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This week, we’re going to hear about a study that claims to have determined what the scariest movie of all time is – scientifically. Then, we’ll hear about one of the recent real-life creepy stories of artificial intelligence going rogue. After that, we’re diving deep into bigfoot lore.
Featuring audio from Chad Benson from KRLD 1080 in Dallas, A New Morning out of WBEN in Buffalo, the Dana & Parks Show out of KMBZ in Kansas City and the Dave Glover Show out of KMOX in St. Louis.
Featuring audio from Chad Benson from KRLD 1080 in Dallas, A New Morning out of WBEN in Buffalo, the Dana & Parks Show out of KMBZ in Kansas City and the Dave Glover Show out of KMOX in St. Louis.
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00:11Welcome to a Weird News Roundup presented by Odyssey's Something Offbeat podcast.
00:17We explore strange tales reported on by Odyssey's radio newsrooms from coast to coast.
00:24I'm your Roundup host, Lauren Berry.
00:27This week, we're going to hear about a study that claims to have determined what the scariest movie of all
00:35time is, scientifically.
00:38Then we'll hear about one of the recent real-life creepy stories of artificial intelligence going rogue,
00:46and in this case, reporting a fake tip to police.
00:51Then we're diving deep into Bigfoot lore.
00:56First, we'll hear about a new film that has apparently debunked famous Bigfoot footage from the 1960s.
01:04And then we'll hear about current expeditions to find Sasquatch and other cryptids.
01:11First up, here's Chad Benson of the Chad Benson Show on KRLD 1080 in Dallas.
01:19He's filling us in on a new study from a group called the Science of Scare Project.
01:25This includes heart rate studies, suspense, jump scares, and sustained anxiety.
01:31That's 25 points.
01:33Cultural impact.
01:34Public reaction.
01:35Iconic characters.
01:36Social influence and lasting recognition.
01:38Box office success.
01:39Inflation-adjusted performance.
01:41Budget efficiency and theatrical success.
01:43Influence on horror.
01:45That's 20 points.
01:46And finally, the last is staying power.
01:49Critical reputation, rewatchability, and influence across generations.
01:54So 25-25, that's for science, cultural impacts.
01:58Box office gives you 20.
02:00Influence on horror gives you 20.
02:02Legacy and staying power gives you 10.
02:05And today, in our countdown, we start with a movie that, quite frankly, scares a lot of folks, and it
02:13should.
02:13It is frightening, and that's not just according to me, kids.
02:17That is according to science.
02:19In fact, this movie scored 87 out of 100 in our countdown.
02:25And out of that, it scored the highest when it came to the fright factor.
02:30And it came out 14 years ago.
02:33That movie is Sinister.
02:35Sinister has actually held that top spot for four years in a row on the Science of Scare Projects list.
02:42Starring Ethan Hawke.
02:44It was made for about $3 million.
02:45It made $90 million worldwide.
02:47Now, it's a combination of a movie that we would normally see and found footage.
02:52It's a hybrid.
02:53The premise of the movie, a true crime writer named Ellison Oswalt moves his family to a house where a
02:58gruesome murder occurred.
02:59He discovers a box of Super 8 horror movies documenting horrific deaths.
03:04As he investigates, he has covered something far more sinister than an ordinary serial killer.
03:11And it goes from there.
03:12As far as the scare factor goes, 96.
03:15So science says it is the number one scare as far as jump scares and things like that.
03:22Are you ready for this?
03:23Watching Sinister, the average heart rate is 86.
03:27Resting is 64.
03:29Peak is 131.
03:32Gives you that fear factor.
03:33Study also reports 21% drop in heart rate with variability suggesting sustained physiological stress, not just brief moments of
03:42jump scares.
03:42Here's some fun things about the movie behind the scenes.
03:45If you've never seen it, it's incredible.
03:47The entire movie came from an actual nightmare.
03:49The writer, Robert Cargill, watched the Japanese horror remake The Ring, went to sleep and dreamed he found a box
03:55of Super 8 films in his attic.
