According to the LL Research group and their Law of One material, spontaneous combustion is a possibility. 17.26 Questioner: Is this the reason for what we call spontaneous combustion? (In session 17: Question 27) RA Answers: ..."There are random occurrences which do not have to do with the entity, but with the window phenomenon..."
Hi, funeral director here. Cremation actually doesn’t reduce body to ash. It reduces it to bones, after which we put the bones it what is basically a food processor, we grind/pulverise the bones into a fine powder :)
Yeah its basically impossible to reduce a body to ashes without, like, an atomic bomb at point blank or something stupidly hot like that. A few murderers have gotten caught because they mistakenly thought burning the body would get rid of the bones. Maybe we should let people believe that specific piece of misinformation so more murderers get arrested for bone fragments in their fireplaces…
Why did I have literally no idea about this? As a true crime junkie, I know only an idiot would attempt to discard of a body that way, since it’s very difficult to get it to burn hot enough to break things down fully, but I didn’t realize even that loud machine that still weirds me out (please tell me why my biology class took a field trip to a funeral home when I was 15?!) didn’t actually burn up the bones at all!
If the "candle effect" or "wick effect" theory actually applies, that sort of combustion won't be as rapid as and external like in a crematorium. The body fat itself will provide fuel to the fire and the combustion will be rather internal. So, the damage to the muscle and bones will be more extensive. The bones contain bone marrow which is largely composed of lipids. If the heat manages to liquify this marrow, the bones too will be consumed.
I'd like to request a video about Tasmanian Tigers also known as Thylacines. Despite supposedly going extinct in 1936 there are still reported sightings to this day, some even have videos. There's also a new report that came out that indicates that the Thylacine may have actually survived later than we thought (some estimates as late as the 80's and 2000's). They likely wouldn't have a viable population to stay alive much longer if they are actually still out there. But some people believe that the people of Tasmania don't report sightings to protect them. As a non Australian I don't know everything about the topic, but I think it could make an interesting video.
5:51 This brought back a memory for me. When I was in college I worked at a 1 hour photo and I had to develop some important (albeit disturbing) images sometimes. I was the only employee that would. The worst one I ever did was of a commercial plane crash being investigated by a local company. I had to stay after hours (by myself) and develop rolls of fim that contained photos of 100+ bodies on blue tarps. I had to print them in 5x7 glossy and then make slides of each print. What made it worse was the printer was overcompensating for the blue tarp so I had to color correct every single image as I was printing them.
Oh geez, now that I think of it....the amount of TV shows and movies from that era which featured the terrifying Hollywood version of "quicksand"....and how it just shows up out of nowhere....yeah. As a child, and given the lack of information you likely had about the world around you, this fear would've been quite legit.
My grandpa told me I’d start growing into a tree if I swallowed gum. That part didn’t freak me out, but him pulling a branch out of my head freaked me out. It was only later I realized the branch came from the trees and shrubs I’d been playing in all day. I miss him quite a bit.
I too thought swallowing bubble gum would kill me as a child, and always wondered why everyone was so calm about it. Obviously I was too timid to go against the social norm so I chewed gum like any kid, mildly terrified of the consequences. Then one day it happened. A moments' lapse of concentration. A gulp I could not ungulp.I asked my brother, who I'm pretty sure was the one who gave me this fear, for reassurance. He hadn't seen what had happened, so I asked as innocently as I could: "If you swallow gum, do you really die?" "Of course." He matter of factly replied... Siblings are wonderful.
I am ALL FOR a video on ball lightning and other meteorological phenomenon. Joe Scott did a video on it a couple years ago, so we need a Simon "Legend" Whistler video. My top 3 greatest fears of death as a child: 1) water creatures - I feared getting eaten by a shark, or stepping on a sting ray, or nibbled to death by piranhas. This childish fear was cemented as a full-blown phobia after a beach trip on my 16th birthday. My friends pressured me to go out waist-deep into the waves, when I felt something rub against my leg. I looked down and saw three sharks circling me. Everyone else screamed and fled. I stayed sooooo still, pale as a ghost, until a lifeguard could come and chase the sharks away. Now I won't even dip my toes into water that is murky. 2) driving off a cliff - a legit concern, it happened once every few years in the hills near where I lived, and even my older brother drove his truck off the cliff, breaking his lower back. I get outright panicky and hyperventilate when I have to go through mountain roads. I would rather drive AROUND a mountain range than through it. 3) death by lava - The nearest volcano in my childhood was probably 1000 miles away, but it was still a frequent nightmare of mine. Ironically, I now live within view of Mt. Saint Helens, and folks around here still have stories of it blowing its top. That old fear surged up again after my brother moved to Hawaii. (The same brother who drove his truck off a cliff.) His house was devoured by lava during that big eruption that happened a few years ago, so he decided to move back to the continent. Proof that some childish fears really are things to be cautious about. Just not swallowing gum.
Aside from water fears in general for me, one of my biggest fears is being trapped in a vehicle underwater. For whatever reason, I always envision this as driving off some kind of cliff beforehand haha. I can understand your fear there to a degree.
You sound better adjusted than me as a child. Your fears being natural phenomena. I was phobic to the point of absolutely refusing to go outdoors, of nuclear radiation.
I was living on the west side of WA when she blew. We woke to murky brown light and an inch of fine gray ash, which muffled all sound. The wind blew east, so that side got gritty ash. It was found as far away as Kansas.
Ball lightning is very much the exception that proves the rule where unexplained phenomenon are concerned. Most haven't seen a major spike in reported sightings since people started carrying a camera in their pocket at all times, except for ball lightning, which became so prevalent that scientists had to accept this was a real thing. It's still very rare, but there are enough examples that clearly something is happening.
Lasering cervixes is a treatment for precancerous cells, if anyone is wondering. Also, a friend of mine kept getting infections from going to the GYN in Japan. She told them she’s allergic to latex and they always use condoms for the intra-vaginal ultrasound wand. My friend has a lot of cysts so that is a normal procedure but they didn’t have alternatives to the condoms. Then she’d go back for a rash and a vaginal infection and they’d claim it was from her having too much sex…her who hadn’t even been on a date in months… I 100% believe the Japanese hospital tried to blame the patient. No way could they be irresponsible or make a mistake
About the seemingly random capitalization: at one time it was normal to capitalize nouns, all nouns. As I recall, "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift had all the nouns capitalized. German does this today, although English does not.
As soon as the topic came up my first thought of this story I saw on this this whole thing and a picture of a woman (what was left of her) sitting in a big chair and the only thing really left of her was from the knees down and both legs appeared to be untouched by flames or even burned, she still had the lower part of whatever she was wearing and her socks and shoes that were completely untouched at all as if nothing had happened but the rest of her plus the chair were completely burned but also the area around wear she burned was basically untouched as well except for maybe a bit of smoke damage! It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen!
No, crematoriums do not reduce a body to ash. The bones remain intact and then a grisly set of roller gears break the bones up into small bits. That's why a funeral earn contains "cremains" not just fine ash.
earn haha that's wild, that explains a lot. I always wondered why murderers don't just toss bodies into a crematorium furnace for easily unidentifiable disposal... you've provided the answer: bone remnants are left behind, even if crushed to bits
@@MMAFightMagazine hahaha I have no clue man I haven't watched much CSI nor have I imagined how I'd dispose of a body, I just always thought that if cremation erased all evidence (which I now see is not the case) then it would seem to be a good idea to get access to a crematorium and just blaze the body and leave the ashes with the rest, though I guess ashes aint usually leftover lmao idk, I enjoy educating myself but body disposal just aint a subject I'm particularly well-versed in 🤣😅
“I remember doing a video a while ago which describes how much calories the different human body parts had, I don’t know why I did that video, It seems a little bit disturbing doesn’t it” Simon you know you talk about serial killing cannibals right?
I know exactly what book & what image Katie means, having been a fan of cheap paranormal paperbacks as an 80's/90's British kid too. Given the brutal, traumatising content dished out to kids on teatime TV eg, Mr Bronson on Grange Hill, Dark & Lonely Water, etc I think it might actually have been a kids book. I remember another book from the time that was about near death experiences & included an experiment where staff left random objects like playing cards on top of cabinets, so when some old dear says 'I was floating in the air & I saw the Queen of Hearts', they all got spooked.
Hey Simon and co, enjoying the content as always. Just a little feedback, the videos have gotten a lot quieter lately! I usually watch/listen whilst in the kitchen but lately my kettle is louder than your vids! Anyways, thanks for all the great content ❤
After watching an episode of “ In Search Of” with Leonard Nimoy about spontaneous combustion, I couldn’t sleep for at least 2 weeks. I was absolutely terrified!
"Coroners are like scientists!" Simon...lol I think that is one of my favorite quotes from you now. They generally are scientists, Fact Boy. And yes, it was an episode of CSI.
From my knowledge and guesses I've always assumed supposed cases of spontaneous human combustion are the result of some items now being fire resistant such as furniture and most clothing not being fire resistant, but some still is. This would explain why the limbs regularly survive.
No, the fire burns too intensely. Chemicals burn fast and light, meaning not enough fuel to ignite a continual flame. Especially burning up complete human parts. Simply looking at the pictures can tell you this isn’t chemical induced.
