Our brains are constantly processing information from our senses to make us understand who we are and what we feel. When those physical mechanisms don’t work as expected, especially with the sense of touch, our minds can play bizarre and sometimes dangerous tricks on us.

10Mirror-Touch Synesthesia

Synesthesia is an unusual condition that is believed to result from the tangling of our senses. The stimulation of one sense triggers another. For example, some people taste words or see letters as colors. It’s possible that some forms of synesthesia are learned. A 2015 study found that children who played with colored plastic letters, especially the magnetic kind that stick to a refrigerator door, were more likely to become synesthetes who saw letters as colors.

With an even more bizarre form of this condition, mirror-touch synesthesia, the synesthete feels the touch that he or she sees happening to someone else. In this form of synesthesia, many scientists believe that the affected person’s brain has overactive mirror neurons, cells that help us to understand and sometimes feel the experiences and emotions of others.

For one woman with mirror-touch synesthesia, the side of her body where she felt the touch changed according to how she viewed the other person. If she was facing someone who received a touch on the left cheek, she experienced the same touch on her right cheek. However, if she was standing side by side with that person, she would feel the touch on the other’s person left cheek on own her left cheek.

Mirror-touch synesthesia appears to make a person more empathetic than average. As one mirror-touch synesthete described it: “I have never been able to understand how people can enjoy looking at bloodthirsty films, or laugh at the painful misfortunes of others when I cannot only not look but also feel it.”

9The Ghost Illusion

We’ve previously discussed how doctors unexpectedly produced a creepy shadow person that mimicked the movements of a woman being prepared for epilepsy surgery. The woman sensed a presence when doctors electrically stimulated her left temporoparietal junction, the part of her brain linked to self-perception. Not realizing that her shadow person was an imagined double of herself, she believed that she was being watched and that the shadow person was trying to interfere with her activities. The effect ended when the electrical stimulation did.

In a more recent experiment, researchers used a robot to make some mentally and physically healthy participants feel a ghostly presence nearby when nothing was actually there. The participants’ brains tried to make sense of a mismatch between their senses by creating the illusion of a ghost.

While blindfolded and wearing headphones, the participant was asked to stand between two robots. Then the participant would tap the robot in front, which caused the robot in back to touch her back in an identical move. This made the participant feel as though she was reaching forward to tap her own back.

In the next phase of the experiment, when the participant tapped the robot in front, the robot in back would briefly hesitate before touching the person’s back. As the person’s brain tried to determine the mismatched sensation’s origin, it created the illusion of a ghost’s touch. “For some, the feeling was even so strong that they asked to stop the experiment,” said neuroscientist Giulio Rognini.

In both of these cases, researchers believe that even a small distortion of the delicate balance between our brains’ perceptions of self and others led to experiences that may explain what happens to people who suffer from schizophrenia, hallucinations, and other symptoms of mental illness.

8The Hug Brain Test

Rather than rely on a person’s behavior or description of their symptoms, scientists are trying to devise medical tests that can more objectively diagnose psychiatric conditions. Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University has been researching how to use fMRI and other technologies to map the effects of human thought on the brain. By asking participants to imagine types of social communication such as hugging, Just has used an fMRI scanner to identify people with autism with a 97-percent success rate.

“When asked to think about hugging or adoring, the neurotypical participants put themselves into the thoughts; they were part of the interaction,” said Just. “For those with autism, the thought was more like considering a dictionary definition or watching a play—without self-involvement.”

This type of procedure has revealed that certain emotions and thoughts activate specific patterns of neurons in the brain. Thought-markers, or departures from these established patterns, may be helpful in diagnosing mental illness. Besides using this with autism, Just is trying a similar approach to diagnosing other types of psychiatric disorders.

7Deaf People Hear Touch

When someone loses a sense, the brain rewires itself to compensate. MRIs have shown that deaf people sense touch with the hearing part of their brains, also known as the Heschl’s gyrus in the auditory cortex. To a lesser extent, deaf people also use this part of the brain to process visual cues. Researchers believe their studies suggest that deaf students can learn to read or do math using their sense of touch.

Scientists are continuing to develop new technologies to help the hearing-impaired. As a less-expensive alternative to cochlear implants, which currently cost over $40,000, researchers recently developed a smart retainer/earpiece instrument that converts words heard by the earpiece into distinct tactile sensations felt by the tongue. The device uses a 9-volt battery to avoid electrocuting the patient.

The goal is to rewire the brain to associate those sensations with specific words and allow the partially deaf person to hear with his or her tongue. It’s similar to a blind person associating words with the patterns of bumps used in Braille.

The tongue was chosen because it’s hypersensitive. “Some people suggest it feels like the sensation of having champagne bubbles or Pop Rocks on their tongue,” said mechanical engineer John Williams.

6Startle Disease

Sometimes, normal touch affects our brains in odd ways. For example, a simple touch can produce seizures in babies with hyperekplexia (“startle disease”). Any unexpected movement or loud noise has the same effect. The muscles in their throats and chests freeze, while their legs and arms become stiff. Sometimes, they’ll stop breathing. If someone tries to comfort the baby and ease the reaction, the symptoms usually become worse.

Hyperekplexia is a neurological disease that’s often misdiagnosed as epilepsy. Caused by mutations in two genes, hyperekplexia is an exaggerated startle reflex that doesn’t resolve normally. These genetic mutations change how the glycine molecule, which reduces a person’s response to sound, moves between cells. The nerve cells don’t communicate with each other correctly.

For one child, the symptoms started at three hours old. “I’d felt abnormal movements and vibrations in my tummy during pregnancy, sometimes 10 times a day,” said her mother, Abbie. “Then when she was born, she had her first seizure, went a bit blue, and shook from head to toe. It was very frightening.” The baby would have attacks if breastfed, out of breath, or surprised. In the most extreme cases, startle disease can trigger sudden infant death.

If there’s a bright side, it’s that hyperekplexia usually becomes much less severe after the child’s first birthday. However, some adults do suffer from the disease, which can cause them to fall unexpectedly and possibly even die.

5A Link Between Touch And Emotions

Sensations don’t necessarily feel pleasant or unpleasant on their own. Instead, we respond to them according to emotional associations. This is because the primary somatosensory cortex, the region of the brain that responds to touch, also processes emotional factors.

In a 2012 study, researchers showed heterosexual men videos of either a pretty woman or a macho man caressing a leg. Simultaneously, an unseen figure touched the subject’s actual leg. Subjects who watched the tape of the woman found the touch pleasurable, while those who watched the tape of a man did not—even though the touch was identical (a woman touched the subject in each case).

“Intuitively, we all believe that when we are touched by someone, we first objectively perceive the physical properties of the touch—its speed, its gentleness, the roughness of the skin,” said researcher Valeria Gazzola. “Only thereafter, in a separable second step based on who touched us, do we believe we value this touch more or less.” The experiment disproved that assumption.

This type of study may lead researchers to develop methods of helping autistic people respond more positively to gentle touches from family members. It may also lead to related treatments for victims of abuse and torture.

4The Perception Of Pain

We can lessen pain by touching the hurt area and giving our brains feedback about the state of our bodies. Clenching your hand may also significantly relieve acute pain. A lot of us know this from experience and instinctively rub our head when we bump it without knowing why.

To study why self-touch may ease pain, researchers conducted an experiment using the thermal grill illusion. Participants put the second and fourth fingers of each hand in hot water while chilling the middle finger of each hand in cold water. By tricking the brain with different temperature signals coming from the fingers of the same hand, each participant experienced the illusion that their cold middle fingers were painfully hot.

When the participants were told to press the fingers of their hands together, they experienced a 64-percent drop in the pain from their middle fingers. It didn’t work if someone else touched their fingers. That suggested to the researchers that the brain was doing more than interpreting feedback about the temperature of the participants’ fingers. It was also creating an overall representation of the body. “In other words, self-touch affects how the brain represents the current state of the body,” said Marjolein Kammers of the University College of London, “and that can influence the way we experience pain.” It may also lead to better methods of treatment.

