Morgellons Disease

[00:00:00] Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari. And I'm deaf now. I gotta keep it down, I'm too excited when we start the show.

[00:00:23] But today, there's a reason that I'm so excited, and that is because we are talking about a disease that might not actually exist. Or it might be a government conspiracy, or it might be caused by chemtrails, or genetically modified organisms, or alien nanotechnology. Or maybe, maybe it might be caused by scratching yourself until fibers from your t-shirt get stuck in the wound, and then you show those fibers to a doctor who tells you to see a psychiatrist. What?

[00:00:53] And then you go home and get on the internet and find 14,000 other people who are also pretty sure that the government put little fiber worms in their skin. I don't. This week, that's right, we're going to piss off the comment section by talking about Morgellons Disease. The scariest part of Morgellons Disease is that the people who have it, or at least believe that they have it, are in genuine, documented, measurable pain. Their lives fall apart, some kill themselves.

[00:01:21] The CDC has spent a small fortune investigating it, but after 20-plus years of research and debate, the question is really no closer to being settled than it's ever been. Is Morgellons Disease real? Is it fake? Or is it both? What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for... Time for... Scared all the time. Hey, welcome back to the show.

[00:01:50] As you know, we've been doing less housekeeping just to kind of keep the train moving here, but we got a really funny review on Spotify of all places, and we figured we'd read it and do a couple five-star reviews because it's been a minute. Yeah, you guys know it. You love it. If you leave a five-star review, we are continuing our promise to read your five-star reviews. So this one was left on Kids Who Kill Their Parents by Fede. He left the review that reads as such. Have I listened yet? No.

[00:02:20] Am I reading the title of this podcast in the dark trying to get my son to sleep? Yes. Did I almost scream and karate chop my son when he snored? Absolutely. And that's just reading the title. At Scared all the Time, They Deliver. Five stars. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. There's a lot going on in that review, too. That's what we like to hear. Thank you, Fede. I hope you never karate chop your son. It also sounds like from the beginning of the review, the kid wasn't asleep, and by

[00:02:49] the end of those sentences, a few sentences, the kid was snoring. So job well done. Job well done. Good job, Fede. All right. Cool. Well, let's go to another one. Since we're here, I'm going to do one by KCO. Five stars. When are we scared? Question mark. All the time. Exclamation point. I think that's a reference to our theme. Been here since the beginning, and I all caps love it. These guys put in so much effort. Well, thank you.

[00:03:18] To make this show amazing. I look forward to the weekly episodes, and I learn something new every time. And if you haven't joined the Patreon, what are you doing? Holy smokes. Their live stream every... I added holy smokes. Their live stream every month feels like a big friends hangout, and I look forward to it every month. The Discord is pretty sick as well. Great community to be a part of. Keep up the great work, Hoses Boys. I think they meant Hose Boys, but I like Hose Boys better. Hoses Boys is pretty good. Thank you, Casey. That is...

[00:03:47] We know you. We love you. And we try to make the live streams feel as much like a cookout without a grill as possible. We just hang out. We have some drinks. We talk about weird news. We recently instigated... It depends. We shouldn't be instigating anything. We're not instigating anything. We recently installed a fourth live camera. Oh, yeah. You'll have to come see to believe if you come to the live shows.

[00:04:14] And then after you do, you'll say, that's another thing you probably shouldn't have done. But yeah, we have a great time. So thank you, Casey. And that, I think, will do it for five... I have one more. Do you have another one up? I have one more I can do. What's your one more? Well, this one, just because it's open. AmeliaAH978 says five stars. And then this is probably a bad one to have chosen. Aristophanes? Pasadena? Is the subject.

[00:04:44] The body is... It's just fun listening to Chris's mispronunciation of various words in Ed's sassy quips. Wait, hang on. Have I mispronounced Pasadena? I don't know. But I was thinking there was going to be more mispronunciations in this that I would be fucked trying to pronounce. But it turns out it's not the case so far. Unless, I don't know if Aristophanes is correct. I'm saying I don't know. But anyway, back to how fun it is to hear you fuck up and me be fun.

[00:05:14] They've both reignited my love of old horror flicks and unlocked fears I didn't even know I had. Thanks for all the sleepless nights to come! Exclamation points. Thank you, Amelia. It's nice to know people like all the good things. Yeah. Thanks, Amelia. I'll make sure to mispronounce things just for you in the future. Pasadena. I don't know. I don't even know how I could have messed up Pasadena. But I guess I did. You Amelia'd. We'll say you fucking Amelia'd, bro.

[00:05:44] I Amelia'd it. All right, guys. Well, yes. Leave five-star reviews on Apple. Become a verb. They're easier to find. You can leave them on Spotify as well. We do check the Spotify comments. But preferably Apple. Become a verb. Get used on the show. Get read on the show. Speaking of using, if you use fucking YouTube, subscribe. Subscribe to our YouTube. We're doing a lot more video. And that's something we are not necessarily prioritizing, but working hard on.

[00:06:11] So it really helps out if people can subscribe and not just watch them. So on the list of things you can do and should be doing and we demand you do, it's the five-star reviews. And then in this case, also YouTube. We'd like to do more shit there. Yes. We're sort of like God in that we demand you do certain things and then you earn our eternal love. Exactly. So until we hear from you, enjoy Morgellon's disease.

[00:06:38] So, Ed, before we fully dive down the Morgellon's rabbit hole, I got to ask you, have you ever heard of this before? Or am I talking to a blank slate? You usually are. That's true. That's true. So, it's the guy that drove around the globe in his boat car? And was that disease scurvy? No, I think you're thinking of Morgellon. And I don't know what diseases he had, but I'm sure he had a lot of them because he was a sailor in the- Well, he drove a boat car. He was like, 1600s or something.

[00:07:07] He sailed a boat. I don't think it was a boat car. Do you remember in Age of Empires, you can put in codes and get like a Dodge Viper? I never knew that. No. And it gets shot missiles and stuff. Sick. Yeah. So, you can be like, nice ziggurat or whatever and just shoot a bunch of missiles at it. Anyway, that's where my mind went. So, in this version, this is a version of Morgellon that you have a cheat code where he gets a sick boat car. And he's firing disease out of it via missile. Yeah. Is that what this episode's about? No. Oh, shit.

[00:07:36] I'm going to leave then. This episode is about a disease that I think I first encountered back on this conspiracy message board that used to exist called AboveTopSecret.com. I think you've mentioned it. Yeah. I don't think it exists anymore, but there was a period of time there from right around when I graduated high school to when, you know, like 2010, 2011 maybe when I was out here that I was on that website a lot. It was a crazy- You moderated it? No, I never moderated it.

[00:08:06] But there was always something wild being posted there. And they were my introduction to a lot of bizarre internet conspiracy subcultures. But Morgellon's disease stuck with me because it's a lot like gang stalking. Oh, here come the emails. Yeah, that's what I said. We're going to piss off the comments section. Yeah, well, I didn't know what it was then. I thought it was a boat car. It's more like gang stalking than a boat car. It lives in a really interesting gray zone that fascinates me.

[00:08:34] Any topic like this fascinates me where you have people who are suffering from something and they are clearly suffering for real. But what they are suffering from is probably not what they think it is. And the fact that they can't accept what it might be is creating more suffering. Is that like a Munchausen by proxy thing? No, although Munchausen by proxy does sort of figure into the story of Morgellons. But we'll get to that in a minute.

[00:09:05] So Morgellons, for those of you who are uninitiated to this world, it is defined as, quote, from this is from PubMed, a paper on PubMed. The disease is defined as, quote, a disfiguring and perplexing skin condition associated with spirochettal infection and tick-borne illness. Ticks again, ticks. It has some similarities to Lyme disease. Lyme disease is fucking such a shit disease. All right.

[00:09:31] So people who are suffering from Morgellons disease, the symptoms are very, very weird. It is a person who believes that they have sores on their arms that grow strange biological fibers out of the sores. According to a paper examining the history of Morgellons published on PubMed, quote,

[00:09:57] The distinguishing diagnostic feature of Morgellons is spontaneously appearing ulcerative skin lesions that contain unusual filaments lying under, embedded in, or projecting from the skin. The characteristic filaments are microscopic, visually resembling... I'm sorry, microscopic? Microscopic. How do people know they have it? They, I don't think that it means, well, I should say the quote here is that the filaments are microscopic. I think kind of what it's saying is that they are often examined beneath a microscope.

[00:10:27] They are small, very small fibers that people pluck from these wounds. They are visible to the naked eye. Oh, as long as they're visible to the naked eye. But you can't tell, like when you pluck one off, you can't necessarily tell what it is without using a microscope. It's not like, oh, this is from a t-shirt or this is from a... It's a very tiny, thin filament. That's gross, though. I'd be pissed if that was happening to me. Yeah.

[00:10:53] It's visually resembling textile fibers that are white, black, or more vibrant colors such as red or blue. It's a very poorly understood condition for a lot of reasons that we're going to get into with a worldwide distribution and an estimated self-reported number of cases that reached over 14,000 people in the year 2009. Just that year? Or you're saying by 2009? By 2009, it was 14,000 people. Remember when I didn't sleep for three days?

[00:11:19] I was working on that project and then I kept telling you that I was seeing little moving hairs on the t-shirts. I was trying to make t-shirts to ship out. Yes. And then I was like, fuck it, the shirt's breathing. Yeah. So I was elucidating. Yes. But then I ended up washing that shirt. And so someone, whoever got that shirt who knows it's been washed because it looks washed, I was like, oh, I think the washing took care of it. Took care of what? The fact that it was breathing? It was breathing. I remember taking the shirt outside and it had these little red hairs that were on. It was crazy. Crazy.

[00:11:47] But anyway, I'm not saying that's what these people are experiencing. No. But I didn't sleep for three days and I thought my clothes had more gallons. Yes. So, you know, who knows where we're going to go with this. There's another symptom, though. In addition to the very strange fiber production that seems to be a part of this disease, some patients may experience a sensation known as formication. Have you ever experienced formication, Ed? I don't know what that is. It's not what it sounds like. Is that like when you wake up in the morning as a puddle and then later in the day you're yourself again? Return to your form? Yeah.