Yeah such as the old coats people used to wear like "waxed jackets" - which are still a thing to this day - that actually had a coating of wax on them to make them waterproof. The chemicals used in the wax were petroleum based, so this could be a fuel source for a "human combustion" fire. You can actually buy bars of wax online (often called Otter Wax or "Fabric Wax Bar") to turn any fabric clothing or bag waterproof, but these days they use more natural ingredients rather than petroleum such as beeswax which might still melt in a fire but shouldn't _fuel_ the fire quite as much.
If you grew up in the UK in the 80s you were almost certainly scared of deep water because of the public information film ‘Lonely Water’. Also scared of grain silos, train lines and highly-polished hallway floors with rugs on them for similar reasons!
Being as I just got laid off a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been doing DoorDash delivery driving. It sucks, but the money’s not bad. What makes it all the more worthwhile, is having a new episode of decoding the unknown to accompany me. Thanks for these, team
@@theConquerersMama unfortunately it’s kinda rare to get tipped, albeit decently. People will have us grocery shop for them and not even have the decency to tip
@@Zeta9966 what??? Really? That surprises me. Today my mom's birthday cake was delivered upside down but I could tell the person delivering it was trying to be careful. They just didn't get the upside down type packaging. I still tipped and took a moment to show how the cake rounds go. And the they can be counterintuitive of how they should be. It's not the end of the world. I am grateful someone can shop for me and bring it to my door step.
When I was a kid I was told it I fell asleep with gum in my mouth it would end up in my hair. This is reasonable if you figure it would fall out of your mouth while sleeping and get in your hair. Which I can only assume is what my grandma meant when she told me that. My little kid brain I was convinced it meant it would somehow float out of my mouth, hover over my head and the stick itself into my hair.
As someone who had to have gum cut out of my hair after falling asleep chewing it I can confirm it's a thing. Though I don't think uncanny floating was involved.
Things I thought would be a bigger concern in life when I was a child that turned out to not really be a worry at all: 1/ Quicksand 2/ Spontaneous Human Combustion
As soon as he said "There's one particular image..." I knew exactly which picture she's talking about. And yes, it is the picture of what was left of Dr Bentley
I've also seen this pic...it was likened to a plasma cutter (which did not exist back then) by the precision/pinpoint outlines the heat was contained to, without the burn-pattern spreading, etc. His chair was just off the hole but IIRC was also not burned (& IIRC, the surrounding floor).
I reeeally want to see Simon cover ball lightning now. ...I'm also not positive I haven't seen this before, but he got so excited about it and it actually is a hella interesting scientific topic that also has a weird amount of overlap with the UFO community.
@@dstinnettmusic there's a weird amount of physics journals publishing papers on it for that to be the case. Some of them are speculative, sure, but the Journal of High Energy Density Physics is hardly a UFOlogy rag.
Holy cow Katie!! I had the same fears as a kid too. Well apart from the IRA but I did think Bin Laden was going to kidnap me if I went into the woods on my property. The spontaneous human combustion myth really freaked me out. I still have the image of a chair with only a woman's shins and feet left in front of it. I didn't worry too much about it happening to me but my dad was an alcoholic. He would often fall asleep beside our potbelly heater and I just knew the alcohol in his body would cause him to blow up.
@@davidt3563 I was CONVINCED that a serial killer was going to break into my house and murder us all. Even after Richard Ramirez was caught I was sure that there were other crazy murderers out there. Also quicksand.
@@davidt3563 grew up in Appalachia, so for me it was whatever local fantastical monster the shiners and ginseng farmers had come up with to keep folks away from their patches... So naturally the ghost dogs were gonna carry me away 😆
I've never seen spontaneous human combustion but a neighbor of mine had some solventy rags in a metal bucket in his garage. My mom and I were taking a nice summer bike ride and we were just passing this guy's house when the bucket exploded right next to him. He was fine and grabbed a fire extinguisher right away, but it was a pretty serious fireball and would have lit him up like a candle if he would have been closer.
Ball lightning is actually a ball of plasma, formed by a lightning stroke. It has been documented to behave very strangely. Related to Saint Elmo's Fire.
@@Whittz.UA-cam also, googling around, can’t find any experiments that are what you are describing. Can you tell me what to google to get the abstract for the experiment you are describing? The closest I am finding are “vaporized silicon” but that isn’t what people describe when talking about ball lightning.
@@dstinnettmusic yo relax, I wasn't attacking your character. Search holovect. It's one of the first implementations of using light or energy to excite plasma at a certain point in space for a quick moment so it doesn't overheat. And with that in mind, natural occurring phenomenon like that would be hard to film let alone witness due to the rapid degeneration of variables. Most videos I'll admit are most likely fake.
Listening to Simon at work while wearing my vessi’s thank you for making my day better by listening to you but also being comfortable while I stand on my feet for 10 hours straight
Dude I remember Unsolved Mysteries had me so scared of spontaneous combustion that it was part of my nightly prayers to not just suddenly burst into flames lol.
I was so scared of that too, but I guess as a child you kind of believe everything you are told. But it can have rather bad consequences, my father told me when I was small that HIV existed because Africans had intercourse with Monkeys. You can surely imagine how upset the teacher (and after that me too) was when I brought that up in class. Since then I swore to me that I won’t tell lies to my future children.
As a kid I was CONVINCED spontaneous human combustion was real, and I would go into a screaming panic before bed, sure that I would wake up in the dead of night, actively on fire.
True story, for a couple years in my state of Alabama, fire departments had signs up saying the number one cause of house fires in the state were those plug-in fragrance warmers. Apparently overtime the wicks would dry out and catch fire. Always wondered how in the hell could you not smell the thing burning the wick once the fragrance ran out before it got to the point of actually catching ablaze.
Wonder if because it is being heated evenly that it starts out only melting the insides until it causes the electrical bits to actually catch fire and that's why. Or maybe their sense of smell isn't that great, which might explain how they didn't know it was empty. 🤷🤷♀️🤷♂️
Eek, I just realized that because we didn't have people over for Easter, I bet I haven't changed the plug-ins in our guest room or guest bath since Christmas. I am not even sure if they are plugged in or not. Edit : yep, they were still plugged in. Dry as tinder. I never would have thought about that. So many thanks for bringing it to my attention.
They probably didn't notice because people leave their houses for a lot of the day. Can't smell what's burning if you're in a different building, say at work or something.
Logan Ford I edited my comment. I checked my plug ins. I had 4 totally dried out ones still plugged in in rooms around the house. 🤦 So many thanks to you.
@@theConquerersMama Wow!! I'm glad I could help!! You would think manufacturers would incorporate some type of safety feature that would disable them once they're empty!
When I was a kid, I'd read a random pulp magazine at a friend's place, and spontaneous combustion made me terrified of the idea that one day I might be walking down the street and suddenly burst into flames. This was an irrational fear that stuck with me for years, until I actually learned English in high school and could look up information about the topic from a more skeptical perspective, and realize that all the "mysterious" spontaneous combustion stories were about people who "mysteriously" burned to ashes while being right next to a source of fire. How mysterious. To me, this is the other side of the coin of the "Korean fan death" thing I'm not even going to call a mystery. Here, old people die near and/or get exposed to a source of fire, and other people ignore it and pretend the cause was mysterious and supernatural. There, old people die at night during the summer, while their fan is on to keep them cool, and people ignore the obvious cause of death (read: being old and suffering from chronic illnesses) and instead pinpoint focus on the fan in the room and come up with increasingly ludicrous theories about how the blades cut the oxygen molecules and suffocated the person or whatever.
My top 3 worries were the same thing! Grew up near London and probably the same age as writer lol. That leg photo from my dad's readers' digest book of mysteries is scorched in my memory
I grew up in India... Still live in India.... My dad was absolutely a product of Colonial British Raj... (He was a huge fan of Readers Digest as well) Because, I share the same thoughts and fears like the whole 90s British kids bunch😂😂😂
Dude, he is going to be so senile and confused. He already forgets 9/10ths of a script as soon as he reads it, then “vaguely remembers hearing about it” the next time another channel talks about the same thing.
@@gibbyrockerhunter that's ok, I won't remember half the stories anyway and happily sit through them again and again. Heck, I already do that sometimes.
my guess is that this video was recorded first, then the thoughty2 video, which was then released, and then this one was put out earlier than intended because why not capitalize on our collectively peaked interest
Simon, can you or your editors check the audio settings? On many of the recent videos, across all your channels, I've been having to keep my volume up high to hear, but then when UA-cam drops an ad in, i get blasted because i didn't realize that i had maxed the volume out....
Okay. What's going on here? Thoughty2 and Simon both release a video about spontaneous human combustion within a few hours of each other. Something's weird here.
That Chapter and Coffeehouse Crime released a video covering the same case within an hour of each other. Everyone thought they collabed but no. It was just parallel thinking.
Am I the only one that wants to see Simon, Thoughty2 and Mark Roper do a drinking/debate game where they have to draw conspiracy & paranormal topics from a hat and flip a coin to see which side they have to support?
Being from Belfast, Katy, I feel ya on the childhood ptsd of the constant threat of being blown up by the IRA. Still now when I'm in town (Belfast) it's always in the back of my mind the ra could be sneaking about with C4. If I see a car parked on the side of the road with it's hazards on I still immediately turn the other way out of instinct #Belfastthings.