In an earlier experiment at the University of Oxford, scientists found that both pain and swelling in a patient’s hand could be changed by making the hand appear larger or smaller to the patient. When viewing their hands through binoculars that magnified size, patients sensed more pain and took longer to feel normal again. They also experienced more swelling of their fingers. Conversely, when the binoculars shrunk the image of their hands, patients experienced less pain and swelling. Researchers believe that people take less ownership of a body part that appears to be smaller than they were expecting.

3Cellular Changes From Meditation

In a surprising study, emotionally distressed breast cancer survivors who practiced mindful meditation and yoga or were involved in support groups maintained the length of their telomeres, the repeating DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes. Survivors who didn’t engage in these activities had shorter telomeres. Longer telomeres are linked to slower aging of cells and protection against disease. When a telomere is too short, the associated chromosome (in a cell’s nucleus) can’t make any more copies of itself, and the cell dies.

You can think of cellular aging like an old-fashioned clock that you wind by hand. As long as the clock keeps ticking, the cell lives by producing new cells. But when the clock winds down, time stops and the cell dies. That’s why we want our telomeres to maintain their length.

“We already know that psychosocial interventions like mindfulness and meditation will help you feel better mentally,” said lead researcher Linda E. Carlson. “But now for the first time we have evidence that they can also influence key aspects of your biology.”

The study only lasted three months, so it’s not yet known how long this effect of maintaining telomere length will last.

2Touch-Back Technology

In a field called haptics, scientists want to integrate touch into the technologies that are part of our everyday lives. By using the virtual bump illusion, researchers discovered how the brain processes information from more than one finger at the same time. The virtual bump illusion occurs when your fingers feel forces along a flat surface that cause the illusion of bumps.

“Our big finding was ‘collapse’—the idea that separate bumps felt in separate fingers are nonetheless experienced as one bump if their separation happens to match that of the fingers,” said J. Edgar Colgate, an expert in touch-based systems. In other words, if you run your fingers over a flat screen with two virtual bumps, the brain may only perceive one bump if the bumps and the fingers are spaced uniformly. The coincidence tricks the brain and alters its perception of touch.

This will allow scientists to give the illusion of depth to flat screen technologies. In that way, blind people will be able to use touch screens, while flat screen keyboards will actually feel like 3-D keyboards.

The goal is to bring touch to the digital world by having the mind perceive a flat surface as having texture and shape. Your touch screen will touch you back.

1Body Swapping

In 2008, Swedish scientists designed experiments that convinced participants that they had swapped bodies with other humans or with mannequins. By having their brains manipulated through the use of touch, the participants experienced the illusion of being inside someone else’s body, even if the body was of the opposite sex.

In one experiment, two cameras were placed on the head of a dummy where human eyes would have been located. Then the human participant was fitted with virtual reality goggles that connected to the cameras on the dummy. The human saw what the dummy saw. So if the human participant and the dummy looked down at the same time, the human would see the dummy’s body as though he were seeing his own body.

Then the researcher used two sticks to simultaneously stroke the human’s and the dummy’s stomachs. Although the human participant couldn’t see his own body, he felt his stomach being stroked while watching the dummy’s stomach being stroked through the virtual-reality goggles. For the human, this created the strong illusion that the mannequin’s body actually belonged to the human participant.

The scientists concluded that the effect was real when they scared the participants into believing their swapped bodies were about to be slashed with a real knife. Even though it was the mannequin’s body that was about to be attacked, the participants exhibited stress reactions such as sweating. It was unclear what would have happened to a person’s psyche and sense of body ownership if the experiment had been continued for a prolonged period of time.

“This shows how easy it is to change the brain’s perception of the physical self,” said Henrik Ehrsson, who led the project. “By manipulating sensory impressions, it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies, too.”

As much as body swapping may have sounded like science fiction, even to the researchers themselves in 2008, real head transplants (or body transplants depending on your point of view) are being contemplated in the present day.

Let’s start this one with an acknowledgement that a characteristic of a lot of fads is that they rarely make sense. Fidget spinners, for instance, were just things that spun. They were huge for about a month and then they weren’t. The Pet Rock was another one. It was legitimately a stone, and you kept it in the house. 

That aside, there are fads and there are fads. You can see how a fidget spinner might be something useful for a fidgety person. And a pet rock has some quirky kitsch value. But there are some other fads that really stretch your imagination to explain why they ever existed.

10. Walking With a Limp 

We’ve all seen someone who seems to be faking or forcing the way they walk before. Usually it’s someone who has a weirdly dramatic swagger they’ve decided to add to their gait. For reference, look at any clip of LaVar Ball walking into a room. One thing most people don’t do, unless they’re panning for sympathy, is fake a limp. But that wasn’t always the case.

In Victorian England, limps were all the rage. Known as the Alexandra Limp, fashionable ladies of the time adopted this wobbly stride in honor of Alexandra of Denmark who had married the Prince of Wales. She was already a fashion trendsetter and the ladies of Great Britain who wanted to seem current and cool would copy her looks. 

When Alexandra developed rheumatic fever, the illness left her with a noticeable limp. So, naturally, those desperate to emulate her also walked with a limp. Shopkeepers even began selling uneven shoes, one with a much higher heel, to accommodate the fad.

Like any proper fad, most people hated it. One newspaper described it as idiotic and ludicrous. That it was inspired by an actual physical infirmity was the source of most people’s dislike but it only lasted a short while. 

9. Flagpole Sitting

The band Harvey Danger was a one-hit wonder with their song Flagpole Sitta but maybe they would have done better if they’d released the song back in the 1920s when flagpole sitting was actually a thing. 

There are no euphemisms at play here, flagpole sitting was the act of sitting on a flagpole. You’d climb to the top of a pole, the higher and more dramatically placed the better, and sit there. The longer you could endure, the more attention you’d get. Hollywood studios hired a professional stuntman named Alvin Kelly to do it in 1924 to get attention for a movie that arguably had nothing to do with flagpoles.

Kelly stayed on the pole for 13 hours and got in the news, which got him more offers to sit on flagpoles, which inspired other people all around the country to try it. 

By 1927, Kelly had graduated to mind blowing flagpole sitting endurance heights and stayed atop one pole for over 23 days. They sent up a pail on a rope for food and water, and he had a tube he used to go to the bathroom.

8. Swallowing Live Goldfish 

There are a lot of fads around eating that are still popular today. Spicy food challenges are still huge, as are competitive eating competitions. But one that thankfully got left behind in the 1930s was the act of swallowing live goldfish. 

According to legend, the fad began in 1939 at Harvard. A freshman bragged to some friends he’d once eaten a live fish, as freshmen do. Being a hallowed institution of higher education, his friends immediately bet him $10 he couldn’t repeat this miraculous and scholarly act.

This all would have died there, along with the poor fish, if not for a reporter also being there for God knows what reasons. So the student ate the fish, made his $10, and the reporter wrote a story about it which went national. 

Like the Cinnamon Challenge that spread on the internet, the goldfish challenge spread as well. By the end of April the record for swallowing live fish was at 101. Eventually, amidst warnings of parasites, threats of lawsuits and animal cruelty allegations, the fad eventually died like so many fish before it.  

7. Phone Booth Stuffing

Finding a phone booth in the wild these days is kind of like seeing a dolphin when you go boating. It’s very fun and exciting because it’s a novelty that makes you feel connected to a secret world which, in the phone booth’s case, is the past. 

Once upon a time there were phone booths all over the world, just waiting on street corners for those who needed to call a cab or change into a superhero. They even had doors. In the 1950s, they were also used for clown car-esque endurance tests. Just how many people can fit into a single phone booth?

For most of us the answer to that question is one. They were built to hold a single person. But there’s a story of how 25 South African students jammed themselves into a single phone booth in 1959 that set off the fad. They sent the pic of themselves to Guinness and achieved a world record. 

For those who doubt, the photos still exist that prove you can fit an impressive number of full grown adults in a phone booth if no one cares about comfort or breathing deeply. Colleges all around the world tried to match the feat, usually crapping out in the high teens.

The US record seems to be 22 students and by the end of 1959, few people were trying anymore so the South Africans went undefeated. 

