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Speaker 1: Happy day, and welcome to Unexplained, with me, your host, Richard McLean-Smith, where each week we explore another true tale of high strangeness. If you're new here, and you're a fan of expertly told, atmospheric stories about the strange and unexplained, then you've come to the right place. And please subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so, and please share it with others if you enjoy it. Unexplained Season 10 will begin on Friday, November 27th. In the meantime … we're dipping back into the vaults. In 1802, Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was introduced to guano, a substance made from accumulated bird and bat droppings that had been prized for centuries as an exceptionally effective fertiliser, dating back to the time of the ancient Incas. Humboldt's efforts to introduce guano to European agriculture would have consequences far beyond anything that he could possibly have imagined. This is Unexplained, Season 5, Episode 2, The Unceasing Cloud. In his famed and controversial 1798 paper, An Essay on the Principle of Population, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus outlined the theory for which he has since been immortalised. Malthusianism, as it came to be known, broadly speaking, is the belief that the global human population will increase inevitably to the point where it can no longer be sustained by the resources available to it, unless it is cured by either natural disasters or state intervention. Without such checks, Malthus believed, many would be fated to a lifetime of financial poverty and destitution, as more and more people would be forced to scrap over diminishing proportions of food, Malthus' theory was undermined emphatically in the next hundred years by the sheer human capacity for ingenuity and its rapacious thirst for commodities. Throughout the 19th century, although global population continued to increase at a rapid rate, it was more than compensated for by the equally rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. With new tools such as the threshing machine, came the ability to farm more intensively than ever before. But just as crucial was the introduction to Europe and the United States of an extremely unlikely nitrogen-rich fertiliser. It was back in 1802 that the brilliant Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt first came across it while trekking through Peru. Called guano by those local to the region, otherwise known as guano, This natural fertiliser, comprised of bat and bird excrement, had long been considered an extraordinarily effective fertiliser, used even by the ancient Incas. Humboldt's introduction to guano set in motion a chain of events that would not only change the world as we knew it, but change it in ways that we may struggle to ever recover from. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith. A veritable polymath, Alexander Humboldt spent much of his early years studying a vast array of disciplines, including languages, geology, anatomy and astronomy. Amongst many other things, he is credited with reintroducing the word cosmos into popular usage and is also regarded as the first person to describe the phenomenon of human-induced climate change. By his 40s, Humboldt was already a well-established member of the European science community when he received a blessing from the King of Spain to undertake an expedition to the Americas. Arriving in 1799, Humboldt would spend the next five years trekking extensively throughout the continent. After returning to Europe, Humboldt wrote effusively about the merits of guano, encouraging industrialists, to look into the possibility of incorporating it into Western agricultural practices. Within 30 years, as many began to see the benefits for themselves, millions of tonnes of it, largely harvested by enslaved people from China, Africa, the Polynesian Islands and Hawaii, was being exported and traded throughout Europe and the United States. Before long, with the unquenchable desire for it, Deposits of guano had been all but exhausted by the 1870s. This pitfall was swiftly overcome, however, with the discovery of vast quantities of natural sodium nitrate found in Chile around the same time. But, as many were quick to recognise, sodium nitrate was also a finite resource and much like the once bountiful supply of guano, it too would someday run out. By the 1890s, The world, it seemed, was once again in a perilous position. With the global population now 50% larger than it had been in Malthus' time, thanks in part to our increased capacity to farm, fears of a Malthusian catastrophe were once again being raised. In 1898, Sir William Crookes, President of the British Academy of Sciences, drew attention to this worrying predicament. It was his belief that unless a viable alternative to the natural but finite fertilizers could be found soon, food supplies would no longer be sufficient to sustain the global population. There was one great hope, however, he added. Since nitrogen made up 79% of the Earth's atmosphere, there was certainly more than enough of it to go around. All that was needed was for someone to find a way to convert it into a compound. that plants could feed off. In 1909, chemist Fritz Haber was working as an assistant and lecturer at Karlsruhe University in Germany. Though not especially well known at the time, Haber had been steadily making a name for himself, specialising in the technology of dye for textiles and electrochemistry. That year, however, Working in their lab at Karlsruhe, Haber and his assistant Robert Le Rossignon would make one of the greatest discoveries of modern science. Spurred on by the global hunt for a synthetic fertilizer to match the nutrient-rich nitrates such as those from Chile, Haber devised a process that successfully combined nitrogen from the air with hydrogen to create ammonia, a nitrogen-rich compound capable of fertilising plants. Haber's process was acquired by the German chemical company