[00:12:17] No. Formication is the scientific term for stinging, biting, creeping, and crawling sensations on the skin. Oh, ew. So you've got fibers, you've got creeping, stinging, biting, crawling sensations on the skin, and the symptoms are not limited to just those. In formification or whatever, formication. Formication. Chemo-califormication. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say.

[00:12:40] Formication is simply like if there was actually a centipede on your arm, would it still, you wouldn't describe that sensation as that? It's only like if you're having a sensation. That's a good question. I don't know if formication is only the definition for that term if there's not actually a physical object causing it. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I didn't look it up to see what the difference would be between stinging, biting, creeping, and crawling sensations caused by a real bug versus a fake bug. Yeah.

[00:13:10] I also wonder if a doctor would ever ask that. They'd probably just be like, are you feeling stinging? They wouldn't be like, any formication? No. Probably not. Probably not. It's just a, I think it's a funny word and I'd never heard it before. I didn't know what it meant. So I wanted to let the audience know it's another great bar trivia answer. Yeah. Formication under consent of the king. And if you want someone to go home with you from that bar, don't mention that you are currently experiencing formication. There's other symptoms too.

[00:13:36] According to a study of Morgellons that the CDC undertook in 2012, 70% of participants reported chronic fatigue lasting six months or more. Okay. 71% had musculoskeletal complaints. Okay. 59% showed cognitive impairment on neuropsychological testing. I think I have this. Sufferers would call that brain fog. I have this. Yes. Well, you don't. I have Morgellons. You don't have Morgellons. Not yet. We hope you don't.

[00:14:01] Although, yes, brain fog includes memory loss, confusion, and difficulty holding a thought, which I feel like we run into multiple times per episode. I have all the things. I'm a sting away from being Morgelloned out. Some people report even stranger symptoms like black sweat and seed-like objects emerging from the pores in their skin. Okay. I have two things away from Morgellons now. Quality of life scores were significantly below national norms. Yeah. When seeds are falling out of you. Now you're back up. Now you're back up. Okay. Quality of life is, yeah, that's true.

[00:14:30] I'm below national norms. And their quality of life scores are often worse than patients with something a little bit more traditional like psoriasis or eczema, which are also skin issues. Yeah. Skin issues. I think it's really interesting. And, you know, I'm not trying to draw connections here other than to say, I think it's interesting that some of these symptoms, with the exception of like black sweat and fibers, are found in other diseases that are really hard to study.

[00:14:58] Fatigue, joint pain, cardiac complications. Like a fibromyalgia type of thing. Cognitive difficulties and neuropathy are all symptoms that are commonly reported by Lyme disease patients and fibromyalgia patients. I got that one. And long COVID patients. So is there a connection between all of these things other than the fact that they, as we'll get into, tend to be dismissed because they disproportionately affect women and are built around symptoms that are hard to physically diagnose? I don't know.

[00:15:28] But I do find it interesting that there's a common thread, excuse the pun, between all of those diseases. I think it'd be really interesting if COVID, one of the symptoms of COVID was black sweat or like ejecting seeds. Yep. Because that would be like, everyone knows it's November, COVID season's on the rise. Like stay away from anyone bleeding black sweat or Johnny apple seed types. They have pods emerging from their necks. Yeah. That would be really interesting.

[00:15:56] Like, I don't even know what the world would be. I don't even know what the world would be because, you know, you know, like, remember when COVID, like we had a vaccine, but it was whatever, but you still go to weddings and people were like, oh, I tested fine. And, and you never know, you know, people were lying. Yeah. Like you fully know people were lying to your face. Like they definitely were coughing like a day earlier. They just didn't want to, but the idea of someone lying to you, like the way my niece lies when she was a little kid where they're just fully like drenched in black sweat.

[00:16:24] And they're like, I don't even have it, bro. Like I'm coming. It's fine. It ain't nothing, man. This isn't COVID. It's a false negative or whatever. I've been sweating like this since I was a kid. This is normal. What is very unique about Morgellons in comparison to some of these other diseases that are difficult to diagnose because of their psychosomatic symptoms is that it does seem to have these very, very weird, painful, physical symptoms.

[00:16:54] Yeah. I pulled a few from a list compiled in that PubMed study and boy, oh boy, one 65 year old female reported sensations of fibers in her eyelids, quote, wormy things coming from her skin. And she self-diagnosed herself with Morgellons. As a person who, without the use of drugs, when I stayed up for three days to do that thing, that project. Correct. I guess my first question would be like, have you gone to sleep? Like when's the last time you went to sleep?

[00:17:20] Because I saw shit, like I was experiencing symptoms that were bananas and that was only three days of being awake. Yeah. Well, we've talked about in the sleep episode about the things that can happen to a person when they haven't slept at all. A lot of people who suffer from Morgellons also have been found to suffer from either some sort of like benzo addiction or stimulant addiction or insane degrees of depression. Took the vaccine. Yeah, had gotten the vaccine.

[00:17:50] Had gotten it. Yeah. I mean, I see enough paperwork is going to be. Well, I one of the things and I kind of left this out because it felt like I was tacking on a politically tricky subject. No problem talking about it. To the end of the episode. I put in my body at the end of the episode. But during COVID, Morgellons had another had like a second life kind of on TikTok because people were posting all these videos with absolutely no creation of where they came from or anything.

[00:18:17] But videos being like, look, you can see Morgellons fibers on the face masks that we all have to wear. And it became took on another life of its own during COVID. Sure. Also tied to the vaccines. So I pulled from this PubMed study, I pulled a list of symptoms and people who claim to suffer them so that you can kind of get a sense for how varied and extreme some of the symptoms of Morgellons can be.

[00:18:44] A 65 year old female who self-diagnosed herself with Morgellons reported sensations of fibers in her eyelids and, quote, wormy things coming out of her skin. OK. 37 year old female who says she had a black substance coming out of her hands. It's called sweat, lady. We all do it. What's the big deal? I told you I'm fine. Yeah. A 44 year old female who reported crawling sensations, strings and parasites coming out of her eyelids, eyelashes and ears. A lot of ears.

[00:19:13] I mean, a lot of eye stuff so far. A 65 year old female who reported crawling sensations and believed a snake had migrated in her body. We've heard that before in the one of the drug episodes. There's a lot of snake stuff. And spider stuff in the LSD. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was like people went to the ER being there's a fucking snake in me.

[00:19:31] And then a 46 year old male who self-diagnosed with Morgellons and said that he was experiencing crawling sensations, cocoons emerging from his body and also believed that he was being pursued by the Japanese mafia, which is not a traditional symptom. That's not a symptom. But it was on this list. I watch a lot of football, which is a lot of pharmaceutical commercials. Yeah. Never once it was like if the Japanese mafia chases you for longer than six hours. Please see your doctor. Like not once.

[00:19:59] The way that these symptoms manifest. I mean, these symptoms all sound like something from a body horror movie or some other Nicholas Winding Refn movie if it involves the Japanese mafia. But the way that these symptoms manifest is also much more extreme than, you know, feeling this brain fog and then looking at your arm and being like, oh, huh. Is that a weird little string? What is that? Did the Yakuza do this? They stitched me up. Are my organs still here?

[00:20:27] I mean, the first things you had said so far, it is funny how much, not funny, but interesting how much overlap there was with some of our Bad Trips episodes. Yes. There's very much, it does seem that there is a mental component to a lot of this. But we'll get to that in a minute because the way that this often starts is just with an itch. Imagine waking up one morning with the sensation of formication, of something crawling under your skin like little bugs burrowing through your muscle tissue.

[00:20:57] Mm-hmm. That itching gets so intense that you can't stop scratching it and you scratch so much that you break the skin. I have never once. And even after we've done our episodes on like fucking skin stuff. Flesh eating bacteria. Flesh eating bacteria. I'm still guilty of, I don't think I've had a mosquito bite once in my life that did not become a scab. Like, I feel like I'm not even itching a lot. Yeah. And it already is like, well, that's bleeding. The itching that these people report is on levels way above mosquito bites.

[00:21:27] Yeah, I imagine it would be. It is a consistent, aggressive, painful. Like body horror. Yeah, kind of itching. And they scratch so much that they break the skin. And when they break the skin, that's when they often see the fibers. They don't pop out of their skin like snakes in a can or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But most people don't even realize that they're there until for whatever reason, they end up looking more closely at the wounds that they've given themselves from scratching.

[00:21:56] You ever look at yourself in a mirror a long time? Yeah, it's no good. It gets weird. It gets weird, yeah. And so I think if you focus on something, your eyeballs do tend to like fill in gaps that weren't there necessarily. Sometimes. But some of these people report that they've not only found these fibers on the wounds, but when they have plucked them out of their body, a new one grows back in its place. Hydra. Two grow back in its place.

[00:22:21] So at that point, if you, Ed Voccola, are sitting at home with a weeping sore on your arm that you've scratched through the skin. Crying? Like oozing. Weep, you know, like it's all blistery and raw. Okay, yeah. And you've plucked these fibers out of your skin. You're going to go, well, what the fuck is this? This isn't good. I'm not supposed to have. I'm probably saying that a couple of times leading up to this moment. Yeah.

[00:22:48] But the mistake you might make is to do. Take you to a lab? No, no, no. That would be a very smart and good thing to do. But a lot of people do what a lot of us do when there's a mysterious symptom. Oh, you Google fucking. You go to WebMD. You go and you Google fibers growing out of skin or fibers in my wounds or strange fiber on body. And you will find out very quickly that you are not alone. Fuck, man.

[00:23:16] There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people all over the world experiencing this exact same thing. And if we can get them together, we'll save a lot of money on fabric. We can just make bolts out of these people. Yeah, they say, you know, the economy is having a rough time. I think if we could just pay the Morgellons community. Yeah, it's like donating plasma. Yeah, they donate those threads. We bring the cost of fabrics down. Clothes become cheaper. They have a sense of purpose.

