Zoinks! What do pheromones, the Pentagon, and an elite ancient Greek army have in common? More than you would ever guess, and Josh is here to connect the dots in one of the wildest episodes the gang has tackled yet.

It started with cologne. Josh has been on a lifelong quest for the perfect scent, one powerful enough to, as he puts it, land a big hairy silver fox. While researching pheromone-based fragrances, he stumbled onto something the United States government would probably rather forget: the Gay Bomb. Yes, that was the actual name. In the late 1990s, the Pentagon explored the idea of a non-lethal weapon that would release pheromones into the air and make enemy soldiers so attracted to each other that they would stop fighting. The theory was that an explosion of airborne hormones would trigger a mass battlefield romance, effectively ending combat without a single bullet fired.

The proposal made it far enough to appear in official Pentagon records as part of a broader study into non-lethal chemical weapons. It was never built, and for good reason. No scientific evidence has ever demonstrated that any scent or pheromone can alter a person's sexual orientation. Companies have been making that claim since the 1970s with musky colognes and supposed attraction sprays, and the science has never backed it up.

But the trail leads somewhere unexpected. Josh discovered that an all-gay military unit actually existed, and it was one of the most feared fighting forces in the ancient world. The Sacred Band of Thebes consisted of 150 male couples, 300 soldiers total, who fought side by side as lovers. The idea was simple and effective: a soldier fights harder when the person he loves is standing next to him on the battlefield. The unit was active from 378 BC and remained undefeated for decades until Alexander the Great finally overcame them in 338 BC.

The gang investigates how ancient Greek culture viewed homosexuality in the military, including passages from Plato's Symposium that praised the bond between male soldiers as a source of extraordinary courage. As Plato wrote, no man is such a coward that love cannot inspire him with bravery equal to the bravest born. In ancient Greece, these relationships were not hidden or merely tolerated. They were celebrated as a military advantage.

From a Pentagon proposal that treated attraction as a weapon to an ancient army that proved love actually could win wars, this episode covers ground that history books tend to skip. Josh brings his signature humor and genuine curiosity to a story that is equal parts absurd, fascinating, and surprisingly moving.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The real Pentagon proposal to weaponize pheromones and why it never left the drawing board

The Sacred Band of Thebes, 300 elite gay soldiers who were undefeated for 40 years

Plato's take on why love makes better warriors than fear

Josh's personal quest for the perfect cologne and how it led to a classified government document

Jinkies! What happens when a family moves into a 512-acre cattle ranch in northeastern Utah and discovers every door, window, and cabinet bolted shut from the inside? For the Sherman family, the locks were just the beginning.

In 1994, Terry and Gwen Sherman purchased a remote ranch in the Uintah Basin, lured by cheap land and wide-open skies. Within weeks, they understood why the previous owners had fortified every inch of the house. Cattle started turning up dead with surgical wounds, organs removed, and not a drop of blood anywhere. One cow had an 18-inch hole cored straight through its body cavity. No predator leaves a scene like that.

Then came the wolf. A massive animal, three times the normal size, appeared in the fields and attacked a calf. Sherman fired four rounds from a .357 Magnum at close range, then grabbed a rifle and fired again. A chunk of flesh tore free, but the wolf just looked at him and walked away. No blood. Its tracks ended the next morning in the middle of a field and simply stopped.

The lights followed. Blue orbs with orange centers drifted across the property, floating through walls and hovering above the fields. One night, three of the family's dogs chased an orb into thick brush. Three yelps. The next morning, all that remained were three greasy spots on scorched earth where the dogs had been. Four bulls vanished from a corral and were found crammed inside a sealed metal trailer, cobwebs still undisturbed across the door, waking from what looked like a trance.

The gang investigates one of the most documented paranormal properties in American history. After the Shermans sold the ranch in 1996, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow deployed a full scientific team through his National Institute for Discovery Science. They documented close to 100 incidents, but the phenomenon seemed aware it was being watched. Activity spiked when observers were present but died the instant instruments were aimed at it. Cameras were vandalized. Sensors failed at exactly the wrong moments.