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Baden Aniline and Soda Factory in July the same year, who in turn assigned chemist Karl Bosch to scale it up for industrial use. With the help of what would become known as the Haber-Bosch process, BASF were producing industrial quantities of ammonia by 1913. which couldn't come soon enough for the German nation. With the outbreak of war in July 1914, recognising that Chile's sodium nitrate deposits would not only be vital for agriculture, but also the production of explosives, the German government attempted to secure access to it for themselves. However, the German naval fleet that was sent to complete the task was destroyed a few months later by the British Navy. Left with no access to this vital resource, Carl Bosch and his team at BASF duly stepped in to make up the shortfall, turning their hand to generating vast quantities of ammonia at the military's request, this time to produce nitric acid for use in explosives. Fritz Haber, who thanks to the genius of the Haber-Bosch process was well known to the government, was invited to take up a slightly different task. and turn his talent for chemistry to figuring out how his process might best be used in the field of war. As a confirmed patriot, Haber had little trouble accepting the task, and quickly began by experimenting with tear gas. But Haber would go much further than that. Though many on both sides of the war had predicted a swift and early resolution to hostilities, by April 1915 a very different picture was beginning to emerge, with both sides thoroughly locked in a seemingly endless war of attrition. Fighting by this point was largely confined to the Western Front, a vast line of trenches and fiercely contested territory, stretching south from the coastline of the North Sea through Belgium, France and Germany, all the way to Switzerland. Located at the northern end of the front was the Ypres Salient, a 10-mile stretch of the line just to the east of the Belgium city of Ypres. As one of the few sections of the front at the time where the British, Canadian and French armies had succeeded, in pushing back into German occupied territory, the Ypres salient was also a vital strategic and symbolic landmark. So heavily was this section contested, the German military became convinced that if they could just break through it, it would be such a blow to the opposition's morale that that victory would be all but guaranteed. By April 22nd, the surrounding area had been obliterated by artillery shells from both sides, transforming the once rich and verdant farmland into hellish stretches of mud and twisted wire, pockmarked by vast yawning craters, and all of it strewn with the rotting corpses of fallen soldiers. The trenches weren't much better, Bogged down with water due to the low water table, they offered little respite from the elements. They too were littered with the bodies of the dead. The morning of the 22nd began with another period of heavy bombardment as the German army once again did all
they could to disrupt the line. By early afternoon, however, the guns had fallen silent. At the northern section of the salient, French Algerian troops waited nervously for whatever might come next. At just after 5pm, with the light beginning to fade, the aerial bombardment began afresh. The shells pummeling down into the mud became louder and louder with each passing minute, when suddenly, one of the lookouts observed something unusual in the distance. A thick cloud of smoke, slowly billowing toward them, across no man's land. Thinking the smoke was cover for an imminent attack, officers across the line screamed at their men to get ready, ordering their troops to stand and mount the first step in preparation for a defensive charge. Gathering weapons, helmets and ammo, the men threw themselves dutifully against the side of the trenches and hearts thumping in their chests as they awaited the next order. Officers gripped tighter on their revolvers as they braced themselves for the sudden onrush of German soldiers. But the soldiers never came. The officers could only look on with bemused stares as that peculiar smoke, seeming much thicker now, continued to draw nearer and nearer. It was almost beautiful, the way it shimmered a peculiar shade of yellow and green in the light. The smell hit them first, an acrid whiff of bleach that scraped at the back of the throat. Then the men began to cough and pull back, clawing at their necks. While some cried out for water, others were already on the ground, screaming in agony as they writhed about in the mud, frothing at the mouth and gasping for breath. and still the cloud of smoke kept coming until the entire trench had been engulfed by it. But it wasn't smoke at all. It was chlorine gas. Just under a mile away to the north, at the German line, the bald, bespectacled figure of Fritz Haber watched with satisfaction as the gas he had so meticulously helped to manufacture continued on its southerly direction, across the rest of the opposition's line. Haber later said that his intention had merely been to use the gas to cause mass disruption, leaving the opposition forces afraid and shaken, but able to retreat to safety if need be. It was, he claimed, merely a tactical attempt to bring a quick end to the war that would ultimately save lives in the long run. Harbour's technique had been to place 6,000 metal canisters containing 168 tonnes of liquid chlorine along a four-mile stretch of the German army line. After waiting all day for the wind to change direction, the canisters were finally prized open, turning the liquid chlorine inside instantly to gas. Up to 1,400 soldiers