[00:23:45] You might have just saved the world. Put a giant sweater around the world, man. So if you make the mistake of getting online, you will find that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people experiencing this exact same thing. They have a name for it. Morgellons. They have a website. They have a community. And just like victims of gang stalking, these people are furious that no one will take them seriously. But they're going to doctors. Well. Okay, well, I'll let you continue.

[00:24:12] Before we continue, I do just want to say that if you are in need of community, we've got one ready and waiting for you over at our Patreon. Oh my God. For just five bucks a month, you can get ad-free early release episodes and brand new episodes of our bonus show, New Fear Unlocked, when they drop every other Friday. Now to the history of Morgellons. Oh my God, yep. That was great. I wasn't expecting that. But now I'm interested in the product you're offering. So great. Jeez, Ed.

[00:24:39] What an episode to introduce our listeners to our new friends over at Rula. Oh yeah, yeah. If you made it this far into Morgellons and thought, wow, I may have some things I'd like to discuss with a licensed professional. Good news. As many longtime listeners are well aware, I've been discussing things with a licensed professional for more than a decade. And getting therapy is something I do truly encourage everyone to do, especially in tumultuous times like these. Because it doesn't matter what scares you or what keeps you up at night.

[00:25:09] A good therapist can help you work through all kinds of fears. The ones that live in your brain, the ones that feel like they live in your body, and the ones that follow you around everywhere you go, like the clowns in the van outside my house. That's why we're talking about Rula. Rula is a healthcare company that helps connect you with licensed therapists and mental health providers who actually take your insurance. Rula partners with over 100 insurance plans, and Rula patients typically pay an average copay of just $15 per session when using insurance. Depending on your benefits, it could be as little as $0.

[00:25:38] And I can tell you, as someone who uses insurance for therapy, that is crazy good. I've never paid that little for therapy. And I feel like if Rula can offer you that, you have no reason not to seek it out. And because we all have different fears, anxieties, stressors, and nightmares, Rula also helps you find someone who actually fits what you need. Which again, is something that I had trouble with when I went to find my first therapist.

[00:26:04] I didn't know how to find somebody who actually matched with the problems I was dealing with. I just kept walking into a clinic asking for help until they gave me somebody. Oh my God, that's one way to do it. But Rula considers your goals, preferences, background, and state requirements, and then gives you a curated list of licensed in-network providers. Hell yeah. And appointments can be available as soon as tomorrow. And Rula supports you through the whole process from finding the right therapist to help scheduling appointments and checking in on your progress.

[00:26:32] Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. So visit Rula.com slash scared to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com slash scared. Because you deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. So again, go to Rula.com slash scared. That's R-U-L-A dot com slash scared. And tell them the hose boy sent you.

[00:27:00] And the best way to do that is again to use the code scared. Yeah. While I always assume that Morgellons emerged fully formed from the swamps of the internet, it turns out that the history of the disease is even weirder than that. The popular history of Morgellons can be traced back literally to one patient zero named Drew Latow. I was really expecting their name to be Morgellons. No, no, no. Okay.

[00:27:28] Who was only two years old in the summer of 2001. According to an article written in 2006 for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which is where the Latow family lived as Pittsburgh. Called Latow turns five? No, no, no. He was two in 2001. So he's seven or something now. This was a look back at the history of Morgellons by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And quote, Drew says mommy and daddy and milk. And often when he points to an irritated patch of skin under his lips, bugs.

[00:27:58] His mother. Oh, that's horrible. It's like if your kid said goes, bro. His mother, Mary Latow, a graduate of UMass Boston with a degree in biology, found this really weird. She'd already taken Drew to several Pittsburgh dermatologists and pediatricians, but nothing they prescribed for eczema or atypical scabies ever stopped his itching. One night as she was applying his scabies cream, which is the thing I hope to never apply to a child. It sounds terrible.

[00:28:26] And that I hope someone would have applied to that poor old person who had eaten alive. Yeah. Who's eaten alive by the scabies. I don't think by the end they had really anybody helping them out. Unfortunately. It was a really sad story. Go listen to our eating alive episode. For more sad stories. For more sad stories. But as Mary was applying the scabies cream to her son, quote, something fiber-like emerges from his skin. As a biologist, she was mesmerized. But as a mother, she's horrified.

[00:28:52] She collected a sample of the strands from Drew's skin and was surprised that they glide right off like filaments from a dandelion. She places them onto slides and examines them underneath an $8 Radio Shack microscope. Wait, did she go buy it or did she just have that? I don't know. How seriously do you take your job? That's what you've committed in terms of investment? $8? Well, I think this was maybe just the home microscope. I imagine that at some point she probably did take these to a more powerful microscope at work. Absolutely. Sure. I just...

[00:29:21] Interesting that she had it at all. Doesn't seem... Yeah, it seems like if you had access to a nicer microscope and your son was suffering from mystery disease, you would just elect to go straight to the nice microscope. Yeah. You wouldn't start with the at-home magnifying glass. But in any case, according to the Post-Gazette, Mary calls what she's discovered fibers, which becomes the term for what these are. And at first, she hopes to find that they're just sweater strands or some simple fungus that she's unfamiliar with.

[00:29:50] But after months of studying, she finds something else. Yeah, months of studying on that fucking $8 number? I don't know if she... Like, are you going to go to work with this? You're a biologist or whatever. She... I need to know if she got time on a better microscope. After months of studying, she finds something else. Something that sometimes appears red or black or blue and fluoresces beneath the proper light.

[00:30:15] So I think this months of studying did come after she took it to other labs and microscopes. I don't think this was all at home. Do you think she gets new ones every day from the kid where it's like, could you please squirt out a few more? Or can you please pop a few more seeds for me? She was taking a lot of fiber samples off her son. Okay. Her first description of these fibers was that under magnification, they appear ribbon-like and scenocytic, which means they didn't have cell walls.

[00:30:43] So she was examining this beneath a nicer microscope than her $8 radio shackle. Or we all think we need a nicer microscope than $8 does the trick. That's true. What we might be learning from a scientist here is that the nice microscopes are way overpriced. Superpriced. Also, RIP, God bless Radio Shack. According to the article, Ms. Latow tried to prove herself wrong dozens of times. Logic tells her people don't sprout fibers. Plus there's Spider-Man in the first Sam Raimi one where it's crazy. Well, that's totally different.

[00:31:12] Oh, I'm sorry. Ejection. Remember he looks at his hand and the weird little barbs, like spider barbs, come out of his fingertips. And it's really gross. And we don't need to know how Spider-Man does, it turns out. No matter how many times she swabs her son's sores clean and then covers them with a sterile, non-fibrous wrap, the fibers always return. So she brings Drew to a doctor. And then another doctor. And then another. And another. Texas Monthly says she went to at least 12 doctors, including doctors at Johns Hopkins.

[00:31:42] And none of them could find anything wrong with this kid. They couldn't get fibers. They couldn't get fibers. They suggested that the fibers Mary was bringing in little plastic bags and showing them were threads from Drew's clothes that were just affixing themselves to the sores. In fact, the Johns Hopkins specialist, a guy named Dr. Fred Heldrick, who was specifically known for solving medical mysteries, wrote a letter. That's what he's known for? He's like a doctor house.

[00:32:12] He was like a guy who you would bring weird cases to. Yeah, when all else fails, this guy will, in the third act, figure it out. Dr. Heldrick, not as good of a name as Dr. House. But he wrote a letter to Latow's referring physician that basically said, your patient's mom needs to see a psychiatrist and I hope she stops using her son to explore whatever is wrong with her. Oh, wow.

[00:32:33] Another specialist at Johns Hopkins flat out refused to see her and suggested she might have Munchausen by proxy, which is the psychological condition where a parent fabricates or induces an illness in their child for attention. It's a really sad mental illness that... She means it'll probably be the next episode. Yeah. Yeah. But Mary said, no, no, no, that's not what's going on here. There's something wrong with my son and we need to figure out what it is.

[00:32:59] So she started scouring the internet for any evidence that other people were experiencing the same thing. But remember... This is like 2003, 2004? This is 2001, 2... Oh my God. Yeah, you had to find someone's Fortune City website. But here's the thing. This was the first case of Morgellons. She found strange stories that sounded similar often on Scabies message boards, but nothing that defined what Drew was experiencing.

[00:33:23] And then she found a letter from a man named Dr. Thomas Brown, who had written a description of exactly what her son was experiencing. And this is written before, technically posted before she went to see all those doctors? Yeah. It was posted way, way, way before she went to go see those doctors. I am printing that out and bringing it to all the doctors. He wrote this letter 330 years before Mary found it, all the way back in 1670.

[00:33:52] Who typed it and put it on the internet? Well, it wasn't... It wasn't... I don't know if it was typed or where she found it. I'm saying like it... How was this even doing on the internet in 2001, I'm saying? Like one of the Dead Sea Scrolls you found this in? Like... Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls probably were typed up and put on the internet somewhere too, so... For me though, this is very vindicating for her and me. Yeah, it's a great turn of events for Mary. She was thrilled.

[00:34:18] Because she felt for the first time that she may not have been the first person to discover this disease. It's just that it was so unbelievable that its existence had slipped straight through the cracks of medical science. An article published on Jezebel takes us back in time. Okay. It tells us, quote,

[00:34:54] Their mothers tried to ease their pain by rubbing their backs and coating their skin with honey and new milk. And eventually, the mothers noticed, quote, coarse hairs emerging from their children's skin. They would grab, quote, little pinchers as women used to pull the hair from off their eyebrows and pull the offending coarse hairs from their children's bodies one by one. The extraction was the closest they had to a cure. The mothers would ritualistically repeat the process over and over and over again

[00:35:22] until the children stopped crying and convulsing and until the hairs stopped sprouting from their racked little bodies. Okay, so with the removal of hair also was an easing of the pain. Okay. As early as the 14th century, physicians and men of science had visited this region of France to witness these painfully diseased children and left detailing the horrifying screams of infants, the rituals of their mothers,

[00:35:47] and the detrimental effects that the inexplicable coarse hairs had on the well-being of the entire community's children. And eventually, it's this mystery that drew the attention of British physician Sir Thomas Brown, who visited the region in 1630. It was a little unclear to me if he waited 40 years to write a letter about this because he didn't write the letter until 1670, or if perhaps, you know, that's the only letter that survived and he wrote about it earlier, but we lost that information. Sure.