6. Fake Moles and Beauty Marks

Beauty, it’s been said, is in the eye of the beholder. Throughout history, standards of beauty have changed greatly from place to place. But regardless of what a society values, you can rest assured there will be people trying to fake it in one way or another.

Once upon a time beauty marks were all the rage and a beauty mark, of course, is a mole. Back in Ancient Greece, a beauty mark on your cheek meant you were destined for prosperity, so people definitely wanted them. Later on, fake beauty marks made of things like velvet or even mouse fur became fashionable. 

Women in England would use them to cover blemishes like scars, which is where the idea of them adding to your beauty came from, since they covered up things that were not beautiful. By the 16th century they were no longer just cover-ups but attention getters. They would contrast with an artificially pale complexion to draw the eye of others.

5. Raccoon Coats 

Fur coats are no longer fashionable among most people thanks to most people appreciating you’re killing multiple animals for no reason except to make a coat. There’s still a market for them, but they carry a stigma. 

Once upon a time not only was fur considered fine, there was even a full length raccoon fur coat fad. In the 1920s, it was a fashion trend among college men to deck themselves out in a full length coat.

The trend was mostly in Ivy League schools because, even back then, you were paying some cash for a fur coat. Eventually the idea of men in fur coats became undesirable and by the 70s it was mostly associated with men of unsavory characters who might be pimps. 

4. Post Mortem Photography 

Few fads ever achieved the creepy heights (or depths) of post mortem photography. If a loved one had died, you could hire a photographer to come and take a picture of the body. Except it wasn’t just doing that. You’d pose the body in your home or outside or wherever in a way that suggested they were still alive. 

Infant mortality was high in the 1800s, and photography was rare. A couple would have many children and it was likely a few of them wouldn’t make it but, you know, you could always take a family photo after the fact and make it look like they were still there if you missed the chance when they were still alive. Some photos depict all the kids posing together, with one of them propped up against a wall because they were no longer living. 

When you think about it, it makes a grim kind of sense. It would be the last time you’d ever get a chance to take a photo of that person. That could account for why, in the 1840s, photographers took three times as many death photos as wedding photos. 

3. Pointy Shoes

You may have noticed in some medieval art that people, often jesters and bards and such, are wearing impossibly pointy shoes. This was not just an artistic choice from whoever made that art, it was a reflection of a fad of the times. Pointy shoes were really cool once. 

Pointy shoes, called crackows because they were blamed on Poland, rose to prominence in England in the 1380s. Men and women wore them and the more aristocratic you were, the longest your toes had to be. They’d stuff them with junk like moss and hair so they wouldn’t get floppy. 

In France, the country was already sick of them before the English even caught on. Charles V banned them in Paris in 1368. It wasn’t until 1463 in England when King Edward IV banned anyone who wasn’t nobility from having shoes with a point longer than two inches. 

The point of the pointy shoe was to show off. A longer shoe was more expensive, so it naturally meant you had more wealth. But it also symbolized the fact you were kind of lazy. Laborers wouldn’t wear silly, long shoes, only the aristocracy could. So it symbolized how you didn’t need to do manual labor because you literally couldn’t. Not in those shoes, anyway. 

Like so many things that have become popular in the years since, pointy shoes were a way of smugly telling the world you had money to burn. 

2. Panty Raids

If you recall the movie Revenge of the Nerds, you may remember one scene where the nerd fraternity engages in a panty raid. They break into a sorority house to steal underwear from the women there. In modern times that’s just short of mind-boggling and, let’s be honest, it was a little unrealistic even back in the ’80s. But the writers didn’t pull that idea out of thin air. The panty raid was a real fad back in the ’50s and ’60s.

In 1952, the National Guard had to be called to the University of Missouri to deal with 2,000 male students who went on a panty raid rampage. They kicked in doors and broke windows at sororities and dorms and stormed the halls. Some of the women tried to fight them off with broom handles and buckets of water. Underwear was stolen but so was money, jewelry and more.

Try to imagine being in your dorm as 2,000 dudes break into every possible opening in the building and tear your entire room apart. What was a fad in the ’50s is essentially the kickoff to a new Blumhouse horror franchise today. Back then, the governor of Missouri literally said “boys will be boys.”

1. Dead Fish Hats for Whales

Fads may seem like one of the silliest ways a human being can waste their time but if you think that, you need to know it’s not true. The human being part, at least. We didn’t corner the market on this idea and there is some documented evidence of orca whales engaging in the most amazing fad you’ll ever hear of. They used to wear dead fish hats.

Whales are often studied by scientists, and a lot of that study is simple observation. Track them, watch what they do, see if we can learn about how they live and communicate and all that good stuff. Back in 1987, a pod of orca whales was being observed by researchers when one of the whales began wearing a salmon on her head. The salmon was dead, and she just held it there above her snout like a little fish hat. 

The whale continued to wear her fish hat and, over the course of the next several weeks, other whales joined in. Whales in her pod started it first and then it spread to two other pods that the first pod had made contact with. Everyone was swimming around with a fish hat. 

Like a human fad, the novelty seemed to wear off for the whales and by the end of the six week period; it was done. No more fish hats. There’s never been a solid explanation for why it happened, at least not any more revelatory than they just felt like it.

While we use our senses every day, we usually do not tend to think about them very much unless some kind of illness, injury or other problem causes us a temporary or permanent problem. For most of us we have five senses, maybe six, and they do what they do. However, scientists believe it is much more complicated than just five senses, and it is amazing what they can do that you may not have ever known.  

10. Infrasound Could Be A Scientific Explanation For Some Hauntings 

Many people have been to a haunted house and reported feeling chills, presences, sounds or all sorts of other strange phenomena. And of course, plenty of people report these things outside of haunted houses — or at least outside of well known ones. Belief in ghosts and hauntings goes back forever, and is one of those things that is hard to convince someone of if they don’t believe, and even harder to convince someone against if they have had an actual experience of some kind. 

However, while it is always possible some people are experiencing something otherworldly, there are also scientific theories that could at least explain some of the things that people claim to be feeling. The thing is that sounds known as infrasound that can affect us, but are outside of the spectrum of audible hearing, could potentially be responsible for some of those weird feelings you get in old houses. A drafty old house that is constantly settling could have all sorts of infrasound pockets, and these could trigger your fight, flight or freeze response, and cause you to think all sorts of things if you include the power of suggestion. Movies like Paranormal Activity have made use of infrasound in an attempt to make their movie scarier without you even realizing what was going on. 

9. Some Blind People Can Use Sound Waves To Perform Echolocation 

We’ve all heard of the comic hero Daredevil, the blind man who has incredibly powerful hearing and can use it to see a perfect sonar picture of everything. In one situation when it is raining he can see so well with sonar he gets a perfect picture of a woman’s face. Many people have also heard that blind people get an increased sense of hearing, and that if they use this properly it can make a big difference. 

As like many things, there are levels of truth. Some blind people have claimed to learn to use echolocation to an incredible degree, but it is not a popular method of orientation and mobility. One man in California who is blind uses this skill to mountain bike and claims he can train others. There was also a boy, now deceased, who claimed to have taught himself how to play basketball while blind by using echolocation. While the ability of most fully blind people to do this is somewhat in doubt as it is not widely practiced, perhaps in the future many people will be mini-daredevils. This does not necessarily mean they will ever be able to see someone’s face in the rain, but being able to effectively play basketball with sighted people and mountain bike while fully blind is still pretty cool. 

8. If We Harness It Properly, Smell Can Be A Powerful Memory Trigger 

One sense we often don’t think of to use as a tool all that much is smell. Sure, we may use it when sussing out if food is good or not, but apart from that we don’t really think of it that much. However, the truth is that smell has a really useful purpose most people don’t know about. Smell is believed to be the most powerful memory trigger of all, and if you can use it properly you can really boost your ability to remember important things. 

There are also relatively easy ways to practically do this. If you are studying for a test, you could make sure to use a chapstick or lip balm that will have the same smell as one you use during the test. As long as your test allows lip balm, you aren’t breaking any rules by using it to power your memory. This also ties into context dependent memory in general, which means that if things are the same context in as many ways as possible, you are more likely to remember. You could boost the power of the smell trick by studying for the test in a room that is as similar as possible of an environment, desk and look as well, to increase your memory power further. 

