🎧 Episode 5 — When Humans Get Confident and Reality Gets Creative

In this episode of The Oddities Department, we open six case files that prove one uncomfortable truth: humans are very confident… and very often wrong.

We start in 18th-century France, where people feared potatoes so deeply they would rather starve than eat them, until a pharmacist staged one of history’s earliest PR campaigns and changed a nation’s diet forever.

From there, we step into the private world of Princess Alexandra of Bavaria, a royal woman whose belief that her body was made of glass went unquestioned, not because it was true, but because no one was allowed to challenge it.

We then walk the long corridors of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a place built with hope that collapsed under overcrowding, outdated medicine, and the dangerous idea that silence meant success.

Next, we meet Timothy Dexter, a loud, illiterate man who failed upward so aggressively that luck became a personality trait—and history mistook chaos for brilliance.

The episode turns darker with the Atacama “Alien,” a tiny skeleton mislabeled as extraterrestrial until science revealed a far harder truth: the remains belonged to a human child, and the real mystery was how quickly dignity was sacrificed for a better story.

We close underground with naked mole rats, nearly ageless, cancer-resistant, pain-ignoring mammals that break almost every biological rule we assume applies to us.

Episode 5 is about confidence, belief, and the consequences of deciding we’re right before we’re careful.

Welcome back to The Oddities Department.
Stay curious. Stay weird. And don’t take anything at face value.