[00:36:14] But it was this passage that caught Mary's attention. Quote, Hairs which have most amused me have not been in the face or head, but on the back. Amused? And not in men, but children, as I long observed in the endemial distemper of the little children in Langdok called the Morgellons, wherein they critically break out with harsh hairs on their backs, which take off the unquiet symptoms of the disease and delivers them from coughs and convulsions. I'm so, wait, hold on.

[00:36:42] So Morgellons is like an area where these people lived? It's, Jezebel says that his description of the disease as Morgellons was a bastardization of what more renowned physicians called Masculus or Maskellons. So I think Maskellons or Masculus was the term for what they decided these kids were suffering from. Okay. But he called it Morgellons. And he thought it was hilarious. I don't know if he thought it was hilarious.

[00:37:09] I'm not sure amused here is being used in the modern sense of... The part that really had me slapping my knee was when they would cry because of the back hairs. Let me tell you what. These kids made me LOL. LOL. At the end of the day, though, his errors didn't matter to Mary because she matched the symptoms described in this letter to the disease devouring her kid's body. And it's older than her complaint. Yeah. So fucking Morgellons is real.

[00:37:36] And for the remainder of this podcast, you have to dissuade me on that. Mystery solved. Well, I do just want to pause to point out that despite Mary's best intentions to help her son and others that she'd run into online, it is this sort of loose attention to detail that doesn't really help her case. Because what her son is experiencing sounds sort of similar to Morgellons. But at no point does it seem that he grew large, coarse black hairs that you could pluck out with tweezers.

[00:38:06] Nor did it say that when she removed the hair... That the itching stopped. ...that it subsided. And furthermore, while I'm not sure Mary knew this at the time, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, but it turns out that the Morgellons tormenting the 17th century children of Long Dock had a much more prosaic explanation. Not long after Brown penned this letter that she found hundreds of years later, science determined that those coarse hairs, quote unquote,

[00:38:32] that were emerging from the children of Long Dock were likely just the bristled legs of the sarcopets sky bay. What? Sarco... I don't care about the word. Sarcopets sky bay or itch mites. So they were scabies? Yes. They were scabies. By the time... We gotta stop... Fucking Jesus, man. By the time... We gotta stop having bugs in us. By the time the Italian stud Giovanni Cosimo Bonomo

[00:38:59] identified the existence of the scabies mite in 1687, this word, Morgellons or McKellons or whatever, had already entered the lexicon. So my point is, the reason that Mary felt this disease had like slipped through the cracks of history was not because it was a medical mystery that no one could understand. It's just that no one had figured out what scabies yet. And once they did, they just renamed it scabies. I'm never gonna Google it. I'm never gonna look for a fucking photograph.

[00:39:27] It will not be on the screen of the video version. But like, I guess in my mind, I thought scabies were more microscopic than like, ew, a leg. Watch out. Like, it's big enough for the naked eye to like big old leg because the hair is not super small, you know? Yeah. Look, I don't... Don't Google it. I don't know anything about... And nor should we. Scabies. Nor should our audience. Well, probably... I know they ate that one woman alive that one time. Yeah.

[00:39:57] Might be a werewolf with how hairy she's getting. That's what I'm saying. I thought it was maybe more microscopic. It does seem like... I'm doing some real-time producing here. And it does seem that scabies are essentially invisible to the naked eye. There you go. But they look like tiny black... They may look like tiny black dots on the skin. Dots. Dots are not hair. Dots are not hair. So Morgellons is back, baby. Morgellons is back on the table, baby. Yeah, because now I'm not convinced that it's just scabies. So...

[00:40:26] I thought you were going to say that people had like centipedes in them. No. No, no, no. Centipedes are nowhere near the story of Morgellons. No, I know. But I'm saying that... I'm saying scabies is not a circle that goes into a circle hole or whatever. Yeah. I don't know... I don't even know what I was trying to say there. But I'm saying it's not one for one. I'm saying scabies is not for me close the door to Morgellons. Magellan. MacGyver's. Morgellons. Okay. Well, in any case, you'll remember that Mary was convinced that Drew did not have scabies.

[00:40:56] So she was not going to be satisfied with this solution. She was aware. Yeah, because scabies don't come out neon green and shit. And she launched a website called the Morgellons Research Foundation to act as a hub for people suffering with the disease and to gather and trade information. Where was that? It's not scabies.org? That would have been a much better name. It's hard because you can't believe an apostrophe, but... On March 29, 2004, she formally established the Morgellons Research Foundation as a non-profit group headquartered in her home. In non-scabies group.

[00:41:25] Quote, there, self-identified Morgellons sufferers shared their symptoms and exchanged homemade remedies to alleviate their pain. They also obsessively documented their symptoms. Now, I don't want to... I just feel, you know, everyone's got a different body, whatever. But if none of their remedies was like, have you tried just pulling the hairs out and the pain goes away, then it does slip a little bit further from the old story. Yes. Because it seems like the old story, which they were like, you know, Janine and Ghostbusters hitting the button being like, we got one.

[00:41:54] And like, her being like, finally Morgellons is real should also... You can't like window shop with that. Like, what else about that story? Like, yep, there are the hairs. Great. If you pull them out, the pain subsides. Right. Then it's like, fuck. Then this is definitely Morgellons. But if they were like, the only thing that makes it go away is like honey and almond paste or whatever, then... Well, nothing makes it go away for most of these people.

[00:42:18] There is sort of a cycle that some researchers have described about the particular cruelty of Morgellons, which is you scratch, you bleed or open a wound, you discover a fiber, you then scratch more to try to find... So you discover a fiber, which proves to you that it's Morgellons, and then you'll scratch more to find more fibers to continue to prove that you're actually suffering from something. And so a lot of these people, their wounds never even close.

[00:42:47] Because they keep digging for more. It keeps itching, so they keep going, there's got to be more. Oh, that's okay. Interesting. You're saying because they hadn't gotten to the root cause of the itch, I thought it was an equally terrible existence, which is I need to collect more fibers to prove that I have a disease. I mean, I think it's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of both, and those things compound. And then especially when you go to a doctor with your evidence, and they say, this is just from your t-shirt. Yeah.

[00:43:15] You're like, no, doc, look, I'm fucking in pain here, and they're coming out of my skin. But of course... Yeah, this isn't self-mutilation. It's clearly like I'm itching. But when the doctors look, they very rarely find any of these fibers. That's because Radio Shack went out of business. That's true. They don't have the equipment anymore. Radio Shack, we need you. We need it back, man. You think you're going to find these results on a Circuit City microscope? So people suffering from Morgellons found the Morgellons Research Foundation and shared

[00:43:43] their stories, their remedies, and they also shared their obsessively documented symptoms. The forum, which is now no... Pieces of it still are kind of on like the Wayback Machine and stuff, but a lot of it doesn't exist anymore. But the forum at the time contained pages upon pages of photographs of lesions across scabbed and bloodied faces, arms and backs, photographs of sufferers pulling fibers from their skin, photographs of bundles of saved fibers stored for researchers and doctors to study.

[00:44:11] And Mary began to collect the stories of all of these people suffering from something. And the itching and the burning was really the worst part for most of them. And some of them went to... And the hardest thing to catch on camera. Yes. I mean, because you can't show an itch. But some of these people were driven to truly desperate lengths to stop the sensation. And I've been itchy. Oh, yeah. Like, I've been... Like, like... I've had poison ivy. Jock-itch type thing from, like, sports and, like, or, like, the toe. Fungus? Whatever the fuck it is. Like, like... Athlete's foot?

[00:44:41] Athlete's foot type of thing, which has, like, a burning sensation as well. And I'm not saying it's like, oh, you can see all these scars on my balls from when I... Like, I itched so much. But I'm saying, like... Did you check your balls for fibers? I mean, you put a... You probably would have found some. Around 12 or whatever when they first started, I guess. But I'm saying it is one of the least pleasant annoyances we have. Like, an itch that you just need to scratch, whether it's a mosquito bite or what I said

[00:45:09] earlier, which I might cut, is... It sucks. So to have it to the point where, like, I'm involuntarily breaking skin is a nightmare. It got so bad for these people that documented interventions include a person who bathed in bleach. No! Someone who applied pesticides directly to their skin. Don't! Someone doused their lesions with acid. They scrubbed with nail brushes and detergents until their skin was raw. Ah, boy.

[00:45:37] Some people took veterinary-grade antiparasitic drugs at doses meant for livestock. This feels like some machinist shit. One woman set off bug bombs in her condo eight different times. While she was in it. There's no way you should be breathing that in at all. And one 45-year-old man overdosed on Benadryl. He was so desperate to stop the burning, telling doctors... But he made a new friend. Yeah, that's right. He met Hatman. He went to go visit Hatman, and Hatman said, My son, you are cured. Oh, no. On this realm only.

[00:46:06] The man who overdosed on Benadryl later told doctors that he'd rather be dead than feel like this. I mean, I get it. And one writer, Atul Gawanda, described a Massachusetts woman who had a chronic itch in her scalp who eventually scratched through her skull and into her own brain only to discover the damage when she awoke to liquid cerebrospinal fluid running down her face. That's pictures that didn't happen. Like, that is... I mean, you're touching your own brain also.

[00:46:37] What were those rocks when we were kids? They had, like, a little indent, like a wishing stone type of thing. Uh-huh. You rub your thumb in it. Yeah. Yeah. If you're rubbing your fucking skull to the point where you've made, like, a wishing stone of a head... Yeah. Like... You're rubbing too hard, lady. I just don't even know how much... For all I know, brains are actually... Maybe it's very easy to do. But, like, in my mind, it's like you're trying to erode a mountain. Yeah. I mean, I don't think this was overnight.

[00:47:05] I think this was probably an ongoing... She's scratching for weeks, if not months. You know, the scalp is raw and she's just continuing to scratch and scratch and scratch and scratch. I just can't even... What do we... Why do we even have skulls if that's a way in? Yeah. You would hope that they'd be a little bit tougher than an old lady's fingernails. But apparently, given enough time, those fingernails can do some damage. The craziest thing about this is if it's not...