The story took a classified turn when a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst visited the ranch in 2007 and reported seeing a floating yellow object in the kitchen. Senators Harry Reid, Ted Stevens, and Daniel Inouye secured $22 million in classified funding for a government study through Bigelow's company, BAASS. Over 100 technical papers and 38 classified defense documents were produced before the program ended in 2012. The New York Times revealed its existence to the public in December 2017.

But the most unsettling finding was what researchers called the Hitchhiker Effect. The phenomena did not stay at the ranch. It followed investigators home. Blue orbs appeared at researchers' houses in Las Vegas. Military personnel reported strange activity at their own homes after visiting the property. Every one of five service members deployed to the ranch experienced something unexplained.

Today the ranch is owned by Brandon Fugal and featured on the History Channel. The questions remain open, the cameras keep rolling, and whatever lives on that land keeps watching back.

What youll hear in this episode:

The Sherman family's harrowing 18 months on the ranch, from mutilated cattle to a bulletproof wolf

A $22 million classified government investigation that produced more questions than answers

The Hitchhiker Effect and why what happens at the ranch does not stay at the ranch

The gang investigates a mystery hiding in plain sight. Humanity is headed back to the moon, and while the Artemis 2 crew circles our closest neighbor for reconnaissance photos and crater naming ceremonies, the real question might not be about exploration at all. It might be about what is buried in the lunar dust.

Helium-3 is one of the rarest minerals on Earth. A single kilogram costs roughly $18.7 million, and the entire global supply is valued at around $125 million. That is about seven kilograms total. On Earth, the only way to produce it is through the decay of nuclear stockpiles. But the surface of the moon is covered in the stuff, embedded in the fine dust by billions of years of solar wind bombardment with no atmosphere to block it.

If Helium-3 can be mined, transported back to Earth, and used in fusion reactors, the payoff would reshape civilization. A few kilograms could power a major city for a year. One million tons could theoretically supply the planet with energy for thousands of years. The energy produced would generate minimal radiation and drastically reduce radioactive waste. There is one catch: fusion using Helium-3 requires temperatures around one trillion degrees Fahrenheit. Essentially a microstar created here on our planet's surface.

Zoinks! Multiple nations are already staking their claims. China is reportedly planning on building mining operations on the far side of the moon. The United States is planning a permanent base in ancient volcanic tubes beneath the lunar surface. Russia, India, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Luxembourg, and the European Space Agency have all claimed lunar territories. A company called Interlune is developing autonomous solar-powered excavators capable of processing hundreds of tons of lunar soil per hour.

Space has its own set of laws, similar to old maritime codes. Whoever claims territory first owns it, flag planted and all. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits sovereign claims on celestial bodies but does not clearly regulate resource extraction. The Artemis Accords and national laws are scrambling to catch up, but when trillions of dollars are at stake, the rules tend to follow the money.

The trail leads to an even stranger question. If mining begins in earnest and crews start digging deep into the lunar surface, they may stumble into one of the moon's oldest conspiracies: that the moon itself is hollow. Some believe it is an ancient satellite, possibly even a monitoring station, sent to orbit our planet long before recorded history. Mining operations could finally put that theory to rest or crack it wide open.

We could see permanent structures on the moon in our lifetime. The ISS is being decommissioned and eventually sunk into the ocean. Its replacement may not orbit Earth at all. It may sit inside a volcanic tunnel on the lunar surface. What was once science fiction is becoming budget line items and mining contracts.

What you'll hear in this episode:

Why Helium-3 is the most expensive mineral on Earth and how the moon is covered in it

The nations racing to claim and mine the lunar surface

What it takes to create a microstar and why fusion is the ultimate energy prize

The connection between moon mining and the hollow moon conspiracy

How space law works and why it might not be enough

Jinkies! On March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona looked up and saw something that would change their lives forever. From Henderson, Nevada to Tucson, a massive V-shaped formation of lights moved silently through the desert sky, and nearly three decades later, no one can explain what it was.

The Phoenix Lights weren't one event. They were two. The first began around 8:00 PM, when a structured formation of five to seven lights traveled roughly 300 miles across the state. Retired police officers, pilots, and families watched it pass overhead. The second event at 10:00 PM featured a row of amber orbs hovering over the Sierra Estrella Mountains southwest of Phoenix. The military would eventually explain those orbs as illumination flares from A-10 training jets. But event one? The government has never offered a single explanation.