7. An Anechoic Chamber Can Make Us Hear Things We Normally Wouldn’t

If you have ever wondered what it is like to truly be without any form of sight or sound feedback at all, there are experimental chambers where you can go to do this. Back in the day, the closest thing you could get was going to a place like Mammoth Cave deep underground, and having everyone turn off their lights for a bit. Of course, even in this situation no one is truly completely quiet, but an anechoic chamber removes all sound, and some are built to remove all light as well. 

The chambers have mainly been designed so that researchers can better understand the relationship between the feedback we hear or see and how our senses perceive it and translate that to our brain. The interesting thing is that when people cannot hear, they usually either hear things that aren’t there, or claim to hear their own lungs, or other internal organs working. In the special float tanks designed to take away sight as well, some people also report visual hallucinations that weren’t there as well. Researchers believe that this is likely because our brains are so used to feedback that when we don’t receive any, we make something up instead. 

6. You Think New Things Taste Like Chicken Because It Is A Mostly Blank Template 

You’ve almost certainly heard the phrase “it tastes like chicken”, in fact, there is a good chance you have said it yourself. Some people who are philosophical have speculated on this and wondered whether it is that most things actually taste like chicken, or that chicken is somehow compared to a lot of new things for some reason, even if it is not similar. With all sorts of diseases and other major things out there, scientists set out to answer this very important question. 

Studies on this showed that the reason we do this is because chicken actually has a very neutral flavor profile and texture when it has not been heavily seasoned and nothing particularly special has been done with it. It is also a food that pretty much every culture on earth is very familiar with and uses as a blank slate to create all sorts of dishes. This means that when you say that something tastes like chicken, it really means you are eating a new food that also has little flavor profile on its own, and is likely lightly seasoned in order to introduce you to it. 

5. Everyone Has A Unique Smell And It Is A Proven Part Of Sexual Attraction

When it comes to smell, most of us are of course aware of how we smell and how others around us smell as well. We shower regularly and wear deodorant or even perfumes. Many people who are looking for romantic or sexual partners will go to greater lengths in this regard, however, there is more to smell and especially more to your smell when you are dating than just showering regularly and using the right cologne. 

Scientific research has proven that people all have their own unique smell, regardless of their cologne or showering habits, and that a big part of this is genetic. You might have even noticed that a family visiting your house, even if they all use different soaps, will have a similar smell about them that is unfamiliar to your home if they aren’t around a lot. This smell can be involved in sexual attraction, although the question of chicken or egg can be a difficult one. In a scientific study women were tested with clothes from both their partner and a stranger without knowing which was which. The women reported feeling a sense of well being with their partners clothes, but had increased cortisol levels with the strangers clothes. However, while this proves a partner is attracted to their partner’s smell,  it does not necessarily mean the smell initially attracted them. 

4. Humans May Actually Have A Danger Sense Of A Sort 

Many people like to talk about having a sixth sense of some sort, or an ability to feel hunches or the like. Some people will swear by this and claim that they simply know when danger is coming and that they can feel it. Others argue this is a claim in the supernatural, and hard to prove at the very least. However, some researchers believe that there is more physiological evidence for this than most realize. 

The truth is that we may actually have a sort of innate danger sense that we can even train ourselves to understand and utilize better, but it isn’t anything particularly mystical. The fact of the matter is that we don’t actually have five senses. Some scientists say we have more than twenty, and others say we have more than thirty. Your body is constantly giving you all kinds of feedback you don’t even realize and sending it all to that amazing brain of yours. Your brain actually can quickly put a picture of things together, and tell if something is abnormal. This will set off physical alarm bells like goosebumps, adrenaline rushes or the like. 

3. Alcohol Tricks Us Into Thinking It Is Warming Us Up While Robbing Our Body Heat 

One belief many people have about alcohol is that it can actually warm our body up, and is great especially if we get lost out in the cold. There are even paintings and cartoons showing the famous St. Bernard rescue dog with a keg of brandy on his neck. Now, there were brave St. Bernards who long ago made their fluffy way through the alps helping lost travelers in the cold, but there is no evidence that they ever carried brandy, and little evidence they ever carried a keg of any kind of non-alcoholic liquid either. The entire idea of the keg is based on a painting by an Englishman who liked to draw animals.

The reason none of this was actually done was because drinking brandy or other alcohol will make you temporarily feel warmer, but it isn’t actually good for someone who is in need of emergency care. The reason for this is that alcohol is sending blood to your extremities and quickly warming you up, but this rush also quickly loses your body that heat.

2. Diving Too Deep Can Mess With Your Senses And Disorient You  

Any kind of deep diving always presents a certain element of danger, as there are a myriad of things that could cause you death or injury. Down deep almost anything wrong with your equipment could be a serious issue, and if you don’t estimate your oxygen properly you could have trouble getting back in time — there is also the rare danger of sea creatures attacking. However, even experienced divers with perfectly functioning equipment can still end up in trouble and get lost underneath the water. For this reason, most divers go with at least one partner. 

The issue is something called nitrogen narcosis that can affect your brain when you are deep underwater. The deeper you go and the greater the pressure gets, the more concentrated the air you are breathing from the tank. If you don’t regulate your breath very carefully, it is easy to get way too much nitrogen. Scientists do not entirely understand it as it is not something you can ethically test, but they believe that it slows down the cognitive process and can cause confusion . This is why some extremely experienced divers can get so confused by their own senses that they end up unable to realize which is up from down, even by watching their bubbles — if nothing else because that thought does not occur to them. 

1. When You’re Distracted, You Can Both See And Miss Something Right In Front Of You

Most of us tend to think pretty highly of our own ability to observe our surroundings. While we may not all think of ourselves as Sherlock Holmes, we do like to believe that if something silly or ridiculous happened right in front of us, we would notice it. Now, we all know that magicians can use sleight of hand to make us miss stuff, but usually it involves doing something really fast, while putting something in front of the thing they don’t want us to see. Most of the time they aren’t actually showing us what is happening directly, although this is sometimes implemented. 

One of the most well known examples of this does not come from magicians, but from a video that psychologists like to use to teach students about how easily we can miss things and how we can be tricked. The video shows several people tossing a basketball back and forth. You are asked to watch the video and see how many times the people pass the basketball. Most people are so concerned with counting the passes they don’t notice the man in the gorilla suit walking through the image and stopping to thump his chest. This is called inattentional blindness and is a well known phenomenon among psychologists.

Are you experiencing symptoms of imbalanced frequencies? Low cellular voltage? Psychic aberrations? Well, sit back and relax. There’s a wellness device just for you—even if you don’t feel diseased.

Warning: This list may contain misinformation, if the title wasn’t enough indication already.

10. Spooky2

Did you know that all medical conditions have specific electromagnetic frequencies? If you did, you’ve probably heard of the Rife machine. Invented in the 1920s, it delivers pulses of electromagnetism to cure almost any disease. Unfortunately for the inventor, and possibly for the world, mainstream science was hostile. The earnest engineer Royal Raymond Rife died penniless and embittered, and, in the years since, his already ruined legacy has been further sullied by snake oil salesmen and scandals.

More recently, however, especially during the feeding frenzy of COVID-19, Rife has made a big comeback. Marketed on Facebook as “the affordable Rife device for every home,” Spooky2 Scalar controversially promised to “protect you and your family from this terrible virus.” Supplied with a specific frequency for stopping the disease, as per Rife’s theories, the device came with additional assurance that “scalar energy provides optimal energetic support for the immune system.” The Federal Trade Commission disagreed and sent the company a warning. But don’t let that slow you down. The basic kit only costs $1,600 and comes in a reassuringly rugged briefcase with a cutesy smiling ghost logo.

9. Electropsychometer

Despite what Scientologists would have you believe, the E-meter wasn’t invented by L. Ron Hubbard. The Electropsychometer, as it was originally called, was invented by Volney Mathison, a chiropractor, for use in psychotherapy or analysis. This is ironic given Hubbard’s avowed antipathy to psychotherapists. But he had another use in mind: falsifying serious aberrations or criminality in a user with so-called “discreditable reads”. This is Scientology’s on-ramp.

