An immense world : how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us
Ed Yong
Introduction

The Only True Voyage

IMAGINE AN ELEPHANT IN A room.
This elephant is not the

proverbial weighty issue but an actual weighty mammal.
Imagine the room is spacious enough to accommodate it;

make it a school gym.
Now imagine a mouse has scurried

in, too.
A robin hops alongside it.
An owl perches on an

overhead beam.
A bat hangs upside down from the ceiling.
A rattlesnake slithers along the floor.
A spider has spun a

web in a corner.
A mosquito buzzes through the air.
A

bumblebee sits upon a potted sunflower.
Finally, in the

midst of this increasingly crowded hypothetical space, add

a human.
Let’s call her Rebecca.
She’s sighted, curious,

and (thankfully) fond of animals.
Don’t worry about how

she got herself into this mess.
Never mind what all these

animals are doing in a gym.
Consider, instead, how Rebecca

and the rest of this imaginary menagerie might perceive

one another.
The elephant raises its trunk like a periscope, the

rattlesnake flicks out its tongue, and the mosquito cuts

through the air with its antennae.
All three are smelling the

space around them, taking in the floating scents.
The

elephant sniffs nothing of note.
The rattlesnake detects the

trail of the mouse, and coils its body in ambush.
The

mosquito smells the alluring carbon dioxide on Rebecca’s

breath and the aroma of her skin.
It lands on her arm,

ready for a meal, but before it can bite, she swats it away—

and her slap disturbs the mouse.
It squeaks in alarm, at a

pitch that is audible to the bat but too high for the elephant

to hear.
The elephant, meanwhile, unleashes a deep,

thunderous rumble too low-pitched for the mouse’s ears or

the bat’s but felt by the vibration-sensitive belly of the

rattlesnake.
Rebecca, who is oblivious to both the

ultrasonic mouse squeaks and the infrasonic elephant

rumbles, listens instead to the robin, which is singing at

frequencies better suited to her ears.
But her hearing is too

slow to pick out all the complexities that the bird encodes

within its tune.
The robin’s chest looks red to Rebecca but not to the

elephant, whose eyes are limited to shades of blue and

yellow.
The bumblebee can’t see red, either, but it is

sensitive to the ultraviolet hues that lie beyond the opposite

end of the rainbow.
The sunflower it sits upon has at its

center an ultraviolet bullseye, which grabs the attention of

both the bird and the bee.
The bullseye is invisible to

Rebecca, who thinks the flower is only yellow.
Her eyes are

the sharpest in the room; unlike the elephant or the bee,

she can spot the small spider sitting upon its web.
But she

stops seeing much of anything when the lights in the room

go out.
Plunged into darkness, Rebecca walks slowly forward,

arms outstretched, hoping to feel obstacles in her way.
The

mouse does the same but with the whiskers on its face,

which it sweeps back and forth several times a second to

map its surroundings.
As it skitters between Rebecca’s

feet, its footsteps are too faint for her to hear, but they are

easily audible to the owl perched overhead.
The disc of stiff

feathers on the owl’s face funnels sounds toward its

sensitive ears, one of which is slightly higher than the

other.
Thanks to this asymmetry, the owl can pinpoint the

source of the mouse’s skittering in both the vertical and

horizontal planes.
It swoops in, just as the mouse blunders

within range of the waiting rattlesnake.
Using two pits on

its snout, the snake can sense the infrared radiation that

emanates from warm objects.
It effectively sees in heat,

and the mouse’s body blazes like a beacon.
The snake

strikes…and collides with the swooping owl.
All of this commotion goes unnoticed by the spider,

which barely hears or sees the participants.
Its world is

almost entirely defined by the vibrations coursing through

its web—a self-made trap that acts as an extension of its

senses.
When the mosquito strays into the silken strands,

the spider detects the telltale vibrations of struggling prey

and moves in for the kill.
But as it attacks, it is unaware of

the high-frequency sound waves that are hitting its body

and bouncing back to the creature that sent them—the bat.
The bat’s sonar is so acute that it not only finds the spider

in the dark but pinpoints it precisely enough to pluck it

from its web.
As the bat feeds, the robin feels a familiar attraction that

most of the other animals cannot sense.
The days are

getting colder, and it is time to migrate to warmer southern

climes.
Even within the enclosed gym, the robin can feel

Earth’s magnetic field, and, guided by its internal compass,

it points due south and escapes through a window.
It leaves

behind one elephant, one bat, one bumblebee, one

rattlesnake, one slightly ruffled owl, one extremely

fortunate mouse, and one Rebecca.
These seven creatures

share the same physical space but experience it in wildly

and wondrously different ways.
The same is true for the

billions of other animal species on the planet and the

countless individuals within those species.[*1] Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and

tastes, electric and magnetic fields.
But every animal can

only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness.
Each is

enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving

but a tiny sliver of an immense world.
—

THERE IS A wonderful word for this sensory bubble—

Umwelt.
It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-

German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909.
Umwelt

comes from the German word for “environment,” but

Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s

surroundings.
Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of

those surroundings that an animal can sense and

experience—its perceptual world.
Like the occupants of our

imaginary room, a multitude of creatures could be standing

in the same physical space and have completely different

Umwelten.
A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares

about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric

acid that emanates from skin.
These three things constitute

its Umwelt.
Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and

clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world.
The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them.
It simply cannot

sense them and doesn’t know they exist.
Uexküll compared an animal’s body to a house.
“ Each

house has a number of windows,” he wrote, “which open

onto a garden: a light window, a sound window, an olfactory

window, a taste window, and a great number of tactile

windows.
Depending on the manner in which these

windows are built, the garden changes as it is seen from

the house.
By no means does it appear as a section of a

larger world.
Rather, it is the only world that belongs to the

house—its [Umwelt].
The garden that appears to our eye is

fundamentally different from that which presents itself to

the inhabitants of the house.”

This was a radical notion at the time—and in some

circles, it might still be.
Unlike many of his contemporaries,

Uexküll saw animals not as mere machines but as sentient

entities, whose inner worlds not only existed but were

worth contemplating.
Uexküll didn’t exalt the inner worlds

of humans over those of other species.
Rather, he treated

the Umwelt concept as a unifying and leveling force.
The

human’s house might be bigger than the tick’s, with more

windows overlooking a wider garden, but we are still stuck

inside one, looking out.
Our Umwelt is still limited; it just

doesn’t feel that way.
To us, it feels all-encompassing.
It is

all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is

to know.
This is an illusion, and one that every animal

shares.
We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and

platypuses can.
We are not privy to the magnetic fields that

robins and sea turtles detect.
We can’t trace the invisible

trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can.
We can’t feel

the air currents created by a buzzing fly the way a

wandering spider does.
Our ears cannot hear the ultrasonic

calls of rodents and hummingbirds or the infrasonic calls of

elephants and whales.
Our eyes cannot see the infrared

radiation that rattlesnakes detect or the ultraviolet light

that the birds and the bees can sense.
Even when animals share the same senses with us, their

Umwelten can be very different.
There are animals that can

hear sounds in what seems to us like perfect silence, see

colors in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense

vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness.
There

are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees,

noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin.
Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins

with their entire bodies.
The star-nosed mole feels around

with its nose, while the manatee uses its lips.
We are no

sensory slouches, either.
Our hearing is decent, and

certainly better than that of the millions of insects that

have no ears at all.
Our eyes are unusually sharp, and can

discern patterns on animal bodies that the animals

themselves cannot see.
Each species is constrained in some

ways and liberated in others.
For that reason, this is not a

book of lists, in which we childishly rank animals according

to the sharpness of their senses and value them only when

their abilities surpass our own.
This is a book not about

superiority but about diversity.
This is also a book about animals as animals.
Some

scientists study the senses of other animals to better

understand ourselves, using exceptional creatures like

electric fish, bats, and owls as “model organisms” for

exploring how our own sensory systems work.
Others

reverse-engineer animal senses to create new technologies:

Lobster eyes have inspired space telescopes, the ears of a

parasitic fly have influenced hearing aids, and military

sonar has been honed by work on dolphin sonar.
These are

both reasonable motivations.
I’m not interested in either.
Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for

brainstorming sessions.
They have worth in themselves.
We’ll explore their senses to better understand their lives.
“

They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of

the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices

we shall never hear,” wrote the American naturalist Henry

Beston.
“They are not brethren, they are not underlings;

they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of

life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail

of the earth.”

—

A FEW TERMS will act as guideposts on our journey.
To sense

the world, animals detect stimuli—quantities like light,

sound, or chemicals—and convert them into electrical

signals, which travel along neurons toward the brain.
The

cells that are responsible for detecting stimuli are called

receptors: Photoreceptors detect light, chemoreceptors

detect molecules, and mechanoreceptors detect pressure

or movement.
These receptor cells are often concentrated

in sense organs, like eyes, noses, and ears.
And sense

organs, together with the neurons that transmit their

signals and the parts of the brain that process those

signals, are collectively called sensory systems.
The visual

system, for example, includes the eyes, the photoreceptors

inside them, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex of the

brain.
Together, these structures give most of us the sense

of sight.
The preceding paragraph could have been pulled from a

high school textbook.
But take a moment to consider the

miracle of what it describes.
Light is just electromagnetic

radiation.
Sound is just waves of pressure.
Smells are just

small molecules.
It’s not obvious that we should be able to

detect any of those things, let alone convert them into

electrical signals or derive from those signals the spectacle

of a sunrise, or the sound of a voice, or the scent of baking

bread.
The senses transform the coursing chaos of the

world into perceptions and experiences—things we can

react to and act upon.
They allow biology to tame physics.
They turn stimuli into information.
They pull relevance

from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany.
They connect animals to their surroundings.
And they

connect animals to each other via expressions, displays,

gestures, calls, and currents.
The senses constrain an animal’s life, restricting what it

can detect and do.
But they also define a species’ future,

and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it.
For example,

around 400 million years ago, some fish began leaving the

water and adapting to life on land.
In open air, these

pioneers—our ancestors—could see over much longer

distances than they could in water.
The neuroscientist

Malcolm MacIver thinks that this change spurred the

evolution of advanced mental abilities, like planning and

strategic thinking.
Instead of simply reacting to whatever

was directly in front of them, they could be proactive.
By

seeing farther, they could think ahead.
As their Umwelten

expanded, so did their minds.
An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though.
Senses

always come at a cost.
Animals have to keep the neurons of

their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so

that they can fire when necessary.
This is tiring work, like

drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the

moment comes, an arrow can be shot.
Even when your

eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental

drain on your reserves.
For that reason, no animal can

sense everything well.
Nor would any animal want to.
It would be overwhelmed

by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant.
Evolving according to their owner’s needs, the senses sort

through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what’s irrelevant

and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or

mates.
They are like discerning personal assistants who

come to the brain with only the most important

information.
[*2] Writing about the tick, Uexküll noted that the rich world around it is “ constricted and transformed

into an impoverished structure” of just three stimuli.
“However, the poverty of this environment is needful for

the certainty of action, and certainty is more important

than riches.” Nothing can sense everything, and nothing

needs to.
That is why Umwelten exist at all.
It is also why

the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is

so deeply human and so utterly profound.
Our senses filter

in what we need.
We must choose to learn about the rest.
—

THE SENSES OF animals have fascinated people for

millennia, but mysteries still abound.
Many of the animals

whose Umwelten are most different from ours live in

habitats that are inaccessible or impenetrable—murky

rivers, dark caves, open oceans, abyssal depths, and

subterranean realms.
Their natural behavior is hard to

observe, let alone to interpret.
Many scientists are limited

to studying creatures that can be kept in captivity, with all

the strangeness that entails.
Even in labs, animals are

challenging to work with.
Experiments that might reveal

how they use their senses are hard to design, especially

when those senses are drastically different from ours.
Amazing new details—and, sometimes, entirely new

senses—are being discovered regularly.
Giant whales have

a volleyball-sized sensor at the tip of their lower jaw, which

was only discovered in 2012 and whose function is still

unclear.
Some of the stories in these pages are decades or

centuries old; others emerged as I was writing.
And there’s

still so much we can’t explain.
“My dad, who is an atomic

physicist, once asked me a bunch of questions,” Sonke

Johnsen, a sensory biologist, tells me.
“After a few I don’t

knows, he said: You guys really don’t know anything.”

Inspired by that conversation, Johnsen published a paper in

2017 entitled “We Don’t Really Know Anything, Do We?
Open Questions in Sensory Biology.”

Consider the seemingly simple question How many

senses are there?
Around 2,370 years ago, Aristotle wrote

that there are five, in both humans and other animals—

sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
This tally persists

today.
But according to the philosopher Fiona Macpherson,

there are reasons to doubt it.
For a start, Aristotle missed a

few in humans: proprioception, the awareness of your own

body, which is distinct from touch; and equilibrioception,

the sense of balance, which has links to both touch and

vision.
Other animals have senses that are even harder to

categorize.
Many vertebrates (animals with backbones)

have a second sensory system for detecting odors,

governed by a structure called the vomeronasal organ; is

this part of their main sense of smell, or something

separate?
Rattlesnakes can detect the body heat of their

prey, but their heat sensors are wired to their brain’s visual

center; is their heat sense simply part of vision, or

something distinct?
The platypus’s bill is loaded with

sensors that detect electric fields and sensors that are

sensitive to pressure; does the platypus’s brain treat these

streams of information differently, or does it wield a single

sense of electrotouch?
These examples tell us that “ senses cannot be clearly

divided into a limited number of discrete kinds,”

Macpherson wrote in The Senses.
Instead of trying to shove

animal senses into Aristotelian buckets, we should instead

study them for what they are.[*3] Though I have organized

this book into chapters that revolve around specific stimuli,

like light or sound, that’s largely for convenience.
Each

chapter is a gateway into the varied things that animals do

with each stimulus.
We will not concern ourselves with

counting senses, nor talk nonsensically about a “sixth

sense.” We will instead ask how animals use their senses,

and attempt to step inside their Umwelten.
It won’t be easy.
In his classic 1974 essay, “What Is It

Like to Be a Bat?,” the American philosopher Thomas

Nagel argued that other animals have conscious

experiences that are inherently subjective and hard to

describe.
Bats, for example, perceive the world through

sonar, and since this is a sense that the majority of humans

lack, “ there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively

like anything we can experience or imagine,” Nagel wrote.
You could envision yourself with webbing on your arms or

insects in your mouth, but you’d still be creating a mental

caricature of you as a bat.
“I want to know what it is like

for a bat to be a bat,” Nagel wrote.
“Yet if I try to imagine

this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and

those resources are inadequate to the task.”

In thinking about other animals, we are biased by our

own senses and by vision in particular.
Our species and our

culture are so driven by sight that even people who are

blind from birth will describe the world using visual words

and metaphors.[*4] You agree with people if you see their

point, or share their view.
You are oblivious to things in

your blind spots.
Hopeful futures are bright and gleaming;

dystopias are dark and shadowy.
Even when scientists

describe senses that humans lack altogether, like the ability

to detect electric fields, they talk about images and

shadows.
Language, for us, is both blessing and curse.
It

gives us the tools for describing another animal’s Umwelt

even as it insinuates our own sensory world into those

descriptions.
Scholars of animal behavior often discuss the perils of

anthropomorphism—the

tendency

to

inappropriately

attribute human emotions or mental abilities to other

animals.
But perhaps the most common, and least

recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the

tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame

animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs.
This bias has consequences.
We harm animals by filling the

world with stimuli that overwhelm or befuddle their senses,

including coastal lights that lure newly hatched turtles

away from the oceans, underwater noises that drown out

the calls of whales, and glass panes that seem like bodies of

water to bat sonar.
We misinterpret the needs of animals

closest to us, stopping smell-oriented dogs from sniffing

their environments and imposing the visual world of

humans upon them.
And we underestimate what animals

are capable of to our own detriment, missing out on the

chance to understand how expansive and wondrous nature

truly is—the delights that, as William Blake wrote, are

“clos’d by your senses five.”

Throughout this book, we’ll encounter animal abilities

that others had long thought impossible or absurd.
Zoologist Donald Griffin, who co-discovered the sonar of

bats, once wrote that biologists have been overly swayed by

what he called “simplicity filters.” That is, they seemed

reluctant to even consider that the senses they were

studying might be more complex and refined than whatever

data they had collected could suggest.
This lament

contradicts Occam’s razor, the principle that states that the

simplest explanation is usually the best.
But this principle

is only true if you have all the necessary information to

hand.
And Griffin’s point was that you might not.
A

scientist’s explanations about other animals are dictated by

the data she collects, which are influenced by the questions

she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is

delimited by her senses.
The boundaries of the human

Umwelt often make the Umwelten of others opaque to us.
Griffin’s words are not carte blanche to put forward

convoluted or paranormal explanations for animal behavior.
I see them, and Nagel’s essay, as a call for humility.
They

remind us that other animals are sophisticated, and that,

for all our vaunted intelligence, it is very hard for us to

understand other creatures, or to resist the tendency to

view their senses through our own.
We can study the

physics of an animal’s environment, look at what they

respond to or ignore, and trace the web of neurons that

connects their sense organs to their brains.
But the

ultimate feats of understanding—working out what it’s like

to be a bat, or an elephant, or a spider—always require

what psychologist Alexandra Horowitz calls “ an informed

imaginative leap.”

Many sensory biologists have backgrounds in the arts,

which may enable them to see past the perceptual worlds

that our brains automatically create.
Sonke Johnsen, for

example, studied painting, sculpture, and modern dance

well before he studied animal vision.
To represent the

world around us, he says, artists already have to push

against the limits of their Umwelt and “look under the

hood.” That capacity helps him “think about animals having

different perceptual worlds.” He also notes that many

sensory biologists are perceptually divergent.
Sarah

Zylinski studies the vision of cuttlefish and other

cephalopods; she has prosopagnosia and can’t recognize

even familiar faces, including her mother’s.
Kentaro

Arikawa studies color vision in butterflies; he is red-green

color-blind.
Suzanne Amador Kane studies the visual and

vibrational signals of peacocks; she has slight differences in

her color vision in each eye, so that one gives her a slightly

reddish tint.
Johnsen suspects that these differences, which

some might bill as “disorders,” actually predispose people

to step outside their Umwelten and embrace those of other

creatures.
Perhaps people who experience the world in

ways that are considered atypical have an intuitive feeling

for the limits of typicality.
We can all do this.
I began this book by asking you to

conjure a room full of hypothetical animals, and I’m asking

you to perform similar feats of imagination over the next 13

chapters.
The task will be hard, as Nagel predicted.
But

there is value and glory in the striving.
On this journey

through nature’s Umwelten, our intuitions will be our

biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest

assets.
—

ONE LATE MORNING in June 1998, Mike Ryan hiked into the

Panamanian rainforest to search for animals with his

former student Rex Cocroft.
Usually, Ryan would have

looked for frogs.
But Cocroft had taken a liking to sap-

sucking insects called treehoppers, and he had something

cool to show his friend.
Heading out from their research

station, the duo pulled off a road and walked along a river.
Once Cocroft spotted the right kind of shrub, he turned

over a few leaves and quickly found a family of tiny

treehoppers of the species Calloconophora pinguis.
Cocroft

had found a mother surrounded by babies, their black

backs capped with forward-pointing domes that looked like

Elvis’s hair.
Treehoppers communicate by sending vibrations

through the plants on which they stand.
These vibrations

are not audible but can be easily converted into sounds.
Cocroft clipped a simple microphone to the plant, handed

Ryan some headphones, and told him to listen.
Then he

flicked the leaf.
Immediately the baby treehoppers ran

away, while producing vibrations by contracting muscles in

their abdomens.
“I figured it was probably going to be

some kind of scurrying noise,” Ryan recalls.
“And what I

heard instead was like cows mooing.” The sound was deep,

resonant, and unlike anything you’d expect from an insect.
As the babies settled down and returned to their mother,

their cacophony of vibrational moos turned into a

synchronized chorus.
Still watching them, Ryan took the headphones off.
All

around him, he heard birds singing, howler monkeys

roaring, and insects chirping.
The treehoppers were quiet.
Ryan put the headphones back on, “and I was transported

into a totally different world,” he tells me.
Once more, the

jungle noises dropped out of his Umwelt, and the mooing

treehoppers returned.
“It was the coolest experience,” he

says.
“It was sensory travel.
I was in the same place, but

stepping between these two really cool environments.
It

was such a stark demonstration of Uexküll’s idea.”

The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it

implies that every creature is trapped within the house of

its senses.
But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive.
It

tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we

experience is but a filtered version of everything that we

could experience.
It reminds us that there is light in

darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness.
It hints

at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the

extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in

mundanity.
It shows us that clipping a microphone onto a

plant can be an intrepid act of exploration.
Stepping

between Umwelten, or at least trying to, is like setting foot

upon an alien planet.
Uexküll even billed his work as a

“travelogue.”

When we pay attention to other animals, our own world

expands and deepens.
Listen to treehoppers, and you

realize that plants are thrumming with silent vibrational

songs.
Watch a dog on a walk, and you see that cities are

crisscrossed with skeins of scent that carry the biographies

and histories of their residents.
Watch a swimming seal,

and you understand that water is full of tracks and trails.
“When you look at an animal’s behavior through the lens of

that animal, suddenly all of this salient information

becomes available that you would otherwise miss,” Colleen

Reichmuth, a sensory biologist who works with seals and

sea lions, tells me.
“It’s like a magic magnifying glass, to

have that knowledge.”

Malcolm MacIver argues that when animals moved onto

land, the greater range of their vision spurred the evolution

of planning and advanced cognition: Their Umwelten

expanded, and so did their minds.
Similarly, the act of

delving into other Umwelten allows us to see further and

think more deeply.
I’m reminded of Hamlet’s plea to

Horatio that “there are more things in heaven and Earth…

than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The quote is often

taken as an appeal to embrace the supernatural.
I see it

rather as a call to better understand the natural.
Senses

that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because

we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our

limitations.
Philosophers have long pitied the goldfish in its

bowl, unaware of what lies beyond, but our senses create a

bowl around us too—one that we generally fail to

penetrate.
But we can try.
Science-fiction authors like to conjure up

parallel universes and alternate realities, where things are

similar to this one but slightly different.
Those exist!
We

will visit them one at a time, beginning with the most

ancient and universal of senses—the chemical ones, like

smell and taste.
From there, via an unexpected route, we’ll

visit the realm of vision, the sense that dominates the

Umwelt of most people but that still holds surprises galore.
We’ll stop to savor the delightful world of color before

heading into the harsher territories of pain and heat.
We’ll

sail smoothly through the various mechanical senses that

respond to pressure and movement—touch, vibration,

hearing, and the most impressive use of hearing,

echolocation.
Then, as experienced sensory travelers whose

imaginations have been fully primed, we’ll make our most

difficult imaginative leaps yet, through the strange senses

that animals use to detect the electric and magnetic fields

that we cannot.
Finally, at journey’s end, we’ll see how

animals unify the information from their senses, how

humans are polluting and distorting that information, and

where our responsibilities to nature now lie.
As the writer Marcel Proust once said, “ The only true

voyage…would be not to visit strange lands but to possess

other eyes…to see the hundred universes that each of them

sees.” Let us begin.
SKIP NOTES

*1 To understand how varied senses can be in a single species, just look at

humans.
For some people, red and green look identical.
For others, body odor

smells like vanilla.
For yet others, coriander (cilantro) tastes of soap.
*2 In 1987, German scientist Rüdiger Wehner described these as “matched

filters”—aspects of an animal’s sensory systems that are tuned to the sensory

stimuli that it most needs to detect.
*3 If you were being maximally reductive, you could reasonably argue that

there are really only two senses—chemical and mechanical.
Chemical senses

include smell, taste, and vision.
Mechanical senses include touch, hearing, and

electrical senses.
The magnetic sense might belong to either category or both.
This framework will probably make absolutely no sense right now, but should

become clearer as you continue in the book.
I’m not especially wedded to it,

but it is one possible way of thinking about the senses—and one that might

appeal to the lumpers among you.
*4 Let me just say that avoiding visual metaphors when describing other senses is extremely difficult over the length of an entire book.
I have tried to do so, or

at least to be judicious and explicit whenever I have to resort to visual terms.
1.
Leaking Sacks of

Chemicals

Smells and Tastes

“I DON’T THINK HE’S BEEN in here before,” Alexandra

Horowitz tells me.
“So it should be very smelly.”

By “he,” she means Finnegan—her ink-black Labrador

mix, who also goes by Finn.
By “here,” she means the

small, windowless room in New York City in which she runs

psychological experiments on dogs.
By “smelly,” she means

that the room should be bursting with unfamiliar aromas,

and thus should prove interesting to Finn’s inquisitive nose.
And so it does.
As I look around, Finn smells around.
He

explores nostrils-first, intently sniffing the foam mats on the

floor, the keyboard and mouse on the desk, the curtain

draped over a corner, and the space beneath my chair.
Compared to humans, who can explore new scenes by

subtly moving our heads and eyes, a dog’s nasal

explorations are so meandering that it’s easy to see them

as random and thus aimless.
Horowitz thinks of them

differently.
Finn, she notes, is interested in objects that

people have touched and interacted with.
He follows trails

and checks out spots where other dogs have been.
He

examines vents, door cracks, and other places where

moving air imports new odorants—scented molecules.
[*1]

He sniffs different parts of the same object, and he’ll sniff

them at different distances, “like he’s approaching the Van

Gogh and seeing what the brushstrokes look like up close,”

says Horowitz.
“They’re in that state of olfactory

exploration all the time.”

Horowitz is an expert on dog olfaction—their sense of

smell—and I’m here to talk with her about all things sniffy

and nasal.
And yet, I’m so relentlessly visual that when

Finn finishes nosing around and approaches me, I’m

instantly drawn to his eyes, which are captivating and

brown like the darkest chocolate.[*2] It takes concerted

effort to refocus on what’s right in front of them—his nose,

prominent and moist, with two apostrophe-shaped nostrils

curving to the side.
This is Finn’s main interface with the

world.
Here’s how it works.
Take a deep breath, both as demonstration and to gird

yourself for some necessary terminology.
When you inhale,

you create a single airstream that allows you to both smell

and breathe.
But when a dog sniffs, structures within its

nose split that airstream in two.
Most of the air heads down

into the lungs, but a smaller tributary, which is for smell

and smell alone, zooms to the back of the snout.
There it

enters a labyrinth of thin, bony walls that are plastered

with a sticky sheet called the olfactory epithelium.
This is

where smells are first detected.
The epithelium is full of

long neurons.
One end of each neuron is exposed to the

incoming airstream and snags passing odorants using

specially shaped proteins called odorant receptors.
The

other end is plugged directly into a part of the brain called

the olfactory bulb.
When the odorant receptors successfully

grab their targets, the neurons notify the brain, and the

dog perceives a smell.
You can breathe out now.
Humans share the same basic machinery, but dogs just

have more of everything: a more extensive olfactory

epithelium, dozens of times more neurons in that

epithelium, almost twice as many kinds of olfactory

receptors, and a relatively larger olfactory bulb.
[*3] And

their hardware is packed off into a separate compartment,

while ours is exposed to the main flow of air through our

noses.
This difference is crucial.
It means that whenever we

exhale, we purge the odorants from our noses, causing our

experience of smell to strobe and flicker.
Dogs, by contrast,

get a smoother experience, because odorants that enter

their noses tend to stay there, and are merely replenished

by every sniff.
The shape of their nostrils adds to this effect.
If a dog is

sniffing a patch of ground, you might imagine that every

exhalation would blow odorants on the surface away from

the nose.
But that’s not what happens.
The next time you

look at a dog’s nose, notice that the front-facing holes taper

off into side-facing slits.
When the animal exhales while

sniffing, air exits through those slits and creates rotating

vortices that waft fresh odors into the nose.
Even when

breathing out, a dog is still sucking air in.
In one

experiment, an English pointer (who was curiously named

Sir Satan) created an uninterrupted inward airstream for

40 seconds, despite exhaling 30 times during that period.
With such hardware, it’s no wonder that dog noses are

incredibly sensitive.
But how sensitive?
Scientists have

tried to find the thresholds at which dogs can no longer

smell certain chemicals, but their answers are all over the

place, varying by factors of 10,000 from one experiment to

another.[*4] Rather than focusing on these dubious

statistics, it’s more instructive to look at what dogs can

actually do.
In past experiments, they have been able to tell

identical twins apart by smell.
They could detect a single

fingerprint that had been dabbed onto a microscope slide,

then left on a rooftop and exposed to the elements for a

week.
They could work out which direction a person had

walked in after smelling just five footsteps.
They’ve been

trained to detect bombs, drugs, landmines, missing people,

bodies,

smuggled

cash,

truffles,

invasive

weeds,

agricultural diseases, low blood sugar, bedbugs, oil pipeline

leaks, and tumors.
Migaloo can find buried bones at archeological sites.
Pepper uncovers lingering oil pollution on beaches.
Captain

Ron detects turtle nests so that the eggs can be collected

and protected.
Bear can pinpoint hidden electronics, while

Elvis specializes in pregnant polar bears.
Train, who

flunked out of drug detection school for being too

energetic, now uses his nose to track the scat of jaguars

and mountain lions.
Tucker used to hang off the bow of

boats and sniff for orca poop; he has since retired, and his

duties now fall to Eba.
If it has a scent, a dog can be

trained to detect it.
We redirect their Umwelten in service

of our needs, to compensate for our olfactory shortcomings.
These feats of detection are worth marveling at, but they

are also parlor tricks.
They allow us to abstractly

appreciate that dogs have a great sense of smell, without

truly appreciating what that means for their inner lives or

how their olfactory world differs from a visual one.
Unlike light, which always moves in a straight line,

smells diffuse and seep, flood and swirl.
When Horowitz

observes Finn sniffing a new space, she tries to ignore the

clear edges that her vision affords, and instead pictures “a

shimmering environment, where nothing has a hard

boundary,” she says.
“There are focal areas, but everything

is sort of seeping together.” Smells travel through

darkness, around corners, and in other conditions that vex

vision.
Horowitz can’t see into the bag slung over the back

of my chair, but Finn can smell into it, picking up molecules

drifting from the sandwich within.
Smells linger in a way

that light does not, revealing history.[*5] The past occupants

of Horowitz’s room have left no ghostly visual traces, but

their chemical imprint is there for Finn to detect.
Smells

can arrive before their sources, foretelling what’s to come.
The scents unleashed by distant rain can clue people in to

advancing storms; the odorants emitted by humans arriving

home can send their dogs running to a door.
These skills

are sometimes billed as extrasensory, but they are simply

sensory.
It’s just that things often become apparent to the

nose before they appear to the eyes.
When Finn sniffs, he is

not merely assessing the present but also reading the past

and divining the future.
And he is reading biographies.
Animals are leaking sacks of chemicals, filling the air with

great clouds of odorants.[*6] While some species

deliberately send messages by releasing smells, all of us

inadvertently do so, giving away our presence, position,

identity, health, and recent meals to creatures with the

right noses.[*7]

“I never thought much about the nose at all,” says

Horowitz.
“It didn’t occur to me.” [*8] When she started

studying dogs, she focused on things like their attitudes to

unfairness—the kind of topic that’s interesting to

psychologists.
But after reading Uexküll and thinking about

the Umwelt concept, she shifted her attention to smell—the

kind of topic that’s interesting to dogs.
She notes, for example, that many dog owners deny

their animals the joys of sniffing.
To a dog, a simple walk is

an odyssey of olfactory exploration.
But if an owner doesn’t

understand that and instead sees a walk as simply a means

of exercise or a route to a destination, then every sniffy act

becomes an annoyance.
When the dog pauses to examine

some invisible trace, it must be hurried along.
When the

dog sniffs at poop, a carcass, or something the owner’s

senses find displeasing, it must be pulled away.
When the

dog sticks its nose in the crotch of another dog, it’s being

indecorous: Bad dog!
After all, in Western cultures at least,

humans don’t smell each other.
[*9] “You could give someone

a hug, but if you actually sniffed them, that would be very

weird,” says Horowitz.
“I could say that your hair smells

great, but I can’t say that you smell great, unless we’re

intimate.” Time and again, people impose their values—and

their Umwelt—onto their dogs, forcing them to look instead

of sniff, dimming their olfactory worlds and suppressing an

essential part of their caninehood.
That was never clearer

to Horowitz than when she took Finn to a nosework class.
Oddly billed as a sport, these classes simply train dogs

to find hidden scents, under increasingly difficult

conditions.
That should come naturally, but it didn’t to

many of the animals in Finn’s class.
Several seemed to lack

any agency: They had to be pulled from box to box by their

owners, or were completely unsure what to do.
Others

became agitated in the presence of other dogs and barked

at them.
But after a summer of sniffing, those behavioral

quirks diminished.
The reticent dogs regained their

volition.
The reactive dogs became tolerant.
All seemed

more easygoing.
Fascinated, Horowitz and her colleague

Charlotte Duranton ran their own experiment with 20 dogs.
In front of each animal, Duranton placed a bowl in one of

three locations: one where the bowl always contained food,

a second where it was always empty, and a third where the

outcome was ambiguous.
The dogs quickly learned to

approach the food-filled bowl and ignore the empty one.
What about the ambiguous one?
A dog’s willingness to

approach that bowl indicates what a cognitive psychologist

might call positive judgment bias and what everyone else

might call optimism.
Horowitz found that dogs became

more optimistic after just two weeks of nosework.
As their

sense of smell brightened, so did their outlook.
(By

contrast, dogs didn’t change after two weeks of heelwork—

an owner-led obedience activity that involves neither

olfaction nor autonomy.)

For Horowitz, the implications are clear: Let dogs be

dogs.
Appreciate that their Umwelt is different, and lean

into that difference.
She does this by taking Finn on

dedicated smell walks, when he’s allowed to sniff to his

olfactory bulb’s content.
If he stops, she stops.
His nose

sets the pace.
The walks are slower, but she has no

destination in mind.
We go on such a walk together,

heading a few blocks west of her office and into

Manhattan’s Riverside Park.
It’s a hot summer’s day, and

the air is redolent with garbage, urine, and exhaust—and

that’s only what I can smell.
Finn detects more.
He runs his

nose along the cracks in the pavement.
He investigates a

traffic sign.
He pauses to sniff a hydrant “because it’s been

visited by all the other dogs of Columbia University,”

Horowitz says.
Sometimes she’ll see Finn sniff a fresh

patch of urine, raise his head, look around (or smell

around), and find the dog that just left it.
The smell isn’t

just an object unto itself but a reference point, and the walk

isn’t just an intermediate state between points A and B but

a tour of Manhattan’s layered, unseen stories.
Once we’re inside the park, the air fills with greenery,

cut grass, mulch, and barbecues.
Another dog walks past

and Finn turns to breathe in an odor sample, puffing his

cheeks out like a cigar smoker.
Two large poodles

approach, but before they can get close, their owner pulls

them away and body-checks them against a fence.
Horowitz

looks sad.
She’s happier when a female Australian

shepherd arrives and circles Finn, both enthusiastically

sniffing each other’s genitals, while we make small talk

with the owner.
We glean the other dog’s sex through

pronouns; Finn worked it out through smell.
We ask about

her age; Finn can guess.
We don’t ask about her health or

readiness to mate; Finn doesn’t need to ask.
“There was a

time when I would try to smell what he’s smelling, but I do

that less often simply because I know I’m not getting what

he’s getting,” Horowitz says.
But there’s room for

improvement.
Though the human nose lacks the anatomical

complexity of a dog’s and is unhelpfully farther from the

ground, it is also underused.
By taking more sniffs herself,

and paying closer attention to odors, Horowitz says that

she has become a better smeller (and a more socially

awkward one).
“We have perfectly good noses.
We just

don’t use them as well as the dog.”

—

A FUNNY THING happens when you mention dogs to

neuroscientists who study olfaction in humans, as Horowitz

learned while writing her book Being a Dog.
They get a

little territorial, a little…well…sniffy.
Some dislike that dogs

get treated like special olfactory paragons when many

other mammals are excellent smellers, including rats

(which can also detect landmines), pigs (whose olfactory

epithelium can be twice as large as a German shepherd’s),

and elephants (which we’ll get to later).
Others point to

massive discrepancies in studies that test dogs’ ability to

detect specific odors.
These have variously claimed that

dogs are a billion times more sensitive than humans, or a

million times, or just ten thousand times.
In some cases,

humans do better: Of 15 odorants where both species have

been tested, humans outperformed our canine companions

on five, including beta-ionone (cedar wood) and amyl

acetate (bananas).
People also excel at discriminating

between smells.
While it’s easy to find two colors that

humans can’t tell apart, it’s very hard to find

indistinguishable pairs of odors.
Neuroscientist John

McGann has tried, and tells me, “We tried odors that mice

can’t tell apart and humans were like: No, we’ve got this.”

Yet textbooks still claim our sense of smell is terrible.
McGann traced the origin of this pernicious myth to the

nineteenth century.
In 1879, neuroscientist Paul Broca

noted that our olfactory bulbs are relatively puny compared

to those of other mammals.
He reasoned that smell is a

base and animalistic sense, and the loss of it was necessary

for us to have higher thought and free will.
He then

classified us (along with other primates and whales) as non-

smellers.
The label stuck, even though Broca never actually

measured how well animals smell, relying instead on

sketchy inferences based on the dimensions of their brains.
Compared to a mouse, a human has an olfactory bulb

smaller relative to other parts of the brain, but also

physically bigger, with roughly as many neurons.
It’s not

clear what any one of these metrics says about an animal’s

experience of smell.[*10]

The textbook perspective is also a Western one, based on

cultures where smell has long been undervalued.
Plato and

Aristotle argued that olfaction was too vague and ill-formed

to produce anything other than emotional impressions.
Darwin deemed it to be “ of extremely slight service.” Kant

said that “ smell does not allow itself to be described, but

only compared through similarity with another sense.” The

English language confirms his view with just three

dedicated smell words: stinky, fragrant, and musty.
Everything else is a synonym (aromatic, foul), a very loose

metaphor (decadent, unctuous), a loan from another sense

(sweet, spicy), or the name of a source (rose, lemon).
Of the

five Aristotelian senses, four have vast and specific

lexicons.
Smell, as Diane Ackerman wrote, “ is the one

without words.”

The Jahai people of Malaysia would disagree, as would

the Semaq Beri, the Maniq, and the many other hunter-

gatherer groups who have dedicated smell vocabularies.
The Jahai use a dozen words for smells and smell alone.
One describes the scent in gasoline, bat droppings, and

millipedes.
Another is for some quality shared by shrimp

paste, rubber tree sap, tigers, and rotten meat.
Yet another

refers to soap, the pungent durian fruit, and the popcorn-

like twang of the binturong.[*11] They “have this ease of

talking about smells,” says psychologist Asifa Majid, who

found that the Jahai can name smells as easily as English-

speakers can name colors.
Just as tomatoes are red, the

binturong is ltpit.
Smell is also a fundamental part of their

culture.
Once, Majid was told off by Jahai friends for sitting

too close to her research partner and allowing their smells

to mingle.
Another time, she tried to name the smell of a

wild ginger plant; children mocked her not only for failing

but also for treating the whole plant as a single object,

when the stem and flowers obviously had distinct smells.
The myth of poor human olfaction “might have been

overridden much earlier if the humans under consideration

had been Jahai instead of Brits and Americans,” Majid tells

me.
Even Westerners can pull off surprising olfactory feats

when given the chance.
In 2006, neuroscientist Jess Porter

took blindfolded students to a park in Berkeley and asked

them to follow a 10-meter trail of chocolate oil that she had

drizzled on the grass.
The students got down on all fours,

snuffled about like dogs, and looked ridiculous.
But they

succeeded, and got better with practice.
When I visit Alexandra Horowitz, she challenges me to

the same test and lays some chocolate-scented string on

the floor.
Eyes closed and nostrils open, I kneel down and

sniff away.
I quickly pick up the smell of chocolate and

follow it.
When I lose the scent, I cast my head from side to

side, exactly like a dog would.
But there end the

similarities.
A dog can sniff six times a second, wafting a

steady conveyor of air over its olfactory receptors.
I start to

hyperventilate after several consecutive sniffs, and when I

pause to exhale, I lose the trail.
I succeed in tracking the

string, but it takes me a minute to do what Finn manages in

half a second.
Even if I practiced regularly, I couldn’t come

close; I don’t have the hardware.
And crucially, Horowitz

adds after whipping away the string, a dog can still follow a

trail once the odor source is gone.
We both try, bending

down to sniff.
“I don’t smell anything left,” she says.
We

humans underestimate our sense of smell, but it’s also

clear that we simply don’t live in the same olfactory world

as a dog.
And that world is so complicated that it’s a

wonder we can make sense of it at all.
—

MANY LIVING THINGS can sense light.
Some can respond to

sound.
A select few can detect electric and magnetic fields.
But every thing, perhaps without exception, can detect

chemicals.
Even a bacterium, which consists of just one

cell, can find food and avoid danger by picking up on

molecular clues from the outside world.
Bacteria can also

release their own chemical signals to communicate with

each other, launching infections and performing other

coordinated actions only when their numbers are large

enough.
Their signals can then be detected and exploited

by bacteria-killing viruses, which have a chemical sense

even though they are such simple entities that scientists

disagree about whether they’re even alive.
Chemicals,

then, are the most ancient and universal source of sensory

information.
They’ve been part of Umwelten for as long as

Umwelten have existed.
They’re also among the hardest

parts of it to understand.
Scientists who work on vision and hearing have it

comparatively easy.
Light and sound waves can be defined

by clear and measurable properties like brightness and

wavelength, or loudness and frequency.
Shine wavelengths

of 480 nanometers into my eyes, and I’ll see blue.
Sing a

note with a frequency of 261 hertz (Hz), and I’ll hear

middle C.
Such predictability simply doesn’t exist in the

realm of smells.
The variation among possible odorants is

so wide that it might as well be infinite.
To classify them,

scientists use subjective concepts like intensity and

pleasantness, which can only be measured by asking

people.
Even worse, there are no good ways of predicting

what a molecule smells like—or even if it smells at all—

from its chemical structure.
[*12] And yet, many animals

naturally grapple with the intricacy of olfaction, without

any training in chemistry or neuroscience.
Their noses are

kings of infinite space.
How do they work?
The basics became clearer after Linda Buck and Richard

Axel made a pivotal discovery in 1991.
In work that would

earn them a Nobel Prize, the duo identified a large group of

genes that produce odorant receptors—the proteins that

initially recognize smelly molecules.[*13] We encountered

them earlier in this chapter while discussing dogs, but they

underlie the sense of smell throughout the animal kingdom.
The odorant receptors probably recognize their target

molecules, like electric sockets accepting certain cables.
[*14] When this happens, the neurons that harbor these receptors send signals to the smell centers of the brain,

and the animal perceives a scent.
But the details of this

process are still murky.
There aren’t enough receptors to

account for the huge range of possible odorants, so the

perception of scent must depend on the combination of

olfactory neurons that are firing.
If one group goes off, you

delight at the scent of a rose.
If another group activates,

you wince at the whiff of vomit.
Such a code must exist, but

its nature is still mostly mysterious.
Odorant receptors can also vary from one individual to

another in dramatic ways.
For example, the OR7D4 gene

creates a receptor that responds to androstenone, the

chemical behind the stench of sweaty socks and body odor.
To most people, it’s repulsive.
But to a lucky few who

inherit a slightly different version of OR7D4, androstenone

smells like vanilla.
That’s just one receptor out of hundreds,

and all exist in varied forms, bestowing every individual

with their own subtly personalized Umwelt.
Everyone likely

smells the world in a slightly different way.
And if it’s that

hard to appreciate the olfactory Umwelt of another human,

imagine how hard the task becomes for another species.
We should be skeptical of any claim that pits one

animal’s sense of smell against another’s.
I have repeatedly

read that an elephant’s sense of smell is five times more

sensitive than a bloodhound’s, but that’s an utterly

meaningless statement.
Does that mean the elephant

detects five times more chemicals?
Does it sense certain

chemicals at a fifth the concentration, or from five times

the distance?
Does it remember smells for five times as

long?
Such comparisons will always be flawed because

smell is diverse and often unquantifiable.
We need to stop

asking “How good is an animal’s sense of smell?” Better

questions would be “How important is smell to that

animal?” and “What does it use its sense of smell for?”

Male moths, for example, are tuned to sexual chemicals

released by females.
They pick up these odorants from

miles away using feathery antennae, and slowly flutter over

to the source.
Smell is so important to them that when

scientists transplanted the antennae of female sphinx

moths onto males, the recipients behaved like females,

seeking out the scent of egg-laying sites instead of mates.
Their sense of smell is clearly amazing, as evidenced by the

continued existence of moths.
But they only put this

amazing sense toward a few specific tasks.
Moths have

been described as “odor-guided drones,” and that’s not an

exaggeration.
Many males don’t even have mouthparts

when they reach adulthood.
Freed from the need to feed,

their short lives are devoted to flying, finding, and…mating.
Their behaviors are simple enough that they can be easily

diverted.
By mimicking female moth odors, bolas spiders

can lure male moths into fatal ambushes, while farmers can

lure them into traps.
Other insects, however, process smells

in more sophisticated ways.
—

IN A LAB in New York City, Leonora Olivos Cisneros pulls out

a large Tupperware container and lifts the lid to reveal a

writhing sea of dark-red dots.
They’re ants.
Specifically,

they’re clonal raiders—an obscure species that’s stockier

than most ants and, unusually, has neither queens nor

males.
Every individual is female and every one can

reproduce by cloning herself.
About 10,000 of them are

scurrying around the container.
Most have formed a

makeshift nest from their own bodies and are tending to

their young grubs.
The rest are wandering around in

search of food.
Olivos Cisneros feeds them on other ants,

including escamoles—the larvae of a much larger species

that she brings over from Mexico.
The clonal raiders are so small that it’s hard to focus on

any one of them.
Under the microscope, they’re much

easier to see, not just because they’ve been magnified but

also because Olivos Cisneros has painted them.
With

practiced hands, she uses insect pins to dab splotches of

yellow, orange, magenta, blue, and green onto the insects’

backs, giving each individual a unique color code that can

be tracked by an automated camera system.
The colors also

make them easier to observe by eye.
Every now and then, I

notice one of them tapping at another with the tips of its

clubby antennae.
This action, delightfully known as

antennating, is the ant equivalent of a sniff.
It’s the means

through which they inspect the chemicals on each other’s

bodies and discern colony-mates from interlopers.
These

ants normally live underground and are completely blind.
“There’s nothing visual going on,” Daniel Kronauer, who

leads the lab, tells me.
“In terms of their communication,

everything is chemical.”

The chemicals they use are pheromones—an important

term that is frequently misunderstood.
It refers to chemical

signals that carry messages between members of the same

species.
Bombykol, which female moths use to attract

males, is a pheromone; the carbon dioxide that draws

mosquitoes to my body is not.
Pheromones are also

standardized messages, whose use and meaning do not

vary between individuals of a given species.
All female silk

moths use bombykol and all males are attracted to it; by

contrast, the smells that distinguish one person’s scent

from another’s are not pheromones.
Indeed, despite the

existence of pheromone parties where singletons sniff each

other’s clothes, or pheromone sprays that are marketed as

aphrodisiacs, it’s still unclear if human pheromones even

exist.
Despite decades of searching, none have been

identified.[*15]

Ant pheromones are another story.
There are many, and

ants put them to different uses depending on their

properties.
Lightweight chemicals that easily rise into the

air are used to summon mobs of workers that can rapidly

overwhelm prey, or to raise fast-spreading alarms.
Crush

the head of an ant, and within seconds, nearby colony-

mates will sense the aerosolized pheromones and charge

into battle.
Medium-weight chemicals that become airborne

more slowly are used to mark trails.
Workers lay these

down when they find food, leading other colony-mates to

foraging hotspots.
As more workers arrive, the trail is

strengthened.
As the food runs out, the trail decays.
Leafcutter ants are so sensitive to their trail pheromone

that a milligram is enough to lay a path around the planet

three times over.
Finally, the heaviest chemicals, which

barely aerosolize, are found on the surface of the ants’

bodies.
Known as cuticular hydrocarbons, they act as

identity badges.
Ants use them to discern their own species

from other kinds of ants, nestmates from other colonies,

and queens from workers.
Queens also use these

substances to stop workers from breeding or to mark

unruly subjects for punishment.
Pheromones hold such sway over ants that they can

force the insects to behave in bizarre and detrimental ways,

in disregard of other pertinent sensory cues.
Red ants will

look after the caterpillars of blue butterflies, which look

nothing like ant grubs but smell exactly like them.
Army

ants are so committed to following their pheromone trails

that if those paths should accidentally loop back onto

themselves, hundreds of workers will walk in an endless

“death spiral” until they die from exhaustion.
[*16] Many ants

use pheromones to discern dead individuals: When the

biologist E.
O.
Wilson daubed oleic acid onto the bodies of

living ants, their sisters treated them as corpses and

carried them to the colony’s garbage piles.
It didn’t matter

that the ant was alive and visibly kicking.
What mattered

was that it smelled dead.
“ The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones

being passed back and forth,” Wilson said.
“We don’t see it,

of course.
We don’t see anything more than these little

ruddy creatures scurrying around on the ground, but

there’s a huge amount of activity, of coordination and

communication going on.” That’s all based on pheromones.
These smelly substances allow ants to transcend the limits

of individuality and act as a superorganism, producing

complex and transcendent behaviors from the unknowing

actions of simple individuals.
They allow army ants to act

as unstoppable predators, Argentine ants to create

supercolonies that extend for miles, and leafcutter ants to

develop their own agriculture by gardening fungi.
Ant

civilizations are among the most impressive on Earth, and

as ant researcher Patrizia d’Ettorre once wrote, their

“genius is definitely in their antennae.”

Kronauer’s research with the clonal raider ant shows

how that genius might have evolved.
Ants are essentially a

group of highly specialized wasps that evolved between

140 and 168 million years ago and rapidly transitioned

from a solitary existence to an extremely social one.
Along

the way, their repertoire of odorant receptor genes—the

ones that allow them to sense smelly chemicals—ballooned

in size.
While fruit flies have 60 of these genes and

honeybees have 140, most ants have between 300 and 400,

and the clonal raider has a record-breaking 500.[*17] Why?
Here are three clues.
First, a third of the clonal raiders’

odorant receptors are only produced on the underside of

their antennae—the parts that they pat each other with

during antennation.
Second, these receptors specifically

detect the heavyweight pheromones that ants wear as

identity badges.
Third, these 180 or so receptors all arose

from just one gene, which was repeatedly duplicated at

roughly the time that ancestral ants went from living alone

to living in colonies.
Putting these clues together, Kronauer

reasons that all that extra olfactory hardware might have

helped ants to better recognize their nestmates.
After all,

they are not only looking for the presence or absence of

one pheromone but weighing up the relative proportions of

a few dozen of them.
That’s a challenging computation, but

one that undergirds everything else that ants do.
By

expanding their powers of smell, they gained the means of

regulating their sophisticated societies.
It becomes especially obvious how much ants rely on

smell when they are disconnected from that sense.
When

Kronauer deprived his clonal raiders of a gene called orco,

which odorant receptors need to detect their target

molecules, the mutant ants behaved in entirely un-ant-like

ways.
“Right from the beginning, there was something

wrong with those ants,” Olivos Cisneros tells me.
“It was

super-easy to spot.” They wouldn’t follow pheromone trails.
They ignored barriers whose intense smells would ward off

normal ants, like lines drawn by Sharpies.
They ignored the

grubs that they’re normally duty-bound to care for.
They

ignored their colonies altogether, and went walkabout on

their own for days at a time.
If they accidentally found

themselves within a colony, their presence was disruptive.
Sometimes they’d release alarm pheromones without

provocation, sending their nestmates into an unnecessary

panic.
“They can’t tell that there are other ants there,”

Kronauer says.
“They just can’t sense them at all.” It’s hard

not to feel sorry for them.
An ant without olfaction is an ant

without a colony, and an ant without a colony is barely an

ant at all.[*18]

Ants are perhaps the most dramatic example of the

power of pheromones, but they’re hardly the only ones.
Female lobsters urinate into the faces of males to tempt

them with a sex pheromone.
Male mice produce a

pheromone in their urine that makes females especially

attracted to other components in their odor; this substance

is called darcin, after Pride and Prejudice’s male hero.
The

early spider-orchid deceives male bees into carrying its

pollen by mimicking their sexual pheromones.
“ We live, all

the time, especially in nature, in great clouds of

pheromones,” E.
O.
Wilson once said.
“They’re coming out

in spumes in millionths of a gram that can travel for maybe

a kilometer.” These tailored messages drive the entire

animal kingdom, from the smallest of creatures to the very

biggest.
—

IN 2005, LUCY Bates arrived in Kenya’s Amboseli National

Park to study its elephants.
On her first day out, her

experienced field assistants told her that these animals,

which had been observed by scientists since the 1970s,

would almost certainly realize that a fresh face had joined

the research group.
Bates was skeptical.
How would they

know?
Why would they care?
But as soon as the team found

one of the herds and switched off their vehicle’s engine, the

elephants immediately turned toward them.
“One of them

came up, stuck her trunk in my window, and had a good

sniff,” Bates tells me.
“They knew someone new was

inside.”

Over the next few years, Bates came to realize what

anyone who spends time with elephants knows: Their lives

are dominated by smell.
You don’t need to know about an

elephant’s record-breaking catalog of 2,000 olfactory

receptor genes, or the size of its olfactory bulb.
Just watch

the trunk.
No other animal has a nose so mobile and

conspicuous, and so no other animal is as easy to watch in

the act of smelling.
Whether an elephant is walking or

feeding, alarmed or relaxed, its trunk is constantly in

motion, swinging, coiling, twisting, scanning, sensing.
Sometimes the entire 6-foot organ periscopes dramatically

to inspect an object.
Sometimes its movements are subtle.
“You can approach a feeding elephant who’s heard you

coming, and without turning its head, it’ll flick just the tip

of its trunk toward you,” says Bates.
African elephants can use their trunks to detect their

favorite plants, even when obscured in lidded boxes, and

even when hidden among a messy botanical buffet.
They

can learn unfamiliar smells: After being briefly taught to

detect TNT, which is supposedly odorless to humans, three

African elephants could identify the substance more

skillfully than highly trained detection dogs.
Two of those

same elephants, Chishuru and Mussina, could sniff a

human and identify the matching scent from a row of nine

jars laced with the odors of different people.
Asian

elephants are no slouches, either.
In one study, they could

correctly identify which of two covered buckets contained

more food through smell alone—a feat that humans can’t

duplicate and that (in one of Alexandra Horowitz’s

experiments) even dogs struggled with.
[*19] “We could tell the difference if we looked, but if we were just smelling it,

there’s no way,” says Bates.
“The level of information they

can get is just so far beyond what we can comprehend.”

Elephants can also smell danger.
Some time after Bates

arrived in Amboseli, one of her colleagues gave a ride to a

couple of Maasai men in a jeep that the team had used for

decades.
The next day, when the team drove out, the

elephants were unexpectedly cautious around the familiar

vehicle.
Young Maasai men will sometimes spear elephants,

and Bates reasoned that the creatures were disconcerted

by the lingering scents in the jeep—some combination of

the cows that the Maasai raise, the dairy products they eat,

and the ochre they daub on their bodies.
To test this idea,

she hid various bundles of clothes in elephant country.
When the animals approached washed garments or those

worn by the Kamba, who pose no threat to them, they were

curious but unconcerned.
But every time they got wind of

clothes worn by the Maasai, their reactions were

unmistakable.
“Once the first trunk went up, the whole

group ran away as fast as they could, and almost always

into long grass,” Bates tells me.
“It was incredibly stark—

every group, every time.”

Food and foes aside, few sources of odor are as

pertinent to an elephant as other elephants.
They’ll

regularly inspect each other with their trunks, probing

away at glands, genitals, and mouths.
When African

elephants reunite after a prolonged separation, they go

through intense greeting rituals.
Human observers can see

their flapping ears and hear their throaty rumbles, but for

the elephants themselves, the experience must also be

olfactory pandemonium.
They vigorously urinate and

defecate, while aromatic liquid pours forth from glands

behind their eyes, filling the air around them with scents.
Few people have done more to study elephant odors

than Bets Rasmussen,[*20] a biochemist who was once

crowned “the queen of elephant secretions, excretions and

exhalations.” If an elephant produced it, Rasmussen likely

sniffed it and possibly tasted it.
Those secretions, she

realized, are full of pheromones, and thus full of meaning.
In 1996, after 15 years of work, she isolated a chemical

called Z-7-dodecen-1-yl acetate, which females release in

their urine to inform bulls that they’re ready to mate.
It

was astonishing that just one compound could so greatly

affect the sex lives of so complex an animal.
It was even

more astonishing that female moths attract males with the

same substance.
Fortunately, male moths aren’t drawn to

female elephants, because the attractant is just one of

several compounds on their search list.
Luckier still, male

elephants don’t try to mate with female moths, because the

latter produce piddling amounts of the pheromone.
Other

elephants,

however,

shine

like

odorous

beacons.
Rasmussen eventually discovered that elephants can tell,

through smell, when females are at different parts of their

estrus cycles, or when bulls are in the hyperaggressive

sexual state called musth.
They can also identify

individuals.
As they walk the time-worn trails that connect

their home ranges, they leave dung and urine behind—not

waste, but personal stories to be read by the trunks of

others around them.
In 2007, Lucy Bates found a clever way of testing this

idea.
She followed family groups of elephants and waited

for one to urinate.
Once the herd had left, she drove over,

scooped up the urine-soaked soil with a trowel, and placed

it in an ice cream tub.
She then drove around the savannah

until she found either the same herd of elephants or a

different one.
Cutting them off, she emptied the container

of soil onto the path ahead of them, sped off to a distant

vantage point, and waited.
“It was not the most pleasant

experiment,” she tells me.
“Often, you’d think you know

where they were going and put the sample out, and they’d

change direction.
That was quite soul-destroying.” When

she got it right, the elephants would always inspect the

urine as they approached.
If it came from a different family

group, they quickly ignored it.
If it came from a family

member who wasn’t part of the current unit, they showed

more interest.
But if it came from an elephant who was part

of the same group and walking behind them, they were

especially curious.
They knew exactly who had left the

urine, and since that individual couldn’t possibly have

teleported ahead, they seemed confused and carefully

investigated the displaced scent.
Elephants move in large

family groups, and it seems they know not only who’s

around but where those individuals are.
Scent cements that

awareness.
“The amount of information that they must be

picking up all the time as they’re walking along, from all

the different smells they’re taking in…I think it just must be

overwhelming,” says Bates.
The exact nature of that information is hard to discern.
Smells aren’t easily captured, so while scientists can

photograph an animal’s displays and record its calls, those

who care about olfaction have to do things like scoop up

urine-soaked soil.
Smells aren’t easily reproduced, either:

You can’t play back an odor through a speaker or a screen,

so researchers have to do things like drive piss-soaked soil

in front of elephant herds.
And that’s if they think about

olfaction at all.
In many cases, elephant researchers have

tested the brains of these animals through experiments

that are implicitly visual and involve objects like mirrors.
How much have we missed about an elephant’s mind

because we’ve ignored its primary senses?
When they walk their favorite routes and encounter the

smelly deposits of other elephants, what are they getting

besides identity?
Do they know the emotional states of

those previous passers-by?
Can they sense stress or

diagnose illnesses?
What of their wider environment?
Elephants that have returned to postwar Angola seem to

skirt around the millions of landmines that still dot the land

—unsurprising, perhaps, given how quickly they can be

trained to detect TNT.
They’ve been known to dig wells in

times of drought, and George Wittemyer, who has also

worked in Amboseli, is sure that they’re using the smell of

buried water to do so.
He also thinks that they can detect

approaching rain from the smells it unleashes as it splashes

onto faraway soils.
“That smell is exhilarating,” he tells me.
“It makes me feel excited and alive, and you’ll also see

elephants rising up to it.”

Rasmussen once speculated that elephants might guide

their long migrations using “chemical memories of

landscapes, terrain, pathways, mineral and salt sources,

waterholes, the scenting of rain or flooding rivers, and tree

odors signifying seasons.” No one has tested these claims,

but they make sense.
After all, dogs, humans, and ants can

all track trails of scent.
Salmon can return to the very

streams in which they were born by homing in on the

distinctive scents of those natal waters.[*21] Whip spiders

use the smell sensors on the tips of their extremely long,

thread-like front legs to find their way back to their

shelters amid the clutter of a rainforest.
Polar bears might

be able to navigate across thousands of miles of indistinct

ice because glands in their paws leave scent behind with

every step.
These examples are so common that some

scientists believe the main purpose of animal olfaction isn’t

to detect chemicals but to use them in navigating through

the world.
With the right noses, landscapes can be mapped

as odorscapes, and fragrant landmarks can show the way to

food and shelter.
Ironically, the best evidence for such feats

comes from animals that, until recently, were thought to be

unable to smell.
—

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, the avid naturalist and artist, was

best known for painting North America’s birds, and

compiling those pieces into a seminal ornithological tome.
But he was also responsible for seeding a centuries-long

falsehood about birds through some truly abysmal

experiments involving vultures.
Since Aristotle, scholars believed that vultures had a

keen sense of smell.
Audubon thought differently.
When he

left a putrefying pig carcass in the open, no vultures came

to eat.
By contrast, when he put out a deerskin stuffed with

straw, a turkey vulture swooped in and pecked away.
These

birds, he claimed in 1826, find their food with sight, not

smell.
His supporters bolstered that claim with equally

dodgy evidence.
One noted that vultures would attack a

painting of an eviscerated sheep, and that captive vultures

refused to eat after being blinded.
Another showed that a

turkey—not a turkey vulture, mind you; an actual turkey—

would still eat food that was tainted with sulfuric acid and

potassium cyanide, a strong-smelling concoction that

proved violently fatal.
These bizarre studies struck a chord.
Never mind that vultures prefer fresh carcasses and ignore

overly stinky meat like the kind Audubon used.
Forget that

Audubon confused black vultures (which are less reliant on

smell) with turkey vultures, or that oil paints at the time

gave off certain chemicals also found in decaying flesh.
Disregard the many reasons a mutilated animal might not

feel very peckish.
The idea that turkey vultures—and by

dubious extension, all birds—can’t smell became textbook

wisdom.
Evidence to the contrary was ignored for decades,

and the study of avian olfaction lapsed into neglect.
[*22]

Betsy Bang revitalized it.
An amateur ornithologist and

medical illustrator, she dissected the nasal passages of bird

after bird and sketched what she saw.
And what she saw—

large cavities filled with convoluted scrolls of thin bone,

much like what lurks within a dog’s snout—convinced her

that birds must be able to smell.
Why else would they have

all that hardware?
Concerned that the textbooks were

spouting misinformation, Bang spent the 1960s carefully

examining the brains of more than a hundred species and

measuring their olfactory bulbs.
She showed that these

smell centers were especially large in turkey vultures, the

kiwis of New Zealand, and the tubenoses—a group of

seabirds that includes albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters,

and fulmars.
Tubenoses are named for the obvious nostrils

on their beaks, which were originally thought to be

channels for expelling salt.
Bang’s work suggested another

purpose: The tubes draw air into the nose, allowing the

birds to catch the scent of food while soaring over the

ocean.
For them, “olfaction is of primary importance,” Bang

wrote.
[*23] (“She didn’t mind taking on a fight, even if it

meant taking on Audubon,” her son Axel later said.)

