loud and clear. The intermittently loud booming surf around Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay at night is probably able to reflect around the region in the same fashion. On Late night stays at Bonny Doon beach I would hear some particularly loud surf sounds depending on the weather , perhaps from some huge waves such as at Mavericks.
Lucky you never got the big one 😜
Concorde did boom over land, I heard it in my childhood but also again shortly before she was taken out of service, over Reading, UK, during the WOMAD festival I was at with 10,000 + other party goers. It was quite exciting
PS I forgot about hearing a controlled detonation in March this year, on holiday with friends on the South Coast. We were woken by a loud boom, followed by a vibration. I went back to sleep, thinking it was a vivid dream. Turned out they'd found an unexploded WW2 bomb on the beach, about 3 miles away. They did a controlled detonation early morning before news crews and tourists could flock to the area.
My impression is that the Boom could easily be explained by a meteor exploding in the atmosphere. The damage on the ground including the holes in buildings is fragments from the exploded meteor striking. If there was a lot of upper atmosphere static the ionizing trail from the burning meteor could initiate a huge lightning strike, which could have struck a power grid cable injecting millions of volts into the power system of the island, causing widespread electrical damage.
If the meteor had a large ice or dry ice content, its possible fragments from the explosion would have reached the ground as a pulse of vapour, or quickly evaporating ice leaving damage but no recognisable debris. Even iron meteors leave tiny fragments that can be very hard to find.
The only real mystery is why this doesn't seem to have been offered as an explanation that is more credible than ball lightning.
Ball lightning - mass ball lightning - would also be symptomatic of a colossal atmospheric ionic dischage, be it from a nuke or a meteoroid.
A few times when Simon said "booms" it totally sounded like "boobs". This had me dying. Loved it.
The sonic boom is heard in an area around the plane any time it is above the speed of sound. It is not just when the plane first exceeds it. Very common misconception.
and the area of ground swept by the traveling boom is called a "Boom Carpet", which is an awesome term
They also complained about a continuous rumbling, too, so that might fit.
I'm glad I checked the comments before posting the same as you.
Having watched Simon for awhile now has somewhat changed what I expect from a video named "Bell Island"
My family and I live by an army base in the US. It’s known as the home of field artillery. Yesterday they were practicing using normal artillery and a C-RAM. The neighbor kids came to me and asked about the noises. One was convinced that the army only uses “nukes” and was wondering if they were the cause of all the noise. While another was convinced they only use tanks 😂😂. It was so difficult convincing them otherwise.
I have had pictures fall off the wall from the shock from the missiles. It’s quite odd thinking that hearing missiles is normal.
I lived near an Army base back in the 1970s. We got used to all the artillery noise, and cracked jokes about it, like the time my sister dropped her purse and hit the ground at the same time a loud explosion went off.
I used to live next door to Fort Carson in Colorado Springs and they did artillery and firearms practice at literally all hours. I don't begrudge the military for training at odd hours to maintain a level of readiness, but ffs it got frustrating, having it sound like an active battlefield with gunfire, artillery, and attack helicopters flying overhead, then the bugle over the PA system at 6 am every morning. I swear, I never slept more than two consecutive hours the entire year I lived there.
Good to know the Army's getting trained up though.
@@soonmeekim930 Fort Sill?
AP Hill is famous for rattling windows miles away with their explosions
I really want to see Simon going nuts over any TLC or History style documentary they try to pass off. Like a solid 20 minutes of him losing his shit. It would be a fantastic BB episode
I would totally watch Simon doing a History Channel pastiche for an hour. Common, well-understood concepts being attributed to ghosts and aliens? Sign me up, Fact Boy! Maybe an April 1st special?
Ball lightening exists. Our cottage was hit by it when I was young. Loud bang, electrics go out, then this ball of electrical light floated in through the window. It moved across the lounge and hit the wall a couple of times. Each time there was a loud bang like a gunshot. It then left again.
In the daylight the wall had two large holes where the ball had hit.
I lived in Jersey, (the ORIGINAL you might say) and just after 9pm every night we'd get the sonic boom from Concorde. And yes, it shaked the house.
😮 That's amazing! That's exactly what I came to the comments section to hear about people who had ball lightning experiences. Thanks for sharing maybe now Simon will understand they're not fictional 🙄
It sounds like a meteorite air burst. Similar to, but much smaller than, the Chelyabinsk event in Russia 2013. No crater, a loud boom, and detected by the Vela satellite. Was disappointed Deniz didn't includes this as a possible explanation.