The Church’s E-meters are assembled at Gold Base, California, a high-security compound under constant armed guard. Each unit usually costs $4,000, but you can pick up non-affiliated Electropsychometers or ex-Scientologist (FreeZone) E-meters for less. Just have a look on eBay.

They’re no more than crude lie detectors, polygraphs lite, galvanometers with tin can electrodes. Powered by leaky batteries, all they do is gauge your skin’s electrical resistance. Hubbard, however, believed (or pretended) the device could eliminate illness—for which the government sued him. Nowadays even the Church admits the device can do nothing by itself. But in the hands of an unscrupulous entrepreneur… Remember: you can’t help anyone until you get rich.

8. BioResonance Machine

Internal organs playing up? Don’t delay! Scan them for imbalanced frequencies and perform a non-linear statistical analysis today! All your organs, cells, and tissues emit electromagnetic waves, don’t you know, and their frequency changes in response to different stresses. In fact (or whatever), each disease has its own “signature resonance frequency”. So it’s possible to scan for pretty much anything without an invasive procedure. Simply attach the electrodes.

Developed (and presumably abandoned) by Russian scientists in the 1990s, this technology has now been perfected by the wizards at OBERON in Florida. Not only can the BioResonance Machine scan your organs for diseases; it can also heal them in no time—in the comfort of your home! It’s just a matter of altering your damaged cells’ frequencies via headphones.

There are no side effects, no chemicals, and no inconvenience, and it works best alongside good nutrition and other treatments… Yes, that’s consistent with placebo—but don’t be a sheep. Another bioresonance company, Rayonex Biomedical, actually has clinical proof of efficacy for cervical spine syndrome, or neck pain. Okay, so pain is easily treated by placebo, and yes, the study was conducted by Rayonex itself, and yes, they seem reluctant to carry out more trials given there’s no evidence—only anecdotes—for the other conditions listed. But did we mention it’s non-invasive?

7. Stimulations VII

Small cup size getting you down? Forget surgery. The Stimulations VII vacuum device can permanently, non-invasively, expand your lilliputian breast tissue. Just place the self-sealing dome over your bust and activate the pump for an enlargement of up to four cup sizes! It can even regrow breasts that were surgically removed by mastectomy. 

Well, that’s if you can find a Stimulations VII on the market. In the early 2000s, one ungrateful customer took the Iowa-based manufacturer, New Womyn, to court for refusing to refund her $2,000. She hadn’t read the small print. By “18-month money-back guarantee,” the company meant she had to use the device for 18 months before she was eligible for a refund. And she would only be eligible if, throughout that time, she’d visited a doctor once a month.

Fair enough. But she kicked up a stink all the same and poor Dan Kaiser, New Womyn’s CEO, was ordered to pay a $90,000 civil penalty.

6. BioPhotonic Scanner

If you’re the sort to wonder how many carotenoids you’ve got in your skin, this device is for you. If you don’t care, this device is also for you—because you should care, what’s the matter with you. Carotenoids are antioxidants that give orange, red, and yellow plants their color. They include beta-carotene, lutein, and lycopene, among others. And, according to experts, they may be one reason why eating fruits and vegetables lowers the risk of disease. What the BioPhotonic Scanner does is check that you’ve eaten enough (which, if you suffer from anterograde amnesia like in 50 First Dates and don’t like keeping a food diary, is no small thing).

Critics say it only measures carotenoids in the skin, and isn’t a reliable measure of your overall antioxidant status. But their only basis for saying so is the total lack of scientific evidence—which means their argument falls down as well. If there’s even a remote chance the BioPhotonic Scanner can measure your antioxidant health, can you really afford not to buy one? Just think of the money you could save at the greengrocer, knowing when to stop buying vegetables.

Plus, if your scan shows sub-optimal carotenoid levels, the same company that sold you the scanner will sell you antioxidant supplements. Beat that for convenience.

5. BioCharger

Sometimes all you need is some more “subtle energy”. Invented by Jim Girard, the BioCharger delivers pulsed harmonics, at a frequency of your choice, to weakly vibrating cells—re-energizing and revitalizing your natural magnetic energy, aligning your mind and body, and raising your cellular voltage. Sure, you can do the same by walking barefoot, releasing negative emotions, listening to pure sounds, and drinking alkaline water, but this is a lot more expensive.

According to the shut-ins at BioCharger, “over 90% of our day is spent indoors, blocked from nature’s vital energies.” They’re not suggesting you go outside; this machine is a high-tech alternative. Anyway, at $15,000, you’ll have to stay in to afford one. Don’t worry about the science; there are loads of testimonials. There’s also a 45-day guarantee, so there’s really nothing to lose besides the non-refundable $250 shipping fee.

With its plasma gas spectrum tubes and menacing red glow, the BioCharger certainly looks the part. Nobody has to know it doesn’t work. You could even make your money back by charging friends for treatment! That’s what Michael Nguyen does; the fecal transplant enthusiast is one of the BioCharger’s most high-profile advocates and even he admits it’s a glorified placebo about as effective as journaling. He still uses it, though, and so should you.

4. Electro Physiological Feedback Xrroid

In 2005, an Oklahoma woman suffering joint and leg pain wisely entrusted her health to the EPFX quantum biofeedback device. That her husband died using it for cancer didn’t matter; she believed it could nurse her back to health. The worst of her husband’s illness—the side effects of chemotherapy—she rightly blamed on the hospital. Neither does it matter that she died the same year.

EPFX salesmen have only good things to say. Even the developer himself, cross-dressing self-described genius William Nelson, who as a teenager helped NASA save Apollo 13, says it cures cancer and AIDS. Stinking rich from selling the things—17,000 of them at 20 grand a piece—he’s got a Budapest mansion with servants and a movie studio. When he’s not on tour giving pep talks to salesmen, he stars in his own movies about saving the world from the villainous FDA. He also has eight doctorates. But that’s all by the by.

EPFX treats the root cause of illness, not just the symptoms. It also has a display to watch healing occur in real time. Arterial cholesterol blockages, for example, appear as little white blobs that shrink and disappear during treatment. Similar to the BioResonance Machine, EPFX detects electrical imbalances (voltage, amperage, electron pressure, and so on) and immediately sets about correcting them.

3. Zapper

Finally, a wellness device that doesn’t bamboozle with a high-sounding sciencey name. Invented by Hulda Clark, doctor of physiology (okay, zoology), the Zapper kills parasites, bacteria, and viruses without harming bodily tissue. It does this by delivering low-voltage electrical zaps through the two supplied handheld electrodes. Not good enough? We can see you’re a sharp one. Why not ride business class with the Orgone Zapper model, which not only zaps but orgone-heals too. Just don’t use a Zapper if you’re wearing a pacemaker! Or pregnant, for that matter, as it can’t tell parasites from babies.

Even if you’re not suffering an infestation, the Zapper may still be for you. Some users report an aura-enhancing effect from just half an hour of use. Clark recommended only seven-minute sessions, but we use it for as long as we like. Just stop when you start seeing burn marks. And show no fear! Sweat can be a problem.

We know what you’re thinking. You can do all this yourself with a car battery, right? But Clark’s Zapper comes with positive offset square wave—and you don’t know what that is, do you?

2. Ozone generator

Hole in the ozone layer, bad. Therefore ozone, good. Therefore pumping the stuff right into your home, even better. It’s unimpeachable reasoning like this that brought us the ozone generator, improving the lives of thousands of investors and salesmen. There are always naysayers, of course: the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Lung Association, the Food and Drug Administration, and various so-called scientists, all of whom insist that ozone is harmful at high concentrations indoors. They’ll tell you it takes years for ozone to eliminate toxins, and that in doing it’ll release a lot more.

But forget about that and think about this: if it’s harmful to us, it’s harmful to parasites—bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens. So there’s really no surer way to banish stink and disease from your home. Besides, ozone is all-natural. Just plug the mechanical discharge unit into the mains and a high-voltage electrical field will do the rest, transforming all your smelly used oxygen into pure, clean ozone.