Brilliant! I was literally about to replay Simon’s last few videos to find a Vessi sponsor to buy a pair (coming into wet grass over winter in Aus), and here it is! Also love a script by Katy - so I’m jumping in! But no way SC exists
Am I crazy, because I swear Simon did a video about ball lightning before on decoding the unknown. It was one of the theories for a big boom that happened on some Island. In the video they say that ball lightning is not real...
Ball lightning is real, it was filmed by accident in 2012 by a team studying lightning storms in Tibet. I think that the Bell Island Boom (I think that's the video you're referring to.) was not caused by ball lightning as it doesn't act like that.
I've noticed that sort of thing from time to time. Two or three unrelated channels will release a video on the same topic within a few days. I wonder why
@@maryhildreth754 I feel like usually something happens in the news or it gets mentioned somewhere and then independently two different channels are like hey I want to make a video about this
@@maryhildreth754 yhea it will have been in the news or on something everyone who makes the videos released has seen. Then the production of the videos, writing scrips, posting the video, etc takes roughly the same amount of time and bang 3 or 4 videos on the same topic.
Regarding fireproof clothes - for the most part, it wasn't intentional. Cotton is naturally fire resistant, and has gotten progressively cheaper. It has several advantages if you can adequately harvest it over most traditional fibers.
I would LOVE to see you Vs. some of America’s Missing 411 cases. Some of them are very strange. The Charles Mccullar case is particularly puzzling to me. I’ve watched too many videos on the cases and I need them from a more skeptical perspective
As a screen printer with the dubious distinction of having done this more than once, I can confirm that clothes are indeed still flammable. Cotton will burn, polyester will melt :p
Some fabric softeners also increase flammability of clothes, due to the chemicals they contain. I remember reading fire advisories about that. Fun, fun. LOL
Some feedback, it would be great if the writers could distinguish and emphasize claims in the first part of the episodes by specifically using the word claim more often. Additionally, if we could do more qualification on titles of individuals like "scientist" or how fringe their claims are. It's important to know if it's one quacks self-reported title and claims or if it's something taken more seriously by the scientific community. I think these practices would also help Simon to react to the information conveyed in the first half. The way it's written now, really takes all these claims and individuals as truly earnest. Which is admirable, but can also mislead.
Thoughty2 and Simon both releasing a video on spontaneous human combustion on the same day... this means something, somehow. Watch out for people randomly burning around you.
It means they both were inspired by the same thing at the same time to create videos, and their production times for videos are extremely similar - at least according to Simon in a tangent he went on in a video of his I just watched explaining why this phenomenon happens which I watched directly before these two videos...
Thoughty2 put out a video on this subject today as well. One of you should do a video on what the odds are or decode the “real” reasons that nobody is saying…
@@daduzadude1547 I remember being down at the job center and the work coach pulled out a coin and tossed it 15 times (he was trying to show people the odds of getting a job or something silly). All landed heads up...the chances of that must be impossible!
@@Webb8991 I know Simon usually records his part weeks or months before we see them. I’d be Aaron puts in significant time in his as well and there is a fair amount of post production that each do in their own way, so as far as these two examples, I’d be not.
A+ video! Amazing writer, stories, analysis, and great images. Lots of great humor too! Glad that there is no longer a worry of dying from spontaneous combustion.
I brought up spontaneous human combustion this morning. Not something that I usually talk about at work, but said something after a coworker was leaning over an open flame on the six burner wearing a quick dry shirt. Made a crack about easily combustible clothes and how we were lucky it’s not the 70’s. All we’d find of her is a pair of shoes and we’d think it was a case of SHC. Weird how this is a new video, on my feed tonight.
Funny story, so during undergrad, when I was taking a summer course on astronomy, my astronomy professor received a phone call from a criminal defense attorney asking if he'd be willing to testify for the defense that spontaneous human combustion was a real phenomenon. I think the real unsolved mystery here is why they were asking the dude with a phd in astronomy to testify about spontaneous human combustion.
A good question to ask might be: Have incidents of SHC decreased in NYC since they implemented the law mandating that cigarettes cannot sustain ignition on their own? They were first in the US, I believe, but it's a pretty hard timeline there, and it's a big enough pool to matter, but small enough to study, with decent record keeping.
The deodorant can flame tracing back to the source is 100% a thing. It happened to my stepbrother. He was lucky that he only got minor burns. I've heard the lighting farts can end the same way, only there isn't a concentrated pocket of flammable material, so it wouldn't explode, just give the ring a major burn! I don't know anyone who has experienced this though.
My forensic anthropology professor swore that almost all instances of spontaneous combustion are from smokers catching their clothes on fire. Either from drugs, alcohol, falling unconscious, or dying with a lit cigarette in their mouth. Then the wick effect takes place cause we are very oily, greasy, fat animals.
@@Ann-sj4pt what high temperatures? What exactly is the temperature for spontaneous combustion? And why is it that much higher than the wick effect can handle?
@Ann-sj4pt that's like 4 times as hot as a cremation chamber or 3 times the melting point of steel or hotter than an acetylene torch. That's almost as hot as the surface of the the sun. How the fuck?
Mortuary cremations don't burn all the bones in a human body, so this kind of event causes very extreme heat. As far as flames going back into aerosol cans, it's possible. Flame thrower operators during the Korean conflict reported that there were occasions where the flames went back into the fuel tanks causing them to explode
I took shop class in high school and during the part when they were teaching us about plumbing and we were doing the practical learning by replicating a sample shape of copper pipe and elbow connections with the flux and solder and then they would check to make sure that it watertight by doing a pressurized water test to see if we had learned the skill properly and it didn’t leak and we had to use these big oxyacetylene torches for it and they were very careful to tell us that if we closed the valves in the wrong order when we were finished then we would probably all die in an explosion, but maybe I’m remembering it wrong, so it might be possible for that to happen with other sorts of torches or with flame throwers?
Acrylic, for one... I used to have Canadian Forces garrison pants (100% Acrylic, I think they later switched to a 65%/35% polyester/cotton blend)... Those things were INSANELY flammable!!! I found out the hard way, using a lighter on loose threads~
In my formative years during the 60s and 70s, SHC was one of my concerns as it seemed a very possible random occurrence. I can remember reading 'reliable' eyewitness reports by firefighters telling of people bursting into flames with a blindingly white fire in their stomach (sorry, tummy) that they couldn't bring under control with a fire hose. As time went on and the mystery was solved, (I remember the pig carcase experiments), it became clear to me how much 'reliable testimony' can be complete Bullcr@p. I learned a lot about human nature from this very 'mystery'. I am now a healthily skeptical and grounded person and if some story appears in the popular media claiming that some highly unlikely event has occurred but it must be true because of witnesses that couldn't possibly be mistaken or dishonest, I know to reserve judgment until some real evidence is available. The most recent example of this is the Tic Tac UFOs, supposedly witnessed by highly trained and unimpeachable Air Force pilots. Yet a little research, by those who are more interested in finding the truth than perpetuating a myth, will turn up expert analysis explaining how these 'highly trained' pilots are misinterpreting known artefacts of the technology which should not catch them out if they were actually as competent as some would have you believe. Your talk of the IRA also sparked a memory. In my innocence, when I first remember hearing a news report of a bombing with the famous 'The IRA have claimed responsibility' phrase, I was completely taken aback by that. Why, I thought, would someone admit to such an atrocity? Forgetting, or not connecting anyway, that a callous, murderous, organisation capable of bombing innocents have already done much worse than admitting to it!
When I was in elementary school, I ordered (through the Scholastic Book Order) the book Strangely Enough! (January 1, 1940 edition). The book had been in circulation for around 50 years, but it was popular enough at the time that the book order would offer it. It was AMAZING! That is the first place I read anything about spontaneous combustion.
My great aunt got hit by lighting sitting in her living room. She survived. I remember my cousins and I getting told to keep her away from the pharmacy when we went shopping with her.
Request! Gloria Ramirez, the ‘toxic woman’ who made a whole emergency department sick. Mass hallucinations or something else? Totally made up like the Ourang Medan is my guess. Sigh… And no, this is not a request for people to comment with other channels or presenter’s videos. I want to hear Simon and the team present it on Deciding the Unknown. Sorry I have to put this last curmudgeonly bit, but it seems to happen every time I ask.
@@jackoh991 I actually agree with you. I feel bad writing it, and in some of my earlier requests I prefaced it with this (that I find it disrespectful to write, however it’s the way it’s most known to the internet and apologising). However there’s only so much I can pack into a request and it’s probably already long enough. 😔 But I know (even having written it) it is pretty insensitive.
I can't remember the chemicals now, but there are a couple of medical case studies that mention "internal thermal injuries" when some medications interacted. With the shoddy regulations and unlisted ingredients of the past, it's not impossible that some people created a reaction in their body.
@@MrsGypsumFantastic hah, totally did and had pretty well forgotten about that. I feel like it showed up a lot in various shows at the time too. I suppose seeing it in shows is definitely the "why", but the way they depicted it was pretty false given how people/animals would always just slowly sink until fully submerged.
I had flashbacks to that leg and shoe just from reading the title of this video. I used to go look at these things in the school library books - I found it fascinating and definitely thought it was a real thing.