[00:47:30] Even if it is a disease, we're just little cars for our brains, right? We're just little brain suits. Yep. And all the bugs that ride around on us, all the parasites. Yeah. The idea that one brain asks another brain, how did your brain suit hurt you? And it's like, oh, I made it think it had an itch so bad that it hurt me. Yeah.

[00:47:56] Like, the brain potentially caused the injury and facilitated being injured is so insane to me. You would think we evolved to have a thick ridge of bone around our brain called a skull to protect our brains. You would think that brains also would have evolved the ability to not damage themselves. Like, where's the, like, Asimov rules of robots for ourselves, where it's like not through inaction or... We have none, man. We live in the wild.

[00:48:26] We live in the wild world of nature. It's just, I don't know if it was like a Pete Holmes bit from a million years ago or whatever, where he's like, I'm paraphrasing, to like make us happy all the time and they just don't. Yeah. It's like, we have Saratoden, we have all this. Yeah. And it's like, it almost never chooses that.

[00:48:49] Well, Mary was still deep in her own funk trying to figure out what exactly was going on here when she anecdotally discovered something that would later be confirmed by scientific studies and something that I mentioned closer to the top of the episode. Morgellons disproportionately affects middle-aged white women. I don't even know about the white part, but I did notice when you gave the list earlier there's only like one guy at the very end. Yes. It's, it's heavily skewed towards middle-aged white women.

[00:49:19] And this is one of the reasons that the medical, medical community immediately started throwing red flags up around claims of Morgellons. Some of it because of misogyny. Yeah. Some of it because there is another disease that predominantly affects middle-aged white women and ticks almost all the same boxes as Morgellons. Hold on. Before you get into that. Yes. Her baby was a little boy though, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, and there are, I mean, there was other research I was doing.

[00:49:45] I've found other long form articles written about men who were experiencing this, but. I mean, he's not only a, a guy, he's far from middle-aged. Yeah. No, no, no. He's, he's a young kid with, with some, something going on. Something going on. But in dermatology, there is this disease called delusional parasitosis that was first described in 1938 by a Swedish neurologist named Carl Axel Ekbaum. I mean, I get it, but I mean, I do imagine. Wait, what do you, what do you get? I, man. We're not, we're not to getting anything yet.

[00:50:15] I just, what I get is what the other, was it, was it anyone who would tell me I have that would get, which is fucking furious. Yeah. Like the fact that someone's like, all right, let me tell you what I think you have. And it includes delusional. Yeah. It's called, you're fucking crazy. Yeah. Like I would be like, fuck you or use an acronym or something. Yeah. Like that's such a shit name for a thing, but that's all I was going to say. I think, I think in this case, delusional is probably being used in like the medical sense of the term. Is there a medical sense?

[00:50:44] Well, it's delusional can be used as an insult, but I think delusional is like a category of mental illnesses. Mental illness. Yeah. If your brain's broke disease, is that one woman who did that to herself? Yeah. She's got both now. Yeah. Shit. But so this disease, delusional parasitosis is a fixed false belief of being infested by

[00:51:13] parasites or a foreign material. Symptoms include itching, scratching, lesions, the bugs under the skin feeling, the formication, everything but the fibers. I know I've been holding that itching for a minute. I didn't want anyone to say anything about it, but yeah, I did have an itch on my head right now. Have you ever seen the movie Bug? No. So the movie Bug, I'm looking- And if it has anything to do with what you've been talking about, I'm glad I have it. I'm looking directly into the cameras right now because I am, if you are watching this

[00:51:40] on video, I need to implore you, if you have never seen William Friedkin's Bug- And I love William Friedkin. And it stars Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, Michael Shannon's first major role. How have I missed this Friedkin movie? It is fucking, it's one of my favorite movies. It's really, really good. It's really intense. You're twisted, bro. It's really disturbing. You're a sick piece of shit. I won't even sit through Joe's apartment. If you've never seen Bug, you should, both because it's excellent, but also because this is basically the disease from the movie Bug.

[00:52:08] If you've ever seen Bug, Bug is sort of delusional parasitosis of the movie. Not as good a title. Not as good a title. It's not a great title either, honestly, but- Bug, it's a good title. It's a good title. It was also, it was Mike, you know, Michael Shannon got the role because it was a play initially, a Tracy Letts play. And Michael Shannon was, I believe, originated the role and was currently performing the role in the stage version when Friedkin-

[00:52:36] I feel like Friedkin used to go to a lot of plays because that was the whole thing where like Stacey Keach was paid to be in The Exorcist. Yeah. But then Friedkin had gone to a play and like saw that guy and he was like, that guy should be the priest. Yeah. And then like whomever- That's true. That's true. And then he cast, yeah, he cast Michael Shannon. And it was because he went to see, he saw like some black box theater play. I guess Friedkin liked to go to plays. He seemed like a cultured man. I could see it. Seems like he screams at a lot of people. He did. R.I.P. God bless. For sure did. Yeah.

[00:53:05] R.I.P. With the mindset of never having seen Michael Shannon before and you will be fucking extra floored because it's like, who the fuck is this guy? Sure. He's really good. Anyway, as part of delusional parasitosis, there's even a name for the behavior where patients bring specimens to the doctor.

[00:53:35] Dermatologists called it the matchbox sign coined by a dermatologist named Alan Lyle back in 1983 because patients would literally show up at appointments carrying little matchboxes full of what they believed was evidence that they were infected with bugs. I don't know if they had like Ziplocs back then. I don't know if they did either. But these people had matchboxes filled with skin flakes and scab materials, sometimes just unrelated bugs. I mean, that stuff could have just gotten in there.

[00:54:02] Between 50 and 80 percent of patients with delusional infestations or delusional parasitosis arrive at the doctor carrying specimens, which is exactly what many people who suffer from Morgellons disease also do. They do bring them these days in Ziploc bags or they bring files full of cell phone pictures of what they saw at home, but they bring the specimens with them.

[00:54:26] I think they have to because they've just spent 14 hours on forums where I'm sure like every post was like, nobody believes me. They won't believe you either. Make sure you show up with stuff. Well, and Mary Lattaro, to her credit, understood that this was kind of the bringing stuff was kind of a trap because she told Psychology Today, quote, you think you're bringing them evidence, but you're really just shooting yourself in the foot. Because as soon as one of these doctors sees you showing up with a Ziploc bag full of thread

[00:54:54] saying you pulled out of your body. Yeah. The really frustrating thing, though, for doctors is that delusional parasitosis is a very easy as far as, you know, mental illnesses go. It's pretty easily treated. Three quarters of patients who are prescribed a mild antipsychotic report that their symptoms disappear completely. Whoa. And usually in a short period of time. The problem is... That last quarter. The problem... Turn into bugs! Yeah.

[00:55:22] They go full Kafka, wake up, bugged out. No, the problem here, though, is that to receive that successful treatment, it requires patients to accept that the condition is psychiatric in nature and not biological. And that is the one thing that Morgellon sufferers will absolutely categorically refuse to do. So the thing that could help them, they refuse because they're like, I'm not crazy. And the doctor's like, I'm not saying you're crazy. I'm just saying, try these pills.

[00:55:51] And if they work, you might have been crazy. Yeah. But you know what? It'll work and you're not going to be in pain anymore. But a lot of Morgellon sufferers don't want to hear it because they, I understand, they don't want to be told they're crazy. I think, I forget which episode it was, but you and I at one point on this show talked about chronic pain and how when I had my gallbladder, when my gallbladder was really acting up and I was in a ton of pain for days on end.

[00:56:16] And that was when I really understood the idea of, or how I really understood how frustrating suffering from something that you can't really prove to anybody else is happening can be. Because I luckily didn't really need to prove to anybody that I was in pain, but you do live, you're living with this agony and there's nothing, if someone is, if someone questioned

[00:56:43] me, if I went into the doctor and said, Hey doc, I'm just burning up and I don't know what's going on. If they said, no, you're not. You'd be pissed. I'd be like, well, but I am. Yeah, but they'd be able to test your temperature. Yes, there's other things that they can test. And that's part of what happened with Morgellons here. As more and more and more people claim to have this disease, more people from the scientific community got invested in figuring out what the fuck was really going on here.

[00:57:11] So enter Dr. Randy Wymore, an assistant professor of pharmacology and physiology at Oklahoma State and a self-described quote glutton for unknowns. He stumbles onto Mary's site and his curiosity gets the best of him. And he decides he's going to figure this out. His hypothesis is that these fibers are coming from somewhere prosaic from inside the house. Fibers are coming from inside the shirt. The problem he thinks is that no one's taking it seriously enough to gather fibers from the

[00:57:40] people who are suffering. Interesting. And then do a, you know, a massive collection of every other fiber they can find in the world and compare them one by one to find a match and go, OK, here's what's going on. I mean, that's a that's cool. I would love to see that if they were like, turns out none of them are cotton. Well, that summer, Dr. Wymore road trips to California and does exactly what he says he's going to do. He pulls fibers off of every fucking thing he sees. Car seats, clothing on Goodwill racks, medical supplies, sports.

[00:58:10] Oh, for not from people. Well, right. Not from people. But he needs to see what to rule out. Yeah. He's collecting samples to match against. He knows that there's plenty of self-collected samples to compare. And people have those. People have those. But he goes out seeking fibers. So he pulls fibers off of everything. Man seeking fibers. Man seeking fibers. He got in a great relationship with these fibers. They went to California together. Then they broke up. Now he's seeing liquid.

[00:58:39] I mean, kind of. That's kind of where this goes. He's seeing they broke up and he's seeing alcohol because he may have ruined his career doing this. But once he collects all of these things, hundreds of Morgellon samples start flooding his lab from desperate patients and medical professionals. And as Wymore starts looking at all of them, his skepticism flips. Does a complete 180. Because he sees that all of these fibers look alike, but they don't look like hair or skin

[00:59:06] cells or cotton or any known textile on the planet. He then teams up with the Tulsa Police Department's Crime Lab to run the test through the database of over 800 different fibers. They match absolutely nothing. And then on February 23rd, 2006, Wymore brings Mary and her children, who her other kids at this point are reporting suffering from similar symptoms as the first kid who started suffering. So they all go to Tulsa for a study alongside seven other Morgellons patients.