are thought to have died in the attack and over 2,000 were injured. The chlorine being so potent, it corroded the soldiers' silver buckles and badges to a greenish black. Harbers hoped that the gas attack would result in a fast resolution to the conflict did not come to pass. Not only did the German army fail to capitalise on the initial attack, it simply opened the door to the development of even more devastating weapons. When an effective solution was found to combat the effect of the chlorine gas, for example, Haber simply developed something even more lethal. Where chlorine gas had to be inhaled, nitrogen mustard needed only to settle on exposed skin to do lasting damage to the body. Symptoms of a mustard gas attack ranged from extensive blistering to weeks spent coughing and choking on blood until death. Though many were quick to condemn the German high command, even within the German military itself, for permitting such a heinous act as the gas attacks, the other nations were equally quick to follow suit. Despite the British senior officer Sir John French being among the most vociferous of critics, describing the use of gas as a barbarous disregard of the well-known usages of civilised war, whatever that is, the British Army would launch their own gas attack only five months later. By the end of the war, the British, French and Belgian forces had used more tonnes of gas than the German Army. Out of the 40 million or so casualties of the First World War, 100,000 are thought to have been killed by gas, with another 1 million believed to have been wounded by it. Only ten years before, at the 1907 Hague Convention, Each nation had signed an agreement forbidding the use of poison or poisoned weapons in war. The Haber-Bosch process would earn Haber a Nobel Prize in 1918 and the ammonia it was used to create today forms the basis of all manufactured nitrogen fertilisers, a method that is credited with feeding roughly a third of the global population and saving billions from starvation. there is perhaps a no more polarising figure in science. With the release of that gas in 1915, there was no putting it back in the canister. As reports of the attacks and those haunting images of soldiers in bug-eyed gas masks drifted back from the front, few could fail to be disturbed by it. It had changed our concept of warfare indelibly and as it would turn out, the spectre of those thick Yellow-tinged toxic clouds would disperse far wider and linger far longer than Harbour had perhaps ever intended them to. On the evening of Friday, December 22nd, 1933, out in the snow-covered fields of Buttertord County in Virginia in the United States, local farmer Clarence Cal Huffman and his wife Mattie were preparing for bed when Mattie became aware of an unusual acrid odour in the air. Feeling suddenly overcome with nausea, she laid herself down and waited for it to pass. With Mattie finally drifting off to sleep, Cal was just about to join her when he too caught a whiff of the unusual odour. Being a farmer, Cal was all too aware that it wasn't uncommon round those parts to for chicken thieves to use gas to knock out livestock before stealing it. In recent years, some enterprising burglars had even used gas to knock out guard dogs before ransacking people's homes. Hurriedly lighting a lantern, Cal grabbed
his gun and quickly made his way to the back door. Pulling it open, he held up the lamp and stared out into the chill of the night. Seeing little but empty fields, at the usual trees standing bare and skeletal in the dark, he felt suddenly all too aware of just how isolated he and his family were. With his wife and children to think about, he decided it best to call the police. Special Officer Oscar Lemon arrived 30 minutes later to find Cal waiting for him on his porch, shotgun in hand. His wife and children had all been roused from bed by the excitement, waited patiently inside After he explained the situation to Lemon, Cal joined him in making a quick circuit of the property. Their home, a large stone building known locally as the Brian MacDonald Jr. House, was one of the more prominent properties in the county, and as such, a likely target perhaps for unwanted attention. As the officer flicked his flashlight about looking for anything unusual Lemon noticed one of the windows to the enclosed front porch was slightly open. Shining his light underneath it he spotted the print of a small high-heeled shoe in the dirt unlike anything anyone in the family owned. And neither did anyone remember leaving the window open. As unlikely as it sounded to Officer Lemon, it seemed that someone might have tried to poison the family with gas, with the possibility that they'd used the porch window to pipe it into the property. After checking in on Matty, who was by then feeling better, Officer Lemon suggested the family try to get some rest and call back if anything else strange occurred. With Lemon having left the property around 1am, it was a few hours later when Cal and Matty were woken by the sound of coughing and spluttering coming from their children's bedrooms. Igniting the lamp again, Cal and Matty rushed through to the hallway just in time to see their 20-year-old daughter Alice. stumble from her bedroom, seemingly unable to breathe, before collapsing onto the floor. Yelling that they were under attack again, Ashby Henderson, a neighbour who was staying with the family at the time, was convinced he'd seen movement outside a window and dashed out of the house to investigate. Cal joined him a moment later, but after some time scanning the area, they found nothing. Local doctor, 28-year-old Samuel Driver, arrived on the scene shortly after to find Alice, by then, completely unresponsive. He turned her onto her front and attempted to resuscitate her. He splayed her arms out to the side like wings and carefully