1. Hyper Dimensional Resonator

This one’s a little different. It’s a radionic time travel device that can help with astral projection by emitting unlimited white chi energy. Invented on a farm in Nebraska in 1981, it’s actually the souped-up version of an earlier prototype, the Sonic Resonator. The main improvement is a caduceus coil electromagnet. Operation is simple. Strap on the time-coil headband, spit in the witness well, add a quartz crystal, place the electromagnet between your legs, and turn the dials to the date you wish to visit. (Both go up to 10.) Then meditate while rubbing the rubbing plate. You should be transported—astrally, unless you happen to be sitting on a grid point or vortex, in which case physically—to your desired spacetime coordinates.

Users commonly find themselves aboard UFOs, in other countries, or in parallel dimensions and time lines. Some have returned with objects, only to see them disintegrate. Other times it’s more subtle. One user, after a seemingly unsuccessful session, woke up feeling strange like he was in the wrong place. His suspicions were confirmed when he opened the fridge and couldn’t find the cookie dough he left there. He called his wife at work and was astonished to hear there wasn’t any there in the first place. Another got to use it with the inventor himself, back in 1989: “When he turned it on, clouds formed in the room, and sparks danced around the chandelier.” At first it seemed like nothing had happened, but when she next sat down to watch her favorite movie, Shane, “dialogue she’d memorized was altered or spoken by different characters.” She said it scared her to death.

But don’t be put off; the Hyper Dimensional Resonator is a wellness device. Consistent use can nurture your spiritual growth. Just don’t get blood in the witness well; it’ll attract demons.

Movie villains enshrine themselves forever in our imaginations with their larger-than-life personas, their zany outfits, and of course, their grand and diabolical designs on life as we know it. While some villains’ plans are actually quite ingenious and would have been very hard to undo if not for the last-minute intervention of our intrepid heroes, these are not the type of plans we are here to discuss.

In this list, we will go over villains whose plans seem okay on the surface but are almost laughably bad once you stop to think about them for a minute. Spoilers ahead—you’ve been warned.

10 Emperor’s Plan at End of Rise of Skywalker Is Actually Completely Hilarious

At the end of Rise of Skywalker, we find out the Emperor is alive (with no explanation) and that he has made a thousand Star Destroyers that have planet-destroying super-lasers similar to the one on the Death Stars. However, there are some serious problems with Palpatine’s plan, not even getting into the fact that the element of surprise is useful, and he announces himself before his ships have left dry-dock. Worse yet, though, is that the plan, in general, has more holes than swiss cheese. The thing about the Death Stars is that they were extremely hard to destroy, the first one had a single weak point, and the second one would have been nigh impossible to destroy with a fleet from outside if they had managed to finish building it.

However, star destroyers are quite destructible, and rogue fleets of smaller ships, as we see at the end of the movie, would easily swarm and destroy them before they could get within planet-destroying range. Considering how large the Star Wars galaxy is presumed to be, the random people fighting the empire are just a motley group that Lando threw together in a day; it’s hardly close to the strength of all galactic privateers. Even if they got free, the Emperor’s group of Star Destroyers would have quickly become too spread out and been annihilated by tiny fleets of freighters and suicidal fighter pilots.^[1]

9 Once Scar Tricked Mufasa to His Death, All He Needed Was to Eat Simba

We all know the story of The Lion King, how Scar tricked Mufasa to his death while also making Simba self-exile from guilt, thinking it was his fault. And the truth is, Scar made an absolutely stupendous error. Once Mufasa was gone, all Scar had to do was eat Simba—the little lion cub would have posed no real threat at that size—and then kill and eat any other remaining lion cubs that were not his own offspring. After that, he could simply move in as the leader, and no one would question him.

In the lion kingdom, this is normal behavior. Whenever a new male lion or lions take control of the pride, they simply kill and eat any lion cubs that are not their own offspring and then replenish the pack with their own DNA. While it is a nice Disney movie, they wouldn’t go with such a dark plot. In real life, the story would have been a lot shorter, and Simba would have been in Scar’s belly. For those wondering, only about 20% of lion cubs ever make it to adulthood. ^[2]

8 The Machines in The Matrix Waste Power to Keep Humans Alive

In the first movie, we are told by Morpheus that the robots are keeping us alive in order to use us as giant batteries to keep them powered. However, this is one of the biggest plot holes in movie history because it really doesn’t make any sense. As far as the laws of thermodynamics and science in general go, this is a really dumb idea. Even if you could theoretically make it work, you could generate more power by just burning the resources you are using to keep the humans alive.

The only explanation—apart from it being a plot hole and the writers not understanding science—is that the machines, being partly sentient, are amused by us. Or they have some kind of affection toward us and actually don’t want us entirely destroyed. The battery idea is something they could want us to think, so we don’t realize we are basically a reality show for their amusement.^[3]

7 The Villains in Jurassic World Are So Dumb, Cartoonish Doesn’t Begin to Describe It

Jurassic World is a movie full of stupid choices. From leaving the door open while checking the pen of a supposedly escaped dinosaur (that we know can camouflage) to attacking said dinosaur with a bunch of guys on foot with tranquilizer guns and all the way up to the CEO of the park, who is a novice helicopter pilot, trying to destroy the escapee with a machine gun attachment and ending up crashing into a giant glass enclosure of pterodactyls.

What we are saying is that the decisions in this movie are already some of the dumbest imaginable, and the people in it are all already cartoonishly stupid, but the villains are beyond even that. InGen is up to its old tricks, and they want to train raptors to fight in battle for them, like trained dogs or something. And they somehow believe it will revolutionize warfare.

In order to test this theory, they do a live-fire exercise where they free a bunch of raptors and try to fight alongside them to kill another dinosaur. In order to punish them for their own hubris, the raptors decide to team up with the dinosaur they are meant to catch, and helpfully murder the rest of the park mercenaries they are supposed to be helping.^[4]

6 Erik Killmonger’s Plan Would Work if Wakanda Didn’t Exist in the Marvel Universe

In Black Panther, we learn the “poor” nation of Wakanda is actually a secret paradise of riches and technology, boosted by a rare metal called vibranium native to the region. This technology has allowed them to hide from colonialism, but some felt they should have fought back against it. This included the uncle of the current Black Panther, who was destroyed for his betrayal of his country, leaving behind a son in America.

That son, who goes by the moniker Killmonger, devises a plan to rejoin Wakanda, challenge T’Challa for the throne, and take control of the country. Then he plans to give out vibranium weapons to all the various rebel groups he has throughout the world and start a revolution where they take over and rule from Wakanda as lords of the entire world, finally righting all the wrongs of slavery and colonialism and making sure everyone lives in proper peace and harmony. The problem with this plan is that the Avengers exist, as do all the other superpowered heroes in this universe, one of whom already makes use of vibranium technology.^[5]

5 Professor Moriarty Isn’t Much of a Genius, Just a Jerk With a Lot of Shell Companies

At the beginning of Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows, we learn the world is lurching towards war, and Holmes suspects Moriarty is behind it all. After some very dangerous investigations that almost cost himself, John Watson, and John’s new wife their lives, he discovers that his arch-nemesis Moriarty has been secretly pulling strings to make things worse while being a good friend of the prime minister and a supposed man of peace on the outside. We learn that the real reason Moriarty went to incredibly absurd lengths to start an entire world war is so that he can “own the bullets and the bandages” while people fight. Things he owns by investing in hundreds of shell companies—something Holmes destroys by stealing and decoding his secret notebook.

The silly thing about all this is that there is no need to go to all this trouble and potentially end up getting caught—like he did—and being pulled over a waterfall. You don’t need to start a war to get governments to buy bullets and bandages. They buy them in peacetime anyway and stock up anytime you make things sound slightly worse. Moriarty would probably make more money over time by keeping tensions high but not starting a war, so countries still had strong economies to buy but felt the need to stockpile.^[6]

4 Ozymandias Plan in Watchmen Would Just Start a World War, Not Unite People

In the movie Watchmen, Nixon is in a third term after winning the Vietnam War with the help of superheroes and has now outlawed them further. One anti-hero named Rorschach believes former heroes are being targeted, but it soon becomes clear something more is going on. As the story progresses, the blue, radioactive, god-like superhero Doctor Manhattan is accused of giving people cancer and leaves the Earth in disgrace and sadness.