The descriptions of the victims in this just had me laughing so hard, a glueish moisture and liver fused to a spinal column are not the way you want grandma to go 🤣🤣
My high school biology teacher had a theory that stored chemical energy in the body was spontaneously released. ATP instantly reducing to AMP. Thus a huge amount of energy released instantaneously. When something flashes like this it seldom damages surrounding items. Like flash powder.
Me and the author had a lot of similar worries as a kid. When I first heard about spontaneous combustion, I thought about it all the time. I was also a child in the early 2000s so I was scared Osama Bin Laden was going to bomb where I live (even though I live nowhere near Al-Qaeda attacks)
As a welder, clothes are very much still flammable. As for materials in the house, they are fire resistant, which is different. Once caught on fire, they can burn violently.
A friend from church told me at a candle party that, years ago, her daughter blew out a candle (as opposed to using a snuffer to extinguish it) & a few embers landed on her brand-new comforter. It took a while due to the fire retardant on it, but eventually, the comforter DID catch fire. Thankfully, she woke up & got out of bed, so she was not badly burned.
Me and some friends were quite drunk and one of us decided to test the lighting a fart on fire thing for a laugh once when we were around 16 or so and he ended up setting his ass on fire which was hilarious
@@Webb8991 Nobody's copying anyone -do you seriously think Simon saw that Thoughty did an upload on this subject earlier today, then got a script written, filmed and edited in a few hours?
I work for a medical examiners office. Years ago I had a case and we were all on board with it being SHC. It was so strange. A man who could not walk was in a hospital bed and burned to a skeletal crisp. The sheets and most of the mattress were burned away, but nothing else in the house was damaged aside from some smoke damage on the ceiling. We were all freaking out because we can’t just call it spontaneous human combustion even if that’s what it looked like. Luckily as we sifted through the ashes we found a few thin wires. We determined it was an electric blanket that caught on fire and slowly burned him alive from the feet up. I know that’s not much better but welcome to my world.
Thoughty2 did this vid today, and you were speaking about the likelyhood of you and other channels releasing vids on the same topic at the same time in a vid you released y'day, mad.
Clothes are most DEFINITELY flammable. Be careful, especially with polyester fiber or other plastic type fibers, they can burn in A very short period at very high temperatures. A good friend of mine nearly died when her Halloween costume got too close to a lit candle. She's an amazing person, and made an incredible recovery, but her life was still permanently changed.
My dad was terrified of spontaneous combustion as a child. Lol, that and being the only human awake on the planet. He told me about both of these fears at some point and I swear I looked at him like he had 3 heads because never in my life did I think about them. Haha. But every kid has their things.
Crackpot theory: I have often attributed this to cases of Auto-Brewery Syndrome. If someone were going around with a body that was (unbeknownst to them) making alcohol, the vapors would be extremely flammable. Any sort of spark could ignite the vapor outside the mouth and travel immediately into the stomach.
I always figured it had to do with that, cause a lot of the older ones (pre-1900) were people who were known to drink a lot. I remember some of the bodies were reported to have cirrhosis (or they were diagnosed with cirrhosis before going up in flames). It also seems to effect older people more often, and it’s so rare we’re still debating if it exists. All in all seems to add up to a genetic disorder and/or extreme outside situations, and alcohol is pretty dang flammable.
Cows can build up a lot of internal gas that a vet needs to get out. I've heard it called cow bloat. The vet used a needle and the gas can be set on fire and gives off a pretty good flame for quite a while.
Coroners are *not* always “like scientists.” They are frequently extremely unqualified minor public figures like sheriffs or town officials pulling double duty.
I watched a program about this topic once, the investigators setup a human analog dummy in a chair with natural and man made cloth. They dropped a lit cigarette onto the lap and it quickly caught alight. Heat and flame travels upward to consume the available fuels. At the end all that was left were the dummies feet. The fire was quick to burn and burn itself out, leaving the room untouched.
First Please do an episode on Ball Lightning. (I thought it was bogus too & would love to learn about it). Second-the laser cervix thing is real. Don’t ask 😮
Sulphur dipped matches appeared in the 1700s and friction matches in the early 1800s, the latter of which were known to cause unintentional fires 🔥. Also the timeline coincides with the early cases of human combustion 300 years prior
Simon, please do a video on voodoo death. In some cultures, the belief in voodoo magic is so strong, that if someone gives another the curse of death, it is very real. Family mourns the dead person, who insists "I'm right here!" The victim is completely ignored by the community - they act as if he/she doesn't exist anymore. The belief is so strong, and the physical & mental stresses so great, that the victim invariably withers and dies within days, despite no identifiable cause.
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Yeah Simon. Extensive use of bones 😂. I know few girls who went up in Flames because of their tennis elbow 😉 . True story.
As a woman, I wonder if Mrs. Whistler enjoys wearing Vessis. 🤔
@@marcbeebee6969Reasons to practice the ol switch hit 😆
According to the LL Research group and their Law of One material, spontaneous combustion is a possibility.
17.26 Questioner: Is this the reason for what we call spontaneous combustion?
(In session 17: Question 27)
RA Answers: ..."There are random occurrences which do not have to do with the entity, but with the window phenomenon..."
@@writhj Simon should do a video on this material. It has very interesting topics for discussion.
Hi, funeral director here. Cremation actually doesn’t reduce body to ash. It reduces it to bones, after which we put the bones it what is basically a food processor, we grind/pulverise the bones into a fine powder :)
Yeah its basically impossible to reduce a body to ashes without, like, an atomic bomb at point blank or something stupidly hot like that.
A few murderers have gotten caught because they mistakenly thought burning the body would get rid of the bones. Maybe we should let people believe that specific piece of misinformation so more murderers get arrested for bone fragments in their fireplaces…
Why did I have literally no idea about this? As a true crime junkie, I know only an idiot would attempt to discard of a body that way, since it’s very difficult to get it to burn hot enough to break things down fully, but I didn’t realize even that loud machine that still weirds me out (please tell me why my biology class took a field trip to a funeral home when I was 15?!) didn’t actually burn up the bones at all!
If the "candle effect" or "wick effect" theory actually applies, that sort of combustion won't be as rapid as and external like in a crematorium.
The body fat itself will provide fuel to the fire and the combustion will be rather internal. So, the damage to the muscle and bones will be more extensive. The bones contain bone marrow which is largely composed of lipids. If the heat manages to liquify this marrow, the bones too will be consumed.
Fascinating. I had no idea. Do no bones ever burn in the cremation device?
:)
Simon has 50 different channels and manages to have a completely different audio level in every video that is posted
Yes! I was just thinking about how quiet this video is. Thank you for helping me realize I'm not crazy.
@@AmbrosiaR
It's even variant within the videos sometimes haha.
Yes this one is very quiet!
Agreed. I always listen on my phone and most of the time I have to turn it all the way up then on other videos it's fine
I found this one particularly difficult to listen to as the background music was louder than his voice. Thank goodness for closed captioning!
I'd like to request a video about Tasmanian Tigers also known as Thylacines. Despite supposedly going extinct in 1936 there are still reported sightings to this day, some even have videos. There's also a new report that came out that indicates that the Thylacine may have actually survived later than we thought (some estimates as late as the 80's and 2000's). They likely wouldn't have a viable population to stay alive much longer if they are actually still out there. But some people believe that the people of Tasmania don't report sightings to protect them. As a non Australian I don't know everything about the topic, but I think it could make an interesting video.
Yes, please, Simon. Do deep research. ❤
As an Australian I say nah to the Tasmanian Tiger but yeah to Drop Bears.
@@legoqueen2445 How about both?
@@legoqueen2445 what kind of decoding the unknown could be made about drop bears?
What's a drop bear?
5:51 This brought back a memory for me. When I was in college I worked at a 1 hour photo and I had to develop some important (albeit disturbing) images sometimes. I was the only employee that would. The worst one I ever did was of a commercial plane crash being investigated by a local company. I had to stay after hours (by myself) and develop rolls of fim that contained photos of 100+ bodies on blue tarps. I had to print them in 5x7 glossy and then make slides of each print. What made it worse was the printer was overcompensating for the blue tarp so I had to color correct every single image as I was printing them.
😮
I worked in a developing factory and I remember some seriously weird pnotos!
Where's the eye bleach & brain bleach when you need it? That must have been rough. Hope you don't have PTSD.
jfc, how horrifying.
As a child growing up in the 70's I thought I was in grave danger of dying by falling into Quicksand.
Same! And sink holes.
Grew up in the 80s/90s and definitely thought quicksand was going to be a bigger problem than it actually is. Lol
Me too. That and spontaneous combustion. No joke.
Same!
Oh geez, now that I think of it....the amount of TV shows and movies from that era which featured the terrifying Hollywood version of "quicksand"....and how it just shows up out of nowhere....yeah. As a child, and given the lack of information you likely had about the world around you, this fear would've been quite legit.
As someone who has worked for years with elderly people, I have to say they can produce alot of static electricity when they shuffle around all day
My grandpa told me I’d start growing into a tree if I swallowed gum. That part didn’t freak me out, but him pulling a branch out of my head freaked me out. It was only later I realized the branch came from the trees and shrubs I’d been playing in all day. I miss him quite a bit.