Elsewhere in California, Bernice Wenzel had come to the

same conclusion.
A physiology professor (and one of the

few women in the United States to hold such a position in

the 1950s), Wenzel showed that when homing pigeons

catch a whiff of scented air, their hearts beat faster and the

neurons in their olfactory bulbs buzz excitedly.
She

repeated that test with other birds—turkey vultures, quails,

penguins, ravens, ducks—and all reacted similarly.
She

proved what Bang deduced: Birds can smell.
Both Bang and

Wenzel, who have since passed away, have been described

as “mavericks of their generation” who pushed against

incorrect dogma and allowed others to explore a sensory

world that was deemed nonexistent.
And because of the

examples they set and the mentorship they offered, many of

the scientists who followed in their footsteps were also

women.
One, Gabrielle Nevitt, was in the audience when Wenzel

discussed her seabird studies in one of her final pre-

retirement talks.
Inspired, Nevitt began a career-long quest

to find out how tubenoses make use of smell.
Beginning in

1991, she would get onto any Antarctic voyage that she

could, while trying “to figure out how to test birds from the

deck of an icebreaker without getting killed,” she tells me.
She’d soak tampons in fish oils and fly them from kites.
She’d release slicks of pungent oils from the sterns of

ships.
And every time, tubenoses arrived quickly.
Nevitt

suspected that the birds were drawn to a specific chemical

within the pungent glop, but she didn’t know what it might

be, or how the birds found it across featureless water.
She

only learned the answer on a later Antarctic voyage, and in

unexpected circumstances.
During the trip, a fierce storm rocked Nevitt’s ship,

throwing her across her room and slamming her into a tool

chest.
She tore her kidney and was confined to her bunk,

even after her ship had docked and a fresh crew had come

on board.
Still recuperating, Nevitt chatted with the new

chief scientist—an atmospheric chemist named Tim Bates,

who had come to study a gas called dimethyl sulfide, or

DMS.
In the oceans, plankton release DMS when they’re

eaten by krill—shrimp-like animals that are, in turn, eaten

by whales, fish, and seabirds.
DMS doesn’t dissolve easily

in water, and eventually makes its way into the air.
If it

rises high enough, it seeds clouds.
If it enters the nose of a

sailor, it evokes an odor that Nevitt describes as “a lot like

oysters” or “kind of seaweed-y.” It’s the scent of the sea.
In particular, DMS is the scent of bountiful seas, where

huge blooms of plankton feed equally huge swarms of krill.
As Nevitt talked to Bates, it dawned on her that DMS was

exactly the chemical she had envisioned—an olfactory

dinner bell that alerted seabirds when waters were teeming

with prey.
Bates cemented this impression by giving Nevitt

a map that showed DMS levels across parts of Antarctica.
In the varying levels of the chemical, Nevitt saw a seascape

of odorous mountains and unscented valleys.
She realized

that the ocean wasn’t as featureless as she had once

imagined; rather, it had a secret topography that was

invisible to the eye but evident to the nose.
She began to

perceive the sea the way a seabird might.
Once back on her feet, Nevitt carried out a string of

studies that confirmed the DMS hypothesis.
She found that

tubenoses will flock to slicks of the chemical.
She

calculated that they can detect it at the kind of low, feeble

traces that might realistically drift on the wind.
She

showed that some tubenoses are drawn to DMS before they

can even fly.
[*24] Many species nest in deep burrows, and

their chicks, which resemble grapefruit-sized balls of lint,

hatch into a world of darkness.
Their early Umwelt is bereft

of light but awash in odor, wafting in from the burrow

entrance or carried in on the beaks and feathers of their

parents.
These hatchlings have no knowledge of the ocean,

but they know to head toward DMS.
And even after they

emerge into the light, trading their claustrophobic

nurseries for the immensity of the sky, smells remain their

north star.
They soar for thousands of miles, searching for

diffuse plumes of scent that might betray the presence of

krill beneath the surface.
[*25]

But smells are more than dinner bells.
In the ocean,

they’re also signposts.
Geological features, like submerged

mountains or slopes in the seafloor, affect the levels of

nutrients in the water, which in turn influence

concentrations of plankton, krill, and DMS.
The

smellscapes that seabirds track are intimately tied to actual

landscapes, and so are surprisingly predictable.
Over time,

Nevitt suspects, seabirds build up a map of these features,

using their noses to learn the locations of the richest

feeding spots and their home nests.
This is a hard idea to test, but Anna Gagliardo found

compelling evidence for it.
She transported a few Cory’s

shearwaters—a kind of tubenose—to locations 500 miles

from their nesting colonies and temporarily shut down their

sense of smell with a nasal wash.
When released, these

birds struggled to travel home, taking weeks or months to

do what normal shearwaters did in mere days.
Without

smell, they lost their way.
Without smell, the ocean was

stripped of landmarks.
As the writer Adam Nicolson

described in The Seabird’s Cry, “ What may be featureless

to us, a waste of undifferentiated ocean, is for them rich

with distinction and variety, a fissured and wrinkled

landscape, dense in patches, thin in others, a rolling

olfactory prairie of the desired and the desirable, mottled

and unreliable, speckled with life, streaky with pleasures

and dangers, marbled and flecked, its riches often hidden

and always mobile, but filled with places that are pregnant

with life and possibility.”

—

SHEARWATERS, DOGS, ELEPHANTS, and ants all smell with

different organs, but they all smell in stereo, using a pair of

nostrils or antennae.
By comparing the odorants that land

on each side, they can track the source of a scent.
Even

humans can do this: The string-tracking task that

Alexandra Horowitz asked me to try is much harder if one

nostril is blocked.
Directionality comes more easily to a

paired detector, which also explains the distinctive shape of

one of nature’s least likely but most effective smell organs

—the forked tongue of snakes.
Snake tongues come in shades of lipstick red, electric

blue, and inky black.
Outstretched and splayed, they can be

longer and wider than their owners’ heads.
Kurt Schwenk

has been fascinated by them for decades, and he often finds

that he’s alone in that.
In the second year of his PhD, he

told a fellow student what he was working on, eager to

revel in the joys of scientific pursuits with a like-minded

soul.
The student (who is now a famous ecologist) burst out

laughing.
“That would have been enough to hurt my

feelings, but this was a guy who studied the mites that

hang out in the nostrils of hummingbirds,” Schwenk tells

me, still slightly outraged.
“Someone who studied

hummingbird nostril mites thought that what I did was

funny!
For some reason, people find tongues funny.”

Perhaps there’s something unseemly about studying

organs that are linked to carnal delights like sex and food.
Perhaps it’s weird to seriously investigate things that we

protrude in jest or defiance.
Or perhaps it’s that the forked

tongue has become a symbol of malevolence and duplicity.
Whatever the case, serious scholars have put forward some

very strange hypotheses for how snakes use their tongues,

or for why those tongues are forked.
Some have described

them as venomous stingers, or fly-catching forceps, or

tactile organs akin to hands, or even nostril-cleaning tools.
Aristotle suggested that the fork doubled the pleasure that

a snake gets from its food—but the snake’s tongue has no

taste buds and conveys no sensory information on its own.
Instead, as scientists finally discovered in the 1920s, it’s a

chemical collector.
When it darts into the world, its tips

snag odor molecules that lie on the ground or drift through

the air.
When it retracts, saliva sweeps the chemical bounty

into a pair of chambers—the vomeronasal organ—that

connect to the brain’s smell centers.[*26] With the aid of its

tongue, a snake smells the world.
Each flick is the

equivalent of a sniff.
Indeed, the very first thing that a

hatchling serpent does upon breaking out of its egg is to

flick its tongue.
“That tells you something about the

primacy of the sense,” Schwenk says.
Using its tongue, a male garter snake can track a

slithering female by following the trail of pheromones she

leaves behind.
By comparing what she deposited on

different sides of objects she pushed against, he can work

out her direction.
Once he finds her, he can gauge her size

and health, possibly with just one or two flicks.
He can do

this all in the dark.
A male can even be fooled into

vigorously mating with a paper towel that has been imbued

with a female’s scent.
But all of these feats could be just as

easily accomplished with a paddle-shaped, human-esque

tongue.
So why do snakes have forked ones?
Schwenk

reasoned that the fork allows snakes to smell in stereo, by

comparing chemical traces at two points in space.
If both

tips detect trail pheromones, the snake stays on course.
If

the right tip gets a hit but the left one doesn’t, the snake

veers right.
If both come up empty, it swings its head from

side to side until it regains the trail.
The fork allows the

snake to precisely define the edges of the path.
As a timber rattlesnake slithers over the forest floor, its

tongue turns the world into both map and menu, revealing

the crisscrossing tracks of scurrying rodents and

discerning the scents of different species.
Amid the tangled

trails, it can pick out those of its favorite prey[*27] and find

sites where those tracks are common and fresh.
It hides

nearby, coiled in ambush.
When a rodent runs past, the

snake explodes outward four times faster than a human can

blink.
It stabs the rodent with its fangs and injects venom.
The toxins usually take a while to work, and since rodents

have sharp teeth, the snake avoids injury by releasing its

prey and letting it run off.
After several minutes, it starts

flicking its tongue to track down the now-dead victim.
The

venom helps.
Aside from lethal toxins, rattlesnake venom

also includes compounds called disintegrins, which aren’t

toxic but react with a rodent’s tissues to release odorants.
The snakes can use these aromas to distinguish

envenomated rodents from healthy ones and to tell rodents

envenomated by their own species from those bitten by

other kinds of rattlesnakes.
They can even track the

specific individual that they attacked because they instantly

learn the victim’s scent at the moment of a bite.
“There are

presumably odors of multiple mice around, but they know

which trail to follow,” Schwenk says.
Snakes can also catch trails of scent on the breeze.
Chuck Smith, one of Schwenk’s former students,

demonstrated this by implanting copperheads with radio

transmitters and tracking their movements.
Twice, he

released a female snake into the wild and watched as she

stayed in exactly the same place.
She couldn’t have left a

scent trail, but she still managed to attract males who were

randomly wandering hundreds of yards away, then

suddenly crawled directly to her in a straight line.
Schwenk guessed that their secret lies in the way they

flick.
Lizards, the group from which snakes evolved, also

smell with their tongues, which are also sometimes forked.
But when lizards stick their tongues out, they usually flick

once.
The tips extend, scrape the ground, and retract.
Snakes, without exception, flick repeatedly and rapidly,

often never touching the ground.
The tongues bend in the

middle as if moving on a hinge, and the tips carve out a

wide circular arc, 10 to 20 times a second.
Bill Ryerson,

another of Schwenk’s students, analyzed those movements

by getting snakes to tongue-flick into clouds of cornstarch.
He illuminated the clouds with laser light, and filmed the

swirling particles with high-speed cameras.
When Schwenk

saw the footage, “my brain nearly exploded,” he says.
It turns out that the tongue’s tips splay out at the ends

of each flick and get closer at the midpoint.
This motion

creates two donut-shaped rings of continuously moving air

that draw in odorants from the left and right sides of the

snake.
It’s as if the snake temporarily conjures up two large

fans that suck in odors from either side, concentrating

diffuse odor molecules onto the tips of its tongue.
And since

the odors come in from left and right, the fork can still

provide a sense of direction, even when flicking in air.
This style of smelling is unusual in two ways.
First, it

involves a tongue, which is traditionally an organ of taste—

a sense that snakes barely use, for reasons I’ll get to.
Second, it involves an organ that, in most other animals, is

either nonexistent or of secondary importance.
Many

backboned animals have two distinct systems for detecting

odors.
The main one includes all the structures, receptors,

and neurons that I described in the head of a dog at the

start of this chapter.
The vomeronasal organ is its sidekick;

it has its own kinds of odor-sensing cells, its own sensory

neurons, and its own connections to the brain.
It’s usually

found inside the nasal cavity, just above the roof of the

mouth.
Don’t bother trying to feel around for yours,

though.
For some reason, humans lost our vomeronasal

organ during our evolution, as did other apes, along with

whales, birds, crocodiles, and some bats.
Most other mammals, reptiles, and amphibians have

kept theirs.
When one elephant touches another with its

trunk and brings the pheromone-coated tip into its mouth,

those molecules head to the vomeronasal.
When horses or

cats curl back their upper lip to expose their teeth, they’re

cutting off their nostrils and sending inhaled odorants to

the vomeronasal.
And when a snake retracts its tongue and

squeezes the tips between the floor and roof of its mouth,

the collected molecules are squirted to the vomeronasal.
In

snakes, this sidekick is the star.
Without it, garter snakes

stop following trails and stop eating, while rattlesnakes

botch half their strikes and fail to capture what they hit.
These snakes can still inhale odorants through their

nostrils, but their “main” olfactory system can’t seem to do

much with that information.
It has been relegated to a

passive role, informing the brain if there’s something

interesting around to tongue-flick at.
Snakes are unusual not just because their vomeronasal

organ is so important but also because we actually

understand what it does.
In other animals, the organ is a

mystery, albeit one that seems to attract confident claims.
[*28] For the moment, no one really knows why some species

have two separate systems for smelling.
Nor is it entirely

clear why most animals have another distinct chemical

sense.
I’m talking, of course, about taste.
—

EVERY APRIL, THE Association for Chemoreception Sciences

holds its annual meeting in Florida, and, per tradition,

scientists who study smell square off against those who

study taste in a heated softball game.
“Smell usually wins,”

smell scientist Leslie Vosshall tells me, “because the field is

vastly larger.
It’s like four or five to one.” Like smell, taste

—or gustation, in the fancy scientific parlance—is a means

of detecting chemicals in the environment.
But beyond that,

the two senses are distinct.
Put your nose next to vanilla

oil, and you’ll inhale a pleasing odor; drop that same oil on

your tongue, and you’ll likely flinch in disgust.
The difference between smell and taste is surprisingly

complicated.
You might reasonably say that animals smell

with noses and taste with tongues, but snakes use their

tongues to collect odors, and other animals (which we’ll

meet shortly) taste with unusual body parts.
You could also

argue (and many scientists do) that we smell molecules

that drift through the air, but taste those that stay in liquid

or solid form.
Smell works at a distance; taste works

through contact.
That’s a better distinction, but it has

several problems.
First, the receptors that are responsible

for recognizing smells are always covered in a thin layer of

liquid, so odorant molecules must first dissolve to be

detected.
So smell—like taste—always involves a liquid step

and always involves close contact even if those smells have

traveled from afar.
Second, as we’ve seen, ants and other

insects can smell by contact, using their antennae to pick

up pheromones that are too heavy to go airborne.
Third,

fish can smell even though everything they’re smelling is

dissolved in water.
For creatures like these that are

constantly immersed in liquid, the distinction between taste

and smell can be so confusing that one neuroscientist just

told me, “I avoid thinking about it.”

But John Caprio, a physiologist who studies catfish, says

the difference between smell and taste couldn’t be clearer.
Taste is reflexive and innate, while smell is not.[*29] From

birth, we recoil from bitter substances, and while we can

learn to override those responses and appreciate beer,

coffee, or dark chocolate, the fact remains that there’s

something instinctive to override.
Odors, by contrast,

“don’t carry meaning until you associate them with

experiences,” Caprio says.
Human infants aren’t disgusted

by the smell of sweat or poop until they get older.
Adults

vary so much in their olfactory likes and dislikes that when

the U.S.
Army tried to develop a stink bomb for crowd

control purposes, they couldn’t find a smell that was

universally disgusting to all cultures.
Even animal

pheromones, which are traditionally thought to trigger

hardwired responses, are surprisingly flexible in their

effects, which can be sculpted through experience.
Taste, then, is the simpler sense.
As we’ve seen, smell

covers a practically infinite selection of molecules with an

indescribably vast range of characteristics, which the

nervous system represents through a combinatorial code so

fiendish that scientists have barely begun to crack it.
Taste,

by contrast, boils down to just five basic qualities in

humans—salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami (savory)—and

perhaps a few more in other animals, which are detected

through a small number of receptors.
And while smell can

be put to complex uses—navigating the open oceans,

finding prey, and coordinating herds or colonies—taste is

almost always used to make binary decisions about food.
Yes or no?
Good or bad?
Consume or spit?
It’s ironic that we associate taste with connoisseurship,

subtlety, and fine discrimination when it is among the

coarsest of senses.
Even our ability to taste bitter, which

warns us of hundreds of potentially toxic compounds, isn’t

built to distinguish between them.
There’s only one

sensation of bitter because you don’t need to know which

bitter thing you’re tasting—you just need to know to stop

tasting it.
Taste is mostly a final check before consumption:

Should I eat this?
That’s why snakes barely bother with

taste.
With their flickering tongues, they can make

decisions about whether something is worth eating through

smell well before their mouths make contact.[*30] It’s

almost unheard of for a snake to strike a prey animal and

then spit it out.
(We tend to wrongly equate taste with

flavor, when the latter is more dominated by smell.
That’s

why food seems bland when you have a cold: Its taste is the

same, but the flavor dims because you can’t smell it.)

Reptiles, birds, and mammals taste with their tongues.
Other animals aren’t so restricted.
If you’re very small,

food isn’t just something you put in your mouth, but

something you can walk upon.
As such, most insects can

taste with their feet and legs.
Bees can detect the

sweetness of nectar just by standing on a flower.
Flies can

taste the apple you’re about to eat by landing on it.
Parasitic wasps can use taste sensors on the tips of their

stings to carefully implant their eggs in the bodies of other

insects.
One species can even taste the difference between

hosts that have already been parasitized by other wasps

and those that are currently vacant.
[*31]

If a mosquito lands on a human arm, “it’s a delight of the

senses,” says Leslie Vosshall.
“Human skin has a taste to it,

which gives them more confirmation that they made it to

the right place.” But if that arm is covered with bitter-

tasting DEET, the receptors on their feet force them to take

off before they get a chance to bite.
Vosshall has videos in

which a mosquito lands on a gloved hand and walks over to

a small patch of exposed but DEET-covered skin.
Its leg

touches the skin, and immediately withdraws.
It circles,

tries again, and retreats again.
“It’s poignant,” she tells

me, in a strange display of sympathy for a mosquito.
“It’s

also really psychedelic.
We have no idea what it’d be like to

taste with our fingers.” Insects can taste with other body

parts, too, which expands the uses to which they can put

this typically limited sense.
Some can find good sites for

laying their eggs using taste receptors on their egg-laying

tubes.
Some have taste receptors on their wings, which

might alert them to traces of food as they fly.
Flies will start

grooming themselves if they taste the presence of bacteria

on their wings.
Even decapitated flies will do this.
The most extensive sense of taste in nature surely

belongs to catfish.
These fish are swimming tongues.
They

have taste buds spread all over their scale-free bodies,

from the tips of their whisker-like barbels to their tails.
There’s hardly a place you can touch a catfish without

brushing thousands of taste buds.
If you lick one of them,

you’ll both simultaneously taste each other.[*32] “If I were a

catfish, I’d love to jump into a vat of chocolate,” John

Caprio tells me.
“You could taste it with your butt.” With

their body-wide buds, catfish have turned taste into an

omnidirectional sense—albeit one that’s still devoted to

evaluating food.
They eat meat, and if you put a piece

anywhere on their skin (or add meat juices to the water

around them), they’ll turn and snap at the right place.
They’re exquisitely sensitive to amino acids—the building

blocks of proteins and flesh.[*33] They aren’t great at

detecting sugars, though: Unfortunately for Caprio, his

chocolate fantasy would be underwhelming.
This inability to sense sugar and other classic tastes is

surprisingly common, and varies according to an animal’s

diet.
Cats, spotted hyenas, and many other mammals that

eat meat and nothing else similarly lack a sweet tooth.
Vampire bats, which drink only blood, have also lost their

taste for sweetness, and for umami.
Pandas have no need to

sense umami either, since they only eat bamboo, but they

gained an expanded set of bitter-sensing genes to warn

them of the myriad possible toxins in their mouthfuls.[*34]

Other leaf-eating specialists, like koalas, have also gained

more bitter detectors, while mammals that swallow their

prey whole, including sea lions and dolphins, have lost most

of theirs.
Repeatedly and predictably, the gustatory

Umwelten of animals have expanded and contracted to

make sense of the foods they most often encounter.
And

sometimes those changes altered their destinies.
Like cats and other modern carnivores, small predatory

dinosaurs probably lost the ability to taste sugar.
They

passed their restricted palate on to their descendants, the

birds, many of which still have no sense for sweetness.
Songbirds—the vocal and hugely successful group that

includes robins, jays, cardinals, tits, sparrows, finches, and

starlings—are an exception.
In 2014, evolutionary biologist

Maude Baldwin showed that some of the earliest songbirds

regained their sweet tooth by tweaking a taste receptor

that normally senses umami into one that also senses sugar.
This change occurred in Australia, a land whose plants

produce so much sugar that its flowers overflow with

nectar and its eucalyptus trees exude a syrupy substance

from their bark.
Perhaps these abundant sources of energy

allowed the newly sweet-toothed songbirds to thrive in

Australia, to endure marathon migrations to other

continents, to find nectar-rich flowers wherever they

arrived, and to diversify into a massive dynasty that now

includes half the world’s bird species.
This story is

unproven but nonetheless beguiling.
It’s possible that if a

random Australian bird hadn’t expanded its Umwelt tens of

millions of years ago, none of us would be waking up to the

melodic sounds of birdsong today.
[*35]

—

YOU CAN SPLIT the senses into different groups depending

on the stimuli that they detect.
Smell, its vomeronasal

variant, and taste are chemical senses, which detect the

presence of molecules.
They are ancient, universal, and

seem to sit apart from the others, which is partly why I

chose them as the first stop on our journey.
But they aren’t

entirely distinct.
On closer inspection, they share common

ground with at least one other sense, in an unexpected way.
At the start of this chapter, we saw that dogs and other

animals detect smells using proteins called odorant

receptors.
These are part of a much larger group of

proteins called G-protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs.
Ignore the convoluted name; it doesn’t matter.
What

matters is that they are chemical sensors.
They sit on the

surface of cells, grabbing specific molecules that float past.
Through their actions, cells can detect and react to the

substances around them.
This process is temporary: After

the GPCRs are done, they either release or destroy the

molecules that they’ve grabbed.
But one group of them

bucks this trend: opsins.
They are special because they

keep hold of their target molecules, and because those

molecules absorb light.
This is the entire basis of vision.
This is how all animals see—using light-sensitive proteins

that are actually modified chemical sensors.
In a way, we see by smelling light.
SKIP NOTES

*1 In the official parlance, an odorant is the molecule itself, and an odor is the sensation that said molecule produces; isoamyl acetate, an odorant, has the

odor of bananas.
*2 It’s no coincidence that I’m drawn to Finn’s eyes.
Dogs have a facial muscle that can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive

expression.
This muscle doesn’t exist in wolves.
It’s the result of centuries of

domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit

more like ours.
Those faces are now easier to read, and better at triggering a

nurturing response.
*3 I’ve deliberately avoided putting hard numbers on the scale of these

differences.
It is easy to find estimates, and very hard to find primary sources

for them; after an hours-long search that included a scientific paper that

sourced a factoid to a book in the For Dummies series, I fell into an existential

void and questioned the very nature of knowledge.
Regardless, the differences

are there, and they’re substantial; it’s only a question of exactly how

substantial they are.
*4 In one study, two dogs could detect amyl acetate—think bananas—at just 1

or 2 parts per trillion, which would make them 10,000 to 100,000 times better

than humans.
But it also makes them 30 to 20,000 times better than six

beagles that were tested on the same chemical 26 years earlier, using

different methods.
*5 I can think of one exception: Some marine worms release glowing “bombs”

full of luminescent chemicals, whose persistent light distracts predators from

the escaping worms.
*6 Leopard urine smells of popcorn.
Yellow ants smell of lemons.
Depending on the species, stressed frogs can smell of peanut butter, curry, or cashew nuts,

according to scientists who painstakingly sniffed 131 species and won an Ig

Nobel Prize for their efforts.
Crested auklets—comical seabirds that have

tufted heads—roost in massive colonies that, quite delightfully, smell of

tangerines.
*7 One possible exception is the puff adder, a venomous African snake.
It sits in ambush for weeks at a time, and protects itself by visually blending into its

environment.
But somehow, it seems to blend in chemically, too.
In 2015,

Ashadee Kay Miller found that keen-nosed animals, including dogs,

mongooses, and meerkats, can’t detect a puff adder, even when they walk over

one.
Dogs can detect the scent of shed skin, but for reasons that no one

understands, the living snakes are undetectable to their noses.
*8 Scientists fall prey to this, too.
When Horowitz tallied every study of dog behavior published in the last decade, she found that only 4 percent focused

on smell.
Just 17 percent described the odor environment in which

experiments were done—including airflow, temperature, humidity, or the

previous presence of people or food.
It’s as if vision researchers hadn’t

thought to mention if their laboratory lights were on or not.
*9 At the Oscars ceremony in 2021, a journalist asked South Korean actor Yuh-

Jung Youn what Brad Pitt smells like.
Youn replied, “I didn’t smell him!
I’m not

a dog!”

*10 The olfactory bulb might not even be necessary for smell.
In 2019, Tali

Weiss identified several women who seem to lack this structure altogether and

could smell just fine.
How they do it is anyone’s guess.
*11 The binturong is a black, shaggy, 2-meter-long creature that looks like a

cross between a cat, weasel, and bear.
It’s also known as a bearcat, and makes

a cameo appearance in my first book, I Contain Multitudes.
*12 Unless you actually stuck your nose over some benzaldehyde, you couldn’t

guess that it smells like almonds.
If you saw dimethyl sulfide drawn on a page,

you couldn’t foresee that it carries the scent of the sea.
Even similar molecules

can produce immensely different smells.
Heptanol, with a backbone of seven

carbon atoms, smells green and leafy.
Add another carbon atom to the chain

and you get octanol, which smells more like citrus.
Carvone exists in two

forms that contain exactly the same atoms but are mirror images of each

other: One smells of caraway seeds and the other of spearmint.
Mixtures are

even more confusing.
When mixed, some pairs of odors still smell distinct,

while others produce a third smell that’s unlike the two parents.
Meanwhile,

perfumes that contain hundreds of chemicals don’t smell any more complex

than individual odorants, and people typically struggle to name more than

three ingredients in a blend.
Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist who studies

olfaction, has come closer than anyone else to wrangling this complexity.
While I was writing this book, he and his team developed a measure that

analyzes 21 features of odorant molecules and collapses these into a single

number.
The closer this smell metric is for any two molecules, the more

similar their odors.
This isn’t quite the same as predicting scent from

structure, but it’s the next best thing—predicting scent from similarity to

other scents.
*13 The terminology is confusing.
In sensory biology, the word receptor is

usually used to describe a sensory cell, like a photoreceptor or a

chemoreceptor.
In this case, the odorant receptors are proteins on the surface

of those cells.
Don’t blame me; I didn’t make the rules.
*14 One widely popularized theory, which says that smells are encoded in the

vibrations of different molecules, has been thoroughly debunked.
*15 Human pheromones likely exist, but finding them is a chore.
In animals,

researchers typically look for stereotyped behaviors or physiological reactions

that reveal the reaction to a pheromone—a flaring of the lips, a fluttering of

antennae, or a rise in testosterone.
Humans are so annoyingly varied and

complex that few of our actions fit the bill.
Some researchers once suspected

that women synchronize their menstrual cycles because of some unidentified

pheromone, but such synchronicity is itself a myth.
Others now think that

breasts might release a pheromone that prompts babies to suckle, but again,

no chemical has been isolated.
*16 In September 2020, I noted that the army ant death spiral was the perfect

metaphor for the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic: “The

ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead.
They have no

coordinating force to guide them to safety.
They are imprisoned by a wall of

their own instincts.”

*17 A word of caution: It is dangerous to assess an animal’s sensory abilities by counting its genes.
Dogs have twice the number of working odorant receptor

genes as humans, but that doesn’t mean that their sense of smell is twice as

good.
*18 There’s precedent for this.
Back in 1874, the Swiss scientist Auguste Forel showed that an ant’s antennae are its main organs of smell.
When he removed

those antennae, ants wouldn’t build their nests, care for their young, or attack

interlopers from other colonies.
*19 Horowitz thinks that the dogs might just not have been motivated to do it.
*20 Given that elephants live in matriarchal societies that are led by females, it’s fitting that the study of elephant senses has been led by women: Bets

Rasmussen for olfaction; Katy Payne, Joyce Poole, and Cynthia Moss for

hearing; and Caitlin O’Connell for seismic senses.
We’ll meet the others in

later chapters.
*21 Arthur Hasler confirmed this ability in the 1950s after having his own

olfactory epiphany.
While hiking near a waterfall, the familiar smells brought

back long-buried childhood memories, and he wondered if migrating salmon

experience something similar.
*22 Ornithologist Kenneth Stager ran much better versions of Audubon’s

studies and showed that turkey vultures do indeed home in on the scent of

hidden carcasses.
He also learned that an oil company had begun tracking

leaks in its pipelines by adding ethyl mercaptan—a gas that smells of farts and

decay—and scanning the skies for circling vultures.
Intrigued, Stager

fashioned his own mercaptan dispenser and deployed it at various sites in

California.
Whenever he did, vultures arrived.
Audubon was wrong: Turkey

vultures not only can smell, but can smell well enough to detect the faintest

plumes of odorants from miles overhead.
*23 Birds evolved from the same group of small, predatory dinosaurs that

included celebrities like Velociraptor.
By scanning the skulls of these animals,

paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky showed that they had large olfactory bulbs for

their size—as did larger cousins like Tyrannosaurus.
These dinosaurs likely

used their sense of smell to hunt, and birds are the modern inheritors of that

ancient Umwelt.
*24 Tubenoses aren’t the only animals that track DMS.
Penguins, reef fish, and sea turtles can all detect the chemical, and are all drawn to it.
*25 Tracking such plumes is harder than following a straight line of sight.
A

bird’s best option is to fly across the wind to maximize its chances of

blundering into a stray odor molecule, and then follow it upwind on a

zigzagging path.
That’s how male moths find the pheromones released by their

females, and it’s how albatrosses find the odors released by their prey.
Henri

Weimerskirch fitted wandering albatrosses—the birds with the world’s

greatest wingspan—with GPS loggers to track their whereabouts and stomach

temperature recorders to log when they ate.
By analyzing that data, Gabrielle

Nevitt shows that the birds use zigzagging, smell-tracking flights to capture at

least half of their food.
*26 For the longest time, researchers have claimed that the tongue delivers

chemicals to the snake’s vomeronasal organ, also known as Jacobson’s organ,

by threading its tips through two holes in the roof of a snake’s mouth.
This is a

myth.
X-ray movies show that they do nothing of the sort, and the tongue

simply nestles into the roof of the mouth.
But to Schwenk’s eternal annoyance,

the misconception still persists and abounds in textbooks.
*27 Rulon Clark, whom we’ll meet in a later chapter, showed that even

inexperienced lab-born rattlesnakes can distinguish the smells of favored prey

like chipmunks and white-footed mice from those of unfamiliar lab rats.
He

also found, rather sinisterly, that rosy boas are specifically drawn to the odors

of female mice who have litters of young.
*28 It’s often mythologized as a specialized pheromone detector, but that can’t be true, since it also responds to other odorants, while the main smell system

also picks up pheromones.
It might detect molecules too heavy to float

through the airways of the main olfactory system, but this idea hasn’t been

adequately tested.
It might control instinctive responses to smells while the

main system governs responses that animals learn through experience; this

idea hasn’t been thoroughly tested, either.
*29 The two senses use different receptors and different neurons, which

connect to different parts of the brain.
In vertebrates, the taste system is

mostly wired to the hindbrain, which controls basic vital functions.
The smell

system is hooked up to the forebrain, which controls more advanced abilities

like learning.
*30 Schwenk thinks that’s because snakes eat infrequently, but in bulk.
They’ll often tackle much larger prey, and then remodel their innards to digest their

meals.
When a python swallows a pig or deer, its guts and liver double in size

and its heart swells by 40 percent over just a few days.
For them, every meal

soaks up a lot of energy, and they need to know as early as possible whether to

pay that cost.
*31 The stinger of a parasitic wasp is like a Swiss army knife.
Aside from taste sensors, it can also carry smell sensors, touch sensors, and bits of metal.
It’s a

drill, a nose, a tongue, and a hand.
*32 Some catfish have venomous spines and (as we’ll discover in a later chapter) others can create electricity, so animal welfare issues aside, I would

highly recommend not licking one, except as part of a thought experiment.
*33 Amino acids come in two forms that are mirror images of each other, called L and D.
Nature relies primarily on the L forms, and the D forms are

incredibly rare in animals.
So in the mid-1990s, when Caprio tested the

marine hardhead catfish, he was shocked to learn that almost half its taste

buds react to D-amino acids.
“I thought that’s got to be a mistake,” he says.
“Where are there D-amino acids in the environment that would be important

to catfish?” He eventually learned that several marine worms and clams can

flip L-amino acids into their mirrored D opposites.
Scientists only discovered

that marine animals make D-amino acids in the 1970s.
“The catfish knew it

hundreds of millions of years ago,” Caprio says.
*34 Remember, though, that taste is more about coarse detection than fine

discrimination: Compared to a dog, a panda might recognize more things as

being bitter, but it likely experiences those things in the same consistent way.
*35 Baldwin also showed that hummingbirds repurposed their umami receptor

into a sugar one.
They changed the same gene as the songbirds, but

independently, and in an almost completely different way.
She tells me that in

some species, the altered receptor can still detect umami, which means “they

may not be able to distinguish between sweet and savory.” Imagine being

unable to tell the difference between soy sauce and apple juice.
2.
Endless Ways of

Seeing

Light

I AM STARING AT A JUMPING spider, and even though its

body is pointing away from me, it is staring back.
Four

pairs of eyes encircle its turret-like head, two pointing

forward and two pointing sideways and backward.
The

spider has close to wraparound vision, and its only blind

spot is immediately behind it.
When I waggle my finger in

its five o’clock, it sees my vibrating digit and turns around.
As I move the finger, the spider follows.
Jumping spiders

“are the only spiders that will turn and look at you

routinely,” says Elizabeth Jakob, whose lab in Amherst,

Massachusetts, I am currently visiting.
“A lot of spiders

spend a lot of time just sitting motionless on a web and

waiting for something to happen.
But these are active.”

Humans are such a visual species that those of us with

sight instinctively equate active eyes with an active

intellect.
In their flitting, darting movements, we see

another curious mind investigating the world.
In the case of

jumping

spiders,

this

is

not

unwarranted

anthropomorphism.
Despite their poppy-seed-sized brains,

they really are surprisingly smart.[*1] The Portia species are

famed for planning out strategic routes when stalking prey,

or flexibly switching between sophisticated hunting tactics.
The bold jumping spiders (Phidippus audax) that Jakob

studies are less ingenious, but she still houses them in the

company of stimulating objects—the kind of environmental

enrichment that zookeepers might provide for captive

mammals.
Some have brightly colored sticks in their

terraria.
One individual, I note, has a red Lego brick.
We

joke about what it might build when our backs are turned.
Barely bigger than my smallest fingernail, the bold

jumping spider is mostly black, except for white fuzz on its

knees and vibrant turquoise splotches on the appendages

that hold its fangs.
It is unexpectedly cute.
Its stocky body,

short limbs, large head, and wide eyes are all rather

childlike, and stir the same deep psychological bias that

makes babies and puppies adorable.
But its proportions

didn’t evolve to engender empathy.
The short limbs power

great leaps: Unlike other spiders that sit in ambush,

jumping spiders stalk and pounce upon their prey.
And

unlike other spiders that mostly sense the world through

vibrations and touch, jumping spiders rely on vision.
That’s

why the eight eyes occupy up to half the volume of their

large heads.
They are the spiders whose Umwelten are

closest to ours.
In that similarity, I find affinity.
I watch the

spider, and it watches me back, two starkly different

species connected by our dominant sense.
The late British neurobiologist Mike Land, described to

me by one of his colleagues as “the god of eyes,” pioneered

the study of jumping spider vision.
In 1968, he developed

an ophthalmoscope for spiders, which he could use to

observe the creatures’ retinas as they, in turn, gazed at

images.
Jakob and her colleagues have refined Land’s

design; during my visit, they’ve placed a jumping spider in

their device, which is currently trained upon the creature’s

central eyes.
These point straight ahead and are the largest

of the four pairs.
They are also the sharpest.
Despite being

just a few millimeters long, they can see as clearly as the

eyes of pigeons, elephants, or small dogs.
Each eye is a

long tube, with a lens at the front and a retina at the back.
[*2] The lens is fixed in place, but the spider can look around by swiveling the rest of the tube inside its head.
(Imagine gripping a flashlight by its head, and then aiming

its beam by moving the tube.)[*3] The female spider in the

eye tracker is doing exactly that.
Her body is still.
Her eyes

look still, too.
But on the monitor, we can see that her

retinas are moving.
“She’s really looking around,” Jakob

says.
For reasons that no one fully understands, the retinas of

her central eyes are shaped like boomerangs.
At first, on

Jakob’s screen, they seem separate (> <).
But when she

shows the spider a black square, the two retinas converge

upon it, forming crosshairs (><).
As the square moves, the

retinas follow.
After a while, though, the spider loses

interest, and the retinas diverge.
Jakob replaces the square

with the silhouette of a cricket, and the retinas converge

again.
This time, they dance over the image, flitting

between the antennae, body, and legs with the same jerky

hops that our eyes make when taking in a scene.
The

retinas also rotate together, twisting clockwise and

anticlockwise, perhaps because the spider is searching for

specific angles that might help it identify what it’s looking

at.
Mike Land once wrote that it is “ an exhilarating but

very weird experience to look into the moving eyes of

another sentient creature, particularly one so far removed

in its evolution from oneself.” I couldn’t agree more.
At

least 730 million years of evolution separate humans from

jumping spiders, and it is hard to interpret the behavior of

such a different creature.
But on Jakob’s monitor, I can

watch a spider paying attention and losing interest.
I can

observe it observing.
By watching its gaze, I can get as

close as possible to glimpsing its mind.
And, despite many

similarities, I can see just how different its vision is from

mine.
For a start, it has more eyes.
The central pair may be

sharp and mobile, but their field of view is very narrow.
If

they were all the spider had, its vision would be like two

flashlights sweeping around a dark room.
The secondary

eyes on either side of the central pair compensate for this

shortcoming with a much broader field of view.
And though

they are themselves immobile, they are highly sensitive to

motion.
If a fly buzzes in front of the spider, the secondary

eyes spot it and tell the central eyes where to look.
And

here’s the truly bizarre part: If the secondary eyes are

covered, the spider cannot track moving objects.
I find this almost impossible to imagine.
As I write these

words, I am focusing the sharpest parts of my eyes on the

letters appearing on my screen.
Meanwhile, in my

peripheral vision, I can see the black shape of Typo, my

corgi puppy, as he prowls around my living room in search

of trouble.
These tasks—sharp vision and motion detection

—feel inseparable.
And yet jumping spiders have separated

them so thoroughly that they exist within different sets of

eyes.
The central ones recognize patterns and shapes and

see in color.
The secondary ones track movements and

redirect attention.
Different eyes for different tasks, and

each set has its own distinct connections to the spider’s

brain.
[*4] Jumping spiders remind us that we share a visual

reality with other sighted creatures, but we experience it in

utterly different ways.
“We don’t have to look to aliens from

other planets,” Jakob tells me.
“We have animals that have

a completely different interpretation of what the world is

right next to us.”

Humans have two eyes.
They’re on our heads.
They’re

equally sized.
They face forward.
None of these traits is the

norm, and a cursory glance at the rest of the animal

kingdom reveals that eyes can be as varied as the creatures

that own them.
Eyes can come in eights or hundreds.
The

eyes of the giant squid are as big as soccer balls; those of

fairy wasps are the size of an amoeba’s nucleus.
Squid,

jumping spiders, and humans have all independently

evolved camera-like eyes, in which a single lens focuses

light onto a single retina.
Insects and crustaceans have

compound eyes, which consist of many separate light-

gathering units (or ommatidia).
Animal eyes can be bifocal

or asymmetric.
They can have lenses made of protein or

rock.
They can appear on mouths, arms, and armor.
They

can accomplish all the tasks our eyes can perform, or just a

few of them.
This smorgasbord of eyes brings with it a dizzying

medley of visual Umwelten.
Animals might see crisp detail

at a distance, or nothing more than blurry blotches of light

and shade.
They might see perfectly well in what we’d call

darkness, or go instantly blind in what we’d call brightness.
They might see in what we’d deem slow motion or time-

lapse.
They might see in two directions at once, or in every

direction at once.
Their vision might get more or less

sensitive over the span of a single day.
Their Umwelt might

change as they get older.
Jakob’s colleague Nate

Morehouse has shown that jumping spiders are born with

their lifetime’s supply of light-detecting cells, which get

bigger and more sensitive with age.
“Things would get

brighter and brighter,” Morehouse tells me.
For a jumping

spider, getting older “is like watching the sun rising.”

—

SONKE JOHNSEN OPENS his book The Optics of Life by noting

that vision “is about light, so perhaps we should start with

what light is.” And then, with admirable candor: “I have no

idea.” Though it surrounds us almost constantly, light’s true

nature is not intuitive.
Physicists contend that it exists both

as an electromagnetic wave and as particles of energy

known as photons.
The specifics of this dual nature needn’t

concern us.
What matters is that neither guise is something

living things should obviously be able to detect.
From a

biological perspective, perhaps the most wondrous thing

about light is that we can sense it at all.
Look inside the eyes of a jumping spider, a human, or

any other animal, and you’ll find light-detecting cells called

photoreceptors.
These cells might vary dramatically from

one species to another, but they share a universal feature:

They contain proteins called opsins.
Every animal that sees

does so with opsins, which work by tightly embracing a

partner molecule called a chromophore, usually derived

from vitamin A.
The chromophore can absorb the energy

from a single photon of light.
When it does, it instantly

snaps into a different shape, and its contortions force its

opsin partner to reshape itself, too.
The opsin’s

transformation then sets off a chemical chain reaction that

ends with an electrical signal traveling down a neuron.
This

is how light is sensed.
Think of the chromophore as a car

key and the opsin as an ignition switch.
The two fit

together, light turns the key, and the engine of vision whirs

into life.
There are thousands of different animal opsins, but they

are all related.
[*5] Their unity creates a paradox.
If all vision

relies on the same proteins, and if those proteins all detect

light, then why are eyes so diverse?
The answer lies in

light’s distinct properties.
Since most light on Earth comes

from the sun, its presence can hint at temperature, time of

day, or depth of water.
It reflects off objects, revealing

enemies, mates, and shelter.
It travels in straight lines and

is blocked by solid obstacles, creating telltale features like

shadows and silhouettes.
It covers Earth-scale distances

almost instantaneously, offering a fast and far-ranging

source of information.
Vision is diverse because light is

informative in a multitude of ways, and animals sense it for

myriad reasons.
The biologist Dan-Eric Nilsson says that eyes evolve

through four stages of increasing complexity.
The first just

involves photoreceptors—cells that do little more than

detect the presence of light.
The hydra, a relative of

jellyfish, uses photoreceptors to ensure that its stings fire

more readily in dim light; perhaps it does this to save those

stings for nighttime hours, when its prey is more common,

or to deploy them when it senses the shadow of a passing

target.
Olive sea snakes have photoreceptors at the tips of

their tails, which they will pull away from sources of light.
Octopuses, cuttlefish, and other cephalopods have

photoreceptors dotted throughout their skin, which might

help to control their amazing color-changing abilities.
[*6]

In the second stage, photoreceptors gain shade—a dark

pigment or some other barrier that blocks the light coming

in from certain angles.
Shaded photoreceptors can not only

detect light’s presence but also infer its direction.
These

structures are still so simple that many scientists don’t

even regard them as genuine eyes, but they are useful to

their owners nonetheless.
They can also show up anywhere.
The

Japanese

yellow

swallowtail

butterfly

has

photoreceptors on its genitals.
A male uses these cells to

guide his penis over a female’s vagina, and a female uses

them to position her egg-laying tube over the surface of a

plant.
In the third of Nilsson’s stages, shaded photoreceptors

cluster into groups.
Their owners can now knit together

information about light from different directions to produce

images of the world around them.
For many scientists, this

is the point when light detection becomes actual vision,

when simple photoreceptors become bona fide eyes, and

when animals can truly be said to see.[*7] At first, their

vision is blurry and grainy, suitable only for crude tasks like

finding shelter or spotting looming shapes.
But with the

addition of focusing elements like lenses, their view

sharpens, and their Umwelt fills with rich visual detail.
High-resolution vision is the fourth of Nilsson’s stages.
When it first appeared, it would have intensified the

interactions between animals.
Conflicts and courtships

could play out over distances longer than touch or taste

would allow and at speeds too fast for smell.
Predators

could now spot their prey from afar, and vice versa.
Chases

ensued.
Animals became bigger, faster, and more mobile.
Defensive armor, spines, and shells evolved.
The rise of

high-resolution vision might explain why, around 541

million years ago, the animal kingdom dramatically

diversified, giving rise to the major groups that exist today.
This flurry of evolutionary innovation is called the

Cambrian explosion, and stage-four eyes might have been

one of the sparks that ignited it.
Nilsson’s four-stage model addresses a concern of

Charles Darwin, who was unsure how complex modern

eyes could have evolved.
“ To suppose that the eye, with all

its inimitable contrivances…could have been formed by

natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the

highest possible degree,” he wrote in The Origin of

Species.
“Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations

from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and

simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be

shown to exist…then the difficulty of believing that a

perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural

selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can

hardly be considered real.” The gradations Darwin

imagined do indeed exist: Animals have every conceivable

intermediate from simple photoreceptors to sharp eyes.
And different animal groups have repeatedly and

independently evolved diverse eyes using the same opsin

building blocks.
The jellyfish alone have evolved stage-two

eyes at least nine times, and stage-three eyes at least

twice.
Eyes, far from being a blow to evolutionary theory,

have proved to be one of its finest exemplars.
[*8]

Darwin was wrong, though, in calling complex eyes

perfect and simpler ones imperfect.
Stage-four eyes are not

some Platonic ideal that evolution was striving toward.
The

simpler eyes that preceded them are all still around and

are well suited to the needs of their owners.
“Eyes didn’t

evolve from poor to perfect,” Nilsson emphasizes.
“They

evolved from performing a few simple tasks perfectly to

performing many complex tasks excellently.” As we saw in

the introduction, a starfish has eyes on the tips of its five

arms.
These eyes can’t see color, detail, or fast movements,

but they don’t have to.
They only have to detect large

objects, so that the starfish can slowly amble back toward

the safety of a coral reef.
A starfish has no need for an

eagle’s acute eye, or even a jumping spider’s.
It sees what

it needs to.
[*9] The first step to understanding another

animal’s Umwelt is to understand what it uses its senses

for.
Primates, for example, probably evolved big, sharp eyes

to capture tree-dwelling insects sitting on branches.
We

humans have inherited that acute vision, which sighted

people now use to guide their dexterous fingers, to read

symbols that they imbue with meaning, and to assess the

cues hidden in subtle facial expressions.
Our eyes suit our

needs.
They also give us a singular Umwelt that most other

animals do not share.
—

IN 2012, WHEN Amanda Melin, a scientist who studies

animal vision, met Tim Caro, a scientist who studies animal

patterns, their conversation naturally turned to zebras.
Caro had become the latest in a long line of biologists to

wonder why zebras have such conspicuous black-and-white

patterns.
One of the earliest and most prominent

hypotheses, he told Melin, was that the stripes

counterintuitively act as camouflage.
They mess with the

eyes of predators like lions and hyenas by breaking up the

zebra’s outline, or by helping it to blend in among the

vertical trunks of trees, or by causing a confusing blur

when it runs.
Melin was dubious.
“I had a look on my face,”

she recalls.
“I said, ‘I think most of the carnivores are

hunting at night, and their visual acuity is going to be so

much worse than humans’.
They probably can’t see the

stripes.’ And Tim went, ‘What?’ ”

Humans outshine almost every other animal at resolving

detail.
Our exceptionally sharp vision, Melin realized, gives

us a rarefied view of a zebra’s stripes.
She and Caro

calculated that on a bright day, people with excellent

eyesight can distinguish the black-and-white bands from

200 yards away.
Lions can only do so at 90 yards and

hyenas at 50 yards.
And those distances roughly halve at

dawn and dusk, when these predators are more likely to

hunt.
Melin was right: The stripes can’t possibly act as

camouflage because predators can only make them out at

close range, by which point they can almost certainly hear

and smell the zebra.
At most distances, the stripes would

just fuse together into a uniform gray.
To a hunting lion, a

zebra mostly looks like a donkey.
[*10]

An animal’s visual acuity is measured in cycles per

degree—a concept that, by happy coincidence, you can

think of in terms of zebra stripes.
Stretch out your arm and

give a thumbs-up.
Your nail represents roughly 1 degree of

visual space, out of the 360 degrees that surround you.
You

should be able to paint 60 to 70 pairs of thin black-and-

white stripes on that nail and still be able to tell them

apart.
A human’s visual acuity, then, is somewhere between

60 and 70 cycles per degree, or cpd.
The current record, at

138 cycles per degree, belongs to the wedge-tailed eagle of

Australia.
[*11] Its photoreceptors are some of the narrowest

in the animal kingdom, which allows them to be densely

packed within the eagle’s retinas.
With these svelte cells,

the eagle effectively sees the world on a screen with over

twice as many pixels as ours.
It can spot a rat from a mile

away.
But eagles and other birds of prey are the only animals

whose vision is substantially sharper than ours.
Sensory

biologist Eleanor Caves has been collating visual acuity

measurements for hundreds of species, almost all of which

are surpassed by humans.
Aside from raptors, only other

primates come close to our standards.
Octopuses (46 cpd),

giraffes (27 cpd), horses (25 cpd), and cheetahs (23 cpd) do

reasonably well.
A lion’s acuity is only 13 cpd, just above

the 10 cpd threshold at which humans are considered

legally blind.
Most animals fall below that threshold,

including half of all birds (and surprising ones like

hummingbirds and barn owls), most fish, and all insects.
A

honeybee’s acuity is just 1 cycle per degree.
Your

outstretched thumbnail represents roughly one pixel of a

bee’s visual world, and all the detail within that nail would

collapse into a uniform smudge.
Around 98 percent of

insects have vision that’s even coarser.
“Humans are

weird,” Caves tells me.
“We’re not the pinnacle of any

sensory modality, but we’re rocking it with visual acuity.”

And paradoxically, our sharp vision muddies our

appreciation of other Umwelten, because “we assume that

if we can see it, they can, and that if it’s eye-catching to us,

it’s grabbing their attention,” says Caves.
“That’s not the

case.”

Caves fell prey to this perceptual bias herself.
She

studies cleaner shrimps, which helpfully exfoliate fish of

parasites and dead skin.
“They’re cleaning colorful coral

reef fish, and they’re colorful themselves, so I thought

they’d have reasonable vision,” Caves tells me.
They do not.
Their fish clients can see the vibrant blue spots on their

bodies, and the bright white antennae that they wave

about, but they themselves cannot.
A cleaner shrimp’s

beautiful patterns are not part of a cleaner shrimp’s

Umwelt, even at very close range.
“They probably can’t

even see their own antennae,” Caves says.
Many butterflies also have intricate patterns on their

wings, which might warn predators that these insects are

toxic.
Some scientists have suggested that the butterflies

might recognize each other from these patterns, but that’s

unlikely when their vision isn’t sharp enough.
A blackbird

can see the black spots that freckle the orange wings of a

map butterfly, but another map butterfly probably just sees



an orange blur.
We’ve always looked at butterflies, cleaner

shrimps, and zebras through the wrong eyes—ours.
Why, then, since animals are so frequently adorned with

elaborate patterns, aren’t sharp eyes more common?
In

some cases it’s because eyes are constrained by their past.
The curse of low resolution is baked into the structure of a

compound eye, and having started off with eyes of this

kind, insects and crustaceans are now stuck.
Robber flies

manage 3.7 cycles per degree, but that’s about the limit.
For a fly’s eye to be as sharp as a human’s, it would have to

be a meter wide.
A map butterfly as viewed through the eyes of different species from

varying distances

Acute eyes also come with a hefty drawback.
As the

wedge-tailed eagle demonstrates, animals can achieve

sharper vision by having smaller and more densely packed

photoreceptors.
But each receptor now collects light over a

smaller area and is thus less sensitive.
These qualities—

sensitivity and resolution—seesaw against each other.
No

eye can excel at both.
An eagle might be able to spot a far-

off rabbit in broad daylight, but its acuity plummets as the

sun sets.
(There are no nocturnal eagles.) Conversely, lions

and hyenas might not be able to resolve a zebra’s stripes at

a distance, but their vision is sensitive enough to hunt one

at night.
They, and many other animals, have prioritized

sensitivity over acuity.
As ever, eyes evolve to suit the needs

of their owners.
Some animals simply don’t need to see

crisp images.
And some animals don’t need to see images

at all.
—

DANIEL SPEISER NEVER thought he would spend his career

trying to empathize with scallops.
When he started

graduate school in 2004, he thought about them the same

way most people do—“as lumps of meat on a plate,” he tells

me.
But those appetizing pan-seared lumps are merely the

muscles that scallops use to close their shells.
Look at a

full, living scallop, and you’ll see a very different animal.
And that animal will see you, too.
Each half of a scallop’s

fan-shaped shell has eyes arrayed along its inner edge—

dozens in some species, and up to 200 in others.
In the bay

scallop, the eyes look like neon blueberries.
Speiser finds

them “funny and horrifying and charming,” all at once.
It is strange enough that scallops have eyes when most

other bivalves like mussels and oysters do not.
It’s even

stranger that those eyes, as Mike Land showed in the

1960s, are complex.
Each one sits at the end of a mobile

tentacle.
Each has a little pupil: “It’s wild and creepy to see

all of them opening and closing at the same time,” Speiser

says.
Light passes through the pupil and hits the back of

the scallop’s eye, where it is reflected by a curved mirror.
The mirror is a precisely tiled array of square crystals that

collectively focus light onto the scallop’s retinas.
That’s

retinas, plural.
There are two per eye, and they are about

as different as two animal retinas could be.
[*12] Between

them, they have thousands of photoreceptors, which gives

them enough spatial resolution to detect small objects.
“Their optics are really good,” Speiser says.
[*13]

But why?
When scallops are threatened, they can swim

away, opening and closing their shells like panicked

castanets.
Beyond these rare moments of action, though,

they mostly sit on the seafloor, sieving edible particles from

the water.
They’re “glorified clams,” according to Sonke

Johnsen.
Why do they need such a complicated eye, let

alone dozens or hundreds of them?
What does a scallop use

its vision for?
To find out, Speiser ran an experiment that

he called Scallop TV.
He strapped their shells to small

seats, placed them in front of a monitor, and showed them

computer-generated movies of small, drifting particles.
It

was such a ridiculous setup that no one seriously thought

that it would work.
But it did: If the particles were large

enough and moving slowly enough, the scallops opened

their shells, as if ready to feed.
“It was the craziest thing

I’ve ever seen,” Johnsen tells me.
At the time, Speiser thought that scallops must use their

eyes to spot potential food.
Now he thinks something else is

happening.
Interspersed between their eyes are tentacles

that scallops use to smell molecules in the water.
Speiser

thinks they use smell to recognize predators like starfish

and vision to detect things that are simply worth an

investigative sniff.
When they opened their shells in

response to Scallop TV, they weren’t trying to feed but

were seeking to explore.
“My guess is that we were seeing

scallops being curious,” Speiser says.
Speiser suspects that scallop vision works in a very

different way than ours.
Our brains combine the

overlapping information from our two eyes into a single

scene.
A scallop could do the same across a hundred eyes,

but that seems unlikely given how crude its brain is.
Instead, each eye might simply tell the brain whether it has

detected something moving or not.
Think of the scallop’s

brain as a security guard watching a bank of a hundred

monitors, each connected to a motion-sensing camera.
If

the cameras detect something, the guard sends sniffer dogs

to investigate.
Here’s the catch: The cameras may be state-

of-the-art, but the images they capture are not sent to the

guard.
All the guard sees on the monitors is a warning light

for every camera that has spotted something.
If Speiser is

right about this bizarre setup, it means that even though

each individual scallop eye has good spatial resolution, the

animal itself might not have spatial vision.
It knows when

eyes in a certain region of its body have detected

something, but it has no visual image of that object.
It

doesn’t experience a movie in its head the same way we do.
It sees without scenes.
This kind of vision is probably closer to our sense of

touch than anything we experience with our eyes.
We don’t

create a tactile scene of the world, even though we can feel

with every part of our skin.
Indeed, we largely ignore those

sensations until something pokes us (or vice versa).
And

when we feel something unexpected, our most common

reaction is to turn and look at it.
Perhaps for a scallop,

smell (not vision) is the fine-grained exploration sense and

vision (not touch) is the crude, whole-body detection sense.
[*14]

But if that’s the case, why does each individual eye have

such good resolution?
Why do sophisticated components

like the mirrors and double retinas exist?
Why are there so

many eyes when just a few could cover the entire space

around the scallop’s shell?
Why have such good eyes

evolved in an animal whose brain can barely handle the

information they convey?[*15] No one knows.
“Sometimes I

feel like I can almost get my mind around it, and extend my

empathy into scallops,” Speiser tells me.
“But a lot of the

time I feel lost again.” [*16]

Some animals might have the scallop’s distributed vision

without possessing eyes at all.
The brittle star Ophiomastix

wendtii looks like a skinny, spiny starfish, or perhaps like

five centipedes wriggling out of a hockey puck.
It doesn’t

have any obvious eyes, but it clearly sees.
It will scuttle

away from light, crawl toward shady crevices, and even

change color after sunset.
In 2018, Lauren Sumner-Rooney

showed that the brittle star has thousands of

photoreceptors over the full lengths of its sinuous arms.
It’s

as if the entire animal acts as a compound eye.[*17] Weirder

still, it’s only an eye during the day.
When the sun is out, the brittle star expands sacs of

pigment in its skin, which give it the deep red of a blood

clot.
At night, it shrinks these sacs, and becomes pale gray

and striped.
When expanded, the pigment sacs block light

from reaching the photoreceptors at certain angles.
This

gives each receptor the directionality of a stage-two eye,

and it gives the entire animal the spatial vision of a stage-

three eye.
But when the pigment sacs contract at night, the

photoreceptors are fully exposed.
Unable to tell the

direction of incoming light, their spatial vision no longer

works.
“It knows when it’s exposed to light, but doesn’t

know how to get away from it,” Sumner-Rooney says.
It’s anyone’s guess what the brittle star itself makes of

this change.
Unlike a scallop, it doesn’t even have a brain—

just a decentralized ring of nerves surrounding its central

disc.
This ring coordinates the five arms but doesn’t

command them; they mostly act on their own.
It’s as if the

brittle star has the same weird system of cameras as the

scallop, but without the security guard.
The cameras are

just signaling each other.
Do they do so across the entire

animal?
Is each separate arm its own eye?
Is each arm a

swarm of semi-autonomous eyes that happen to be linked?
“It could be something so out there that we haven’t even

thought of it yet,” Sumner-Rooney tells me.
“Everything we

know about animal vision to date relies on having an eye.
We’re basing everything on a century’s worth of research

on contiguous retinas, with photoreceptors that are close

together and grouped.
[The brittle star] violates a lot of

those assumptions.”

With multitudes of eyes, no heads, and sometimes no

brains, brittle stars and scallops all reveal how strange

vision can be.
“An animal doesn’t have to see a picture to

be able to use vision,” Sumner-Rooney says.
“But humans

are such visually driven creatures that trying to conceive of

these completely alien systems is very hard.” It is easier to

imagine the visual worlds of more familiar creatures with

heads and two eyes.
But even then, we might miss what is

right in front of us.
—

RISING HIGH ON columns of warm air, griffon vultures soar

over rolling landscapes in search of food.
Since they can

spot carcasses on the ground, they should easily be able to

see large obstacles ahead of them.
And yet vultures, eagles,

and other large raptors often fatally crash into wind

turbines.
In one Spanish province alone, 342 griffon

vultures collided with wind turbines over a 10-year period.
How could birds that fly by day and have some of the

planet’s sharpest eyes fail to avoid structures so large and

conspicuous?
Graham Martin, who studies bird vision,

answered this question by addressing another: Where

exactly do vultures look?
In 2012, Martin and his colleagues measured the griffon

vulture’s visual field—the space around its head that its

eyes can cover.
They got each bird to rest its beak on a

specially fitted holder, and then looked into its eyes from all

directions with a visual perimeter.
“It’s the same device

that an optician would use when you get an eye test,”

Martin told me at the time.
“It’s just a question of sitting

the bird down for half an hour.
One tried to grab at me and

I did lose a bit of my thumb.”

The perimeter revealed that a vulture’s visual field

covers the space on either side of its head but has large

blind spots above and below.
When it flies, it tilts its head

downward, so its blind spot is now directly ahead of it.
This

is why vultures crash into wind turbines: While soaring,

they aren’t looking at what is right in front of them.
For

most of their history, they never had to.
“Vultures would

never have encountered an object so high and large in their

flight path,” Martin says.
It might work to turn off the

turbines if the birds are near, or to lure the vultures away

using ground-based markers.
But visual cues on the blades

themselves won’t work.
[*18] (In North America, bald eagles

also crash into wind turbines for the same reasons.)

When I think about Martin’s study, I’m suddenly and

acutely aware of the large space behind my head that I

cannot see and that I seldom think about.
Humans and

other primates are rather odd in having two eyes that point

straight ahead.
The left eye gets a very similar view to the

right, and their visual fields overlap a lot.
This arrangement

gives us excellent depth perception.
It also means we can

barely see things to our sides, and we can’t see what’s

behind us without turning our heads.
For us, seeing is

synonymous with facing, and exploration is achieved

through gazing and turning.
But most birds (except for

owls) tend to have side-facing eyes and don’t need to point

their heads at something to look at it.
A soaring vulture that’s scanning the ground can also

see other vultures flying next to it, without having to turn.
A heron’s visual field covers 180 degrees in the vertical;

even when standing upright with its beak pointing straight

ahead, it can see fish swimming near its feet.
A mallard

duck’s visual field is completely panoramic, with no blind

spot either above or behind it.
When sitting on the surface

of a lake, a mallard can see the entire sky without moving.
When flying, it sees the world simultaneously moving

toward it and away from it.
We use the phrase “bird’s-eye

view” to mean any vista seen from on high.
But a bird’s

view is not just an elevated version of a human one.
“ The

human visual world is in front and humans move into it,”

Martin once wrote.
But “the avian world is around and

birds move through it.” [*19]

Birds also differ from humans in where their vision is

sharpest.
Many animals have an area in their retinas where

their photoreceptors (and the attendant neurons) are

densely packed, increasing the resolution of their vision.
This region goes by many names.
In invertebrates, it’s

called an acute zone.
In vertebrates, it’s an area centralis.
If that area is also inwardly dimpled, as it is in our eyes, it’s

a fovea.
For all our sakes (except the vision scientists, to

whom I apologize), I’m just going to stick with acute zone.
In humans, it’s a bullseye—a round spot in the center of our

visual field.
It’s what you are training upon these letters as

you read them.
Most birds also have circular acute zones,

but theirs point outward, not forward.
If they want to

examine objects in detail, they have to look sideways, with

just one eye at a time.
When a chicken investigates

something new, it will swing its head from side to side to

look upon it with the acute zone of each eye in turn.
“When

chickens look at you, you never know what the other eye is

doing,” says Almut Kelber, a zoologist who studies bird

vision.
“They must have at least two centers of attention,

which is very hard to imagine.”