03:57And out of that, he tremped this up.
04:00The monster was discovered on a flicker.
04:02Director Scott Derrickson searched thousands of horror photographs online.
04:06He found an image called Natalie, bought the rights from his creator, and developed Bagul.
04:11Bagul isn't actually a Babylonian god.
04:13They invented the mythology, drawing from an ancient religious stories and demonology, they found.
04:19They really shot the murder movies on Super 8, which is crazy.
04:25And the music itself is practically another monster.
04:29And if you haven't seen it, you need to.
04:34And now for a real story that might send a shiver up your spine.
04:39In recent months, there have been a number of troubling reports about artificial intelligence going rogue.
04:46And some of those were from leading AI companies themselves.
04:51A new entry into the Creepy AI Stories list reveals that one of these programs took it upon itself to
04:59send a tip to police about a crime that didn't exist.
05:04ABC News tech reporter Mike Dabuski joined a new morning out of Odyssey station WBEN in Buffalo to discuss the
05:14case this week.
05:15AI models submitted a tip to police about a murder investigation in Philadelphia.
05:24Yeah, so we first got wind of this last week, but according to Anthropic, which the clawed model that they
05:30were testing is actually the thing behind this false murder tip,
05:33this actually happened over the summer.
05:36On July 18th at 11.27 p.m., Philadelphia police say they got a tip about an unsolved murder.
05:42It was submitted through their publicly accessible web form, which is called phillyunsolvedmurders.com,
05:48and it came from someone who claimed to have information about this case.
05:52At the time, that tip was flagged as spam, never acted upon.
05:56Police say Anthropic discovered the incident on September 28th as part of the ongoing review process that that company was
06:03conducting
06:04in the wake of the OpenAI hugging face attack that we've talked about extensively.
06:08The Anthropic company then notified Philadelphia police on October 7th.
06:13A meeting between Anthropic and police officials happened the next day.
06:17And then on Friday, Anthropic published its latest report detailing what it calls unintended model actions.
06:24To dive a little bit deeper into this report they put out, Anthropic says it was testing how this model
06:29interacts with randomly selected websites.
06:31We're talking about a model called Claude Haiku 4.5 here.
06:36It was, according to this company, tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected web pages,
06:43basically flashing a bunch of different websites at this model and seeing if it could navigate those websites.
06:49And it makes sense why Anthropic would want to do this.
06:52A lot of modern generative AI products are billed as little personal assistants that can go to a website and
06:58buy something for you
06:59or cancel a subscription or things like that.
07:01They say that Claude was told not to log in or create accounts or make purchases.
07:05However, they didn't say anything about filling out a form, which is exactly what this tip form was.
07:10So when it came up in that randomly generated website, you know, ticker, Claude, you know, filled out the form.
07:17And it wrote specifically, I may have information regarding this case.
07:21I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area during that time period.
07:26Please contact me if this information is relevant.
07:28Notably, the tip line here did not have any description of a suspect.
07:32So it doesn't seem like Claude knew what it was talking about when it said, I have someone matching the
07:37description.
07:37There was no description.
07:38It also didn't submit a name or any contact information.
07:41So no one could contact it, even if this wasn't immediately flagged as spam.
07:46Anthropic says Claude appears to have only been producing example content for this task rather than trying to mislead anyone.
07:52And as a precaution, they have now cut off their latest frontier models from the Internet while they're in this
08:00testing phase.
08:01OK, but in this case, you really wouldn't be able to tell whether this information was coming from AI or
08:07from an actual person, could you?
08:09Well, to a degree, Philadelphia police did kind of clock that this was either AI or at least something suspicious,
08:17because, again, they flagged this as spam.
08:19Philadelphia police say this never actually was looked at by a human, the sort of automated system that is supposed
08:26to sequester spammy content or spammy submissions to the tip line acted on this.
08:31And no cop ever basically looked at it.
08:34They also say there's no indication that this incident involved any unauthorized access to police systems or a compromise of
08:41department data.