My grandad terrified me with his false teeth because I complained about his chain smoking. I have been terrified of them ever since!
I too thought swallowing bubble gum would kill me as a child, and always wondered why everyone was so calm about it. Obviously I was too timid to go against the social norm so I chewed gum like any kid, mildly terrified of the consequences. Then one day it happened. A moments' lapse of concentration. A gulp I could not ungulp.I asked my brother, who I'm pretty sure was the one who gave me this fear, for reassurance. He hadn't seen what had happened, so I asked as innocently as I could: "If you swallow gum, do you really die?" "Of course." He matter of factly replied...
Siblings are wonderful.
As an older brother, that’s a brother move
I am ALL FOR a video on ball lightning and other meteorological phenomenon. Joe Scott did a video on it a couple years ago, so we need a Simon "Legend" Whistler video.
My top 3 greatest fears of death as a child:
1) water creatures - I feared getting eaten by a shark, or stepping on a sting ray, or nibbled to death by piranhas. This childish fear was cemented as a full-blown phobia after a beach trip on my 16th birthday. My friends pressured me to go out waist-deep into the waves, when I felt something rub against my leg. I looked down and saw three sharks circling me. Everyone else screamed and fled. I stayed sooooo still, pale as a ghost, until a lifeguard could come and chase the sharks away. Now I won't even dip my toes into water that is murky.
2) driving off a cliff - a legit concern, it happened once every few years in the hills near where I lived, and even my older brother drove his truck off the cliff, breaking his lower back. I get outright panicky and hyperventilate when I have to go through mountain roads. I would rather drive AROUND a mountain range than through it.
3) death by lava - The nearest volcano in my childhood was probably 1000 miles away, but it was still a frequent nightmare of mine. Ironically, I now live within view of Mt. Saint Helens, and folks around here still have stories of it blowing its top. That old fear surged up again after my brother moved to Hawaii. (The same brother who drove his truck off a cliff.) His house was devoured by lava during that big eruption that happened a few years ago, so he decided to move back to the continent.
Proof that some childish fears really are things to be cautious about.
Just not swallowing gum.
Aside from water fears in general for me, one of my biggest fears is being trapped in a vehicle underwater. For whatever reason, I always envision this as driving off some kind of cliff beforehand haha. I can understand your fear there to a degree.
You sound better adjusted than me as a child. Your fears being natural phenomena. I was phobic to the point of absolutely refusing to go outdoors, of nuclear radiation.
Love Joe Scott! Awesome channel! 👌
I was living on the west side of WA when she blew. We woke to murky brown light and an inch of fine gray ash, which muffled all sound. The wind blew east, so that side got gritty ash. It was found as far away as Kansas.
Ball lightning is very much the exception that proves the rule where unexplained phenomenon are concerned. Most haven't seen a major spike in reported sightings since people started carrying a camera in their pocket at all times, except for ball lightning, which became so prevalent that scientists had to accept this was a real thing. It's still very rare, but there are enough examples that clearly something is happening.
Lasering cervixes is a treatment for precancerous cells, if anyone is wondering.
Also, a friend of mine kept getting infections from going to the GYN in Japan. She told them she’s allergic to latex and they always use condoms for the intra-vaginal ultrasound wand. My friend has a lot of cysts so that is a normal procedure but they didn’t have alternatives to the condoms. Then she’d go back for a rash and a vaginal infection and they’d claim it was from her having too much sex…her who hadn’t even been on a date in months… I 100% believe the Japanese hospital tried to blame the patient. No way could they be irresponsible or make a mistake
About the seemingly random capitalization: at one time it was normal to capitalize nouns, all nouns. As I recall, "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift had all the nouns capitalized. German does this today, although English does not.
As soon as the topic came up my first thought of this story I saw on this this whole thing and a picture of a woman (what was left of her) sitting in a big chair and the only thing really left of her was from the knees down and both legs appeared to be untouched by flames or even burned, she still had the lower part of whatever she was wearing and her socks and shoes that were completely untouched at all as if nothing had happened but the rest of her plus the chair were completely burned but also the area around wear she burned was basically untouched as well except for maybe a bit of smoke damage! It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen!
No, crematoriums do not reduce a body to ash. The bones remain intact and then a grisly set of roller gears break the bones up into small bits. That's why a funeral earn contains "cremains" not just fine ash.
earn haha
that's wild, that explains a lot. I always wondered why murderers don't just toss bodies into a crematorium furnace for easily unidentifiable disposal... you've provided the answer: bone remnants are left behind, even if crushed to bits
@@variaxi935 You think THAT'S why murderers don't all just cremate all the evidence? Lol wtf.
@@MMAFightMagazine hahaha I have no clue man I haven't watched much CSI nor have I imagined how I'd dispose of a body, I just always thought that if cremation erased all evidence (which I now see is not the case) then it would seem to be a good idea to get access to a crematorium and just blaze the body and leave the ashes with the rest, though I guess ashes aint usually leftover lmao idk, I enjoy educating myself but body disposal just aint a subject I'm particularly well-versed in 🤣😅
@@MMAFightMagazine if you have actual explanations (unlike myself) as to why they don't do this I'd be interested to hear em haha
@@variaxi935 yeah it takes a while for a human to burn to ash
“I remember doing a video a while ago which describes how much calories the different human body parts had, I don’t know why I did that video, It seems a little bit disturbing doesn’t it” Simon you know you talk about serial killing cannibals right?
I know exactly what book & what image Katie means, having been a fan of cheap paranormal paperbacks as an 80's/90's British kid too. Given the brutal, traumatising content dished out to kids on teatime TV eg, Mr Bronson on Grange Hill, Dark & Lonely Water, etc I think it might actually have been a kids book. I remember another book from the time that was about near death experiences & included an experiment where staff left random objects like playing cards on top of cabinets, so when some old dear says 'I was floating in the air & I saw the Queen of Hearts', they all got spooked.
I remember that sort of thing!
Me too. But it was possibly a readers digest book, as my gramps had hundreds of cool RD books
I immediately knew the picture in question too
Hey Simon and co, enjoying the content as always. Just a little feedback, the videos have gotten a lot quieter lately! I usually watch/listen whilst in the kitchen but lately my kettle is louder than your vids!
Anyways, thanks for all the great content ❤
💯
I sometimes have it playing on my phone when I'm driving. I couldn't hear this one at full volume over the sound of the car
Yes! I listen while driving but couldn’t with this one it was so quiet.
Yep, this one is the worst yet
And the music and clips were much louder and distracting.
After watching an episode of “ In Search Of” with Leonard Nimoy about spontaneous combustion, I couldn’t sleep for at least 2 weeks. I was absolutely terrified!
Loved that show
I totally remember that show
Absolutely.
Oh I loved Leonard Nimoy!
"Coroners are like scientists!" Simon...lol I think that is one of my favorite quotes from you now. They generally are scientists, Fact Boy.
And yes, it was an episode of CSI.
From my knowledge and guesses I've always assumed supposed cases of spontaneous human combustion are the result of some items now being fire resistant such as furniture and most clothing not being fire resistant, but some still is. This would explain why the limbs regularly survive.
No, the fire burns too intensely. Chemicals burn fast and light, meaning not enough fuel to ignite a continual flame. Especially burning up complete human parts. Simply looking at the pictures can tell you this isn’t chemical induced.
Yeah such as the old coats people used to wear like "waxed jackets" - which are still a thing to this day - that actually had a coating of wax on them to make them waterproof. The chemicals used in the wax were petroleum based, so this could be a fuel source for a "human combustion" fire. You can actually buy bars of wax online (often called Otter Wax or "Fabric Wax Bar") to turn any fabric clothing or bag waterproof, but these days they use more natural ingredients rather than petroleum such as beeswax which might still melt in a fire but shouldn't _fuel_ the fire quite as much.
If you grew up in the UK in the 80s you were almost certainly scared of deep water because of the public information film ‘Lonely Water’. Also scared of grain silos, train lines and highly-polished hallway floors with rugs on them for similar reasons!
I'll forever have Jimmy being fried when retrieving his frisbee from a power substation, tattooed on the backside of my psyche.
As a kid I was scared of falling from a great height and then I became a paratrooper. I got over it. Cheers
And an adjustment in the balance of background soundtrack vs voice, please.
As a kid I didn't fear heights. Now almost 30 I fucking hate being close to cliffs.
Being as I just got laid off a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been doing DoorDash delivery driving. It sucks, but the money’s not bad. What makes it all the more worthwhile, is having a new episode of decoding the unknown to accompany me. Thanks for these, team
As someone who has to rely on delivery drivers for everything - Thank you & I hope people tip you, express their thanks & you are safe.
@@theConquerersMama unfortunately it’s kinda rare to get tipped, albeit decently. People will have us grocery shop for them and not even have the decency to tip
@@Zeta9966 what??? Really?
That surprises me.
Today my mom's birthday cake was delivered upside down but I could tell the person delivering it was trying to be careful. They just didn't get the upside down type packaging.
I still tipped and took a moment to show how the cake rounds go. And the they can be counterintuitive of how they should be.
It's not the end of the world.
I am grateful someone can shop for me and bring it to my door step.