Many birds of prey, like eagles, falcons, and vultures,

actually have two acute zones in each eye—one that looks

forward, and another that looks out at a 45-degree angle.
The side-facing one is sharper, and it’s the one that many

raptors use when hunting.
When a peregrine falcon dives

after a pigeon, it doesn’t plunge straight at its prey.
Instead, it flies along a descending spiral.
That’s the only

way it can keep the pigeon within its murderous side-eye,

while also pointing its head down and maintaining a

streamlined shape.
[*20]

The peregrine prefers to use its right eye to track prey.
Such preferences are common to birds; when eyes see

distinct views, those eyes can be used for distinct tasks.
The left half of a chick’s brain is specialized for focused

attention and categorizing objects; the bird can spot food

grains among a bed of pebbles if it uses its right eye

(directed by its left brain), but not its left eye.
The right

half of the brain deals with the unexpected; many birds use

their left eyes (directed by their right brains) to scan for

predators, and are quicker to detect a threat when it

approaches from the left.
An animal’s visual field determines where it can see.
Its

acute zones determine where it sees well.
Without

considering both traits, we can seriously misinterpret an

animal’s actions.
In a video that went viral on TikTok, a

male argus pheasant displayed his dazzling plumage to a

female, who seemed to look off to the side.
Viewers laughed

at her apparent disinterest, not knowing that she was

looking right at him with her side-facing visual field.
A

seal’s visual field is more similar to ours but with excellent

coverage above its head and poor coverage below,

presumably to spot fish silhouetted against the sky.
A seal

that swims upside down might look relaxed to a human

observer, but is actually scanning the seafloor for food.
Cows and other livestock also have a somnolent air

because their gaze is so fixed.
They rarely turn to look at

you in the way another human (or a jumping spider) might.
But they also don’t need to.
Their visual fields wrap almost

all the way around their heads and their acute zones are

horizontal stripes, giving them a view of the entire horizon

at once.
The same is true for other animals that live in flat

habitats, including rabbits (fields), fiddler crabs (beaches),

red kangaroos (deserts), and water striders (the surface of

ponds).
Except for the occasional aerial predators, up and

down are largely immaterial to them.
There is only across,

in every possible direction.
A cow can simultaneously see a

farmer approaching it from the front, a collie walking up

from behind, and the herdmates at its side.
Looking

around, which is inextricable from our experience of vision,

is actually an unusual activity, which animals do only when

they have restricted visual fields and narrow acute zones.
Elephants, hippos, rhinos, whales, and dolphins have

two or three acute zones per eye, possibly because they

can’t quickly turn their heads.
[*21] Chameleons don’t have

to turn because their turret-like eyes can move

independently; they can look in front and behind at the

same time, or track two targets moving in opposite

directions.
Other animals are steadier in their gaze.
Many

male flies focus upward: The large facets at the top of their

compound eyes are called love spots, and allow them to

detect the silhouettes of females flying overhead.
Male

mayflies have gone even further: The female-spotting parts

of their eyes are so enormous that each eye looks like it is

wearing a chef’s hat.
The fish Anableps anableps, which

lives at the surface of South American rivers, also

partitions its eyes.
The top half sticks out of the water and

is adapted for air vision, and the bottom half stays below

the surface and is adapted for aquatic vision.
It’s also

known as the four-eyed fish.
In the three-dimensional world of the deep ocean, above

and below matter as much as in front and behind.
Many

deep-sea fish like barreleyes and hatchetfish have tubular

eyes that point upward, allowing them to see the outlines of

other animals silhouetted against the faint downwelling

sunlight.
The brownsnout spookfish, a kind of barreleye,

has amended the upward eye of its kin with a downward-

pointing chamber that has its own retina; with these two-

part eyes, it can look up and down at the same time.
So can

the cock-eyed squid, whose left eye is twice the size of its

right.
It hangs in the water column with the small eye

pointing downward to spot bioluminescent flashes and the

big eye pointing up to spot silhouettes.
Meanwhile, the

deep-sea crustacean Streetsia challengeri has fused its

eyes into a single horizontal cylinder, which looks like a

corn dog.
It can see in almost every direction

circumferentially—above, below, and to the sides—but not

ahead or behind.
It is almost impossible to imagine what it would be like

to see like Streetsia, or a chameleon, or even a cow.
The

reverse-facing camera of my smartphone can show me

what’s going on over my shoulder, but that image still

appears in my relentlessly forward-facing visual field.
Again, as with the scallops, it helps to think about touch.
I

can simultaneously feel the sensations on the skin of my

scalp, soles, chest, and back.
If I concentrate, I can just

about imagine what it might be like to fuse the

omnidirectional nature of that sensation with the long

range of sight.
Vision can extend in any direction and every

direction.
It can envelop and surround.
And it can vary in

time as well as space.
It can fill not just the empty voids

around us but also the fleeting gaps between moments.
—

THE MEDITERRANEAN IS home to a small, unassuming fly

called Coenosia attenuata.
Just a few millimeters long, with

a pale gray body and large red eyes, “it looks like a

standard housefly,” Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido tells me.
In

fact, it is a killer.
From its perch on a leaf, it will take off in

pursuit of fruit flies, fungus gnats, whiteflies, and even

other killer flies—“anything that’s small enough for them to

subdue,” Gonzalez-Bellido says.
During the chase, it

stretches out its legs.
As soon as one touches the target, all

six clamp shut, forming a cage.
Often, it will fly the victim

back to its original perch.
If you can coax a killer fly to

crawl onto your finger, it will repeatedly launch itself from

your digit and return with prey, like a (very tiny) falcon to

its falconer.
This experience can be unexpectedly magical

for a human.
It’s less so for the prey.
While a typical

housefly has a proboscis that resembles a sponge on a

stick, used for dabbing and sucking at liquids, a killer fly’s

proboscis is part dagger and part rasp, used for stabbing

and scraping flesh.
The fly shoves it into its victim and

hollows it out while it is still alive.
Gonzalez-Bellido has a

video in which you can see a killer fly’s mouthparts

scraping away a fruit fly’s eye from the inside, leaving

nothing behind but a grid of transparent lenses.
Farmers

and gardeners frequently introduce this insect into

greenhouses to take care of pests, and it has now spread all

around the world.
For killer flies, speed is everything.
“Their prey can

come from anywhere, and the Mediterranean is so dry that

it’s rare for them to have prey,” Gonzalez-Bellido says.
They

immediately take off after anything that could conceivably

be a meal and, once airborne, catch their prey as quickly as

possible so that they themselves aren’t cannibalized by

others of their kind.
Their chases are near impossible for

even well-trained human eyes to follow.
By filming these

pursuits with high-speed cameras, Gonzalez-Bellido showed

that they typically take a quarter of a second.
They might

even be over in half that time.
A killer fly can capture its

target in the space of a human blink.
Their ultrafast hunts are guided by ultrafast vision.
It

may seem strange to talk about animals seeing at different

speeds, because light is the fastest thing in the universe,

and vision seems instantaneous to us.
But eyes don’t work

at light speed.
It takes time for photoreceptors to react to

incoming photons, and for the electrical signals they

generate to travel to the brain.
In killer flies, evolution has

pushed these steps to their limits.
When Gonzalez-Bellido

shows these insects an image, it takes just 6 to 9

milliseconds for their photoreceptors to send electrical

signals, for those signals to reach their brains, and for their

brains to send commands to their muscles.[*22] By contrast,

it takes between 30 and 60 milliseconds for human

photoreceptors to accomplish just the first of those steps.
If

you looked at an image at the same moment as a killer fly,

the insect would be airborne well before a signal had even

left your retina.
“We don’t know of a faster photoreceptor

than the ones from these flies,” Gonzalez-Bellido tells me.
She says it with something approaching pride.
[*23]

The fly’s vision also updates more quickly.
Imagine

looking at a light that flickers on and off.
As the flickering

gets faster, there will come a point when the flashes merge

into a steady glow.
This is called the critical flicker-fusion

frequency, or CFF.
It’s a measure of how quickly a brain

can process visual information.
Think of it as the frame rate

of the movie playing inside an animal’s head—the point at

which static images blend into the illusion of continuous

motion.
For humans, in good light, the CFF is around 60

frames per second (or hertz, Hz).
For most flies, it’s up to

350.
For killer flies, it’s probably higher still.
To its eyes, a

human movie would look like a slideshow.
The fastest of our

actions would seem languid.
An open palm, moving with

lethal intent, would be easily dodged.
Boxing would look

like tai chi.
In general, animals tend to have higher CFFs if they’re

smaller and faster.
Compared to human vision, cats are

slightly slower (48 Hz) and dogs slightly faster (75 Hz).
The

eyes of a scallop are positively glacial (1 to 5 Hz), and those

of nocturnal toads are slower still (0.25 to 0.5 Hz).
Those of

leatherback turtles (15 Hz) and harp seals (23 Hz) are

faster but still sluggish.
Those of swordfish aren’t much

better under normal conditions (5 Hz), but these fish can

heat up their eyes and brains with a special muscle,

boosting the speed of their vision by eight times.
Many

birds have naturally fast vision; with a maximum CFF of

146 Hz, the pied flycatcher—a small songbird—has the

fastest vision of any vertebrate that’s been tested, perhaps

because its survival depends on tracking and catching

flying insects.[*24] And those insects have eyes that are

faster still.
Honeybees, dragonflies, and flies have CFFs

between 200 and 350 Hz.
It’s possible that each of these visual speeds comes with

a different sense of time’s passage.
Through a leatherback

turtle’s eyes, the world might seem to move in time-lapse,

with humans bustling about at a fly’s frenetic pace.
Through a fly’s eyes, the world might seem to move in slow

motion.
The imperceptibly fast movements of other flies

would slow to a perceptible crawl, while slow animals

might not seem like they were moving at all.
“Everyone

asks us how we catch the killer flies,” Gonzalez-Bellido

says.
“You just move toward them slowly with a vial.
If

you’re slow enough, you’re just part of the background.”

—

FAST VISION REQUIRES a lot of light, so killer flies can only be

active during the day.
Other animals are not so limited.
After the sun’s golden fingers withdraw from the

Panamanian rainforest and the understory’s shade thickens

into an even deeper darkness, a small bee emerges from a

hollow stick.
This is Megalopta genalis, a sweat bee.
Its

legs and abdomen are golden yellow.
Its head and torso are

metallic green.
None of those beautiful hues are usually

visible to human observers because the bee only emerges

when there’s too little light for humans to see, let alone see

in color.
But despite the darkness, Megalopta slaloms

through a labyrinth of lianas and tracks down its favorite

flowers.
Having collected its fill of pollen, it somehow then

returns to the very same thumb-width stick in which it

nests.
Eric Warrant, who grew up collecting insects and now

studies their eyes, first encountered Megalopta in 1999 on

a research trip to Panama.
He quickly confirmed, to his

astonishment, that it uses vision to guide its nighttime

flights.
By filming the insect with infrared cameras,

Warrant saw that when it first emerges from its stick, it

turns around and hovers slowly in front of the entrance,

memorizing the appearance of the surrounding foliage.
Later, when it has finished foraging, it uses this visual

memory to find its way home.
If Warrant set up his own

landmarks, like white squares, and moved them to another

stick while the bee was away, it would return to the wrong

place.
The bee’s feat would be hard enough in bright

daylight: Rainforests are neither easy to navigate nor short

of sticks.
But Megalopta somehow finds its home “in the

dimmest imaginable light,” Warrant says.
He has filmed the

bee finding its nest on nights so dark that he couldn’t even

see his own hand in front of his face.
He had to use night-

vision goggles to see what the bee could with its own eyes.
“They’re no clumsier in the dark than a honeybee is in

bright sunlight,” Warrant tells me.
“They come flying in

quite rapidly, they don’t hesitate, and they land incredibly

quickly.
It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.”

Warrant suspects that Megalopta’s ancestors veered

toward a nocturnal schedule to escape intense competition

from daylight pollinators, including other bees.
But life at

night isn’t easy for animals that rely on vision, for two

major reasons.
The first is obvious: There’s much less light.
Even the light of a full moon is a million times dimmer than

full daylight.
A moonless night that’s illuminated by stars

alone is a hundred times dimmer still.
A night where

starlight is obscured by clouds or tree cover is a hundred

times dimmer again.
These are the kinds of conditions in

which Megalopta can still navigate—starless darkness that

offers barely enough light for an eye to collect.
The second

challenge is less intuitive: Photoreceptors can accidentally

go off on their own, and at night, these false alarms can

easily outnumber the real signals from actual photons.
So

nocturnal animals must not only detect the little light that’s

there but also ignore the phantom lights that aren’t.
They

must overcome both the limits of physics and the messiness

of biology.
Some animals have simply dropped out of the struggle.
Like all sensory systems, eyes are expensive to build and

maintain.
It takes a lot of energy to even prep

photoreceptors and their associated neurons for the arrival

of light, so that they can react when needed.
Even when

animals aren’t seeing anything, the mere possibility of sight

drains their resources.
This drain is significant enough that

if eyes stop being useful or effective, they tend to diminish

or disappear.
Sometimes animals invest in other senses that

aren’t yoked to light.
(We’ll meet these later; many

exceptional senses were discovered because scientists

noticed animals doing amazing things in total darkness.)

Others unsubscribe from vision entirely.
In underground

realms, in caves, and in other dark corners of Earth where

vision cannot earn its worth, eyes are often lost.
[*25]

Other animals, instead of ceding their vision to the dark,

have evolved ways of seeing in the dimmest of conditions.
Some use neural tricks, including the sweat bee that

Warrant studied.
It pools the responses from several

different photoreceptors, turning lots of smaller pixels into

a few large megapixels.
Its photoreceptors might also

collect photons for more time before firing, like a camera

whose shutter is left open for a longer exposure.
These two

strategies group the photons reaching the bee’s eye in both

space and time, increasing the ratio of signal to noise.
Its

vision is grainy and slow as a result but remains bright

when brightness seems impossible.
And “seeing a coarser,

slower, brighter world is better than seeing nothing at all,”

Warrant says.[*26]

Animals can also see in the dark by grabbing every last

photon they can.
Some species, including cats, deer, and

many other mammals, have a reflective layer called a

tapetum, which sits behind their retinas and sends back

any light that gets past their photoreceptors; those cells

then get a second chance to collect the photons they

initially

missed.
[*27]

Other

animals

have

evolved

exceptionally large eyes and wide pupils.
The tawny owl’s

eyes are so big that they bulge out of its head.
The tarsiers

—small primates from Southeast Asia that look like

gremlins—have eyes that are each larger than their brains.
And the biggest eyes of all evolved in one of the darkest

environments in the planet—the deep ocean.
—

TO DIVE INTO the ocean is to enter the largest habitat on the

planet—a realm with over 160 times more living space than

all the ecosystems on the surface combined.
Most of that

space is dark.
At 10 meters down, 70 percent of the light from the

surface has been absorbed.
If you were descending in a

submersible, anything red, orange, or yellow on your

person would now look black, brown, or gray.
By 50 meters,

greens and violets have largely vanished, too.
By 100

meters, there is only blue, at just 1 percent of its surface

intensity, if that.
By 200 meters, the start of the

mesopelagic or twilight zone, that intensity has fallen by

another 50 times.
The blue is now almost laser-like—eerily

pure and all-encompassing.
Through it, silvery fish dart

about.
Gelatinous jellyfish and siphonophores slowly snake

past.
At 300 meters, it’s as dark as a moonlit night, and

getting darker.
Gradually, the fish get blacker, the

invertebrates redder.
Increasingly, they produce their own

light, and their bioluminescent flashes paint the outline of

your descending submersible.
At 850 meters, the residual

sunlight is so faint that your eyes can no longer function.
At

1,000 meters, no animal eyes can.
This is the beginning of

the bathypelagic or midnight zone.
The complex visual

scenes of the surface are long gone and have been replaced

by a living star-field of bioluminescence, twinkling in the

otherwise total darkness.
Depending on where you are in

the world, there might be another 10,000 meters of ocean

left to go.
The deep ocean’s consummate darkness creates a

problem for the scientists who want to study its denizens.
Researchers can’t see what’s around them unless they turn

on their submersible’s lights, but doing so is devastating

for creatures that have adapted to a lightless life.
Even

moonlight can blind a deep-sea shrimp in a few seconds.
A

submersible’s headlights will do much worse.
Some deep-

sea animals end up doing kamikaze runs at subs.
Startled

swordfish ram them with their swords.
Other creatures

freeze or flee.
“The way to think about ocean exploration is

that we probably create a sphere a hundred yards wide

that keeps away anything that can get away,” says Sonke

Johnsen.
“Most of the time, we’re seeing terror and

blindness.
We see how animals behave when they think

they’re being killed by some glowing god.”

To be more respectful of deep-sea Umwelten, Johnsen’s

mentor Edith Widder created a stealth camera called

Medusa.
It films deep-sea animals with red light that most

of them can’t see, and attracts them with a ring of blue

LEDs that resemble a bioluminescent jellyfish.
“The only

real innovation is that we turned off the lights,” he says.
“Once we do that, really big stuff shows up.”

In June 2019, Widder and Johnsen took Medusa on a 15-

day research cruise through the Gulf of Mexico.
Under

what seemed to be the only storm in the Gulf, they would

manually lower the 300-pound camera to the end of its

2,000-meter line, and then haul it up again the next night.
“Have you ever pulled up a fridge-sized object for a mile?”

Johnsen asks me.
“It took three hours every night.” After

every deployment, Nathan Robinson would pore over

Medusa’s videos.
And over the course of the first four, “we

saw a shrimp making a little bioluminescence,” Johnsen

says.
“Yay?”

Then, on June 19, “I’m on the bridge, and all of a

sudden, Edie’s at the bottom of the stairs with a smile on

her face that’s practically cracking her ears off, and I

thought: This can only be one thing.” On its fifth outing,

Medusa had filmed a giant squid.
The footage was unmistakable.
At a depth of 759 meters,

a long cylinder appears and snakes toward the camera

before unfurling into a mass of writhing, suckered arms.
It

briefly grabs the camera with two long tentacles before

losing interest and withdrawing back into the dark.
The

crew estimated that it was a 10-foot-long juvenile, which

was nowhere close to the species’ maximum size of 43 feet.
Still, it was a giant squid—an almost mythic animal, and

one with the largest and most sensitive eyes on the planet.
As I noted at the start of this chapter, the eyes of a giant

squid (and the equally long but much heavier colossal

squid) can grow as big as soccer balls, with diameters up to

10.6 inches.
These proportions are perplexing.
Yes, bigger

eyes are more sensitive, and it makes sense for an animal

in the dark ocean to have them.
But no other creature,

including those that live in the deep sea, has eyes that are

even in the same ballpark as a giant or colossal squid’s.
The next-largest eyes, which belong to the blue whale, are

less than half the size.
A swordfish’s eye, which is the

largest of any fish at 3.5 inches, could fit inside a giant

squid’s pupil.
The squid’s eyes are not just big; they are

absurdly and excessively bigger than those of any other

animal.
What does it need to see that it can’t see with a

swordfish-sized eye?
Sonke Johnsen, Eric Warrant, and Dan-Eric Nilsson think

they know the answer.
They calculated that in the deep

ocean, eyes suffer from diminishing returns.
As they get

bigger, they cost more energy to run but offer little extra

visual power.
Once they get past 3.5 inches—that is,

swordfish-sized—there’s little point in enlarging them

further.
But the team found that extra-large eyes are better

at one task, and one task alone: spotting large, glowing

objects in water deeper than 500 meters.
There’s an animal

that fits those criteria, and it is one that giant squid really

need to see: the sperm whale.
The largest toothed predators in the world, sperm

whales are the giant squid’s main nemeses.
Their stomachs

have been found full of the squid’s parrot-like beaks, and

their heads often bear circular scars inflicted by the

serrated rims of the squid’s suckers.
They do not produce

their own light, but just like a descending submersible,

they trigger flashes of bioluminescence when they bump

against small jellyfish, crustaceans, and other plankton.
With its disproportionately large eyes, the giant squid can

see these telltale shimmers from 130 yards away, giving it

enough time to flee.
It is the only creature with eyes large

enough to see these bioluminescent clouds at a distance,

and also the only one that needs to do so.
“No other

animals are looking for things that are really large at

depth,” Johnsen says.
Sperm whales and other toothed

whales use sonar rather than vision to find their food.
Large sharks tend to go after smaller prey.
Blue whales

subsist on tiny shrimp-like krill.
Krill might benefit from

seeing the bioluminescent cloud of a blue whale, but their

compound eyes are too limited in resolution, and their

bodies are too slow to do anything with that information.
Giant (and colossal) squid are unique in being massive

animals that need to see massive predators, and their

singular need has led to a singular Umwelt.
With the

largest and most sensitive eyes that exist, they scan one of

the darkest environments on Earth for the faint sparkling

outlines of charging whales.
[*28]

—

TURN

OFF

THE

lights, and our world becomes

monochromatic.
This shift occurs because our eyes contain

two types of photoreceptors— cones and rods.
The cones

allow us to see colors, but they only work in bright light.
In

the dark, the more sensitive rods take over, and a

kaleidoscope of daytime hues is replaced by the blacks and

grays of the night.
Scientists used to think that all animals

were similarly color-blind at night.
Then, in 2002, Eric Warrant and his colleague Almut

Kelber did a pivotal experiment with the elephant

hawkmoth.
This beautiful European insect has a pink-and-

olive body and a wingspan of almost 3 inches.
It feeds

entirely at night, hovering in front of flowers and drinking

their nectar with a long, unfurled proboscis.
Kelber trained

hawkmoths to drink instead from feeders, which sat behind

blue or yellow cards.
Having learned to associate these

colors with food, the moths could reliably distinguish them

from equally bright shades of gray.
And they kept on doing

so as Kelber turned down the lights in her lab.
At light levels equivalent to a half-moon, Kelber’s world

turned black-and-white, but the moths were still going

strong.
At one point, “it took me 20 minutes sitting in my

dark lab to be able to see the moth,” she tells me.
“I

couldn’t even see its proboscis,” but it was still drinking

from the right feeders.
The lights then faded to the levels of

dim starlight, and, though Kelber couldn’t see at all, the

elephant hawkmoth could still perceive the cards in all

their glorious color.
But those colors were probably very

different from the ones we perceive.
SKIP NOTES

*1 I ask Jakob how much of a jumping spider’s above-average intelligence (for a spider) is baked into its senses.
Spiders that mostly sense vibrations along

their webs don’t have a huge amount of information to interpret, she says.
“For the really visual spiders, the complexity of information they have to deal

with is so much higher,” she says.
“I can’t help but think it’s valuable for them

to be able to interpret it, and that seems like a good opening for evolution to

push them toward higher and higher cognitive skills.
But I don’t know.
We

have to factor in our own human bias toward being visual.”

*2 Each central eye actually has two lenses, one at the top and one at the

bottom.
The top lens collects and focuses light, while the bottom one spreads

it out.
This arrangement enlarges images before they hit the spider’s retina,

which is why these tiny animals can see as sharply as small dogs.
The

telescopes that Galileo started using in 1609 work in the same way, using

tubes with lenses at both ends to peer at distant objects.
Unbeknownst to him,

he was unwittingly plagiarizing a structure that jumping spiders had evolved

millions of years prior, and which, on clear nights, they can use to see the

moon.
*3 Baby jumping spiders are transparent.
With good lighting, you can see their eye tubes moving about inside their heads.
*4 What about the other two pairs of eyes?
One seems to detect motion behind

the spider.
The other is very reduced, and its purpose is unclear.
*5 In 2012, evolutionary biologist Megan Porter compared almost 900 opsins

from different species, and confirmed that they share a single ancestor.
That

original opsin arose in one of the earliest animals and was so efficient at

capturing light that evolution never conjured up a better alternative.
Instead,

the ancestral protein diversified into a wide family tree of opsins, which now

underlie all vision.
Porter draws that tree as a circle, with branches radiating

outward from a single point.
It looks like a giant eye.
*6 There’s always at least one person who writes in with a pompous and

incorrect corrective, so let’s get this out of the way: The word octopus is

derived from Greek and not Latin, so the correct plural is not octopi.
Technically, the formal plural would be octopodes (pronounced ock-toe-poe-

dees) but octopuses will do.
*7 This distinction isn’t universally agreed upon, and some researchers would

argue that a stage-two eye—a photoreceptor plus a shading pigment—also

counts as an eye.
*8 In 1994, Nilsson and Susanne Pelger simulated the evolution of a sharp

stage-four eye from a simple stage-three one.
The simulation began with a

small, flat patch of photoreceptors.
With every generation, the patch slowly

thickens and curves into a cup.
It gains a crude lens, which gradually

improves.
Assuming pessimistically that the eye improves by just 0.005

percent every generation, and that each generation lasts for a year, it would

take just 364,000 years for the blurry stage-three eye to become something

like ours.
As far as evolution goes, that’s a blink of an eye.
*9 It’s not the case, either, that advanced eyes always exist in advanced

creatures and simple eyes always in simple ones.
There are some microbes

that consist entirely of single cells and which also double as surprisingly

complex eyes.
Consider the freshwater bacterium Synechocystis.
Light that

hits one side of its spherical cell becomes focused on the opposite side.
The

bacterium can sense where that light is coming from, and move in that

direction.
It is effectively a living lens, and its entire boundary is a retina.
The

warnowiids, a group of single-celled algae, also seem to be living eyes, and

each cell has components that resemble a lens, an iris, a cornea, and a retina.
What they see, and whether they see at all, are open questions.
*10 So why are zebras striped?
Caro has a definitive answer: to ward off

bloodsucking flies.
African horseflies and tsetse flies carry a number of

diseases that are fatal to horses, and zebras are especially vulnerable because

their coats are short.
But stripes, for some reason, confuse the biting pests.
By

filming actual zebras, as well as normal horses dressed in zebra-striped coats,

Caro showed that flies would approach the animals and then fumble their

landings.
It’s not yet clear why this happens.
*11 One oft-quoted study from the 1970s suggested that the American kestrel

has an acuity of 160 cpd, but other studies of the same bird have found much

lower values on a par with humans.
*12 There are two major groups of animal photoreceptors, known as ciliary and

rhabdomeric.
Both use opsins, but they function in very different ways.
Scientists used to think that ciliary receptors were only found in vertebrates,

and rhabdomeric ones were only in invertebrates.
But that’s not true: Both

kinds of receptors are found in both groups.
And both are found in the scallop,

which has one retina full of ciliary photoreceptors and one full of rhabdomeric

ones.
Why?
It’s unclear, although one retina appears to be used to detect

moving objects and the other is used for selecting habitats.
*13 It’s not that scallop eyes are perfect.
When light enters the eye, it must first get through the retina before the mirror can reflect and focus it.
The

retina gets two shots at absorbing that light—once on its unfocused initial

pass, and again in its more focused form.
This means that the eye sees a

focused image against a background of blurry haze.
*14 This idea is especially compelling because the eyes are actually modified chemosensory tentacles.
It’s a visual system jury-rigged from one originally

used for smell and touch.
*15 In 1964, Mike Land, who was still a graduate student, looked into a

scallop’s eye and saw an upside-down image of himself.
That’s how he

discovered that each eye contains a focusing mirror.
He later showed that the

mirror consists of layered crystals, and suggested (correctly) that the crystals

are made of guanine—one of the building blocks of DNA.
Guanine crystals

don’t naturally form squares, so the scallop must somehow control their

growth.
It’s unclear how it manages this, or how it gets every crystal to the

same exacting measurement—74 billionths of a meter thick.
*16 Scallops aren’t the only animals with perplexing distributed vision.
Chitons are mollusks that look like the disembodied forehead of a Klingon from Star

Trek; their bodies are covered in armored plates, and those plates are dotted

with hundreds of small eyes.
Fan worms look like colorful feather dusters,

extending from rocky tubes; those plumes are tentacles, which teem with

eyes.
Giant clams look like…well, very big clams; their meter-wide mantles

contain several hundred eyes.
Dan-Eric Nilsson likens all of these eyes to

burglar alarms.
They detect nearby movement and encroaching shadows, so

their owners know when to take defensive measures.
The chitons clamp down

onto rocks, the fan worms pull their fans back into their tubes, and the giant

clams close their shells.
It’s likely that, like the scallops, none of these animals

sees scenes.
*17 Like brittle stars, sea urchins also seem to use their entire bodies as a

crude eyeball.
Each urchin is a spiky ball that crawls around on hundreds of

tube feet.
Its photoreceptors are on those feet, and they are shaded either by

the animal’s spines or by its hard exoskeleton.
Its vision may not be especially

sharp, but it can certainly amble toward dark shapes.
*18 Why don’t vultures just have wider visual fields that allow them to look

ahead while flying?
Martin thinks it’s because their large, sharp eyes are

vulnerable to dazzling glare from the sun.
In general, he says, birds with large

eyes tend to have larger blind spots.
Birds with panoramic vision, like ducks,

tend to have smaller and less acute eyes that can better tolerate the presence

of the sun.
*19 Chickens and many other birds rely on frontal vision only at close range,

when they want to accurately grab something with their beaks or feet.
*20 Turning the eyes is out of the question because birds of prey can barely move their eyes without turning their heads.
Indeed, their eyes are so big that

they almost touch each other inside the skull.
*21 A whale’s pupil doesn’t constrict by shrinking into a pinhole, like ours does.
Instead, it pinches in the middle, creating what looks like an awkwardly

smiling mouth with two small openings at either end.
Each of these openings

is effectively its own mini-pupil, and admits light onto a separate acute zone.
*22 The photoreceptors in a killer fly’s eye fire quickly and reset quickly.
Both traits demand a lot of energy.
Compared to the photoreceptors of a fruit fly,

those of a killer fly have three times more mitochondria—the bean-shaped

batteries that supply animal cells with power.
*23 Other predatory insects, like dragonflies and robber flies, have large, high-resolution eyes with distinctive acute zones.
As they pursue their targets, they

turn their heads to keep the prey within the sharpest part of their visual field.
Killer flies “have to pay attention in all directions,” Gonzalez-Bellido says, so

they don’t have an acute zone, and their visual resolution isn’t especially high.
Despite that, they seem to have a more demanding hunting strategy.
Dragonflies hunt against the sky, spotting the silhouettes of prey that fly above

them.
But killer flies somehow “do the impossible thing of hunting against the

ground,” Gonzalez-Bellido says.
They’ll pick out prey moving in front of

complex backgrounds, and then chase those targets through leaves and other

cluttered environments.
*24 Traditional fluorescent lights flicker at 100 Hz—that is, 100 times a second.
That’s too fast for humans to see, but not for many birds like starlings, for

whom the lights must be stressful and irritating.
*25 There are many ways to break an eye, and evolution has explored them all.
Lenses have degenerated.
Visual pigments have disappeared.
Eyeballs have

sunk beneath the skin or been covered by it.
One species alone, the Mexican

cavefish, has lost its eyes several times over, as different sighted populations

moved from bright rivers to dark caves and independently abandoned vision.
As Eric Warrant tells me, “Why Gollum in The Hobbit had extra-big eyes

makes no scientific sense.”

*26 This doesn’t fully account for Megalopta genalis’s night vision, though.
“I can’t explain how they do it,” Warrant tells me.
“I’ve got clues about some of

the mechanisms they use to enhance vision in dim light, but I can’t see the

whole picture.”

*27 Reflections from the tapetum are responsible for the eyeshine of dogs, cats, deer, and other animals illuminated by car headlights or camera flashes.
The

structure of a reindeer’s tapetum changes in the dark winter to reflect even

more light.
Coincidentally, this also changes the tapetum’s color, and thus the

color of reindeer eyes, from golden yellow in the summer to a rich blue in the

winter.
*28 The giant squid seems to be a global species that lives in every ocean.
But for the longest time, it was known only from carcasses that washed ashore.
The first photographs of this creature in the wild were only taken in 2004.
The

first natural footage was captured in 2012, when Widder and her colleagues

deployed the then-new Medusa camera off the coast of Japan.
Seven years

later, the stealth camera proved its worth yet again, just 100 miles southeast

of New Orleans.
“That part of the Gulf is packed with oil rigs, and there are

thousands of remotely operated vehicles there,” Johnsen says.
“Those pilots

have never seen a giant squid, and we saw one on our fifth deployment.
Either

we are the luckiest people in the world, or it’s that we turned our lights off.”

(They are pretty lucky.
Half an hour after the crew saw the squid footage,

lightning struck their ship, frying a lot of instruments but mercifully sparing

Medusa’s hard drive.
Shortly after, the ship also dodged a waterspout.)





3.
Rurple, Grurple,

Yurple

Color

WHEN MAUREEN AND JAY NEITZ adopted a toy poodle

puppy, “like all good parents, we went out and read a book

about how to raise a dog,” Jay tells me.
The book claimed

that dog names should ideally have two syllables and hard

consonants.
The Neitzes brainstormed a few options, and

Maureen, in joking reference to Jay’s research on vision,

suggested Retina.
(I point out that Retina has three

syllables.
“Yes, but our version has two,” Jay says.
“Ret-

na.”) Black, fluffy, and very cute, Retina became a part of

history.
She was one of the dogs who first confirmed what

colors dogs actually see.
In the 1980s, when the Neitzes were getting their PhDs,

many people believed that dogs were color-blind.
In The

Far Side, cartoonist Gary Larson drew a dog praying at its

bedside for “Mom, Dad, Rex, Ginger, Tucker, me, and all

the rest of the family to see color.” Scientists bought into

this myth, too: One textbook claimed that “on the whole,

mammals appear not to have color vision except for the

primates.” And yet, very few species had actually been

carefully tested—including dogs, despite their popularity.
“People would always ask me what their dogs see, and we

had really no idea,” Jay says.
“Or we had ideas, but no

evidence.”

To get that evidence, he took Retina and two Italian

greyhounds to his lab.
He trained them to sit in front of

three lit panels, one of which was differently colored.
If



they touched the odd panel with their noses, they earned a

cheesy treat.
And they did, repeatedly.
Dogs do see color.
They just don’t see the same range that most people see.
Nor do most other animals.
To appreciate their varied

visual palettes, we must first understand what color really

is, how animals see it, and why they evolved to see it at all.
Color vision is complicated enough that even a simplified

explanation, which I’m about to lay out, can feel abstract

and confusing.
But bear with me: The details are the key to

truly understanding birds, butterflies, and blossoms.
We

need to spend some time in the weeds to appreciate the

flowers.
Each curve represents one class of cone cell; the peak of each curve

shows the wavelength of light to which the cone is most sensitive.
Note

that dogs have two cone classes, while humans have three.
Light comes in a range of wavelengths.
Those we can

see span from 400 nanometers, which we perceive as

violet, to 700 nanometers, which we perceive as red.
Our

ability to detect these wavelengths, and the rainbow that

lies between them, depends on our opsin proteins—the

foundation of all animal vision.
Opsins come in different

varieties, and each is best at absorbing a particular

wavelength of light.
Normal human color vision depends on

three of these opsins, each of which is deployed by a

different type of cone cell in our retinas.
Based on their

preferred wavelengths, the opsins (and the cones that

contain them) are called long, medium, and short.
More

familiarly, they’re called red, green, and blue.
[*1] When

light bounces off a ruby and enters our eyes, it stimulates

the long (red) cones strongly, the medium (green) ones

moderately, and the short (blue) ones weakly.
If that light

bounces off a sapphire, the opposite happens—the short

(blue) cones react most strongly, and the others less so.
But color vision involves more than merely detecting

different wavelengths of light.
It’s about comparing them.
The signals from the three types of cones are added and

subtracted by a complex network of neurons.
Some of these

neurons are excited by inputs from the red cones but

inhibited by inputs from the green ones; they allow us to

discriminate reds from greens.
Other neurons are excited

by the blue cones but inhibited by the red and green ones;

they allow us to distinguish blues and yellows.
This simple

neural arithmetic—R – G and B – (R + G)—is called

opponency.
It’s how the raw signals from just three cones

are transformed into the glorious rainbows that we

perceive.
Opponency is the basis of (almost) all color vision.
Without it, an animal doesn’t really see colors in the way

we imagine.
Daphnia water fleas, for example, have four

opsins that are sensitive to orange, green, violet, and

ultraviolet wavelengths.
But those wavelengths just trigger

hardwired and almost reflexive responses.
Ultraviolet

means sun, so swim away.
Green and yellow mean food, so

swim toward.
Water fleas can respond to four specific kinds

of light that we see as colored.
But being unable to

compare the signals from their four opsins, they can’t

perceive a spectrum.
Color, then, is fundamentally subjective.
There’s nothing

inherently “green” about a blade of grass, or the 550-

nanometer light that it reflects.
Our photoreceptors,

neurons, and brains are what turn that physical property

into the sensation of green.
Color exists in the eye of the

beholder—and also in their brain.
Consider the story of the

artist Jonathan I., as told by Oliver Sacks and Robert

Wasserman in “The Case of the Colorblind Painter.” After a

life of seeing and painting in colors, he suffered a brain

injury that turned his world monochrome.
His retinas were

healthy, his opsins were present, and his cones were

working.
But his brain could only conjure up a world of

blacks, whites, and grays.
Even when he closed his eyes,

his imagined world was drained of color.
A small proportion of people, and entire species of

animals, also see only in shades of gray, not because of

brain damage but because their retinas aren’t set up for

color vision.
They are called monochromats.
Some, like

sloths and armadillos, only have rod cells, which work well

in dim light but aren’t geared toward color.
Others, like

raccoons and sharks, only have one cone, and since color

vision depends on opponency, having one cone is effectively

like having none.
Whales have just one cone, too: To

paraphrase the vision scientist Leo Peichl, for a blue whale,

the ocean is not blue.
Cone cells are unique to vertebrates,

but other animals have wavelength-specific photoreceptors

that play a similar role.
Surprisingly, the cephalopods—

octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—have just one class of

these, which means they are also monochromats.
[*2] They

can rapidly change the colors of their skin yet are unable to

see their own shifting hues.
The existence of so many monochromats hints at one of

the most counterintuitive things about color vision: It isn’t

necessary.
Almost all the things that animals use their eyes

for—navigating, foraging, communicating—can be done

with shades of gray.
What, then, is the point of seeing

colors at all?
Physiologist Vadim Maximov suggested that the answer

might lie around 500 million years in the past, during the

Cambrian era, when the ancestors of modern animal

groups arose.
Many of those ancestral creatures lived in

shallow seas, with rays of sunlight flickering around them.
These rippling rays are beautiful to our modern eyes but

would have been enormously confusing to ancient

monochromatic ones.
If the brightness of a given spot of

water can change by a hundred times from one second to

the next, it becomes much harder to spot relevant objects

against a background.
Is that dark shape that just appeared

the looming shadow of a predator, or merely the shadow of

a sunbeam that briefly strayed behind a cloud?
Monochromatic eyes that only deal in brightness and

darkness would struggle to tell.
But eyes that see in color

would fare much better.
That’s because different

wavelengths of light tend to keep the same relative

proportions, even when the total amount of light brightens

or dims.
A strawberry that looks red in bright sunlight still

looks red in the shade, and its green leaves are still

obviously green even under the reddish tint of a sunset.
Color—and specifically color vision with opponency—offers

constancy.
If an animal can compare the outputs of

photoreceptors that are tuned to different wavelengths, it

can stabilize its view of a world where light dances and

flickers.
Even two classes will do the job.
That’s the basis of

dichromacy, the simplest form of color vision.
It’s what

Retina, other dogs, and most mammals have.
Dogs have two cones—one with a long, yellow-green

opsin and another with a short, blue-violet one.
They see

mostly in shades of blue, yellow, and gray.
When my corgi

Typo looks at his red-and-violet toy, he probably sees the

red as a dark, muddy yellow, and the violet as a deep blue.
When he looks at the bright-green ring that he likes to

chew, the green stimulates both his cones equally.
Because

of opponency, those signals cancel out, and Typo sees

white.
Horses are dichromats, too, and their cones are sensitive

to wavelengths very similar to those a dog’s respond to.
This means that horses struggle to make out the orange

markers that are used to highlight obstacles at

racecourses.
These orange blazes stand out to trichromatic

human vision, but Sarah Catherine Paul and Martin

Stevens showed that they blend into the background to a

horse’s dichromatic eyes.
If we designed racecourses for

horse vision, we’d paint the markers fluorescent yellow,

bright blue, or white.
Then again, if we designed racecourses for inclusive

human vision, we’d probably do the same.
Most “color-

blind” people are also dichromats, because they’re missing

one of the three usual cones.
They still see colors, albeit in

a narrower range.
There are many kinds of color-blindness,

but deuteranopes, who lack the medium green cones, come

closest to seeing like dogs and horses.
Their world is

painted in yellows, blues, and grays, while reds and greens

are hard to distinguish.
Color-blind people might be

confused by traffic lights, electrical wiring, or paint

swatches.
They might struggle to read packaging or charts,

to distinguish sports teams that are wearing ostensibly

distinct colors, or to complete seemingly simple school

assignments like drawing a rainbow.
In some countries,

they might be disqualified from flying planes, joining the

military, or even driving.
Color-blindness shouldn’t be a

disability, but it can be because humans have built cultures

that are predicated on trichromacy.
And what’s so special

about trichromacy, other than that most people have it?
If

dichromacy is good enough for most mammals, why are we

and other primates different?
Why do we see the colors we

do?
—

THE FIRST PRIMATES were almost certainly dichromats.
They

had two cones, short and long.
They saw in blues and

yellows, like dogs.
But sometime between 29 and 43 million

years ago, an accident occurred that permanently changed

the Umwelt of one specific lineage of primates: They gained

an extra copy of the gene that builds their long opsin.
Such

duplications often happen when cells divide and DNA is

copied.
They’re mistakes, but fortuitous ones, for they

provide a redundant copy of a gene that evolution can

tinker with without disrupting the work of the original.
That’s exactly what happened with the long-opsin gene.
One of the two copies stayed roughly the same, absorbing

light at 560 nanometers.
The other gradually shifted to a

shorter wavelength of 530 nanometers, becoming what we

now call the medium (green) opsin.
These two genes are 98

percent identical, but the 2 percent gulf between them is

also the difference between seeing only in blues and

yellows and adding reds and greens to the mix.
[*3] With the

new medium opsins joining the earlier long and short ones,

these primates had evolved trichromacy.
And they passed

their expanded vision to their descendants—the monkeys

and apes of Africa, Asia, and Europe, a group that includes

us.
This story explains how we came to see the colors we

see, but not why.
Why exactly did the duplicated long-opsin

gene shift toward a medium wavelength?
The answer might

seem obvious: to see more colors.
A monochromat can

make out roughly a hundred grades of gray between black

and white.
A dichromat adds around a hundred steps from

yellow to blue, which multiplies with the grays to create

tens of thousands of perceivable colors.
A trichromat adds

another hundred or so steps from red to green, which

multiplies again with a dichromat’s set to boost the color

count into the millions.
Each extra opsin increases the

visual palette exponentially.
But if dichromats can flourish

with just tens of thousands of colors, why do trichromats

benefit from millions?
Since the nineteenth century, scientists have suggested

that trichromats would do better at spotting red, orange,

and yellow fruit against green foliage.
[*4] More recently,

some researchers have argued that their advantage lies

more in finding the most nutritious rainforest leaves, which

tend to flush red when they are young and rich in protein.
These explanations aren’t mutually exclusive: Most

primates eat fruits, but at times when those aren’t ripe or

available, larger species can make do with young leaves.
That’s the “perfect setting for the evolution of

trichromacy,” says Amanda Melin, who studies primate

vision (and occasionally, as we saw in the last chapter,

zebra stripes).
“It’s useful for finding your main food and

your fallback food.” [*5]

The monkeys of the Americas complicate this story.
They

also evolved trichromacy, but in a distinct way with very

different consequences.
In 1984, Gerald Jacobs noticed that

some squirrel monkeys were sensitive to red light, but

others were not.
And with help from Jay Neitz, he worked

out why.
These monkeys never developed a second copy of

the long-opsin gene.[*6] Instead, their original gene now

comes in several versions, some of which still produce long

cones and some of which make medium cones.
The gene

also sits on the X chromosome, which means that the male

monkeys (which are XY) can only ever inherit one version.
Medium or long, it doesn’t matter: They’re destined to

dichromacy.
The female monkeys, however, are XX.
Some of

them inherit both the medium and long versions, one on

each of their X chromosomes.
That gives them trichromacy.
[*7] So when a group of these monkeys cavorts through the

treetops in search of food, some will see red fruits against

green leaves, while others will only see yellows and grays.
Even brothers and sisters can perceive different colors.
It’s easy to assume that the dichromats must be at a

disadvantage.
But after 15 years of studying white-faced

capuchins in the forests of Costa Rica, Amanda Melin

thinks differently.
By following several groups of these

monkeys, she learned to identify every individual on sight.
And by collecting their poop and sequencing their DNA, she

worked out which were trichromats and which were

dichromats.
Neither group, she found, is more likely to

survive or reproduce than the other.
The trichromats are

indeed better at finding brightly colored fruit, but the

dichromats surpass them at finding insects disguised as

leaves and sticks.
Without a riot of colors to confuse or

distract them, they’re better at detecting borders and

shapes, and seeing through camouflage.
Melin has watched

them nabbing insects that she, a trichromat, didn’t even

know were there.
Seeing extra colors has both drawbacks

and benefits.
More isn’t necessarily better, which is why

some females are still dichromats and all males are.
Or, I should say, almost all males.
In 2007, the Neitzes

added the human long-opsin gene to the eyes of two adult

male squirrel monkeys, giving them three cones instead of

two, and turning them into trichomats.
The two monkeys—

Dalton and Sam—suddenly performed differently on the

same vision tests that they had been doing every day for

two years, and could distinguish new colors that were

previously invisible to them.
Dalton died from diabetes

shortly after the experiment.
But as of April 2019, when I

last spoke to Jay, Sam was still alive and in his 12th year of

trichromacy.
I wondered what his life was now like.
Does he

behave any differently?
Does he react to fruit in new ways?
“I tried to talk to him,” Jay said, laughing.
“How cool is it?
That’s the interesting thing, right?
But he’s very

nonchalant.”

To me, Sam’s silence speaks volumes.
He reminds us

that seeing more colors isn’t advantageous in and of itself.
Colors are not inherently magical.
They become magical

when and if animals derive meaning from them.
Some are

special to us because, having inherited the ability to see

them from our trichromatic ancestors, we imbued them

with social significance.
Conversely, there are colors that

don’t matter to us at all.
There are colors we cannot even

see.
—

IN THE 1880S, John Lubbock—banker, archeologist,

polymath—split a beam of light with a prism and shone the

resulting rainbow onto ants.
The ants scurried away from

the light.
But Lubbock noticed that they also fled from a

region just beyond the rainbow’s violet end, which looked

dark to his eyes.
This area wasn’t dark to the ants, though.
It was bathed in ultraviolet—literally “beyond violet” in

Latin.
Ultraviolet (or UV) light has wavelengths ranging

from 10 to 400 nanometers.
[*8] It is largely invisible to

humans, but must be “apparent to the ants as a distinct and

separate colour (of which we can form no idea),” Lubbock

presciently wrote.
“It would appear that the colours of

objects and the general aspect of nature must present to

them a very different appearance from what it does to us.”

At the time, some scientists believed that animals either

are color-blind or see the same spectrum that we do.
Lubbock showed that ants are exceptional.
Half a century

later, bees and minnows turned out to see ultraviolet, too.
The narrative shifted: Some animals can see colors we

can’t, but the skill must be very rare.
But after another half

century, in the 1980s, researchers showed that many birds,

reptiles, fish, and insects have UV-sensitive photoreceptors.
The narrative changed again: UV vision exists in many

groups of animals, but not in mammals.
Still wrong: In

1991, Gerald Jacobs and Jay Neitz showed that mice, rats,

and gerbils have a short cone that is tuned to UV.
Okay,

fine, mammals can have UV vision, but only small ones like

rodents and bats.
Not so: In the 2010s, Glen Jeffery found

that reindeer, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, ferrets, and many

other mammals can detect UV with their short blue cones.
They probably perceive UV as a deep shade of blue rather

than a separate color, but they can sense it nonetheless.
So

can some humans.
Our lenses typically block out UV, but people who have

lost their lenses to surgeries or accidents can perceive UV

as whitish blue.
This happened to the painter Claude

Monet, who lost his left lens at the age of 82.
He began

seeing the UV light that reflects off water lilies, and started

painting them as whitish blue instead of white.
Monet

aside, most people can’t see UV, which probably explains

why scientists were so eager to believe that the ability was

rare.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Most animals that can see

color can see UV.
It’s the norm, and we are the weirdos.[*9]

Ultraviolet vision is so ubiquitous that much of nature

must look different to most other animals.
[*10] Water

scatters UV light, creating an ambient ultraviolet fog,

against which fish can more easily see tiny UV-absorbing

plankton.
Rodents can easily see the dark silhouettes of

birds against the UV-rich sky.
Reindeer can quickly make

out mosses and lichens, which reflect little UV, on a hillside

blanketed by UV-reflective snow.
I could go on.
I’m going to go on.
Flowers use dramatic UV patterns to

advertise their wares to pollinators.
Sunflowers, marigolds,

and black-eyed Susans all look uniformly colored to human

eyes, but bees can see the UV patches at the bases of their

petals, which form vivid bullseyes.
Usually, these shapes

are guides that indicate the position of nectar.
Occasionally,

they are traps.
Crab spiders lurk on flowers to ambush

pollinators.
To us, these spiders seem to match the colors of

their chosen blooms, and they’ve long been treated as

masters of camouflage.
But they reflect so much UV that

they are highly conspicuous to a bee, which makes the

flowers they sit upon that much more alluring.
Rather than

blending in, some of them attract their UV-sensitive prey by

standing out.
Many birds also have UV patterns in their feathers.
In

1998, two independent teams realized that much of the

“blue” plumage of blue tits actually reflects a lot of UV; as

one of them wrote, “Blue tits are ultraviolet tits.” To

humans, these birds all look much the same.
But thanks to

their UV patterns, males and females look very different

from each other.
The same is true for more than 90 percent

of songbirds whose sexes are indistinguishable to us,

including barn swallows and mockingbirds.
It’s not just humans who can’t see UV patterns.
Since

UV light is heavily scattered by water, predatory fish that

have to spot prey at a distance are often insensitive to it.
Their prey, in turn, have exploited this weakness.
The

swordtail fish of Central American rivers look drab to us,

but as Molly Cummings and Gil Rosenthal showed, males of

some species have strong UV stripes along their flanks and

tails.
These markings are alluring to females, but they’re

invisible to the swordtails’ main predators.
And in places

where those predators are more common, swordtails have

more vivid UV markings.
“They could get away with being

super-flamboyant” without attracting danger, Cummings

says.
Similar secret codes exist in Australia’s Great Barrier

Reef, home to the ambon damselfish.
To human eyes, it

resembles a lemon with fins, and looks identical to other

closely related species.
But Ulrike Siebeck found that its

head is actually streaked with UV stripes, as if invisible

mascara had run all over its face.
Predators can’t see these

markings, but the ambons themselves use them to

distinguish their own kind from other damselfish.
For us, UV feels enigmatic and intoxicating.
It’s an

invisible hue lying just on the edge of our vision—a

perceptual void that our imaginations are keen to fill.
Scientists have often attributed special or secret

significance to it, treating it as a channel for covert

communication.
But aside from the ambon damselfish and

swordtails, most such claims have foundered.
[*11] The

reality is that UV vision and UV signals are extremely

common.
“My personal view is that it’s just another color,”

Innes Cuthill, who studies color vision, tells me.
Imagine what a bee might say.
They are trichromats,

with opsins that are most sensitive to green, blue, and

ultraviolet.
If bees were scientists, they might marvel at the

color we know as red, which they cannot see and which

they might call “ultrayellow.” They might assert at first that

other creatures can’t see ultrayellow, and then later

wonder why so many do.
They might ask if it is special.
They might photograph roses through ultrayellow cameras

and rhapsodize about how different they look.
They might

wonder whether the large bipedal animals that see this

color exchange secret messages through their flushed

cheeks.
They might eventually realize that it is just another

color, special mainly in its absence from their vision.
And

they might wonder what it would be like to add it to their

Umwelt, bolstering their three dimensions of color with a

fourth.
—

NESTLED 9,500 FEET up in Colorado’s Elk Mountains, the

town of Gothic was once home to a thriving silver mine.
When the value of silver crashed in the late nineteenth

century, Gothic became a ghost town.
But in 1928, it was

reborn as, of all things, a research station.
Today, the Rocky

Mountain Biological Laboratory, affectionately known as

Rumble, attracts scientists from around the world.
Hundreds of them migrate there every summer to live and

work among what looks like the set of a Western, to study

the local soils and streams, ticks and marmots.
When Mary

Caswell “Cassie” Stoddard arrived there in 2016, she had

hummingbirds on her mind.
“I grew up watching birds, but it wasn’t until I got to

college that I learned birds can perceive colors humans

can’t,” Stoddard tells me.
“I found that mind-blowing.”

Most birds have four types of cone cells, with opsins that

are most sensitive to red, green, blue, and either violet or

UV.
That makes them tetrachromats.
Theoretically, they

should be able to distinguish a multitude of colors that are

imperceptible to us.
To confirm that they can, Stoddard and

her

team

tested

Rumble’s

resident

broad-tailed

hummingbirds—a beautiful species with iridescent green

feathers and, in the males, bright magenta bibs.
Exploiting the hummingbirds’ natural instinct to feed

from colorful flowers, Stoddard attracted them to feeders

placed near special lights, which had been customized to

produce colors that a tetrachromat should be able to see.
One light might illuminate a nectar-containing feeder with

a mix of green and ultraviolet, while another might shine

pure green onto a water-containing feeder.
Stoddard

couldn’t tell the difference between these colors, but the

hummingbirds could, with minimal experience.
Over the

course of a day, they would increasingly flock toward the

nectar feeder, having “learned to distinguish between lights

that look identical to us,” she says.
“That’s what we always

predicted, but seeing it with our own eyes was

thrilling.”[*12]

Even with experiments like this, it is easy to

underestimate what other birds can see.
They don’t just

have human vision plus ultraviolet, or bee vision plus red.
Tetrachromacy doesn’t just widen the visible spectrum at

its margins.
It unlocks an entirely new dimension of colors.
Remember that dichromats can make out roughly 1 percent

of the colors that trichromats see—tens of thousands,

compared to millions.
If the same gulf exists between

trichromats and tetrachromats, then we might be able to

see just 1 percent of the hundreds of millions of colors that

a bird can discriminate.
Picture trichromatic human vision

as a triangle, with the three corners representing our red,

green, and blue cones.
Every color we can see is a mix of

those three, and can be plotted as a point within that

triangular space.
By comparison, a bird’s color vision is a

pyramid, with four corners representing each of its four

cones.
Our entire color space is just one face of that

pyramid, whose spacious interior represents colors

inaccessible to most of us.
If our red and blue cones are stimulated together, we

see purple—a color that doesn’t exist in the rainbow and

that can’t be represented by a single wavelength of light.
These kinds of cocktail colors are called non-spectral.
Hummingbirds, with their four cones, can see a lot more of

them, including UV-red, UV-green, UV-yellow (which is red

+ green + UV), and probably UV-purple (which is red +

blue + UV).
At my wife’s suggestion, and to Stoddard’s

delight, I’m going to call these rurple, grurple, yurple, and

ultrapurple.[*13] Stoddard found that these non-spectral

colors and their various shades account for roughly a third

of those found on plants and feathers.
To a bird, meadows

and forests pulse with grurples and yurples.
To a broad-

tailed hummingbird, the bright magenta feathers of the

male’s bib are actually ultrapurple.
Tetrachromats also have a different concept of white.
White is what we perceive when all our cones are equally

stimulated.
But you’d need a different blend of wavelengths

to excite a bird’s quartet of cones than you would a

human’s trio.
Paper is treated with dyes that happen to

absorb UV, so it wouldn’t look white to a bird.
Many

supposedly “white” bird feathers reflect UV and wouldn’t

necessarily look white to birds, either.
It’s hard to know what birds make of rurples, grurples,

and other non-spectral colors, Stoddard says.
As a violinist,

she knows that two simultaneously played notes can either

sound separate or merge into completely new tones.
By

analogy, do hummingbirds perceive rurple as a blend of red

and UV, or as a sublime new color in its own right?
When

they make choices about which flowers to visit, “do they

group rurple with reds, or do they see it as an entirely

different hue?” she asks.
They can tell that it’s different

from pure red, “but I can’t articulate what it looks like to

them.”

Birds aren’t the only tetrachromats.
Reptiles, insects,

and freshwater fish, including the humble goldfish, have

four cones as well.
By looking at tetrachromats among

modern animals and working backward, scientists can

deduce that the first vertebrates were likely tetrachromats,

too.
Mammals, probably because they were all initially

nocturnal, lost two of their ancestral cones and became

dichromats.
But they scurried beneath the feet of

dinosaurs, which were almost certainly tetrachromats and

“probably saw all kinds of cool non-spectral colors,”

Stoddard says.
It’s ironic that for the longest time,

illustrators and filmmakers portrayed dinosaurs in dull

shades of brown, gray, and green.
Only recently have

artists started painting these animals with bright colors,

inspired by the revelation that they are the ancestors of

birds.
But even these vivid hues, applied with a

trichromat’s eye, capture just a tiny proportion of the

colors that dinosaurs probably wore or saw.
It is much easier for most people to imagine a dog’s

sense of color than a bird’s (or a dinosaur’s).
If you are a

trichromat, you can simulate dichromatic vision by using

apps that remove certain colors.
You could even simulate

what a different trichromat (like a bee) might see by

mapping their blue, green, and UV system onto our red,

green, and blue one.
But there is no way of representing a

tetrachromat’s color vision for a trichromatic eye.
“People

often ask if we can engineer goggles to allow humans to

see these non-spectral colors—and I wish!” Stoddard says.
You could use a spectrophotometer to find the rurples and

grurples on a bird’s feathers, but you’d then have to recolor

them with our more limited range of colors.
Four into three

just won’t go.
Frustrating though it might be, most of us

simply cannot imagine what many animals actually look like

to each other, or how varied their sense of color can be.
—

EVEN FOR A butterfly, the red postman has a peculiarly

delicate style of flight.
With fast wingbeats but surprisingly

little forward motion, it seems to be trying very hard to be

nowhere in particular.
Its languid movements befit its

defenses: Full of toxins, and clad in red, black, and yellow

warning colors, it’s in no rush to avoid predators.
But there

is nothing off-putting about them to human eyes.
In a

greenhouse in Irvine, California, I watch as two dozen of

these butterflies flutter by my head, between the red and

orange flowers of lantana plants.
Between their bright

colors and soothing movements, the world feels both richer

and more tranquil.
The technical name for these butterflies

is Heliconius erato, and both parts feel fitting.
In Greek

mythology, Mount Helicon was the home of the Muses and

a source of poetic inspiration; Erato was the Muse of love

poetry.
One erato butterfly lands on the shoot of a lantana plant,

curls her abdomen, and deposits a tiny golden egg.
Five

more sit sociably together on a nearby leaf, slowly opening

and closing their wings.
Another alights on the display of

the greenhouse’s climate control system, which reads 97

degrees Fahrenheit and 59 percent humidity.
Jeans, I

realize, were a mistake.
Next to me, Adriana Briscoe, who

is more sensibly dressed, is looking around and beaming

broadly.
This greenhouse is hers, and it is both a workplace

and a retreat, somewhere she goes to feel happy and calm.
“I love being here,” she says wistfully.
“You can see why

many scientists have devoted their careers to studying

these butterflies.”

Throughout Central and South America, erato typically

lives alongside a close relative—Heliconius melpomene,

named after the Muse of tragedy.
Both erato and

melpomene are toxic, and they mimic each other so that

any predator that learns to avoid one will also avoid the

other.
In any one place, these two species look almost

identical.
But across their range, they vary considerably.
In

Tarapoto, Peru, both erato and melpomene have red bands

on their forewings and yellow bands on their hindwings.
But in Yurimaguas, just 80 miles away, both species have

yellow splotches and red bases on their forewings, and red

stripes on their hindwings.
You’d scarcely believe that

eratos from the two sites were actually the same species,

and you’d struggle to distinguish between eratos and

melpomenes at any one site.
Briscoe’s greenhouse could

have been full of both, and I would never have known.
So

how do the butterflies themselves tell the difference?
When

Briscoe started studying them in the late 1990s, it struck

her as odd that no one knew.
“For such visual animals that

are also very popular, it seems like it would have been an

obvious thing to do to look at their eyes,” she says.
Most butterflies are trichromats.
Like bees, they have

three opsins that are most sensitive to UV, blue, and green,

and can see colors ranging from red to UV.
But in 2010,

Briscoe discovered that Heliconius butterflies differ from

their relatives in two important ways.
First, they’re

tetrachromats.
Alongside the usual blue and green opsins,

they have two UV opsins that peak at different

wavelengths.
Second, while related butterflies pattern their

wings with yellow pigments, Heliconius uses yurple—the

non-spectral color that mixes UV and yellow.
These two

traits are related.
With two UV opsins, the Heliconius

species can carve up the UV part of the spectrum into finer

gradations, and discriminate between subtly different

shades of UV-based colors.
And by painting their wings

with those colors, they can better tell the difference

between their own kind and their mimics.
Even birds, with

their single UV opsin, don’t seem to discriminate between

yellow and the shade of yurple the butterflies use.
The male erato butterflies can’t, either.
In 2016,

Briscoe’s student Kyle McCulloch found that only female

eratos are tetrachromats.
The males are trichromats.
They

have the gene for the second UV opsin, but for some reason

they suppress it.
Just like squirrel monkeys, the female

eratos have an extra dimension to their color vision that

males lack.[*14] In Briscoe’s greenhouse, we watch as two

eratos start to have sex.
Their abdomens join, but before

they can separate, the female takes off with the male still

stuck to her.
They flutter off as one, briefly conjoined by

their genitals but forever separated by their Umwelten.
These butterflies are not the only species with a sex

difference in tetrachromacy.
Humans share that trait.
Somewhere in Newcastle, England, lives a woman known in

the scientific literature as cDa29.
She’s a private person

who doesn’t do interviews, and her real name isn’t publicly

known.
But according to psychologist Gabriele Jordan, who

has worked with her extensively, cDa29 aces tests that only

a tetrachromat could pass.
Much like Stoddard’s

hummingbirds, she can pick out one shade of green among

other extremely similar ones, “like a cherry from a tree,”

Jordan tells me.
“For us, it’s just green among greens.
Other people look and look and look and then maybe have a

guess.
She can spot the odd one out within milliseconds.”

Human tetrachromats are usually women, because the

genes for the long and medium opsins both sit on the X

chromosome.
Since most women have two X chromosomes,

they can inherit two slightly different versions of either

gene.
They would then end up with four different kinds of

opsins that are tuned to different wavelengths—short,

medium, long-a, and long-b, for example.
Around one in

eight women has this pattern…but most of them are not

tetrachromatic.
To possess that ability, a lot of other pieces

need to fall in place.
Normally, the red and green cones

respond best to wavelengths that are just 30 nanometers

apart.
To produce a new and distinct dimension of color, the

fourth cone has to sit almost exactly in the middle of that

range, 12 nanometers away from the green.
(That’s what

cDa29 has.) To build an opsin with that exact specification,

“you almost have to split an atom genetically,” Jordan says.
Even if women can make the right kind of fourth cone, they

need to have it in the right part of the retina—the central

fovea, where our color vision is sharpest.
And most

important, they need the right neural wiring to perform

opponency with the signals from these cones.
This combination of traits is rare enough that only a very

small proportion of women with four cones are truly

tetrachromatic.
Jordan tells me that many people who say

they are actually aren’t.
Artists, in particular, are often

convinced that they can see more colors than others, but

being more attentive to hues because of your work is not

the same as seeing a whole other dimension of color.
“I’ve

tested many who turned out not to be tetrachromatic,”

Jordan says.
“It’s very attractive, the idea of superhuman

vision.[*15] But it isn’t as common as people make out.” The

first confirmed tetrachromat was cDa29; Jordan estimates

that there are around 48,600 others in the United Kingdom,

but they are not easy to find.
[*16] They’re not walking

around with amazing technicolor clothes, just as

dichromats aren’t filling their lives with drab colors.
Until

cDa29 got tested, “she never thought there was anything

special about her vision,” Jordan says.
“You’re viewing the

world with a given set of retinas and a given brain, and if

you can’t see with someone else’s, it doesn’t really cross

your mind that you’re better.”

When Jordan first told me this, I confess to feeling a

little disappointed, as I did when Jay Neitz told me that

Sam the genetically engineered squirrel monkey was

nonchalant about his newfound trichromacy.
Colors matter

to us.
Color TVs, printers, and books are more prized than

their black-and-white cousins.
It’s natural to expect that an

extra dimension of color would be a spectacular thing to

see.
To learn that it could be taken for granted threatens to

drain color of its magic.
But of course, all of us—

monochromat, dichromat, trichromat, or tetrachromat—

take the colors that we see for granted.
Each of us is stuck

in our own Umwelt.
As I wrote in the introduction, this is a

book not about superiority but about diversity.
The real

glory of colors isn’t that some individuals see more of them,

but that there’s such a range of possible rainbows.
When thinking about human tetrachromats and erato

butterflies, I’m struck by how absurd it is that people once

thought all animals saw the same spectrum of colors as

humans.
Humans don’t even see the same colors as each

other.[*17] We have varying forms of partial or complete

color-blindness.
Some of us are tetrachromats.
Look across

the rest of the animal kingdom and you’ll find even greater

variations.
Color vision varies considerably within the 6,000

species of jumping spiders, the 18,000 species of

butterflies, and the 33,000 species of fish.
At least three kinds of color vision exist just within the

eye of a larval zebrafish.
The part of the fish’s retina that

looks up at the sky sees in black and white, because color

isn’t necessary for spotting the silhouettes of aerial

predators.
The part that looks straight ahead is dominated

by UV detectors, which help it to spot tasty plankton.
And

the part that scans the horizon and the space below the fish

is tetrachromatic.
From black-and-white vision to more

colors than humans can see, the eyes of these baby fish

have it all.
To appreciate the colors that another animal sees, you

can’t just add an Instagram filter over your own view.
You

can’t assume that those colors stay the same across a scene

or a season, or from one individual to another.
And you

can’t just count the numbers of opsins or photoreceptors

that an animal has and reconstruct its visual palette.
Kentaro Arikawa has found that many butterflies have a

frankly excessive number of photoreceptor classes.
The

cabbage white butterfly has eight, but one exists only in

females and another only in males.
The Japanese yellow

swallowtail has six but uses only four, for tetrachromatic

vision; the other two are likely hardwired for specific tasks,

like spotting objects of a specific color flying past.
The

champion among butterflies—the common bluebottle—has

15.
But these insects are not pentadecachromats, with 15-

dimensional color vision.
Only three of the photoreceptors

are found all over the eye, while four are confined to the

top half, and eight to the bottom.
Arikawa expects that he’d

find even finer segregations if he looked for them.
The

bluebottle butterfly, he thinks, is probably a tetrachromat

that uses its other 11 classes of photoreceptors to detect

very specific things in narrow parts of its visual field.
Indeed, color vision doesn’t ever need to be more

sophisticated than tetrachromacy.
Based on the colors that

reflect off natural objects, animals can see everything they

could possibly need to with just four classes of

photoreceptors, evenly spaced across the spectrum.
Birds

have close to the ideal setup.
Anything more would be a

wasteful and inefficient extravagance.
So when scientists

find animals with a lot more than four kinds of

photoreceptors, there’s probably something strange afoot.
—

“IF YOU PUT your fingers in there, it’s going to hit you,” Amy

Streets tells me, gesturing at a small aquarium tank in

Brisbane, Australia.
“If you want to try it…”

I do want to try it, but the animal in the tank has a

reputation, and I’m nervous about testing it.
“How hard is the hit?” I ask.
“It’s enough to surprise you,” Streets says.
“Do it.”

I stick my pinky into the water.
Almost instantly, there’s

a flash of green as a two-inch-long animal darts out and

attacks me.
There’s a loud click, and a sharp but tolerable

pain in my finger.
I feel strangely proud to have taken a

punch from a purple spot mantis shrimp.
Mantis shrimps, also known as stomatopods (or, more

affectionately, pods), are marine crustaceans.
They’re

related to crabs and prawns but have evolved on their own

for around 400 million years.
The back half looks much like

a small lobster.
But the front half includes two folded arms

that are slung underneath the animal’s body like the

mantises for which they are named.
In the “spearer”

species, these arms end in a row of fiendish spikes; in the

“smashers,” they end in a bludgeoning hammer.
Both

groups can unfurl these weapons at astonishing speeds,

and need little excuse to do so.
They punch their prey into

submission.
They punch anything that intrudes upon their

burrows.
They punch each other at first contact.
Mantis

shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions—

frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.
Their punches are the fastest and most powerful in the

world.
The clubs of a large smasher can accelerate like a

high-caliber bullet and hit speeds of 50 miles per hour in

water.
These animals can punch their way into crab shells,

out of aquaria, and through flesh and bone.
For good

reason, they’ve been nicknamed thumb-splitters, finger-

poppers, and knuckle-busters.
You can understand why I

was nervous about letting one hit me.
Even that individual,

which was too small to do any damage, moved quickly

enough to vaporize the water in front of its club.
This

created small bubbles, which made a popping sound as

they collapsed—hence the click that I heard.
“The different

species sound slightly different in their smacking, which is

kind of fun,” Streets tells me.
She takes me to another tank that contains a peacock

mantis shrimp, a gaudily colored smasher whose carapace

is streaked with reds, blues, and greens.
Of the 500

stomatopod species, this is the most famous.
It is also one

of the most powerful.
“Don’t get hit by these guys,” Streets

says, emphatically.
I take her advice.
Instead of testing the

peacock pod’s patience, I stare at its eyes.
There are two of

them, which look like pink muffins wrapped in blue foil.
They sit at the top of the animal’s head, at the ends of

mobile stalks.
The left one is staring at me.
The right one is

looking at Streets.
They are arguably the strangest eyes on

the planet, and they see color in a way that no other animal

shares.
Of all the creatures we have encountered so far, the

mantis shrimp’s Umwelt is the hardest to imagine.
After

more than three decades, Justin Marshall, who runs the lab

where Streets works, still struggles to do so.
Marshall’s mother was a natural history illustrator, and

his father was a marine biologist and curator of fish at

London’s Natural History Museum.
They filled his

childhood with beaches and boats, and his mind with a love

of colors and marine life.
In 1986, when his PhD advisor,

Mike Land (whose work we met in the last chapter), asked

him to choose between studying spiders, butterflies, or

stomatopods, the decision was obvious.
“I pretty rapidly

chose mantis shrimps,” Marshall tells me, “because they

lived in the tropics.”