Not long after this, we reach the lair of another hero named Ozymandias, known to be the smartest and fastest man in the world. After a convoluted final battle, he activates several superweapons that destroy major cities in every major country on Earth, especially the nuclear ones. And he makes it look like it was Doctor Manhattan. The entire world somehow unites behind Doctor Manhattan as a common enemy, who believes it’s best to make them think he did it, so there will be peace and a permanent end to the cold war. He then leaves the planet willingly so the charade will continue.

None of this, of course, makes any sense at all. The fact is that Doctor Manhattan is still seen as an American hero, and even if he did destroy U.S. cities as well, this would almost certainly unite the countries against each other, not just make them angry at Doctor Manhattan. And nations would be especially angry at the USA for unleashing him.^[7]

3 Despite J.K. Rowling’s Justifications, Voldemort’s Plan for His Horcruxes Is Very Stupid

In book six of Harry Potter, we learn Voldemort has been splitting his soul when he kills people and hiding the pieces in objects to anchor himself to the mortal world. Harry, at first, is despairing, wondering at the enormity of the task ahead of them, as Dumbledore explains that all these magic vessels must be destroyed so the dark wizard will no longer be anchored to the Earth. Dumbledore reassures him, though, explaining that Voldemort would have been sentimental and wanted to put them in objects that had value. And also ones he would be able to get back to if he needed to. However, apart from vanity, there is really no reason to put them in anything special; it just makes it easier for your enemies to identify. And to make matters worse, putting them somewhere you can get to them gives your enemies a way to get to them and is basically pointless.

Even if he could put his soul back together, there is no indication he even wanted to, as he thought having it in seven pieces—”the most powerfully magical number”—would be a big deal. And finally, if he had put them in random objects and then magicked them so someone couldn’t get back to them, people would have to keep destroying his body, and he would keep coming back like Ganondorf again and again.^[8]

2 The Aliens in Signs Are So Incompetent It’s Like a Child’s Fevered Dream

In the movie Signs, our heroes start to notice strange crop circles, then weird noises on the radio. Before long, things have escalated to the point that they see a bizarre video on television where what looks like a gray alien is seen walking through the frame. Not long after that, they are huddled in their basement, expecting an impending alien invasion. As the movie progresses, we find that aliens who managed to spend unknown light years traversing the galaxy and have humanlike appendages somehow have more trouble opening doors than a common housecat and cannot break through wood. Also, by the way, they are incredibly weak to water.

When the movie ends, it is accepted that “they came for us, to harvest us,” which leaves us with some of the dumbest aliens imaginable. They are smart enough to have technology that can invade Earth but don’t have bio suits to protect them from water, the most prevalent thing on the planet—something they are deathly allergic to. And they are somehow trying to harvest us, despite us being mostly bags of squishy water with some crunchy bones within. Even after scouting first and setting up landing pads in our fields, they couldn’t even figure out how to protect themselves from water or a baseball bat… and couldn’t open a simple wooden door.^[9]

1 Thanos’s Entire Plan Is Absurd on Its Face

We all know of Thanos’s plan to snap half of all life out of existence using the Infinity Stones in order to solve what he believes is a serious resource problem throughout the galaxy. However, there are a few giant holes in his plan. For one, his plan also has him destroying half of plant and animal life, which doesn’t really fix the resource problem. Suddenly eliminating half of the people does free up some current resources, but it also culls a lot of people who may have been in important positions or doing important things. Now, for argument’s sake, say Thanos thinks of all this and makes sure the snap doesn’t affect people driving a car or flying a plane, so we don’t have extra casualties, leaves a fair distribution of people with the right expertise per region, doesn’t touch plant or animal life, and leaves almost nothing to chance.

Major problems still remain, though, because most resource issues are actually infrastructure related, and for argument’s sake, even if they weren’t, killing a bunch of people doesn’t change the fact people will just breed again. Thanos destroys the stones so no one can undo what he did, but that means he cannot do it again once populations inevitably boom again, especially with all the abundant resources they now have. In the end, Thanos just wants to commit genocide, and no positives would be gained. At least in the comics, they were more honest about it, and he just wanted to do it to be a big shot and impress the female deity that personified death.^[10]

Having a counterintuitive, provocative interpretation of a mainstream film is an easy but effective way to be heard, since it allows the person who comes up with it to ride the coattails of a well-financed ad campaign or a project that connected with millions of people. Consequently there are a lot of popular opinions of movies that were arrived at without much concern for accuracy. It’s not that this causes much real harm. Still, it tends to get in the way of appreciating an intellectual property’s real aesthetic value and messages. So we’re trying to help correct the record as much for the sake of the creators as we are just because people being loudly wrong is annoying. 

10. The Lion King as a Kimba Ripoff

The idea that the 1994 Disney pop culture phenomenon plagiarized the 1966 Osamu Tezuka IP Kimba the White Lion enjoyed massive, unquestioned distribution. For example, there’s this YouTube video, which got millions of views and is just a splitscreen of Kimba, 1994’s The Lion King, and the 2019 remake. Articles on sites like Cracked.com got in on the action, too, to the tune of millions of views. A passing glance will show why: Kimba sounds like the name of the Lion King protagonist Simba, after all. Lion King has dark-furred villain Scar and Kimba has dark-furred facially scarred villain Claw. Both feature a comic relief warthog, villainous hyena sidekicks, and so on.

Enter YouTube reviewer Adam Johnston to set the record straight with a very thorough video stretching more than two hours. For example, he pointed out how, in the aforementioned video, all the supposedly matching shots came from a 1997 Kimba reboot likely made to ride on the success of Lion King, not the 1966 movie which was mostly just episodes of the TV show edited together. This is especially obvious considering the massive difference in film grain, color saturation, and animation frame rate comparing a ’60s Japanese TV show to a feature film. 

Further he explains that Simba is “lion” in Swahili, and cited an explanation by NBC executive Fred Ladd that the show/character got renamed Kimba (it’s Jungle Emperor Leo in Japan) because “Simba” as a generic phrase couldn’t be trademarked and thus they couldn’t protect merchandising rights. The characters that are said to parallel those in Lion King do not have similar personalities to those in the Disney film and are largely insignificant bit characters. For example, Claw is nothing like Scar in terms of his relationship to the protagonist or his importance to the series. This is just scratching the surface of his very thorough analysis. But as Johnston says in the video, the real lesson about Kimba and The Lion King: it’s that people shouldn’t have passionate opinions on matters where they haven’t consulted the primary sources because some social media account or another will be able to manipulate you very easily otherwise.  

9. Joker is a Pro-Incel Movie

When Todd Phillips’s R-rated pop culture phenomenon debuted, critics and police were both spreading the message that the movie would likely inspire dangerous behavior from the sexually frustrated. Indiewire called it “a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels.” Even Time magazine said the lead character “could be the patron saint of incels.” Police were dispatched to theaters to guard opening screenings out of fears there’d be a repeat of the 2012 Aurora Theater shooting. 

While the protagonist Arthur Fleck is not portrayed as sexually active except in his imagination, he never expresses any of the grievances associated with incels — i.e., there’s no blaming of women or PC culture, as noted in The Guardian. All the people he explicitly lashes out at (Wall Street traders, network TV host Murray Franklin, his coworker, Thomas Wayne) are Caucasian men, and mostly higher class than him. The Guardian went on to devote an entire article to how the real villain of the story is government austerity because it costs Fleck his medication and contributed to the garbage strikes that have raised tensions in the city so high that there are massive riots inspired by Fleck’s crimes. It’s why the movie was enthusiastically embraced by such left wing media figures as Michael Moore.   

8. Eyes Wide Shut is a Coded Expose about Ruling Class Child Predators

In 2019, the arrest and subsequent highly suspicious death of child predator Jeffrey Epstein brought Stanley Kubrick’s final film back into cultural prominence. After all, it features a scene where Tom Cruise’s doctor character sneaks into a ruling class orgy and later has his life threatened if he lets the information out. It brings to mind suspicious aspects of Epstein’s conviction, such as the fact that his prosecutor, future secretary of labor Alexander Acosta, wrote him a “sweetheart deal” where all of his co-conspirators were automatically granted legal immunity, which is practically screaming a cover-up. Considering Kubrick’s prominence in pop culture that allowed him carte blanche with A-list talent, it feels quite plausible he knew horrifying things you and I don’t about the upper class. A theatrically distributed film would seem to be a way available to him to spread the word far and wide.  