[00:59:36] And two OSU physicians, Rhonda Casey and Stephen Eddy, start examining the kids. And within 45 seconds, they find fibers lurking beneath completely unbroken skin. Stop it. Which all sounds really impressive. I'm impressed. Until you examine these claims a little bit further. And taking a closer look to examine these claims is exactly what brought a man named Mick West into the picture. First name Mick, last name West. First name Mick, last name West. Interesting.

[01:00:01] If you roll in conspiracy communities, you probably are familiar with Mick. If you don't, a quick introduction. He's a very controversial figure in the skeptical community. He's not controversial to skeptics. He's controversial to everyone else. The people whose theories he is obsessed with debunking. Oh. So Mick's a bit of a curmudgeon, but I do generally appreciate his perspective.

[01:00:25] He actually, he's forever endeared to me because the way he got his start or his first job was as a video game programmer. And he co-founded Neversoft Studios. Remember Neversoft? What did they do? Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Oh, wow. Best soundtrack ever. Mick West was the technical director on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Wow. He helped program the skating physics and everything. Yeah. He left the video game industry a very rich man in 2003. And these days, Mick is better known as the founder of skeptic website Metabunk.

[01:00:54] And he is one of the leading skeptics of the UAP phenomenon. I will say I think he is a very good skeptic. It doesn't seem like he'd be particularly fun at parties. No, he's always blasting Goldfinger. He's like, I can't stop listening to it. No, he's just, he's a very kind of somber, serious man.

[01:01:13] But he does make really compelling cases in his skeptical arguments, often backed up by software that he himself has developed to take UAP video and analyze the flight patterns, atmospheric distortions, the sky, what was going on, you know, everything. So he's become a bit of an enemy of the UAP community.

[01:01:34] But anyway, he enters the picture here because in 2006, he began his first major skepticism campaign targeted at the bunk science surrounding Morgellons. He founded Morgellons Watch, a direct answer to the Morgellons Research Foundation. And the findings that he turned up around Dr. Wymore's study are really interesting. Dr. Wymore is the guy who's driving around picking shit off. Plucking fibers. Sure. Okay. First, West points out the scope was tiny and informal.

[01:02:02] The Tulsa PD ultimately only tested four fibers, two red and two blue. And as Mick clarified in his original articles on this, what they compared it to was an 800 fiber database, not a 100,000 fiber FBI database, as some reports erroneously suggested. Okay. A police forensics lab is also designed to match crime scene fibers to known textiles, and it's not equipped to identify every biological material on Earth.

[01:02:32] So no match in our database doesn't mean this isn't from clothing. It means we just don't have it. It's not in our database. Second, Wymore, and this one gets me. I don't know why anybody who is investigating something that is really hard to believe and truly has an interest in solving the mystery does this. But a lot of them do. He never published any of his findings in a peer reviewed paper. Why not? I know. I know. I know. It's why you just said that. I'm saying like, I'm saying like, yeah, idiot. Great question.

[01:03:02] Just fucking do it. If you have this, this happens with the, with alien implants a lot. If you have physical evidence of something that is undeniably strange, it is beyond me how any well-meaning man of science or woman of science doesn't send those samples out in the world going, please figure out what this is. But I've seen enough. It's weird to me that you wouldn't want that unless what you really care about is another lab proving you right and not another lab proving you wrong.

[01:03:31] But I've seen enough movies and TV shows where it's like, I can't give this alien finger I found to the lab because the men in black will take it. Or if I try and show it, if I publish my material, they'll come and take me away. Well, in this case, though, you know, in the, in the early days of Morgellon's study, I don't think this was registering on the level of an alien finger. It was a weird thing, but nobody at this point was being particularly conspiratorial about it.

[01:04:01] It was a disease. I saw in some, some of the research that part of another thing that kind of fanned the flames here is you were talking about fibromyalgia earlier. Yeah. Well, I know some people who have that. And it's like, that's another difficult thing where they've seen a lot of doctors. Well, and the, a lot of pain involved. The medical community had really just recognized fibromyalgia relatively soon before this Morgellon stuff started.

[01:04:26] So there was a recent example of a case with a bunch of people saying that they had these weird symptoms that no one could explain and they were able to define it. So especially at this point, some of these people were seen a little bit as kooks, but it wasn't out of the question that there was something real going on here. Anyway, I think it's ridiculous that you would not submit to peer reviewed papers and it is a big red flag.

[01:04:48] As for the discovery of those fibers in 45 seconds beneath the skin, dermatologist Noah Kraft at Harvard UCLA who has actually biopsied Morgellon's patient's skin. Okay. Meaning he's like taken flesh and skin samples and not just felt for fibers beneath the skin. And it's weird to me too, that they brag that they found them in 45 seconds. That seems like a really, um, you know. I think if they just mean that like, they're so prevalent. That they found them. Yeah.

[01:05:17] It didn't take as long to find a fiber. It sounds like they just didn't look very hard and said, that might be a bump. That's how that's a fiber. I think that's a fiber is what that is. Okay, sure. And the guy with the stopwatch is like, and that's a new record. Oh, you guys did it faster than anybody. This doctor Noah Kraft says that in his biopsies, he has never seen anything to suggest that Morgellons is a real condition in the sense that it is a biological in nature.

[01:05:41] In fact, the only place Kraft says he has ever seen evidence of all of these fibers are the photos on the Morgellons Research Foundation website. And to his eyes, they look like fibers and fabric and on occasion collagen fibers from within the skin. In the biopsies I have taken, he says, there appears to be only normal skin and inflammation as one would find in a bump that has been picked at. Okay. Another doctor, Jeff Meffert, goes one further.

[01:06:07] This fibers business, he says, as presented by the fiber disease community is nonsense. They have not convinced me. And quite honestly, they have pissed me off. Oh my God. The only fibers he's ever seen, he says, are consistent with animal hair, human hair or textile fibers. And he also says that I saw fibers, this quote from an article, I saw fibers stuck to the eczema scab of everyone I saw today. Every patient with oozing, weeping skin has fibers stuck to their skin.

[01:06:36] In other words, the skeptical community basically sees Morgellons as a particularly bad case of delusional parasitosis that traps its victims in that cycle of itch, pick, scratch, find the fiber. I'm not crazy. I'm not taking the pills. Itch, pick, grab. Find more. Yeah. Gets worse. Gets worse. Gets worse.

[01:06:55] I will also say in my research here, I did have trouble pinning down where some of these fibers went, how many fibers have been collected, how many are available for public study. Because it seems like thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of photos of these fibers have been submitted to all kinds of different Morgellons groups across the internet. Yeah.

[01:07:19] But it doesn't, it does seem to me that people have been collecting fibers and some of them. For 70 years. Seems like. Some of the fibers that people are saying are Morgellons do seem to be weirder than others. And I, and I had trouble. I think part of the reason I had trouble is because some of this is so easily and readily dismissed that you're basically either reading a Morgellons fan page that says, look at all this shit that's 100% real.

[01:07:49] Or you're reading a medical study that's like, these people are delusional and we really have no interest in talking to them. Okay. And so the reality I think of, I allow for a little bit of some of these fibers might be really weird. And I think there may be a little bit of some of this getting lost in the cracks. I don't know. I don't, we'll talk more about whether or not Morgellons is actually real in a bit, but it was frustrating for me to not be able to find a straight answer to, okay, that person who said they had this disease said they collected hundreds of fibrillers.

[01:08:19] Where did those fibers go? Did a doctor ever see them? Or did they just claim to have those fibers? Gotcha. There's a lot of that going on. I think what's where, I think it's within the realm of possibilities to just get a little place together that collects all the fibers. Well, that's what the Morgellons Research Foundation was supposed to be. I mean, like collect them. Don't send me a picture of your shoebox. Right, right, right. Fucking hairs. I mean, like, hey, everybody gets to send in five.

[01:08:43] And we have an ever-growing, you know, we've made a deal with the FBI that we have access, the API to their fucking database. Yeah. And you send something in and we send you back. The problem with that is nobody wants the responsibility. Like, nobody wants to get them and then be like, hey, I got a rejection letter, essentially. Like, oh, shit, they sent it back and said it was my carpet.

[01:09:08] That's sort of, on some level, finding someone to take responsibility for this research is sort of what happened next. Because according to Jezebel, quote, it was through the Morgellons Research Foundation website and the many sites it spawned that Morgellons patients decided to launch a letter-writing campaign. They flooded the mailboxes of nearly every member of Congress with a persuasive case that sounded a lot like fibromyalgia.

[01:09:33] Thousands of Americans, a disproportionate number of them women, recounting an excruciating strange pain. And their reality, they said, had been dismissed by physicians who told them there was either nothing physically wrong or the source of their pain was common scabies or some other skin infection. There was so much mail that senators of no less star power than Hillary Clinton and John McCain and Barack Obama decided to take the disease seriously. And they pushed the CDC to issue a study.

[01:10:02] We got to get some of this in the vaccine. Listen, guys, in about 15 years, we've got something big coming down the pipe. We got to get this shit in there. Well, it was a little unusual for them to ask the CDC to issue this study because the CDC only studies infectious diseases. And there was really no evidence that this was an infectious disease of any kind. Yeah, no one was like, my baby went to daycare and they came back also with hairs. Yes, and every baby at the daycare started sprouting hairs.

[01:10:29] So the CDC pulled a great little government do-si-do and they funneled somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 tax dollars to Kaiser Permanente and asked them to do the research. That's a California place, isn't it? It is. And part of the reason Kaiser Permanente was chosen is because there was a large concentration of cases of Morgellons being reported out of Northern California.

[01:10:52] So that was part of why Kaiser was chosen because they had easy access to the medical records of this group of people. And if they have access to the medical records of the state, it's 40 million people versus any other state. So Kaiser searched the electronic health records of the people that they covered to identify clinic visits with certain keywords like Morgellons, obviously, fiber, thread, fuzzball, dots, specks, granules, and delusion recorded in the case notes. It's a statement.

