Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

An AI-generated Granny baffles and bedevils phone scammers across the UK. The US collectively freaks out as unidentified swarms of drones appear over multiple cities. Some Russian politicians want to declare Santa a foreign agent. The largest supermarket merger in history goes sour in court, with Albertsons calling off the merger and suing Kroger. Russia sends an elite force to North Korea -- not 100 soldiers, but 100 top-tier goats. All this and more in this week's strange news segment.

Could mysterious, possibly supernatural strangers really appear at just the right time to save someone's life? It's a question that's haunted humanity since the days of ancient empires. To many, these could be guardian angels or spirits of loved ones. However, modern scientists are increasingly researching the enigmatic "Third Man Factor" and, as Ben, Matt and Noel discover in the second part of this special two-part series -- the experts may have found some clues to the puzzle; small bits of information that, when combined, might not just explain the Third Man phenomena -- but also habve stunning implications for the interaction of science and spirituality overall.

Earlier this year the guys traced the rise of the enigmatic financier and child abuser Jeffrey Epstein, discovering a quagmire of crime, corruption and cover-ups implicating some of the world’s most powerful individuals. It seemed Epstein’s connections effectively placed him above the law - at least, that is, until renewed public scrutiny and criminal investigations found Epstein arrested once again and, this time, placed in a real prison. Many speculated Epstein would never go to trial. On August 10th, he was found dead in what the media described as an “apparent suicide”. So what happened?

Imagine you are on the edge of death. You're summiting Everest, surviving on a space station, lost in the woods or losing consciousness after a car accident. Suddenly, a mysterious presence appears: "Keep going," it says, "take my hand. Stick around just a bit longer, and I will lead you home." This experience exists across cultures and time -- in the past, humans deemed it the intervention of the divine. Today, it's often called the "Third Man Factor." In the first chapter of this week's special two-part series, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the concept of a benevolent stranger appearing just in time to save your life -- then, once the danger has passed, disappearing without a trace.

From the late 1970s to the 1980s, the US Government paid for intelligence officers to undergo weeklong training sessions at a remote place called the Monroe Institute. Training sessions themselves aren't particularly abnormal -- but these officers weren't learning new languages, the latest news about satellites and so on. Instead, the Institute was using hypnosis to teach them astral projection, ESP and clairvoyance. The news went public via a declassified CIA document released in 1984, but questions remain: Was this all a waste of money? Or was there something else to the story?