Yeah, I'm going Concord + coincidence of "small Tunguska". And given the seemingly documented electromagnetic effects, how is the brain of a kid close to the center going to react?
How does a meteor make gamma rays?
😆😆 Simon making the fridge (cooler) noises
I spent a bunch of time on bell island as a kid with my family...I had no idea!
I know I'm a little late to the party, but I regularly hear loud booms in the smallish South Texas town where I live. They sound like large artillery firing and seem to come from different directions and distances relative to where I'm at. Occasionally I'll hear people around town talk about them, but it usually devolves quickly from a genuine discussion into "mUsT bE aLiEnS, LOL!"
A bit of context- there are quite a few petrochemical plants in the area and an air force base about 15 miles away, so I've just kind of always assumed it's related to one or both of those, though the booms don't really sound like a sonic boom and seems way too loud and close to be industrial.
Fast forward to about 3 months ago, I was driving to work during a thunderstorm and as I turned onto the road where I work, I saw a basketball-sized spherical explosion. Then I heard it, the EXACT same boom that I've been hearing occasionally for years. It wasn't a low grumble or even a crack like thunder, it was a loud, deep, short "pop" like a cannon firing. I thought maybe a transformer blew, but when I drove by the next day there was nothing there. No wires, no transformer, nothing. It was just an explosion in thin air. Was it ball lighting? I suppose it could've just been a regular lightning strike, but if it was, it was unlike any I've ever seen or heard before.
That's amazing 😮 lol the party's just begun 🥳
This reminds me of the phenomena we experience occasionally in North Carolina. I've personally experienced a very huge boom once or twice. No damage was reported as far as I know, just rattled nerves. I know good and well that they weren't sonic booms. I'm a former Air Force brat and have heard sonic booms many times. Plus North Carolina has several military bases and artilery ranges so we know what those sound like. The booming phenomenon doesn't happen often, maybe once every several years or so. It tends to be more concentrated at the coast especially around the Cape Fear region, though there have been instances much further inland closer to Raleigh. There have also been reports of these booms from places like New York state, India, Bangladesh, etc. A common name for it is Seneca gun(s) from Lake Seneca in NY. Some of these reports go back to at least the 1800s which definitely eliminates the explanation of sonic booms. A couple of possible explanations have been gas pockets rupturing and air bursts from meteors. Would be cool if y'all could do an episode on it.
This is the first time I have heard anyone question or dismiss the existence of ball lightening. It is a rare, but well known weather phenomenon acknowledged by meteorogists. There's a ton of scientific evidence of its existence, and lots of theories about what it consists of and causes it. I saw one of those fly across my neighbor's kitchen floor once. Back then I didn't know what it was, so it scared me silly. But all three of us who were in the kitchen at the time saw it. We smelled it, too. It was a stingy, unpleasant smell, and it left marks on the kitchen floor. Science is real, guys.
It's a theory. It's not proven at all. There's no proof of ball lightning occuring
Agree with Simon's initial assessment. This has all the hallmarks of a high altitude EMP detonation. The birds were killed by infrasonic shockwaves, a phenomenon which has been observed a lot. Infrasound would also explain the hallucinations.
Or, you know, ozone and carbon monoxide...
@@runed0s86 from Where though? Carbon monoxide and ozone don't just appear in large amounts.
When I was growing up as a child in the 70s near Whidbey Island Navel Air Station we'd hear sonic booms frequently. As the sign says "Please pardon our noise it's the sound of freedom"
Simon manages to maintain a low effort, unprepared content cranking style that is yet very likeable
All the effort is performed by the basement gang
I'd like to see Simon spend a few minutes on Wikipedia and with a map to get a baseline understanding and gain some perspective before reading the scripts.
He spent the vast majority of the video believing the event was caused by military experiments, even though Bell Island is literally surrounded by a quarter of a million people, making it a very unlikely target for dangerous unpredictable government shenanigans. Bell Island is like 15 mi away from the provincial capital of Newfoundland, St John's; not exactly the remote, desolate island the script portrays it to be.