When I was a kid I was told it I fell asleep with gum in my mouth it would end up in my hair. This is reasonable if you figure it would fall out of your mouth while sleeping and get in your hair. Which I can only assume is what my grandma meant when she told me that. My little kid brain I was convinced it meant it would somehow float out of my mouth, hover over my head and the stick itself into my hair.
As someone who had to have gum cut out of my hair after falling asleep chewing it I can confirm it's a thing. Though I don't think uncanny floating was involved.
😂
My sister slept with earplugs in & had a dream one night that she was chewing gum...she woke up with one of her earplugs in her mouth! 🤮
Things I thought would be a bigger concern in life when I was a child that turned out to not really be a worry at all:
1/ Quicksand
2/ Spontaneous Human Combustion
Sharks
(In the ocean/lakes/pool- wherever)
3/ The Bermuda Triangle
Rattlesnakes.
And I live in northern England so pretty fucking unlikely 😅
As soon as he said "There's one particular image..." I knew exactly which picture she's talking about. And yes, it is the picture of what was left of Dr Bentley
Indeed, I remember that picture from a Danish book as well.
I've also seen this pic...it was likened to a plasma cutter (which did not exist back then) by the precision/pinpoint outlines the heat was contained to, without the burn-pattern spreading, etc. His chair was just off the hole but IIRC was also not burned (& IIRC, the surrounding floor).
I reeeally want to see Simon cover ball lightning now.
...I'm also not positive I haven't seen this before, but he got so excited about it and it actually is a hella interesting scientific topic that also has a weird amount of overlap with the UFO community.
Ball lightning is so unproven that you may as well claim it is aliens.
@@dstinnettmusic there's a weird amount of physics journals publishing papers on it for that to be the case. Some of them are speculative, sure, but the Journal of High Energy Density Physics is hardly a UFOlogy rag.
Holy cow Katie!! I had the same fears as a kid too. Well apart from the IRA but I did think Bin Laden was going to kidnap me if I went into the woods on my property. The spontaneous human combustion myth really freaked me out. I still have the image of a chair with only a woman's shins and feet left in front of it. I didn't worry too much about it happening to me but my dad was an alcoholic. He would often fall asleep beside our potbelly heater and I just knew the alcohol in his body would cause him to blow up.
Mine were similar, but in the US back then it was Russians that were going to get me lol
@@davidt3563 I was CONVINCED that a serial killer was going to break into my house and murder us all. Even after Richard Ramirez was caught I was sure that there were other crazy murderers out there.
Also quicksand.
@@davidt3563 grew up in Appalachia, so for me it was whatever local fantastical monster the shiners and ginseng farmers had come up with to keep folks away from their patches... So naturally the ghost dogs were gonna carry me away 😆
I remember that photo! I was very scared of spontaneously combusting during my childhood because of that photo!
That's the same photo I always think of too.
I've never seen spontaneous human combustion but a neighbor of mine had some solventy rags in a metal bucket in his garage. My mom and I were taking a nice summer bike ride and we were just passing this guy's house when the bucket exploded right next to him. He was fine and grabbed a fire extinguisher right away, but it was a pretty serious fireball and would have lit him up like a candle if he would have been closer.
Ball lightning is actually a ball of plasma, formed by a lightning stroke. It has been documented to behave very strangely. Related to Saint Elmo's Fire.
Ball lighting has never been observed or created, so we don’t know why it happens or if it even does happen. It’s a theorized explanation.
@davidnotonstinnett interactive plasma usually formed as a ball has been created in a lab a while ago. Can move, change shape, etc.
@@Whittz.UA-cam this does not prove that this is a natural phenomenon.
@@Whittz.UA-cam also, googling around, can’t find any experiments that are what you are describing.
Can you tell me what to google to get the abstract for the experiment you are describing?
The closest I am finding are “vaporized silicon” but that isn’t what people describe when talking about ball lightning.
@@dstinnettmusic yo relax, I wasn't attacking your character. Search holovect. It's one of the first implementations of using light or energy to excite plasma at a certain point in space for a quick moment so it doesn't overheat. And with that in mind, natural occurring phenomenon like that would be hard to film let alone witness due to the rapid degeneration of variables. Most videos I'll admit are most likely fake.
Listening to Simon at work while wearing my vessi’s thank you for making my day better by listening to you but also being comfortable while I stand on my feet for 10 hours straight
As a kid I was terrified by the thought I might spontaneously burst into all consuming flames at any moment.
Dude I remember Unsolved Mysteries had me so scared of spontaneous combustion that it was part of my nightly prayers to not just suddenly burst into flames lol.
And I thought I was alone in that😅😅😅
Lol me too! 😅
Me too, that and I thought I’d wake up with a baby in my stomach 🙄
I was so scared of that too, but I guess as a child you kind of believe everything you are told. But it can have rather bad consequences, my father told me when I was small that HIV existed because Africans had intercourse with Monkeys. You can surely imagine how upset the teacher (and after that me too) was when I brought that up in class. Since then I swore to me that I won’t tell lies to my future children.
As a kid I was CONVINCED spontaneous human combustion was real, and I would go into a screaming panic before bed, sure that I would wake up in the dead of night, actively on fire.
True story, for a couple years in my state of Alabama, fire departments had signs up saying the number one cause of house fires in the state were those plug-in fragrance warmers. Apparently overtime the wicks would dry out and catch fire. Always wondered how in the hell could you not smell the thing burning the wick once the fragrance ran out before it got to the point of actually catching ablaze.
Wonder if because it is being heated evenly that it starts out only melting the insides until it causes the electrical bits to actually catch fire and that's why. Or maybe their sense of smell isn't that great, which might explain how they didn't know it was empty. 🤷🤷♀️🤷♂️
Eek, I just realized that because we didn't have people over for Easter, I bet I haven't changed the plug-ins in our guest room or guest bath since Christmas.
I am not even sure if they are plugged in or not.
Edit : yep, they were still plugged in. Dry as tinder. I never would have thought about that. So many thanks for bringing it to my attention.
They probably didn't notice because people leave their houses for a lot of the day. Can't smell what's burning if you're in a different building, say at work or something.
Logan Ford I edited my comment. I checked my plug ins. I had 4 totally dried out ones still plugged in in rooms around the house. 🤦
So many thanks to you.
@@theConquerersMama Wow!! I'm glad I could help!! You would think manufacturers would incorporate some type of safety feature that would disable them once they're empty!
When I was a kid, I'd read a random pulp magazine at a friend's place, and spontaneous combustion made me terrified of the idea that one day I might be walking down the street and suddenly burst into flames. This was an irrational fear that stuck with me for years, until I actually learned English in high school and could look up information about the topic from a more skeptical perspective, and realize that all the "mysterious" spontaneous combustion stories were about people who "mysteriously" burned to ashes while being right next to a source of fire. How mysterious.
To me, this is the other side of the coin of the "Korean fan death" thing I'm not even going to call a mystery. Here, old people die near and/or get exposed to a source of fire, and other people ignore it and pretend the cause was mysterious and supernatural. There, old people die at night during the summer, while their fan is on to keep them cool, and people ignore the obvious cause of death (read: being old and suffering from chronic illnesses) and instead pinpoint focus on the fan in the room and come up with increasingly ludicrous theories about how the blades cut the oxygen molecules and suffocated the person or whatever.
My top 3 worries were the same thing! Grew up near London and probably the same age as writer lol. That leg photo from my dad's readers' digest book of mysteries is scorched in my memory
I grew up in India... Still live in India.... My dad was absolutely a product of Colonial British Raj... (He was a huge fan of Readers Digest as well) Because, I share the same thoughts and fears like the whole 90s British kids bunch😂😂😂
Oh... My God 😢😢😢 Don't remind me of that photo😭😭😭😭
Simon is the epic fireside storyteller. He will still be reading to us when we're all gray and in rocking chair by fire.
...until we fall asleep in that rocking chair by the fire and an ember floats gently along and lands on us there... 🔥
Dude, he is going to be so senile and confused. He already forgets 9/10ths of a script as soon as he reads it, then “vaguely remembers hearing about it” the next time another channel talks about the same thing.
one can only hope
@@gibbyrockerhunter that's ok, I won't remember half the stories anyway and happily sit through them again and again. Heck, I already do that sometimes.
@@WouldntULikeToKnow. haha. Good point. I guess I’m here too so... lol
I guess it's international spontaneous combustion day, 2 channels putting videos out about it within hours.. that's lit!
my guess is that this video was recorded first, then the thoughty2 video, which was then released, and then this one was put out earlier than intended because why not capitalize on our collectively peaked interest
@@doublepiedavid8908 Yeah, that's what i figure as well, they probably have a lot on the back-burner.
A Thoughty2 fan I see.
@@doublepiedavid8908 The Why Files covered it 5 months ago as well. There is often crossover between these two channels.
@@seth7745 that could’ve been what gave both channels that uploaded today the inspiration to discuss this topic
Simon, can you or your editors check the audio settings? On many of the recent videos, across all your channels, I've been having to keep my volume up high to hear, but then when UA-cam drops an ad in, i get blasted because i didn't realize that i had maxed the volume out....
Okay. What's going on here? Thoughty2 and Simon both release a video about spontaneous human combustion within a few hours of each other. Something's weird here.
I was litterly about to comment the same thing 😅
I was about to say the same thing. Literally said "wtf" out loud when I seen this video from Simon.