He began his study by dissecting the eye of a peacock

pod.
Like other crustaceans, these animals have compound

eyes, which consist of many separate light-gathering units.
But, uniquely, each eye is split into three sections.
There

are two hemispheres with a distinct midband running

between them, like the tropics wrapping around Earth.
When Marshall looked at the midband under a microscope,

he found a beautiful surprise—a kaleidoscopic array of

colored blobs that were red, yellow, orange, purple, pink,

and blue.
At the time, crustaceans were thought to be

color-blind.
This animal clearly wasn’t.
“I remember exactly

what Mike said when I showed him the slide, which was,

‘Fuck!
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Fuck!’ ” Marshall says.
“I thought,

oh, this must be good.”

Marshall guessed that the mantis shrimp uses these

colored blobs to filter the light that reaches a single class

of photoreceptors.
In this way, it could see colors with an

eye that would normally be color-blind.
To test this idea, he

traveled from England to the United States to work with

Tom Cronin, who had both the right equipment and a

burgeoning interest in stomatopods.
Over a few intense

weeks, the duo worked their way through the eye,

analyzing any photoreceptors they could find.
And to their

shock, they found not one class, but at least 11.
“It didn’t

make sense,” Cronin tells me.
“We found a new one every

time we looked at a new part of the eye.
That was the most

miraculous period of my whole career, Justin and I working

together and discovering this.” The mantis shrimp “could

have a color vision system that outperforms anything

previously described,” the duo wrote in 1989.
Or as

Marshall puts it, “There were even more fucks.”

The midband consists of six rows of light-gathering

units.
Forget the bottom two for now; only the top four are

used for color vision.
Each row has three unique

photoreceptors that are arranged in tiers.
Row 1 has violet

and blue receptors, row 2 has yellow and orange, row 3 has

orange-red and red, row 4 has cyan and green, and each

row has its own unique UV photoreceptor sitting on top of

the others.
[*18] That makes 12 photoreceptor classes,

including four that are devoted to ultraviolet.[*19] Mantis

shrimps have more classes of photoreceptors covering the

ultraviolet spectrum than we have in total.
What could they

possibly be doing with so many?
Could they be

dodecachromats, with 12-dimensional color vision?
Or are

they performing four kinds of trichromacy in each of the

midband rows?
Either way, they must surely be

connoisseurs of color, able to tell even the subtlest

differences between nigh-indistinguishable hues.
A coral

reef looks stunning enough to us; what must it look like to a

stomatopod?
Speculations have run amok.
Imaginations

have run wild.
The Oatmeal, an online comic strip,

suggested that “where we see a rainbow, a mantis shrimp

sees a thermonuclear bomb of light and beauty.”

It does not.
In 2014, Marshall’s student Hanne Thoen

did a decisive experiment that upended the mantis shrimp’s

growing reputation.
She trained them to attack one of two

colored lights in exchange for a rewarding snack.
She then

altered the colors until they were similar enough that the

animals could no longer tell them apart.
Humans can

distinguish colors whose wavelengths differ by between 1

and 4 nanometers.
But the mantis shrimps failed with

colors that were between 12 and 25 nanometers apart,

which is roughly the gap between pure yellow and orange.
For all their optical extravagance, they turned out to be

abysmally bad at discriminating colors.
Humans, bees,

butterflies, and goldfish can all outperform them.
Marshall now thinks that the mantis shrimp sees colors

in a unique way.
Rather than discriminating between

millions of subtle shades, its eye actually does the opposite,

collapsing all the varied hues of the spectrum into just 12

colors, like a child’s coloring book.
Every kind of red

stimulates the bottom photoreceptor of row 3.
All shades of

violet stimulate the top receptor of row 1.
And rather than

comparing the outputs of these 12 receptors through

opponency, the retina just sends its raw signals directly to



the brain.
The brain then uses these patterns to recognize

specific colors, as if the visible spectrum were a barcode

and its midband were a supermarket scanner.
You could

imagine that if receptors 1, 6, 7, and 11 go off, the brain

recognizes these signals as prey, and the mantis shrimp

attacks.
If receptors 3, 4, 8, and 9 go off, that might be a

mate, and it’s a mantis shrimp, since “some very careful

wooing ensues,” Marshall says.
The animal might not even

have any conception of color at all.
Each curve represents one of the 12 classes of photoreceptor cells in a

mantis shrimp’s eye.
The peak shows the wavelength of light to which

that class is most sensitive.
All of this remains a highly educated guess.
None of the

stomatopod researchers I spoke to claim to really know

what these animals see.
It’s possible that they might use

different kinds of color vision for different tasks.
For

recognizing food, as in Thoen’s experiment, a 12-color look-

up table might suffice.
But when recognizing each other,

they might use a more conventional system that can

discriminate between similar colors.
After all, many of them

are vividly colored themselves, and display their markings

to each other when they meet.
“For a mate, maybe the

subtleties matter,” Cronin says.
“But that’s a very difficult

experiment to do.”

Studying animal behavior is always challenging.
But

studying the behavior of mantis shrimps borders on

masochism.
In Marshall’s lab, as part of a new experiment,

Streets has been trying to train the peacock pods to attack

zip ties with particular colors on them.
But when she

demonstrates this for me, the animals consistently make

the wrong choice.
At one point, one of them punches the

wall of the aquarium.
Another just air-punches (water-

punches?) nothing in particular.
I ask Streets if they’re

hard to train.
“Oh my god,” she says, shaking her head

slightly.
They’re not motivated by food, because they don’t

need to eat very often.
They seem to lose interest very

easily, so she can only test them once a day.
“I swear to god

they know what the task is but they’re just spiteful,”

Streets says.
“Do you love or hate working with them?” I ask.
“It’s mixed,” she says, resignedly.
“At first, it’s super-

cool.
I’m working with mantis shrimps!
Everyone who likes

this sort of thing has heard of them.
But then you start

working with them, and you just sit there and wonder why

you’re doing this.”

—

WE, LIKE STREETS, are going to stick with mantis shrimps for

a little while longer, because there’s even more to their

eyes than meets the…well, you know.
Indeed, their eyes

have proved to be so unusual, so complicated, and so hard

to understand that many scientists around the world now

study them.
Nicholas Roberts and Martin How do so in

Bristol, England.
They take me to a room where they also

have peacock mantis shrimps—eight individuals, which live

in separate aquaria for each other’s safety.
Their tanks are

at eye level, which makes it easier to see how inquisitive

they are.
As we approach, several of them notice and start

looking at us.
I press a finger against one of the tanks, and

a pod named Nigel swims up.
I move the finger, and he

follows.
It feels like I’m dragging him around.
Nigel’s eyes are constantly moving, in every conceivable

direction.
They move up and down, and side to side.
They

rotate clockwise and anticlockwise.
[*20] They rarely move

together, or in the same direction.
Roberts sometimes does

experiments where he films mantis shrimps from above as

they look at a screen.
“Quite often, they’ll have one eye

doing the task on its own, and one eye pointed up at the

camera,” he tells me.
As I noted in the previous chapter, we

interpret active eyes as a sign of an active mind.
But mantis

shrimps actually have small, weak brains.
The hypermobile

nature of their eyes is not a sign of a probing intelligence.
But it is the key to understanding how and what they see.
Our retinas have cone-rich foveae, where our vision is

sharpest and most colorful.
We train this zone onto

different parts of the world by flicking our eyes from place

to place.
And when we spot something interesting in our

peripheral vision, we redirect our gaze at it to analyze it in

detailed color.
Mantis shrimps do something similar.
The

midband sees color, but its view is confined to a thin strip

of space.
The hemispheres probably only see in black-and-

white, but their view is panoramic.
As the mantis shrimp

moves its eyes around, it looks for movements and objects

of interest with the hemispheres.
When it spots something,

it flicks its eyes across and scans the midbands over the

area, as if waving two supermarket scanners along a shelf.
Does the mantis shrimp start with a monochrome view,

which it gradually paints with colors?
“I don’t think so,”

Marshall tells me.
He suspects that “they never construct a

solid two-dimensional representation of color” in their

brains.
Instead, as they scan with their midbands, they

simply wait for anything that excites the right combination

of photoreceptors.
Imagine that you’re a mantis shrimp.
It is a truth

universally acknowledged that you are in want of

something to punch.
Your eyes are in constant,

uncoordinated motion, the right one perusing one part of

the reef, the left glancing somewhere else.
Your view is

monochrome because what you’re after is not color but

movement.
You spot it to your right, and flick both your

eyes across.
They’re scanning together now, sweeping their

midbands

over

the

mystery

object.
Suddenly,

photoreceptors 3, 6, 10, and 11 fire.
Your brain recognizes

a fish.
Your arms lash out and hit their mark.
This style of vision is highly efficient, and means less

work for the mantis shrimp’s small brain.[*21] But it comes

with a catch.
It’s very hard to detect movement with an eye

that’s also moving.
When we walk along a street or stare

out a vehicle window, our eyes actually fix on specific

points ahead of us, rapidly flicking from one to the next.
These flicks, or saccades, are some of the fastest

movements we make, which is just as well, because as

they’re happening, our visual system shuts down.
Our

brains fill the millisecond-long gaps to create a sense of

continuous vision, but that’s an illusion.
The same thing

happens to mantis shrimps when they do their slow

midband scans.
“It could be that in that time, they have to

turn off their motion vision,” How tells me.
“Their eye is

moving, the world is blurring, and it’s probably harder to

see a predator coming in.” But when the eye isn’t scanning,

most of the mantis shrimp’s view is black-and-white.
The

jumping spiders we met in the previous chapter split

different visual tasks—motion and colorful detail—among

separate eyes.
The mantis shrimps do the same among

different portions of the same eye, and among different

periods of time.
To see movement, they have to give up

color.
To see color, they give up movement.
“It’s a time-

sharing system,” Cronin says.
“It’s not really one you’d

build, but they discovered it and it has worked for them.”

By this point, dear reader, you might reasonably be

feeling overwhelmed by talk of photoreceptors and

midbands and hemispheres and all the other absurd

complications that mantis shrimps have packed into their

eyes.
Or maybe, after all of that, you’re feeling a touch of

clarity, as if you’re on the cusp of imagining the stomatopod

Umwelt.
In either case, I have bad news for you.
There is

more.
Remember that light is a wave.
As it moves, it oscillates.
Those oscillations can usually occur in any direction

perpendicular to the line of travel, but they’re sometimes

confined to just one plane—imagine attaching a rope to a

wall and then shaking it up and down, or side to side.
This

kind of light is said to be polarized, and it is common in

nature.
It is formed when light is scattered by water or air,

or when it reflects off smooth surfaces like glass, waxy

leaves, or bodies of water.
Humans are largely oblivious to

polarization,

but

most

insects,

crustaceans,

and

cephalopods can see it in much the same way that they see

color.
Their eyes typically have two classes of

photoreceptors that are stimulated by horizontally or

vertically polarized light.
By comparing their two receptors,

they can distinguish between light that’s polarized to

different extents, or at different angles.
You could call these

animals dipolats.[*22]

Mantis shrimps have this arrangement in the top

hemisphere of their eyes.
But in the bottom hemisphere,

their polarization receptors are rotated by 45 degrees.
And

in rows 5 and 6 of the midband, they have something

unique.
Polarized light usually oscillates in a single fixed

plane, but that plane can sometimes rotate, so the light

travels along a twisting helix.
This is called circular

polarization.
And as Marshall’s postdoc Tsyr-Huei Chiou

found in 2008, mantis shrimps are the only animals that

can see it.
The bottom rows of their midbands have

photoreceptors that are tuned to circularly polarized light,

spiraling either clockwise or anticlockwise.
So mantis

shrimps have six classes of polarization receptors—vertical

and horizontal, two diagonals, clockwise and anticlockwise.
Ever the exceptions, they are hexapolats.
[*23]

I have explained polarization and color separately, and

these topics often occupy separate chapters in textbooks.
But there’s no reason to think that mantis shrimps treat

them differently.
They might well treat the six kinds of

polarization signals as yet more colors—more channels of

information that they use to recognize objects around

them.
But why do they need six more, when they already

have 12?
Why is their vision so inordinately complicated?
“There are animals with much simpler visual systems that

are very effective on the reef,” Tom Cronin tells me.
So,

with mantis shrimps, “there remains the question: What’s it

all for?
And no one knows.”

—

WAIT A MINUTE.
Back up a bit.
Why exactly can mantis

shrimps see circularly polarized light?
Unlike linearly polarized light, circularly polarized light

is very rare, which is probably why no other animal has

evolved the ability to see it.
Indeed, the only things in the

mantis shrimps’ environment that reliably give off

circularly polarized light…are the mantis shrimps

themselves.
One species reflects it from the large keel on

its tail, which males use during courtship.
Another reflects

it from body parts that it displays to rivals during combat.
Perhaps, then, mantis shrimps communicate using a form

of light so secretive that only they can see it.
There’s

something unsatisfyingly circuitous about this explanation,

though.
Circularly polarized signals would be useless if the

mantis shrimps didn’t already have eyes that could see

them.
But why would those eyes have evolved that ability if

there wasn’t anything for them to see?
Which came first,

the eye or the signal?
Tom Cronin thinks it was the eye.
In the bottom two

rows of the midband, the photoreceptors are arranged in a

way that just happens to untwist circularly polarized light

so that it becomes linearly polarized instead.
That’s how

mantis shrimps can sense it.
This arrangement might have

been an anatomical fluke—a quirk of their compound eye

that gave them the ability to see circularly polarized light,

even when there was little of that light around to see.
The

ancestral mantis shrimps effectively had an accidental

sense.
They exploited it by slowly developing structures on

their shells that reflect circularly polarized light, evolving

signals that suited their eyes.
This happens a lot.
Signals

are meant to be seen, and so the colors that adorn the fur,

scales, feathers, and exoskeletons of animals are shaped by

the colors that the animals’ eyes can perceive.
In viewing

nature’s paintings, eyes define its palette.
Primates, for example, evolved trichromacy to better

spot young leaves and ripe fruits.
And once they added red

to their Umwelt, they began evolving patches of bare skin

that could convey messages by flushing with blood.
The red

faces of rhesus macaques, the red rumps of mandrills, and

the comically red and bald heads of uakaris are all sexual

signals made possible by trichromatic vision.
Most of the fish in coral reefs are also trichromats.
But

since red light is strongly absorbed by water, their

sensitivities are shifted toward the blue end of the

spectrum.
This explains why so many reef fish, like the blue

tang that stars in Pixar’s Finding Dory, are blue and yellow.
To their version of trichromacy, yellow disappears against

corals, and blue blends in with the water.
Their colors look

incredibly conspicuous to snorkeling humans, because our

particular trio of cones excels at discriminating blues and

yellows.
But the fish themselves are beautifully

camouflaged to each other, and to their predators.
The color vision of predators diversified the patterns of

Central America’s strawberry poison frog—a single species

that comes in 15 incredibly different forms.
One is lime

green with cyan stockings.
Another is orange with black

spots.
These colors are so varied as to seem almost

random, but there’s method to the visual madness.
These

frogs are poisonous, and the most toxic ones are also the

most conspicuous.
But as Molly Cummings and Martine

Maan discovered, they are conspicuous only to birds and

not to other predators like snakes.
It is likely that

tetrachromatic avian eyes drove the evolution of the

outlandish amphibian skins.
This makes sense: The colors

are intended as warnings, and across the generations, frogs

whose hues were best suited to the vision of their predators

were more likely to go unattacked.
And Cummings and

Maan showed that you can work out who those predators

are—in this case, birds—by studying the colors of their

prey.
Since eyes define nature’s palette, an animal’s palette

tells you whose eyes it is trying to catch.
You can apply the same logic to flowers.
In 1992, Lars

Chittka and Randolf Menzel analyzed 180 flowers and

worked out what kind of eye would be best at

discriminating their colors.
The answer—an eye with green,

blue, and UV trichromacy—is exactly what bees and many

other insects have.
You might think that these pollinators

evolved eyes that see flowers well, but that’s not what

happened.
Their style of trichromacy evolved hundreds of

millions of years before the first flowers appeared, so the

latter must have evolved to suit the former.
Flowers

evolved colors that ideally tickle insect eyes.
I find these connections profound, in a way that makes

me think differently about the act of sensing itself.
Sensing

can feel passive, as if eyes and other sense organs were

intake valves through which animals absorb and receive

the stimuli around them.
But over time, the simple act of

seeing recolors the world.
Guided by evolution, eyes are

living paintbrushes.
Flowers, frogs, fish, feathers, and fruit

all show that sight affects what is seen, and that much of

what we find beautiful in nature has been shaped by the

vision of our fellow animals.
Beauty is not only in the eye of

the beholder.
It arises because of that eye.
—

IT’S A SUNNY afternoon in March 2021, and I’m taking Typo,

my corgi, for a walk.
As we approach a neighbor who is

rinsing his car with a hose, Typo stops, sits, and stares.
As I

wait with him, I notice a rainbow in the water arcing from

the hose.
To Typo’s eyes, it goes from yellow to white to

blue.
To mine, it goes from red to violet, with orange,

yellow, green, and blue in the middle.
To the sparrows and

starlings perched in a tree behind us, it goes from red to

ultraviolet, with perhaps even more gradations in between.
I noted at the start of this chapter that color is

fundamentally subjective.
The photoreceptors in our retinas

detect different wavelengths of light, while our brains use

those signals to construct the sensation of color.
The

former process is easy to study; the latter is extremely

difficult.
This tension between reception and sensation,

between what animals can detect and what they actually

experience, exists for most of the senses.
We can dissect a

mantis shrimp’s eye and work out what every component

does, but still never really know how it actually sees.
We

can work out the exact shape of the taste receptors on a

fly’s feet without ever understanding what it experiences

when it lands on an apple.
We can chart how an animal

reacts to what it senses, but it’s much harder to know how

it feels.
And that distinction becomes especially difficult—

and important—when thinking about pain.
SKIP NOTES

*1 Technically, based on the wavelengths of light that most excite them, the

long and short cones should really be called yellow-green and violet instead of

red and blue.
*2 The firefly squid is an exception.
It’s the only cephalopod known to have

three different classes of photoreceptors, and may well have color vision.
*3 Both medium and long genes lie on the X chromosome.
If someone with two

X chromosomes inherits a faulty copy of either gene, they usually have a

working backup.
But if someone with an X and a Y chromosome inherits a

faulty copy, they’re stuck with it.
This is why red-green color-blindness, which

is typically caused by the loss of either the M or L cones, is much more

common in men than in women.
*4 Kentaro Arikawa, who studies color vision, first realized that he has a red-green color deficiency when he was six; his mother asked him to pick

strawberries from their garden for breakfast and he failed, disappointing her.
In several lab experiments, trichromats do outperform dichromats at finding

fruit.
*5 Primates also have unusually acute vision, which might explain why

trichromacy didn’t evolve in other fruit- or leaf-eating mammals.
“You can give

a mouse trichromacy, but what good would that be to a nocturnal mammal

with poor acuity?” says Melin.
By contrast, sharp-eyed primates can use

trichromacy to spot fruit and young leaves from afar, and reach them before

competitors realize they have appeared.
*6 Howler monkeys are the exception.
They live in the Americas, but unlike the other monkeys they share a continent with, they are all trichromatic, males

and females.
That’s because they evolved trichromacy in the same way as

their cousins in Africa and Eurasia—by duplicating the long-opsin gene.
And

they did so independently.
*7 It’s even more complicated than this, because many of these American

monkeys have three possible versions of the same gene.
Females might inherit

two of the three versions or a pair of the same ones, which means that these

animals have six different forms of color vision—three dichromacies and three

trichromacies.
*8 Visible light is just a small part of the vast electromagnetic spectrum, and there are reasons it’s the only slice that our eyes can detect.
Electromagnetic

waves with very short wavelengths, like gamma rays and X-rays, are largely

absorbed by the atmosphere.
Those with very long wavelengths, like

microwaves and radio waves, don’t have enough energy to reliably excite

opsins.
For these reasons, no animal can see microwaves or X-rays.
There’s

only a narrow Goldilocks zone of wavelengths that are useful for vision, and

they range from 300 to 750 nanometers.
Our eyes, which work from 400 to

700 nanometers, already cover much of that available visual space.
But in the

margins, a lot can happen.
*9 Why don’t most humans see UV?
It might be the cost of having sharp

eyesight.
When light passes through our lenses, shorter wavelengths are bent

at sharper angles.
Even if the lens admitted UV, it would focus these

wavelengths at a point well in front of the others, blurring the image on the

retina.
This is called chromatic aberration.
It’s less of an issue for small eyes, or for those that don’t need to be very acute.
But for big-eyed animals with

sharp vision, it’s a problem.
This may be why primates don’t see UV, and why

raptors see much less of it than other birds.
*10 Some scientists think that the first kind of color vision to evolve was

dichromacy with a green photoreceptor and a UV one.
If that’s true, animals

have been seeing UV for as long as they’ve been seeing color.
*11 Other claims about UV vision have also fallen apart.
In 1995, a Finnish

team suggested that kestrels can track voles by looking for UV reflecting off

their urine.
This claim has been frequently repeated in books and

documentaries, but “it’s wrong,” says Almut Kelber.
In 2013, she and her

colleagues showed that vole urine doesn’t actually reflect much UV and isn’t

distinguishable from water.
Kestrels can’t possibly see it from afar.
*12 If Stoddard set both lights to produce the same colors, the hummingbirds

could no longer reliably arrive at the nectar-baited feeder.
This suggests that

they’re not just learning the position of the right feeder, or relying on other

senses like smell.
*13 I am still hung up on whether UV-purple should be called ultrapurple or

purpurple.
*14 There’s another twist to this story, which readers of my first book, I Contain Multitudes, will be delighted by.
Every now and then, Briscoe would find a

female erato with male-like eyes that only had three opsins.
This pattern

confused her, until she realized that all of these females were infected by a

bacterium called Wolbachia.
Wolbachia is one of the most successful bacteria

on the planet, and infects a huge proportion of insects and other arthropods.
It

only passes down the female line from mother to daughter, and has many

tricks for doing away with useless males.
Sometimes it kills males outright.
Sometimes it transforms them into females.
Sometimes it allows females to

reproduce asexually without needing males at all.
What it’s doing in erato is a

mystery, but one that Briscoe is now trying to solve.
*15 Note that cDa29 and other genuine tetrachromats can’t see ultraviolet like birds can, so their vision would cover the same range of wavelengths as a

normal trichromat’s.
They still see an extra dimension of color, and their color

space can still be represented by a pyramid instead of a triangle.
But it’s a

pyramid that fits inside the one that birds have.
*16 In 2019, Jordan developed a test that could quickly tell if women have a fourth cone with exactly the right 12-nanometer spacing to offer true

tetrachromacy.
“That would allow us to go around and very quickly find out

how many of them there are,” she says.
“And then COVID-19 came.”

*17 Amanda Melin tells me that human color vision is far more varied than

what she and others have seen in chimps, baboons, and other primates.
It’s

unclear why, but it might be that our survival is now less closely tied to the

colors we see, allowing for variants that might once have been detrimental to

remain.
*18 The colored blobs that Marshall first noticed are found in rows 2 and 3.
As he suspected, they do act as filters, but their job is to sharpen the sensitivity of

the underlying photoreceptors.
*19 You might have read that they have 16 photoreceptor classes.
Aside from

the 12 in the first four rows of the midband, there are two in the last two rows,

and two more in the hemispheres.
As far as anyone knows, these other four

are not involved in color vision.
Also, not all mantis shrimps have 12 classes.
While most species live in colorful shallows, some inhabit deeper waters and

have lost all but one or two of their photoreceptor classes.
*20 While we can perceive depth by comparing the images from our two eyes, a

mantis shrimp can do the same with the three zones of a single eye.
Each eye

has trinocular vision and can gauge distance independently of its twin.
This is

a handy skill for a pugnacious animal that often loses one of its eyes in

combat.
*21 Imagine that you’re trying to build a robot that can sneak into a local diner and find a hamburger for you.
You could equip that robot with two state-of-the

art cameras and an algorithm that can learn to analyze and classify the images

from those cameras.
But “surely it’s better to just build a hamburger-

detector,” Marshall says.
“And the best way to do that is to build a line-scan

device.
It’s much more efficient.”

*22 Cephalopods are more sensitive to polarization than any other animals.
Shelby Temple and his colleagues found that the mourning cuttlefish can spot

the difference between two kinds of polarized light whose planes of vibration

differ by just one degree.
These animals are color-blind, but they might use

polarization as a replacement, to add rich detail to their visual world.
*23 They can also rotate their eyes to enhance the polarization contrast between an object and its background, making them the first known animals

with dynamic polarization vision.
4.
The Unwanted Sense

Pain

IN A WARM ROOM THAT smells sweetly of corn, I’m holding a

small rodent in my gloved hand.
Pink and mostly hairless, it

seems less like a rat or guinea pig and more like a finger

that’s been soaking in a bath too long.
It almost looks

embryonic, even though it is a fully grown adult.
Its eyes

are black pinpricks.
Its long incisors stick out in front of its

lips.
Its loose skin feels tough but is so translucent that I

can make out its internal organs, including the dark outline

of its liver.
It is a naked mole-rat.
Its appearance is the

least strange thing about it.[*1]

Naked mole-rats are exceptionally long-lived for rodents,

with life spans of up to 33 years.
Their lower incisors can

splay apart and come together to grasp objects.
Their

sperm are misshapen and sluggish.
They can survive for up

to 18 minutes without oxygen, a hardship that no mouse

can endure for more than a minute.
They live in

cooperative colonies like those of ants and termites, with

one or more breeding queens and dozens of sterile

workers.
A single naked mole-rat, like the one I am holding,

is an unusual sight.
So is a naked mole-rat in the open.
They normally live within labyrinthine underground

tunnels, which they constantly expand, remodel, and patrol

in their quest for nutritious tubers.
Thomas Park replicates

this network in his Chicago-based lab with interconnected

plastic cages filled with toilet paper rolls and wood chips.
Some of the mole-rats are instinctively chewing the walls of

these containers in a bid to expand their artificial tunnels,

and kicking their legs back as if removing loosened dirt.
Others are resting in the nesting chamber, a pile of

wrinkled bodies curled around their queen.
She is much

larger than they are, and her belly bulges with unborn

pups.
“For naked mole-rat people, that’s a beautiful sight,”

Park tells me.
I take his word for it.
In their wild burrows, naked mole-rats also sleep in

large huddled piles to keep warm.
Those at the bottom

rapidly run out of oxygen, which is probably why they have

evolved to withstand the gas’s absence.
They’ve also been

forced to tolerate carbon dioxide, which builds up in the

nesting chambers with every exhalation.
Carbon dioxide

normally makes up 0.03 percent of the air in an average

room.
If levels shot up to 3 percent, you’d hyperventilate

and panic.
Meanwhile, the gas would dissolve in the wet

surfaces of your mucous membranes, acidifying them.
Your

eyes would sting.
Your nose would burn.
You’d wince in

distress.
You’d try to get away.
But a naked mole-rat

wouldn’t flee or flinch.
Park demonstrated this with an arena that’s infused with

carbon dioxide at one end and regular air at the other.
A

mouse would scurry to the latter region.
But naked mole-

rats were comfortable in the thick carbon dioxide, moving

away only when levels reached a preposterous 10 percent.
They simply don’t find acids painful.
They’ll sniff strong

vinegary fumes with no sign of discomfort.
They don’t

register drops of acid beneath their skin—the equivalent of

squirting lemon juice into a cut in your hand.
And they’re

similarly unperturbed by capsaicin, the chemical that gives

chili peppers and pepper spray their burn.
While capsaicin

inflames our skin, leaving it hypersensitive to heat, it has

no such effect on naked mole-rats.
It’s not that these

animals can’t feel pain, as is commonly said.
They dislike

pinches and burns, and they’ll recoil from the chemical

responsible for mustard’s sting.
But they’re oblivious to

several noxious substances that we find painful.
Our experience of pain depends on a class of neurons

called nociceptors.
(The word is pronounced with a soft c,

and comes from the Latin word nocere, meaning “to

harm.”) The naked tips of these neurons pervade our skin

and other organs.
They are loaded with sensors that detect

harmful stimuli—intense heat or cold, crushing pressures,

acids, toxins, and chemicals released by injuries and

inflammation.[*2] Nociceptors vary in their size, how

excitable they are, and how quickly they transmit

information—qualities that collectively sculpt a landscape

of pricks, stabs, burns, throbs, cramps, and aches that we

are unfortunate enough to experience.
Almost all animals have nociceptors, and naked mole-

rats are no exception.
But theirs are fewer in number and

have been disabled in several ways.
Those that would

normally be activated by acids are instead blocked by them.
Those that detect capsaicin still do so, but don’t produce

the neurotransmitters that normally convey their signals to

the brain.
Some of these changes seem easy to explain: If

naked mole-rats could still feel acidic pain, the carbon

dioxide in their nesting chambers would probably lead to

an agonized sleep.
“But we don’t know why they can’t

respond to capsaicin,” Park tells me.
Perhaps they eat an

especially spicy tuber to which they’ve become resistant?
Or perhaps it was the opposite: After millions of years in a

relatively safe environment, they simply lost sensory

abilities that they no longer needed.
Either way, their

imperviousness tells us that there’s nothing inherently

painful about either capsaicin or acids.
Several hibernating mammals that, like the naked mole-

rat, must deal with building levels of carbon dioxide are

also insensitive to acids.
Birds that carry the seeds of

pepper plants don’t feel the burn of capsaicin.
Humans are

insensitive to nepetalactone, a chemical produced by the

catnip plant that is intensely irritating to mosquitoes.
The

grasshopper mouse, a surprisingly ferocious predator of

scorpions, can shrug off stings that feel to humans like

cigarettes being stubbed out on our skin.
The mouse’s

nociceptors have evolved to stop firing when they recognize

a scorpion’s toxins, turning venom that would normally be

excruciating into a painkiller.
People often assume that pain feels the same across the

entire animal kingdom, but that is not true.
Much like color,

it is inherently subjective and surprisingly variable.
Just as

wavelengths of light aren’t universally red or blue, and

odors aren’t universally fragrant or pungent, nothing is

universally painful, not even chemicals in scorpion venom

that specifically evolved to inflict pain.
Pain, in warning

animals of injury and danger, is crucial to their survival.
And while all animals have things to be wary of, they differ

in what they must avoid and what they must tolerate.
That

makes it notoriously tricky to tell what an animal might find

painful, whether an animal is experiencing pain, or whether

it even can.
—

IN THE EARLY 1900s, the neurophysiologist Charles Scott

Sherrington noted that the skin has “a set of nerve-endings

whose specific office it is to be amenable to stimuli that do

the skin injury.” Those nerves would “evoke skin pain” if

connected to the brain, but they could still trigger

defensive reflexes “devoid of psychical feature” if said

connections were cut.
A dog, for example, would still pull

its paw away from a hard squeeze even after a spinal injury.
Sherrington wanted a separate term to describe the act of

sensing harmful stimuli as distinct from the painful feelings

they produce—a term that would have “the advantage of

greater objectivity.” He came up with nociception.
Over a century later, scientists and philosophers still

make the distinction between nociception and pain.
Nociception is the sensory process by which we detect

damage.
Pain is the suffering that ensues.
Last week, when

I accidentally touched a hot pan, the nociceptors in my skin

sensed the scalding temperatures.
That’s nociception,

which triggered a reflex that forced my arm to withdraw

before I realized what was happening.
Shortly after, signals

from those nociceptors reached my brain, which produced

feelings of discomfort and distress.
That’s pain.
The two are

intimately linked but also distinct.
Nociception occurred in

my hand (and spinal cord); the pain was produced by my

brain.
They are the sensory and emotional halves of a

process that, to most of us, feel inseparable.
But they can be separated.
Amputees who feel the

phantom remnants of their old limbs can experience pain

without nociception.
Other people are congenitally

indifferent to pain—from birth, they’re aware of sensations

that others would find painful, but aren’t distressed by

them.
[*3] Some painkillers duplicate this effect by acting on

the central nervous system to dull pain without affecting

nociception.
“I took Vicodin after having surgery on my

jaw,” Robyn Crook, a neuroscientist who studies pain, tells

me.
“I would still be fully aware that the sensation was

there, but I felt very serene about it.” People can also learn

to ignore or even enjoy things that trigger nociceptors, like

mustard, chilies, or intense heat.[*4]

To be clear, the separation between nociception and pain

does not make the latter any less real.
People (and

especially women) with chronically painful disorders have

long been disbelieved and neglected by the medical

establishment.
They’ve been wrongly told that their

suffering is just in their heads, or the result of mental

health problems like anxiety.
Pain is easy to dismiss in this

way because it is subjective.
And thanks to the unfortunate

persistence of dualism—the outdated belief that the mind

and body are separate—people often equate subjective with

woolly, and psychological with imagined.
This is harmfully

wrong.
It’s not the case that nociception is a physical

process of the body, while pain is a psychological process of

the mind.
Both arise from the firing of neurons.
It’s just

that in humans, nociception can be confined to the

peripheral nervous system, while with pain, the brain is

always involved.
Pain requires some degree of conscious

awareness.
Nociception can exist without it.
Nociception is an ancient sense.
It is so widespread and

consistent across the animal kingdom that the same

chemicals, opioids, can quell the nociceptors of humans,

chickens, trout, sea slugs, and fruit flies—creatures

separated by around 800 million years of evolution.
But

since pain is subjective, it is difficult to tell which creatures

have it.
Humans can barely do that with each other.
“You

can tell me you have a screaming headache and I’d have no

idea what that means for you,” Crook tells me, “and we’re

the same species, with brains that are basically the same.”

Scientists who study human pain still largely rely on

people’s own accounts, and animals obviously can’t talk

about their feelings.
[*5] Our only recourse is to read the tea leaves of their behavior.
Pinch the foot of a mouse (or naked mole-rat) and it will

pull its limb away, and probably lick and groom it.
Offer

painkillers and it will accept.
These actions resemble what

a hurt human might do, and since a rodent’s brain is

similar enough to ours, we can reasonably guess that its

nociceptive reflex is accompanied by pain.
But such

arguments by analogy are always fraught, especially when

it comes to animals with very different bodies and nervous

systems.
A leech will writhe when pinched, but are those

movements analogous to human suffering, or to an arm

unconsciously pulling away from a hot pan?
Other animals

may hide their pain.
Social creatures can call for help by

whining when they’re injured, but an anguished antelope

would likely keep quiet lest its distress calls convey

weakness to a lion.
The signs of pain vary from one species

to another.
How, then, do you tell if an animal is

experiencing it?
For many historical thinkers, who believed animals

incapable of emotions or conscious experiences, the

question was irrelevant.
The seventeenth-century dualist

René Descartes thought of them as automata.
Paraphrasing

his views, the philosopher and priest Nicolas Malebranche

wrote that “animals eat without pleasure, cry without pain,

grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing,

know nothing.” Such views have changed in recent

decades, and most scientists would now agree that

mammals can feel pain.
But fierce debates are still raging

around other animal groups, including fish, insects, and

crustaceans.
[*6] At the core of these lingering controversies

is the distinction between nociception and pain.
That

distinction “is a relic of attempts to emphasize differences

between humans and other animals or between ‘higher’

and ‘lower’ animals,” wrote Donald Broom, a biologist who

specializes in animal welfare.
After all, in other senses, the

actions of sensory receptors and the subjective experiences

produced by the brain don’t get different names.
Scientists

who study eyes don’t get into arguments about whether

humans have vision and fish merely have photoreception.
But as we saw in the earlier chapters, there is a

difference between what the cells in a retina detect and the

conscious experience of seeing.
Vision scientists do, in fact,

make distinctions between simple photoreception and

spatial vision—remember the four stages of Dan-Eric

Nilsson’s model of eye evolution.
They suspect that some

creatures, like scallops, might stretch our concept of vision

by seeing without scenes.
They recognize that some

aspects of our visual world, like colors, are constructs of

the brain, and that some animals that can sense different

wavelengths of light, like mantis shrimps, might not

perceive colors at all.
In the chemical senses—smell and taste—it’s also

possible to sense and react to a stimulus without being

aware of it.
You’re doing it right now.
Humans have taste

receptors throughout our bodies—not over our skin or feet,

but in our internal organs.
Sweet receptors in our gut

control the release of appetite-controlling hormones.
Bitter

receptors in our lungs recognize the presence of allergens

and trigger an immune response.
All of this happens

without us knowing.
Similarly, the taste receptors on a

mosquito’s foot could trigger a reflex that makes it

withdraw from DEET without ever passing information to

the insect’s brain.
The taste receptors on a fly’s wing can

initiate a grooming reflex if they detect microbes, without

the fly needing to know what a microbe or a wing is.
To an

observer, those behaviors look remarkably like disgust, but

we have no idea if such emotions are playing out in the

insect’s brain.
Broom is right that we rarely distinguish between the

raw act of sensing and the subjective experiences that

ensue.
But that’s not because such distinctions don’t exist.
It’s because they usually don’t matter.
Questions about

what a scallop sees, or whether birds and humans see the

same red, are philosophically interesting.
But the

distinction between pain and nociception is a morally,

legally, and economically vital matter, which affects our

cultural norms around catching, killing, eating, or

experimenting on animals.
Pain (or nociception, if you

prefer) is the unwanted sense.
It is the only one whose

absence (in naked mole-rats or grasshopper mice) feels like

a superpower.
It is the only one that we try to avoid, that

we dull with medication, and that we try to avoid inflicting

upon others.
—

SCIENTISTS WHO WORK on vision or hearing can play images

and sounds at the animals they’re studying.
But those who

study pain have to harm the creatures they work with in

the pursuit of knowledge that might improve the welfare of

those same creatures.
They want to use as few animals as

possible, but have to use enough that their results are

statistically sound.
Their work is morally challenging and

often frustrating.
“People either feel that animals

absolutely feel pain like we do so it’s a stupid question to

research, or that they don’t feel pain like we do so it’s a

stupid question to research,” Robyn Crook tells me.
“There’s not a lot of middle ground where people are

agnostic.”

Fish exemplify the fraught nature of pain research.
In

the early 2000s, Lynne Sneddon, Mike Gentle, and Victoria

Braithwaite injected trout in the lips with bee venom or

acetic acid, the substance that gives vinegar its kick.
Unlike fish that had been injected with saline, these

unfortunate individuals began breathing heavily.
They

stopped eating for several hours.
They lay on the gravel

bottoms of their tanks and rocked from side to side.
Some

of them rubbed their lips against the gravel or the walls of

their tanks.
They no longer kept their distance from

unfamiliar objects, as if something was distracting them—

an effect that vanished when they were injected with

morphine.
Sneddon and her colleagues couldn’t see how

these actions, which persisted well after the injections,

could be attributed to mere nociception.
They saw animals

in pain.
These studies, published in 2003, were groundbreaking.
Scientific texts, angling magazines, and Nirvana lyrics had

all promulgated the belief that fish don’t feel pain.
The

struggles of a hooked fish were meant to be simple

reflexes, rather than signs of suffering.
No one even knew if

fish had nociceptors, until Sneddon’s team confirmed that

they do.
She tells me that when she began her work, she

would ask veterinary students or angling groups if fish

experience pain.
“A few people would say yes,” she says.
Now, after 17 years of mounting evidence, “pretty much

everyone puts their hand up.”

When fish nociceptors fire, the signals travel to parts of

the brain that deal with learning and other behaviors more

complex than simple reflexes.
Sure enough, when the

animals are pinched, shocked, or injected with toxins,

they’ll behave differently for hours or days—or until they

get painkillers.
They’ll make sacrifices to get those drugs,

or to avoid further discomfort.
In one experiment, Sneddon

showed that zebrafish prefer to swim in an aquarium full of

plants and gravel than in one that’s empty.
But if she

injected the fish with acetic acid and dissolved a painkiller

in the water of the barren aquarium, they abandoned their

normal preferences and chose the boring but soothing

environment instead.
In another study, Sarah Millsopp and

Peter Laming trained goldfish to feed in a specific part of

an aquarium, and then gave them an electric shock.
The

fish fled and stayed away for days, forgoing food in the

process.
They eventually returned, but did so more quickly

if they were hungry or if the shock had been mild.
Their

initial escape might have been reflexive, but they then

weighed up the pros and cons of avoiding further harm.
As

Braithwaite wrote in her book, Do Fish Feel Pain?, “ There

is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as there is

for birds and mammals.”

But a group of vocal critics remains unconvinced.
[*7]

They accuse Sneddon and others of anthropomorphism,

and seeing the fish in their studies through human eyes.
More likely, they argue, those fish were behaving

unconsciously.
After all, their brains are capable of little

else.
Our brains are topped by a thick mushroom cap of

neural tissue called the neocortex.
It’s organized like an

orchestra, with many specialized sections that act together

to produce the music of consciousness and the lament of

pain.
But fish brains lack a neocortex, much less a highly

organized one.
“ Fishes are neurologically equipped for

unconscious nociception and emotional responses, but not

conscious pain and feelings,” seven skeptics wrote in 2014,

in a paper entitled “Can Fish Really Feel Pain?”

Ironically,

this

argument

is

itself

grossly

anthropomorphic.
It blithely assumes that the neocortex

must be necessary for pain in all animals, since that’s the

case in humans.
But if that’s true, then birds can’t feel

pain, either, since they also lack a neocortex.
And by the

same faulty logic, fish must lack all the other mental skills

that are rooted in the neocortex, like attention, learning,

and many of the other abilities that they plainly possess.
Animals often evolve different solutions to the same

problems, and different structures for the same tasks.
To

argue that fish can’t feel pain because they lack a human-

like neocortex is like saying that flies cannot see because

they lack camera eyes.
The critics do have a point, though: We cannot assume

that all animals are capable of pain or other conscious

experiences.
Consciousness isn’t an inherent property of all

life.
It arises from nervous systems, and while those

systems might not need a neocortex, they do need enough

processing power.
For perspective, crabs and lobsters use a

cluster of about 30 neurons to control the rhythmic

movements of their stomachs.
Meanwhile, the nematode

worm C.
elegans has 302 neurons in total.
Can the worm

produce subjective experiences with just 10 times as many

neurons as a crab needs to churn its stomach?
That doesn’t

seem likely.
“At some point the nervous system is just too

small,” says Robyn Crook.
“But how much brainpower is

enough?” Is it the 86 billion neurons of humans, the 2

billion of a dog, the 70 million of a mouse, the 4 million of a

guppy, or the 100,000 of a fruit fly?
Crook doubts that the

10,000 neurons of a sea slug are enough, but “it’s not like

someone can say you need 10,057 neurons,” she tells me.
What matters is not just the total tally of neurons but the

connections between them.
In human brains, hundreds of

thousands of neurons connect the different sections of our

cortical orchestra.
These links allow us to play the full

symphony of a painful experience, melding sensory cues

with negative emotions, bad memories, and more.
But such

links are much sparser in the brains of insects.
A fruit fly’s

nociceptors connect to a part of the brain called the

mushroom body, which is critical for learning.
But the

mushroom body only has 21 output neurons that lead to

other brain regions.
The fly may well learn to avoid a

nociceptive stimulus, but do those lessons come with the

bad feelings that are so inherent to human suffering?
Insects might not even have a brain region that processes

emotions, like the amygdala does in humans.
“That makes

it difficult to understand what the subjective experience of

pain would be like in an insect,” Shelley Adamo, a

physiologist who studies insect behavior, tells me.
Then again, Adamo adds, how would you know what an

insect’s emotional center looks like?
Given how little we

know about how human brains work, let alone how those of

other animals are wired, it feels premature to make

definitive proclamations about whether any neurological

feature is necessary for experiencing pain.
And some

animals seem to overperform the limits of their simple

brains.
—

IN 2003, AT a pub in Killyleagh, Northern Ireland, the

biologist Robert Elwood bumped into celebrity chef Rick

Stein.
“We’ve got a mutual interest in crustaceans: I study

their behavior and you cook them,” Elwood remembers

saying.
And Stein immediately asked, “Do they feel pain?”

Elwood didn’t think they could, but he didn’t really know.
Afterward, the question gnawed at him, and he started

trying to answer it.
“I thought it would be a quick project,

and we could move on,” he tells me.
“It didn’t turn out that

way.”

Elwood studied the common hermit crab, which

frequents European beaches and tucks its soft abdomen

into empty seashells.
These shells are valuable property,

and the crabs are vulnerable without them.
But Elwood and

his colleague Mirjam Appel found that they will nonetheless

evacuate if given a small electric shock.
These flights

looked reflexive, but the crabs didn’t always flee.
It took a

stronger shock to force them out of their favored

periwinkle shells than it did to evict them from the less

desirable flat-top shells.
And they were half as likely to

abandon their shells if they could smell the scent of

predators in the water.
“That told me that this isn’t a

reflex,” Elwood says.
Instead, evacuation is a decision the

crabs make after weighing up several sources of

information.
The crabs also behaved differently long after the shocks.
After fleeing, they wouldn’t return to their shells, despite

being dangerously exposed.
They groomed the part of their

abdomens that got shocked.
And even when they didn’t

relinquish their shells, they were quicker to accept a new

one without the usual careful investigations.
These data,

Elwood says, are consistent with the idea of pain, but it’s

impossible to know what crustaceans are really feeling.
“I’m often asked if crabs and lobsters feel pain,” he tells

me, “and after 15 years of research, the answer is maybe.”

Crustaceans are the evolutionary cousins of insects and

have similarly simple nervous systems.
And yet, Elwood’s

crabs behaved in apparently complex ways.
How do we

reconcile that inconsistency?
If an animal’s actions don’t

match what its brain is theoretically capable of, are we

overinterpreting its behavior or underestimating its

nervous system?
Sneddon and Elwood argue that it’s the

latter.
Adamo would say it’s the former.
And it really isn’t

clear who is right, or if they all are.
[*8]

“Fussing about the size of the brain may be a red

herring,” Adamo tells me.
Instead, she prefers to think

about the evolutionary benefits and costs of pain.
By costs,

she means energy, not agony.
Evolution has pushed the

nervous systems of insects toward minimalism and

efficiency, cramming as much processing power as possible

into small heads and bodies.
Any extra mental ability—say,

consciousness—requires more neurons, which would sap

their already tight energy budget.
They should pay that

cost only if they reaped an important benefit.
And what

would they gain from pain?
The evolutionary benefit of nociception is abundantly

clear.
It’s an alarm system that allows animals to detect

things that might harm or kill them, and take steps to

protect themselves.
But the origin of pain, on top of that, is

less obvious.
What is the adaptive value of suffering?
Why

should nociception suck?
Some scientists suggest that

unpleasant emotions might have intensified and calcified

the effect of nociceptive sensations, so that animals not

only avoid what is currently hurting them but also learn to

avoid it in the future.
Nociception says, “Get away.” Pain

says, “…and don’t go back.” But Adamo and others argue

that animals can learn to avoid dangers perfectly well

without needing subjective experiences.
After all, look at

what robots can do.
Engineers have designed robots that can behave as if

they’re in pain, learn from negative experiences, or avoid

artificial discomfort.
These behaviors, when performed by

animals, have been interpreted as indicators of pain.
But

robots can perform them without subjective experiences.
This is not to claim, as Descartes did, that animals are

unthinking, unfeeling automata; as Adamo says, “No robot

is as sophisticated as an insect.” Her point is that insect

nervous systems have evolved to pull off complex behaviors

in the simplest possible ways, and robots show us how

simple it is possible to be.
If we can program them to

accomplish all the adaptive actions that pain supposedly

enables

without

also

programming

them

with

consciousness, then evolution—a far superior innovator

that works over a much longer timeframe—would surely

have pushed minimalist insect brains in the same direction.
For that reason, Adamo thinks it’s unlikely that insects (or

crustaceans) feel pain.
Or, at least, their experience of pain

is likely to be very different from ours.
The same goes for

fish.
“I would expect they have something, but what?” she

says.
“It’s probably not the same.”

This point is crucial.
The controversies about animal

pain often assume that they either feel exactly what we feel

or nothing at all, as if they’re either little people or

sophisticated robots.
This dichotomy is false, but it persists

because it’s difficult to imagine an intermediate state.
We

know that some people have different thresholds of pain

than others, just as we know that some have blurrier vision.
But a qualitatively different version of pain is as

conceptually challenging as a scallop’s scene-less vision.
Could pain exist without consciousness?
If you strip the

emotion out of pain, are you just left with nociception, or a

gray area that our imaginations struggle to fill?
Perhaps

more than for other senses, it is easy to forget that pain can

vary, and hard to conceive of how it might.
—

IN SEPTEMBER 2010, the European Union extended its

regulations on animal research to cephalopods—the group

that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish.
Being

invertebrates, cephalopods aren’t usually covered by laws

that protect the welfare of backboned lab animals like mice

or monkeys.
But they also have much larger nervous

systems than most invertebrates—500 million neurons in

an octopus, compared to 100,000 in a fruit fly.
They show

intelligent and flexible behaviors that surpass those of

some vertebrates like reptiles and amphibians.
And, as the

EU noted in its directive, “there is scientific evidence of

their ability to experience pain, suffering, distress and

lasting harm.” That statement came as a surprise to Robyn

Crook, who had worked with cephalopods and knew of no

such evidence.
The EU seemed to have assumed that

apparently intelligent animals must be capable of suffering.
But at the time, no one even knew if they had nociceptors,

let alone if they experienced pain.
“There was a huge

disconnect between what science knew at that point and

what legislators presumed science knew,” Crook tells me.
She began to bridge that gap, starting with the longfin

squid—a foot-long species that is commonly fished in the

North Atlantic.
This animal frequently loses the tips of its

arms, either to aggressive rival squid or to the pincers of

crabs.
Crook mimicked these wounds with a scalpel.
As

expected, the squid jetted away while releasing clouds of

distracting ink, and changed colors to blend in with their

surroundings.
A few days later, they were still quicker to

flee and hide.
But surprisingly, they never touched,

groomed, or cradled their wounds, the way humans, rats,

and even hermit crabs do.
They could easily reach their

stump with any of their other seven arms, but they didn’t

try.
Even more surprisingly, Crook found that injured squid

behave as if their entire bodies were sore.
When humans

and other mammals get cut or bruised, the damaged area is

painful but the rest of the body isn’t.
If I singe my hand, it

hurts when I prod the burn but not when I poke my foot.
But when Crook damaged one of the squid’s fins, the

nociceptors on the opposite fin were just as excitable as

those on the wounded side.
Imagine if your entire body

became delicate to the touch whenever you stubbed your

toe: That’s a squid’s reality.
“When they’re injured, their

whole body becomes hypersensitive,” Crook tells me.
“They

go from being normal to this potential world of pain.” This

might explain why they don’t groom their wounds.
They

can sense that they’ve been hurt, but they might not be

able to tell where.
For mammals, the localized nature of pain allows us to

protect and clean vulnerable body parts, while getting on

with the rest of our lives.
Why should squid lack such a

useful source of information?
One possibility, Crook says,

“is that everything in the ocean will eat a squid.” Injured

squid are especially attractive to predatory fish, either

because they are more conspicuous or because they look

(or smell) like easier prey.
By setting their entire bodies on

high alert, they might be better at evading attacks that

could come from any direction.[*9] Body-wide sensitivity

also makes sense for animals that cannot physically reach

most of their bodies.
What good would it do them to know

that a fin has been injured when they can’t do anything

about it?
Octopuses are different.
Unlike squid, they can touch

every part of their bodies.
They can even reach inside

themselves to groom their own gills—the equivalent of a

human putting a hand down their throat to scratch their

lungs.
And unlike squid, which are stuck in open-water

groups and can’t take a day off, octopuses can hole up in

solitary dens until they feel better.
Since they have the time

and dexterity to tend to their injuries, it would make sense

for them to know where their wounds are.
And as Crook

showed, they do.
Octopuses will sometimes break off an

arm if its tip is injured.
When that happens, the stump will

be more sensitive than the arms around it, and octopuses

will cradle that stump in their beaks.
In her latest study,

published in 2021, Crook found that octopuses will avoid

places where they’ve been injected with acetic acid, but

gravitate to places where they receive painkillers.
And once

they’re injected with local anesthetic, they stop grooming

their injured arms.
In her latest paper, Crook is

unambiguous: “Octopuses are capable of experiencing

pain.”

Even before that study was published, Crook told me

that she runs her lab on the assumption that cephalopods

feel pain.
She does studies that could improve cephalopod

welfare, like checking if anesthetics work on them.
She

uses as few animals as possible (while still being

statistically robust) and ensures that their injuries are

minimal.
Thinking through the ethics of animal research,

especially when that research is about pain, is not easy,

“but I think it should be hard,” she says.
“You should be

distressed by what you’re doing to an animal in an

experiment, even if it’s not painful.
Animals don’t sign up

for this.
Even if my broader goal is to alleviate animal

suffering, the animal sitting in the tank doesn’t know that.”

Many scientists who study pain feel the same.
They

argue that whether cephalopods, fish, or crustaceans feel

what humans do or experience something radically

different, there is enough evidence to invoke the

precautionary principle.
“It’s highly possible that these

animals can suffer,” Elwood says, “and we should consider

ways of avoiding that suffering.”

—

THE MANY DEBATES about pain in animals often revolve

around a simple question: Do they feel it?
And lurking

behind that question are several implicit ones.
Is it okay to

boil a lobster?
Should I stop eating octopus?
Can I go

fishing?
[*10] When we ask if animals can feel pain, we’re

asking less about the animals themselves, and more about

what we can do to them.
That attitude limits our

understanding of what animals actually sense.
There is much more to pain than its presence or

absence.
Shelley Adamo is right that we need to

understand more about its benefits and costs.
Pain does not

exist for its own sake.
There’s no reason why anything

should hurt.
Things hurt so that animals can do something

with that information.
And without understanding their

needs and their limitations, it’s hard to interpret their

behavior correctly.
Insects, for example, often do alarming things that seem

like they should be excruciating.
Rather than limping,

they’ll carry on putting pressure on a crushed limb.
Male

praying mantises will continue mating with females that

are devouring them.
Caterpillars will continue munching on

a leaf while parasitic wasp larvae eat them from the inside

out.
Cockroaches will cannibalize their own guts if given a

chance.
These behaviors “strongly suggest that if a pain

sense is present, it is not having any adaptive influence on

the behavior,” wrote Craig Eisemann and colleagues in

1984.
But maybe they simply show what insects are willing

to endure?
Maybe cockroaches and mantises prioritize

protein and procreation over pain, tolerating it in the same

way that athletes and soldiers can in the middle of

competition or combat.
Perhaps caterpillars don’t feel the

pain of being eaten alive because they can’t alleviate that

pain.
Consider also the squid and octopuses.
Both are

cephalopods, but they’ve been evolving separately for more

than 300 million years, roughly the same amount of time

that separates mammals and birds.
Their bodies and

lifestyles are utterly different, so it’s no surprise that their

nervous systems function very differently after injury.
Rather than asking if cephalopods experience pain, we

might ask which ones experience it, and how.
The same

goes for the 34,000 known species of fish, the 67,000

known species of crustaceans, and the who-knows-how-

many-million species of insects.
It’s ridiculous to treat

these groups as monolithic when we know, from other

senses like vision and smell, that even closely related

animals differ in how they perceive the world.
Instead of focusing on whether pain even exists, we

might ask, as physiologist Catherine Williams told me, “In

which conditions and from which stimuli is it an advantage

to have it, experience it, and display it?” And we would find

that pain manifests differently in a burrowing mole-rat than

in a scorpion-hunting mouse, or in a long-armed octopus

than in a short-armed squid.
We might possibly find

different forms of pain in sociable animals that can call for

help or solitary ones that must fend for themselves, or in

short-lived animals that have few chances to repeat their

mistakes versus long-lived ones that have many chances to.
And we would certainly learn that pain can vary in animals

that must tolerate extremes of temperature, from baking

heat to freezing cold.
SKIP NOTES

*1 Naked mole-rats are so weird that their bizarre traits have often been

mythologized, and many of the claims that surround them are untrue.
I highly

recommend the paper “Surprisingly Long Survival of Premature Conclusions

About Naked Mole-Rat Biology,” which is an important corrective to some of

these myths.
*2 Unlike vision, smell, and hearing, which detect specific stimuli—light,

molecules, sound—nociception detects a class of very different stimuli that are

united by their potential to cause harm.
It’s a mishmash sense, combining

elements of smell, which we’ve already explored, and others, like touch, that

we are about to.
*3 This condition can be dangerous.
Children and babies who have it don’t

learn that injuries are dangerous, and often bite their own fingers, bang their

heads against objects, or scald themselves.
Those who survive are sometimes

exploited.
The first documented case of congenital indifference to pain was a

man who made a living at a circus, as a human pincushion.
One Pakistani boy

who had the condition would perform on the streets by stabbing knives

through his arms.
He died on his 14th birthday after jumping off a roof.
*4 I highly recommend Leigh Cowart’s Hurts So Good—an exploration of

masochists, ultramarathoners, icy ocean bathers, and other people who

engage with pain on purpose.
*5 Brain scanners aren’t helpful: It’s unclear what patterns of brain activity would indicate a conscious mind, let alone a conscious mind in pain, let alone

a conscious, non-human mind in pain.
*6 Until the 1980s, there were still debates about whether premature or

newborn human babies could perceive pain or would benefit from painkillers.
*7 For a sense of the debate, compare reviews written by Sneddon and by a

group of authors led by James Rose.
You can also read Brian Key’s paper

entitled “Why Fish Do Not Feel Pain,” and the dozens of replies that largely

contradict him.
*8 Debates around animal pain can be extremely acrimonious.
But notably,

Adamo, Sneddon, and Elwood all jointly published a review on defining animal

pain, and all speak good-naturedly about each other’s views, even though they

disagree.
*9 Crook confirmed this in an experiment.
She showed that sea bass will

specifically target injured squid, which take evasive maneuvers earlier than

uninjured animals.
If she treated them with anesthetic, she also slowed their

escapes, and reduced their odds of survival.
*10 The answers to these questions could fill a completely different book.
Here, I will only note that subjective pain is just one thing to consider when thinking

about animal welfare, and may not even be the most important.
“ We could

simply accept that nociception itself is more than enough to affect an animal’s

welfare, and thus may require treatment,” the veterinarian Frederic Chatigny

wrote.
“Pain, while defined by consciousness, is not necessary for an animal’s

wellbeing to be negatively affected.”