[01:11:22] I brought it with me. Yeah. It's right here. Yeah. This search pulled down 115 case patients, 100 of whom agreed to answer survey questions, and 40 consented to physical and psychological testing. Fibers were collected for analysis and sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The study was reviewed and approved by the institutional review boards at the CDC, at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and at the University of Rochester.

[01:11:52] It took four years from the beginning of this study in 2008 to its publication in 2012. And Ed, what do you think the CDC found? The fact that we're not talking about Morgellons regularly tells me they maybe said this was maybe not a great use of our money. They did not discover a biological cause for this disease.

[01:12:12] They did find that most of the fibers collected from participants' skin were composed of cellulose, a.k.a. cotton fibers. But you said 600 grand? 600 grand. Which is really, for a medical study, not that much. Honestly, not a lot of money at all. Well, probably this was more money back then, but yes.

[01:12:41] Not a huge amount of money, but still. On the biopsy side, because they collected biopsies, things weren't looking any more convincing. The most common abnormality present in 51% of biopsies was something called solar elastosis, which sounded very mysterious to me. So I googled it, and it just basically means skin damage from the sun. Okay.

[01:13:32] That still leaves some wide open territory about what could be the causes. He also stressed the study should not be interpreted to conclude that the problem is all in the sufferer's heads. Okay, they're just saying it's not the stuff we do here. Yes, and he says this study should be a baseline for future research. Now, there was really very little future research ever done because most of the scientific community took this to mean exactly what Mark Eberhardt said not to mean. Yeah. And to be fair, there are critics of this study.

[01:14:01] It wasn't perfect. Some people have pointed out that drawing participants from that single geographic area in Northern California really limited the ability to have a diverse group of people that you were studying. It's a small sample size. Some of the language in the paper they thought felt dismissive.

[01:14:20] But in terms of the methodology on display here, biopsies, spectroscopies, forensic fiber analysis, and psychiatric evaluations, this was the most rigorous investigation of Morgellons ever conducted to this day. Nothing else has ever really come close. But of course, that answer didn't satisfy people suffering from Morgellons. Of course.

[01:14:48] And unfortunately, once science put Morgellons down, conspiracy theorists picked it right back up. That tends to be the case. Tends to be what happens. And here's where things get really fun because everything we've talked about so far has been grounded in either real science or real suffering. But once the CDC pissed off the entire Morgellons community, real went out the window and the CDC became part of a widespread government conspiracy to cover up the truth about Morgellons. Oh my God.

[01:15:17] At this point, they've got to just be like, get in line. Like everybody at this point. For conspiracies? Has turned the CDC. It might as well be called Conspiracy Department Central or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never. The CDC and the FEMA. Or Central Department for Conspiracy. FEMA is the other one that's always being pegged as like, they're opening the camps. Yeah. I mean, I literally haven't even figured out the acronym that I'm trying to make. You throw a FEMA in my face? So I think Central Department for Conspiracy. It's pretty good. Pretty good. And then FEMA would have to be fake.

[01:15:46] Emergency. Emergency. Well, the E is really emergency. Okay. Well, then what's your skin called? Epidurus? Epidural. Fake epidural. Manipulated. Or mind disease. E. Wait, A. FEMA. I don't know. It's hard to do in real time. I'll give you. You can go back and you can kind of drop something in later. A little sound bite. I don't got time.

[01:16:09] So the truth about Morgellons, the capital T truth about Morgellons, depends who you ask, what that truth is. I really want to know what Mary Leitao thinks, the woman who started all of this. Give her a call. Well, I would. But after the CDC study came out, she shut down the Morgellons Research Foundation and disappeared from public life entirely. As of this recording, she hasn't given an interview or made a public statement in more than a decade. This is our chance. She just vanished. Well, no one knows.

[01:16:38] No one has been able to find her. Well, you keep telling me that all the stuff I read about missing scientists right now is bullshit. I don't think it's bullshit. I'm just saying that. I just think people are connecting dots. She could have been the first. We're recording this in the middle of the time period where a couple of scientists related to strange physics experiments went missing in the United States. So that's what Ed is referring to if you're listening to this five or ten years in the future. And if those people and Mary Leitao came back. They're all on the show. They're all on the show. We got to ask them where they went. Was it another dimension? Yeah, no.

[01:17:06] Mary Leitao just apparently her and her whole family vanished. The woman who named the disease, who built the movement, lobbied Congress, got them to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there were photos of her and stuff. She was a real person. She's a real person. It's not like a Mirage Man situation. No, it's not a Mirage Man situation. But it does seem like she heard the answer that this isn't real and for some reason walked away. I would like to give her the credit that maybe she realized she'd really stepped in it and got mega embarrassed and just decided to dip.

[01:17:35] But if that's the case, it would have also been nice for her to issue some kind of a statement or something to be like, hey. My bad. Or even just any statement. Whether it's my bad, I've seen the error in my ways. Or even another statement that's like, we'll never stop fighting. But I need for me and my family to take some space from something that I'm very passionate about. But this latest blow has been difficult on all of us. And we need to take a minute. Fucking Bing Blop 69 on the forum.

[01:18:04] We'll step up as lead moderator. And to do with this company, would you please? That was a really good apology. Something like that. Not an apology, but just like. Do you write emergency PR in your head a lot? No, I don't. Because that came right out. That was good. Yeah, I don't know. But I'm saying those are two ways she could have stepped away gracefully. I'm like, what are we bracing for at the podcast here? I just like to say for my family and my friends.

[01:18:28] There are also many rumors and accusations of financial improprieties taken with the funds that she raised through the MRF. So alternate theory, she's a criminal and started a scam and got away with it. I feel that way about anything. I want all charities to be squeaky clean. I want all 501Cs or whatever. But it's like, yeah, there's money coming in. So someone's taking it somewhere. You know. She didn't pass the MRF, the Morgellons Research Foundation. She didn't pass it down to anyone.

[01:18:58] In her absence, it's a little unclear exactly what happened and who took it over. But if you try to go to the Morgellons Research Foundation, it now directs to Morgellons.org. And the first. A multi-level marketing scheme. The first thing you'll notice is the fact that the organization or what's left of it has succumbed to the most yogurt-brained conspiracy-minded people on the planet. What the fuck is yogurt-brained? Just mush-brained, no thoughts. That's not a fault of their own. They scratched until their skull opened.

[01:19:27] That's what happens when you have skull itch. The thing that tipped me off to the fact that they chose a path here is that one of the headlines across the top of the page screams, Chemtrails and Morgellons, it's worse than you thought. The writer of this urgent article describes the way that they've been tracking the appearance of chemtrails over their town and what they discovered in local water sources that they believe fell from these chemtrails,

[01:19:55] which is apparently some kind of fibers that they believe are tied to Morgellons. I can send you the photos from this article. If you want to put any of them up on screen, you can. But they basically just look like fibers under a microscope. Most of the audience can probably imagine what that looks like. You can imagine what that looks like. It's less work for me. The quotes here are wild. I couldn't really make heads or tails of what exactly this person's arguing,

[01:20:22] but I will quote them at length here because maybe someone in the audience knows what they're saying. Or Ed, maybe you can decipher. So this person explains their little science experiment thusly. Quote, What's alkalize? What does that mean? To alkalize water? Yeah. Can't you like buy alkaline water or something like that? Yeah. Let's see. I don't actually know.

[01:20:52] I know people like drinking alkaline water. But the beginning of what you started that sentence makes it think like you shouldn't drink that water. It's a water with a higher pH level than regular tap water achieved by adding minerals or using electrolysis to reduce acid. Okay. It's used for potential health benefits like enhancing hydration, relieving acid reflux, and improving metabolic acidosis. And that's different than just having a Gatorade. Yes. Okay. I believe that is different than having- So it's not just like electrolytes or whatever. No, I don't think it's electrolytes.

[01:21:20] They use electrolysis to reduce acid. I don't think electrolytes have anything to do with it. All right. All right. So this person is saying that when you alkalize water, any water-based air-breathing organism allows for increased storage and the creation of DC current, especially when mixed with other components slash chemicals. I proved this in myself with only a pretty good digital voltmeter. So another $8 Radio Shack special, I guess. Yeah.

[01:21:48] I measure my voltage constantly by just wetting my fingers and squeezing the probes. What are you in the matrix? I think there's probably electrical currents going through us. We are batteries. I started looking at the collected water with an old microscope in early April by drying about 30 drops on a microscope slide and saw immediately what appeared to be what I'd seen coming from Morgellons patients on the web. I really had thought the story was a hoax, quite frankly, but now I know otherwise.

[01:22:16] I started to look at all my samples and found dozens of these fibers. Confirmation of what these fibers were came when a, quote, golden head nanosensor was isolated. I don't know what that is. I'm not sure it's real. Yeah. This confirmation was quite the shock because I knew then all of us in the White Mountains, at least, were all being infected with this bizarre nano affliction infestation infection. What are the White Mountains? Where they live. They live in the White Mountains. Westeros? Jesus.

[01:22:44] Why the voltage thing is so important. I've observed in my jars that were electrolyzed that the growth of what I've learned are called, quote, synthetic model organisms or artificial life forms is greatly enhanced and increased. The fibers they call Morgellons increase in about six months to almost visible with the naked eye or magnifying glass. One such clump of fibers has gone from a dozen microscopic fibers to about 100 or so and can easily be extracted by tweezers.

[01:23:11] Wait, so they're saying if they put it in alkaline water, it grows and becomes a greater number? Apparently, yes. Okay. One plausible explanation of how the flat ribbon plausible, Ed, one plausible explanation. I'm ready for it. For how the flat ribbon-like fibers seem to grow even on glass is that these synthetic model organisms can assemble plastic components from the air, water, or wherever present and use DC current as part of their assembly technique. Oh.

[01:23:37] Or they are feeding off the silicone in the glass or both. All right. The first one. It's been proven. There are always forever chemicals floating around. It's been proven that plants extract most of their mineral content from the air, not the soil. Give me that shit, they say. As was once believed, nanotech is designed to mimic the things that man has discovered about how nature works, assembles itself, et cetera. Wait, so they're saying that Morgellons is like nanotechnology?