Lmao I saw the same thing. That's bizarre!
That Chapter and Coffeehouse Crime released a video covering the same case within an hour of each other. Everyone thought they collabed but no. It was just parallel thinking.
The difference is one channel is incredibly entertaining while the other is total garbage.
Am I the only one that wants to see Simon, Thoughty2 and Mark Roper do a drinking/debate game where they have to draw conspiracy & paranormal topics from a hat and flip a coin to see which side they have to support?
Being from Belfast, Katy, I feel ya on the childhood ptsd of the constant threat of being blown up by the IRA. Still now when I'm in town (Belfast) it's always in the back of my mind the ra could be sneaking about with C4. If I see a car parked on the side of the road with it's hazards on I still immediately turn the other way out of instinct #Belfastthings.
Unattended bags..... That's what gets me .... I noticed one as a kid in Harrods ( 80's) security freaked out and the day was over... Dammit ! 🤔😂
Brilliant! I was literally about to replay Simon’s last few videos to find a Vessi sponsor to buy a pair (coming into wet grass over winter in Aus), and here it is!
Also love a script by Katy - so I’m jumping in!
But no way SC exists
As always, I learned some new things. The first of those things is to never go on a long road trip with Simon.❤😊
Am I crazy, because I swear Simon did a video about ball lightning before on decoding the unknown.
It was one of the theories for a big boom that happened on some Island. In the video they say that ball lightning is not real...
Sellsword Arts ball lightening is indeed real. It's been sighted, and Nicola Tesla spoke about it and I'm pretty sure knew how to produce it.
Ball lightning is real, it was filmed by accident in 2012 by a team studying lightning storms in Tibet. I think that the Bell Island Boom (I think that's the video you're referring to.) was not caused by ball lightning as it doesn't act like that.
I literally just finished Thoughty2’s video on this. Heck of a coincidence this channel just released this one.
I've noticed that sort of thing from time to time. Two or three unrelated channels will release a video on the same topic within a few days. I wonder why
@@maryhildreth754 I feel like usually something happens in the news or it gets mentioned somewhere and then independently two different channels are like hey I want to make a video about this
Me too! 😁
@@maryhildreth754 yhea it will have been in the news or on something everyone who makes the videos released has seen. Then the production of the videos, writing scrips, posting the video, etc takes roughly the same amount of time and bang 3 or 4 videos on the same topic.
Echochambers are not just political.
Regarding fireproof clothes - for the most part, it wasn't intentional. Cotton is naturally fire resistant, and has gotten progressively cheaper. It has several advantages if you can adequately harvest it over most traditional fibers.
I feared spontaneously combusting as a child. I still slightly do.
LOL. I just commented basically the same thing.
Me too. It seemed far scariest than other deaths because I saw no way to prevent or predict it. Just suddenly POOF and you were dead.
Don’t flagrantly light your farts and y’all should be fine 😝
I would LOVE to see you Vs. some of America’s Missing 411 cases. Some of them are very strange. The Charles Mccullar case is particularly puzzling to me. I’ve watched too many videos on the cases and I need them from a more skeptical perspective
As a screen printer with the dubious distinction of having done this more than once, I can confirm that clothes are indeed still flammable. Cotton will burn, polyester will melt :p
Some fabric softeners also increase flammability of clothes, due to the chemicals they contain. I remember reading fire advisories about that. Fun, fun. LOL
You've spontaneously combusted more than once?
Some feedback, it would be great if the writers could distinguish and emphasize claims in the first part of the episodes by specifically using the word claim more often. Additionally, if we could do more qualification on titles of individuals like "scientist" or how fringe their claims are. It's important to know if it's one quacks self-reported title and claims or if it's something taken more seriously by the scientific community. I think these practices would also help Simon to react to the information conveyed in the first half. The way it's written now, really takes all these claims and individuals as truly earnest. Which is admirable, but can also mislead.
I agree
Wow, you and Thoughty2 both dropped videos on this topic on the same day! Wild! 🤯💥
Thoughty2 and Simon both releasing a video on spontaneous human combustion on the same day... this means something, somehow. Watch out for people randomly burning around you.
I finished watching T2's video earlier, here now 😆
It means they both were inspired by the same thing at the same time to create videos, and their production times for videos are extremely similar - at least according to Simon in a tangent he went on in a video of his I just watched explaining why this phenomenon happens which I watched directly before these two videos...
I found out about this channel by people making the same comments on Thoughty2. Simon has way too many channels x.x
It happened spontaneously.
Coincidence?? I think not!!! Proof of pulling things from the Ether in real time!!!! Lol!!!
Thoughty2 put out a video on this subject today as well. One of you should do a video on what the odds are or decode the “real” reasons that nobody is saying…
Was just about to comment the same 😂
@@daduzadude1547 I remember being down at the job center and the work coach pulled out a coin and tossed it 15 times (he was trying to show people the odds of getting a job or something silly). All landed heads up...the chances of that must be impossible!
@@Webb8991 I know Simon usually records his part weeks or months before we see them. I’d be Aaron puts in significant time in his as well and there is a fair amount of post production that each do in their own way, so as far as these two examples, I’d be not.
A+ video!
Amazing writer, stories, analysis, and great images.
Lots of great humor too!
Glad that there is no longer a worry of dying from spontaneous combustion.
Dude what a wild day to be subscribed to DTU and Thoughty2
Hahaa legit
Beat me by 4 minutes. !!!! Me too!
😂
Yeah just finished watching thoughty2s video on this recently.
I brought up spontaneous human combustion this morning. Not something that I usually talk about at work, but said something after a coworker was leaning over an open flame on the six burner wearing a quick dry shirt. Made a crack about easily combustible clothes and how we were lucky it’s not the 70’s. All we’d find of her is a pair of shoes and we’d think it was a case of SHC. Weird how this is a new video, on my feed tonight.
And Thoughty2 released a video on the same subjest today as well.
TLDR: it's totally real but it only happens to the lizard people that are hiding among us.
Underrated comment
Funny story, so during undergrad, when I was taking a summer course on astronomy, my astronomy professor received a phone call from a criminal defense attorney asking if he'd be willing to testify for the defense that spontaneous human combustion was a real phenomenon. I think the real unsolved mystery here is why they were asking the dude with a phd in astronomy to testify about spontaneous human combustion.
A good question to ask might be:
Have incidents of SHC decreased in NYC since they implemented the law mandating that cigarettes cannot sustain ignition on their own?
They were first in the US, I believe, but it's a pretty hard timeline there, and it's a big enough pool to matter, but small enough to study, with decent record keeping.
The deodorant can flame tracing back to the source is 100% a thing. It happened to my stepbrother. He was lucky that he only got minor burns.
I've heard the lighting farts can end the same way, only there isn't a concentrated pocket of flammable material, so it wouldn't explode, just give the ring a major burn! I don't know anyone who has experienced this though.
My forensic anthropology professor swore that almost all instances of spontaneous combustion are from smokers catching their clothes on fire. Either from drugs, alcohol, falling unconscious, or dying with a lit cigarette in their mouth. Then the wick effect takes place cause we are very oily, greasy, fat animals.
Well they are wrong,the wick effect can never reach such high temperatures.
@@Ann-sj4pt what high temperatures? What exactly is the temperature for spontaneous combustion? And why is it that much higher than the wick effect can handle?
@@eliharper6616 it’s around 4,000 c
The fire would spread before it would reach that heat if it was “normally” able.The wick effect has been debunked an age ago
@Ann-sj4pt that's like 4 times as hot as a cremation chamber or 3 times the melting point of steel or hotter than an acetylene torch. That's almost as hot as the surface of the the sun. How the fuck?
Mortuary cremations don't burn all the bones in a human body, so this kind of event causes very extreme heat.
As far as flames going back into aerosol cans, it's possible.
Flame thrower operators during the Korean conflict reported that there were occasions where the flames went back into the fuel tanks causing them to explode
I took shop class in high school and during the part when they were teaching us about plumbing and we were doing the practical learning by replicating a sample shape of copper pipe and elbow connections with the flux and solder and then they would check to make sure that it watertight by doing a pressurized water test to see if we had learned the skill properly and it didn’t leak and we had to use these big oxyacetylene torches for it and they were very careful to tell us that if we closed the valves in the wrong order when we were finished then we would probably all die in an explosion, but maybe I’m remembering it wrong, so it might be possible for that to happen with other sorts of torches or with flame throwers?
Simon and Thoughty2 both put out a video on human combustion on the same day! Double the watching pleasure.
Yes, clothes today are still flammable, especially ones made from synthetic fabrics. It's a standard lab safety training talking point.
Acrylic, for one...
I used to have Canadian Forces garrison pants (100% Acrylic, I think they later switched to a 65%/35% polyester/cotton blend)...
Those things were INSANELY flammable!!!