The gang investigates witnesses whose accounts lined up with unsettling precision. Kurt Russell, flying his private plane into Sky Harbor Airport, reported six lights in V formation to the tower. His radar showed nothing. A retired aeronautical engineer named Dana Valentine estimated the object was at roughly 500 feet altitude and described a "gray distortion of the night sky" behind the lights. The Tim Ley family in North Phoenix watched the craft pass directly over their home at an estimated 100 feet. They could not see the other edge. Their children started jumping, not from fear, but from the eerie silence of something so enormous making no sound at all.

When the public demanded answers, Arizona Governor Fife Symington held a press conference. His chief of staff was escorted in wearing a rubber alien costume. "This just goes to show that you guys are entirely too serious, " the staffer announced. Councilwoman Frances Barwood personally interviewed over 700 witnesses and was rewarded with tin foil business cards from colleagues and political cartoons mocking her in the Arizona Republic. Two Phoenix physicians buried their accounts for years, terrified that going public would destroy their medical careers.

Then, ten years later, the same governor went on CNN and admitted he saw it too. "I witnessed a massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, " he said. "As a pilot and former Air Force officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any manmade object I had ever seen."

An anonymous airman from Luke Air Force Base reported that two F-15s scrambled and intercepted a gigantic object over Phoenix. The intercepting jet's radar went to white noise. The object's lights dimmed in unison and vanished. Two days later, the airman was transferred to Greenland and has never been heard from since.

So what was the 8:00 PM V formation? No federal agency has ever provided an answer. The Air Force cited the closure of Project Blue Book in 1969 as reason enough not to investigate. A class action lawsuit forced the Department of Defense to conduct a records search. Their response: they could find no information about any craft or related program.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The complete timeline of both Phoenix Lights events and why they're separate mysteries

Kurt Russell's pilot log entry he forgot about for two years

The governor's alien costume press conference and his stunning reversal a decade later

Witness accounts from a family who felt a physical field from the craft

The anonymous airman who was shipped to Greenland after reporting what he saw

Jinkies! When you think royal mistresses had it easy, think again. The story of Madame de Montespan reads like something the gang would uncover in a crumbling French castle, complete with accusations of satanic rituals, infant sacrifices, and poisoned gowns.

Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart came from one of the oldest noble houses in France. Beautiful, ambitious, and cunning, she caught the eye of King Louis XIV and became his official mistress, bearing him seven children. Her entire world revolved around keeping the king's attention. But as the years passed and her beauty began to fade, desperation set in.

The trail leads to some of the darkest accusations in French royal history. According to testimony, Montespan allegedly collaborated with a sorcerer named Lazen to perform black masses. Witnesses claimed she lay upon an altar while a rogue priest performed forbidden rituals over her. The allegations only got worse from there. She was accused of using blood from sacrificed infants and other gruesome ingredients to craft love potions and powders designed to keep the king obsessed with her. But as Josh points out, the timing of these accusations is suspicious. Why did these so-called witnesses wait until she fell from favor to come forward?

The accusations didn't stop at dark magic. She was also accused of attempting to poison both the king himself and her rival mistress, Madame de la Valliere, using poisoned clothing. The method was chilling. Fabric would be soaked in poison, and as the wearer's body heat activated it through sweat, the toxin would absorb through the skin. Trapped inside the tightly laced corsets of the era, victims couldn't simply tear the garments off. It was a calculated, horrifying way to kill someone.

Meanwhile, her husband had reached his breaking point. When word reached him about the dark accusations surrounding his wife, the Marquis de Montespan got rip-roaring drunk and allegedly drove a carriage topped with antlers straight to Versailles, a bold public symbol of his wife's adultery. He also draped his carriage in black to symbolize her death. The king despised scandal, and this very public display sealed Montespan's fate.

Rather than risk a public trial that would expose the king's connection to a supposed witch, the court quietly arranged her exile. She departed with half a million francs and retreated first to a convent, then to her late sister's chateau. In her final years, she donated generously to hospitals and charities, devoted herself to religious observance, and became a patron of the arts. She died in 1707 at the age of 66. As a final act of rejection, the king forbade all seven of their children from wearing mourning attire for her.