For your information yes Newfoundland is a very big rum drinking place... We have the most bars per capita in Canada, and probably the biggest Saint Patrick's Day celebration west of Ireland.... However we do drink cocoa as well... With rum in it
I have actually seen something that I would call ball lightning, over a frozen Canadian lake, it was New Year’s Eve, we had been out snowmobiling and headed to my cabin for a celebration, note I was sober that night and had been for 8 years, I remember after a day long trail ride and speed running over the lake , when we went back to the cabin we noticed a bit of static electricity when taking off our outerwear. Anyway sometime after midnight I noticed the lights maybe about the size of large beach balls. Moving across the ice .. they made a cracking noise. I went in to get my snow gear on and to run out and. Heck to make sure it wasn’t people with lights ( you always investigate on cold nights in the lake ) but before I could go out I heard the hat sounded like close by shotgun shots and the lights were gone.
best bedtime story ever!
as a canadian I can say were very weird compared to our neibours mainly due to our small population vs our dense wilderness and A LOT of serial killers, many yet to be caught.
edit: strange that bell island doesnt use a fog horn though, I live in vancouver and we recently had some intense fog for days and I enjoyed the calm humming as two ships anchored in the harbour blew their fog horns one after the other alternating at two different tones. it was really quite lovely
I grew up on the Fraser, fog horns are common even though there isn’t that much fog compared to where I now live in the Maritimes. Yet I never ever hear a fog horn here except near one lighthouse and it sound high pitched and weird. I live near a major harbour for lobster boats too. Believe me, the fog you see here it seriously intense. It blocks out the sun black fog, happens in any season and temperature, won’t ‘burn off’, and can last for days. No horns :(
Statistics show that there are at least six active serial killers hunting vulnerable indigenous women in the West, particularly centered on the "Highway of Tears". I'm not talking about "over time". I mean, presently, all at once.
Given that we only know about these half dozen active deadly predators from statistics, it should be obvious that local law enforcement don't have a handle on this in *the least*, let alone a full understanding of the entire picture. There's a reason we have a length of roadway called "The Highway of Tears", a nickname cruelly appropriate.
Edit: This is nothing like a conspiracy theory. I cannot give details, but I have high level sources who happen to be a data analytics experts who confirmed the strength of this statistical hypothesis. One of the experts I showed the analysis to, once they were finished with their assessment...broke down crying.
i grew up in fog horn territory myself and i loved the sound of them, especially all tucked up in a warm bed! don`t hear them much now a days, definetly miss them
@@jessgunn6639 Same. I lived on the coast with one and it was a lovey sound to fall asleep to.
The entire time I was listening to this episode I was thinking "this is an elabourate Newfie joke on the rest of the world, right?" :)
I saw a segment on this on a series called The Extraordinary and what the scientist think killed the chickens was electrical discharge. Their coop they were kept in was wire mesh and apparently chickens are more susceptable to electric shocks than people. Also in the program powerful electical discharges were thought to be the culprit. The boy was knocked off his bike by the boom and found himself staring up a a bright orb that vanished over a time. He rushed home. Electrical items in the house were fried and there were photos shown of how the fuses in the consumer unit in the house had been fired across the hall where they were embedded in the plaster.
The cause of all this mayhem. I am definitely with the vast majority of people who believe the military were dicking about. I mean, if you ask thee military if they were conducting experiments that were causing mayhem with people on an island they would hardly say, 'Yes, we fried your electronics, killed your chickens and scared the living shit out of you.' Definitely a case of 'No, no, not us. We did not cause this problem. It's all a case of mass hysteria caused by he locals eating too many berries.'
Simon: Nuclear weapons aren't beyond my comprehension!
Also Simon: Spends an hour demonstrating absolutely no grasp of how large and damaging a nuclear blast is.
And WOW was this episode poorly researched.
I live in Nova Scotia! Totally laughed out loud hearing Simon say he had no idea where it was. 😂
Maybe an idea for a future episode, based on an interest in stories from the Cold War. It may be totally BS but the legend I grew up with included a story about SALT agreements that ended pretargeted missiles, which included a disclosure of the targeted cities. The small Texas panhandle town I grew up in was supposedly more highly targeted than any other location in the US
I live nearby Bell Island. Over 2000 people live on it currently. The government was offering incentives at the time for people to move away, but it's not like it was a ghost town. At the time, there would have still been fishing going on.
I like the ball lightning theory...I'm pretty certain it exists. There is one case where a orb passed through the fuselage of airliner. It was seen floating inside the aircraft. Photos of the grapefruit size hole in the planes side are online.