5.
So Cool

Heat

I’M COLD.
OUTSIDE, THE AUTUMNAL air is a warm 24°C

(75°F), but I’m inside what’s essentially a large walk-in

fridge that’s been chilled to just 4°C (39°F).
It’s an artificial

hibernaculum—a room designed to mimic the dark, frigid

conditions in which hibernating animals spend the winter.
Since I am apparently incapable of packing suitable

clothing for a reporting trip, I’ve turned up in a light T-

shirt.
As heat bleeds from my bare-skinned arms, I

instinctively rub them.
Meanwhile, Maddy Junkins, who is

more sensibly dressed, reaches into a box of shredded

paper and pulls out a small furry sphere.
It’s a thirteen-

lined ground squirrel.
Roughly the size and weight of a

grapefruit, it’s curled into a ball, with its tail brushing its

nose.
It looks like a big, fancy chipmunk, with 13 black

stripes streaking down its back and light spots within those

stripes.
I can see those patterns because my eyes can

detect the red light that illuminates the room.
The

squirrel’s eyes cannot, and, regardless, they’re tightly shut.
It’s mid-September, and the long hibernation season has

begun.
Hibernation isn’t sleep but a more intense state of

inactivity that allows the ground squirrel to survive the

harsh winters of northern America.
During this time, its

metabolism almost totally shuts down.[*1] When Junkins

delicately places it in my latex-gloved hand, I’m instantly

struck by how still it is.
There’s none of the manic, twitchy

energy that rodents possess.
Its flanks, which ought to be

vibrating with frenetic breaths, aren’t moving.
Its heart,

which beats at least 5 times a second in the summer, now

ekes out the same number of beats over a minute.
“There’s

usually so much life in your hand, but this is not that at all,”

Junkins says.
“It’s an inactive, cold lump.” Indeed, the

squirrel soon becomes uncomfortably chilly to the touch.
Its body has abandoned the summertime norm of 37°C

(99°F) and instead hovers at 4°C (39°F), just like every

inanimate object in the room.
It, too, feels uncannily

inanimate—devoid of warmth and so seemingly devoid of

life.
Only its paws confirm that it’s actually living: They’re

still pink from blood, and, when gripped, they recoil, albeit

in slow motion.
If I held the squirrel for too long, the

warmth of my hand would rouse it, so I put it back in its

makeshift den before leaving the hibernaculum.
Outside,

Elena Gracheva, who runs the facility, is waiting.
“How was it?” she asks.
“So cool,” I say.
Gracheva is a scholar of heat and the ways animals

detect it.
Having studied vampire bats and rattlesnakes

(which we’ll get to later), she recently turned her attention

to the more adorable thirteen-lined ground squirrels and

their remarkable ability to withstand low temperatures.
“If

you put me in a cold room, I’ll start to feel pain, and then

hypothermia,” she tells me.
“I probably couldn’t survive for

more than 24 hours.” A thirteen-lined ground squirrel,

however, can stay between 2°C (36°F) and 7°C (45°F) for

half a year.
The closely related Arctic ground squirrel can

go even lower, withstanding subzero temperatures of

−2.9 °C (27°F).
These feats of endurance depend on an

essential ability that often goes unnoticed: The squirrel

doesn’t mind the cold.
Vanessa Matos-Cruz, who worked with Gracheva,

demonstrated this by putting ground squirrels on a pair of

heatable plates.
If one of these was heated to 30°C (86°F)

and the other to 20°C (68°F), where would the animal

decide to stand?
Rats, mice, and humans almost always go

for 30°C since that produces a pleasant sensation of

warmth— think about how luxurious heated floors feel.
But

to thirteen-lined ground squirrels, 20°C is just as delightful

as 30°C.
They only start gravitating toward the 30°C plate

when the alternative falls below 10°C (50°F)—a

temperature that rats and mice will completely avoid

because it’s painfully cold.
Even if the second plate falls to

0°C (32°F), the ground squirrels will still stand on it.
Without this tolerance for low temperatures, a ground

squirrel wouldn’t be able to hibernate.
Instead, it would do

what we do when we get too cold while asleep: start

burning fat to produce heat, and, if that doesn’t help,

automatically wake up.
For us, that’s a lifesaver.
For a

ground squirrel in the dead of winter, it would be lethal.
It

needs to hibernate, and for that to happen, its senses have

been adjusted accordingly.
It’s not that the ground squirrel

ignores the cold.
Instead, it has a different conception of

what “cold” is—a different minimum temperature at which

its body can no longer cope and its senses raise an alarm.
All living things are deeply affected by temperature.
If

conditions are too cold, chemical reactions slow to a

useless crawl.
If they are too hot, proteins and other

molecules of life lose their shape and fall apart.
These

effects constrain most of life to a Goldilocks zone where the

temperature is just right.
The limits of that zone vary, but

they always exist, which is why every animal with a nervous

system has a way of sensing and responding to

temperature.
Animals use a variety of temperature sensors, and the

most thoroughly studied of these are a group of proteins

called TRP channels.
They are found throughout the body

on the surface of sensory neurons, where they act as tiny

gates that open when they reach the right temperature.
When this happens, ions enter the neurons, electrical

signals travel to the brain, and we feel the sensations of hot

or cold.
Some TRP channels are tuned to hot temperatures,

and others to cold ones.
(Cold isn’t just the absence of hot;

it’s a different sense in its own right.)[*2] TRP channels also

respond to different severities of temperature: Some detect

mild and innocuous ranges, while others fire at dangerous

and painful extremes.
Certain chemicals can trigger these

channels as well, producing heating and cooling sensations.
Chili peppers burn because the capsaicin within them

triggers TRPV1—a TRP channel that detects painfully high

temperatures.
[*3] Mint cools because it contains menthol,

which activates the cold sensor called TRPM8.
These same sensors are found throughout the animal

kingdom, but each species has its own subtly different

versions that are calibrated to its body and lifestyle.
Warm-

blooded animals produce their own heat, and their versions

of the cold sensor TRPM8 alert them if their body

temperatures start dipping below a narrow comfortable

range.
In a rat, that set point occurs at around 24°C (75°F).
In a chicken, whose body runs at a slightly hotter

temperature, TRPM8 is tuned to 29°C (84°F) instead.
Cold-

blooded animals, by contrast, rely on their environment for

warmth, and their body temperatures fluctuate over a wide

range.
Consequently, their versions of TRPM8 are typically

set much lower—at 14°C (57°F) in frogs.
Fish seem to lack

TRPM8 altogether, and most of them can tolerate

temperatures close to freezing.
Even if they do feel pain, it

seems that they have no idea what it’s like to be

agonizingly cold.
Individual humans might feel comfortable

at different temperatures, but that variation is even greater

across the entire animal kingdom.
And what about the ground squirrels?
Matos-Cruz found

that their version of TRPM8 is very similar to that of other

warm-blooded rodents but has a few mutations that make it

much less sensitive.
It still responds to menthol, but barely

reacts to temperatures as low as 10°C (50°F).
That partly

explains why these squirrels can hibernate so comfortably

in conditions we’d find intolerably frigid.
[*4]

The TRPV1 sensor, which detects painful heat, is also

tuned to the needs of its owners, and especially to their

body temperatures.
It activates at 45°C (113°F) in

chickens, 42°C (108°F) in mice and humans, 38°C (100°F)

in frogs, and 33°C (91°F) in zebrafish (which might have no

use for a cold sensor but clearly benefit from a hot one).
Each species has its own definition of hot.
The temperature

at which we live would be painful to a zebrafish.
The

temperature that would start to agonize a mouse wouldn’t

bother a chicken.
And even chickens are overshadowed by

two species that have the least sensitive versions of TRPV1

thus far tested, enabling them to shrug off heat that other

creatures can’t bear.
For obvious reasons, one of these is

the desert-dwelling Bactrian camel.
Unexpectedly, the

second is—drumroll, please—the thirteen-lined ground

squirrel!
The unassuming rodent that I held not only can

cope with temperatures that are close to freezing but also

can abide extreme heat.
In Gracheva’s hotplate tests, the

squirrels will scurry over to a colder plate only if the one

they’re standing on reaches a scorching 55°C (131°F).
No

wonder they thrive throughout the United States, from

Minnesota in the north to Texas in the south.
Their

temperature sensors influence their geographical range,

the seasons in which they’re active, and much else besides.
By defining the temperatures that animals can sense and

tolerate, and by tweaking their personal limits of “hot” and

“cold,” these sensors define where, when, and how they

live.
Those lives can be extreme.
The Saharan silver ant

forages under the midday heat of Earth’s greatest desert,

over sands that can reach 53°C (127°F), while the Pompeii

worm, which lives near volcanic undersea vents, can also

resist brief spells at similar temperatures.
Snow flies are

active at −6°C (21°F), while ice worms spend their entire

lives on glacial ice; both animals will die if you hold them.
When scientists study these so-called extremophiles, they

tend to focus on adaptations like heat-reflecting hairs in

their bodies or self-made antifreeze in their blood.
But such

adaptations would be useless if an animal’s sensory system

were constantly screaming at it, triggering feelings of pain

(or nociception).
If you want to live in the Sahara, or at the

bottom of the ocean, or on a glacier, you’d better tweak

your senses to like it.
This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch

extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the

Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it’s

easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives.
We admire them not just for their physiological resilience

but also for their psychological fortitude.
We project our

senses onto theirs and assume that they’d be in discomfort

because we’d be in discomfort.
But their senses are tuned

to the temperatures in which they live.
A camel likely isn’t

distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don’t

mind huddling through an Antarctic storm.
Let the storm

rage on.
The cold doesn’t bother them, anyway.
—

THE THERMOSTAT IN my house currently reads 21°C (70°F).
But the entire house isn’t at the same temperature.
I’m

working in the south-facing living room, which is

considerably warmer than the other parts.
And as I type

these words, my head is being warmed by a sunbeam while

my feet are chilling in the shade beneath my desk.
Such

variations exist at small scales, too: The air 5 millimeters

above my skin might be 10°C (18°F) cooler, so a fly that

landed on my arm might experience very different

temperatures on its legs than on its wings.
Being small, the

fly would quickly take on the temperature of its

environment.
If it landed on my head, the sun would heat

its body to harmful temperatures within a few seconds.
That’s unlikely to happen, though, thanks to temperature

sensors at the tips of its antennae.
Neuroscientist Marco Gallio demonstrated how good

those sensors are by putting fruit flies in chambers whose

quadrants were heated to varying degrees—essentially the

same experiment that Matos-Cruz did with ground

squirrels and hotplates.
Gallio showed that flies could

easily stay within air spaces that are kept to 25°C (77°F),

which they love, while avoiding neighboring zones of 30°C

(86°F), which they dislike, or 40°C (104°F), which kills

them.
They could also make these decisions at incredible

speed.
Whenever they’d hit the edge of a hot zone, they’d

immediately execute a sharp midair U-turn, as if they’d run

into an invisible wall.
Such maneuvers are possible because the chitin that

makes up a fly’s antennae is very good at conducting heat

and because the antennae themselves are tiny.
They can so

quickly equilibrate with their surroundings that a fly can

instantly tell if it has blundered into air that’s too hot or

cold.
Gallio found that it can even use its antennae as

stereo thermometers to track gradients of heat, much as a

dog uses its paired nostrils for odors.
The fly can tell if one

antenna is just 0.1 °C hotter than the other, and uses those

comparisons to steer toward the more comfortable

temperature.
When Gallio tells me about these results, I

suddenly reconsider the movements of every fly I’ve ever

seen.
Their paths, which always seemed so random and

chaotic, now take on an air of purpose, as if the insect is

threading its way through an obstacle course of hot and

cold that I can’t perceive, don’t care about, and oafishly

wade through.
The fly’s ability is called thermotaxis, and it’s common in

the animal kingdom.
[*5] Creatures big and small use their

thermosensors to tell if their surroundings have become

intolerable, and to gauge how the temperature around

them changes as they move.
Like children who are told if

they’re getting warmer or colder as they approach a hidden

object, most animals use changes in ambient temperature

to follow the gradients of heat that are created by

sunbeams and shadows, breezes and currents.
But some

have transformed this common ability into something rarer.
They can tell if point B is hotter than point A without

having to move there.
They can actively seek out sources of

heat from a distance.
—

AT 11:20 A.M.
on August 10, 1925, a bolt of lightning

struck an oil depot near the town of Coalinga, California.
The strike ignited a lake of fire that burned for three days.
Flames rose so high that, at night, people could read by

that light from nine miles away.
And while they read, they

might have also noticed tiny black specks that flew against

the billowing curtains of smoke and traveled toward the

inferno.
These specks were fire-chaser beetles.
They were

living up to their name.
Moths are famously drawn to flames, but it’s the light

that attracts them.
[*6] The fire-chasing Melanophila beetles,

however, are drawn to heat.
These black, half-inch-long

insects have been found in what entomologist Earle Gorton

Linsley described as “unbelievable numbers” in smelting

plants, the kilns of cement factories, and the vats of hot

syrup in sugar refineries.
One summer, Linsley saw them

swarming an outdoor barbecue where “large quantities of

deer meat were being prepared.” In the 1940s, the insects

would regularly bother football fans in Berkeley’s

California Memorial Stadium “by alighting on the clothing

or even biting the neck or hands,” Linsley wrote.
It’s

possible that “the beetles are attracted by the smoke from

some twenty thousand (more or less) cigarettes which on

still days sometimes hangs like a haze over the stadium.”

These incidents are unfortunate for both species, because

industrial plants, barbecues, and football stadiums are

unhelpful distractions that waylay the beetles from their

true targets: forest fires.
Arriving at a fire, the beetles have perhaps the most

dramatic sex in the animal kingdom, mating as a forest

burns around them.
Later, the females lay their eggs on

charred, cooled bark.
When the wood-eating grubs hatch,

they find an Eden.
The trees they devour are too injured to

defend against insect larvae feeding within them.
The

predators that might eat them are put off by the smoke and

heat emitted from the embers and ashes.
In peace, they

thrive, mature, and eventually fly off in search of their own

blazes.
But forest fires are rare and unpredictable, and the

beetles must have some means of detecting them from afar.
Being active during the day, the beetles can’t spot distant

flames in the way that nocturnal insects easily could.
They

can’t rely on seeing plumes of smoke since their eyes

probably aren’t sharp enough to distinguish such plumes

from clouds.
And though their antennae can certainly

detect the smell of scorched wood, such clues are heavily

influenced by the direction of the wind.
For them, the most

reliable cue is heat.
The atoms and molecules in all objects are constantly

jiggling about, and this motion produces electromagnetic

radiation.
As an object gets hotter, its molecules move

faster, and it emits more radiation at higher frequencies.
That radiation includes some visible light—think about the

glow of heated metal—but most of it lies in the infrared

spectrum.
[*7] We can’t see infrared, but we might be able to

feel it.
When you stand near a fireplace, infrared light

radiates from the burning wood.
When it reaches you, its

energy is absorbed and heats up the closest parts of your

skin, triggering the temperature sensors within it.
You feel

the heat.
You can also work out where it’s coming from

because the parts of your body under infrared illumination

are getting hotter while those that lie in the infrared

shadow are not.
But this trick only works at close range.
Infrared light spreads from the fireplace in all directions,

and some of it gets absorbed on its travels.
As you walk

farther from the logs, less and less of that light reaches

you, until its imparted energy no longer warms your body

to a noticeable degree.
To detect the infrared light from a

distant source, either the source must be extremely intense

(like the sun) or you need specialized equipment.
Melanophila beetles have the latter.
Below their wings and just behind their middle legs,

these insects have a pair of pits.
Each one contains a

cluster of around 70 spheres that together look like a

malformed raspberry.
When zoologist Helmut Schmitz

examined these spheres under a microscope, he saw that

each is filled with fluid and encloses the tip of a pressure-

sensitive neuron.
When infrared radiation hits the spheres,

the fluid inside them heats up and expands.
It can’t bulge

outward because the spheres have hard exteriors, so

instead it squeezes the nerves, causing them to fire.
This is

a different kind of heat sensing than what we’ve seen

earlier in this chapter.
Unlike hibernating ground squirrels

or zipping fruit flies, the beetles aren’t just measuring the

ambient temperature of their surroundings.
Instead, much

as we do when we bask by a fireplace, they’re sensing

radiant heat that travels from hot sources in the form of

infrared light.
The beetles’ spherical sensors must be extraordinarily

sensitive, since the insects frequently travel to burning

forests and other hot places from dozens of miles away.
The

Coalinga oil depot that was struck by lightning in 1925 lies

in the middle of an arid, treeless region, and most of the

beetles that arrived there likely came from forests that lay

80 miles to the east.
Based on this distance, and

simulations of the 1925 blaze, Schmitz calculated that the

beetles’ pits are more sensitive than most commercial

infrared detectors and on a par with state-of-the-art

quantum detectors that must first be cooled with liquid

nitrogen.
Schmitz thinks that the pits couldn’t possibly be

this sensitive on their own.
The beetles must have ways of

making them more responsive.
During flight, their beating wings create vibrations that

travel into the nearby pits, shake the spherical sensors, and

push the sensory neurons within to the edge of firing.
It

now takes much less infrared radiation to fully push them

over that edge.
Think of this another way: Imagine a brick

that’s lying flat on its side.
If a fly crashed into it, it

wouldn’t budge.
But if it was instead balanced on its edge,

even a fly would be enough to topple it.
In that state, the

brick would be primed to react to a tiny amount of energy.
Schmitz argues that a fire-chaser beetle’s beating wings

prime its heat sensors in a similar way, setting them up to

detect sources of infrared that would normally be too weak.
A beetle that’s sitting on a tree would be relatively

insensitive.
But as soon as it takes off in search of fires, its

body automatically widens its search area and transforms

even faint traces of distant heat into blazing beacons.
[*8]

The beetles’ bodies are relevant in another way.
As with

all insects, their outer surface is very good at absorbing the

kinds of infrared radiation that fires emit.
The beetles were

effectively pre-adapted for chasing fires.
Their ancestors

merely needed to develop a sensor that could make sense

of the infrared light that their bodies naturally absorb.
The

11 species of Melanophila did this and became so

successful that they spread across five continents.
They

never reached Australia, though.
There, three other types

of insects independently evolved infrared sensors that

allow them to exploit the tranquil paradise of a charred

forest.
Fire-chasing is a trick so useful that it has evolved at

least four times over.
And fires are not the only sources of

heat that an animal might want to track.
Some species

search for the warmth of bodies.
—

“YOU’RE DEFINITELY NOT allowed to come in here,” Astra

Bryant tells me.
I dutifully oblige, hovering outside while

Bryant rummages through a fridge.
After a few minutes,

she emerges with a pipette that holds 5 microliters of clear

liquid in its tip.
It’s a volume so small I can barely see it.
I

certainly can’t see the thousands of nematode worms that

are swimming inside.
Nematodes are one of the most diverse and numerous

groups of animals, including tens of thousands of species

that are mostly harmless to humans.
The exceptions

include the species that Bryant is carrying—Strongyloides

stercoralis, the threadworm.
Its larvae abound in soil and

water that are contaminated by feces.
If an unlucky person

stands or walks through such places, the worms swim

toward them and penetrate their skin.
Threadworms, along

with hookworms and other skin-penetrating nematodes,

infect around 800 million people around the world, from

Vietnam to Alabama.
They cause gastrointestinal problems,

stunted development, and sometimes death.
They’re also

very hard to treat.
Bryant and her mentor Elissa Hallem are

trying to find out how the worms find their hosts in the first

place, in order to create new ways of preventing infections.
Odors are certainly part of the equation.
So is heat.
Bryant carries her pipette of monstrosities to a steel

chamber with a biohazard sign on its door.
Inside, there’s a

slab of translucent gel that has been asymmetrically heated

so its right side is at room temperature, while its left is the

temperature of a human body.
Bryant squeezes the worms

out onto the middle of the slab, and they appear on a

nearby monitor as a ring of white dots.
With horrific

immediacy, the dots start to move.
The ring quickly

stretches into a cloud that drifts leftward toward the heat.
Drifts?
More like zooms.
Each worm is just a millimeter or

two long, but quickly covers a distance several hundred

times greater.
I’m starting to understand why hundreds of

millions of people are infected.
Within three minutes,

they’re all huddled on the leftmost edge, searching for the

source of the heat they can sense but not find.
“This was

shocking the first time I saw it,” says Bryant, who expected

the worms to spend hours traveling distances that in fact

they covered in minutes.
“I show this in my talks, and I

generally get groans out of the audience.”

Parasitism may be grisly, but it’s one of the most

common lifestyles in nature.
It’s likely that the majority of

animal species are parasites, which survive by exploiting

the bodies of other creatures.
Many of these freeloaders

are fastidious about their choice of hosts and need some

way of finding the right targets.
Smells provide good cues.
But hundreds of millions of years ago, another possibility

emerged.
The ancestors of birds and mammals independently

evolved the ability to produce and control their own body

heat, divorcing their temperatures from the temperatures

of their surroundings.
This ability, known technically as

endothermy and colloquially as warm-bloodedness,

endowed birds and mammals with speed and stamina,

durability and possibility.
It allowed them to survive in

extreme environments and stay active over long durations

and distances.
It also made them very easy to track.
Their

unwavering body heat made them perpetually blaring

beacons, which parasites could use to find hosts, and

especially blood vessels.
Blood, after all, is a superb source

of food—rich in nutrients, well balanced, and usually

sterile.
It’s no surprise that at least 14,000 animal species

have evolved to feed on it, or that many of these—bedbugs,

mosquitoes, tsetse flies, and assassin bugs—are attuned to

heat.
Among mammals, only three species of vampire bats

feed exclusively on blood.
Two mostly drink from birds, but

the common vampire targets mammals, especially large

ones like cows or pigs.
It’s a small animal that measures 3

inches from nose to tail and has a flattened, pug-like face.
On the ground, its wings fold back, and it adopts a

sprawling, four-legged stance.
It approaches targets like

this, either landing directly on their backs or alighting

nearby and crawling over in a most un-bat-like way.
Once

near, it painlessly inflicts a small cut with its blade-like

incisors and laps up the blood that flows out.
A compound

in its saliva, aptly known as draculin, stops the blood from

clotting, allowing the bat to feed for up to an hour.
It can

drink its own body weight in blood and must do so once a

night to survive.
Other senses help it to track a target from

afar, but once it gets at least 6 inches away, it uses a

thermal sense to pick a good bite site.
The vampire’s heat sensors lie in its nose, which consists

of a heart-shaped flap lying over a semicircular pad.
Sandwiched between these layers are a trio of millimeter-

wide pits, each one riddled with heat-sensing neurons.
Among infrared-sensing animals, vampire bats have a

unique problem because they are themselves warm-

blooded.
The neurons in their pits ought to be bamboozled

by their own body heat, but a dense network of tissue

insulates them and keeps them 9°C (16°F) cooler than the

rest of the bat’s face.
Elena Gracheva studied those neurons in the days before

she started working with those adorable ground squirrels.
Her colleagues in Venezuela rode to caves where the bats

roost, lured them out using their own horses as bait,

dissected out their pit neurons, and shipped the tissue

samples to Gracheva in the United States.
By analyzing

those samples, she showed that the neurons are loaded

with a special version of TRPV1—the same temperature

sensor that we met earlier in this chapter, which usually

detects painful heat and the sting of chilies.
TRPV1 is

calibrated to different temperatures depending on what

respective animals would find painfully hot—33°C (91°F) in

a cold-blooded zebrafish, and 42°C (108°F) in a warm-

blooded mouse or human.
In the vampire bat, TRPV1 is set

at a typical mammalian level, except in the pit neurons,

where it instead goes off at a much lower temperature,

31°C (88°F).
The bat has retuned this sensor from one that

detects extreme heat into one that detects body heat.
Ticks also suck blood, but their heat sensors are found

on the tips of their first pair of legs.
When they wave these

legs around—a behavior known as questing—it looks like

they’re waiting to grab something.
They are, but they’re

also sensing.
Jakob von Uexküll, coiner of the Umwelt

concept, wrote that ticks track their hosts through scent

and use temperature only to check if they’ve landed on

bare skin.
But this isn’t true.
Ann Carr and Vincent Salgado

recently found that ticks can detect body heat from up to

13 feet away.
More surprisingly, the duo showed that

common repellents like DEET and citronella don’t disrupt a

tick’s sense of smell but do stop them from tracking heat.
This discovery might lead to new ways of preventing tick

bites, and it might force scientists to reevaluate a lot of

previous tick studies.
How many past experiments have

been misinterpreted because researchers have had an

inaccurate picture of a tick’s Umwelt?
In hindsight, the tick’s thermal sense should have been

clear.
The organs at the tips of their questing legs were

mostly thought to be odor detectors.
But these structures

also include tiny spherical pits with neurons at their bases,

much like those on a vampire bat’s face.
Tellingly, these

pits are covered with a thin sheet that has a small hole in it.
That’s a terrible design for a nose, because the sheet would

block most odorants from reaching the underlying neurons.
It is, however, an excellent design for an infrared sensor.
Infrared radiation, emanating from the blood of a distant

host, would be mostly blocked by the sheet, but some

would pass through the hole to partly illuminate the pit

below.
By analyzing which bits were lit up, the tick could

work out the direction of the radiation, and the

whereabouts of its source.
This idea still needs to be

confirmed, but it makes sense.
After all, it’s how the most

sophisticated heat sensors in nature work.
To find them,

you need a little courage, some shin guards, and a long

pole.
—

WE CAN’T FIND Julia.
We know she’s right in front of us,

lurking within a rat nest that’s inside a prickly pear bush,

but we can’t see her.
We can hear a loud telltale beep as

our antenna picks up a radio signal from the transmitter

inside her, but she herself is silent.
She’s not even rattling.
We leave her be and head off in search of another snake.
My wife, Liz Neeley, and I have come looking for

rattlesnakes in a fenced tract of California scrubland that’s

owned by the U.S.
Marine Corps.
Leading us are Rulon

Clark—who spent his childhood running around after

snakes and lizards and never really stopped—and his

student Nate Redetzke.
Redetzke regularly has to relocate

snakes that show up in nearby homes and has implanted

several of them with radio trackers.
Having parked on a

dirt lane aptly called Rattlesnake Canyon Road, we donned

Kevlar shin guards and tromped off through the sagebrush,

breathing in the fennel-scented air, dodging poison oak,

and clambering over boulders.
“Working with reptiles makes you very sensitive to

temperature and weather,” says Clark.
He started our

expedition in the early morning, hoping to find rattlesnakes

that were openly basking in what forecasts said would be

an unseasonably warm October day.
But the forecasts were

wrong.
It’s actually cold and overcast, so although we are

out, the snakes are not.
Powers was hidden deep within a

cactus.
Truman was somewhere inside a pile of boulders.
Julia was out of sight.
(Redetzke has named them all after

former presidents and first ladies.) We’re about to give up

when he hears a loud beep, perks up, and bounds off

around the hillside.
Moments later, he shouts that he’s

found Margaret.
He prizes apart the branches of a bush,

reaches in with a pair of tongs, and pulls out a red diamond

rattlesnake—rust-colored and 3 feet long.
Red diamonds

are supposedly docile, but even they have their limits.
As

Redetzke lowers Margaret into a bag, she strikes it, leaving

globs of yellow venom on the cloth.
Once inside, she rattles,

but she’s cold and the sound is dull.
Later, Redetzke nudges Margaret into a plastic tube

that’s just wider than her body.
Gently gripping her tail at

one end, I stare down the other into her face.
The pupils

are vertical slits.
The mouth curves upward in what looks

like a grimace.
The lidless eyes are overhung by large

horizontal scales that create what I call resting viper face—

a look of perpetual anger.
It’s a visage that normally instills

fear.
But I find her beautiful.
Who knows what she makes of

me, but at this distance, she can certainly see me, and not

just with her eyes.
With a pair of small pits nestled just

behind her nostrils, she can detect the infrared radiation

that’s flooding from my warm face and, to a lesser extent,

from my clothed body.
Against the cool morning sky, I must

be shining.
Heat-sensitive pits have evolved independently among

three groups of snakes.
Two of these, pythons and boas, are

non-venomous constrictors that kill with suffocating coils.
[*9] The third are the highly venomous and aptly named pit

vipers—cottonmouths,

copperheads,

moccasins,

and

rattlesnakes.[*10] Rattlesnakes will strike at warm objects,

preferring freshly killed mice over long-deceased ones, and

they’ll hit their targets in complete darkness.
Even a

congenitally blind rattlesnake that was born without eyes

could kill mice as effectively as a sighted individual.
Thanks

to its pits, its aim was good enough not only to hit the

rodents but to specifically strike them in the head.
A pit viper’s thermal sensitivity comes from the

structure of its pits (which are similar to those on a tick’s

legs).
To get an idea of their shape, imagine placing a

miniature trampoline on the bottom of a goldfish bowl and

turning the whole thing on its side.
There’s a narrow

opening, leading into a wider air-filled chamber, across

which a thin membrane is stretched.
When infrared

radiation passes through the opening, it falls upon the

membrane and heats it up.
This happens readily because

the membrane is exposed to the elements, is suspended in

midair, and is a sixth as thick as a page of this book.
It is

also riddled with some 7,000 nerve endings that detect the

slightest rise in temperature.
Those nerves, as Elena

Gracheva discovered, are packed with the heat sensor

TRPA1, carrying 400 times as much of it as neurons

elsewhere in the snake’s body.
They’ll respond if the

membrane rises in temperature by as little as 0.001 °C.
This

astonishing sensitivity means that a pit viper can detect the

warmth of a rodent from up to a meter away.
A blindfolded

rattlesnake that’s sitting on your head could sense the

warmth of a mouse on the tip of your outstretched finger.
[*11]

The pits are structurally similar to eyes.
The membrane,

which detects infrared light, is like a retina.
The opening,

which allows that light to enter, is like a pupil.
And just like

a pupil, the opening is narrow, which means that some

regions of the membrane are heated by incoming infrared

while others lie in cool shadow.
The snake can use these

patterns of hot and cold to map a heat source in its vicinity

just as it uses the light falling on its retina to construct an

image of a scene.
These similarities aren’t just

metaphorical.
Some scientists think that the pits really are

a second pair of eyes, tuned to the infrared wavelengths of

light that are invisible to the main pair.
Signals from the

two organs are initially processed by different parts of the

brain but eventually feed into a single region called the

optic tectum.
There, the two streams are combined, and

information inputs from the visible and infrared spectrums

are seemingly fused together by neurons that respond to

both.
It’s possible that the snakes really are seeing

infrared, treating it as just another color.
“ It is a fallacy to

consider the pit organs as an independent sixth sense,”

neuroscientist Richard Goris once wrote.
“What the pits do

is improve vision for their owners.” They might provide

more detail at night, reveal warm objects that are obscured

by undergrowth, or direct the snake’s attention to

scurrying prey.
[*12]

But if the pits are eyes, they’re very simple ones with

blurry vision.
They only have thousands of sensors

compared to the millions in a typical retina, and they have

no lens to focus the incoming infrared.
Nature

documentaries get this wrong when they try to show what

rattlesnakes see by filming the world with thermal

cameras.
Those images, with white and red rodents

moseying in front of blue and violet backgrounds, are

always unrealistically detailed.
Predator, the 1987 movie in

which Arnold Schwarzenegger encounters a trophy-hunting

alien, did a better job of depicting the blurriness of infrared

vision.
(This is perhaps the only time that anyone has

accused Predator of being realistic.)

Recently, physicist George Bakken simulated what the

pits would pick up when a mouse runs across a log.
He got

grainy images of small warm blobs moving over large cool

blobs.
A mouse on your finger might be detectable to a

blindfolded rattlesnake on your head, but it would be

shapeless unless it ran onto your biceps.
Pit vipers

compensate for this shortcoming by carefully choosing

their ambush sites.
Sidewinders tend to point toward

thermal edges where the environment rapidly flips between

hot and cold and a moving warm-blooded animal might be

easier to spot.
And on China’s Shedao Island, the local pit

vipers choose ambush sites that face into open sky,

allowing them to more easily detect the migrating birds

they gorge upon in spring.
How do the snakes actually perceive heat?
Chinese

herpetologist Yezhong Tang found a hint by working with

short-tailed pit vipers.
If he blocked one eye and one pit on

the same side, the snakes bit their victims 86 percent of the

time.
If he blocked either both eyes or both pits, their

accuracy fell slightly to 75 percent.
But if he blocked one

eye and one pit on opposite sides, they landed just 50

percent of their strikes.
That unexpected result suggests

that the snakes are combining visual and infrared

information.
But how do they manage when those senses

operate at such different resolutions?
Bakken wonders if

the brain could learn to better interpret the coarse

information it gets from the pits using the much sharper

information from their eyes.
After all, humans can program

artificial intelligences to classify pictures or spot hidden

patterns by training them on a large enough set of images.
Maybe a snake’s eyes provide the training set that its brain

needs to interpret the blurry information from the pits.
Whatever advantage the pits provide, it must be

significant.
The nerves in their membranes are loaded with

tiny batteries called mitochondria, far more than exist in

typical sense organs.
This suggests that the infrared sense

demands a lot of energy, so it must provide benefits that

are worthy of that cost.
It certainly seems to give pit vipers

an edge over pit-less snakes.
[*13] But the more I ask Clark

about the infrared sense, the more unanswered questions

I’m left with.[*14] Why did pit vipers evolve it when most of

them also have excellent night vision?
If the infrared sense

bolsters vision, then why didn’t it also evolve in other

nocturnal vipers?
Why did pythons and boas, which are

separated from vipers by some 90 million years of evolution

and hunt in very different ways, evolve the same trick when

more closely related snakes, like cobras and garter snakes,

did not?
And most puzzlingly, why do the pits seem to work

better when they’re cold?
[*15] “There’s something that

we’re missing,” Clark tells me.
“Maybe the infrared sense

is simply about targeting prey, but I think they’re using it in

ways that we don’t understand.”

To understand another animal’s Umwelt, you have to

watch its behavior.
But a pit viper’s behavior mostly

consists of waiting.
Since they don’t generate their own

body heat, they can go without eating for months and can

sit in ambush until exactly the right moment.
The few

researchers brave enough to study them end up with

animals that mostly sit around doing nothing, which makes

them very hard to train—or comprehend.
After all, even

animals that we already understand and that we know how

to train can sense heat in ways that are hard to explain.
—

WHEN ZOOLOGIST RONALD Kröger got a dog—a golden

retriever named Kevin—he started wondering about its

nose.
Sleeping dogs tend to have warm noses.
But shortly

after they wake up, the tips become wet and cool.
Kröger

found that in a warm room, a dog will keep its nose around

5°C cooler than the ambient temperature, and between 9°

and 17°C colder than the nose of a cow or pig in the same

space.
Why?
Vampire bats and rattlesnakes both seem to

cool their heat-sensitive pits.
Could dogs be doing the

same?
Could their noses be infrared sensors as well as

organs of smell?
Kröger certainly thinks so.
His team successfully trained

three dogs—Kevin, Delfi, and Charlie—to tell the difference

between two panels that looked and smelled the same but

that differed in temperature by 11°C.
In double-blind tests,

when handlers didn’t know the right answer and couldn’t

unconsciously influence the dogs, the three canines still

picked the right panel between 68 and 80 percent of the

time.
The team suggests that wolves, the ancestors of

domestic dogs, might have benefited from detecting the

infrared radiation coming off their large prey.
But since

such radiation rapidly weakens with distance, how would it

benefit animals that already have acute senses of hearing

and smell?
Surely a wolf would be able to sniff its meals

well before its nose could detect telltale hints of warmth.
And at close quarters, surely its eyes and ears would help it

track a running target without any help from an infrared-

sensing snout.
“It’s hard to imagine how this could be

actually useful,” says Anna Bálint, who worked on the

study.
“I guess we have to think outside of the box.”

When thinking about another Umwelt, distance always

matters.
Under the right conditions, smell and vision

operate over vast scales.
Infrared senses work over shorter

distances, unless they’re honed to detect a blazing forest

fire.
And some senses are more intimate still, requiring the

closeness of contact.
SKIP NOTES

*1 The two processes are so different that hibernating ground squirrels actually incur sleep debt and must periodically rouse from inactivity and raise their

body temperatures so they can get some actual sleep.
*2 In the 1880s, Magnus Blix used a pointed metal tube, connected to bottles of water at varying temperatures, to show that certain spots on his hand were

sensitive to hot and others to cold.
Two other scientists, Alfred Goldscheider

and Henry Donaldson, independently made the same discovery at the same

time.
*3 Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t a matter of taste.
As I can attest, having once taken a shower immediately after chopping habanero peppers, if you get

enough capsaicin on your hands and other delicate body parts, you’ll

experience that burning sensation everywhere you touch.
*4 There’s a version of the human TRPM8 that becomes increasingly common

at higher latitudes and might reflect an adaptation to colder climates.
It’s still

unclear whether people who carry this version perceive cold in a different

way.
*5 Fish, from tiny larvae to 30-foot whale sharks, will control their temperatures by ascending to warmer shallows or diving to colder depths.
Sulfide worms that live in hydrothermal vents, where scalding volcanic fluids

bubble out of the seafloor, can find pockets of cooler water amid the roiling

plumes.
Butterflies that are warming their flight muscles in a sunbeam will

stop basking when temperature sensors in their wings tell them that they’re

overheating.
Turtle embryos can even pull off thermotaxis within the confines

of their eggs, shuffling over to bask on the warmest side before they’ve even

hatched.
*6 Naomi Pierce, who showed that butterflies have temperature sensors in

their wings, isn’t fully convinced that moths are only drawn to the light of

candle flames.
She and her colleague Nanfang Yu have spent years

investigating the possibility that moth antennae can act as infrared detectors.
*7 Infrared light covers such a huge range of wavelengths that if you represent it by the length of your arm, the visible spectrum would be no wider than a

hair.
The shortest of these wavelengths, also known as near-infrared, can be

seen by certain animals like the migrating salmon we met in Chapter 1 or

humans wearing night-vision goggles.
Mid-wavelength infrared lies beyond

the scope of such sensors; these are the wavelengths that heat-seeking

missiles seek, that forest fires emit, and that fire-chaser beetles chase.
Far-

infrared is what warm bodies give off.
It’s what thermal imaging cameras and

rattlesnakes detect.
*8 For now, this idea is speculative, and very hard to test.
Schmitz would have to take electrical recordings from a beetle’s neurons, and do so in a way that

doesn’t leach any heat from the pits.
And if his theory about the flapping

wings is right, he’d have to do this in a flying insect.
“That’s very hard,” he

says, with Germanic understatement.
*9 In some ways, the pit organs of boas and pythons are very different from

those of pit vipers.
Their membranes aren’t suspended, and are likely less

sensitive.
They have several pairs of pits running up the sides of their heads,

instead of a single pair at the front of their heads—a pattern that George

Bakken compares to the compound eyes of insects.
And yet, Elena Gracheva

found that all three groups rely on the same heat sensor—TRPA1.
*10 The first Western scientist to describe their pits, back in 1683, correctly guessed that they were sense organs, but wrongly supposed that they were

ears.
Just as wrongly, others suggested that they were nostrils, tear ducts, or

sensors of smells, sounds, or vibrations.
No one hit on the right answer until

1935, when Margarete Ros—no relation to Margaret the snake—noticed that

she could stop her pet python from slithering toward warm objects by

covering its pits with Vaseline.
She deduced that the snake uses its pits to

sense the body heat of its prey.
*11 Just trust me on this one and don’t try it at home.
*12 Some researchers have claimed that ground squirrels can fool a

rattlesnake’s infrared sense.
When confronted, they raise their tails and heat

them up by pumping warm blood into them.
This would increase the size of

their thermal silhouette and make them seem more intimidating to a heat-

sensing predator.
Tellingly, the squirrels only do this to rattlesnakes, and not

to harmless gopher snakes that can’t sense infrared.
This has been billed as

the first known example of infrared communication between two species.
But

Clark and others aren’t convinced.
The squirrels might just be raising their

tails and pumping blood into them because they’re alarmed.
And they might

be doing this to rattlesnakes instead of gopher snakes because the former are

more alarming!
*13 Ecologist Burt Kotler, based in Israel, demonstrated this by setting pitted sidewinder rattlesnakes against horned vipers from the Middle East—very

similar to the rattlers except that they lack an infrared sense.
When Kotler

placed both snakes in large outdoor enclosures, the pit-less horned vipers

became less active on moonless nights, ceding the darkness to the

sidewinders, which could still use heat to hunt.
The Israeli rodents in those

enclosures also came to treat the alien sidewinders as a threat greater than

their own native vipers.
Kotler describes the pits as a “constraint-breaking

adaptation”—an innovation that shunts snakes to the next level of predatory

effectiveness by allowing them to hunt in even the dimmest light.
*14 One of Clark’s students, Hannes Schraft, found several confusing results

when he tried to study pit vipers in the wild.
At night, sidewinders lie in wait

in bushes, which are slightly warmer than the surrounding sands and should

act like glowing landmarks.
But Schraft found that blindfolded sidewinders

are appalling at finding bushes, and will wander erratically without success.
He also wondered if the snakes use their infrared vision to gauge the

temperature of their prey, since colder targets should be slower and easier to

catch.
They don’t.
Schraft presented them with lizard carcasses that had been

warmed with a hot water bottle, and the snakes didn’t care.
*15 In 2013, Viviana Cadena found that rattlesnakes can control the way they

exhale to actively cool their pits, keeping them a few degrees below their body

temperatures.
A few years later, Clark and Bakken kept rattlesnakes at various

temperatures and measured their ability to spot a warm pendulum moving

over a cooler background.
To their surprise, the colder the snakes, the better

they were at tracking the pendulum.
“We were gobsmacked,” says Bakken.
This pattern doesn’t make sense if the main heat sensor is TRPA1, which

ought to work better at higher temperatures.
It doesn’t make sense since cold-

blooded animals should be more effective as they get warmer.
As a rattlesnake

heats up, it becomes a faster and more active hunter…just as one of its main

hunting senses becomes less sensitive?
“It’s backward and I don’t know what

to make of it yet,” says Clark.
In a refreshing act of academic straight talk, he

and Bakken published their results under the title “Cooler Snakes Respond

More Strongly to Infrared Stimuli, but We Have No Idea Why.”





6.
A Rough Sense

Contact and Flow

AT FIRST, EVERYONE THOUGHT THAT Selka was sleeping.
An

adolescent sea otter, Selka was living in an enclosure at the

Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, with a pool that had

a fiberglass table resting just above the water’s surface.
She had taken to swimming under the table, sticking her

nose into the narrow air space just below it, and having a

nap—or so it seemed.
It turned out that between snoozes,

Selka had also been slowly unscrewing the nuts that held

the table legs in place.
One day, Sarah Strobel, a sensory

biologist who had been working with the otter, found the

entire platform tilting on its side.
Selka was swimming

around cradling a dislodged table leg, having stuffed the

accompanying nuts and bolts down the drain.
Almost every photograph of sea otters shows them

floating on their backs, often asleep, sometimes holding

hands.
This creates the deeply misleading impression that

they are lazy and sedate.
In fact, “they’re really fidgety,”

Strobel tells me.
“They’re constantly doing things, playing

with things, wanting to touch things.” This rambunctious

quality is something that sea otters share with other

mustelids—the mammal group that includes weasels,

ferrets, badgers, honey badgers, and wolverines.
But sea

otters combine what Strobel calls a “general mustelid

mojo” with large size—at 3 to 5 feet in length, they’re the

biggest of the group—and unusually dexterous paws.
Consequently, they’re infamously hard to house in captivity.
[*1] “They’re just super-destructive,” says Strobel.
“They’re very curious, and the way they manifest that curiosity is:

How can I break this and figure out what’s inside?”

Inquisitiveness,

dexterity,

and

a

penchant

for

disassembly: These traits serve sea otters well in their

native habitat along the western coast of North America.
Those frequently cold waters challenge a creature that,

though large for a mustelid, is unusually small for a marine

mammal.
Sea otters have neither the large heat-retaining

bodies nor the insulating blubber of seals, whales, and

manatees.
They do have the densest fur in the animal

kingdom, with more hairs per square centimeter than

humans have on our heads, but even that isn’t enough to

stop heat from rapidly bleeding off their bodies.
To stay

warm, they need to eat a quarter of their own weight every

day; hence their frenetic nature.
They’re always diving, day

and night.
Almost everything’s on the menu, and almost

everything is grabbed by hand.
Even when there’s not

enough light to see by, their paws lead them to food.
With

the same manual dexterity that Selka displayed in

dismantling her table, wild sea otters snag fish, seize sea

urchins, and dig out buried clams.
Their delicate sense of

touch allows them to survive as a small, warm mammal in a

big, cold ocean.
The sensitivity of their paws is evident in their brains.
As

in other species, a region called the somatosensory cortex

deals with touch.
Different sections of the somatosensory

cortex receive inputs from different parts of the body, and

the relative size of these sections can hint at an animal’s

major tactile organs.
In humans, the hands, lips, and

genitals are most heavily represented.
In mice, it’s the

whiskers; in platypuses, the bill; and in naked mole-rats,

the teeth.
In sea otters, the part of the somatosensory

cortex that receives signals from the paws is

disproportionately big compared to those of other

mustelids, and even compared to those of other otters.
Those paws don’t look like sensitive hands, though.
They

barely look like hands at all.
The skin has the texture of a

cauliflower head, and the digits aren’t clearly separated.
If

you held the paw, you could feel the nimble fingers moving

underneath, but if you just looked at it, you’d see “knobbly

mittens,” Strobel tells me.
To measure what these mittens

are capable of, she put Selka to a test.
She trained the otter

to recognize the feel of a textured plastic board that was

covered in thinly spaced ridges.
Selka then had to

distinguish that board from others whose ridges were

either slightly narrower or slightly further apart.
And she

did so, reliably and repeatedly, even when the ridges

differed in their spacing by a quarter of a millimeter.
Her

paws really are as sensitive as her brain would suggest.
Sensitivity, however, is not the only metric by which a

sense can be judged.
As we saw in Chapter 1, humans and

dogs can both follow chocolate-scented strings, but the

former species labors slowly at the task while the latter

does it quickly and assuredly.
Likewise, Strobel found that

humans are just as sensitive as sea otters at discriminating

textures with their hands, but the latter are substantially

faster.
[*2] In her experiment, human volunteers repeatedly

ran their fingertips over the two possible boards, again and

again, until they finally made their choice.
Selka picked the

right board as soon as she laid her paw on it.
If the first one

she touched was correct, she didn’t even bother feeling the

alternative.
She made her choice in a fifth of a second, 30

times faster than her human rivals.
Even her slowest

decision times were considerably faster than those of the

fastest humans.
“They’re very confident in whatever they’re

doing,” says Strobel.
Imagine that, right now, a sea otter is about to search

for food.
Floating on its back on the surface of the sea, it

rolls and dives.
It will only stay submerged for a minute—

roughly the time it will take you to read this paragraph.
The descent eats up many of the precious seconds, so once

the otter reaches the right depth, it has no time for

indecisiveness.
In a few frantic moments, it presses its

knobby mittens over the seafloor, inspecting whatever it

can find.
The water is dark, but darkness doesn’t matter.
To

some of the most sensitive paws in the world, the ocean is

bright with shapes and textures to be felt, grasped,

pressed, prodded, squeezed, stroked, and manhandled—or

perhaps otterhandled.
Hard-shelled prey nestle among the

similar hard rocks, but in a split second, the otter feels the

difference between the two, and pulls the former from the

latter.
With its sense of touch, its dexterous paws, and its

overabundant mustelid confidence, it snatches that clam,

yanks that abalone, grabs that sea urchin, and finally

ascends to eat its catches, breaking the water at the end of

this sentence.
—

TOUCH IS ONE of the mechanical senses, which deal with

physical stimuli like vibrations, currents, textures, and

pressures.
For many animals, touch can operate at a

distance.
As we shall see later in this chapter, creatures as

diverse as fish, spiders, and manatees can all feel the

hidden signals that flow, blow, and ripple through air and

water.
Using tiny hairs and other sensors, they can feel the

telltale signals of other animals from afar.
Crocodiles can

detect the gentlest ripples at the water’s surface, crickets

can sense the faint breeze produced by a charging spider,

and seals can track fish by the invisible currents that they

leave as they swim.
But most such signals are undetectable

to us: I can feel the strong air currents created by my

ceiling fan, but little else.
For humans (and sea otters),

touch is primarily a sense of direct contact.
Our own fingertips are among nature’s most sensitive

touch organs.
They allow us to wield tools with fine

precision, to read patterns of raised dots when our vision is

impaired, and to control screens with taps, swipes, and

touches.
Their sensitivity depends on mechanoreceptors—

cells that respond to light tactile stimulation.
These cells

come in several varieties, each of which responds to a

different kind of stimulus.
Merkel nerve endings respond to

continuous pressure: They help you gauge the shape and

material properties of this book as you squeeze its pages.
Ruffini endings respond to tension and stretch in the skin:

They help you adjust your grip, and recognize when objects

slip from your grasp.
Meissner corpuscles respond to slow

vibrations: They produce the feelings of slip and flutter as

your fingers move over surfaces, and they allow Braille

readers to make sense of raised dots.
Pacinian corpuscles

respond to faster vibrations: They’re useful in assessing

finer textures or in sensing objects through tools, like hairs

that are gripped by tweezers or soil that crunches beneath

a spade.
Most of these receptors also exist in a sea otter’s

paw or a platypus’s snout.
Collectively, they produce the

sensation of touch, just as our sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and

umami receptors together define our sense of taste.
At a broad level, we understand how these

mechanoreceptors work.
Despite their variety, they all

consist of a nerve ending enclosed in some kind of touch-

sensitive capsule.
A tactile stimulus bends or deforms the

capsule, causing the nerve inside to fire.
But exactly how

this happens is still unclear, because touch is one of our

least-studied senses.
Compared to sight, hearing, or even

smell, it inspires less art and fewer scientific devotees.
Until very recently, the molecules that allow us to

experience touch—the equivalent of opsins for vision, or

odorant

receptors

for

smell—remained

completely

mysterious.
We only have a rough sense of the sense that

senses roughness.
But touch cannot be ignored.
It is a sense of intimacy

and immediacy—and it varies just as much as smell or

vision.
Animals differ widely in how sensitive their touch

organs are, what they use those organs to feel, and even

the body parts on which those organs are found.
And by

considering how touch contributes to the Umwelten of

different creatures, we will see sandy beaches,

underground tunnels, and even internal organs in new

ways.
Even the true extent of our own tactile abilities has

only recently come to light.
In one experiment, people

could distinguish between two silicon wafers that differed

only in their topmost layer of molecules, telling them apart

thanks to minuscule differences in the way their fingers slid

over the two surfaces.
In another test, volunteers could tell

the difference between two ridged surfaces, even when

those ridges differed in height by just 10 nanometers—akin

to judging which of two sandpapers is coarser, when the

grains are only the size of large molecules.
These incredible feats are possible through movement.
If

you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a

limited idea of its features.
But as soon as you’re allowed to

move, everything changes.
Hardness becomes apparent

with a press.
Textures resolve at a stroke.
As your fingers

run over the surface, they repeatedly collide with invisibly

small peaks and troughs, setting up vibrations in the

mechanoreceptors at their tips.
That’s how you detect the

subtlest of features, even down into the nanoscale.
[*3]

Movement transforms touch from a coarse sense into an

exquisite one.
It allows many of nature’s tactile specialists

to react with incredible speed.
—

MANY SCIENTISTS SPEND their entire lives studying the same

animals.
Ken Catania is an exception.
In the last 30 years,

he has investigated the senses of electric eels, naked mole-

rats, crocodiles, tentacled snakes, emerald cockroach

wasps, and humans.
He is drawn to oddities, and his

attraction to weird creatures almost always pays off.
“Usually, it’s not that, oh, the animal turned out not to be

interesting,” he tells me.
“Usually, it’s that the animal is ten

times more capable than I could have imagined.” No

creature taught him that lesson more acutely than the first

one he studied: the star-nosed mole.
The star-nosed mole is a hamster-sized animal with silky

fur, a rat-like tail, and shovel-like paws.
It lives throughout

the densely populated eastern parts of North America, but

since it dwells in bogs and swamps and spends most of its

time underground, few people ever see it.
Those who do

would recognize it instantly.
On the tip of its snout, it has

11 pairs of pink, hairless, finger-like appendages, arranged

in a ring around its nostrils.
This is the unmistakable star

for which the mole is named.
It looks like a fleshy flower

growing out of the animal’s face, or perhaps a sea anemone

impaled on its nose.
Scientists have long speculated about what the star

might be for, but the answer was obvious to Catania when

he first examined it under a microscope in the 1990s.
He

expected to see a world of different sensors.
Instead, he

found just one type—a dome-shaped bump called an

Eimer’s organ, repeated again and again, like the surface

of a raspberry.
Each bump contains mechanoreceptors that

respond to pressure and vibration, and nerve fibers that

carry those sensations toward the brain.
These were clearly

touch sensors, and they constituted the entirety of the star.
The star is an organ of touch, and touch alone.
Squint at it,

and you might mistake it for a set of hands reaching out at

the world.
More or less, that’s what it is.
[*4]

Close your eyes and press your hands against the

nearest surfaces—the seat or floor beneath you, your own

chest or head.
With each press, a hand-shaped burst of

shape and texture resolves in your mind.
Press quickly and

often enough, and you start to build a three-dimensional

model of your surroundings.
This is almost certainly what

the star-nosed mole does with its nose.
As it scurries

through its dark underground world, it constantly presses

its star against the walls of its tunnels, a dozen times a

second.
With every press, its environment comes into focus

in a starburst of textures.
I imagine that each one adds to a

continuous model of the tunnel that builds in the mole’s

mind, like a pointillist image appearing dot by dot.
The mole’s somatosensory cortex—the touch center of

its brain—is disproportionately devoted to the star, much as

a human’s touch center is especially devoted to our hands.
And just as our somatosensory cortex has clusters of

neurons that represent each of our fingers, the mole’s has

stripes of neurons that correspond to each ray of the star.
“You can essentially see the star in the brain,” Catania

says.
[*5] But when he first discovered this mapping, one aspect of it made no sense.
The 11th pair of rays, which are

smaller than all the rest, is represented by a massive chunk

of neurons, which take up a quarter of the brain region

that’s used for the entire star.
Why should the mole devote

the largest amount of processing power to the tiniest of its

touch sensors?
By filming the mole using high-speed cameras, Catania

and his colleague Jon Kaas realized that it always ends up

investigating a piece of food with the 11th and smallest

pair of rays, even if other parts of the star touch the object

first.
It will often dab an object several times in succession,

each one bringing the 11th pair of rays closer.
This is

remarkably similar to what we do with our eyes.
We make

tiny adjustments to focus on objects with our fovea, the

part of our retina where our vision is most acute.
Similarly,

the mole’s 11th pair of rays is what Catania calls the tactile

fovea—the zone where the animal’s sense of touch is

sharpest.
It’s no coincidence that this zone lies just in front

of the mole’s mouth.
The instant it decides that an object

feels like food, it can part the 11th pair of rays and seize

the morsel with its tweezer-like front teeth.
The mole doesn’t stroke or rub or palpate with its star.
Whatever it’s doing occurs through the simplest of actions:

press and lift.
That is how the animal might be able to

recognize its prey through shape, by comparing how

neighboring Eimer’s organs are dented or deflected.
The

mole can certainly distinguish textures, since it’ll eat bits of

dead earthworm but ignore similarly sized chunks of

rubber and silicone.
And it can do all of this at a speed that

puts even the sea otter to shame.
Catania shows me a video that he filmed from below as a

star-nosed mole investigated a glass slide containing a

piece of worm.
When the video is slowed by 50 times, I can

see the animal dabbing its star against the glass, detecting

the morsel, bringing the tactile fovea across to inspect it

more thoroughly, and finally swallowing it.
In real time, it’s

impossible to work out what is happening.
The mole simply

appears, and the worm disappears.
By analyzing such

footage, Catania and his colleague Fiona Remple found that

the mole can identify its prey, swallow it, and begin

searching for the next mouthful in an average of 230

milliseconds and as little as 120 milliseconds.
That’s as fast

as a human blink.
Imagine that your eye starts to close at

the exact moment that a foraging mole first touches an

insect with its star.
Before your lashes cross the midline of

your eye, the mole’s brain has already recognized what it

has touched and sent motor commands to reposition the

star.
By the time your eye is fully shut, the mole has

touched the insect a second time with its supersensitive

11th rays.
By the time your eye is half-open, the mole has

processed the information from that second touch and

decided on a course of action.
When your eye is fully open,

the insect is gone and the mole is looking for another.
The star-nosed mole seems to be moving as fast as its

nervous system will allow, restricted only by the speed at

which information can travel between the star and the

brain.
That trip takes just 10 milliseconds.
Within the same

time, visual information can’t even make it through the

retina, let alone reach the brain or complete the return

journey.
Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but

light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s

sense of touch blows past them all.
“It’s moving so fast that

it’s almost getting ahead of its brain,” says Catania.
He

shows me another video in which the mole touches a chunk

of worm and begins moving away before changing direction

and scooping up the briefly missed morsel.
“It’s on to the

next thing before it realizes what it’s just touched,” he

says.
Sighted people know what it’s like to do a double take

after walking past something unexpected.
But that’s an

easy movement—a simple turn of the head.
For a star-

nosed mole, sensing the world through touch and not

vision, and touching with its face instead of its limbs, a

double take is a frenetic full-body affair.
Its speed and sensitivity are linked.
With its bizarre

nose, the mole can detect and capture small prey like

insect larvae.
But to subsist on such little morsels, it must

scoop up a lot of them as quickly as possible.
“They’re little

vacuum cleaners,” says Catania.
“They eat things so small

that you might think: Why even bother?” They bother

because they have no competition.
Thanks to the star—a

nose that works like a hand and scans like an eye—the

underground world appears in glorious detail, and abounds

with food that its competitors can’t even perceive.
A tunnel

that might seem like an empty corridor to another mole

twinkles with tasty treats under the touch of the star.
—

LIKE THE STAR-NOSED mole, many animals that specialize in

touch work in conditions where vision is limited.
They’re

often searching for things that are hidden or hard to find,

which forces them to root around with body parts that can

probe, press, and explore.
Whether we’re talking about a

sea otter’s paw or a human’s finger, an elephant’s trunk or

an octopus’s arm, animals discover the world by

deliberately moving tactile organs over it.
And as the mole

shows, those organs don’t have to be hands.
The beaks of birds are made of bone and sheathed in the

same hard keratin that constitutes your fingernails.
They

seem inanimate and insensitive—hard, face-mounted tools

for grabbing and pecking.
But in many species, the tip of

the bill contains a smattering of mechanoreceptors,

sensitive to vibrations and movements.
In chickens, which

rely heavily on vision to forage, those mechanoreceptors

are relatively rare, and concentrated in a few small clusters

on the lower beak alone.
But in some ducks, like mallards

and shovelers, they’re spread all over the bill, upper and

lower,

inside

and

out.
In

some

places,

these

mechanoreceptors are as densely packed as they are in our

digits.
The mallard’s bill may be covered in the stuff of

human fingernails, but it’s extremely sensitive.
Ducks use

this sense to find food in murky water.
With head

submerged and tail aloft, they swirl, strain, and dabble,

rapidly opening and closing their bills.
They can grab fast-

swimming tadpoles in the dark, and filter edible morsels

from the inedible mud.
“ Imagine being given a bowl of

muesli and milk to which has been added a handful of fine

gravel,” wrote Tim Birkhead in his book Bird Sense.
“How

good would you be at swallowing only the edible bits?
Hopeless, I suggest, yet this is precisely what ducks can

do.” [*6]

Many other birds forage by shoving their bills into dark

recesses and feeling for food.
Such behavior is especially

common on shorelines.
Even the most deserted beaches are

full of buried treasure—worms, shellfish, and crustaceans,

all concealed within the sand.
To reach this hidden buffet,

shorebirds like curlews, oystercatchers, sandpipers, and

knots probe among the grains with their beaks.
Under a

microscope, the tips of their bills are riddled with pits, like

corncobs with all their kernels bitten off.
Those pits are full

of mechanoreceptors that are similar to those in our hands

and allow the birds to detect buried prey.
But how does a shorebird know where to stick its bill in

the first place?
Subterranean prey aren’t obvious from the

surface, so one might guess that the birds just probe

around haphazardly and hope for the best.
But in 1995,

Theunis Piersma showed that red knots find shellfish up to

eight times more frequently than would be expected if they

were doing random searches.
They must have a technique.
To discover it, Piersma trained the birds to inspect sand-

filled buckets for buried objects and to indicate if they’d

found anything by approaching a designated feeder.
This

simple experiment revealed that the knots could still detect

clams that were buried beyond the reach of their bills.
They

could even sense stones, so they clearly weren’t relying on

smells, sounds, tastes, vibrations, heat, or electric fields.
Instead, Piersma thinks that they use a special form of

touch that works at a distance.
As a knot’s bill descends into the sand, it pushes on the

thin rivulets of water between the grains, creating a

pressure wave that radiates outward.
If there’s a hard

object in the way—say, a clam or a rock—the water must

flow around it, which distorts the pattern of pressure.
The

pits on the knot’s bill tip can sense those distortions,

detecting surrounding objects without having to make

contact with them.
This ability, which Piersma calls “remote

touch,” is impressive enough, but the knot improves it even

further by probing the same areas repeatedly, stabbing its

beak up and down several times a second.
This stirs up the

sand grains, which settle into a denser configuration,

heightening the buildup of pressure from the beak and

making the distortions more obvious.
Every time the knot

lowers its head, the food around it becomes more obvious,

as if it were using a kind of sonar based on touch instead of

hearing.[*7]

The emerald jewel wasp also has a long, probing organ

with a touch-sensitive tip, but its goals and methods are far

grislier than a red knot’s.
The wasp—a beautiful inch-long

creature with a metallic green body and orange thighs—is a

parasite that raises its young on cockroaches.
When a

female finds a roach, she stings it twice—once in its

midsection to temporarily paralyze its legs, and a second

time in its brain.
The second sting targets two specific

clusters of neurons and delivers venom that nullifies the

roach’s desire to move, turning it into a submissive zombie.
In this state, the wasp can lead the roach to her lair by its

antennae, like a human walking a dog.
Once there, she lays

an egg on it, providing her future larva with a docile source

of fresh meat.
This act of mind control depends on that

second sting, which the wasp must deliver to exactly the

right location.
Just as a red knot has to find a clam hidden

somewhere in the sand, an emerald jewel wasp has to find

the roach’s brain hidden somewhere within a tangle of

muscles and internal organs.
Fortunately for the wasp, her stinger is not only a drill, a

venom injector, and an egg-laying tube but also a sense

organ.
Ram Gal and Frederic Libersat showed that its tip is

covered in small bumps and pits that are sensitive to both

smell and touch.
With them, she can detect the distinctive

feel of a roach’s brain.
When Gal and Libersat removed the

brain from a cockroach before offering the roach to some

wasps, they repeatedly stung it, trying in vain to find the

organ that was no longer there.
If the missing brain was

replaced with a pellet of the same consistency, the wasps

stung it with the usual precision.
If the replacement pellet

was squishier than a typical brain, the wasps seemed

confused and kept rooting around with their stingers.
They

know what a brain should feel like.
Both the wasps and their cockroach victims also use

their antennae to feel their way around, as most insects do.
[*8] Long, sweeping tactile organs are so useful for

navigation that many species have independently evolved

their own versions.[*9] Humans, ever the tool users, tap the

ground in front of them with canes.
The round goby, a

bottom-dwelling fish, uses supersensitive pectoral fins.
The

whiskered auklet, a puffin-like seabird, has a large black

crest that curves forward from its head, which it uses to

feel the walls of the rocky crevices in which it nests.[*10]

Many other birds have stiff bristles on their heads and

faces.
These are often wrongly billed as nets that help birds

to snag flying insects.
It’s more likely that they’re touch

sensors, which the birds use when handling prey, feeding

chicks, or maneuvering around dark nests.
Such uses might

explain why birds have feathers at all.
It’s clear that birds

evolved from dinosaurs, and that many dinosaurs were

covered in bristly proto-feathers or “dino-fuzz.” These

structures were too simple for flight, so they must have

evolved for some other reason.
The most common

explanation is that they provided insulation, but that would

only be true if they suddenly appeared in large numbers.
Alternatively, and perhaps more plausibly, they could have

initially evolved to provide tactile information.
As the

whiskered auklet shows, an animal only needs a few

bristles to extend its sense of touch in useful ways.
Perhaps

feathers first appeared as small clumps on the heads or

arms of dinosaurs, helping them first to feel and only later

to fly.
Mammalian hair might have had a similar start,

appearing first as touch sensors that were only later turned

into insulating coats.
Some hairs still retain that original

tactile function.
They’re called vibrissae, from the Latin

word for “vibrate.” More commonly, they’re known as

whiskers.
They are typically found on the faces of

mammals, and are longer and thicker than other kinds of

hair elsewhere in the body.
Each one sits in a cup that’s full

of mechanoreceptors and nerves.
When the shaft of the

whisker

is

deflected,

its

base

nudges

the

mechanoreceptors, which send signals to the brain.
(You

can get a feel for how this works, no pun intended, by

closing your hand around the tip of a pen and deflecting the

other end away from you.)

Some mammals continuously sweep their whiskers back

and forth, several times a second, as they move.
This

action, delightfully known as whisking, allows them to

explore the zone in front of and around their heads.
When I

first heard about whisking, I underestimated it.
It

intuitively felt like what I might do when I stumble down a

dark corridor—reaching out with my hands to avoid

bumping into a wall or to feel for a light switch.
But after

talking to sensory biologist Robyn Grant, I realize that a

whisking mouse or rat uses its vibrissae in a way that’s far

closer to what I do with my eyes.
The rodent constantly

scans and re-scans the area in front of it, building up an

awareness of a scene.
If it senses something with the long,

mobile whiskers on its snout, it investigates further with

the shorter, immobile whiskers on its chin and lips, which

are more numerous and more sensitive.
This behavior is

similar to that of a star-nosed mole pressing its nose along

a tunnel, detecting objects with its star, and finally bringing

the small and most sensitive rays into play.
It’s also similar

to a human sweeping their eyes over a scene, detecting

something in their peripheral vision, and focusing on it with

their high-resolution foveae.
The similarities to vision don’t stop there.
If we turn our

head, our eyes move first; likewise, a mouse will lead a

head turn with its whiskers.
Just as we map the world

through the pattern of light falling across our retinas, a

mouse can map its world by the patterns of touch across its

array of whiskers.
Each connects to a different part of the

somatosensory cortex, so the mouse knows which whiskers

have made contact with an object.
And since it also knows

what orientation those whiskers are in, “it can make maps

of what it touches,” Grant tells me.
The information that

builds those maps must flicker in and out as the whisker

tips move.
But Grant says that a mouse’s brain probably

interprets these discrete touches in a seamless way.
I

wonder if whisking for them is like vision for us—an

experience that feels uninterrupted even though our eyes

are constantly darting and blinking.
Mammals have been using whiskers for almost as long

as mammals have existed.
[*11] Today, rats and opossums,

which share the habits of their small, nocturnal, climbing,

scampering ancestors, still whisk.
Guinea pigs do it half-

heartedly.
Cats and dogs don’t do it at all, although their

whiskers are still mobile.
Humans and other apes have lost

our whiskers entirely and invested instead in sensitive

hands.
Whales and dolphins are born with whiskers, but

these quickly fall out except around the lips and blowholes.
Whisking, after all, is too difficult to do in the water.
Whiskers, however, can still be useful.
—

TWO FLORIDA MANATEES live at the Mote Marine Laboratory

in Sarasota.
As we stare at them, Gordon Bauer tells me

that one, Hugh (as in Hugh manatee), is hyperactive.
The

other, Buffett (after Jimmy, not Warren), is sluggish and a

little overweight.
I confess to him that I’m struggling to

work out which is which.
Their 3-meter bodies seem

equally rotund and their dispositions equally languid.
After

a while, though, I notice that one of them is slowly circling

around his tank, performing what I guess is the manatee

version of a zoomie.
That’s Hugh.
In the wild, manatees would spend their time trundling

along shallow seabeds, grazing on underwater plants.
In

captivity, Hugh and Buffett devour around 80 heads of

romaine lettuce every day.
Hugh is currently going to town

on one of these, slowly rending it apart.
Sometimes he

holds it between his flippers.
Other times he grips it with

his face, and specifically with the bit between his upper lip

and nostrils.
This large area, known as the oral disk, gives

manatees the hangdog expression that makes them so

endearing.
And unlikely though it might seem, it is also an

extraordinarily sensitive organ of touch.
The disk is muscular and prehensile, more like an

elephant’s trunk than a typical lip.
By flexing and flaring

the oral disk, a manatee can handle and investigate objects

with the same dexterity and sensitivity as a hand.
This is

called oripulation—manipulation done with a mouth.
Manatees will oripulate everything in their environment,

from anchor lines to human legs.
Sometimes this lands

them in trouble: Florida manatees, which are endangered,

get caught in ropes and crab traps because of their habit of

exploring everything face-first.
More often, oripulation

cements their relationships.
“Whenever they meet, they’ll

oripulate each other’s faces, flippers, and torsos,” says

Bauer.
Reader, Hugh oripulated me.
While Buffett took part in

an experiment, Hugh was chilling out in a separate part of

their enclosure.
He lay on his back while a trainer held his

flipper and popped beets into his mouth.
I leaned over, and

he exhaled sweet-scented breath over my face.
I put my

hand in the water in front of him, and he immediately

began exploring it with his oral disk.
It felt strange, this

meeting of two tactile organs—my hand and Hugh’s oral

disk, both incredibly different but both devoted to the same

sense.
I can only imagine what I felt like to him—softer

perhaps than the vegetables he eats, but smoother than the

skin of his brother Buffett.
To me, oripulation felt like being

licked by a dog, except with no tongue involved—only

prehensile lips, which danced over my palm.
My fingertips

soon felt like they’d been lightly sandpapered because

many of Hugh’s whiskers are stubbly.
Those whiskers—vibrissae—are the key to the oral disk’s

sensitivity.
There are around 2,000 of them.
Some are long,

thin, and bristly.
Others are short and spiky, like broken

toothpicks.
When the oral disk is relaxed, these whiskers

are lost among the fleshy folds.
But when it’s time to eat or

explore, the manatee flares and flattens the disk, extending

the whiskers outward.
By flexing it in just the right way and

moving the whiskers against each other, a manatee can clip

grasses and shred lettuces.
“They can grab food and bring

it into their mouth, but also take things like pebbles out,”

Bauer says.
His colleague Roger Reep once filmed a

manatee eating a plant with one side of its mouth while

using the other to remove what it didn’t want to swallow.
By pressing these hairs against an object, a manatee can

take the measure of its texture and shape, like a whisking

rodent, only much slower.
In 2012, Bauer tested Hugh and

Buffett to see if they could distinguish between plastic

boards with differently spaced ridges, much as Sarah

Strobel later did with Selka the sea otter and various

human volunteers.
The two manatees performed just as

well as the other species.[*12] Their faces were the equals of

human fingertips.
Manatees are the only known mammals that only have

vibrissae and no other kinds of hair.
Aside from the

whiskers on their oral disk, they have another 3,000

scattered all over their large bodies.
Thin and widely

spaced, they are hard to see at first, but I eventually catch

a glimpse of Hugh’s, glinting in the daylight.
“Every once in

a while, when the sun is just right, they look like a field of

wheat,” says Bauer.
[*13] Manatees use these body-wide

whiskers for another purpose—to sense the water flowing

around them.
Sensory hairs are versatile structures.
They can be

actively pressed against surfaces to produce tactile

sensations, as whisking rats and oripulating manatees do.
But they can also be passively bent and deflected by

flowing air or water.
By responding to that pressure, an

animal can detect the flows created by distant objects,

touching things from afar without needing to make direct

contact.
Manatees can certainly do this.
Bauer and his

colleagues showed that Hugh and Buffett could use their

body whiskers to detect the minute vibrations of a sphere

that was shaking in the water.
The animals were

blindfolded, their facial whiskers were covered, and the

sphere was positioned a meter away from their flanks.
They

sensed it nonetheless, even when it was displacing the

water by less than a millionth of a meter.
In the wild, they probably use this “hydrodynamic” sense

to judge the direction of a current, to work out what other

manatees are doing, or to detect the approach of other

animals.
They successfully keep their distance from

snorkelers even though their eyesight is notoriously bad.
They often swim upstream from estuaries just as the tide

starts to come in.
They rest on the seabed in groups and

then suddenly rise as one for a breath.
Their eyes might be

small, and the water around them might be turbid, but they

perceive their surroundings through a distributed and

distant version of touch.
They can tap into the hidden

signals that I hinted at earlier—the invisible currents of

information that flow around us, and which animals can

detect with the right sensory equipment.
—

AT THE LONG Marine Lab where Sarah Strobel worked with

Selka the sea otter, a harbor seal who goes by Sprouts is

floating on his back in a pool.
Colleen Reichmuth calls to

him, and he hauls his gray, mottled body out of the water.
She asks him to speak.
He unleashes a startlingly loud

noise that sounds like a cross between a roar and a

foghorn.
“BUH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH-

WOOOAAAARRRR,” he seems to say.
I put my hand on his

chest, and I feel the rumble through my entire arm.
Underwater, where his song is much louder, it can feel like

a punch.
Seals, sea lions, and walruses—the group of animals

collectively known as pinnipeds—are often ignored by

scientists in favor of more popular marine mammals like

whales and dolphins.
But Reichmuth has always been

fascinated by them, perhaps because they, like her, must

split their time between land and sea.
“I grew up swimming

and I always wanted to be in the water,” she says.
“I was

drawn to these creatures that could just kind of switch

back and forth between these two lives.” Reichmuth came

to the Long Marine Lab in 1990 and has worked there ever

since.
She has known Sprouts for all of that time: He

arrived at the facility a year earlier, shortly after his birth

at SeaWorld San Diego.
He’s approaching his 31st birthday

when I meet him, which is well past the life span of male

harbor seals in the wild.
His old eyes have cataracts, and

he can barely see.
But that’s not a problem: Thanks to their

whiskers, blind harbor seals can still thrive, even in the

wild.
Sprouts has around a hundred facial whiskers

protruding from his snout and his eyebrows.
When he looks

at me full-on, they form a stiff radar dish around his face.
Sprouts can use them to discriminate shape and texture, to

sense vibrations in the water, and to avoid obstacles.
When

he dives back into the water, his whiskers brush along the

sides of his tank, allowing him to closely follow the curving

wall without ever bumping into it.
“But if we were to throw

a fish in there, he would have a really hard time finding it,”

says Reichmuth.
“Unless it started swimming.”