Was the king ashamed that rumors made him turn on someone he once loved? Or was Madame de Montespan truly the baby-killing, poison-brewing, satanic-ritual-performing royal mistress that history painted her to be? The gang digs into a mystery where power, beauty, and dark magic collide in the court of the Sun King.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The rise and fall of France's most infamous royal mistress

Accusations of black masses, love potions, and infant sacrifices

The terrifying history of poisoned clothing in royal courts

A drunk husband's antler-topped protest carriage at Versailles

Josh's verdict on whether any of it actually happened

Zoinks. Six people killed on an isolated Bavarian farm in the middle of a snowbound March night -- and then, for four days, the killer didn't leave. He fed the cattle. He stoked the fire. He ate their food. He slept in their beds. And nobody knew.

The gang is heading to Bavaria.

In the early hours of April 1, 1922, the Gruber family farm at Hinterkaifeck -- a remote homestead about 70 kilometers north of Munich -- fell silent in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Six people were dead: farmer Andreas Gruber, his wife Cazilia, their widowed daughter Viktoria Gabriel, Viktoria's two children, and the new maid Maria Baumgartner, who had arrived only hours before and was killed on her very first day. The weapon was a mattock -- a farm tool, one that was already there. The killer used what the farm provided.

What makes this case one of the most haunting unsolved murders in European history is not the killings themselves, but what came after. Witnesses in nearby villages noticed smoke rising from the Hinterkaifeck chimney for four days following the murders. Someone had collected the mail. Someone had fed the animals. When neighbors finally arrived and found the bodies, investigators discovered that whoever committed these killings had lingered -- living inside the crime scene, among the dead, for the better part of a week.

The warning signs had been there for weeks before. Andreas Gruber told neighbors he had found footprints in the snow leading toward the farmhouse -- but none leading away. He heard sounds in the attic. Newspaper pages appeared that no one in the household had purchased. A previous maid had quit the position months earlier, convinced the farm was haunted, and refused to return. Whatever was coming had been circling for a while.

Jinkies -- the investigation that followed became one of the most complex in Bavarian history. Over a hundred suspects were questioned. In a measure that would become one of the more chilling historical footnotes of the case, the victims' skulls were removed and sent to clairvoyants in the hope of generating leads. Those skulls were lost during World War II. A prime suspect, neighbor Lorenz Schlittenbauer, had documented motive and was notably the first person to enter the barn alone when the bodies were discovered. The case was reopened in 2007 by the Bavarian Police Academy. It has never been solved.

The gang will hear the full story: who these people were, the warning signs no one acted on, the evidence investigators pieced together, and the questions that have followed this case for over a hundred years.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The isolated Hinterkaifeck farm and the Gruber family's troubled history

The weeks of strange signs leading up to the night of March 31, 1922

Six killings, one weapon, and a killer who refused to leave

Seven-year-old Cazilia's final moments and what investigators found

Lorenz Schlittenbauer and why he remains the most studied suspect

The investigation's most disturbing choices -- and its unsolved legacy

Jinkies! Three ancient civilizations, separated by oceans and thousands of years, independently built the same thing -- a structure that marks the exact moment the sun crosses the sky's midpoint. No GPS. No satellites. No communication between them. And every single one of those structures still works today, right on schedule.

This week Josh brought a mystery that swings in the opposite direction from most of what the gang explores. No crime. No ghost. No cover-up. Just a category of question that might be harder to answer than any of those: how did ancient people, using only the stars and stone, build monuments so precise that the sun itself performs on command?