I wonder if this was a case of Upper-atmospheric lightning, UAL generally only happens at extreme high altitude, but hypothetically it can happen closer to the ground. Google the term for a quick shock because it has been photographed and is very much real. It can also release the energy equivalent to small nukes when it goes off, and as others below have mentioned lighting superbolts are another possible explanation.
By the way, ball lightning is a bit more plausible than you make it out to be, just never scientifically observed. It's theoretical, and sometimes used as an explanation for UFO sightings (vs aliens, which is more likely? Though it could always be secret experimental aircraft).
As a Canadian, it’s such a relief to finally be stereotyped for producing celebrities like Ryan Reynolds instead of Celine Dion and Bryan Adams lol 😖
Ummmm ball lightning is a genuine, real and exceptionally rare phenomenon that does occur and has been replicated in labs (specifically University of Alabama’s electrical engineering department). Just thought someone should know
I'm from Newfoundland and when I tell you I am SO STOKED that you are covering this ❤❤
The way Simon says Newfoundland it’s sounds more like newfinland😂😂😂 and as someone who was born and raised in Newfoundland, it’s kind of funny yet also slightly annoying
Same here but let’s be honest, very few people who aren’t from here/have lived here say it correctly. Most of my coworkers are on the mainland and I’ve had to give them lessons lol
@@melanie7601 We moved from Bell Island to the States when I was 10. When the principal at my new school there asked, "So you're from NewFUNlund?" I was like "No, I'm not!
Confusing days and months ensued~
@@slypear Oh boy, I can only imagine!
41:30 I like how Simon is so offline other than work that he doesn't get the horrors beyond comprehension joke.
The principle thought that comes to my mind is a copper meteorite - get an air blast similar to the Chelyabinsk strike in 2013, explain the beam of light leading to the blast that a bunch of witnesses report, and most critically of all, a lump of a conductive material passing through the magnetic field at that sort of speed would build up one *hell* of an electric charge, thereby (possibly) providing an explanation for the electrical weirdery (might also explain the way that the blast seems to have atomised and dispersed - em fields collapsing within the shattering meteor could accelerate the shards in all sorts of fun and interesting ways - any surviving findable bits could also have just carried on into the sea).
Multiple times though and at night only, and only in that isolated area? Maybe there's some sort fluke where a line of them hit earth in a perfect timing that matched the Earth's rotation.and angle etc, but that's nearly as doubtful as God existing.
@@shaneebz5292 I'm strongly leaning towards the pops and the boom being very much separate events/phenomena - if they were linked then yeah, you'd be right.
@@Thamian plasma from superheated metal already contains a large electrical charge. That alone could explain a lot of the events.
@@shaneebz5292 The sonic boom explanation for the prior "pops" was most likely correct, except instead of Concord it was probably military jets. When I was a kid I lived fairly close to NAS Fallon prior to the ban on going supersonic over inhabited areas, and the descriptions of the pops sounds a lot like the sonic booms I heard.
Also, remember that the "pops" were heard all the way up and down the eastern seaboard, which makes that phenomena much wider spread. That points to a more common/down to earth explanation for the pops much more likely (like a sonic boom from military jets), and makes the "boom" happening at Belle Island much less coincidental.
I live in Newfoundland, I can see Bell Island from my window.
Bell island is a beautiful place but such a waste of money. Their ferry system sucks and breaks down all the time. People are then flown back and forth on a helicopter. Costing taxes payers thousands upon thousands of dollars and just over 2000 people live there.
Ball lightning does exist. I've seen it once, decades ago, while driving through a storm in Cleveland. I doubt, however, that it could cause the extensive damage in this case.
the ball lightning didn't cause the damage, whatever caused the damage ALSO caused the ball lightning. it was just an accompanying phenomenon. and yes, i agree that those lights were probably ball lightning.
Well, we may have not decoded this mystery, but we've learned that Simon looks rum, and Deniz has a noisy fridge, and I've enjoyed that.
Canada isn't weird, it's full of some of the nicest people on the planet. Well, at least until you have them put on skates, hand them a stick, and drop a puck on the ice. Then they turn into vicious and bloodthirsty savages. It's ok though, we all have something...
Very true. Especially in Montreal, very warm people. I have fond memories of my one visit to Montreal when I was 5, especially of this bakery that made bread shaped like a turtle. The citizens of Toronto however…less said of my experience there the better. I really want to visit Montreal again.