As a fish swims, it leaves behind a hydrodynamic wake—

a trail of swirling water that continues to whirl long after

the animal has passed.
Seals, with their sensitive whiskers,

can detect and interpret these trails.
[*14] This ability was

only discovered in 2001, by Guido Dehnhardt and his team

at Rostock, Germany.
They showed that two harbor seals,

Henry and Nick, could follow the underwater path of a

mini-submarine.
They clung to the trail even when their

eyes were blindfolded and their ears were plugged by

headphones.
Only when their whiskers were covered by a

stocking did they lose the sub.
At the time, most

researchers believed that hydrodynamic senses would only

work over short distances.
The disturbances created by

moving underwater objects ought to die away so quickly

that beyond a range of a few inches, they would be

undetectable.
But hydrodynamic wakes can actually persist

for several minutes.
Dehnhardt estimated that a swimming

herring should leave a trail that a harbor seal could follow

from up to almost 200 yards away.
Sprouts might be getting on in years, but his

hydrodynamic sense is still sharp.
Reichmuth tests it using

a ball that’s mounted on the end of a long pole.
She walks

around the edge of the pool, moving the ball through the

water in a sinuous trail.
After a few seconds, Sprouts, who

was waiting patiently, gets the green light.
He searches

around, sweeping his whiskers from side to side.
As soon as

they make contact with the ball’s wake, Sprouts instantly

turns and follows it.
He isn’t just heading in the rough

general direction.
He’s following the exact path of the ball

in minute detail, up and down, in and out, as if pulling

himself along an invisible rope.
He can’t be relying on

vision—even if his eyes weren’t so old, he’s wearing a

custom-made blindfold.
Instead, he’s picking up on a track

of invisible whirling vortices temporarily imprinted into the

water.
When he starts to stray beyond the trail, he moves

his head from side to side to find its edge, just as a snake

might do with its forked tongue.
When the trail crosses a

gushing water pipe, he temporarily loses it, but quickly

picks it up again on the other side.
[*15] When the trail turns

back on itself, so does Sprouts.
In watching Sprouts, I’m

reminded of Finn the dog sniffing his way along odor trails

and following the scents of previous passers-by.
To us,

touch is rooted in the present, in the instants when a

sensor makes contact with a surface.
But to Sprouts, touch

extends into the recent past, just as smell does to Finn.
His

whiskers can feel what was, rather than simply what is.
This ability seemed impossible back when Dehnhardt

first discovered it.
As a seal swims, its whiskers should

produce their own swirling vortices of water.
These ought

to vibrate the whiskers and drown out the subtler signals

produced by the wakes of distant fish.
But harbor seals

have an answer to this problem, which becomes clear when

Sprouts sticks his head out of the water.
Looking closely at

his whiskers, I can see that they’re slightly flattened and

angled so that the bladed edge always cuts into the water.
They aren’t smooth, either.
At first glance, they look like

they’re covered in beads of water.
But as I run my finger

over them, I realize that they’re dry, and that the “beads”

are part of the whiskers’ actual structure.
They have an

undulating surface that repeatedly widens and narrows

along their entire length.
The Rostock team showed that

these shapes dramatically reduce the vortices left by the

whiskers themselves.
Through this quirk of anatomy, seals

can tone down the signals from their own bodies and

enhance those left by their prey.
These flattened,

undulating whiskers aren’t found in walruses, which use

their numerous vibrissae to feel out buried shellfish.
They

aren’t found in sea lions, which are still strongly guided by

vision.
They’re unique to seals, which are consequently

better at following hydrodynamic wakes than other

pinnipeds.[*16]

Having shown off his skills, Sprouts sinks to the bottom

of his tank and lies there, waiting.
Harbor seals do this in

the wild, too.
They’ll lurk in the darkness of a kelp forest

using their radar dish of erect whiskers to detect the wakes

of passing fish.
From those impressions alone, the seal can

tell in which direction a fish was swimming.
It can

discriminate between the wakes left by objects of different

sizes and shapes, which might help it to pursue only the

largest and most nutritious individuals.
It might not need a

wake at all.
In one experiment, Henry and other seals at

Rostock could detect gentle currents rising from the

seabed, as might be produced by the gills of buried flatfish.
Those fish might be camouflaged and lying perfectly still,

but a seal can still feel their breaths with its face.
A seal’s

tactile world is attuned to flow and motion, and their prey

cannot help but move.
It would seem like an unfair contest,

if those prey didn’t have incredible hydrodynamic powers

of their own.
—

WHEN SEALS AND other underwater predators charge at a

group of fish, the school moves as one.
The fish don’t flee in

random directions.
They don’t collide with each other.
They

seem to flow around their attackers like the very water in

which they’re immersed.
This miraculous feat of

coordination depends partly on vision.
But it also depends

on a system of sensors called the lateral line.
The lateral line is found in all fish (and some

amphibians).
It usually includes a smattering of visible

pores on a fish’s head and flanks, along with fluid-filled

canals running just below its skin.
After describing the

pores in the seventeenth century, scientists spent 200 years

thinking that they mostly secreted mucus.
But on closer

inspection, they noticed small groups of pear-shaped cells,

capped in a gelatinous dome.
These structures, now called

neuromasts, were obviously sensors.
In the 1930s, the

biologist Sven Dijkgraaf showed that blind fish can use

their lateral lines to detect the currents produced by

objects moving nearby.[*17] More impressively, he showed

that they could also detect stationary objects by analyzing

the currents that they themselves produce.
A swimming fish displaces the water in front of it,

creating a flow field that envelops its body.
Obstacles

distort that field, and the lateral line can detect those

distortions, providing the fish with a hydrodynamic

awareness of its surroundings.
If it swims toward an

aquarium wall, the wall “prevents the water particles

giving way as freely as in unobstructed water,” Dijkgraaf

wrote, and “the fish will experience an ‘unexpected’ rise of

water resistance.” This is similar to the technique that red

knots use to locate buried clams, and it’s likely how

manatees perceive whatever’s in the turbid water around

them.
But fish had been using their lateral lines to feel at a

distance for hundreds of millions of years before either

manatees or knots existed, and they are far more sensitive

to water movements.
[*18]

With the lateral line, fish can feel the rich sources of

information that are literally flowing around them.
This

awareness extends in almost all directions, for up to a body

length or two away, which Dijkgraaf described as “touch at

a distance.” Humans can feel strong water currents flowing

over our skin, but “I don’t think that even gets close to the

rich perceptions that fish must have through their lateral

line,” says Sheryl Coombs, who has been studying this

system for decades.
When we walk down the street,

patterns of brightness and color move over our retinas, and

we perceive our surroundings flowing past us.
Perhaps a

fish gets a similar experience from the patterns of water

moving over its lateral line.
They can certainly use those

patterns to orient in flowing water, find prey, escape from

predators, and keep tabs on each other.
Schooling fish use

their lateral lines to match the speed and direction of their

nearest neighbors.
When a predator lunges, the rush of

incoming water triggers the lateral lines of the nearest

individuals, which dart away.
Their startled movements

trigger the lateral lines of their neighbors, which trigger

their neighbors, and so on.
Waves of panic spread outward,

and the school seamlessly parts around the predator.
Each

fish only attends to the small volume of water around it, but

the sense of touch connects them all and allows them to act

as a coordinated whole.
Blind fish can still school.
Though all fish share the same basic neuromast

structure, many of them have expanded and tweaked the

lateral line in unusual ways.
Surface-feeding fish have

flattened heads loaded with neuromasts, which detect the

vibrations of insects falling on the water’s surface.
Halfbeaks have massive underbites, and the neuromasts

that line their protruding lower jaws can tell them if prey

are swimming in line with their mouths.
Blind cavefish have

lost their sight and use exceptionally large, numerous, and

sensitive neuromasts to find their way around.
[*19] And

some fish, unexpectedly, have almost lost their lateral lines

altogether.
In 2012, Daphne Soares, a lover of both caves and

unusual animals, traveled to Ecuador to see a blind catfish

called Astroblepus phoeleter, which lives in a single cave

and is so obscure that it has no common name.
Examining

it under a microscope, she expected to find giant and

exceptionally sensitive neuromasts, like the ones found in

many cave-dwelling fish that have dispensed with vision.
Soares was shocked to find barely any neuromasts at all.
Instead, the animal’s skin was covered in what looked like

little joysticks, the likes of which she had never seen

before.
“That’s the reason I’m in science—that feeling of: I

wonder what this is,” she says.
Soares showed that the joysticks are mechanosensors.
More unexpectedly, she learned that they’re teeth.
They’re

not tooth-like structures—they’re actual teeth, made of

enamel and dentine, with nerves coming out of their bases.
While most catfish have expanded their taste buds to cover

their bodies, this cave species has done the same with its

teeth, turning them into a body-wide coat of flow sensors.
That seems like a strange innovation for an animal whose

ancestors would already have had a fully functioning lateral

line.
But Soares notes that these catfish live in a cave that

experiences torrential floods on an almost daily basis.
Those

raging

currents,

she

thinks,

might

have

overwhelmed the lateral line, forcing the fish to evolve

stiffer sensors.
They now use their skin-teeth to find calm

zones, where they can wait out the torrents by sticking to

rocks with their sucker-like mouths.
Soares is now studying

other cavefish to see if they, too, have strange touch

sensors.[*20] “I like weird animals,” she tells me.
“The more

extreme or ancient or unique, the better.”

—

IN THE SUMMER of 1999, before cavefish came into her life,

Soares was sitting in the back of a pickup truck, next to a

large alligator that had been collected by the U.S.
Fish and

Wildlife Service.
During the long ride, she got a good look

at her companion’s taped mouth.
That’s how she first

noticed the bumps.
Alligators have rows of dark, raised domes along the

edges of their jaws, as if they’re wearing beards made of

blackheads.
Scientists first described these bumps in the

nineteenth century, but no one knew what they were for.
“I

thought they have got to be some sort of sensory things,”

Soares says.
Back in her lab, she found that the bumps

contained nerve endings.
But she couldn’t find any hairs,

pores, or other obvious sensory structures that might

stimulate those nerves.
Working with sedated alligators

that were lying in water, Soares tried exposing the bumps

to light, electric fields, or bits of smelly, tasty fish.
The

nerves didn’t react.
Then, one day, she reached into the

water to retrieve a tool that she had dropped.
As her hand

broke the surface, it caused ripples.
And when these

ripples hit the alligator’s face, the nerves in its bumps

finally started to fire.
“I called my friends over to confirm

that I wasn’t hallucinating,” Soares tells me.
The bumps, she discovered, are pressure receptors that

can detect vibrations at the water’s surface.
They might

work like little buttons, akin to the Eimer’s organs on

moles.
They’re so sensitive that if Soares let a single drop

of water fall into an (unsedated) alligator’s tank, the animal

would turn and lunge toward the disturbance, even when

its eyes and ears were covered.
But if Soares covered its

snout in a plastic sheet, the drops went unnoticed.
The

animals use the bumps to scan the thin horizontal layer

where air and water meet.
They sit in ambush in that layer,

waiting for something to land in the water or to arrive at its

edge for a drink.
This strategy demands stillness, so they

can’t engage in the comparatively hectic explorations of

moles, mice, or even manatees.
Unmoving, they use their

touch sensors to monitor everyone else’s movements.
[*21]

These bumps might detect more than the ripples of prey.
When male alligators want to attract mates, they produce

deep-throated bellows.
These vibrate the water above their

backs, causing it to dance and sputter like oil on a sizzling

pan.
Other alligators might be able to sense these

vibrations through their delicate faces.
The bumps are also

found around the teeth and inside the mouth, so

crocodilians might use them to assess their food or adjust

their bites.
When they forage underwater by sweeping their

jaws around, the bumps could tell them when they’ve hit

upon something edible.
When a mother croc hears the cries

of infants about to hatch, she might use the bumps to

deliver just enough force to crack the eggs.
When she

carries her hatchlings around in her jaws, her fine sense of

touch might help her to distinguish between prey she

should bite and babies she should not.
This goes against every stereotype one might have about

crocodiles as brutish, unfeeling animals.
With jaws that can

crush bone and thick skin that’s heavily armored with bony

plates, they seem like the antithesis of delicacy.
And yet,

they are covered head to tail in sensors that, as Ken

Catania and his student Duncan Leitch showed, are 10

times more sensitive to pressure fluctuations than human

fingertips.
What other organs of touch might people have missed

because they exist in creatures that seem insensitive?
Many snakes have thousands of touch-sensitive bumps on

the scales of their heads.
These bumps are especially

common and prominent in sea snakes, which might use

them as hydrodynamic sensors much as crocodilians seem

to do.
Spinosaurus, an enormous sail-backed dinosaur, had

pores at the tip of its snout that resemble the holes in a

crocodile’s skull and that might have also allowed nerves to

pass into pressure-detecting bumps.
Spinosaurus had a

crocodile-like face and has often been depicted as a semi-

aquatic fish-eater; perhaps it also used touch sensors to

feel for rippling prey.
Daspletosaurus, a close relative of

Tyrannosaurus, also had telltale holes in its jaws and might

well have been covered in sensory bumps.
These dinosaurs

didn’t live in water, but perhaps they rubbed their sensitive

faces during courtship, or used them to carry their young in

their mouths.
Such speculations might sound far-fetched,

but perhaps they shouldn’t when we think about the bumps

of crocodiles, the lateral lines of fish, or the whiskers of

seals.
Science has a long track record of underestimating

or overlooking touch and flow sensors—including ones that

were sitting in full view.
—

FEW BIRDS ARE more recognizable or ostentatious than the

peacock.
But ignore, if you can, the gaudy iridescent tail.
Focus instead on the stiff, spatula-like feathers that form a

crest on their heads.
These are utterly conspicuous, but

often ignored.
To find out if they have a purpose, Suzanne

Amador Kane acquired several of them from aviaries and

breeders, plus one unfortunate zoo peacock that flew into a

polar bear enclosure.
Her student Daniel Van Beveren then

mounted the crests on a mechanical shaker, and watched

as they wobbled to and fro.
When shaken at exactly 26 Hz—

that is, 26 times a second—they moved with exceptional

vigor.
That’s their resonant frequency.
It happens to be the

exact frequency at which a courting male peacock shakes

his tail feathers.
That, Kane tells me, “couldn’t possibly be

a coincidence.” Van Beveren played different recordings to

his mounted peacock crests.
When he put on a clip of an

actual peacock rattling his tail, the crest feathers

resonated.
When he put on other recordings, including

“Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees, they did not.
These results suggest that a peahen that stands in front

of a courting male might be able to detect the air

disturbances produced by his tail.
As well as seeing his

efforts, she might feel them.
(This also works in reverse,

since females will sometimes display back to males.) Kane

now wants to prove this idea by filming the crests of living

courting peacocks to see if they actually shake at the same

frequencies.
[*22] If they do, it would mean that a peacock’s

display, despite its flamboyance, has always had a secret

component that was inconspicuous to human observers.
We

just don’t have the right equipment to fully appreciate it.
And if we’re missing something in one of the most

flamboyant exhibitions in the animal kingdom, then what

else are we missing?
A clue can be found at the base of each peacock crest

feather, where there’s a smaller companion feather called a

filoplume.
It’s just a simple shaft with a tufted tip, and

could act as a mechanosensor.
When moving air shakes the

crest feather, the crest feather could nudge the filoplume,

and the filoplume could trigger a nerve.
Filoplumes are

found in most birds, and are almost always associated with

another feather.
Birds can use them to monitor the position

of their feathers, perhaps to sense when their smooth

plumage has become ruffled and needs to be preened.
But

filoplumes are especially important during flight.
Bird flight looks so effortless that it’s easy to forget just

how demanding it is.
To stay aloft, birds continuously adjust

the shape and angle of their wings.
If they get everything

right, air flows smoothly over the contours of each wing,

producing lift.
But if they hold their wings at too steep an

angle, the smooth flows form turbulent vortices and the lift

disappears.
This is called stalling, and if the bird can’t

avoid or correct it, it will drop out of the sky.
This rarely

happens, in part because filoplumes provide birds with the

information they need to rapidly adjust their wings and stay

in the air.
Which is, frankly, incredible.
I remember once

standing on a boat and watching a gull fly alongside me.
It

was windy, and we—the boat and the bird—were moving

fast.
As I held my hand out and felt the air blow over and

between my fingers, I marveled that the gull’s wing could

shape those same currents and keep it aloft.
But I didn’t

realize all the bird was doing—that it was also using its

filoplumes to read the air around it and make tiny

adjustments to its flight.
The French ophthalmologist André

Rochon-Duvigneaud once wrote that a bird is a “wing

guided by an eye,” but he was wrong—the wings also guide

themselves.
The same could be said about bats.
Their membranous

wings are very different from the feathered ones of birds,

but are no less sensitive.
They are covered with a

smattering of touch-sensitive hairs, protruding from small

domes and connected to mechanoreceptors.
[*23] Susanne

Sterbing showed that most of these hairs react only to air

that flows from the back of the wing to the front, which

typically occurs when the wing is about to stall.
Bats, like

birds, can sense those moments and take corrective

measures.
Thanks to their hairs, they can bank steeply,

hover, backflip to catch insects in their tails, and even land

upside down.
When Sterbing treated bat wings with hair

removal creams and flew the animals through obstacle

courses, the effects were obvious.
They never crashed, but

they kept a wide distance from the objects around them,

and their turns were wider and clumsier.
By contrast, with

their hairs intact, they could fly within inches of obstacles

and pull off hairpin turns.
For them, airflow sensors make

the difference between flying and flying acrobatically.
For other animals, however, such sensors mean the

difference between life and death.
Perhaps that is why they

have evolved into some of the most sensitive organs in the

world.
—

IN 1960, A shipment of bananas arrived at a marketplace

in Munich, Germany.
It had come from somewhere in

Central or South America, and had brought with it a few

hitchhikers—three large spiders, each as big as a hand.
The

spiders were sent to the University of Munich, where a

scientist named Mechthild Melchers began studying and

breeding them.
The species, now known as the tiger

wandering spider for the black and orange stripes on its

legs, has since become the most thoroughly studied spider

in the world.
The tiger wandering spider doesn’t spin a web to catch

food; instead, it sits in wait for its prey.
Its legs are covered

in hundreds of thousands of hairs, which are packed so

densely that there can be 400 in a square millimeter.
Almost all of them are connected to nerves and are

sensitive to touch.
Prod just a few on a single leg, and the

spider will either withdraw its limb or turn to investigate.
If

it is running and its hairs brush against an object—say, a

wire strung across its path by a curious scientist—the

spider will arch its body and scurry over the obstacle.
During courtship, a male might stimulate a female’s hairs

in just the right way to prevent her from eating him.
Most of these hairs only respond to direct contact, but

some are so long and sensitive that they will also be

deflected by the wind.
These are called trichobothria, from

the Greek words for “hair” (trichos) and “cup” (bothrium).
Like a bird’s filoplumes or a fish’s neuromasts, they’re flow

sensors—albeit exceptionally sensitive ones.
Even air that’s

moving at just an inch per minute—a breeze so gentle it

could hardly be called a breeze—will deflect them.
Watch

them under a microscope, and you’ll see them fluttering

away under the influence of imperceptible currents, while

everything around them is still.
With a hundred

trichobothria on every leg, the tiger wandering spider can

tune in to the airflow around its body, in every possible

direction.
It uses this sensitivity for lethal ends.
In its rainforest home, the spider spends the day hiding

within the leaf litter and only emerges half an hour after

sunset.
It walks onto a leaf and waits.
As the darkness

intensifies, gusts of wind become rare, and the steady

ambient airflow is dominated by low frequencies that the

spider ignores.
Its trichobothria are tuned instead to the

higher frequencies produced by airborne insects, like a fly

zooming toward the spider.
The fly might be minuscule, but

it still pushes air ahead of it.
At first, the spider can’t

distinguish that moving air from the background flow.
But

once the fly is about 1.5 inches away, its air signal becomes

noticeable, like a silhouette emerging from a fog.
The

trichobothria on the leg closest to the fly start to move

before those on the other seven, and sensing this

difference, the spider turns to face its incoming prey.
As

soon as the fly moves over one of its legs, it deflects the

trichobothria from straight overhead, and the spider jumps.
It grabs the fly from the air with its front legs, drags it to

the ground, and delivers a venomous bite.
“It’s even able to

correct its path while jumping,” says Friedrich Barth, who

has been studying the spider since 1963 and has watched

its jumps many times over.
“I’ve always thought about how

difficult it would be to build a robot to do this.”

Insects aren’t helpless, though.
Many have airflow

sensors of their own.
Wood crickets have a pair of spines

called cerci that protrude from their rear ends.
These are

covered in hundreds of hairs that are just as sensitive as a

spider’s trichobothria, if not more so.
These so-called

filiform hairs can detect the current produced by a wasp’s

wingbeats.
And, as Jerome Casas has shown, they can

detect the infinitesimal wind created by a charging spider.
The wolf spider is the cricket’s major predator and runs

down its prey.
On the uneven, leaf-strewn floor of a forest,

it must launch its attacks while standing on the same leaf

as its target.
It is fast, but Casas found that the cricket’s

hairs can sense it almost as soon as it starts to run.
Indeed,

the faster the spider moves, the more detectable it

becomes.
Its only hope is to sneak up on the cricket,

moving so slowly that it barely disturbs the air in front of it,

and getting close enough for a final lunge.
Even then, its

odds of success are just 1 in 50.
“The cricket almost always

wins,” Casas tells me.
“As soon as it jumps away from that

leaf and lands somewhere else, the game is over.
It’s on

another world.” [*24]

The filiform hairs of crickets and the trichobothria of

spiders are almost inconceivably sensitive.
They can be

deflected by a fraction of the energy in a single photon—the

smallest possible quantity of visible light.
These hairs are a

hundred times more sensitive than any visual receptor that

exists, or could possibly exist.
Indeed, the amount of energy

needed to shift a cricket’s hairs is very close to thermal

noise—the kinetic energy of jiggling molecules.
Put another

way, it would be almost impossible to make these hairs

more sensitive without breaking the laws of physics.
So why doesn’t everything in the world set them off?
Why aren’t spiders constantly leaping at imagined insects,

or crickets constantly fleeing from phantom spiders?
Partly,

the hairs only respond to biologically meaningful

frequencies—the kind produced by predators or prey, and

not by the environment.
The mechanoreceptors at the base

of the hairs are also less sensitive than the hairs

themselves and need stronger stimulation before they fire.
Finally, no single hair will send the spiders into action.
Animals rarely respond to the excited buzz of a single

mechanoreceptor.
Instead, they listen to the entire chorus.
Why, then, is each hair so sensitive?
The obvious

explanation is that long arms races between predators and

prey have led to the evolution of sensors that detect the

faintest possible signals.
“But that’s a bit of an easy answer,

and I’m not totally convinced,” says Casas.
As a biologist,

he’s used to talking about optimization, where animals

make the best of what they’ve got given the many

constraints they face.
But the cricket hairs are a rare

example of maximization, he says.
“They almost couldn’t be

better than they are, and that’s surprising.
No one really

knows why.” [*25]

Most arthropods—the diverse group that includes

insects, spiders, and crustaceans—have hairs that detect

the flow of either water or air.
The implications of this

widespread sense are profound, in ways we have barely

begun to grapple with.
For example, in 1978, Jürgen Tautz

showed that caterpillars can use hairs on their midsection

to sense the air movements produced by flying parasitic

wasps.
They react by freezing, throwing up, or falling to the

ground.
Thirty years later, Tautz showed that flying

honeybees can trigger the same effect.
Simply by moving

the air around the plants that they visit, bees can reduce

the amount of damage that very hungry caterpillars might

inflict.
Few groups of insects matter more to plants than

bees and caterpillars.
And yet no one appreciated that

these groups—the pollinators and the despoilers—are

connected by the slightest gusts of wind and the minuscule

deflections of hairs.
The air around us is full of signals that

we don’t detect.
And so is the ground below us.
SKIP NOTES

*1 Orphaned and stranded when she was one week old, Selka was rescued in

2012 and brought to Monterey Bay Aquarium, where she was raised by one of

its resident sea otters.
After months of learning how to otter, she was released,

but after just eight weeks, she was brutally attacked by a shark.
The aquarium

took her back, fixed her wounds, and released her again.
But after a bout of

toxic shellfish poisoning and signs that she had become too habituated to

humans, the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service decided that she was “too likely to

interact with humans to be safe in the wild.” She spent two years in the Long

Marine Lab before finally returning to Monterey Bay Aquarium, where she

now acts as a surrogate mom to other orphaned pups.
*2 Aristotle once wrote that “in the other senses man is inferior to many

animals, but in the sense of touch he far surpasses them all in acuity.” He had

never heard of sea otters, but he wasn’t too far off in his claims.
*3 Mark Rutland, who led the study in which volunteers distinguished between

ridges that differed in height by 10 nanometers, said that “if your finger was

the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses [and] cars.”

That’s true, but only if you dragged your planet-sized digit down the street—

an act that, ironically, would be rather insensitive.
*4 You might think that the rays of the star grow outward from the mole’s nose.
That’s not the case.
A star-nosed mole embryo has tiny swellings on the side of

its snout, which gradually lengthen into cylinders.
These are the future rays of

the star.
When the mole is born, the cylinders are still attached to its face.
Slowly, skin starts to grow beneath them, separating them from the underlying

tissue.
After roughly a week, the rays break free and spring forward.
A star is

born.
*5 Around 5 percent of star-nosed moles have mutant noses with either 10 or

12 pairs of rays.
Their brains have the corresponding number of stripes.
*6 Some are especially good at this.
Elena Gracheva (the scientist who studies thirteen-lined ground squirrels) and her husband, Slav Bagriantsev, showed

that the Pekin duck, an animal that we domesticated from wild mallards and

now breed exclusively for meat, is a touch specialist.
Compared to other

ducks, it has a wider bill, more mechanoreceptors in that bill, and more

neurons that carry signals from those mechanoreceptors.
More surprisingly, it

also has fewer neurons for sensing pain and temperature.
Sensory abilities

don’t come for free, so to become masters of fine touch, mallards had to

sacrifice other kinds of tactile sensations.
*7 Inspired by Piersma’s discovery, Susan Cunningham showed that distantly

related birds also use remote touch.
Ibises use the technique when probing

through muddy wetlands with their long, sickle-like beaks.
New Zealand’s

kiwis do the same through leaf litter.
*8 Insects evolved from ancestors that had many body segments, each with its

own pair of legs.
Over time, several of the frontmost segments fused to create

the insect head, and their respective limbs were transformed into either

mouthparts or antennae.
The antennae are essentially repurposed legs, or

sensory limbs.
*9 Tactile organs don’t have to be long or sweeping.
The remoras, or

suckerfishes, have transformed their dorsal fins into suction cups, which they

use to cling to the undersides of larger fish.
That sucker is full of

mechanoreceptors, which might tell the fish when it has made contact with a

host.
*10 When Sampath Seneviratne placed some auklets in a dark maze and taped

down their crests and whiskers, they were more likely to bump their heads.
*11 Grant showed that the opossum—a marsupial—also whisks, and controls its

vibrissae using muscles very similar to those used by a mouse.
These distantly

related species belong to branches of the mammalian family tree that

separated shortly after the group first evolved.
This suggests that the earliest

mammals actively explored their world through whisking.
*12 Buffett did slightly better, which Bauer attributes to Hugh’s shorter

attention span.
*13 A few other mammals have body-wide whiskers, including the naked mole-

rat and the hyraxes—small creatures that look like marmots but are in fact the

closest relatives of elephants and manatees.
These hairs probably help mole-

rats and hyraxes to detect the walls of cramped tunnels and rocky crevices,

much like the whiskered auklet.
*14 The seals actively keep the whiskers warm, even when diving in freezing

water.
This stops the tissues from stiffening and allows the whiskers to move

freely.
They pay a price for this.
Sense organs can’t usually be insulated in the

same way that internal organs can.
They have to be close to the surface, and

thus often leak heat.
To keep these organs heated in icy water is like powering

a radiator that’s situated in a doorway.
The fact that the animal bothers says

something about how valuable these organs are.
*15 For obvious reason, the U.S.
military funds studies like these, in the hope of creating instruments that can also track stealthy objects that are moving

underwater.
“Can you build devices that mimic the biological capabilities of an

animal like this one?” says Reichmuth, pointing at Sprouts.
“The answer so far

is no.”

*16 Bearded seals are an exception that proves the rule.
Their many whiskers

are also simple and cylindrical, because they, like walruses, are bottom-

feeders that root around for prey.
They don’t need a particularly strong

hydrodynamic sense.
*17 In 1908, the ichthyologist Bruno Hofer came close to working out what the lateral line did.
He noticed that a blind pike could still avoid collisions and

react to water currents as long as its lateral line was intact.
Hofer correctly

deduced that the organ allowed the pike to “feel at a distance” by sensing the

flow of water.
Unfortunately, he published his claim in an obscure and short-

lived journal that he himself had founded and that hardly anyone read.
*18 In 1963, Dijkgraaf summarized his work in a seminal paper, which argued

that the lateral line is a “specialized organ of touch,” analogous to the

vibrissae of mammals.
In a nice bit of conceptual turnabout, when the

hydrodynamic abilities of the manatee’s body vibrissae were first discovered,

they were billed as a mammalian equivalent of the lateral line.
*19 Some blind cavefish have evolved a unique style of swimming where they

alternate between rapidly kicking forward and gently gliding along.
The kicks

provide propulsion but swamp the lateral line.
The glide is slower but

generates a stable flow field that makes surrounding objects easier to discern.
*20 One of these is a Chinese fish called Sinocyclocheilus.
Between its long, upturned snout and a mysterious forward-pointing hump on its back, it looks

like a cross between a fish and an iron.
Its lateral line is normal, but Soares

suspects that the horn might somehow sensitize the neuromasts by creating a

bow wave ahead of the fish.
It’ll take more work to confirm that idea, but

Soares is keen to start.
*21 Crocodilians—alligators, crocodiles, and their relatives—weren’t always

aquatic.
They and their extinct relatives have been around for some 230

million years, and many of those ancient species were land-living creatures

that prowled like cats or galloped like horses.
It’s hard to know what senses

these prehistoric animals possessed, but their skulls provide a clue.
If they

had the same ripple-detecting bumps as modern crocodilians, they would also

have had telltale holes in their jaws through which nerves would have passed.
Some of them did—but not all of them.
Crocodilians only evolved the pressure-

sensitive bumps when they started transitioning to life in the water.
*22 That’s easier said than done since a female’s crest is green and is usually in front of green foliage.
But Kane knows some breeders who have white

peacocks, and discussions are afoot.
*23 Too short and thin to be seen with the naked eye, these hairs are not for insulation.
In 1912, scientists suggested that they could be airflow sensors

that allowed bats to fly in darkness.
But once people realized that bats use a

kind of sonar to navigate, interest in their tactile sense dropped, until Susanne

Sterbing reignited it in 2011.
*24 This ability resembles Spider-Man’s spider-sense, which warns him of

danger.
In some movies, the spider-sense is represented by small hairs that

stand up on Peter Parker’s arm.
But as Roger Di Silvestro wrote on the

National Wildlife Federation’s blog, “ Spiders can detect danger coming their

way with an early-warning system called eyes.”

*25 Does this airflow sense count as touch at a distance, as it is often

described?
Is it some version of hearing, which also relies on hairs that

respond to movements of air?
Opinion is divided.
Casas thinks it has elements

of both.
Barth feels that it’s a distinct sense in its own right.
I personally find it

hard to categorize without knowing more about what the animals are actually

experiencing.
How does the airflow of a distant fly feel to a spider compared

to a wire directly brushing its leg?
Do these feel as distinct as, say, hot or cold

to us, or are they two ends of the same spectrum of tactile sensations?
7.
The Rippling Ground

Surface Vibrations

IN 1991, KAREN WARKENTIN WAS living the dream.
They

loved frogs and snakes, and as a new PhD student, they had

somehow ended up in a place with plenty of both—Costa

Rica’s Corcovado National Park.
Sitting by a pond, they’d

observe the abundant red-eyed tree frogs with their lime-

green bodies, orange toes, electric-blue thighs, yellow-

striped flanks, and bulging, tomato-red eyes.
In just one

evening, each female would lay around a hundred eggs,

which she’d encase in jelly and stick to leaves overhanging

the water.
But around half of the clutches were devoured

by cat-eyed snakes.
The others would hatch after six or

seven days, releasing their tadpoles into the water—or,

occasionally, onto Warkentin.
“It was pretty common, in the

field, to have tadpoles falling in your hair, tadpoles falling

in your notebook,” they tell me.
“I also had the experience

of bumping into a clutch and seeing a few embryos hatch

out very quickly.”

That was weird.
The tadpoles weren’t passively spilling

out of eggs that Warkentin had broken.
It looked like they

were actively making a run for it.
If they could do that

when Warkentin bumped them, could they also flee from an

attacking snake?
Could they sense the motion of chewing

jaws and decide to take their chances in the water?
Warkentin presented this idea at a scientific meeting and

was met with skepticism.
Frog embryos were meant to be

passive entities that hatch on a fixed schedule and are

oblivious to their environment.
“Some people thought it

was a crazy idea,” Warkentin says.
“I thought it was a

testable one.”

They collected batches of eggs and housed them in

outdoor cages along with cat-eyed snakes.
The snakes are

nocturnal, so Warkentin had to check on them throughout

the night.
They’d sleep on a couch in an adjacent building,

suffer through the clouds of mosquitoes, and wake up every

15 minutes to groggily inspect the eggs.
It was rough, but

they were right: Embryonic tadpoles can hatch early when

attacked.
Warkentin even saw them bursting out of eggs

that were held in a snake’s mouth.
Warkentin has been studying this behavior ever since.
Fortunately, their research now involves fewer itchy all-

nighters and more infrared video cameras.
They show me

one recent video in which a cat-eyed snake lunges at a tree

frog clutch and grabs several eggs in its jaws.
As it tries to

pull its mouthful free from the jelly, the surrounding

embryos wriggle furiously, releasing an enzyme from their

faces that quickly disintegrates their eggs.
One of them

plops into the water.
A second later, another joins it.
Soon,

tadpoles are tumbling down too quickly to count, and the

snake, still chewing its first mouthful, is left with a smear of

empty jelly.
“I never get tired of watching this,” Warkentin

tells me.
Their experiments showed that frog embryos are neither

as helpless nor as unaware as people thought.
The

embryos’ sensory bubble extends beyond the actual bubble

in which they’re trapped.
Light can pass through the

translucent eggs, and chemicals can diffuse into them.
But

vibrations are what really matter.
They pass into the eggs

and into the embryos, which can distinguish between bad

vibes and benign ones without any previous experience of

either.
A bite from a snake will trigger hatching.
Rain,

wind, and footsteps will not.
Even when a mild earthquake

rattled Warkentin’s pond, the embryos didn’t react.
By

recording different vibrations and playing them back at the

eggs, Warkentin showed that they’re attuned to pitch and

rhythm.
Falling raindrops produce a steady pitter-patter of

short, high-frequency vibrations.
Attacking snakes produce

lower frequencies and more complicated patterns, with

prolonged bouts of chewing punctuated by periods of

stillness.
If Warkentin edited gaps of stillness into rainfall

recordings to make them feel more snake-like, the tadpoles

found them scarier and were more likely to hatch.
They can

clearly sense the world before entering it, and they can use

that information to defend themselves.
They have agency.
They have an Umwelt.
“As they develop, they get more and more senses, and

more and more information,” says Warkentin.
At two days

old, the embryos can detect the oxygen levels around them,

which tells them if their eggs have accidentally fallen into

water.
But they don’t respond to snakes until they are just

over four days old because, as Warkentin’s student Julie

Jung discovered, that’s when the vibration sensors in their

inner ears come online.
They can escape from danger

before then, but they have no way of sensing it.[*1] Snakes

are not yet part of their Umwelt.
But in a matter of hours,

everything changes: A new sense kicks in, and a realm of

vibrations to which they were once oblivious transforms

their lives.
Once the tadpoles have transformed into frogs and are

ready to make tadpoles of their own, males compete for

access to mates.
By watching them with infrared cameras,

Warkentin and their colleague Michael Caldwell saw that

males would square off along a branch, raise their bodies,

and vigorously shake their backsides.
These displays are

meant to be visually captivating, but males will also

perform when their lines of sight are obscured.
They might

not be able to see each other, but they can still feel the

vibrations created by their rival’s quivering bum and use

those vibrations to assess size and motivation.
In these

contests, the victors are usually those that shake for more

time and create longer-lasting vibrations.
[*2]

Many other animals probably communicate in this way.
Male fiddler crabs attract mates by thumping their gigantic

claws on the sand.
Termite soldiers drum their heads

against the walls of their mounds to create vibrational

alarms that attract more soldiers.
Water striders—insects

that skate along the surface of ponds and lakes—can coerce

partners into sex by making ripples that summon vibration-

sensitive predators.
All of these creatures create and

respond to vibrations that travel along the surfaces around

them, whether branch or beach.
Scientists call these

substrate-borne vibrations.
Everyone else might just call

them vibrations, or perhaps tremors or surface waves.[*3]

To some people, these surface vibrations (and the airflow

patterns that excite wandering spiders and crickets) count

as “sound.” By that logic, everything I described in the

second half of the previous chapter and everything I’m

about to describe in this one falls within the rubric of

“hearing.” I have no horse in this race and don’t care to

pick one.
If you’re a lumper, feel free to read these as a

single continuous chapter, and if you’re a splitter, think of

them as three discrete ones.
Either way, it’s worth noting

that while these stimuli have a lot of overlaps, they do also

have important differences in their physical properties that,

in turn, determine which animals pay attention to them and

what those species do with the information.
For example, airborne sounds are waves that oscillate in

the

direction

of

travel—imagine

stretching

and

compressing a Slinky.
Surface waves, by contrast, oscillate

perpendicularly to the direction of travel—imagine shaking

the Slinky up and down.
Those oscillations are obvious as

ripples on the surface of water.
They also occur on solid

ground to a less visible extent.
Throw a rock on the ground,

and a subtle wave will ripple along the surface.
If an animal

is sensitive enough, it could feel the rise and fall of the

ground beneath its feet.
Many animals are sensitive

enough, but most humans are not.
Aside from the bass of a

speaker or the shake of a cellphone, most of us miss out on

the lush vibrational landscape that other species are privy

to.
It doesn’t help that surface vibrations can be hard to

separate from airborne sounds.
Animals often produce both

at the same time, shaking earth and air simultaneously.
And

animals often detect both kinds of waves with the same

receptors and organs, like hair cells and inner ears.
We

certainly talk about them using a shared vocabulary:

Creatures are said to be “listening” for vibrations, even

when those are inaudible.
Perhaps the most important distinction between surface

vibrations and sounds is that the former are largely

ignored, including by scientists who study the senses.
For

the longest time, researchers saw all kinds of drumming,

thumping, shaking, and quivering body parts, and

interpreted them as visual or auditory signals, while

ignoring the surface waves that those movements produce.
Every red-eyed tree frog cues into that sensory world from

four and a half days of age, but generations of scientists

ignored it.
“ We have encountered it, but we were not

looking for it,” wrote ecologist Peggy Hill.
It’s a lesson that

sensory biologists, and everyone else, should heed: By

giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be

right in front of us.
And sometimes what we miss is

breathtaking.
—

I’M IN A lab in Columbia, Missouri, staring at a tick-trefoil

plant.
A dot of red light is shimmering on one of its leaves,

as if someone planned to assassinate it.
The dot is coming

from a device called a laser vibrometer.
It converts the

vibrations moving over the surface of the leaf, which we

cannot hear, into audible sounds, which we can.
When I

touch the table, I shake the entire plant and hear a loud

roar.
When I speak, the sound waves from my mouth set up

surface waves in the leaf, which are converted back into

sound waves by the speaker.
I hear my own voice, as

channeled through the plant.
No one’s interested in the

sound of my voice, though.
Rex Cocroft and his student

Sabrina Michael are more interested in the song of the

minute creature on the leaf.
It’s a treehopper—a kind of

sap-sucking insect.
It has large orange eyes, legs tucked so

closely under its head that they resemble a beard, and

black-and-white textures that look like a seashell.
This

species is known as Tylopelta gibbera, and though it has no

official common name, Cocroft makes one up on the spot—

the tick-trefoil treehopper.
We met Cocroft in the introduction, when he took his

mentor Mike Ryan to meet some treehoppers in the

Panamanian rainforest.
That encounter took place more

than 20 years ago, but Cocroft is still fascinated by these

insects and the messages they exchange.
By rapidly

contracting muscles in their abdomen, they can create

vibrations that move along the plants on which they stand,

and up the legs of other treehoppers.
These vibrations are

normally silent, but a vibrometer can convert them into

audible sound.
Cocroft, Michael, and I all lean in toward

the tiny tick-trefoil treehopper with almost comical

expectation.
And then we hear a rumbling noise, which

sounds entirely unlike what an insect would produce.
It’s a

purr but a startlingly deep one, more lion than house cat.
“Here we go,” says Cocroft, beaming.
“Good job, buddy,” says Michael.
Plants are strong, flexible, and springy, which makes

them fantastic carriers of surface waves.
[*4] Insects exploit

that property, filling plants with their vibrational songs.
Between treehoppers, leafhoppers, cicadas, crickets,

katydids, and more, Cocroft estimates that around 200,000

species of insects communicate through surface vibrations.
Their songs aren’t normally audible, and so most people

are completely unaware that they exist.
Those who become

aware often get hooked.
Cocroft remembers his first time.
He was a young

student interested in animal communication and had

decided to focus on treehoppers because they were obscure

and understudied.
In a field in Ithaca, he found a goldenrod

plant that was covered in the species Publilia concava.
He

clipped a contact microphone onto the stem of the plant

and listened through headphones.
“Very shortly, I heard

this woo-woo-woo-woo,” he tells me, mimicking a noise that

sounds like a plaintive bullfrog.
“It was a crazy sound that

nobody had ever heard before, and it was right in my

backyard.
And that was it.
I think that everyone who learns

about this vibrational world can’t help but be charmed by

it, but there’s a certain fraction of people who become so

amazed that they have to go out and record from more

species.
There’s so much out there.
It’s really endless.”

Cocroft now has a library of treehopper recordings.
When he plays them to me, I’m dumbfounded.
The songs

are haunting, mesmerizing, and surprising.
None of them

sound remotely like the familiar, high-pitched chirping of

crickets or cicadas, but instead sound more like birds,

apes, or even machinery and musical instruments.
They’re

often deep and melodic, and they likely sound that way to

the insects themselves.
The song of Stictocephala lutea

resembles a scratchy didgeridoo.
Cyrtolobus gramatanus

melds a hooting monkey with mechanical clicks.
Atymna

sounds like the warning that a truck makes when it’s

backing up, combined with a drum.
Potnia lures me into a

false sense of security with a mundane brum-brum-brum

train, which then ends with a shocking half moo, half

scream.
When Cocroft first heard that, he tells me, “I sat

back in my chair and thought: No way!
Is that an insect?”

These vibrational songs are so strange because they’re

not subject to the same physical constraints as airborne

sounds.
In the air, an animal’s pitch is normally tied to its

size, which is why mice don’t bellow and elephants don’t

squeak.
That constraint doesn’t exist for surface waves, so

small animals can make low-frequency vibrations that seem

like they’re coming from much larger bodies.
A treehopper

can produce a mating call that’s as low as that of an

alligator, even though the latter is millions of times heavier.
Airborne sounds have another limitation: They radiate

outward in three dimensions, and so lose energy very

quickly.
Insects compensate for this by concentrating all

their efforts in a narrow range of frequencies, producing

simple chirps.
But surface waves only have to travel along

flat paths, so they retain their energy over longer

distances.
Insects that signal along this channel can afford

to get more creative.
They can produce melodic upsweeps

and downsweeps, stacks of tones, and percussive

backdrops.
That’s why they sound more like birds.
There are more than 3,000 species of treehoppers, and

they use surface waves in a variety of ways.
[*5] Some babies

produce synchronized vibrations to summon their mothers

when they sense a predator.
Some mothers produce

vibrations that silence the youngsters, lest their panicked

tremors attract even more predators.
Tick-trefoil

treehoppers, like the one I saw in Cocroft’s lab, use surface

waves to congregate in groups.
One will purr, and if

another is within legshot, it responds with a sharp tick.
The

duo repeatedly move toward each other while purring and

ticking, like children shouting “Marco” and “Polo” until

finally they meet.
They court each other in a similar way.
A

male makes a vibratory whine, followed by a train of high-

pitched pulses.
If a female hears him and is receptive, she

makes a hum as soon as he finishes.
He uses that hum to

gauge her direction, walks a little closer, and makes

another whine.
She hums again, and slowly, the two

duetters find each other.
But if a second male is on the

same plant, he’ll unleash his own whine in the final

moments of the first male’s call; this shuts down the

female’s response.
The first male retaliates by timing his

next call to interrupt the second male, and the two go back

and forth, repeatedly jamming each other.
“If there’s more

than one male, it takes them a long time to find a female,”

Cocroft says.[*6]

Treehoppers can gather on a single plant in the

hundreds, and many of them might be vibrating away at the

same time.
A single stem might be as raucous as a busy

street, full of cries for help, calls for silence, invitations to

hang out, and literal booty calls.
Even if you’ve never heard

of treehoppers until now, if you spend any time outdoors,

you will almost certainly have sat next to one, oblivious to

the vibrational serenade it was performing.
And these are

just some of the many animals taking part in the full

vibrational chorus.
Masked birch caterpillars scrape their

anuses on leaves to invite other caterpillars to social

gatherings.
Acacia ants vigorously defend their home trees

from browsing mammals if they sense the vibrations

created by chewing mouths.
Even species whose calls we

can hear are often sending vibrational signals that we

can’t.
Cocroft plays me more recordings, made through

plant stems, in which chirping cicadas sound like cows, and

katydids sound like revving chainsaws.
“I’m just amazed at

the unbelievable richness of nature that already seemed so

rich,” he says.
It is surprisingly easy to tap into that extra richness,

even without a laser vibrometer.
In 1949, three decades

before such instruments were invented, a pioneering

Swedish entomologist named Frej Ossiannilsson heard the

vibrations of leafhoppers by putting them on grass blades,

sticking the blades in test tubes, and holding the tubes to

his ear.
As a trained violinist, he transcribed what he heard

in musical notation.
To hear them today, Cocroft simply

uses a cheap speaker and a digital recorder connected to a

clip-on microphone that a guitarist might use.
With this kit,

he spends his spare time prospecting for vibrations, miking

random stems, leaves, and branches in nearby parks, or

even in his backyard.
Most times, he’ll hear something new.
I ask him to show me.
We drive to a park just a few minutes away from his lab.
In a sunny spot, next to a wall of long grass, Cocroft and his

students kneel down and begin clipping their microphones

onto plants.
For a while, we hear nothing.
It’s late

September, and the season for vibrational song is drawing

to a close.
Strong gusts of wind are drowning everything

else out.
I can hear the footsteps of a walking caterpillar,

and a beetle landing heavily on a leaf, but nothing like the

haunting melodies I had hoped to experience firsthand.
After a disappointing half hour, Cocroft apologizes.
But just

as we decide to call it a day, one of his students, Brandy

Williams, calls to us.
“There’s something really cool here,”

she says.
We walk over, and from her speaker, we hear what

sounds like…sniggering?
“Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh,” it seems to

say.
It is more hyena-like than insect-like.
“Eh, eh, eh, eh,

eh.” Williams has clipped her microphone onto the bottom

of a random blade of grass, and we cannot see any insects

upon it.
And yet, there’s definitely an insect there.
“Eh, eh,

eh, eh, eh.” So few people have listened to the vibrational

world of treehoppers and other insects that on any attempt,

there’s always a chance of experiencing something that no

other human ever has.
I ask Cocroft if he’s heard the

mysterious sniggering before.
“I’ve heard things like that,”

he tells me, “but whether I’ve heard that one…I really don’t

know.
There are so many species out there.”

Satisfied, we head back to his car.
I’m suddenly aware of

the choruses that might be vibrating through all the plants

we walk past.
I think about the vibrations that we ourselves

are making with every step—the seismic surface waves that

ripple out from each footfall.
Although we hear the crunch

of twigs underfoot and the soft squelches as shoes meet

mud, we don’t detect the tremors our footsteps send out.
But other creatures do.
—

AS NIGHT FALLS on the Mojave Desert, so does silence.
Aside

from the occasional howl of a coyote or the distant roar of a

passing plane, the air is silent.
The dunes, however, thrum

with vibrations.
As insects emerge to forage, their petite

feet create tremors that course along the sand.
These

waves are extremely faint and short-lived.
But they’re

strong enough for the sand scorpion to sense.
Sand scorpions are some of the Mojave’s most common

residents and will eat anything they can successfully grab

and sting, including other sand scorpions.
In the 1970s,

Philip Brownell and Roger Farley realized that the

scorpions would readily attack anything that walks or lands

within 20 inches of them.
“ Gentle disturbances of the sand

with a twig also triggered a vigorous attack,” Brownell

later wrote in Scientific American, “but a moth held

squirming in the air a few centimeters from the scorpion

did not attract its attention.” It seemed to track its prey

using surface waves.
Brownell and Farley tested this idea by placing

scorpions in a cunningly designed arena.
It looked smooth

and continuous on the surface, but a buried air gap blocked

vibrations from traveling between the two halves.
If a

scorpion stood on one half, it was completely oblivious

when the researchers prodded the other half with a stick,

even at a point just an inch away.
But if even one of the

scorpion’s legs straddled the gap, it became aware of the

entire arena and would turn to face any disturbance.
Its sensors lie in its feet.
On the joint that could be

loosely described as an “ankle,” there’s a cluster of eight

slits, as if the exoskeleton had been scored by a sharp

knife.
These are the slit sensilla—vibration-detecting

organs common to all arachnids.
Each slit is spanned by a

membrane and connected to a nerve cell.
When a surface

wave reaches the scorpion, the rising sand pushes against

its feet.
This compresses the slits by an infinitesimal

amount, but enough to squeeze the membrane and cause

the nerves to fire.
By sensing the tiniest changes in its own

exoskeleton, the scorpion can feel the steps of passing prey.
The first time this happens, it shifts into its hunting

stance.
It raises its body, opens its pincers, and arranges its

eight feet into a near-perfect circle.
In this position, it can

work out where surfaces waves are coming from by noting

when those waves hit each of its feet.
It turns and runs

before pausing and waiting for another wave.
When one

arrives, it turns and runs again, getting closer to its target

with each successive tremor.
If its pincers collide with

something, the scorpion seizes and stings.
If it arrives at

the source of the waves and can’t find anything, it knows

that its prey is underground, and digs it out.
Fittingly, these discoveries were earthshaking.
They

were made over a decade before Karen Warkentin found

their frog-filled pond and Rex Cocroft started listening to

treehoppers.
At the time, the study of surface vibrations

was even more niche than it is now.
Scientists knew that

animals can feel such vibrations, but few believed they

could track down a source, any more than a human can

locate an earthquake’s epicenter without equipment.[*7] It

seemed especially preposterous that an animal could do so

on sand, whose loose grains ought to damp and absorb

vibrations rather than transmit them.
But Brownell and

Farley’s meticulous experiments showed that these

assumptions were wrong.
Sand, soil, and solid earth are

surprisingly good at transmitting surface waves, which are

strong enough for animals to detect and informative

enough for them to use.
They were also interesting enough

for scientists to study.
Others began to look for seismic

senses in other animals.
They didn’t have to look very far.
—

THE LARVAE OF antlion insects, which are known as

doodlebugs in North America, also hunt using surface

waves that travel along sand.
But rather than running down

their victims, they bring their prey to them.
They dig

conical pits in dry sand and lurk at the bottom with their

plump bodies buried and their gigantic jaws agape.
The

pits are precisely constructed traps.
Their sides are shallow

enough that they don’t spontaneously collapse, but steep

enough that any ant that walks into them will start to slip.
The footfalls of an ant, even a struggling one, are hardly

heavy, but the antlion is covered in bristles that can detect

vibrations of less than a nanometer.
It can sense when an

ant is walking outside the pit, and can definitely tell when

one is inside it.
It reacts by tossing sand at the thrashing

creature, creating an avalanche that further destabilizes

the already slippery ground beneath it.
Eventually the ant

falls into the antlion’s jaws, and is pulled under and

injected with venom.
Its vibrations then cease.
Other predators hunt by exploiting the seismic senses of

their prey.
Every April, the town of Sopchoppy, Florida,

hosts a festival to celebrate the old tradition of worm

grunting.
Since the 1960s, several local families have

ventured into the woods, pounded stakes into the ground,

and created strong vibrations by scraping the stakes with

iron.
Soon, hundreds of large earthworms rise up, where

they are easily collected by the bucketful and sold as bait.
Some worm grunters believe that their vibrations mimic

the sound of rainfall.
Ken Catania—the same man who

studied the star-nosed mole—proved otherwise.
While

attending the Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin’ Festival in 2008,

he showed that worms barely react to the patter of

raindrops, but they hightail it to the surface if they detect

the vibrations of a digging mole, or even a recording of

those vibrations.
This is usually a sensible strategy since

moles don’t pursue their prey aboveground.
But several

surface predators have learned that they can summon

worms by deliberately shaking the ground.
Herring gulls

and wood turtles do this, as, apparently, do Floridians.
For

decades, worm grunters have been unknowingly mimicking

mole-quakes.
[*8]

Animals have likely been able to sense seismic vibrations

from the moment they ventured onto the land from the

oceans.
The first backboned creatures to make that move—

early amphibians and reptiles—probably laid their large

heads on the ground, allowing surface waves to travel

through the bones of their jaws and into their inner ears.
In

the ancestors of mammals, three of those jawbones became

repurposed for transmitting airborne sounds.
They shrank

and moved, turning into the small bones of the middle ear—

the hammer, anvil, and stirrup.
Now, instead of

transmitting surface vibrations from the ground via the jaw,

they transmit sounds from the air via the outer ear and

eardrum.
But the ancient bone-conduction pathway still works:

Vibrations can pass directly to the inner ear via the bones

of the skull, bypassing the outer ear and eardrum

altogether.
Cyclists and runners can use bone-conduction

headphones to listen to music while keeping their ears free.
People with hearing difficulties can use bone-conduction

hearing aids, while deaf dancers can use special vibrating

dancefloors.
And everyone who can hear does so partly

through bone conduction, which is why people often think

they sound strange on recordings.
Those recordings

reproduce the airborne components of our voices, but not

the vibrations traveling through our skulls.
Other mammals have tweaked their own anatomy to

better sense vibrations through bone conduction and

restore their ancestral seismic sense.
Among the sands of

southwestern Africa lives the Namib Desert golden mole.
It

is mostly insensitive to airborne sounds, because its outer

ear is tiny and hidden in fur.
But it is highly sensitive to

vibrations, thanks to its malleus—the hammer bone of its

middle ear.
This bone is relatively enormous: Even though

the golden mole weighs just an ounce and would fit in your

palm, its malleus is bigger than yours.
[*9]

The golden mole forages at night, either by trundling

over the Namib’s dunes or by “swimming” through the

loose sand with its paddle-like feet.
It searches for sparse

mounds of dune grass, where delicious termites might nest.
Peter Narins has suggested that wind blowing over these

mounds produces gentle low-frequency vibrations through

the dunes, which the golden mole can detect by

periodically dipping its head and shoulders into the sand.
Every time it does, vibrations pass into its inner ear via its

malleus, and humming beacons of dune grass resound

around it.
[*10] The golden mole’s seismic sense is so acute

that, though blind, it can walk between distant mounds in

virtually straight lines.
Golden moles, sand scorpions, antlions, and earthworms

all have poor eyesight and all live either very close to the

ground or within it.
It seems plausible, and perhaps even

obvious with hindsight, that they should be attuned to

vibrations in the ground.
But a seismic sense is harder to

intuit in creatures that stand higher off the ground.
Cats,

for

example,

have

a

lot

of

vibration-sensitive

mechanoreceptors in the muscles of their bellies.
When a

cat crouches down during a stalk, is it doing more than

lying low?
Is it also sensing the vibrations of potential prey?
Could a lion pinpoint distant antelope herds?
“ The lying

about that nature documentaries attribute to innate

laziness of lions may actually be a period of astute

assessment,” wrote Peggy Hill in her book about vibrational

communication.
Hill herself admits that such ideas could be

“greeted with applause or derision,” but her point is that

the questions are worth asking.
Seismic senses have been

long neglected, and biologists always seem to be one stray

observation away from uncovering an unseen side to even

the most familiar creatures.
—

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Caitlin O’Connell spent weeks at a time

sitting in a dank, cramped, half-buried cement bunker,

gazing through a narrow slit at a waterhole.
She had come

to Etosha National Park in Namibia to study elephants and

to find ways of keeping them away from croplands.
In the

meditative confines of her bunker, she got to know the local

herds, and certain behaviors began to leap out.
Sometimes,

she noticed, an elephant seemed to sense something in the

distance, freeze midstride, and lean forward with a foot

propped up on its toenails.
To O’Connell, that pose seemed

strangely familiar.
As a master’s student, she had studied

the vibrational communication of planthoppers, which are

related to treehoppers, and which also lean forward and

press down on their feet when trying to detect each other’s

signals.
Could the elephants really be doing the same?
It

surely wasn’t a coincidence that whenever one of them

adopted this pose, other elephants soon appeared in the

distance.
The animals seemed to be listening with their

feet, but no one seemed to have noticed.
In 2002, O’Connell returned to her waterhole to test her

idea.
She had previously recorded the alarm call of local

elephants that were being threatened by lions.
The original

call was audible, but O’Connell transformed it into a mostly

seismic signal by cutting off the higher frequencies and

playing it through shakers buried in the ground.
When she

did this, entire herds would freeze.
They’d fall silent,

become wary, and bunch up into defensive formations.
Watching them through night-vision goggles, O’Connell was

thrilled.
“ All these years of planning, hoping, and

dreaming of this moment.
We were finally showing that my

original hunch so long ago was true,” she wrote in her book

The Elephant’s Secret Sense.
“Elephants were detecting

and responding to our seismic cues.”

A few years later, she repeated the experiment, but with

an extra anti-predator rumble recorded in Kenya.
This time,

the Etosha elephants responded to the vibrations of the

familiar local alarm, but not to the unfamiliar Kenyan one.
They not only paid attention to vibrations but could tell if

they were coming from elephants they knew.
More recently,

O’Connell has shown that elephants can respond to other

kinds of seismic signals.
In one video, a sexually active bull

named Beckham searches fruitlessly for a fertile female

after hearing her rumbles through a hidden speaker.[*11]

What of the other elephant-like creatures, like

mammoths and mastodons, that used to roam the planet?
What about the giant ground sloths, the short-faced bears

that would have towered over modern grizzlies, the

armadillos the size of cars, or the hornless rhinos that were

10 times heavier than modern ones?
These megafauna are

now all extinct, and humans and our prehistoric relatives

are to blame.
As we spread around the globe, the biggest

animals blinked out.
That trend continues today.
The three

remaining species of elephants—two in Africa and one in

Asia—are all endangered.
The next-biggest land animals—

white and black rhinos, giraffes, and hippos—are in trouble,

too.
Great herds are also diminished.
Between 30 and 60

million bison once roamed North America in groups that

were thousands strong, but European colonists slaughtered

them in a bid to also exterminate the Indigenous peoples

who depended on them.
Now just 500,000 bison remain,

and most are confined to private lands.
Imagine how much

quieter the ground is now without all those hooves and

paws.
Six continents that once would have thundered with

the footsteps of titans now reverberate with sparse gurgles.
Can humans, the cause of that seismic silencing, even

feel the loss?
Western societies have largely cut themselves

off from the ground beneath their feet with shoes, seats,

and floors.
If they spent more time sitting upon instead of

standing above the ground, what might they sense?
Luther

Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota chief and author, offered a

clue.
“ The Lakota…loved the earth and all things of the

earth, the attachment growing with age,” he wrote in 1933.
“The old people came literally to love the soil, and they sat

or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a

mothering power….
This is why the old Indian still sits

upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away

from its life giving forces.
For him, to sit or lie upon the

ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more

keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life

and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.
The

earth was full of sounds which the old-time Indian could

hear, sometimes putting his ear to it so as to hear more

clearly.”

That direct connection to the natural vibratory world

may be in decline, but a different vibroscape has arisen.
Modern cellphones buzz against our skin and fingertips,

alerting us of breaking news, upcoming events, and social

attention.
Our devices use vibrations to connect us to the

world beyond our bodies, extending our Umwelt beyond the

reach of our anatomy.
As usual, though, another group of

animals got there first.
—

“IT IS PRETTY gross in here, just to warn you,” Beth

Mortimer warns me.
And yet, I am unprepared.
I had asked to see her colony of Nephila spiders, which I

assumed would be housed individually in a row of cages.
Instead, we walk through a heavy door and a curtain of

wide plastic slats into a large room that used to be an

aviary but now houses a few dozen free-range spiders.
Mortimer and I stand in the middle of this arachnarium to

avoid blundering into the messy, meter-wide webs.
They

are hard to see, but I can easily sense where they are by

looking for the large spiders at their centers.
Each is the

size of an ear.
In the wild, Nephila webs can be big and

strong enough to catch bats.
In this room, they are fed on

flies, which are also allowed to roam freely.
That’s the gross

bit: The flies are bred from a compost bin in the corner, full

of rotting bananas and milk powder.
As Mortimer tells me

about this, and about her work on spider silk, I try to

ignore the large blowflies landing on my hair, notepad, and

pen.
“I bring undergrads in here and they’re

disappointingly squeamish,” she says.
To humans, whose eyes can scan the entire scene and

are sharp enough to just about make out the silk of the

webs, the room is a labyrinth of death traps waiting to

ensnare the flies.
To the spiders, which have very poor

eyesight, the room doesn’t really exist: There is only the

web, and whatever vibrates it.
To the flies, the thin webs

are imperceptible until they are ensnared in one.
I almost

feel sorry for them.
“I don’t,” says Mortimer.
“I hate flies.”