I found out the hard way, using a lighter on loose threads~
In my formative years during the 60s and 70s, SHC was one of my concerns as it seemed a very possible random occurrence. I can remember reading 'reliable' eyewitness reports by firefighters telling of people bursting into flames with a blindingly white fire in their stomach (sorry, tummy) that they couldn't bring under control with a fire hose. As time went on and the mystery was solved, (I remember the pig carcase experiments), it became clear to me how much 'reliable testimony' can be complete Bullcr@p. I learned a lot about human nature from this very 'mystery'. I am now a healthily skeptical and grounded person and if some story appears in the popular media claiming that some highly unlikely event has occurred but it must be true because of witnesses that couldn't possibly be mistaken or dishonest, I know to reserve judgment until some real evidence is available. The most recent example of this is the Tic Tac UFOs, supposedly witnessed by highly trained and unimpeachable Air Force pilots. Yet a little research, by those who are more interested in finding the truth than perpetuating a myth, will turn up expert analysis explaining how these 'highly trained' pilots are misinterpreting known artefacts of the technology which should not catch them out if they were actually as competent as some would have you believe.
Your talk of the IRA also sparked a memory. In my innocence, when I first remember hearing a news report of a bombing with the famous 'The IRA have claimed responsibility' phrase, I was completely taken aback by that. Why, I thought, would someone admit to such an atrocity? Forgetting, or not connecting anyway, that a callous, murderous, organisation capable of bombing innocents have already done much worse than admitting to it!
When I was in elementary school, I ordered (through the Scholastic Book Order) the book Strangely Enough! (January 1, 1940 edition).
The book had been in circulation for around 50 years, but it was popular enough at the time that the book order would offer it.
It was AMAZING! That is the first place I read anything about spontaneous combustion.
I LOVED that book!!
@@unowen9668 Awesome!
Glad to know it wasn’t just me as a child living in constant fear of spontaneously combusting
My great aunt got hit by lighting sitting in her living room. She survived. I remember my cousins and I getting told to keep her away from the pharmacy when we went shopping with her.
Request! Gloria Ramirez, the ‘toxic woman’ who made a whole emergency department sick. Mass hallucinations or something else? Totally made up like the Ourang Medan is my guess.
Sigh… And no, this is not a request for people to comment with other channels or presenter’s videos. I want to hear Simon and the team present it on Deciding the Unknown. Sorry I have to put this last curmudgeonly bit, but it seems to happen every time I ask.
I don't like that she's called the toxic woman though as she did nothing wrong and died tragically
Seconded for these I'd like to hear Simon do them too
@@jackoh991 I actually agree with you. I feel bad writing it, and in some of my earlier requests I prefaced it with this (that I find it disrespectful to write, however it’s the way it’s most known to the internet and apologising). However there’s only so much I can pack into a request and it’s probably already long enough. 😔 But I know (even having written it) it is pretty insensitive.
@@--enyo-- yes agreed
I can't remember the chemicals now, but there are a couple of medical case studies that mention "internal thermal injuries" when some medications interacted.
With the shoddy regulations and unlisted ingredients of the past, it's not impossible that some people created a reaction in their body.
God, this and quicksand were things that I was definitely worried about when I was a kid for some reason.
Did you see Never Ending Story as a kid? This would explain a fear of quicksand.
@@MrsGypsumFantastic hah, totally did and had pretty well forgotten about that. I feel like it showed up a lot in various shows at the time too. I suppose seeing it in shows is definitely the "why", but the way they depicted it was pretty false given how people/animals would always just slowly sink until fully submerged.
I grew up in the 70s and it seemed like all the cartoons and kid shows had quicksand.
I had flashbacks to that leg and shoe just from reading the title of this video.
I used to go look at these things in the school library books - I found it fascinating and definitely thought it was a real thing.
The descriptions of the victims in this just had me laughing so hard, a glueish moisture and liver fused to a spinal column are not the way you want grandma to go 🤣🤣
My high school biology teacher had a theory that stored chemical energy in the body was spontaneously released. ATP instantly reducing to AMP. Thus a huge amount of energy released instantaneously. When something flashes like this it seldom damages surrounding items. Like flash powder.
Me and the author had a lot of similar worries as a kid. When I first heard about spontaneous combustion, I thought about it all the time. I was also a child in the early 2000s so I was scared Osama Bin Laden was going to bomb where I live (even though I live nowhere near Al-Qaeda attacks)
As a welder, clothes are very much still flammable. As for materials in the house, they are fire resistant, which is different. Once caught on fire, they can burn violently.
A friend from church told me at a candle party that, years ago, her daughter blew out a candle (as opposed to using a snuffer to extinguish it) & a few embers landed on her brand-new comforter. It took a while due to the fire retardant on it, but eventually, the comforter DID catch fire. Thankfully, she woke up & got out of bed, so she was not badly burned.
Me and some friends were quite drunk and one of us decided to test the lighting a fart on fire thing for a laugh once when we were around 16 or so and he ended up setting his ass on fire which was hilarious
I enjoyed this comment immensely, thank you 😂
There was a documentary I saw as a kid about shc. Freaked me out for a few months. Then one day I just kind of thought about it a little longer.
The real unknown needs to be decode is how come Simon and Thoughty2 relseased videos of the same topic.
@@Webb8991 Nobody's copying anyone -do you seriously think Simon saw that Thoughty did an upload on this subject earlier today, then got a script written, filmed and edited in a few hours?
I work for a medical examiners office. Years ago I had a case and we were all on board with it being SHC. It was so strange. A man who could not walk was in a hospital bed and burned to a skeletal crisp. The sheets and most of the mattress were burned away, but nothing else in the house was damaged aside from some smoke damage on the ceiling. We were all freaking out because we can’t just call it spontaneous human combustion even if that’s what it looked like. Luckily as we sifted through the ashes we found a few thin wires. We determined it was an electric blanket that caught on fire and slowly burned him alive from the feet up. I know that’s not much better but welcome to my world.
Thoughty2 did this vid today, and you were speaking about the likelyhood of you and other channels releasing vids on the same topic at the same time in a vid you released y'day, mad.
Being a kid in the 80s I grew up thinking quicksand would pose a near constant mortal danger
What weird chances- both Thoughty2 and Decoding the Unkown release videos on spontaneous human combustion within hours of each other lol
I love how much Simon loves vessi
I’ve had moments where I’m actually surprised I didn’t spontaneously combust 🤯
Clothes are most DEFINITELY flammable. Be careful, especially with polyester fiber or other plastic type fibers, they can burn in A very short period at very high temperatures. A good friend of mine nearly died when her Halloween costume got too close to a lit candle. She's an amazing person, and made an incredible recovery, but her life was still permanently changed.
Would have liked to have seen the cases of the Spinal Tap drummers decoded. Tragic mysteries they shall remain then, I guess.
My dad was terrified of spontaneous combustion as a child. Lol, that and being the only human awake on the planet. He told me about both of these fears at some point and I swear I looked at him like he had 3 heads because never in my life did I think about them. Haha. But every kid has their things.
Crackpot theory: I have often attributed this to cases of Auto-Brewery Syndrome. If someone were going around with a body that was (unbeknownst to them) making alcohol, the vapors would be extremely flammable. Any sort of spark could ignite the vapor outside the mouth and travel immediately into the stomach.
I always figured it had to do with that, cause a lot of the older ones (pre-1900) were people who were known to drink a lot. I remember some of the bodies were reported to have cirrhosis (or they were diagnosed with cirrhosis before going up in flames). It also seems to effect older people more often, and it’s so rare we’re still debating if it exists. All in all seems to add up to a genetic disorder and/or extreme outside situations, and alcohol is pretty dang flammable.
44:01 --- I think Bruce Lee's official cause of death was also listed as "Death by misadventure".
I remember reading somewhere that many cases of SHC happened to elderly smokers who also used oxygen tanks. Hmmmm 🤔
Cows can build up a lot of internal gas that a vet needs to get out. I've heard it called cow bloat. The vet used a needle and the gas can be set on fire and gives off a pretty good flame for quite a while.
Coroners are *not* always “like scientists.” They are frequently extremely unqualified minor public figures like sheriffs or town officials pulling double duty.
Do you think it's possible Ireland might be more advanced than the backwater country you are describing?
@@Gambitbeer I imagine that Ireland is much more advanced than the US in many ways!
I watched a program about this topic once, the investigators setup a human analog dummy in a chair with natural and man made cloth. They dropped a lit cigarette onto the lap and it quickly caught alight. Heat and flame travels upward to consume the available fuels. At the end all that was left were the dummies feet. The fire was quick to burn and burn itself out, leaving the room untouched.
First Please do an episode on Ball Lightning. (I thought it was bogus too & would love to learn about it).
Second-the laser cervix thing is real. Don’t ask 😮
Sulphur dipped matches appeared in the 1700s and friction matches in the early 1800s, the latter of which were known to cause unintentional fires 🔥. Also the timeline coincides with the early cases of human combustion 300 years prior
I feel you, Katy. I was really scared of SHC as a kid, too.
Simon, please do a video on voodoo death. In some cultures, the belief in voodoo magic is so strong, that if someone gives another the curse of death, it is very real. Family mourns the dead person, who insists "I'm right here!" The victim is completely ignored by the community - they act as if he/she doesn't exist anymore. The belief is so strong, and the physical & mental stresses so great, that the victim invariably withers and dies within days, despite no identifiable cause.
this raises my doubt meter and reminds me of a song "you don't believe in voodoo, do you? I don't! But believe it or not, yeah I-still-went-blind!".
I agree Simon! Do a video on ball lightning! Would be perfect for this channel and is fascinating af