@@mirandagoldstine8548 I live near Seattle, so I've been to Vancouver many times. Cool city.
@@OrdinaryDude I visited Vancouver many years ago when I was a baby. Apparently I ate my parents scallops and some chocolate dessert when we visited it. I also been to Seattle once when I lived on the West Coast (Los Angeles). It was quite cloudy from what I remember.
"Vicious and bloodthirsty savages"
😂😂
An EMP test sounds like the most likely explanation. Governments did in fact test weapons of mass destruction dangerously near inhabited areas during the Cold War. The Soviets did so in Kazakhstan and the local population was affected by the radiation for decades after. And in the case of Bell Island, government never having fessed up to it seems plausible given that the existence of EMP weapons hadn't been disclosed publicly at that time.
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The thing with ball lighting is similar to the rogue way. No one thought they could possibly exist until it did and was seen. Just pointing this out because it could exist but does not happen enough to be seen. Lots of things never existed until they did and they surprised a lot of people. Never discount anything in nature, it is highly unprintable. Just my thoughts though.
One thing about my father, who was much older then average I would have to say, he would NOT lie. He stressed this in my upbringing, saying he would hate the liar more then the thief! That said, he told me of his encounter with ball lightning in our old home that we called up-north, or the home place. His father finished the farm house in 1910, the year that dad was born. While at some time in the past the Rural Electric Association ran power to the farm, the house was never wire nor connected to the grid. In fact I grew up the first 9 years of my life with no running water or power in our home. According to dad, they had just added another old house onto the back of the house grandfather built, he, a couple of his brothers and grandfather were sitting in the new addition of the house, what became the living room playing poker over a barrel with cardboard over the top making a sort of card table. The weather in Southern North Dakota was stormy as it often was, and the only light in the room was provided by a hurricane lantern that they had with them on returning from chores out in the barn. The cards were flying, and the bottle of whisky made it's round when the entire room was light up so brightly that the men covered their eyes with their hands as the brightness hurt their eyes. There was a ball of light that appeared to come down the hole left for a chimney when the house was added to the old home place. He said it glowed there for nearly a minute then just sort of shot out a window and was gone. That was when I began to believe in ball lightning because as I say, dad would NEVER lie. I lost dad in 1972 may he rest in peace. I was sad that he never lived on a few more years to see me succeed as a police officer. When he died, I was a Sergeant in the US Army, and had finished my tour of duty in Vietnam. That did make dad proud, while he never served, he always had respect and a great interest in the Army.
I’d like to hear that video on ball lightning.
Another weird phenomenon episode idea could be spontaneous human combustion.
According to Wikipedia, Bell Island sold vast amounts of iron ore to Germany before and after WWI and WWII. Germany was not happy when they were cut off. They sent Uboats to try to gain control of the island, however, that never happened and it is believed that the Germans didn't set foot on the island. The Uboats did manage to sink at least 4 ships with lots of coal in and around the island. Some of these merchant ships were armed in case of attack. When they sank their ammunition and weapons went down with them. The Canadian Royal Navy began recovering this stuff and detonating it at a safe distance. But.........what if the explosives went off on route to those safe spots?😮
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Denials scripts and Simon's voice and reactions are an unbeatable combination. I rarely watch/listen to anything for a straight hour, but couldn't walk away from this. Bravo!
Deniz Y Dix is the writers name. This is the 2nd one of his I've had the pleasure to listen to this week.
Sorry, that was an autocorrect error for "Deniz's"
bell island is a cool place! ive been, its a iron mining colony off tthe coast of st johns, newfoundland. its actually got restaurant's, a mine tourist attraction, ferry ride, and amazing cliffs and picture perfect. its not barren and isolated, but was untill the mid 1950-60s. also, st johns is known for its fog. its literally like a wall in the movies
Bit of a nitpick about Concorde: It had four engines, not two. And it was supercruise-capable, meaning it didn't need afterburners at cruising speed, although it used them to accelerate to cruising speed, so it's possible they were on when it was close to the Canadian coast. Then again, it would have been flying at altitudes of 40'000ft or more at this point, making it unlikely it would have been perceived as an "orb of light". I still think Concorde is the explanation for the "Pops", but not for the alleged orbs. I think those can probably just be disregarded. People claim to see "orbs" all the time, in connection with any unusual event you can think of. So I don't think they need to be explained to begin with.