pushed down on her back as he lifted her arms up by the side. After a minute or so, the family were relieved to see the young woman finally come round. With no one able to smell the gas anymore, it seemed this second apparent attack was over. And so, with not much else to be done, the family thanked the doctor and made their way back to bed. A few days after the strange events at the Huffman home, over in Cloverdale, just three miles to the south, Lucy and Clarence Hall were attending a Christmas church service with their three children, When the family returned to their home at 9pm, the couple noticed a sickly, acrid smell in the air. Within moments, their eyes were beginning to sting. Telling the others to wait outside, Clarence moved in further to investigate, only to stop suddenly, looking as though he might keel over at any moment. Lucy, watching on in horror, dashed inside to grab her husband and pulled him back out of the house. Dr William Breckenridge, who attended the scene shortly after, suggested that what happened to Clarence was consistent with the effects of inhaling formaldehyde gas. The following night, with the Hall staying at Lucy's parents' home for safety, Lucy's sister Ada was just driving past the Hall's house with her husband when they saw a figure in the dark poking about with a flashlight near one of the windows. When they pulled up for a better look, The figure got into a car and drove off swiftly into the night. The following day, the news hit the papers that a mysterious assailant, nicknamed the Phantom Gasser, was on the loose in Botetourt County, accused of releasing poisonous gas into people's homes. Having first assumed it to be little more than kids messing about, after a third apparent attack on local welder Albert Kelly, Officer Lemon stepped up his efforts to catch the assailant. With the community, like much of America, only just getting back to his feet after the ravages of the Great Depression, this was the last thing they needed. On the 28th of December, Officer Lemon received word that an unknown man and woman were seen passing Kelly's home about the same time he claimed to have been attacked. The couple had apparently driven back and forth a number of times in a 1932 Chevrolet. However, a check on the vehicle's licence plate failed to identify the owner of the vehicle. A few weeks later, several miles west of Fincastle, at an area known as Howells Mill, Mrs Moore, a woman staying at the home of Gertrude and Homer Hilton with her baby, was alerted to the sound of muffled voices coming from somewhere in the yard. Keeping her eye on her baby, who was fast asleep in its cot, she listened quietly as she heard the sound of rustling footsteps drawing closer to the window. Moments later, Mrs Moore could smell gas, followed by a sudden numbing sensation that seemed to be spreading slowly into her limbs. Crying out for help, she grabbed her baby and ran out of the property. Hearing the cries, the Howells dashed downstairs to find her shivering on the front step outside with no sign of anyone else around. Homer Hilton gathered up his shotgun and took a seat in the front room, bowing to keep watch all night. But nobody came. The following day, Homer spread the news of the attack to neighbours Sally and Tom, who in turn passed it on to their children. Before long, their son Roy was sharing the news with neighbours Lura and Emmett Lee, who, like an invisible
virus, brought it into their home and shared it in turn with each of their ten children. As panic spread among them, the Lees spent the rest of the day plugging up holes in their property, using tin to patch up their windows and terrified that any gaps might provide an opportunity for the phantom gasser to pipe gas into their home. That night, with everyone sleeping together in an upstairs room, Emmett watched over them all with his shotgun. Sometime later, as they were drifting off to sleep, they heard a piece of tin rattling in one of the windows. Emmett ran immediately onto the landing and stared down into the darkness below. and demanded to know who was there. Hearing the rattle again, he pulled open a nearby window, stuck out his gun, and fired a quick warning shot into the air, but saw nothing. With news of the mysterious gas attacks spreading rapidly throughout the community, the once open and friendly citizens of Buttertort County had begun to retreat into their homes and locking all their doors and windows and eyeing their neighbours with suspicion. Families in the more isolated parts of the county slept at their friends' homes for added security, while many had taken to patrolling the roads at night. Others sat out on their front steps, nervously chewing tobacco, with their breath billowing about them in the cold air, as they kept their eyes fixed ahead for any hint of a shadow moving about in the darkness. Vague reports circulated of unknown vehicles being seen in the area on the night of the attack on the Howe property and some claimed to have heard muffled voices near their properties too, shortly before Mrs Moore had apparently done. After visiting the home of another apparent victim, Dr Samuel Driver became convinced that the gas being used was chlorine. On Tuesday 16th January 1934, Local resident Mr Duval arrived at his home shortly after 11.30pm, a quiet place not far from Cloverdale, to find that his family had been attacked. He quickly called Officer Lemon and arranged to meet up with him to search the local area. On his way to meet up with the officer, Duval spotted a man standing by the side of the road. Realising he'd been seen, the man ran off toward a car parked nearby. and jumped into the passenger seat. The car sped off before Duval could give chase. Later, when he returned to the site with Officer Lemon, the pair discovered a print in the dirt next to where the car had been parked. A small, high-heeled shoe, just like the one he'd found at the Huffman property back in December. By January 22nd, 1934, news of the Phantom Gasser had gone national, with the New York Times declaring that Virginians are terrorised by a gas thrower who flees at night after making victims ill. The following week, in one of the more shocking incidences, five friends were gathered at the home of Ed Stanley in an area known as Collin Siding when the phantom gasser struck again. The friends were sat chatting amiably in the front room when one of