08:42And again, if we go back to what Claude wrote into this tip line, it does seem kind of spammy,
08:47right?
08:48The tip line didn't have any description.
08:50This thing references a description.
08:52So it's sort of unclear what it's talking about and not filling out any sort of contact information is like
08:57classic bot behavior.
08:58So there are still, you know, flags here.
09:01I think at the end of the day, while this is sort of an attention grabbing headline, it is an
09:07example of AI being kind of bad at its job as opposed to being too good at its job.
09:13It is something you mentioned there.
09:15It didn't, you know, infiltrate any police systems, you know, didn't access something that wasn't already accessible.
09:21But there's the concern, right, is these get, you know, smarter and smarter.
09:26And we hear about these cyber attacks.
09:28Just imagining like AI breaking into the police system and then inputting crimes that never, you know, happen.
09:34All of a sudden, me and you have police records.
09:36Sure.
09:37I mean, I think we're very far away from that, right?
09:40When we talk about hacking incidents, you know, there is the hugging face incident.
09:44That was sort of the thing that kicked off this latest discussion about AI safety and what these testing processes
09:51look like.
09:52Since then, though, a lot of these have been sort of attempted hacking incidents at best, right?
09:58Like, at the most aggressive version of this, the AIs haven't gotten very far.
10:03They've either stopped themselves or firewalls that are designed to stop this type of attack have worked.
10:08And I think it's important not to get ahead of our skis and overstate the capability of this technology because
10:14it is still very nascent.
10:16It is still very much in development here.
10:18Another thing to keep in mind is that these are not situations where the AI is behaving on its own,
10:25right?
10:25Even the term going rogue is kind of a misnomer here.
10:29The AI has not become self-aware.
10:31These are not acting on their own volition.
10:33These are machines that are being given a task to carry out.
10:37They're carrying out that task.
10:38And this becomes a problem when the guardrails on these tests aren't sufficient.
10:43For example, when Anthropic neglected to stop Claude from filling out forms during this particular test.
10:49Coming up next, we're going to discuss another alleged fake, the 1967 footage claiming to show Bigfoot.
10:57And we'll hear about searches for the elusive cryptid going on today.
11:02All on this Weird News Roundup from Odyssey's Something Offbeat.
11:08Thank you for listening to this special presentation of Weird News from Odyssey's Something Offbeat.
11:17It was the year that the Beatles released Sgt. Peppers, the year of the Summer of Love,
11:23and the year that Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin unveiled film footage that they alleged showed a Bigfoot sighting.
11:32Bigfoot being a legendary, mysterious, giant, hairy, humanoid creature said to lurk in forests.
11:40Now, the makers of a new documentary claim that they have debunked that footage, turning modern Bigfoot lore right on
11:49its head.
11:50Here's the Dana and Parks show out of Odyssey Station KMBZ in Kansas City with more details.
11:57A story here from the New York Post.
12:00A new documentary is blowing the lid off of history's most famous Bigfoot sighting, exposing the legendary footage.
12:06You guys all remember this. Bigfoot is walking through the woods and looks over his shoulder.
12:12He's got that strange gait in his walk.
12:14The original grainy Bigfoot clip of film.
12:17Filmed by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin.
12:20It is, according to the New York Post, a fake.
12:25There was a rehearsal video that was made a year prior.
12:29No!
12:30Yep.
12:32It used the exact same film.
12:35Listen to this.
12:37The film Capturing Bigfoot, which hits theaters and prime video on October 20th,
12:41features a top-secret canister of 16-millimeter film stashed away in a safe for decades,
12:47showing a test-run clip of the hairy guy purportedly shot in 1966,
12:52exactly one year before Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin's famous film, Tricked the World.
12:58Okay, be honest.
13:02Most of us thought that was either fake or we are misunderstanding what it is we are really seeing there.
13:13And as someone who just spent a weekend in the Ozarks, there are those Bigfoot statuaries everywhere.
13:19People have them in their yards.