The trail leads across three continents. On the island of Malta, the Temple of Mnajdra was built somewhere between 3,600 and 2,500 BC, making it one of the oldest freestanding structures on earth. At sunrise on the spring and fall equinoxes, sunlight pours through the temple's main axis and illuminates the interior with a precision that engineers still find difficult to explain. No tools. No formal mathematics. Just stone and sky. In Mexico, the Maya built El Castillo at Chichen Itza between roughly 800 and 1200 AD -- a pyramid with 91 steps on each of its four sides, plus one more at the top, totaling 365. One step per day of the solar year. On each equinox, the setting sun casts a series of triangular shadows down the north staircase that merge with a carved serpent head at the base, creating the illusion of Kukulkan, the feathered serpent god, descending from the sky. And in New Mexico, the ancestral Pueblo people carved two spiral petroglyphs into a remote butte at Chaco Canyon. Three large sandstone slabs in front of those spirals catch the equinox sunlight and throw a dagger of light across the center of the smaller spiral -- precisely, reliably, every year.

Josh's throughline for this episode is the piece that sticks: these three cultures never met. They had no shared language, no trade route, no way to compare notes. And yet they all looked up at the same sky and built monuments that answer the same question on the same two days every year. This episode was recorded on the spring equinox itself.

What you will hear in this episode:

-- How the Temple of Mnajdra captures equinox sunrise in a structure built before Stonehenge

-- The 365-step design of El Castillo and the serpent shadow that appears twice a year

-- The Chaco Canyon sun dagger and why the site was closed to visitors after erosion damaged the stone slabs

-- Why Josh thinks independent construction of astronomical architecture is stranger than a single shared origin would be

-- Shane's reaction to the equinox timing of the recording itself

Pull up a chair with the gang. This one hits differently when you consider that outside right now, the sun is doing the same thing it has done over these sites for thousands of years.

Jinkies! The gang stumbles onto a mystery hiding in plain sight this week - the water in your glass right now might be older than the sun itself, and it definitely did not originate on Earth.

Josh brings a cosmic puzzle to the bunker that rewrites everything you thought you knew about the most common substance on our planet. Water has no natural formation process on Earth - it arrived here during the Late Heavy Bombardment Period, roughly 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, when our planet had no atmosphere and was pelted by asteroids and comets carrying ice. As those space rocks crashed into our molten young world, their ice melted and slowly accumulated into what would become our primordial oceans.

But here is where the mystery deepens: up to 50% of that water is older than the sun. Scientists studying deuterium ratios - a heavy form of hydrogen that acts as a cosmic fingerprint - discovered that much of Earth's water formed in interstellar space before our solar system even existed. That means roughly 60% of your body is made up of molecules over 4.6 billion years old. You are literally walking around with water older than the star that warms our planet.

The trio explores how Mars once had abundant water until its magnetic field weakened around 3.7 billion years ago. Without that protective shield, solar winds stripped away the Martian atmosphere and most of its surface water. Recent research suggests liquid water may still exist beneath Mars' surface, potentially 5 to 8 kilometers deep, trapped in rock pores and fractures - tantalizingly close yet impossibly out of reach.

Back on Earth, the story of water takes a dramatic turn with cyanobacteria, microscopic organisms that thrived in those ancient oceans and produced oxygen as a metabolic byproduct. They generated so much oxygen that it transformed from a trace gas to a dominant atmospheric component - triggering Earth's first mass extinction event roughly 2.4 billion years ago. The very organisms that created breathable air essentially poisoned themselves and nearly all other anaerobic life. Evidence of this cataclysm remains in banded iron formations found worldwide, including the startling fact that decomposing matter turned the oceans red for an extended period.

Josh also uncovers some unsettling truths about our water supply today. Every drop you drink has cycled through dinosaurs, been part of countless organisms, and existed in every imaginable form. The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer beneath the Sahara Desert - covering over 2 million square kilometers - contains "fossil water" that is not part of our natural water cycle. Once depleted, it is gone forever.

The episode closes with perhaps the strangest water fact of all: ultrapure water behaves almost like acid. At Japan's Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector, water so thoroughly purified that it contains nothing except H2O molecules will actively dissolve metal. A dropped wrench reportedly had its chrome plating stripped away, leaving nothing but the base metal behind.

**What you'll hear in this episode:**

- Why 30-50% of Earth's water predates our sun by millions of years

- How Mars lost its oceans and where that water might be hiding now

- The first mass extinction caused by organisms creating too much oxygen

- Universal Yums Korea box tasting: bulgogi noodles, honey butter pretzels, churros, and peach gummies