them, Cecilia Weddle, began choking uncontrollably. The friends looked on in terror as Acelia fought for air, when suddenly they too began to choke before being overcome with a collective nausea. Suspecting they'd been gassed, one of the group, Frank Guy, staggered to his feet and clawed open the front door. As the others helped to drag Acelia out of the house, Frank caught sight of four men running off toward a nearby wood. He raced back inside and picked up the family's shotgun, then took aim at the men. But by the time the shot rang out, the men were nowhere to be seen. With fear having completely gripped the county, the local board of supervisors convened for a meeting the next day. In desperation, the board announced a $ 500 reward, almost $ 13, 000 in today's money, for the capture of those responsible. This move was followed swiftly by the Virginia State Assembly, where delegates from Botetourt and neighbouring Roanoke County introduced a bill promising a prison sentence up to 10 years for anyone caught attacking the public with toxic gas. And so it continued into February. Only now, the gasser and its associated panic had begun to spread further, affecting residents of Roanoke County too. At least one resident was hospitalised, but was discharged the following day with no apparent side effects. By mid-February, after a sudden spate of false alarms throughout Buttertort and Roanoke counties, the reports of mysterious gassings began to tail off. With no concrete clues or evidence with which to mount an investigation, the local police were forced to abandon any efforts to hunt down the phantom. if indeed there had ever been one at all. And slowly but surely, the people of that quiet corner of rural Virginia returned to their normal lives, not quite sure what it was they had experienced, only that for a brief moment a very real fear had stalked the land. A fear born in a laboratory two decades before and unleashed on the world in a toxic cloud of death thousands of miles away. in a field in Belgium. But before long, new fears would emerge to take its place. It's unlikely that when Alexander Humboldt was espousing the virtues of Guano, that he could ever have known just how much it would change the world, nor how only a hundred years later, it would indirectly lead to the development of such devastating chemical weapons. And despite being one of the first to understand the effects of human-made climate change, it's also unlikely that he could have predicted what impact the bat excrement would ultimately have on the environment. As it is, the explosion of crop yields that started with guano, accelerated by processes such as Harbour Bosch and later the Green Revolution, has meant we are now farming more intensively than ever before. And though we would be right to congratulate ourselves on the ingenuity it took to get here, we are once again facing a moment of crisis, both Malthusian and otherwise. A study published in Bioscience Journal in 2017 predicted that despite our increased yields, population growth is once again approaching a point of catastrophe. suggesting that food production would need to increase by somewhere between 25 to 70% to compensate. And yet, just taking the impact of nitrogen fertilisers derived from Harbour Bosch as one example, we are paying a hefty price for those increased yields. Applying too much nitrogen has destabilised the natural nitrogen cycle, with more being created than can ever be absorbed. This in turn has led to a steady depletion of nutrients in the soil, making it ultimately less efficient for farming, with much of it ending up back in the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, an ozone-depleting greenhouse gas that traps heat at a staggering 300 times the rate of carbon dioxide. Today, there is 20% more nitrous oxide in the atmosphere than only 200 years ago. And of course, When the nutrients become depleted in the soil, even more nitrogen-based fertilizer is applied to make up the shortfall, creating a disastrous cycle of diminishing returns. And if that wasn't damaging enough, as the demand for food goes up with the population, so too does the demand for land. And where that land doesn't currently exist, it is made, often by clearing rich, vital and ancient forest ecosystems. Malthus, it seems, may yet be proved right in the long run. But he made one crucial mistake. He underestimated the human capacity for problem solving and though we doubtlessly create many more with the ones we solve and there is no cosmic obligation to care about each other or the planet even, perhaps there is good reason not to despair. Though we might sometimes be more ruthless when our backs are against the wall, so too are we at our most resourceful and brilliant. Perhaps instead of devising new ways to produce and consume more, what's needed, just as it was back in Malthus' day, is just a new way of thinking. History tells us that, for better or worse, we will find it. Please remember to like and subscribe if you've enjoyed the show. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by me, Richard McLean-Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook at Unexplained Podcast and on X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod. Until next time, stay strange and dissonant.