[01:24:02] They're saying that Morgellons is some sort of a nanotechnology that uses DC current and silicone in the glass or both to grow once it's dropped on the populace from chemtrails. Okay. And the best we've, well, I guess only 600 grand went into one of these studies, but, and the best we can do is make hair? Apparently. We have the ability to do nanotechnology and the best it can do is assemble itself like hair erector set. Itchy hair. Itchy hair if it gets in your skin. It's not even good hair. Sure.

[01:24:31] There's another section, though, on the website called Revelations from a Man Who Helped Design Morgellons Disease that features a link to two different videos, which unfortunately have been taken down off the internet. Because they were just viruses. They may have been. And the following description. These two videos are well done and well researched by Clifford Karnakam and Dr. Gwen Scott. They are perhaps the two of the most important videos ever to be made.

[01:24:59] If you have not viewed these videos, you need to do it ASAP. These videos are not casual entertainment. They are about all of us. Not just a few people with a weird disease called Morgellons, but about all of us. This information personally affects every person you love and care about. It is about your grandchildren, your family pet, your loved ones, and even people down the street that you don't care about. I mean, this is I made a joke about forever chemicals earlier, but I think we should be making videos like this about forever chemicals. Yeah, probably.

[01:25:28] I'm sure somebody is. Yeah. So we don't have the videos, unfortunately, because I really wanted to watch them. But they were too filled with truth. I think they were taken down by the truth police. But what Dr. Scott says on camera in reference to meeting this man who claims to have designed Morgellons is transcribed on the website. And so we do know that this is part of what Dr. Scott said. He, being the guy who designed Morgellons, explained to me something that I knew that I had kind of forgotten.

[01:25:57] Every organ in your body has a specific frequency and it operates at that frequency. And even when you interrupt that frequency electromagnetically, you can create all kinds of serious, even unto death problems. Is that true? I don't know. I don't know. I didn't realize if I held like a magnet up to you, you have to make your arm move or something. He also talked about areas of the brain and mind control. And as Orwellian as that may seem, apparently, scientifically, it is very real. We know from Clifford's work for years now. The big red dog?

[01:26:26] No, Clifford Cornish. She's covered in hair. Clifford Carnicom, the other researcher involved here. We know from Clifford's work for years now the electromagnetic properties of what's happening in our air supply as a result of the manipulation and the manipulation of that. Beyond that, he, the inventor of Morgellons, talked about then, confirmed to me the heavy metals, the barium, the titanium, the aluminum, none of which, trust me, are good for the human. That's what I'm always saying. He talked about the biological.

[01:26:56] He said all of it had been altered. Some of it, and Clifford had alluded to earlier in the video, can kind of escape your immune system and cloak itself in one form or another. Again, he spoke of the electromagnetics and also the lack of oxygen, the displacement of oxygen. The more you displace oxygen out of the air supply with particulates, in parentheses, it could be cornflakes, it doesn't matter, the mortality rate goes up concurrently. We are operating on a very low level of oxygen.

[01:27:27] Well, we've learned that before, remember? Turns out we are, and it's fine. Yes. I mean, I certainly feel like I'm operating on a very low level of oxygen after reading all of that. Yeah, no, you've been talking for a while. I'm desperate to see these videos. Desperate. I will continue to scour the internet if we find them. We will post them on the Instagram. Because it sounds like there's a lot of answers in there that I've been waiting for. It feels a bit too dismissive to end this episode on a note of, damn, that all sounds pretty stupid.

[01:27:56] I haven't said that once. I feel like I've been team Morgallon this whole time. Well, those last couple paragraphs I think might be some of the most... That's the first time I felt like it truly made sense to me. That's why I need to see these videos. Okay. So if I asked you to repeat the theories... Heavy metals. Get them out of here. You just want to study the forever chemicals. I am anti-forever chemicals.

[01:28:24] Anyone with a brain would be, but I don't understand the connection. It jumps around, these explanations so much, that it's not even really putting together a theory. I get it. A couple of soft yogurt heads like you, man. You can't follow it the way I did. These yogurt-brained white mountain folk. No, you're a flathead, dude. I followed it fine. I followed that whole thing. I was enthralled. Well, okay. So do you feel at this point that there is any good scientific evidence suggesting that Morgallons is a biological disease?

[01:28:54] Biological meaning human beings have it. No, that it's some sort of infectious spreading... I do not think it's an infectious spreading disease. I think you can have Morgallons. From a psychological perspective. From a... If people are physically feeling pain, whether it's psychological or otherwise, I think these people are physically feeling pain. Yes, I agree. And as, you know, like I said, like with fibromyalgia or something, and you're going to go like 20 years from now, and it's like, oh, it turns out that was a thing. And so I'm not being outwardly dismissive of it.

[01:29:22] I think 600 grand doesn't buy you a fucking grape at Pfizer. And so it's like, you know, I'm sure there's some more studying to be done. I'd be very interested to see a larger sample of the database of hairs, or at least it tested against larger sample sizes. Yeah. I'm saying there's got to be, I don't know, some museum of hair or something. Like, what do they got? You know what I mean? Like, we got to find the best spot to check it against. Because I would love to just see if somebody be like, fuck, man.

[01:29:50] Somebody in Tokyo and somebody in Bangladesh. Brazil. Bangladesh. They have the exact same ribbon fiber. And they've never made this clothing. And that's to me exciting. And so I don't want to dismiss people who are in pain. And I also don't want to dismiss the excitement of finding out that it's a real thing. And that doctor who collected all those fibers, he did claim that they found fibers from people that matched each other, but nothing else.

[01:30:18] That the fibers matched from different... That's what I'm looking for. Yeah. But he was never then able to replicate those results or show any real proof of those results. He just said that that was the case. Yeah. Well, that's the beginning. We got to go find the second example. I think... I agree with you for the most part. I think... I probably feel like there's less of a chance that Morgellons is actually a real physical disease that we just haven't discovered.

[01:30:45] But I do agree with you that a lot of people are suffering from something that probably most likely is a modern or evolved form of that delusional parasitosis. And I do think you should be able to be like, listen, your doctor visits are free. Because it's not a lobotomy we're asking for here. Your doctor visits are free and you'll be taken seriously at this clinic.

[01:31:10] If you also maybe were like, let me try the make the itch go away pill. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We want to try everything. I know it sounds scary. I know it sounds dangerous, but I promise you it's not going to be shock treatment. Yeah. And it's not habit forming or whatever this case may be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like give it two weeks and I promise this facility will still be here when you get back. Like this isn't a smokescreen. Right, right, right. We're not going to report you to the CIA.

[01:31:38] Like the bank that scared all time use that we were not 100% sure is a real bank. We're going to find out in the next couple of months, I think. Yeah, but so far the website still opens. So far so good. So that's how I would handle it. The scariest thing about Morgellons to me is sort of the scary thing about gang stalking, which is that there's this gap between the reality of the pain and the unreality of the explanation. And that is where Morgellons lives. There was a line that I saw in the research.

[01:32:07] It's suffering caused in part by the search for the cause of suffering. Yeah. And I think that kind of... I mean, that's also sums up scratching your own brain. That's the same way to get there. Well, the scratching your own brain is coming from the purely... It's that person is suffering from the cause of the suffering. They're searching for the cause of the suffering ended up in their own brain. Well, I think in the case of Morgellons, though... Okay, I'm saying it's not a search. They were just trying to itch. Yeah, it's not a search.

[01:32:37] It's just trying to itch. The essayist Leslie Jameson attended the annual Morgellons conference in Austin back in 2012 and wrote about it for Harper's Magazine. She's a skeptic. She knows the medical consensus. She went there as a journalist. And after spending a weekend with sufferers of Morgellons, she wrote, The night after my meeting with Paul, I couldn't sleep for all the itching. I had two showers before bed and another in the morning. All through the convention, I am tormented, driven to senseless scratching.

[01:33:06] This is a random lady who just went with no signs of Morgellon. Correct. But I think that kind of says it all. She never came to believe that she was suffering from Morgellons, but this is not a disease that afflicts the weak or the stupid. It's a disease that is contagious through suggestion. It's like that dancing disease. Kind of, yeah. The dancing disease that I think by now, if you listen, if you are subscribed for NFUs, you probably will have heard that. Probably have heard it, yeah. But that's one of the scariest things I can imagine.

[01:33:34] A disease that is transmitted through suggestion is really frightening. Have you been on the internet? A lot of people have a fucking disease through suggestion at this point, man. So that brings us to the end of our exploration of the disease that may or may not be real or might be both, Morgellons, and we have to place it on our fear tier. So, Ed, where are you going to place the mystery of Morgellons on your fear tier?

[01:34:01] I'm going to do a hot weekend in Austin at the convention, an eight. Sounds like everyone who goes there walks away with a little itch. And otherwise, a one. I'm also going to put Morgellons at a one. I do think it is a... I feel like I would have known if I had it by now. You would have known if you had it by now. I only thought I had it that one day when I didn't sleep for three days. Yeah. And I think most people who have it have that day and then something goes very wrong and they just keep having a version of that day for a very long time. Sure.

[01:34:30] So I'm placing Morgellons at a one. I'm not particularly worried about it. I do think it is pretty much a psychosomatic illness. But I do think it's a very interesting rabbit hole to go down. I hope there is more study towards it because it does seem to be something that is hurting a lot of people. Yeah, and like anything in life, 20 years in you find out some shit that everyone thought was bullshit is a thing. And so you do a lot of people a disservice maybe if it's like, well, fuck it. Let's wait 20 more years to give a shit.

[01:34:58] And then now you're 40 years out and then it's like, oh, we should have started that 20 years ago. And that's one of my greatest fears, procrastinating. Yeah. But we're not going to procrastinate the end of this episode any longer, Ed. All right, well, I can cut it down. Until next time, guys, I'm Chris Colari. And I'm feeling a little bit of an itch. And we'll see you next time. Which is real. Bye-bye. Bye. Scare All The Time is co-produced by Chris Colari and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Colari. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel.

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[01:35:56] We are in this together. Together. Together. Together. Together.