She adores spiders, though, and Nephila most of all.
She

studies other vibration-sensing animals, including water

striders, planthoppers, and elephants.
But Nephila, the first

creatures she worked with when she started her scientific

career, “will always be my first love,” she says.
“I really

respect the elephants.
But I love the spiders.
The fact that

they’re so misunderstood by so many people just really

makes me want to sing their praises so much more.” [*12]

Spiders have been around for almost 400 million years,

and they’ve likely been producing silk for all that time.
Their silk is a marvel of engineering.
Though light and

elastic, it can be stronger than steel and tougher than

Kevlar.
Spiders use it to wrap their eggs, construct

shelters, hang in the air, and soar through the skies (more

on that later).
Most famously, many species fashion it into a

flat, circular shape—the orb web.
The orb web is a trap, which intercepts and immobilizes

flying insects.
It’s also a surveillance system, which extends

the range of the spider’s senses well beyond the reach of

its body.
That body is covered in thousands of slit sensilla—

vibration-sensing cracks similar to those that sand

scorpions use to detect the seismic activity of their prey.
On

spiders, these slits are also concentrated around the joints,

where they’re grouped into clusters called lyriform organs.
Using these exquisitely sensitive organs, all spiders can

sense the vibrations coursing through whatever they’re

standing upon.
For the tiger wandering spider of the

previous chapter, that surface is the ground.
For orb-

weavers like Nephila, it’s the web.
These spiders construct

the surfaces that they then sense vibrations through.
For

that reason, the orb web isn’t just another substrate, like

soil, sand, or plant stems.
It is built by the spider and it is

part of the spider.
It is as much a part of the creature’s

sensory system as the slits on its body.
Like the Nephila in Mortimer’s arachnarium, most orb-

weavers sit in the middle of their webs and rest their legs

on the radial spokes that funnel vibrations toward them.
From this position, they can distinguish the vibrations

generated by rustling wind or falling leaves from those

created by struggling prey.
They can probably work out

where those struggles are coming from by comparing the

strength of the vibrations hitting each of their legs.
They

can assess the size of their prisoners, and will approach the

larger ones more carefully or not at all.
If the prey stops

moving, they can find it by deliberately plucking the silk

and “listening” to the returning vibrational echoes.
When it

comes to capturing prey, vibrations supersede other

stimuli.
If a tasty fly buzzes above an orb-weaver, the spider

will simply wave it away with its legs.
The fly only becomes

recognizable as food if it shakes the web.
This dependency on vibrations is so absolute that many

animals can exploit orb-weavers by camouflaging their

footsteps.
The small dewdrop spider Argyrodes is a thief,

stealing from larger spiders like Nephila by hacking their

webs.
From a nearby hiding place, it runs several lines of

silk over to the hub and spokes of a Nephila web,

effectively plugging its sensory system into that of the

bigger spider.
It can tell when Nephila has caught

something and is wrapping it in silk for storage.
It then

runs over and eats the insect itself, often after cutting it

free from the main web so that the host spider can no

longer detect it.
Argyrodes acts carefully to avoid creating

its own telltale vibrations.
It runs only when Nephila is

moving and treads more slowly when Nephila is still.
It also

holds on to any strands it cuts to avoid any sudden releases

in tension.
Through such subterfuge, this thief is almost

never caught.
As many as 40 of them might be plugged into

a single Nephila web.
Other creatures have more lethal intentions than

pillaging food.
Some assassin bugs walk so stealthily that

they can creep right up to a spider and kill it on its own

web.
Portia, a jumping spider that eats other spiders, will

violently twang a web to mimic the impact of a twig and

use this vibrational smoke screen to charge at its prey.
Both

Portia and the assassin bugs can pluck webs to mimic the

vibrations of ensnared prey and lure spiders to them.
These

predators are all visually conspicuous, but as long as their

vibrations feel like those of an insect, a twig, or a breeze,

an orb-weaver can’t tell the difference.
It lives in what

Friedrich Barth calls “ a small woven world full of

vibrations.”

An orb-weaver not only builds its own vibrational

landscape but also can adjust it as if tuning a musical

instrument.
The range of that instrument is immense.
By

using gas guns to fire projectiles at individual silk fibers

and analyzing the threads with high-speed cameras and

lasers, Mortimer concluded that some silks can transmit

vibrations over a wider range of speeds than any known

material.
A spider can theoretically change the speed and

strength of those vibrations by altering the stiffness of its

silk, the tension in the strands, and the overall shape of the

web.
It can do this every time it builds a new web, by

pulling silk out of its body at different speeds, by creating

fibers of different thicknesses, or by adding tension to the

new strands.
It can adjust webs that have already been

spun by adding, removing, or tugging on specific threads.
It

can rely on silk’s natural tendency to contract in humidity,

and then stretch out these tightened threads to just the

right degree.
It’s not clear when orb-weavers might decide

to do any of this, but they certainly have the option of

tuning their own senses and defining their own Umwelt

according to their needs.
Zoologist Takeshi Watanabe showed that the Japanese

orb-weaver Oclonoba sybotides changes the structure of its

web when it is hungry.
It adds spiral decorations that

increase the tension along the spokes, improving the web’s

ability to transmit the weaker vibrations transmitted by

smaller prey.
When it is famished, every morsel counts.
To

capture such morsels, the spider expands the range of its

senses by changing the nature of its web.
But here’s the truly important part: Watanabe found that

a well-fed spider will also go after small flies if it is placed

onto a tense web built by a hungry spider.
The spider has

effectively outsourced the decision about which prey to

attack to its web.
The choice depends not just on its

neurons, hormones, or anything else inside its body, but

also on something outside it—something it can create and

adjust.
Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform

organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at

the leg.
The spider will eat whatever it’s aware of, and it

sets the bounds of its awareness—the extent of its Umwelt

—by spinning different kinds of webs.[*13] The web, then, is

not just an extension of a spider’s senses but an extension

of its cognition.
In a very real way, the spider thinks with its

web.
Tuning the silk is like tuning its own mind.
A spider can also tune its body.
Biophysicist Natasha

Mhatre showed that the infamous black widow can adjust

the lyriform organs on its joints to different vibrational

frequencies by changing its posture.
The widow spins a

messy horizontal web, and normally hangs upside down

from it with legs outstretched.
But when it’s hungry, it can

also draw its legs into a “crouch”—a sensory power pose

that retunes its joints to higher frequencies.
Like the tense

web of Watanabe’s orb-weaver, this stance might shift the

spider’s Umwelt toward the movements of smaller prey.
It

might also help it to ignore the low frequencies of wind.
It’s

like a postural squint, which allows the spider to focus its

attention.
The analogy isn’t exact, though, since squinting

helps us to focus on particular parts of space.
Here, the

black widow’s posture focuses on different parts of

information space.
It’s as if a human could emphasize the

red parts of our vision by squatting, or single out high-

pitched sounds by going into downward dog.
The black widow’s crouch reminds me of the hunting

stance of the sand scorpion, the dipped head of the golden

mole, and the forward-leaning, tipped-toe posture that

clued Caitlin O’Connell in to the seismic sense of elephants.
It seems only right that animals that parse the vibrations

moving beneath them might have special ways of

interacting with whatever they’re standing on.
For us,

sitting down will suffice.
Since getting a puppy, I’ve been spending a lot more

time on the floor than I used to.
From that position, I can

feel surface vibrations that I hadn’t ever noticed before.
I

can feel the footsteps of my neighbors as they come in and

out.
I can feel the rumbles of garbage trucks as they drive

past outside.
This is a world I can lower myself upon, but

it’s one that Typo always resides in.
Being a corgi, he is

usually five feet closer to the rippling ground.
I wonder

what he feels.
I also wonder what he hears.
Typo will often

perk up from a rest, his Yoda-esque ears picking up

something that mine did not.
He reminds me of what I’m

missing: not just the surface waves traveling through the

floor below us but also the pressure waves—sounds—

moving through the air around us.
SKIP NOTES

*1 When the tadpoles’ bodies are shaken, small crystals in their inner ears push against touch-sensitive hair cells, which send signals to their brains.
This

same inner ear system also controls a reflex that steadies the tadpoles’ gaze

by moving their eyes in the opposite direction to their head.
So Jung built a

jury-rigged tadpole rotator.
By placing the tadpoles in tubes, gently turning

them, and watching if their eyes swiveled, she could work out exactly when

their inner ears become sensitive to vibrations.
*2 Caldwell even provoked males with a model frog mounted on an electric

shaker.
When this Robofrog vibrated, other males responded with their own

aggressive signals.
When it made visual signals without accompanying

vibrations, the other males didn’t care.
*3 The vocabulary gets a little difficult, even for scientists.
Many of them use vibrations in a colloquial way to specifically refer to substrate-borne

vibrations, even though the term technically also encompasses sounds.
I’m

going to do the same here, with apologies to engineers who are now surely

recoiling in disgust.
*4 “Surface waves” isn’t strictly accurate here.
When a wave travels along a

long, thin structure, like a plant stem or a strand of spider silk, it’s not that the

surface ripples.
Instead, the structure itself bends and flexes, which is

properly known as a bending wave.
I have relegated this to a note so that we

aren’t drowning in terms.
*5 Cocroft often tries to work out what different vibrations are for by recording them, playing them back to the treehoppers, and seeing how the insects react

to the artificial noises.
His sister once told a friend about this, and the friend

said, “He lies to bugs?”

*6 Many duetting insects will jam each other’s signals, and scientists can

exploit this behavior to control agricultural pests.
By playing the right

vibrations along wires that run through vineyards, they can shut down the sex

lives of leafhoppers that spread diseases.
*7 Can animals sense earthquakes before they happen?
It seems likely that

many species could detect the incoming seismic waves, but whether they can

parse that information and take appropriate evasive action is unclear.
For

millennia, there have been many anecdotal reports of creatures acting

strangely before a quake, but such behaviors aren’t consistent, and it’s hard to

know if human observers are simply remembering unusual activity in

hindsight.
In a few cases where elephants and other animals had been

coincidentally fitted with tracking collars before an earthquake struck, they

didn’t seem to move any differently in the period before the shaking began.
*8 In 1881, Charles Darwin wrote that “ if the ground is beaten or otherwise

made to tremble, worms believe that they are pursued by a mole and leave

their burrows.” Over a century later, Catania confirmed his statement.
*9 Golden moles, despite their name and appearance, are not moles.
They

independently evolved the same physique and lifestyle, but they’re more

closely related to a motley menagerie of mammals that includes manatees,

aardvarks, and elephants.
*10 The malleus normally picks up sound vibrations from the eardrum, and

moves to transmit them to the incus (anvil).
The golden mole’s version is so

big that it works in a slightly different way.
When seismic waves reach the

mole’s head, the malleus mostly stays in the same place, and the rest of the

skull, including the incus, vibrates around it.
*11 As we saw in Chapter 1, doing experiments with animals as big, powerful,

and intelligent as elephants is not easy, and their seismic sense remains

largely mysterious.
O’Connell has shown that elephants produce surface

waves when they call and walk, but do they do so deliberately, or are such

waves incidental?
The vibrations can travel over several miles, and elephants

could potentially use them to coordinate their social groups over long

distances—but do they?
Can they use that information to tell which elephants

are nearby, or whether they are distressed or aggressive?
Seismic signals are

likely part of their Umwelt, but it’s not yet clear if they’re an important part.
*12 It’s striking to me that many scientists who study vibrational senses are also musicians.
Frej Ossiannilsson, who pioneered the field, was a violinist.
Rex Cocroft was originally going to major in piano before he was seduced by

biology.
Beth Mortimer is a singer who also plays the French horn and piano.
*13 Orb-weavers will also pull on spokes that lead to areas where prey are

repeatedly caught, focusing their attention on parts of the web most likely to

yield food.
8.
All Ears

Sound

ROGER PAYNE USED TO BE scared of the dark.
While in high

school, he tried to overcome that phobia by going on long

nighttime walks through a nature reserve near his home.
During these solitary strolls, he often heard (and

occasionally saw) an owl that lived in a nearby building.
And as his fear of the night subsided, his interest in owls

grew.
In 1956, when he got a chance to study the birds as

an undergraduate student, he leapt at it.
Owls have large eyes, but they can catch prey in

darkness so total that even they can’t see.
Payne suspected

that they used their ears.
To test this idea, he taped black

plastic sheets over the windows of a large garage and

carpeted the floor with a thick layer of dry leaves.
On a

perch in the corner, he placed a hand-raised barn owl, who

was named Wol after the character from Winnie-the-Pooh.
Then, sitting in the dark, Payne released a mouse.
“I

couldn’t see anything, but once the mouse started moving,

I could hear the sounds of rustling,” he tells me.
So could

Wol.
For the first three nights of the experiment, the bird

did nothing.
But on the fourth night, Payne heard the sound

of a strike.
He flicked on the lights and saw Wol with the

mouse in his talons.
Over the next four years, Payne did more experiments

with Wol and other barn owls, all of which confirmed how

adept they are at finding their prey through sound.
The

mice seemed aware of the danger, and would skulk at a

glacial pace when Payne introduced them into a leaf-strewn

room.
As soon as they started rustling, they were done for.
Watching through an infrared scope, Payne saw that owls

would react to the first rustle by leaning far forward.
On

the second, they would swoop headfirst toward the rodent

and, at the last moment, rotate their body by almost 180

degrees to place their talons where their faces had been.
They were so accurate that they could not only land on a

mouse but strike it along the long axis of its body.
If Payne

dragged a mouse-sized wad of paper through the leaves,

the owls struck that, too.
If he tied a single leaf to the tail

of a mouse and allowed it to scamper over a foam floor, the

owls attacked the leaf.
These tests confirmed that the birds

couldn’t be using smell, vision, or any other sense.
They

were unquestionably using their ears to guide their strikes.
And if Payne plugged one of those ears with cotton, the

once-unerring birds would miss their rodents by more than

a foot.
“It was a thrill,” he tells me.
“The evidence was so

clear.”

If a mouse rustles, a dog barks, or a tree falls in a forest,

it produces waves of pressure that radiate outward.
As

these waves travel, the air molecules in their path

repeatedly bunch up and spread out.
These movements,

which occur in the same direction as the wave’s line of

travel, are what we call sound.
The number of times the

molecules compress and disperse in a second determines

the sound’s frequency—its pitch, which is measured in

hertz (Hz).
The extent to which they move determines the

sound’s amplitude—its loudness, which is measured in

decibels (dB).
Hearing is the sense that detects those

movements.
Your ear consists of three parts—the outer, middle, and

inner ears.
Your outer ear greets incoming sound waves,

collecting them with a fleshy flap and sending them down

the ear canal.
At the end of the canal, they vibrate a thin,

taut membrane called the eardrum.
Those vibrations are

amplified by the three small bones of the middle ear, which

we met in the last chapter, and transmitted to the inner ear

—specifically, into a long fluid-filled tube called the cochlea.
There, the vibrations are finally detected by a strip of

movement-sensitive hair cells, which send signals to the

brain.
A sound is heard.[*1]

The barn owl’s ear shares the same basic structure: The

outer ear collects, the middle ear amplifies and transmits,

and the inner ear detects.
But while your outer ears are a

pair of fleshy flaps, the owl’s are effectively its entire face.
[*2] The feathers of the conspicuous facial disc that makes

owls look owlish are thick, stiff, and densely packed.
They

act like a radar dish that collects incoming sound waves

and funnels them toward the ear holes.
These enormous

openings are found behind the owl’s eyes, hidden among its

feathers.
In some species, they’re so wide that if you part

the overlying feathers and look into the ears, you can see

the back of the owl’s eyeball.
These features, combined

with an eardrum and a cochlea that are much bigger than

you’d expect for a bird of its size, contribute to the

exceptional sensitivity of a barn owl’s hearing.
The owl excels not only at detecting sounds but also at

working out exactly where they’re coming from.[*3] As we

saw in the chapter on vision, if you make a thumbs-up sign

with your arm outstretched, your nail represents roughly

one degree of space.
Masakazu Konishi and Eric Knudsen

showed that at best, barn owls can localize a sound’s

source to within 2 degrees.
That’s better than most land-

living animals.
For comparison, cats, whose ears are

roughly as sensitive as a barn owl’s, can only localize

sounds to within 3 to 5 degrees.
Humans are almost as good as owls in the horizontal

direction, but considerably worse in the vertical, where our

accuracy falls to between 3 and 6 degrees.
That’s because

our ears are level with each other, so sounds hit both at

roughly the same time whether they’re coming from above

or below.[*4] An owl’s ears, however, are uniquely

asymmetric, with the left being higher than the right.
If you

think of an owl’s face as a clock, its left ear opens at two

o’clock and its right ear at eight o’clock.
If a sound comes

from above or from the left, it arrives a little sooner and a

little more loudly at the higher left ear than the lower right

one.
If the sound comes from below or from the right, the

opposite is true.
The owl’s brain uses these differences in

timing and loudness to work out the position of a sound’s

source in both the vertical and horizontal.
If I go on a hike

and hear a rustling noise nearby, I can tell roughly where

it’s coming from, and I turn my head so that my eyes can

spot the source.
But an owl perched overhead can tell

exactly where the noise is coming from with its ears alone.
A great gray owl can pluck a lemming from within its snow-

covered tunnel or accurately bust through the roof of a

gopher burrow, solely by listening to the chewing or

scurrying sounds coming from beneath the ground.
These

feats are remarkable, and they hint at why hearing can be

such a useful sense.
—

AMONG THE TRADITIONAL five senses, hearing is most closely

related to touch.
That might be counterintuitive, since the

latter is concerned with surfaces, which are solid and

tangible, and the former deals with sounds, which seem

airborne and ethereal.
But both hearing and touch are

mechanical senses, which detect movements in the outside

world using receptors that send electrical signals when

they’re bent, pressed, or deflected.
In touch, those

movements occur when fingertips (or whiskers, bill tips,

and Eimer’s organs) are pressed or stroked against a

surface.
In hearing, the movements occur when sound

waves reach the ear and deflect small hair cells within it.
But unlike touch, hearing can operate over long

distances.
Unlike vision, hearing functions in darkness and

through solid, opaque barriers.
Unlike the vibrational sense

from the previous chapter, hearing doesn’t need a surface

and can work through all-encompassing media like air or

water.
And unlike smell, which is limited by the slow

diffusion of molecules, hearing works at the considerably

faster speed of sound.
Some senses have a few of these

qualities, but hearing has them all, which is why some

animals rely so heavily upon it.
William Stebbins once

encapsulated this beautifully: “Very different from other

forms of stimulation, [sound] can impart information on

current events at an unseen distance,” he wrote.
Compare an owl to a rattlesnake.
Both are nocturnal.
Both hunt rodents.
The rattlesnake doesn’t need to eat very

often and is an ambush hunter.
It can use its sense of smell

to find the right spot for a lengthy stakeout, and wait for

victims to run within the short range of its infrared sense.
The owl has no such luxury.
To sustain its high metabolism,

it must find prey more regularly, which means scanning a

wide swath of forest and accurately localizing the rustles of

fast-moving but unseen rodents.
Hearing—long in range,

fast in speed, and precise in resolution—is naturally its

primary sense.
But hunting by sound has one major disadvantage—

interference.
A visually guided predator like an eagle

doesn’t emit light when it moves, but an owl can’t help but

make noise with its own wingbeats.
Those noises, which

are close to the owl’s ears, could potentially drown out the

faint and distant sounds of its prey.
Fortunately, the owl has

soft feathers on its body and serrated edges on its wings

that make its flight almost imperceptibly quiet.
The noise it

does make is mostly below the range to which its ears are

most sensitive and below the lower limit of what small

rodents can hear.
The owl can hear a mouse just fine, but a

mouse can barely hear an owl coming.
Kangaroo rats can.
These little hopping rodents have

relatively huge middle ears, which are larger than their

brains.
These chambers specifically amplify the low

frequencies produced by an owl’s wings and allow

kangaroo rats to hear incoming danger that most other

rodents can’t perceive.
So they’re especially difficult for

barn owls to catch.
They can even hear the sounds that

rattlesnakes make when they strike, with enough time to

jump away, turn in midair, and kick the lunging snakes in

the face.
(Rulon Clark, the snake expert whom we met in

the chapter on heat, describes them as a “particularly

obnoxious prey item.”)

All of these creatures are connected by sound.
Their

lives and deaths are determined by the frequencies they

can hear, how sensitive they are to those frequencies, and

their skill at localizing the source of sound.
Every species

has its own strengths and weaknesses.
An owl is maximally

sensitive to the frequencies produced by scurrying mice

and can locate those sounds with almost unmatched

accuracy, but it’s oblivious to the highest and deepest notes

that human ears can detect.
Mice can’t hear the low

wingbeats of an owl, but they can make high-pitched alarm

calls that the owl can’t hear.
As with other senses, an

animal’s hearing is tuned to its needs.
And some animals

don’t need to hear at all.
—

OUR ROUNDED EARS might look very different from the

pointy triangles of fennec foxes, the giant flaps of

elephants, or the simple holes of dolphins, but these

differences are superficial.
Most mammals have very good

hearing, and most mammalian ears are very similar.
They

always exist, for a start.
There are always two of them.
They’re always found on the head.
None of these absolutes

is absolutely true for insects.
They have also evolved ears,

but those ears come in a dazzling variety that offers three

important lessons about why animals hear at all.
The first lesson: Hearing is useful, but not universally so

in the way that touch or nociception is.
After all, the first

insects were deaf.
They had to evolve ears, and over their

480-million-year history, they did so on at least 19

independent occasions, and on almost every imaginable

body part.
Ears exist on the knees of crickets and katydids,

the abdomens of locusts and cicadas, and the mouths of

hawkmoths.
Mosquitoes hear with their antennae.
Monarch

caterpillars hear with a pair of hairs on their midsection.
The bladder grasshopper has six pairs of ears running

down its abdomen, while mantises have a single cyclopean

ear in the middle of their chests.[*5] Insect ears are so

diverse because most of them evolved from movement-

sensitive structures called chordotonal organs, which are

found throughout an insect’s body.
These organs consist of

sensory cells that lie just beneath the hard outer cuticle

and respond to vibrations and stretching motions.
They tell

insects about the position of their own body parts—beating

wings, moving limbs, swelling guts.
But since chordotonal

organs can also react to very loud airborne sounds, they’re

almost predisposed to becoming ears.
They just need to

become more sensitive, and that’s easily done by thinning

the cuticle lying over them to create an eardrum.
[*6] Since

this can happen almost anywhere on the body, insects can

conjure ears from the unlikeliest of places.
It’s as if their

entire surfaces are primed for hearing.
But many insects haven’t exploited this evolutionary

gimme.
As far as anyone knows, mayflies and dragonflies

don’t have ears.
The majority of beetles don’t, either.
Indeed, most insects seem to be deaf, and since they

handily outnumber all other animal species, it follows that

most animals might be deaf.
This might seem odd,

especially since sound seems so omnipresent to those of us

who can hear.
And yet millions of deaf people do just fine

without it, and many animals don’t bother with it at all.
If

you look at our fellow mammals and other vertebrates, you

might be forgiven for thinking that hearing is invaluable.
If

you look at insects, you realize that it is decidedly optional.
As with vision, to think about how animals hear, you

have to understand how animals use their ears.
Hearing is

specifically useful in that it offers fast, precise, long-range,

and 24-hour information that allows animals to sense both

rapidly moving prey and rapidly approaching threats.
Accordingly, many insects seem to have evolved ears to

listen out for predators.
Many butterflies, including the

striking blue morpho, have ears on their wings.
These

species are silent, so they’re certainly not listening to each

other.
Instead, Jayne Yack has shown that their wing-ears

are tuned to the same frequencies produced by predatory

birds.
From several feet away, they can hear wingbeats,

territorial calls, and probably other relevant sounds like

feathers swishing through grass or feet hopping on

branches.
They’re likely using their ears in the same way

that a kangaroo rat uses its ears.[*7]

The qualities that make hearing good for detecting

predators also predispose it to communication.
By

producing sounds, and listening out for them, animals can

exchange signals over longer distances than surface

vibrations would allow, in dark and cluttered spaces that

obscure visual cues, and with greater speed than

pheromones can achieve.
This may explain why, millions of

years ago, crickets and katydids started to sing.
The males are the noisy ones.
They have a ridge on one

of their wings, and a comb-like row of teeth on the other.
When they rub these together, they produce a thrrrrp

sound, which females hear with eardrums on their front

legs.
Fossilized insects that have the same ridges and

combs on their wings suggest that these songs have filled

the air for at least 165 million years, and likely much

longer.
But around 40 million years ago, another group of

insects started eavesdropping on the singers: parasitic

tachinid flies.
Most tachinids track their victims through

sight or smell, but Ormia ochracea—a yellow, half-inch-long

species that’s found throughout the Americas—uses sound.
Like female crickets, it listens out for the song of a male.
Homing in on those dulcet thrrrrps, it lands either on or

near the singer, and deposits maggots.
These burrow into

the cricket and slowly devour him from within.
Ormia’s ears are not obvious.
But Daniel Robert is so

familiar with insect ears that when he first looked at the fly

under a microscope in the early 1990s, he instantly

recognized a pair of eardrums—two thin oval membranes

just below its neck.
(“Maybe I’m too much of a nerd,”

Robert tells me.) These ears are very different from those

of most flies, which are usually feathery and found on the

antennae.
They’re much closer to those of a female cricket,

and they’re similarly tuned to the frequency of a male’s

song.
Ormia has tapped into the female cricket’s auditory

Umwelt and uses it for the same goal: pinpoint an unseen

male from afar.
If you’ve ever been plagued by a cricket

singing somewhere inside your house, you’ll know how

hard it is to find the source of the infernal chirping.
Ormia

has no such problem.
It can turn toward a singing cricket

with an accuracy of 1 degree, which is better than humans,

barn owls, and almost every other animal that’s been

tested.
[*8]

Despite this superlative acuity, Ormia’s ears control a

very simple behavior: Find cricket.
That’s true for many

insect ears, and Jayne Yack thinks this might also explain

why they’ve evolved in such a wide variety of body parts.
Ears, she says, tend to appear near the neurons that

control the actions for which those ears evolved.
Female

crickets turn and walk toward singing males, so their ears

are on their legs.
Mantises and moths execute evasive dives

and rolls when they hear predators, so their ears are on or

near their wings.
(Blow on a dog whistle next to an eared

moth, and it will start doing loops and spirals.)

This is the second lesson that insect ears can teach:

Hearing can be incredibly simple.
One might think that a

listening cricket creates a mental representation of what it

hears, and compares that against some internal template of

an ideal male song.
None of that is necessary.
Through

several painstaking studies, Barbara Webb showed that the

female cricket’s ears, and the neurons connected to them,

are wired so that she automatically recognizes a male’s

song and turns toward it.
Her actions are built into her

sensory system.[*9] As the sense that underpins most of our

music and language, hearing can be hard to separate from

sophistication of thought, emotionality, and creativity.
But it

can be akin to the reaction of a human who kicks out when

their knee is stimulated by a hammer.
Even simple behaviors can have big consequences.
Ormia’s acoustic prowess is so acute that on Hawaii, it

once infested a third of male crickets and was seriously

suppressing their numbers.
In response, the crickets

acquired a mutation that warped the comb-like structure

on their wings and muted their songs.
To avoid the grave,

they became as silent as one.
This happened within 20

generations, making the “flatwing” crickets one of the

fastest cases of evolution that has ever been documented in

the wild.
The newly silent males are undetectable to Ormia,

but also to females.
The silent males are reduced to

loitering around the few males who can still sing, in the

hopes of sneakily mating with approaching females.
They

also still go through the motions of singing, rubbing their

wings together as if they could still thrrrrp away.
Here, then, is the third lesson from insect ears: Animal

hearing can drive the evolution of animal calls, and vice

versa.
Just as eyes define nature’s palette, ears define its

voices.
—

IN THE SUMMER of 1978, after a long flight, a train journey,

and a boat ride, a young graduate student named Mike

Ryan finally arrived at Panama’s Barro Colorado Island to

study frogs.
He had been hooked on the amphibians ever

since he had witnessed an older biologist identifying one

species after another from their calls alone.
If another

human could hear so much in what his own ears perceived

as a formless cacophony, Ryan wondered, what might the

frogs themselves hear?
He knew that males called to

attract mates, but what parts of the song were the females

listening to?
What sounds beautiful to a frog?
Initially, Ryan’s plan was to study the Panamanian red-

eyed tree frog, the same species that his future student

Karen Warkentin would focus on two decades later.[*10] But

these animals stuck to the canopy and weren’t very

talkative.
When Ryan tried to record their calls, he would

instead pick up a much louder species that was shouting at

his feet— the túngara frog.
“I kept kicking them away to

get them to shut up,” he tells me.
“And then I said: Duh,

what if I just study them?
There are tons of them and

they’re right in front of me.”

Picture, in your mind, an average frog.
The túngara frog

looks like that.
It’s about the size of a quarter, with bumpy

skin and drab, mossy colors.
But what it lacks in visual

flamboyance, it makes up for in acoustic flair.
After sunset,

the males inflate their huge vocal sacs and force air

through voice boxes larger than their brains.
The result is a

short whine that falls in pitch, like a tiny, receding siren.
After that, the male might add one or more short, staccato

embellishments that are known as chucks.
To some human

ears, the combined call sounds like “tún-ga-ra”—hence the

name.
To Ryan, it resembles a sound effect from an old

video game.
[*11] To a female frog, it sounds like an

invitation.
She’ll sit in front of various males, compare their

whines and chucks, choose the most attractive-sounding

specimen, and allow him to fertilize her eggs.
Courting

males might call 5,000 times in a single evening before

they’re chosen.
Ryan knows this because he spent 186

consecutive nights at Barro Colorado, recording the

serenades and escapades of a thousand individually marked

túngara frogs from dusk to dawn.
It was a marathon of

voyeurism, from which he learned one crucial fact: Chucks

are very sexy.
Females almost always go for males who embellish their

whines with chucks over males who merely whine.
The

chucks are so desirable that if a male is reluctant to make

them, a female will sometimes body-slam him until he does.
Ryan recorded the males’ songs and spliced their whines

and chucks into different combinations.
In a soundproof

room, he played pairs of these remixes to females through

different speakers and noted which they hopped toward.
He learned that a whine is attractive on its own, but a

chuck makes it five times more appealing.
More chucks are

sexier than fewer chucks.
Deeper chucks are sexier than

higher-pitched

ones.
These

preferences

are

straightforward.
The reasons for them are not.
Ryan found that the frog’s inner ear is especially

sensitive to frequencies of 2,130 Hz, which is just under the

dominant frequency of an average chuck.[*12] Even at a

noisy pond, where several species might be calling

simultaneously, a female can easily find her own males,

because she can hear their calls more acutely than those of

other frogs.
Larger males sound especially loud and clear

since their lower-pitched chucks are closer to the ideal

frequency of her inner ear.
Perhaps, Ryan reasoned, that’s

why the túngara ear is tuned in that specific way.
Larger

males can also fertilize more eggs, so in past generations,

females who preferred lower frequencies would have been

drawn to males who provided them with more offspring.
Their predilections became more common and the species

ended up with ears that were tuned to the male’s voice.
This narrative is perfectly plausible.
It’s also completely

wrong.
Ryan discovered the actual story by studying the

túngara frog’s close relatives.
These other species all

whine, but only a few chuck.
And yet, all of them have inner

ears that are tuned to the same chuck-adjacent frequency

as the túngara frog’s.
These other frogs are predisposed to

find chucks attractive, without ever actually hearing them.
Ryan demonstrated this by traveling to Ecuador and

studying the Colorado dwarf frog—one of the túngara’s

chuck-less cousins.
He recorded the male’s whine, added

túngara chucks after them, and played the hybrid calls to

the females.
“I thought it would scare the hell out of them,”

he tells me.
Instead, the females hopped toward the

unfamiliar chimeric sounds.
The chucks, which the females

had never heard before, proved irresistible because they

tapped into a preexisting quirk of their senses.
This discovery flipped Ryan’s narrative on its head.
The

túngara frog’s hearing didn’t change to match its call.
It

was the other way around.
The frog’s ancestor already had

ears that were tuned to 2,130 Hz, and the chucks evolved

to exploit that bias.
The reasons for that ancestral tuning

are still unclear: Perhaps that’s the pitch produced by a

rustling predator, or some other important aspect of the

frog’s environment.
Regardless, the female’s aesthetic

preference came first, and the male’s calls changed to fit

her conception of beauty.
Ryan calls this phenomenon

“sensory exploitation,” and he and others have shown that

it is common throughout the animal kingdom.
[*13] Nature’s

ears really do define its voices.
Male túngara frogs, for their part, get an easy way to

earn their partner’s attention.
A chuck takes very little

effort, and enhances their attractiveness fivefold.
“Think of

all the stuff we do to make ourselves more attractive—and

this is for free,” Ryan says.
They ought to chuck as

frequently and repeatedly as possible, but they’re strangely

unwilling to do so.
While some individuals have been heard

slapping up to seven chucks onto their whine, most add just

one or two.
Many refuse to chuck at all.
Their reticence

was puzzling, until Ryan realized that females aren’t the

only ones listening to their calls.
A year before Ryan arrived at Barro Colorado, his

colleague Merlin Tuttle caught a bat with a half-eaten

túngara frog in its mouth.
This species, the fringe-lipped

bat, turned out to be a voracious frog-eater.
Tuttle and

Ryan showed that it tracks its prey by eavesdropping on its

courtship calls, much as Ormia does with cricket songs.
And the bat, just like female túngara frogs, is particularly

drawn to males that add chucks to their whines.
The

females hear a mate, the bats hear a meal, but both are

listening for the same qualities.
This leaves the male frogs

with an unenviable choice.
Their chucks court both females

and death.
No wonder they sometimes stick to whines.[*14]

I find it astonishing to consider how these creatures

have been bound together through their senses.
For

whatever reason, an ancestral frog had ears that were

partial to frequencies of 2,130 Hz.
Túngara frogs took

advantage of that sensory quirk by adding chucks to their

whines.
Fringe-lipped bats took advantage of those chucks

with an auditory add-on that expanded their hearing into

unusually low frequencies for a bat.
The frog’s Umwelt

shaped the frog’s calls, which then shaped the bat’s

Umwelt.
The senses dictate what animals find beautiful,

and in doing so, they influence the form that beauty takes

in the natural world.
—

FEW ANIMAL SOUNDS are as beautiful to human ears as the

songs of birds.
And few bird songs have been studied as

intensely as those of zebra finches.
Visually, these

Australian birds are striking, with gray heads, white chests,

orange cheeks, red beaks, and black stripes beneath their

eyes that resemble running mascara.
Vocally, the males are

equally flamboyant, singing complicated and raucous

songs.
To my ears, they sound like melodic printers.
But I

also wonder if a zebra finch’s song sounds to another zebra

finch like it does to me.
In terms of pitch, the answer is yes.
The frequency range of bird hearing is roughly similar to

that of humans, so birds generally hear the same range of

pitches that we hear.
But their songs can also be incredibly

fast.
The notes that emerge from a zebra finch’s beak fly by

so quickly that I can barely distinguish them.
Even in the

notes I think I can hear, there seems to be something more,

some intricacy I cannot fully discern, lurking at the edges

of my awareness.
Surely, the birds can hear something in

these songs that I cannot.
Bird enthusiasts have long suspected that bird hearing

works on a faster timescale than ours.
Some birds prove

their temporal prowess by singing dazzlingly synchronized

duets, slotting their notes in and around each other’s with

such precision that the two songs can sound like one.
Others, including zebra finches, learn their songs from

listening to each other, and so must be able to hear the

acoustic minutiae that they then reproduce.
The same goes

for mimics like mockingbirds.
To our ears, the song of the

whip-poor-will comprises three notes, but it actually has

five, which becomes clear if we slow it down.
A

mockingbird doesn’t need the help: When mimicking the

whip-poor-will, it gets all five notes.
In the 1960s, before his work on barn owls, Masakazu

Konishi found direct evidence that the processing speed of

bird hearing is exceptionally fast.
He played strings of

rapid clicks to sparrows, while recording the electrical

activity of neurons in the hearing centers of their brains.
The neurons fired once per click, even when the clicks were

just 1.3 to 2 milliseconds apart.
At such speeds—between

500 and 770 clicks per second—a cat’s auditory neurons

can only keep to the same tempo around 10 percent of the

time.
The sparrows’ neurons kept pace perfectly.
Even

pigeons, whose songs don’t contain rapid sounds, had ears

that seemed to resolve them.
Later studies were less clear.
From the 1970s onward,

Robert Dooling repeatedly failed to find any differences

between the ways birds and humans perceived the

temporal nature of sounds.
For example, he showed that

humans can tell if a silent gap of just 2 milliseconds is

inserted into an otherwise continuous noise.
Birds,

surprisingly, don’t do any better.
Test after test, “nothing

popped out as being different,” Dooling tells me.
“We

measured birds in a gazillion different ways over the years,

but their hearing always looked like a human’s.” It took him

a long time to realize the problem: He had been testing

birds with simple sounds like pure tones, which are

nowhere close to the rich complexity of actual songs.
You

can visualize a pure tone as a smooth curve that undulates

up and down, representing increases and decreases in

pressure over time.
A bird’s song, when visualized in the

same way, looks more like the skyline of a city or the

ridgeline of a mountain range.
It’s full of jagged bumps,

which represent extremely fast shifts that occur within the

span of a single note.
Those details are known as the

temporal fine structure.
They’re missing from the pure

tones that are typically used to study hearing.
And as it

happens, they’re what songbirds are actually listening for.
Dooling confirmed this through an elegant experiment,

in which he asked various songbirds to discriminate

between sounds that differed only in their temporal fine

structure.
This isn’t intuitive, so let’s use a visual analogy.
Imagine taking a movie and reversing the order of every

three frames.
The color palette would stay the same, the

scenes would be composed in the same way, and the plot

would still be comprehensible.
But something would feel

off, and you’d likely notice the difference.
This is roughly

what Dooling did with his birds.
He presented them with

pairs of buzzy sounds.
One consisted of repeated chunks in

which the pitch rose over a few milliseconds before falling

again.
In the other, the pitch of the chunks fell over the

same range of frequencies, and over the same time period.
To a slow ear, both sounds would average out to the same

pitch, and seem identical.
To a fast ear, they’d be

completely different.
Dooling found that humans could only

distinguish between these sounds if the chunks were longer

than 3 to 4 milliseconds.
Canaries and budgerigars hit their

limit at between 1 and 2 milliseconds.
And zebra finches

weren’t even slightly duped by the shortest 1-millisecond

chunks.
This experiment clearly showed that birds can hear

complexities that are imperceptibly fast to humans.
And it

so thoroughly contradicted Dooling’s previous work that “it

kind of freaked me out,” he says.
Indeed, further tests

showed that “our electronics couldn’t handle the fine detail

that the birds are capable of discriminating.” That was the

first of many surprises.
A zebra finch’s song consists of several distinct syllables

that it always sings in the same sequence—A-B-C-D-E.
When Beth Vernaleo and a team of Dooling’s students

reversed one of these syllables—A-B- -D-E—zebra finches

almost always noticed the change.
Human listeners

couldn’t, even after a lot of practice.
But when the team

doubled the gap between two of the syllables, humans

could easily tell—it sounded like a glitch in the recording—

and the finches were completely oblivious.
They couldn’t

hear the differences between two songs that were

obviously different to human ears.
Two students, Shelby Lawson and Adam Fishbein, went

even further.
They completely shuffled the order of the

syllables—C-E-D-A-B.
The finches still couldn’t discriminate

between them.
The two sequences are patently different,

but not different in a way that matters to the finches.
Even

though these birds learn their individual sequence of

syllables in their youth, and sing that same unchanging

sequence for the rest of their life, “they don’t give a crap

about the sequences,” Dooling says.
“They care about

what’s inside the individual notes.” It’s as if two conversing

humans were paying close attention to the nuances of each

other’s vowels, while blithely disregarding the order of

each other’s words.
The answer to my question is clear: A zebra finch’s song

must sound entirely different to a zebra finch than to us.
Their disregard for sequence is especially unexpected, and

flies in the face of our intuitions about bird songs.
The

sequences in those songs are both beautiful and useful to

human ears.
Birders use them to identify particular

species.
Neuroscientists study them because of their

similarities to human languages.
And yet, they might be

utterly irrelevant to the birds that produce them.
Not all

species behave this way: Budgies seem sensitive to the

sequence of notes as well as their fine structure.
But many

others, including Bengalese finches and canaries, mostly

care about the latter.
To them, the beauty and significance

of the song lie in its minutiae.
They ignore the big acoustic

picture in favor of the details.
They can’t—or don’t care to

—hear the forest for the trees.
Humans have the opposite tendency.
To our ears, each

delivery of a zebra finch’s song sounds the same as the last,

and we could be forgiven for thinking that they all carry the

same information.
But Dooling’s colleague Nora Prior

showed that the fine structure of seemingly identical

renditions can sound very different to a finch.
If she

swapped syllable B from one recording with syllable B from

another, the birds could hear that something had changed.
Their songs must be full of subtle nuance that we simply

cannot detect.
While we might hear repeated iterations of

the same unwavering tune, they could conceivably hear

information about sex, health, identity, intention, and more.
Zebra finches sing to establish lifelong bonds with their

partners, to find each other when they’re apart, to stay

together while traveling, and to coordinate their parenting

responsibilities.
Perhaps they accomplish all of this through

information encoded in their songs’ fine structure.
Part of the thrill of listening to animals comes from

wondering what they are saying to each other.
Writers have

conjured up characters like Dr.
Dolittle who can understand

the meaning of the tweets, bleats, and hisses of other

species.
Naively, we might imagine this to be a problem of

vocabulary, as if there might exist some word-chirp

dictionary that would suddenly allow us to speak bird.
There isn’t, and Dooling’s work reminds us why: The

communication barrier between species is also a sensory

one.
Birds encode meaning in aspects of their songs that

our ears can’t pick out and our brains don’t pay attention

to.
“Now, when I hear birdsong, I think it’s amazing that it

sounds so complex but I’m still missing most of it,” Dooling

tells me.
“There’s a lot in there that another bird is

appreciating that I can’t.”

—

IN THE EARLY 2000s, while Robert Dooling was running the

first of his fine structure experiments, Jeffrey Lucas

stumbled upon another unexpected side to bird hearing.
He

and his colleagues placed electrodes on the scalps of six

North American bird species to record how their auditory

neurons responded to different sounds.
This simple

technique is called the auditory evoked potential (AEP)

test.
Doctors use it to check hearing levels in human

patients.
Biologists use it to work out what animals can

hear.
Lucas used it to see if species with more complex

songs hear differently than those with simpler tunes.
More

through accident than planning, he happened to test birds

in two waves—one in the winter, and a second in the

spring.
And when he compared those snapshots in time, he

saw that they were very different.
Birds, Lucas realized,

hear differently across the seasons.
Their hearing changes because of an important trade-off

that’s inherent to all ears.
Let’s say I played you two

musical notes—one with a frequency of 1,000 Hz, and

another with a frequency of 1,050 Hz.
These roughly

correspond to two adjacent keys at the high end of a piano,

which should be easy to tell apart.
But if I played 10-

millisecond snippets of the two notes, they’d be

indistinguishable.
Why?
Because within that short

timeframe, both notes would oscillate 10 times each, and

sound the same.
If I increased the snippet length to 100

milliseconds, the notes would oscillate 100 times and 105

times, respectively, and sound different.
For this reason,

animal ears become more adept at discriminating between

similar frequencies if their neurons integrate sound

information over longer periods of time.
But in doing so,

they also become less sensitive to fast changes that occur

within those periods.
We saw a similar trade-off in the

chapter on vision: Eyes can have exceptional resolution or

exceptional sensitivity, but not both.
Likewise, ears can

have exceptional temporal resolution or exceptional pitch

sensitivity, but not both.
“The auditory system that does

fast stuff is completely different from the auditory system

that does frequency stuff,” Lucas tells me.
And he found

that birds don’t have to settle for one or the other.
They can

flip between the two, as the situation demands.
Consider the Carolina chickadee—a small, inquisitive

songbird that graces much of eastern America.
Its

signature chick-a-dee-dee call rapidly changes in pitch and

volume, much like the songs of zebra finches.
That call can

be heard all year round, but it’s especially important during

the fall, when the sociable chickadees form large flocks.
At

that time, the birds need to parse all the information

encoded within the fine structure of their calls, so their

hearing needs to be as fast as possible—and it is.
Lucas

found that in the fall, their temporal resolution goes up, but

their pitch sensitivity goes down.
When spring rolls around,

everything changes.
The flocks begin to break up, as

females and males pair up to establish their own breeding

territories.
To attract mates, the chickadee males start

singing their courtship songs, which are much simpler than

their year-round calls.
There are four notes—fee-bee-fee-

bay—and each is close to a pure tone.
The male’s

attractiveness depends on how consistently he can sing

these notes, and specifically on whether he can maintain

the exact drop in pitch between the fee and the bee.
Now

the chickadees need to hear the frequencies of their songs

as sharply and precisely as possible—and they do.
While

speed takes all in the fall, pitch is king in the spring.
The hearing of the white-breasted nuthatch changes in

the opposite direction.
Its courtship song—a nasal, fast-

paced wha-wha-wha—has a fine structure that includes fast

changes in volume.
So, unlike the chickadee, its hearing

becomes faster during the breeding season, and less

sensitive to pitch.
Both birds completely retune their sense

of hearing from one season to the next to process the

information that matters most in that season.
Their voices

and their needs change with the calendar.
So do their ears.
These changes are driven by sex hormones like

estrogen, which can directly influence the hair cells in

songbird ears.
This might explain why in some species, the

hearing of males and females changes in different ways.
Lucas and his colleague Megan Gall showed that female

house sparrows have seasonal hearing that shifts in the

same way as the chickadees’: It gets better at handling

pitch in the spring at the expense of speed.
Male hearing,

however, stays fast all year round.
So, while Robert Dooling

showed that humans experience bird songs in a different

way than birds, Lucas showed that birds can also

experience their own songs in different ways, depending on

their sex and the season.
In the fall, all house sparrows

hear in the same way.
In the spring, males and females get

different experiences of the same tunes.
Their Umwelten

converge and diverge throughout the year.
These cycles influence more than their sense of

aesthetics.
As we saw with both owls and Ormia, animals

can calculate where sounds are coming from by noting if

those sounds reach one ear slightly later than the other.
If

ears become worse at detecting small time differences,

their owners become worse at mapping sounds.
So when a

female sparrow’s sense of acoustic timing becomes slightly

slower in the spring, her acoustic space also becomes

slightly fuzzier.
These seasonal cycles shocked Lucas when he first

discovered them in 2002.
Other researchers didn’t believe

his early results, either.
At the time, people thought that

hearing was mostly static.
It might get duller with age in

some species—humans, sadly, among them—but it wasn’t

thought to change over shorter timescales.
But as we’ve

repeatedly seen, an animal’s senses are finely tuned to its

environment and have evolved to extract whatever

information is relevant.
When the environment fluctuates

from one season to the next, the information that’s relevant

also changes.[*15] For a North American bird, spring often

means sex.
The air fills with courtship calls that are absent

in other times of year and must now be carefully judged.
Fall brings openness: Bare branches make little birds more

visible to predators.
The ability to localize the sound of

approaching danger, which is inextricably linked to fast

hearing, becomes paramount.
An animal’s Umwelt cannot

be static, because an animal’s world isn’t static.
Bird songs don’t lie beyond the reach of human senses,

like the circularly polarized patterns of mantis shrimps or

the vibrational songs of treehoppers.
We can very much

hear them.
The fee-bee-fee-bay of chickadees and the wha-

wha-wha of nuthatches are obvious enough that we can

transcribe them.
And yet, we still don’t appreciate these

signals in the same way as their intended audiences can.
To

us, a chickadee song sounds the same whether we listen to

it in October or March.
To a chickadee, it does not.
If so

much mystery can exist within sounds that we can hear,

how much more are we missing in sounds that we can’t?
—

IN THE 1960S, after his seminal work on barn owls, Roger

Payne switched his attention to whales.
In 1971, he

published two historic papers.
One, based on recordings

that Payne analyzed with his wife, Katy Payne, revealed for

the first time that humpback whales sing haunting songs.
It

prompted decades of research, turned whale song into a

cultural phenomenon, spawned a bestselling album, and

helped to spark the Save the Whales movement.
The

second showed that fin whales—the second-largest animals

after blue whales—make extremely low-pitched calls that

can be heard across entire oceans.
It nearly destroyed

Payne’s career.
That controversial paper was born of the Cold War.
To

listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S.
Navy installed chains

of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic.
This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or

SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises.
Some were

clearly biological.
Others were more mysterious.
One

especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive,

and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the

lowest key on a standard piano.[*16] This hum was so loud

that people doubted it could be coming from an animal.
Did

it have a military origin?
Was it produced by underwater

tectonic activity?
Did it come from waves crashing on some

distant shoreline?
The actual source only became clear

when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their

sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.
Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz.
Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound,

and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud.
Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances,

especially in water.
[*17] Knowing that fin whales also

produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that

their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles.
No

ocean is that wide.
Together with oceanographer Douglas

Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that

the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact

throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The

response was brutal.
Leading whale researchers told him

that his paper was pure fantasy.
Colleagues hinted that

critics had been questioning his mental health behind his

back.
“When you get to distances like that, people just

refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.
Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris

Clark.
A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was

recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician

on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales.
It was a

thrilling and formative time.
Camped on a beach beneath

the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and

albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to

whales.
He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop

on their songs and found ways of assigning specific

recordings to individual whales.
He went on to compile

libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from

Argentina to the Arctic.
And all the while, Payne’s idea of

giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.
In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of

Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others

a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS

hydrophones.
Amid

the

spectrograms—visual

representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—

Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale.
On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale

vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS

sensor than had been described before in the entire

scientific literature.
The ocean was awash with their calls,

and those calls were coming in from enormous distances.
Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from

the sensor that recorded it.
He could listen to whales

singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda.
“I just thought: Roger was right,” he says.
“It is physically

possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean

basin.” For Navy analysts, these sounds were regular parts

of their workday, irrelevancies to be marked on the

spectrograms and promptly ignored.
For Clark, they were

mind-blowing epiphanies.
Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans,

no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such

ranges.
It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby

individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to

extend further afield.
But Clark points out that they repeat

the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise

intervals.
A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces

for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges.
“That’s not arbitrary,” he says.
It reminds him of the

redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to

beam data back to Earth.
If you wanted to design a signal

that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d

come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.
Those songs might have other uses, too.
Their notes can

last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a

football field.
Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could

do with such a call.
“I could illuminate the ocean,” the

friend replied.
That is, he could map distant underwater

landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor

itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-

reaching infrasounds.
Geophysicists can certainly use fin

whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust.
But can

the whales do so?
Clark sees evidence in their movements.
Through

SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters

between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a

whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way.
He

has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain

ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds

of miles apart.
“When you watch these animals move, it’s

as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says.
He

also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over

their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk

in their mind’s ear.
After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar

specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had

their own distinctive sounds.
“They said: If you put a pair of

headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off

the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark.
“I thought that if a human

being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do

with 10 million years?”

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with.
There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse

of time.
Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute

to cover 50 miles.
If a whale hears the song of another

whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening

back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer

gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star.
If a whale is

trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to

somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10

minutes later.
That might seem preposterous, but consider

that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at

the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive.
They surely operate on very different timescales than we

do.
If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within

a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over

seconds and minutes.
[*18] To imagine their lives, “you have

to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of

dimension,” Clark tells me.
He compares the experience to

looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then

witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne

Hubble telescope.
When he thinks about whales, the world

feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.
Whales weren’t always big.
They evolved from small,

hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50

million years ago.
Those ancestral creatures probably had

vanilla mammalian hearing.
But as they adapted for an

aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding

mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—

shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies.
At the

same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest

Earth has ever seen.
These changes are probably

connected.
The mysticetes achieved their huge size by

evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to

subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill.
Accelerating into

a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a

volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a

million calories in one gulp.
But this strategy comes at a

cost.
Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to

sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over

long distances.
The same giant proportions that force them

to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the

means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that

are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of

other animals.
Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging

whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long

distances.
If they simply called when fed and stayed silent

when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin

for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky

individuals have found.
A whale pod, Payne suggested,

might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically

connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone

but are actually together.
And as his partner Katy later

showed, the largest animals on land might use infrasound

in the same way.
—

IN MAY 1984, Katy Payne found herself in the company of

several Asian elephants at Washington Park Zoo in

Portland, Oregon, 16 years after she and Roger Payne

learned that humpback whales sing.
She was searching for

another species to study, and elephants, which were also

intelligent and sociable, seemed like good candidates.
As

she observed them, she occasionally felt a deep shuddering

sensation in her body.
“ It had been like the feeling of

thunder but there’d been no thunder,” she later wrote in

her memoir, Silent Thunder.
“There had been no loud sound

at all, just throbbing and then nothing.” The feeling stirred

a memory from her teens, of singing in a chapel choir while

the pipe organ shook her body as it played its deepest

notes.
Maybe, Payne reasoned, the elephants had affected

her in the same way because they were also producing

imperceptibly deep notes.
Maybe they were conversing in

infrasound, just as some whales were said to do.
Payne returned to the zoo in October with two

colleagues and some recording equipment.
They left the

recorders running while keeping round-the-clock notes on

the animals’ behavior.
Payne didn’t listen to the tapes until

Thanksgiving eve, and she began with a recording from one

especially memorable event.
She had felt that familiar

silent throbbing at a time when two elephants—Rosy, the

matriarch, and Tunga, a male—were facing each other on

opposite sides of a concrete wall.
At the time, they seemed

silent.
But when Payne sped up the recordings from that

encounter, raising their pitch by three octaves, she heard

what sounded like mooing cows.
Across their concrete

divide, and unbeknownst to the nearby humans, Rosy and

Tunga had been having an animated chat.
That night, she

had a dream in which she was visited by a group of

elephants.
The matriarch said, “We did not reveal this to

you so you would tell other people.” Payne interpreted this

not as a call for secrecy but as an invitation: We revealed it

to you not to make you famous among people, but to give

you access to us.
Payne’s discovery, which she published in 1984, made

perfect sense to Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss, who had

been studying African elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli

National Park.
They’d noticed that elephant families would

often move in the same directions for weeks at a time, even

though they were separated by several miles.
In the early

evenings, different groups would also converge on the

same waterholes at the same time, but from different

directions.
Infrasound carries over long distances, even in

air, and if elephants use it to communicate, that would

explain how they can synchronize their movements across a

savannah.
Poole and Moss invited Payne to join them.
She

accepted, and in 1986, the team showed that African

elephants use infrasound just like their Asian counterparts

—and in every conceivable context.
There are contact

rumbles that help individuals find each other.
There are

greeting rumbles that they make when reuniting after a

separation.
Males make rumbles when in heat, and females

make rumbles in response to them.
There’s a “let’s go”

rumble, and an “I just had sex” rumble.
At close range,

most of these rumbles contain frequencies audible to

human ears, but some became apparent only when the

team sped up their recordings, or visualized them.
These infrasonic rumbles are airborne sounds, so they’re

partly distinct from the surface-borne signals that Caitlin

O’Connell more recently identified, and that we

encountered in the last chapter.
Both are mostly

imperceptible to us, and both can be detected by other

elephants over long ranges.
The low-frequency parts of the

rumbles range between 14 and 35 Hz—about the same as a

large whale’s.
Those calls don’t carry as far in the air as

underwater, and atmospheric conditions dictate how far

they can travel: The colder, clearer, and calmer the air, the

greater the range.
In the heat of midday, an elephant’s

auditory world shrinks.
A few hours after sunset, it expands

tenfold, theoretically allowing elephants to hear each other

over several miles.[*19] “But we really don’t know how far

these animals are listening to each other, or what they’re

listening for,” Payne says.
“That’s a very important

question, and no one can answer it.”

The same applies to whales.
Much of what Roger Payne,

Chris Clark, and others have theorized is still speculative,

based on little snapshots of whale behavior and educated

guesses about what they should be capable of.
When it

comes to the largest animals that live or have ever lived,

actual data are hard to come by, and experiments are nigh

impossible.
Birds, by contrast, can be easily housed in

cages, and bird songs have been analyzed for centuries.
And yet, it was 2002 before Robert Dooling discovered that

some species pay attention to temporal fine structure at the

expense of qualities we can hear.
If it’s that hard to

understand the Umwelt of a bird, no wonder scientists

barely understand what giant whales are really listening for

in each other’s calls.
Are those songs courtship displays?
Territorial calls?
Dinner bells?
Assertions of identity?
No

one knows.
Even if you could find a blue whale and play a

recorded song to it, how would you expect the animal to

behave?
No one even knows for sure what a mysticete whale’s

hearing range is.
The AEP method, where researchers play

sounds to an animal and record its neural responses

through electrodes on its scalp, is impossible to use on a

free-swimming blue whale.
Researchers have managed to

use AEP on smaller whales and dolphins that either strand

or live in captivity, but mysticetes rarely do the former and

never do the latter.
In lieu of direct measurements,

scientists like Darlene Ketten have estimated what these

giants hear by analyzing their ears with medical scanners.
Her work strongly suggests that they hear the same

infrasonic frequencies that are found in their calls.
What

they do with that sense is another matter.
There are still holes in Payne’s and Clark’s ideas.
Only

male blue whales seem to sing, so if they’re really

navigating or communicating with their calls, then what

are females doing?
There’s also the matter of proportions.
A 20 Hz note has a wavelength of 75 meters, which means

that the distance between two peaks of pressure is two to

three times as long as the longest blue or fin whale.
These

superlatively big animals have the same problem as the tiny

Ormia fly: Their calls should sound the same to both ears,

so it shouldn’t be possible to track their source.
“It may be

impossible, but watch that fly!” Clark says.
“I don’t believe

in spirits or astrology, but don’t underestimate evolution.
I’ve been more than chastised in scientific meetings for

proposing all these preposterous things that I can never

prove.
But I’d much rather be open-minded.
And I

constantly try to put myself in the space of the animal.”

—

WHILE ELEPHANTS AND whales produce calls that are below

the range of human hearing, other species go above it.
In

the winter of 1877, Joseph Sidebotham was staying in a

hotel at Menton, France, when he heard what sounded like

a canary singing on his balcony.
He soon discovered that

the singer was actually a mouse.
He fed it with biscuits,

and it reciprocated by singing for hours by the fireplace,

cranking out a tune as beautiful as that of any bird.
His son

suggested that all mice might sing similar melodies at

pitches too high for humans to hear.
Sidebotham disagreed.
“I am inclined to think the gift of singing in mice is but of

very rare occurrence,” he wrote to the journal Nature.
He was wrong.
Roughly a century later, scientists

realized that mice, rats, and many other rodents do indeed

make a wide repertoire of “ultrasonic” calls, with

frequencies too high to be audible to humans.
They make

these sounds when playing or mating, when stressed or

cold, when aggressive or submissive.
Pups that are

separated from their nests make ultrasonic “isolation calls”

that summon their mothers.
Rats that are tickled by

humans make ultrasonic chirps that have been compared to

laughter.
Richardson’s ground squirrels produce ultrasonic

alarm calls when they detect a predator (or a tan fedora

repeatedly thrown by a scientist to mimic a predator).
Male

mice that sniff female hormones produce ultrasonic songs

that are remarkably similar to those of birds, complete with

distinctive syllables and phrases.
Females attracted to

these serenades join their chosen partners in an ultrasonic

duet.
Rodents are among the most common and intensively

studied mammals in the world and have been fixtures of

laboratories since the seventeenth century.
All that time,

they’ve been spiritedly talking to each other without any

human realizing, exchanging messages that slipped

beneath the senses of the oblivious researchers and

technicians milling around them.
Like

infrasound,

the

term

ultrasound

is

an

anthropocentric affectation.
It refers to sound waves with

frequencies higher than 20 kHz, which marks the upper

limit of the average human ear.
It seems special—ultra,

even—because we can’t hear it.
But the vast majority of

mammals actually hear very well into that range, and it’s

likely that the ancestors of our group did, too.
Even our

closest relatives, chimpanzees, can hear close to 30 kHz.
A

dog can hear 45 kHz; a cat, 85 kHz; a mouse, 100 kHz; and

a bottlenose dolphin, 150 kHz.
For all of these creatures,

ultrasound is just sound.
Many scientists have suggested

that ultrasound offers animals a private communication

channel that other ears can’t eavesdrop upon—the same

claim that was made about ultraviolet light.
We can’t hear

these sounds, so we bill them as “hidden” and “secretive,”

even though they’re patently audible to many other

species.
Rickye and Henry Heffner have a different explanation

for why so many mammals can hear ultrasound: It helps

them work out where that sound is coming from.
Like barn

owls, mammals do this by comparing when a sound arrives

at their two ears.
But as the space between those ears goes

down, such comparisons only become possible for higher

frequencies with shorter wavelengths.
As a general rule,

the smaller a mammal’s head, the higher its hearing range.
The boundaries of our auditory worlds are set by the

physics of sound hitting our skulls.[*20]

High-frequency sounds may be easier to locate, but they

have an important limitation.
They lose energy quickly, and

can be easily scattered and reflected by obstacles like

leaves, grasses, and branches.
This means that ultrasonic

calls can only spread over short ranges.
A singing blue

whale might be heard across an ocean, but a singing mouse

is only audible to its immediate neighbors.
This limited

range might explain why relatively few mammals—rodents,

toothed whales, small bats, domestic cats, and a few others

—use ultrasound to communicate even though they can

hear those frequencies.
The sounds just die off too quickly.
(

This is also why devices that claim to repel pests with

ultrasound don’t really work: Their range is far too limited

to be of much practical use.)

