Episode 12 Supplement

Some weekend reading material about giant rats, psychics, ghost lights, and plasmoids

Wow, this episode was jam-packed. Let’s take things in order:

• Here’s the Smithsonian Magazine piece about the subalpine woolly rat, which, if you squint just right, is actually kinda cute

• More on the role of geography in speciation

• The actual story about finding Douglas Brick’s missing body (including his mom’s journal entry about meeting the psychic)

• 20 mysteries actually solved by psychics and similar stories from the UK

• Extraterrestrial Life in the Thermosphere: Plasmas, UAP, Pre-Life, Fourth State of Matter, the scientific paper we discussed

• The correct term for these entities is “plasmoids,” coined by physicist Winston H. Bostick in 1956. “The plasma is emitted not as an amorphous blob, but in the form of a torus,” he wrote. “We shall take the liberty of calling this toroidal structure a plasmoid, a word which means plasma-magnetic entity. The word plasmoid will be employed as a generic term for all plasma-magnetic entities.”

• Here’s Bostick’s 1957 paper, “Experimental Study of Plasmoids”

• A longer retelling of Tom’s experience seeing the Brown Mountain Lights, and the 1922 Geological Survey report he referenced, which gives a solid history before issuing a lame explanation involving locomotive headlights

• Tom’s (possibly plasmoidal) UAP encounter as featured in our pilot episode