13:20People are selling them on the side of the road, like all of those things, right?
13:26Most Americans thought that it's not really going to be some big hairy monster in the woods, right?
13:32But there are people we've had them on this show, Dana, who literally hooks line and sinker.
13:36There's a show called Chasing Bigfoot.
13:39What does this do to that show?
13:41It proves that every Bigfoot enthusiast is gullible and has been taken for a ride.
13:48The film called, the new film, not Chasing Bigfoot, the series or the film that we're talking about that's 41
13:57seconds.
13:57There's actually a film coming out called Capturing Bigfoot.
14:00It hits theaters and prime video October 20th.
14:04It features a top-secret canister of that film that you're talking about that was stashed in a safe for
14:12decades.
14:14Who had the safe and why did they sit on it and not open it?
14:17Yeah, no red flags there.
14:18A number of people or a couple of the people in this film capturing Bigfoot are the sons of either
14:25Roger Patterson or Bob Gimlin.
14:28The original videographers.
14:32The 1967 footage is widely considered by enthusiasts and researchers as the definitive evidence of the creature's existence.
14:42Yeah.
14:45So all they did in this movie is prove to the world what we all suspected and, let's be honest,
14:52pretty much knew that that was fake.
14:55Why is this not bigger news than today?
14:56I don't know.
14:57Both films, by the way, for anyone thinking, oh, that's AI.
15:01Uh-uh.
15:02Listen, both films were shot on the exact same K100 Kodak film camera, which left a unique edge, numbers, geometric
15:12designs, and date codes on the film itself.
15:16This is the answer we've been looking for for years.
15:21That's definitely faked.
15:22It is definitely rehearsed, quoting here, from Larry Lund, known as the Sasquatch sleuth, after being shown the film.
15:31Now, it doesn't disprove Bigfoot, it just disproves that video of him.
15:36Right.
15:37Oh, boy.
15:38Right.
15:39By the way, what does this tell you?
15:42The bombshell reel hidden in that canister was discovered in 2017.
15:49We've been sitting on this for nine years?
15:51We have been sitting on this for nine years.
15:55Does this not make you sad a little bit?
16:00Hey, Bigfoot!
16:04It kind of makes me sad.
16:06Why would it make you sad?
16:07Because I love those stories.
16:08I love, like, a magician showing a magic trick, and I don't want to know how it's done.
16:13I don't want to see how the sausage is made.
16:14I want to be amazed by someone who can do what I cannot do.
16:17And so when that film is out there, or the photo of the Loch Ness Monster, which is probably a
16:22shadow,
16:23isn't it just a little bit more fun to believe that there's a possibility there's something beneath the surface of
16:29that water?
16:29I think it's entertaining.
16:31The town would go bankrupt, by the way.
16:34A lot of towns would.
16:41As Dana just pointed out, for some fans of Bigfoot lore, part of the allure is simply the mystery of
16:49it all.
16:50Experiencing something we can't understand in a world where constant documentation of our lives is becoming more commonplace.
16:58And, as it seems, that there's little of the world that people haven't explored already.
17:05For some, the draw of the Bigfoot story might be community.
17:10Dave Glover, host of the Dave Glover Show out of Odyssey Station KMOX in St. Louis, is one of those
17:17Bigfoot fans.
17:18And this week, he spoke with Frankie Cambaletta of Emmaus Asylum.
17:23That's a historical site that hosts ghost hunting and cryptid hunting events, including a search for Bigfoot just last month.
17:32So, what happened on the Bigfoot hunt?
17:35What do people see and hear?
17:37So, Bigfoot basically was like a complete one-on-one.
17:39So, Adam and Shelby and Brittany, they're from Half-Inch Rence Crew.
17:44They're out in Frederickstown.
17:46And so, they were able to basically give everybody a one-on-one of, like, how to do this.
17:51Like, the tracking, the knocking, the, you know, what to do if something does happen.
17:56And, you know, how to stay quiet.
17:58How to basically camp and be safe in the areas.