The main problem with this theory is that, as Newsweek reported, Kubrick had been wanting to adapt the 1926 Arthur Schnitzler novella “Traumnovelle” since 1968, long before Epstein had been handpicked by Donald Barr for the career that would make his fortune. He had been explicit in interviews that his intent in adapting the book was more general statements about gender and fantasies than anything to do with classism. Furthermore, if Kubrick were intending to make such veiled accusations in such a highly public manner, why would Warner Bros. allow him to go through a 400 day shoot and release the end result at all if the threat of a powerful cabal hovered over the production? This won’t be the last time a version of this question is asked in this list. 

7. The Protagonist of Blade Runner is a Clone

Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner focuses on the plight of Replicants, essentially clones with artificially compressed lifespans that get forced into various forms of labor. Its protagonist is a sort-of police assassin named Deckard, who hunts down Replicants posing as humans, and who enters into a relationship with a Replicant while on a mission to take down renegade Replicants. In the course of the movie it’s revealed that a new model process of implanting memories in Replicants, pretty much the only way to ensure they don’t know they’re Replicants, is being rolled out. In 2001, Ridley Scott said in an interview that he meant for there to be a twist that wasn’t explicitly spelled out that Deckard was a Replicant himself. 

If his words were taken as gospel, then he just created a number of plot holes in the movie and a number of thematic problems. For example, as Scott Ashlin pointed out in his review, Deckard is much weaker than every single one of the Replicant fugitives he contends with. If he were walking around with implanted memories in his head, why would he receive a private audience to introduce him to that idea as he gets with the business mogul Tyrell? Most significantly, it takes away the dramatic irony of the biological human needing to rediscover his humanity through his interactions with artificial people. So no wonder the film’s screenwriter Hampton Fancher and star Harrison Ford were clear in interviews that Ridley Scott had it wrong. 

6. Black Panther Shows Isolationism in a Positive Light

When Black Panther was released in 2018, it was as much a pop culture event as a blockbuster film. To the surprise of many, however, white nationalists had a campaign to claim the film supported their values. The argument in brief is that the Afrofuturist utopia of Wakanda is so isolated that it surrounds itself with a dome of invisibility, and that the nation did so well by sealing it off supposedly was an endorsement of closed borders and similar policies. 

This ignores the fact that Wakanda’s isolationist position is established at the beginning as being a state in need of change. Having contended with the nuanced villain Killmonger’s challenge to his authority and calls for national vengeance, T’Challa’s arc ends with him ending Wakanda’s status as a secret and that aid will be provided to the rest of the world. That’s not to say every left winger has embraced it (consider how a representative of the CIA, Agent Ross, is presented heroically is massively off considering the CIA’s history in Africa) but the isolationist interpretation didn’t hold water. 

5. ET is a Christ Parable

If alternative film interpretations getting disproportionate media attention seems like a new phenomenon, let’s take a little trip back to the 1980s. In 1982, Seven Spielberg’s family alien movie was such a phenomenon that no less than the New York Times printed a lengthy editorial about it, drawing all the parallels that existed between the alien and Jesus of Nazareth. It was not a casual reading based on such obvious tropes as ET seeming to die and coming back to life or having healing powers. The author of the piece went into such lesser known aspects of the Christian religion as the Roman Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart to draw comparisons to ET’s glowing heart. 

However, even within the piece, the author admitted that these concepts long predated their presence in Christianity and thus aren’t specific references. Spielberg claimed that he anticipated these sorts of interpretations during pre-production, though since he called them “sticky religious areas” apparently he thought the response would be more negative than it was. It would be understandable to assume widespread Christian denouncement of ET by those who thought he was co-opting aspects of Christ, but according to a 2002 article by Christianity Today it led to more religious people embracing the movie. Spielberg was dismissive of the idea he would want to make a Christian parable, rhetorically asking how his mother who owned a kosher shop would feel about that. 

4. The Shining is About the Moon Landing

In 2010 The Atlantic published an article devoted to an independent blogger’s thesis that in 1969 Stanley Kubrick worked with NASA to fake the moon landing, no doubt inspired by the fact Kubrick was fresh off spending four years making 2001: A Space Odyssey. The interpretation tends to come from aspects of the production design over the plot of The Shining. For example, the infamous “All work and no play” is part of the confession because “All” looks like “A-1-1,” which is an abbreviation for Apollo 11.

Most significant to most viewers, because of the intuitive visual element, is the scene where Danny Torrance is wearing a sweater with “Apollo 11” on it. There’s no stated rationale for why Kubrick would feel like confessing his involvement in the alleged, presumably harmless debunked conspiracy in such an indirect manner. This hot take has been discussed on numerous websites as numerous websites and was included in the 2012 festival hit documentary Room 237. 

And speaking of hot takes that were boosted by being featured in movies…

3. Top Gun is a LGBT Film

For many viewers, by far the most memorable scene in the 1994 film Sleep with Me was a bit delivered by Quentin Tarantino that had been thought up by his Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, where he explains the subtext of the 1987 blockbuster film Top Gun. The rationale, beyond the presence of a lot of all-male crowds being photographed while slick with sweat — whether in locker rooms or playing volleyball — is that Maverick’s love interest Charlie Blackwood not only has an androgynous name but during the scene where she wins him over, she has her hair back and under a hat, which supposedly makes her look way more masculine. 

Yahoo Movies did an analysis of this theory in 2016. They interviewed screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. and he was clear that there was no intended gay subtext. Scenes were set in a locker room or playing volleyball because “it’s really a sports movie” and such locations would be where the characters exchange exposition. More significantly, Kelly McGillis was wearing a hat during that scene for continuity because it was a reshoot, and she had changed her hair color.  

2. The Predator is an Honorable Warrior

Let’s stay in the ’80s for a little bit longer and visit this 1987 action blockbuster. Ever since the iconic alien villain Predator (later dubbed a Yautja) killed most of a squad of American soldiers and then went hand to hand against Arnold Schwarzenegger, various sequels and fan articles on sites such as Gamespot have tried to paint him as an honorable warrior. The main basis for this is that the alien will only shoot humans that themselves have weapons.  

As critic Bob Chipman pointed out, the movie doesn’t support that interpretation at all. For one thing, the predator kills the soldiers without them having any way of knowing he exists, which is cold-blooded murder instead of any sort of honorable ritual. There has been no agreement, no communication, and the predator brings massively more advanced weapons, including cloaking technology. It’s less fighting duels than the widely derided practice of wildlife “hunts” where wealthy people shoot large animals that are practically chained to the ground. What’s more, when the predator is bested, he sets himself to self-destruct and laughs maliciously, which is less an honorable embrace of being bested than pure petulance. 

1. The Irishman is Sexist

Responses to Martin Scorcese’s 2019 Netflix movie The Irishman were somewhat polarized due to its length, the de-aging effects, and the relatively low key storytelling compared to Goodfellas or Casino but still generally positive. Still, there was one criticism which drew a lot of attention: Anna Paquin’s character Peggy Sheeran has very little dialogue and 10 minutes of screen time despite being married to the protagonist. The charges of sexism were sufficiently heated that a rumor emerged how Scorcese had allegedly ordered her not to say anything. 

For starters, Anna Paquin herself debunked the rumor that she’d been given any such insulting direction. Further, from the beginning, during the writing process Scorcese said to screenwriter Steven Zaillian that he wanted to give Peggy Sheeran more dialogue and screen time, but that during production he found it was more powerful to have her be a silent witness to the events. It also was more thematically appropriate because the movie is set during a time where ostensibly her character would have less of a voice, especially considering matters that “you don’t talk about.” To paraphrase an old proverb, sometimes the less characters talk the more they say. 

Dustin Koski’s further debunkings can be found on Twitter.