18:02And then, when they go out at night.
18:04Like, they have a really cool, like, night vision drone.
18:09Which is awesome.
18:09So, you can actually see, like, sleeping deer and stuff like that.
18:13I've always thought that's how we're going to catch them.
18:15Yeah.
18:15Oh, totally.
18:16For guys like you to go out there and actually witness that and see that, it's your practicality in your
18:21head trying to make patterns.
18:22Like, what am I seeing?
18:23And I'm like, I'm not supposed to be seeing this, but it's there.
18:26And so, then you're trying to figure.
18:28So, sometimes people will have that experience.
18:31And then they're driving home and all of a sudden it's like, was that Bigfoot?
18:34Exactly.
18:34Because you're trying to, like, put it off and then, wait a minute.
18:36There's no way that a man can be eight feet tall.
18:38There's no man.
18:39There's no way there's a silverback in Colorado.
18:42So, you're just trying to put all the logical stuff together.
18:45And then without, you know, trying to stay crazy, you know, you're just like, I got to go back out
18:49there.
18:49And that's kind of like what we always talk about the paranormal jackpot, right?
18:52It's like a slot machine.
18:53You hit it once.
18:54You see that full-bodied apparition.
18:56You hear the disembodied voice.
18:57And then for the next 25 years, you chase that experience again.
19:01And sometimes you never see it again.
19:03You never hear it again.
19:04But at the same time, it keeps you in the game.
19:06Yeah.
19:06And it also keeps you for, like, you know, those people that come in as skeptics.
19:10Like, we had a couple people, our first event, October 3rd.
19:13You know, they brought the boyfriend, and he was the biggest skeptic.
19:16And all of a sudden, he did not leave a skeptic out of a mass asylum.
19:18We can almost promise that at this point.
19:20Like, it's pretty active.
19:21What is it about the topography around the complex that makes it fertile for a Bigfoot hunt?
19:29So, according to those guys, it's just the way the trail winds are.
19:34So, like, they follow the almost, we believe, there are theories that Bigfoot follows the hunt.
19:39It follows the same tracking as deer and elk.
19:42So, like, whether they eat that or not, we have no evidence of that.
19:46But they like to believe that they follow that same hunting patterns as there.
19:50They like to be near the animals, whether they're protecting them, whether they're doing something else.
19:53We just don't have a real good read on that.
19:56But we just do know that the dense population around Marthasville lends itself that credibility, right?
20:02Being near water, being near high trees and high foliage where they can hide and stay hidden is ample for
20:09them.
20:10But also, you have the runs interference with the Dogman character, which is out of the LBL.
20:14So, and that's land between the lakes for some people.
20:17But, you know, the Michigan tale of Dogman is also kind of run rampant in that area with Highway D
20:23kind of being nicknamed like Dogman Road because people have seen this thing that's on the side of the road
20:28sometimes.
20:29And it stands on its hind legs.
20:31And it's pretty scary, intimidating to look at.
20:34But the Bigfoot idea is that they've caught some beautiful footprints back there that are just, come on, man.
20:42And then the way trees fell, the way trees fall, don't necessarily look like they were actually positioned that way.
20:49So there's a lot of wash out there.
20:51They get a lot of interesting tracking ability out there.
20:54But it was enough for them to say, let's do this event here every year.
20:58So they're definitely seeing stuff.
20:59Because you also have the property across the street, which is like another 50 acres.
21:03But we should note that there still hasn't been any real evidence of Sasquatch walking among us.
21:09Thank you so much for listening to this Weird News Roundup presented by Odyssey's Something Offbeat podcast.
21:17This episode was written and produced by me, Lauren Berry.
21:21Special thanks to Chad Benson from KRLD 1080 in Dallas.
21:26A New Morning out of WBEN in Buffalo.
21:30The Dana and Parks Show out of KMBZ in Kansas City.
21:34And the Dave Glover Show out of KMOX in St. Louis.
21:39You can find all of these programs, including the Something Offbeat podcast,
21:44on the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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