A limited range might be beneficial, however, if animals

want to limit their audience.
The isolation call of a helpless

mouse pup can alert a nearby parent without also alerting

more distant predators.
In this way, ultrasound really can

provide a secret communication channel, not because it lies

in an inaccessible frequency range but because it doesn’t

travel very far.
Annoyingly, that limited range makes

ultrasound even harder to study: We can’t hear it, and even

if we could, we might not be close enough to do so.
Given

how long it took to learn that rodents use ultrasound

extensively in their social lives, it’s entirely possible that

such communication is far more abundant among animals

than we currently appreciate.
Many examples of ultrasonic communication were only

discovered when scientists noticed that animals seemed to

be screaming silently, going through all the motions of

making a call but without unleashing any actual noise.
That’s what Marissa Ramsier noticed while watching

Philippine tarsiers—fist-sized, big-eyed primates that look

like gremlins.
They would open their mouths, but no sound

would emerge.
Ramsier only heard what they were saying

by placing them in front of an ultrasound detector.
Their

calls, she learned, have frequencies of 70 kHz—well above

the ultrasonic boundary and higher than any mammal aside

from bats or cetaceans.
What are they saying?
What are

they listening for, besides each other?
Hummingbirds are even more mysterious.
As with

Ramsier’s experience with tarsiers, many observers have

noticed hummingbirds opening their beaks and fluttering

their chests without seeming to sing.
The blue-throated

hummingbird of North America sings an elaborate song

that we can partly hear, but that also extends up to 30 kHz

—well into the ultrasonic range.
That was surprising since,

as Carolyn Pytte showed in 2004, it can’t hear above 7 kHz.
It can still perceive the lower registers of its song, but

much of what it sings is inaudible to its own ears.
Several

other hummingbirds, like the black jacobin and the violet-

tailed sylph, make calls beyond the hearing of most birds,

and the part of these songs that people can perceive

sounds like crickets.
The Ecuadorian hillstar goes even

further, singing entire phrases in an ultrasonic register.
Birds tend to have similar hearing ranges that top out

before 10 kHz.
So either these hummingbirds have very

unusual ears or they can’t actually hear what they’re

saying.
[*21] And if the latter is true, then why are their

songs so high-pitched?
Calls demand listeners.
If the

hummingbirds’ tunes lie beyond their own Umwelten,

who’s the audience?
Maybe it’s insects?
Even though most insects can’t hear

at all, many of those with ears can hear ultrasonic

frequencies.
More than half of the 160,000 species of

moths and butterflies are so equipped.
The greater wax

moth can even hear frequencies near 300 kHz—the highest

limit of any animal by some margin.
Hummingbirds eat

insects as well as nectar, so perhaps they produce

ultrasonic calls that they can’t hear to flush out the insects

that can.
But why did so many insects evolve ultrasonic hearing,

especially since most of them can’t hear at all?
It certainly

wasn’t to hear hummingbirds, which are relatively recent

evolutionary arrivals.
It probably wasn’t to hear each other,

since many of them are silent.
[*22] The most likely answer is

that their ears were tuned to extremely high pitches to

listen out for their nemeses, which appeared around 65

million years ago—bats.
Bats evolved the ability both to call

and to hear at ultrasonic frequencies, and they combined

these traits into one of the most extraordinary animal

senses of all.[*23]

SKIP NOTES

*1 These hair cells are similar to those in the lateral lines of fish, because both the ear and the lateral line likely evolved from the same ancestral sensory

system.
*2 Some other differences: The owl’s cochlea is curved like a banana, while yours is coiled like a snail shell, and its middle ear has just one bone instead of

three.
Also, unlike mammals, barn owls and other birds have ageless ears.
Their hair cells regenerate, and the sensitivity of their hearing barely

decreases with age.
Confusingly, the prominent tufts of the long-eared owl, the

short-eared owl, and their relatives are just ornaments that aren’t actually

part of the ear and aren’t involved in hearing.
*3 Even a barn owl can’t hear everything, though.
Like humans and every other animal, it can only detect sounds within a certain range of frequencies, or

pitches.
That range is determined by the hair cells in its cochlea, which are

arrayed on a long strip called the basilar membrane.
The base of that

membrane vibrates at lower frequencies, while the tip vibrates at higher ones.
Based on which parts of the strip are vibrating, and thus which hair cells are

being stimulated, the owl’s brain can work out which frequencies are hitting

its ear.
The length, thickness, shape, and stiffness of the membrane determine

the upper and lower limits of its hearing range.
On average, humans can hear

sounds between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, while owls have a slightly narrower

hearing range, between 200 Hz and 12 kHz.
Within that range, they’re

especially sensitive to anything between 4 and 8 kHz, which not coincidentally

covers the frequencies that mice make when they scamper through leaf litter.
*4 We localize sounds without consciously thinking about it, which conceals

how hard that task actually is.
An eye comes with an inbuilt sense of space,

because light from different parts of the world falls on different parts of the

retina.
But ears are set up to capture qualities like frequency and loudness

that have no intrinsic spatial component.
For an animal to take that

information and turn it into a map of the world, its brain has to work really

hard.
*5 In 1968, a zoologist named David Pye published a delightful five-verse poem about insect ears in Nature, one of the world’s top-ranking science journals.
By 2004, scientists had learned so much more about these ears that Pye was

compelled to publish a sequel with 12 extra verses.
“ In later years some

further ears / Were found in other forms.
/ The more we know just goes to

show / There are no real norms,” he wrote.
*6 Not all insect ears have eardrums.
The antennae of mosquitoes and the hairs of monarch caterpillars act more like the airflow-sensing hairs of spiders and

crickets, which we met in Chapter 6.
*7 The ear’s aptitude for detecting predators might explain why some insect

groups haven’t bothered evolving them.
Perhaps mayflies, which have no ears,

take to the air in such large numbers that they find safety from predators

without needing an early-warning system.
Maybe dragonflies, which are also

earless, rely on their excellent eyesight to spot incoming danger, and their

aeronautical acumen to evade even close-range attacks.
*8 The barn owl showed us that animals can work out where a sound is coming

from by comparing the time at which it arrives at each ear.
But as animals get

smaller, their ears get closer together, and sounds reach both of them almost

simultaneously.
Ormia’s ears are less than half a millimeter apart—the width

of the dot on this i.
At such tiny distances, a cricket’s song should hit the two

eardrums no more than 1.5 microseconds apart—a time window so narrow

that it might as well not exist.
(For comparison, human ears need separations

of at least 500 microseconds to accurately localize a sound.) But Robert and

his mentor Ron Hoy showed that Ormia’s eardrums, unlike ours, are

connected.
Within the fly’s tiny head, they are linked by a flexible lever that

looks like a coat hanger.
When sound vibrates one eardrum, the lever

transmits those vibrations to the opposite one—but with a slight delay of

around 50 microseconds.
This greatly extends the time difference between the

two ears, and makes the difference between Ormia hearing a cricket and

Ormia hearing a cricket over there.
*9 Webb even built a simple robot that behaves exactly like a female cricket

and can track a singing male even though it has no internal conception of his

song.
*10 Rex Cocroft, the treehopper aficionado whom we met in the last chapter,

was also one of Ryan’s students.
*11 Ryan does a very good túngara frog impression, but to my disappointment,

he has never tried playing his own rendition through a speaker to see if he can

fool an actual female.
“I should do that,” he tells me.
*12 Technically, the frog has two hearing organs in its inner ear.
One, the

amphibian papilla, is most sensitive to the pitch of the whine—700 Hz.
The

other, the basilar papilla, is tuned to the frequency of the chuck.
*13 Sensory exploitation works across the senses.
In swordtail fish, the bottom half of the male’s tail fin is unusually long.
The longer this sword, the more

attractive the male is to females.
But Alexandra Basolo found that this same

preference exists in the closely related and swordless platyfish.
If she glued

artificial swords onto the tails of platyfish males, they became more attractive.
The sword, then, is like the túngara frog’s chuck—a trait that evolved to

exploit a preexisting preference.
*14 Ryan remembers that after he first presented his bat findings at a seminar, a very senior researcher told him that he was wrong.
Bat ears are tuned to the

exceptionally high frequencies of their own calls, Professor Bigshot said, and

should be deaf to the lower notes of a túngara chuck.
Undeterred, Ryan

showed that they are not.
Their inner ears are wired up to more neurons than

those of almost any other mammal, and uniquely among bats, a subset of these

are sensitive to the low frequencies found in frog calls.
It’s as if they’ve added

a special frog-detecting module onto what is otherwise basic bat hardware.
One of Ryan’s students, Rachel Page, later showed that under some

circumstances, the bats find it easier to locate the frogs if they’re chucking as

well as whining.
They aren’t the only eavesdroppers, either.
Another of Ryan’s

students, Ximena Bernal, showed that bloodsucking midges are drawn to frog

calls, and especially to those with chucks.
*15 Males of the plainfin midshipman fish attract females by making long and

very deep hums, and during the breeding season, the females’ ears become

several times more sensitive to the main frequencies.
Green tree frogs become

more sensitive to their own calls after just two weeks of listening to a chorus.
*16 Hearing ranges don’t have sharp boundaries.
Instead, it just becomes

harder and harder to hear sounds at a specific volume.
Humans, for example,

can hear some infrasonic frequencies if they’re loud enough.
*17 Humans exploited this property during World War II, when aircraft were

armed with explosive charges that went off if the planes sank.
Listening posts

could detect the locations of the wrecks, and rescue teams could be deployed.
*18 There’s a running joke in Pixar’s Finding Nemo where the protagonist Dory speaks whale by saying the usual things loudly and slowly.
Talking to Clark, I

wonder if that’s surprisingly accurate.
*19 Other land animals experience the same expansions and contractions,

which is why songbirds sing at dawn and wolves howl at night.
Nightfall also

increases the range over which a predator might pick up on a call, which

might be why elephants call most often in the late afternoon, when their

sounds travel reasonably far but lions are still snoozing.
*20 Subterranean animals are a striking exception.
Their hearing range is

much lower than expected for the size of their heads, perhaps because they

don’t need to localize sounds, and instead use surface-borne vibrations.
*21 It might seem absurd to think that an animal couldn’t hear its own calls, but there’s at least one clear example where that’s the case—the pumpkin

toadlet of Brazil.
This orange frog is insensitive to the frequencies in its calls,

but calls all the same, perhaps because the sight of its inflating vocal sacs is

attractive to mates.
*22 Some moths do make ultrasonic courtship calls.
Males will follow a

female’s pheromone trail, land next to her, and vibrate their wings to produce

a volley of ultrasound.
These calls are very quiet, almost like whispers.
Like

other ultrasonic communicators, these moths are probably making use of

ultrasound’s limited range so that they’ll be heard by a prospective mate

sitting nearby, but not by a hungry bat flying overhead.
But unlike most songs,

ultrasonic or otherwise, these calls aren’t meant to be attractive.
They’re

meant to sound dangerous.
They mimic the calls of bats, prompting the

females to freeze and allowing the males to mate more easily.
*23 For years, hundreds of textbooks and scientific papers have claimed that

echolocating bats drove the evolution of ears in moths and other insects.
But

halfway through writing this book, I (and the wider scientific community)

learned that this narrative is false.
Moth ears almost always evolved before

bat ultrasound, by at least 28 and as many as 42 million years.
They only

shifted toward higher frequencies once bats arrived on the scene.
As sensory

biologist Jesse Barber tells me, “Most of the introductions I’ve written in my

papers are wrong.”





9.
A Silent World

Shouts Back

Echoes

AS I LOOK THROUGH THE window of a heavy door, a gloved

hand on the other side holds up a ball of brown fur with

long ears and a dark Chihuahua-like face.
This is Zipper.
She’s a big brown bat—one of seven spending the summer

at Boise State University under the care of Jesse Barber.
Big browns are certainly brown, but, at roughly the weight

of a mouse, they’re only big relative to other small bats.
They thrive in attics throughout the United States, but

since they’re nocturnal and quiet, people rarely see them,

and certainly not at this distance.
They emerge at dusk to

chase after moths and other night-flying insects, and Zipper

was so named because she’s especially good at

maneuvering.
Some of her roommates have been given

food-related epithets like Ramen, Pickles, and Tater.
Others

were named for their personalities: Casper (after the ghost)

is friendly; Benny (after a character in Rent) is vocal.
All

these bats will be released in October in time for

hibernation, but until then, they’re in for a cushy summer,

dining on juicy mealworms, snuggling up in warm cages,

and going on regular “flight walks.” “We take them out of

their cages to let them exercise,” Barber tells me.
“It’s like

having 16 dogs.”

As I watch Zipper through the window, she opens her

mouth, exposing her surprisingly long teeth.
This isn’t an

aggressive display.
She’s trying to make sense of her

surroundings.
She’s unleashing a stream of short,

ultrasonic pulses from her mouth.
By listening for the

returning echoes, she can detect and locate objects around

her—a form of biological sonar.
Only a few animals have

this skill, and only two groups have perfected it: toothed

whales (like dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales) and bats.
Currently, Zipper’s sonar is telling her that there’s a solid

barrier in front of her, even though she can see large

creatures standing beyond it.
(Despite the common idiom,

bats aren’t blind.) It must be a little confusing, but in

fairness, Zipper’s ability didn’t evolve to detect windows.
It

evolved to find small insects at night when vision is limited.
During the day, sharp-eyed predators like birds have their

way with bugs.
At night, those prey belong to bats.
Since

we rarely see bats, it’s easy to mistake them for ecological

B-listers that dine on the nocturnal scraps that birds leave

behind.
It’s actually the other way round: In some

rainforests, bats devour twice as many insects as birds.
And

when Zipper’s handlers take her into an adjacent flight

room and release moths into the air, I start to understand

why.
The flight room, which is completely dark, is watched by

three infrared cameras.
The handlers inside can only hear

the sounds of flapping.
Everyone outside—Barber, his

student Juliette Rubin, and I—can see what’s happening on

a monitor.
And what we see is Zipper, for whom darkness is

no impediment, slicing through the air and catching moth

after moth.
Outside, Rubin and Barber whoop and cheer

like excited sports fans.
RUBIN: Did she get it?
No, she just touched it.
BARBER: There it is….
OOOOOHHHHH.
RUBIN: Second interaction.
Third.
She’s gonna get it.
This bat is so good.
BARBER: That moth’s pretty good too….
RUBIN: OH, got it.
Knew it!
HANDLERS, ON THE WALKIE-TALKIE: Did she get it?
RUBIN: Yeah, she did, the badass.
BARBER, TO ME: She’ll need a minute to consume it.
RUBIN: This one’s eaten two lunas, some wax moths,

plus mealworms.
She’s an empty pit.
[The team gives Zipper a break, takes Poppy—another

bat—into the room, and releases another moth.]

RUBIN: Okay, we’re rolling.
Ooooh, nice.
Whoa!
Oh my

gosh.
She is…OH, did you see that acceleration she

just did?
EVERYONE, INCLUDING ME: WHOAAAAAA!
The images on the monitor are monochrome and grainy,

but, on his laptop, Barber shows me several videos that he

captured with much better cameras.
In slow motion and

high definition, a red bat does a double backflip, catching a

moth in its tail and then flipping it into its mouth.
A leaf-

nosed bat tackles another moth in an explosion of scales.
A

pallid bat descends upon a scorpion like a dragon.
These

are bats in their element—and they are glorious.
“For many

people, when I talk about my research, their first reaction

is: Oh, how could you work with those things?” Rubin says.
“I forget that most humans think bats are gross, because

they’re so incredible at what they do—and they look good

doing it.” They are so misunderstood, so often used as

symbols of evil, and so separate from us in altitude and

time of day that “some of their most basic biology is

unknown,” Barber adds.
“Bats might as well be in the deep

ocean.
We know more about their sonar than any other

aspect of their lives.”

For a long time we didn’t know about their sonar, either.
In the 1790s, the Italian priest and biologist Lazzaro

Spallanzani realized that bats could still navigate in spaces

too dark for a captive owl.
In a series of cruel experiments,

he showed that bats could orient when blinded, but would

blunder into objects when deafened or gagged.
He never

fully grasped the meaning of these curious findings and

could only write that “the ear of the bat serves more

efficiently for seeing, or at least for measuring distances,

than do its eyes.” His contemporaries scoffed at that idea;

one philosopher ridiculed it by asking, “Since bats see with

their ears, do they hear with their eyes?”

The meaning of these observations remained unclear for

more than a century, until a young undergraduate named

Donald Griffin came up with a clever idea.[*1] Griffin had

spent many hours studying migrating bats and marveled at

how they flew through dark caves without face-planting

into stalactites.
He heard about an untested hypothesis that

bats listen out for echoes from high-frequency sounds.
And

he knew that a local physicist had invented a device that

could detect ultrasonic sounds and convert them into

audible frequencies.
In 1938, Griffin showed up at the

man’s office with a cage of little brown bats, which he

placed in front of the detector.
“ We were surprised and

delighted to hear a medley of raucous noises from the

loudspeaker,” Griffin wrote in his classic book Listening in

the Dark.
A year later, Griffin and his fellow student Robert

Galambos confirmed that bats make these same ultrasonic

cries as they fly, that their ears can detect such

frequencies, and that both skills are necessary for them to

avoid obstacles.
With mouths and ears unimpeded, they

could effortlessly negotiate around a labyrinth of fine wires

hung from the ceiling.
If their ears were blocked or their

mouths were gagged, they were loath to take wing and

quick to collide with walls, furniture, and even Griffin and

Galambos themselves.
The animals were clearly finding

their way around by listening to the echoes of their own

calls.
Others thought this preposterous.
As Griffin later

recounted, “One distinguished physiologist was so shocked

by our presentation at a scientific meeting that he seized

Bob [Galambos] by the shoulders and shook him while

expostulating: You can’t really mean that!” But the duo did

mean it, and in 1944, Griffin gave a name to the bat’s

astonishing skill.
He called it echolocation.
[*2]

Even Griffin underestimated echolocation at first.
He

saw it merely as a warning system that alerted bats of

possible collisions.
But his views changed in the summer of

1951.
Sitting by a pond near Ithaca, he began to record

wild echolocating bats for the first time.
Pointing his

microphone at the skies, he was shocked by how many

ultrasonic cries he heard, and how different these were

from those he had witnessed in enclosed spaces.
When bats

were cruising through open skies, their pulses were longer

and duller.
When they swooped after insects, the steady

put-put-puts would quicken and fuse into a staccato buzz.
By using a slingshot to launch pebbles in front of the bats,

Griffin confirmed that they go through the same sequence

of quickening pulses every time they pursue an airborne

object.
Echolocation, he was staggered to realize, wasn’t

just a collision detector.
It’s also how bats hunt.
“ Our

scientific imaginations had simply failed to consider, even

speculatively, [this] possibility,” he later wrote.
To study wild bats, Griffin had to stuff a station wagon

with microphones, tripods, parabolic reflectors, radios, a

generator with a car muffler welded onto it, gasoline tanks,

and around 200 feet of extension cord.
Technology has

progressed since then, and so has the study of

echolocation.
Back in 1938, the ultrasound detector that

Griffin used was one of a kind (and he was appalled when

he and Galambos temporarily broke it).
When I visit Cindy

Moss’s state-of-the-art lab in Baltimore 80 years later, I

count 21 ultrasonic microphones dotting the walls of just

one of two flight rooms.
Infrared cameras film the bats as

they fly.
Laptops represent the bats’ inaudible sounds as

visible spectrograms, and these displays are precise

enough that experienced researchers can use them to

identify individual bats.
One might have a stutter.
Another

might have an unusually low voice—a bat baritone.
These gadgets mean that bat echolocation, which was

once undetectable to human ears and implausible to human

minds, is one of the most accessible of all senses.
Of

course, “what bats perceive is not yet known,” Moss tells

me.
“That’s a really important problem.” I mention that this

is the same philosophical dilemma that Thomas Nagel

discussed in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”—that the

conscious experiences of other animals are inherently hard

to imagine.
“Right,” Moss says.
And with a wry smile, she adds,

“Except he thought you would never know.”

—

THERE ARE MORE than 1,400 species of bats.
All of them fly.
Most of them echolocate.[*3] Echolocation differs from the

senses we have met so far, because it involves putting

energy into the environment.
Eyes scan, noses sniff,

whiskers whisk, and fingers press, but these sense organs

are always picking up stimuli that already exist in the wider

world.
By contrast, an echolocating bat creates the

stimulus that it later detects.
Without the call, there is no

echo.
As bat researcher James Simmons explained to me,

echolocation is a way of tricking your surroundings into

revealing themselves.
A bat says, “Marco,” and its

surroundings can’t help but say, “Polo.” The bat speaks,

and a silent world shouts back.
The basic process seems straightforward.
The bat’s call

is scattered and reflected by whatever’s around it, and the

animal detects and interprets the portion that rebounds.
But to successfully do this, a bat must cope with many

challenges.
I count at least 10.
First, distance is an issue.
A bat’s call must be strong

enough to make the outward journey to a target and the

return journey back to its ears.
But sounds quickly lose

energy as they travel through air, especially when they’re

high in frequency, so echolocation only works over short

ranges.
An average bat can only detect small moths from

around 6 to 9 yards away, and larger ones from around 11

to 13 yards.
Anything farther away is probably

imperceptible, unless it’s very large, like a building or a

tree.
Even within the detectable zone, objects on the

periphery are fuzzy.
That’s because bats concentrate the

energy of their calls into a cone, which extends from their

heads like the beam of a flashlight; this helps the sounds to

carry farther before petering out.
[*4]

Volume helps, too.
Annemarie Surlykke showed that the

sonar call of the big brown bat can leave its mouth at 138

decibels—roughly as loud as a siren or jet engine.
Even the

so-called whispering bats, which are meant to be quiet, will

emit 110-decibel shrieks, comparable to chainsaws and leaf

blowers.
These are among the loudest sounds of any land

animal, and it’s a huge mercy that they’re too high-pitched

for us to hear.
If our ears could detect ultrasound, I would

have recoiled in pain while listening to Zipper, and Donald

Griffin probably would have fled from the unbearable

hubbub of his Ithaca pond.
But bats can hear their own calls, which creates an

obvious second challenge: They must avoid deafening

themselves with every scream.
They do so by contracting

the muscles of their middle ears in time with their calls.
This desensitizes their hearing while they shout and

restores it in time for the echo.
More subtly, bats can adjust

the sensitivity of their ears as they approach a target so

that they perceive the returning echoes at the same steady

loudness, no matter how loud the echoes actually are.
This

is called acoustic gain control, and it likely stabilizes the

bat’s perception of its target.
The third problem is one of speed.
Every echo provides a

snapshot.
Bats fly so quickly that they must update those

snapshots regularly to detect fast-approaching obstacles or

fast-escaping prey.
John Ratcliffe showed that they do so

with vocal muscles that can contract up to 200 times a

second—the fastest speeds of any mammalian muscle.
[*5]

Those muscles don’t always contract so quickly.
But in the

final moments of a hunt, when bats are bearing down upon

their targets and need to sense every dodge and dive, they

produce as many pulses as their superfast muscles will

allow.
This is the so-called terminal buzz.
It is what Griffin

first heard at his Ithaca pond.
It is the sound of a bat

sensing its prey as sharply as possible, and of an insect

likely losing its life.
Fast pulses address the third challenge while creating a

fourth.
For echolocation to work, a bat must match every

outgoing call to its respective echo.
If it’s calling very

quickly, it risks creating a jumbled stream of overlapping

calls and echoes that can’t be separated and thus can’t be

interpreted.
Most bats avoid this problem by making their

calls very short—a few milliseconds long for the big brown.
They also space their calls, so that each goes out only after

the echo from the preceding one has returned.
The air

between a big brown bat and its target is only ever filled by

a call or an echo, and never both.
The bat’s control is so

fine that even during its rapid terminal buzz, there’s no

overlap.
After receiving the echoes, the bat must now make sense

of them.
This fifth challenge is the hardest yet.
Consider a

simple scenario where a big brown bat is echolocating on a

moth.
It hears its own call on the way out.
After a delay, it

hears the echo.
The length of that delay tells the bat about

its distance to the insect.
And as James Simmons and Cindy

Moss have shown, the bat’s nervous system is so sensitive

that it can detect differences in echo delay of just one or

two millionths of a second, which translates to a physical

distance of less than a millimeter.
Through sonar, it gauges

the distance to a target with far more precision than any

human can with our sharp eyes.
[*6]

But echolocation reveals more than just distance.
A

moth has a complex shape, so its head, body, and wings will

all return echoes after slightly different delays.
Complicating matters further, a hunting big brown bat

produces a call that sweeps across a broad band of

frequencies, falling over an octave or two.
All of these

frequencies bounce off the moth’s body parts in subtly

different ways, and provide the bat with disparate pieces of

information.
Lower frequencies tell it about large features;

higher frequencies fill in finer detail.
The bat’s auditory

system somehow analyzes all this information—the time

gaps between the call and the various echoes, at each of

their constituent frequencies—to build a sharper and richer

acoustic portrait of the moth.
It knows the insect’s position,

but maybe also its size, shape, texture, and orientation.
All of this would be hard enough if the bat and the moth

were staying still.
Usually, both are in motion.
Hence, the

sixth challenge: A bat must constantly adjust its sonar.
To

even find a moth in the first place, it must scour wide

expanses of open air.
During this search phase, it makes

calls that carry as far as possible—loud, long, infrequent

pulses whose energy is concentrated within a narrow

frequency band.
Once the bat hears a promising echo and

approaches the possible target, its strategy changes.
It

broadens the frequencies of its call to capture more detail

about the target and to more accurately estimate its

distance.
It calls more frequently to get faster updates

about the target’s position.
And it shortens each call to

avoid overlapping with the echoes.
Finally, once the bat

goes in for the kill, it produces the terminal buzz to claim

as much information as possible as quickly as possible.
Some bats will also broaden the beam of their sonar at this

point, widening their sensory zone to better catch moths

that try to bank to the side.
The entire hunting sequence, from initial search to

terminal buzz, might occur over a matter of seconds.
Again

and again, bats adjust the length, number, intensity, and

frequencies of their calls to strategically control their

perception.
Handily, this means that a bat’s voice reveals

its intent.
If its call is long and loud, it’s focusing on

something far away.
If the call is soft and short, it’s homing

in on something close.
If it produces faster pulses, it is

paying more attention to a target.
By measuring these calls

in real time, researchers can almost read a bat’s mind.
This approach has helped to explain how bats cope with

their seventh challenge—cluttered environments.
Bats can

race through rugged caves, tangled branches, and even

mazes of hanging chains.
These messy spaces pose special

problems for sonar that don’t apply to vision.
Imagine that

a bat is flying toward two branches that are the same

distance away.
If it could see them, it could easily tell them

apart, because light reflecting off each branch would fall on

different parts of its retina.
A sense of space is baked into

the anatomy of its eye.
That’s not true for ears.
The bat

must compute space from the timing of its echoes, and

since echoes returning from the two equidistant branches

would arrive after the same delay, they might sound like

the same object.
Cindy Moss showed how bats solve this problem by

training big browns to zoom through a hole in a net.
She

saw that the animals would aim the center of their sonar

beams onto the edges of the hole, scanning it before

hurtling through.
“Just as we can scan different objects in a

room with our eyes, the bat can do the same by directing

its sonar beam,” Moss tells me.
She also found that

whenever the bats are doing something demanding, like

flying around obstacles or chasing erratically moving

targets, they shorten their calls and broaden their

frequency range to wrest as much detail from the echoes as

possible.
They also tend to group their calls into distinctive

clusters that Moss calls sonar strobe groups (buh-buh-buh-

buh…buh-buh-buh-buh…buh-buh-buh-buh).
Bats

may

process each group as a unit, summing up the detail from

all the constituent echoes to build a sharper representation

of their surroundings.
[*7]

Echolocation suffers from another problem—the eighth

in our series—that vision does not.
Eyes have no problem

picking out objects against a background, unless that

object is camouflaged.
But for sonar, small objects on large

backgrounds are automatically camouflaged.
If a moth is

flying in front of a leaf or sitting upon it, the strong echoes

from the leaf would drown out the fainter ones from the

moth.
Of several solutions to this problem that bats have

developed, the common big-eared bat’s is the most

impressive.
Using sonar, and sonar alone, it can grab

dragonflies and other insects right off a leaf, even when

they’re still and silent—a feat that scientists had long

considered impossible.
Inga Geipel found that the bat pulls

off its amazing trick by approaching its prey from a sharp

angle, so that echoes from the insect bounce toward it

while those from the leaf bounce away.
The bat accentuates

this effect by hovering upward and downward in front of

the insect, with its head fixed upon it.
Initially, it probably

hears something fuzzy and indistinct—the merest hint of

possible prey.
But as it slides up and down, gathering

information from different angles, the shape of its meal

sharpens, and to the insect’s misfortune, an impossible feat

becomes all too possible.
The ninth challenge arises when bats fly in groups, as

they often do.
Now they must somehow distinguish the

echoes of their own calls from those of other individuals.
Big browns do this by aiming their calls away from other

bats, shifting the frequencies of their calls to avoid

overlapping with other bats’ sounds, or taking turns to fly

silently.
[*8] But such strategies are less useful for Mexican

free-tailed bats, which gather in the millions.
When 20

million bats are flooding out of a cave together, how on

earth does each one pick out its own echoes?
Researchers

have called this the “cocktail party nightmare,” and it’s not

clear how bats wake from it.
They might only process

echoes that arrive within a certain timeframe, or from a

specific direction.
They might also ignore echolocation

altogether, relying instead on other senses or their

memories.
Mexican free-tailed bats probably know the path

in and out of their caves, and can just follow the right

trajectory without needing to consult any echoes.
This

explains the many historical incidents in which people

barricaded the entrances to caves for safety reasons, only

to later find that bats had fatally crashed into the doors.
These tragic mishaps illustrate the 10th challenge of

echolocation: It takes a lot of effort to solve the other nine.
Echolocation is mentally demanding, especially since bats

do everything they do at speed.
Often they simply don’t

have the time to use their sonar to its fullest capacity,

which is why they often make ridiculous mistakes that

seem beneath them.
[*9] They can distinguish two grades of

sandpaper whose grains differ by half a millimeter, but will

also plow headlong into a newly installed cave door.
They

can discern flying insects by shape, but will go after a

pebble launched into the air.
Bats are fully capable of

avoiding such errors.
They’re just not paying attention.
They’re relying on memory and instinct.
Humans behave in

the same way: Most car accidents occur close to home, in

part because drivers are less watchful when going down

familiar routes.
In both cases, perception is influenced not

just by information from sense organs but also by what

brains decide to do with that information.
Those brains,

and their workings, are still mysterious.
For all we have

learned about echolocation, Nagel was still right: We might

never fully know what it is like to be a bat.
But if we dared

to take an educated guess, it might be something like this.
It is dark, and you, a big brown bat, are hungry.
Easily

sensing trees and other large obstacles, you zip around

them, searching for insects by lobbing strong, infrequent,

and narrow-pitched calls into the intervening air.
Most of

those calls disappear into the distance, but some return,

revealing the presence of something flying at one o’clock.
A

moth?
You turn your head and then your body to keep the

target within the cone of your sonar.
You know precisely

how far away the target is by now, but your perception of it

is still blurry.
That changes as you draw closer.
As your

calls shorten, speed up, and broaden in pitch, your sense of

the target sharpens—it is a moth, a large one, flying away.
As you bear down upon the insect, the incredible muscles

in your throat unleash the fastest possible barrage of sonar

pulses, snapping the moth into sharp focus.
Head, body,

and wings all become richly detailed even as you scoop the

lot into your mouth with your tail.
And you accomplish all of

that in the time between you reading this word…and you

reading this one.
It is no wonder that bats are so successful.
They’re

found on every continent except Antarctica, and they

account for one in every five mammal species.
There are

bats that pluck insects from the air and bats that pluck fruit

from trees.
There are bats that catch frogs, bats that drink

blood, and bats that sip nectar with tongues more than

twice as long as their bodies.
There are bat-eating bats.
There are bats that go fishing by echolocating on ripples.
There are bats that pollinate plants by echolocating on

dish-shaped leaves that are adapted to reflect sonar pulses.
And there are bats that have solved the challenges of

echolocation in a way fundamentally different from what

we’ve already seen, and have developed the most

specialized form of sonar in the world.
—

MOST BATS ECHOLOCATE in a way broadly similar to that of

the archetypal big brown.
They send out short sonar pulses

that last between 1 and 20 milliseconds and are separated

by relatively longer silences.
Those pulses also sweep down

across a broad band of frequencies, which is why these

bats are known as FM, or frequency-modulated, bats.
But

around 160 species—the horseshoes, hipposiderids, and

Parnell’s mustached bat—do something very different.
Their calls are much longer, lasting for many tens of

milliseconds in some species, and separated by much

shorter gaps.
And instead of covering a range of

frequencies, these species hold one particular note.
For

that reason, they are called CF, or constant-frequency, bats.
And they are listening out for a very specific kind of echo.
When a sonar pulse hits an insect’s flapping wing, the

echo strength varies as the wing moves up and down.
But

at one particular moment, when the wing is exactly

perpendicular to the incoming sound, an especially loud

and sharp echo bounces straight back at the bat.
This is

called an acoustic glint.
It’s a dead giveaway that an insect

is flying nearby.
FM bats can theoretically detect these

glints, but they’re unlikely to.
Their brief sonar pulses are

separated by long gaps, so an FM bat has to get very lucky

to hit an insect’s wing at exactly the right moment to return

a glint.
By contrast, the pulses of CF bats are long enough

to cover an entire wingbeat.
They catch glints galore.
And

since leaves and other background objects don’t flap in the

same rhythmic way as wings, a CF bat can use glints to



distinguish fluttering insects against cluttering foliage.
They must be the auditory equivalent of flashes of light.
These spectrograms show the echolocation calls of two bats as they

approach an insect.
Note that the FM bat’s calls cover a wide range of

frequencies, whereas the CF bat mostly holds the same note.
But both

bats produce shorter and more rapid calls as they approach their prey.
Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler, who has been studying CF bats

since the 1960s, has shown that they can recognize

different species of insects from the rhythms of their

wingbeats.
They can tell if the insect is flying toward them

or away from them.
And they can absolutely tell living

targets from inanimate ones: Unlike big brown bats, CF

bats won’t go after airborne pebbles.
[*10]

The ears of CF bats are as specialized as their calls.
The

greater horseshoe bat, for example, makes a call with a

constant frequency of around 83 kHz, and has a

disproportionate number of auditory neurons devoted to

exactly this pitch.
[*11] It hears the sounds of its own echoes

more sensitively than anything else.
Other species have

their own signature frequencies, as if each CF bat has

shaved off a thin slice of the full auditory world and claimed

that slice for itself.
But this strategy also creates a major

problem—an 11th challenge that FM bats do not face.
Sounds seem to rise in pitch as you get closer to their

sources—think about what a siren sounds like when an

ambulance drives toward you.
This is called the Doppler

effect.
It means that when a CF bat flies at an insect, the

echoes it hears get higher in frequency and should

eventually overshoot the bat’s zone of best hearing.
But as

Schnitzler discovered in 1967, CF bats can compensate for

Doppler shifts.
When closing in on a target, they produce

calls that are lower than their normal resting frequency, so

the upshifted echoes hit their ears at exactly the right

pitch.
And they do this (quite literally) on the fly, constantly

tweaking their calls so that the echoes from targets ahead

stay within 0.2 percent of the ideal frequency.
This is a

staggering feat of motor control that’s almost unmatched in

the animal kingdom.
Imagine that you have a mistuned piano that always

produces notes three tones higher than what you’re

actually trying to play.
If you want middle C, you’ll have to

press the A on its left.
You’d soon get the hang of it—but

imagine now that the piano’s mistakes aren’t systematic,

and the gap between the pressed notes and desired notes

changes all the time.
Now you must constantly judge the

size of the gap by listening to the music coming out of the

janky instrument, and adjust your fingers as you play.
That

is what CF bats are doing—many times a second, with

almost no errors.
They can even do this for several targets

simultaneously.
A horseshoe bat can throw its attention

between different obstacles at varying distances and

perform the right Doppler compensation for each one.[*12]

For a nocturnal insect, no environment is safe from bats.
If they fly in open air, big brown bats can grab them.
If they

head for thick foliage, greater horseshoes can track them.
If they land on a surface and stay still, common big-eared

bats can still find them.
Sonar seems like an unbeatable

weapon that can be tailored to any possible habitat.
But

while it is certainly versatile, it isn’t invincible.
In evolving

an incredible sense, bats opened themselves up to equally

incredible illusions.
—

IT IS GENTLY snowing inside Jesse Barber’s lab, or so it

seems.
The team members have been carrying moths into

the flight room where Zipper and other bats are swooping

around, and the insects have left a cloud of white scales

hanging in the air.
The scales are so pervasive that both

Barber and Juliette Rubin have become horribly allergic to

them and are now wearing face masks.
This, they tell me, is

a common occupational hazard among lepidopterists—

people who study moths and butterflies.
In some circles,

it’s called lep lung.
When not inflaming the airways of scientists, the scales

protect the bodies of moths, by absorbing the sound of a

bat’s calls and muffling the resulting echoes.
This acoustic

armor is just one of several anti-bat defenses.
As we saw in

the previous chapter, more than half of moth species have

ears that can hear bat sonar.
Such ears offer a considerable

advantage.
Bats are listening for sounds that have traveled

to a moth and back again, but moths only have to detect

the same sounds after their initial outward journey, when

they’re much stronger.
So while bats can hear small moths

from no more than 9 yards away, moths can hear bats from

15 to 33 yards away.
Many of them exploit this lead by

executing dodges, loops, and power dives whenever they

hear bat voices.
Others talk back.
Tiger moths, a diverse group of 11,000 species, have a

pair of drum-like organs on their flanks.
These vibrate to

produce ultrasonic clicks that seem to baffle bats, causing

them to miss the moths.[*13] Sometimes these clicks are

acoustic versions of warning colors: Many tiger moths are

full of foul-tasting chemicals, and they click to tell bats that

they aren’t worth eating.
The clicks can also jam a bat’s

sonar.
In 2009, Aaron Corcoran and Jesse Barber found

clear evidence that this happens by pitting big brown bats

against Bertholdia trigona—a stunning American tiger

moth that’s clad in the colors of a burning log.
These moths

have no chemical defenses and bats will eat them if they

can.
But the big browns frequently flubbed their attacks

when they approached a clicking Bertholdia, even when the

moths were tethered in place.
The clicks overlapped with

the bats’ echoes and messed with their ability to gauge

distance.
From their perspective, a target that was once

sharply defined and precisely pinpointed would have

suddenly blurred into a nebulous cloud with ambiguous

position.
[*14]

Other moths can cast illusions without incantations.
Barber and Rubin have been breeding luna moths—

unmistakable, palm-sized insects with a white body, blood-

red legs, yellow antennae, and lime-green wings that end in

a pair of long, streaming tails.
When I open a cupboard in

their lab, a few of these moths are just hanging calmly on

the door, their empty chrysalises strewn across the shelves.
In their adult form, they have no mouths and little time.
In

a week, they’ll be dead.
Until then, “all they do is mate and

evade bats,” Barber says.
They have no noxious chemicals.
They can’t make jamming clicks.
They can’t even hear bats

coming because they have no ears.
But those long tails that

grow from their hindwings flap and spin behind them as

they fly, producing echoes that distract echolocating bats

into attacking an inessential body part.
On average, a luna

moth without tails is nine times more likely to be eaten

than one whose tails are intact.
“When I discovered that, I

thought: This can’t be real,” Barber says.
“Echolocation is

such a remarkable sense.
How can a spinning piece of

membrane fool the bats?
But we see it, and consistently.”

I see it, too, on Barber’s monitor.
When a luna moth is

released into the flight room, Zipper the bat attacks it, and

misses.
She turns, attacks again, tears off a mouthful of

tail, and spits it out.
As the unappetizing fragment drifts to

the floor, Barber looks at me, grinning, and says, “I told

you.” The handlers bring out the moth: It’s missing the left

tail but is otherwise unharmed.
They take a second luna

inside, this time with its tails already removed.
Zipper

catches it almost immediately.
[*15]

When I first looked at the luna moths, I thought their

tails were like those of a peacock.
But that was my visual

bias leading me astray again.
These moths find their mates

through smell, and there’s no evidence that the tails make

them more attractive.
They are meant not to delight the

eyes of prospective mates but to fool the ears of

prospective predators.
Donald Griffin once described bat echolocation as a

“magic well” that, when uncovered, became an endless

source of surprising discoveries.
By understanding what

bats can do, we can appreciate them for the biological

marvels that they are instead of the unsavory creatures

they are reputed to be.
We can better understand the

creatures they hunt.
And, as many scientists did after

Griffin’s work, we can look for other creatures that

perceive the world through echoes.
—

BATS AND DOLPHINS are about as different as two groups of

mammals can be.
Bats’ front legs have stretched into

wings, while dolphins’ have flattened into flippers.
Bat

bodies are svelte and lightweight; dolphin frames are

streamlined and blubbery.
Bats cut paths through the open

air; dolphins, the open seas.
But both groups must move

and forage through three-dimensional and often dark

spaces.
Both groups did so by evolving echolocation.
And

both groups surrendered their secrets to science in roughly

the same way: Researchers first noticed that dolphins could

avoid obstacles in the dark even when blindfolded, and

then that they made and heard ultrasonic clicks.[*16] These

observations were easier to interpret because, thanks to

the pioneering work of Griffin and others, people already

knew that echolocation existed.
Researchers working with

dolphins could test for a skill that just two decades earlier

had seemed inconceivable.
Despite that advantage, research on dolphin sonar has

progressed rather slowly, because the animals are not easy

to work with.
Their size alone is a problem.
The smallest

dolphin is around 40 times heavier than the biggest bat and

requires a large saltwater tank instead of a small room.
Dolphins are also smarter, harder to train, and more willful

than bats: Kathy, a bottlenose dolphin who took part in a

seminal early experiment, would agree to wear eye cups,

but absolutely refused to don a sound-blocking mask that

covered her jaw and forehead.
And while bats can be easily

found in buildings and woods, dolphins live in a habitat so

inaccessible that most humans only skim across its surface.
So researchers who study dolphins have been mostly forced

to work with animals that live either in aquariums or in

naval facilities.
The U.S.
Navy started training dolphins in the 1960s to

rescue lost divers, find sunken equipment, and detect

buried mines.
In the 1970s, it invested heavily in

echolocation research, not to understand how the dolphins

themselves perceived the world but to improve military

sonar by reverse-engineering the animals’ superior

capabilities.
A field station in Hawaii’s Kāne‘ohe Bay

became a hub of important research, led by psychologist

Paul Nachtigall and electrical engineer Whitlow Au.
“The

dolphin was a black box, and my interest lay in defining the

parameters of that box,” Au tells me.
“I used to get my kids

very upset because they just wanted to hug the animals,

and I would say that they were just test subjects.” (I ask

him if he still regards them that way after working with

them for decades.
He pauses, then says, “I see them as

more complex test subjects.”)

At Kāne‘ohe Bay, where bottlenose dolphins like

Heptuna, Sven, Ehiku, and Ekahi could swim in large,

open-water pens, Au and his colleagues realized that

dolphin sonar was even more impressive than anyone had

guessed.
Dolphins could discriminate between different

objects based on shape, size, and material.
They could

distinguish between cylinders filled with water, alcohol, and

glycerine.
They could identify distant targets from the

information in a single sonar pulse.
They could reliably find

items buried under several feet of sediment, and they could

tell if those objects were made of brass or steel—feats that

no technological sonar can yet match.
To date, “the only

sonar that the Navy has that can detect buried mines in

harbors is a dolphin,” Au says.
Dolphins belong to the group of whales known as

odontocetes, or toothed whales.[*17] The other members of

this group—porpoises, belugas, narwhals, sperm whales,

and orcas—also echolocate, and many do so just as well as

the familiar bottlenose.
In 1987, Nachtigall’s team started

working with a false killer whale—an 18-foot-long, black-

skinned dolphin species known for being smart and

sociable.
The animal, Kina, could use her sonar to tell the

difference between hollow metal cylinders that looked

identical to the human eye and that differed in thickness by

the width of a hair.
On one memorable occasion, the team

tested Kina using two cylinders that had been

manufactured to the same specifications.
To everyone’s

confusion, Kina repeatedly indicated that the objects were

different.
When the team had the cylinders remeasured,

they realized that one had a minuscule taper and was 0.6

millimeters wider at one end than the other.
“It was

incredible,” Nachtigall recalls.
“We ordered them to be the

same, the machinists said they were the same, and the

animal said, ‘No, they’re different.’ And she was right.”

Dolphins can also echolocate on a concealed object and

then recognize the same object visually—even on a

television screen.
This might seem like an obvious feat, but

stop to consider what it involves.
The animal isn’t just

working out the object’s position but constructing a mental

representation of that object, which can be translated to its

other senses.
And it’s doing that with sound—a stimulus

that doesn’t naturally carry rich, three-dimensional

information.
If you heard a saxophone, you might recognize

the instrument and work out where its music is coming

from, but good luck predicting its shape from sound alone.
You could, however, touch a saxophone and get a solid

impression of what it should look like.
So it is with

echolocation.
This sense is often described as “seeing with

sound,” but you could just as easily think of it as “touching

with sound.” It’s as if a dolphin is reaching out and

squeezing its surroundings with phantasmal hands.
I’m not used to thinking about sound in this way.
Outside

my window, I can hear barking dogs, singing starlings, and

chirping cicadas, all using sound to convey information to

their audiences.
But the air and water of this planet also

abound with sounds that animals use to convey information

to themselves—sound produced not for communication but

for exploration.
Other senses can be used in this way to

explore, but echolocation is inherently exploratory.
And it

absolutely feels that way when deployed by an animal as

inquisitive as a dolphin.
“The animals aren’t echolocating

all the time, but any time you put a new object in with

them, they’ll buzz the crap out of it,” Brian Branstetter,

who started working with dolphins in Oahu in the 1990s,

tells me.
“And when I’m swimming with them, I can hear

and feel their clicks: This animal is checking me out right

now!”

—

MUCH ABOUT DOLPHIN sonar is counterintuitive, including

the way they produce it.
At the top of the dolphin’s head is

the blowhole, which is equivalent to your nostrils.
Just

below the blowhole, in the animal’s nasal passages, are two

pairs of organs called phonic lips.
The dolphin clicks by

forcing air through those lips and making them vibrate.
The

sound then travels forward and is focused by a fatty organ

called the melon, which is what gives the dolphin its

bulging brow.
So while a bat’s call begins in its throat and

goes out through its mouth or nose, a dolphin’s click begins

in its nose and goes out through its forehead.
The sperm whale—the biggest odontocete of all—does

something even stranger.
Its titanic barrel of a nose can

make up a third of its 52-foot body, and the phonic lips lie

at the very front.
When they vibrate, most of their sound

goes backward through the whale’s head.
It passes through

a fat-filled organ called the spermaceti (the contents of

which whalers once prized), bounces off an air sac at the

back of the head, and then moves forward through another

fatty organ called the junk (which whalers deemed

worthless).
The sound that emerges from this absurd

detour is the loudest in the animal world.
At 236 decibels,

it’s basically an explosion.
When scientists want to

calibrate hydrophones to record sperm whale clicks, they

throw cherry bombs into the water.
The clicks are also

focused into an extremely thin beam that’s around 4

degrees wide.
If a bottlenose dolphin perceives the ocean

with a sonar flashlight, then a sperm whale fires a laser.
[*18]

Odontocetes also intercept their own echoes in a bizarre

way.
In the 1960s, Ken Norris found a dolphin skeleton on a

Mexican beach, and noticed that part of its lower jaw was

so thin that it was almost translucent.
This hollow stretch

of bone is filled with the same fats that make up the melon.
These “acoustic fats” are never burned for energy, no

matter how starved a dolphin gets.
Their purpose is to

channel sound toward the inner ear.
A dolphin is an

echolocator that clicks with its nose and listens with its jaw.
Despite these weird traits, odontocetes use many of the

same echolocating tricks as bats.
When they need more

information, they can speed up the pace of their clicks (as

in the terminal buzz) or group those clicks into packets (as

in the strobe groups).
They can adjust the sensitivity of

their ears to dampen their own booming noises and to

perceive the returning echoes at the same steady loudness.
But odontocetes can also pull off feats of sonar that bats

cannot.
Sound behaves differently in water than in air.
It

travels faster and farther, so dolphin sonar operates over

ranges no bat can manage.
[*19] In an early experiment, Au

showed that blindfolded dolphins could detect steel spheres

at a distance of 110 yards, far enough that the team had to

use binoculars to check that the targets were correctly

positioned.
The dolphins didn’t need the help—and it later

transpired that they were working under difficult

conditions.
Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, Kāne‘ohe

Bay was full of snapping shrimps, whose large claws fill the

water with cacophonous pops.
The dolphins were using

sound to spot tennis balls across the length of a football

field, in the underwater equivalent of a rock concert.
Later

studies showed that echolocating dolphins can detect

targets from over 750 yards away.
Sound also interacts differently with objects underwater.
Generally, sound waves reflect when they encounter a

change in density.
In the air, they ricochet off solid

surfaces.
But in water, they’ll penetrate flesh (which mostly

has a density similar to water’s) and bounce off internal

structures like bones and air pockets.
While bats can only

sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets,

dolphins can peer inside theirs.
If a dolphin echolocates on

you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton.
It can

likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in

pregnant women.
It can pick out the air-filled swim

bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their

buoyancy.[*20] It can almost certainly tell different species

apart based on the shape of those air bladders.
And it can

tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal

hook.
In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off

fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside

that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me.
“They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider

unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists

have barely begun to consider its implications.
The beaked

whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-

esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a

strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of

which are only found in males.
Pavel Gol’din has suggested

that these structures might be the equivalent of deer

antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates.
Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in

a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for

animals that are living medical scanners.
With “internal

antlers,” beaked whales could conceivably advertise to

mates without needing to disrupt their sleek silhouettes.
This idea is hard to test because beaked whales are so

elusive.
They’ve never been kept in captivity, and, since

they can dive for several hours on a single breath, many

species are rarely seen.
But despite their rarity, they have

unexpectedly helped to address one of the biggest

mysteries of odontocete sonar: how the animals use it in

the wild.
They certainly don’t care about the distances to

steel spheres, or the width of brass cylinders—but what do

they care about?
How do they use their sonar to orient,

hunt, or solve problems?
Do diving sperm whales

echolocate on the ocean floor to avoid literally hitting rock

bottom?
Do belugas and narwhals scan for distant

breathing holes among Arctic ice?
When dolphins swim into

a school of sardines, do they focus their perception on one

fish, or all of them?
Have any of them developed specialized

strategies akin to CF bats detecting the fluttering wings of

insects?
One way to find out is to use an acoustic tag—an

underwater microphone on suction cups.
When an

odontocete surfaces for air, scientists can sidle over in a

small boat, lean across with a long pole, and plonk the tag

on the animal’s flank.
When it dives out of view, the device

records both its clicks and the returning echoes.
It captures

a detailed journal of the animal’s dive—everything it hears

and everything it’s trying to hear.
Since 2003, one team of

researchers has deployed acoustic tags on dense-beaked

whales near the Canary Islands.
These animals are silent

when they first start to dive, perhaps to avoid attracting

eavesdropping predators like orcas.
Once they hit 400

meters, they start to click, and they’ll typically find

something to eat within minutes.
These dark depths are

apparently so rich in fish, crustaceans, and squid that the

dense-beaked whale can afford to be picky.
It might

ensonify thousands of creatures but chase just a few dozen,

selecting only the best morsels using the fine

discriminatory abilities that Au and Nachtigall saw in their

captive animals.
The whales are so efficient that they only

need about four hours of daily foraging to sustain their

large bodies.
The dense-beaked whale’s foraging style is only possible

because underwater sonar has such a long range.
A flying

bat has less than a second to decide what to do about an

insect-sized target that enters its sonar field, but a

swimming odontocete has around 10 seconds to make its

decision.
A bat must always react.
A whale can plan.
In the

introduction, I wrote about Malcolm MacIver’s hypothesis

that when animals moved from the water to the land, the

extra range of their vision enabled the evolution of more

sophisticated minds, capable of planning.
I wonder if the

same hypothesis might work in reverse for echolocation.
Underwater sonar not only gives odontocetes a chance

to deliberate but also allows them to coordinate.
At night,

spinner dolphins—a small and especially acrobatic species

—capture prey by working together in teams of up to 28

individuals.
Kelly Benoit-Bird and Whitlow Au showed that

these hunts go through several distinct phases.
First, the

spinners patrol in a widely spaced line.
Then, once they’ve

found a group of fish or squid, they cluster together into a

tight row and bulldoze their prey.
The victims pile on top of

each other, and the spinners encircle them to cut off any

escapees.
Pairs of dolphins then take turns darting into the

circle from opposite ends, picking off the trapped animals.
Throughout this sequence, the spinners switch formations

seamlessly and simultaneously, and at those transition

points they’re especially likely to click.
Are they shouting

commands at each other?
Are they echolocating on their

teammates to track their positions?
Could they be using

each other’s echoes to extend their own perceptions?
Whatever the case, their coordinated, intelligent behavior

is made possible by sonar—a sense that works over

distances longer than a single dolphin.
The pod might be

spaced over 40 meters of water, but they’re connected by

sound and can act as one.
Daniel Kish envies them.
“Waterborne sonar is sort of

cheating,” he tells me.
“It gives you enormous advantages,

having a medium like that.
Air is not conducive to sonar,

and yet it still works.” And he should know.
Kish isn’t a bat

researcher or a dolphin researcher.
He doesn’t study

animal echolocation.
He echolocates.
—

WHEN I TRY to click with my tongue, the sound has a muffled

wetness to it, like a stone being thrown into a pond.
When

Daniel Kish clicks, the sound is sharper, crisper, and much

louder.
It is the sound of someone snapping their fingers, a

sound that will make you snap to attention.
It’s a sound

that Kish has been practicing for almost all of his life.
Born in 1966 with an aggressive form of eye cancer, Kish

had his right eye removed at 7 months, and his left at 13

months.
Shortly after he lost his second eye, he started

clicking.
At the age of two, he would routinely climb out of

his crib and explore his house.
One night, he crawled out of

his bedroom window, dropped into a flower bed, and

toddled around the backyard, clicking as he went.
He

remembers sensing the acoustically transparent chain-link

fence, and the large house on the other side.
He

remembers climbing the fence, and then others like it, until

a neighbor finally called the police, who brought him home.
It wasn’t till much later that Kish learned what

echolocation was, or that he’d been doing it for about as

long as he’d been walking.
Now in his 50s, Kish is still clicking and still using the

rebounding echoes to perceive the world.
I meet him at his

house in Long Beach, California, where he lives by himself.
Inside, he doesn’t need to echolocate; he knows exactly

where everything is.
But when we go for a walk, the clicks

come into play.
Kish walks briskly and confidently, using a

long cane to sense obstacles at ground level and

echolocation to sense everything else.
As we head down a

residential street, he accurately narrates everything that

we pass.
He can tell where each house begins and ends.
He

can locate porches and shrubbery.
He knows where cars

are parked along the road.
An overgrown tree stretches a

large branch across the sidewalk, and although my natural

inclination is to warn Kish about it, I don’t need to.
He

ducks, effortlessly.
“If I wasn’t echolocating, I’d have

definitely bumped into that,” he tells me.
Besides bats and odontocetes, several animals use a

simpler form of echolocation.
Small mammals might make

ultrasonic clicks to find their way around, including various

shrews, the solenodons of the Caribbean (which look like

shrews), and the tenrecs of Madagascar (which look like

hedgehogs).
Certain fruit bats, which supposedly don’t

echolocate, create clicking noises with their wings and can

use these to distinguish different textures.
The oilbird, a

large South American fruit-eater, makes audible clicks,

perhaps to navigate the caves in which it roosts.
Swiftlets,

small insect-eating birds, might click for the same reason.
And as Kish and many other people demonstrate, humans

can navigate with echoes, too.[*21]

Human echolocation isn’t as sophisticated as that of a

bat or a dolphin, but as Kish likes to point out, those

species have a several-million-year head start.
And Kish

does have a skill that Zipper the bat and Kina the false

killer whale lack—language.
He can give words to his

experience.
This should neatly solve Nagel’s philosophical

dilemma: We might never know what it’s like to be a bat,

but Kish can explain what it’s like to be Kish.
And yet he

mostly describes his decidedly non-visual experiences in

visual terms, even though he has no memory of what it was

like to see.
Glass panes and stone walls, which return sharp

echoes, are “bright.” Foliage and rough stones, which

produce coarser echoes, are “dark.” When Kish clicks, he

gets a series of “flashes,” like matches being repeatedly

struck in the dark, each one briefly illuminating the space

around him.
“I live on a planet of seven and a half billion

sighted people, so you tend to absorb the way people

language their experience,” he tells me.
And since he

doesn’t know what it’s like to see, and I can’t fully

appreciate his experience of sonar, there’s still a barrier

between us that words can’t fully bridge.
We’re both

guessing at each other’s Umwelt, trying to use a

vocabulary we share to describe experiences we don’t.
When fictional characters echolocate—think Toph

Beifong from Avatar: The Last Airbender or Daredevil from

Marvel comics[*22] —their abilities are usually portrayed as

white concentric lines, spreading over a black background

and delineating the edges of objects.
Some of this is correct

in spirit: Kish does get a sense of the three-dimensional

space around him.
But without the ultrasonic frequencies

available to bats, the resolution of his sonar is lower.
Edges

aren’t clear-cut.
Objects are defined less by their borders

and more by their densities and textures.
Those qualities

“are like the color of echolocation,” Kish tells me.
When I

think about his sensory world, I imagine a watercolor

sculpture popping into awareness with every click.
Objects

are represented by splotches whose outlines are indistinct,

and whose “hues” represent different textures and

densities.
[*23] A tree, Kish tells me on our walk, sounds like

a solid vertical post that is topped by a larger, softer blob.
A

wooden fence will sound softer than a wrought iron one,

and both will sound more solid than a chain-link fence.
On

his street the crisp sound of the hardwood door sandwiched

between the fuzzier sounds of the surrounding bushes tells

him when he’s back at his house.
Occasionally, unexpected

combinations of texture confuse him.
We pass a car that’s

parked in an incompletely paved driveway, with concrete

beneath its tires but turf beneath its undercarriage.
Kish

pauses as we pass it, and asks me if someone has parked

on their lawn.
For Kish, echolocation is freedom.
He walks around the

city, rides his bike, and goes on solo hikes.
And he’s not

unusual in that: Since at least 1749, there have been

anecdotes about blind people who could walk unassisted

through crowded streets, or (in later centuries) cycle

around obstacles and skate in busy rinks.
Humans had

been echolocating for hundreds of years before anyone had

even defined echolocation as a concept.
The ability was

historically described as “facial vision” or an “obstacle

sense.” As with bats, researchers believed that

practitioners were sensing subtle changes in airflow over

their skin.
The practitioners, meanwhile, were mostly

mystified about the nature of their perceptions.[*24]

Take Michael Supa.
A psychology student, Supa had

been blind since childhood.
He would regularly detect

distant obstacles in his daily life but couldn’t explain how

he did it.
He suspected that hearing was involved, since

he’d often snap his fingers or click his heels to find his way

around.
In the 1940s, he tested that idea.
In a large hall,

Supa showed that he and other students—one also blind,

and two sighted but blindfolded—could use their hearing to

detect a large Masonite screen.
This worked best if they

wore shoes on a hardwood floor, less well if they wore

socks on carpet, and not at all if their ears were plugged.
In

an even more dramatic demonstration, Supa asked a

blindfolded experimenter to carry a microphone and walk

toward the screen.
Sitting in a nearby soundproofed room

and listening through earphones, Supa could work out

where the screen was and tell his colleague when to stop.
By coincidence, these experiments were taking place at

roughly the same time Griffin and Galambos were working

with bats.
Supa referenced the bat studies when he

published his results in early 1944, and when Griffin coined

the term echolocation later that year, he was describing the

skills of both bats and blind people, citing Supa.
But while

bat sonar became a common part of popular knowledge,

human echolocation did not.
To this day, Kish will meet

echolocation researchers “who have no idea that humans

can echolocate,” he says.
“Human biosonar has been

dismissed as too crude to be worthy of study.” I suspect

that’s because blindness still carries so much stigma.
To be

blind to something is to be oblivious to it.
To have a blind

spot is to have a zone of ignorance.
To lack vision is to lack

creativity.
These ableist phrases equate lack of sight with

lack of awareness.
And yet blind people are profoundly

aware of their surroundings.[*25]

With echolocation, Kish can do things that sighted

people cannot, like perceive objects behind him, around

corners, or through walls.
But some tasks that are easy

with vision are very hard through sonar.
Large objects in

the background will mask the echoes of smaller objects in

the foreground.
Just as bats struggle to detect insects on

leaves, Kish and other echolocators struggle to locate

objects on tabletops—a task that, somewhat annoyingly,

they’re often asked to try.
“You’re trying to discriminate a

Kleenex box, a stapler, or some other piece of rubbish off of

this massive target,” he says.
“It’s like reading white text

on white.” Similarly, if a person is standing right up against

a wall, Kish will sometimes miss them entirely if he’s

clicking from the wrong angle.
Surfaces that slope up away

from him are easier to detect than those sloping down.
Angled objects are easier than curved ones.
Harder objects

are easier than soft ones.
In one memorable test involving a

German TV show, Kish realized that his echolocation

couldn’t distinguish between a champagne bottle and a

stuffed toy.
The curved and tapered bottle reflected his

clicks in too many directions, while the fluffy toy absorbed

them.
Ultimately, neither reflected enough energy to

produce a clear sense of shape or texture, “and so my brain

equated the two,” Kish says.
“I just couldn’t tell them

apart.”

In practice, these challenges aren’t actually that

challenging because Kish almost never relies on

echolocation alone.
When moving around his house, he

remembers where he placed his stuff.
When he’s walking

around his neighborhood, he remembers the layout of

streets.
He’ll use other senses, including passive hearing

and touch.
If he’s walking down a road, he can hear

oncoming vehicles before he can echolocate them.
If he’s

standing on a sidewalk, his sonar can’t tell him where the

edge of the curb is, but his cane easily can.
Years ago,

when he was a little younger and bolder, he and other blind

friends would go mountain biking.
A sighted friend would

lead the way, and the group would follow.
They fixed zip

ties to the backs of their bikes so that the rattling of plastic

against metal would tell them where their fellow cyclists

were.
They chose bikes with hard suspensions to better feel

the terrain.
“And then, yeah, a heck of a lot of clicking,”

Kish says.
In 2000, Kish founded a nonprofit called World Access

for the Blind to teach other blind people to echolocate.
He

and his fellow instructors, who are also blind, have trained

thousands of students in dozens of countries.
Echolocation

is still a niche skill and one that’s frowned upon by some

parts of the blind community for being socially

inappropriate, counter to tradition, or too hard for all but a

prodigious few.
Kish disagrees.
Echolocation could be more

common if only more echolocators were allowed to teach.
Kish himself was the first fully blind person in the United

States to be certified as an orientation and mobility

specialist—someone who helps blind people learn to get

around.
“There is active resistance to blind people teaching

other blind people how to be blind,” he tells me.
“It’s a sort

of reinforced custodialism.” Kish says that many blind

children will naturally try to explore through noise.
If

they’re not using their tongues, they might snap their

fingers or stomp their feet.
But parents often see these

behaviors as weird or antisocial, and put a stop to them

before they can bloom into a sophisticated sonar sense.
Kish’s parents never did that.
They allowed him to click.
They bought him a bicycle.
“They regarded my blindness as

very much incidental and supported my freedom to move,

to discover, to learn how to relate to my environment,” he

says.
That freedom eventually changed the nature of his

brain.
Neuroscientist Lore Thaler has worked with Kish since

2009.
Using brain scanners, she has shown that when he

and other echolocators hear echoes, parts of their visual

cortex—the region that normally deals with vision—are

highly active.
When sighted people hear the same stimuli,

those same brain regions lie dormant.
This doesn’t mean

Kish is “seeing” echoes.
It’s more that he’s organizing the

information from those echoes to build a spatial map of his

surroundings—a task that vision naturally excels at.
Without vision, the brain can still construct similar maps by

repurposing the so-called visual cortex into an echo-

processing cortex.
[*26] So Kish can hear where things are

relative to him, but he also knows where they are relative

to each other.
This ability likely explains many of the more

impressive things that he does, from hiking to biking.
His

memory, his cane, and his other senses give him

information, but his clicks ground that information in

space.
“His ability to understand space is fundamentally

better than most people who have no vision from an early

age,” Thaler tells me.
And that ability comes from a lifetime

of practice and active exploration.
Earlier in this chapter, when talking about dolphins, I

wrote that echolocation could just as easily be described as

“touching with sound.” That’s also roughly how Kish thinks

about it.
“It feels like an extension of my sense of touch,”

he says.
It’s purposeful and probing.
Like a bat, Kish is

forcing the world to reveal itself.
In some ways, all senses

can be like this.
A raptor can look around with its eyes, a

snake can flick its tongue to collect scent, a star-nosed

mole can press its starry nose upon the walls of its burrow,

a rat can whisk with its whiskers, and a fire-seeking beetle

can sensitize its infrared detectors by flapping its wings.
But an echolocating bat, dolphin, or human is always

exploring, by default.
So far, echolocation is the only sense

we’ve met that works in this permanently active way.
There is another.
SKIP NOTES

*1 For over a century, scholars claimed instead that bats feel their way through the night by sensing air currents playing along their wings.
In 1912, Hiram

Maxim (hot off inventing a fully automatic machine gun) modified this idea by

suggesting that bats feel the reflections of low-frequency sounds produced by

their wingbeats.
It wasn’t until 1920 that the physiologist Hamilton Hartridge

correctly speculated that they were listening for echoes from high-frequency

sounds.
This was the idea that Griffin heard.
*2 The Dutch scientist Sven Dijkgraaf had being doing similar studies.
But with Germany occupying the Netherlands and war disrupting scientific

communication across the Atlantic, Dijkgraaf had no idea what Griffin and

Galambos were up to, and didn’t have access to an ultrasonic detector.
*3 The origins of echolocation are still unclear, because the origins of bats themselves are unclear.
Bat skeletons tend to be small and delicate, which

means they leave behind few fossils that might hint at their ancestry.
And

modern bats, despite their variety, are more physically similar than they are

different, which makes it hard to work out how different groups are related.
For these reasons, there’s still vigorous debate about when bats first started

to echolocate, whether they could already fly at that point, whether they

initially used the ability to avoid obstacles or find prey, and how many times

that ability evolved.
Traditionally, the bat family tree has two main branches—

one containing the smaller echolocating species, and another containing the

larger fruit bats that (with one exception) do not echolocate.
We now know

this is wrong.
The most recent tree, which includes genetic data, shifts several

of the smaller bats, including horseshoes and false vampires, over to the fruit

bat branch.
That’s huge news in the world of bat academia.
If correct, it

means either that echolocation evolved once in the common ancestor of all

bats and was subsequently lost in the fruit bats or that it evolved on two

separate occasions.
*4 The big brown bat actually produces a forked sonar beam with two horns—

one pointing ahead and another pointing downward.
The bat might use the

forward horn to scan for insects and obstacles and the downward one to keep

track of its altitude.
This is reminiscent of the eyes of birds of prey, which have

two foveae, one for scanning the horizon and another for tracking prey.
*5 The bat’s flashlight, however, pulses on and off several times a second,

offering a series of stroboscopic snapshots.
It seems likely that the bat’s brain

knits these snapshots into something smooth and continuous, much as our

brains do when we watch a movie where static frames appear in quick

succession.
*6 This is another reason why bats keep their calls short: Since they compute distance from time, a shorter call provides a more precise estimate of range.
*7 If that scene is especially complex, big brown bats can get even more detail by shifting the frequencies of the individual calls within the strobe groups, so

that each is lower than the last.
Several species do this kind of “frequency-

hopping”: The chestnut sac-winged bat produces triplets of ascending

frequencies, and is also known as the do-re-mi bat.
*8 When bats want to communicate with each other, they tend to make types of calls very different from the ones they use as sonar.
The difference between

communication and echolocation isn’t clear-cut, though.
Some bats can

recognize the sonar calls of familiar individuals and will eavesdrop on each

other’s feeding buzzes.
The greater bulldog bat can also modify its sonar call

into a message: It’ll add a deep warning honk at the end of the pulse if it’s

about to hit another bat.
*9 In Listening in the Dark, Donald Griffin devoted an entire section to

“bumbling bats.” In it, he noted that the miraculous feats for which these

animals are rhapsodized, like flying through a curtain of thin wires, are only

performed by “the most alert and wide-awake” individuals.
Under some

conditions, Griffin wrote, bats “are quite clumsy and they sometimes blunder

headlong into obstacles which they dodge without the slightest difficulty at

other times.
Perhaps I have become a trifle sensitive about this point for

whenever a bat is seen to bump into anything I am very likely to hear about it,

often in slightly accusing tones.”

*10 In practice, many bats use a mix of CF and FM calls.
When FM bats like big browns are searching in open air, they produce CF-like pulses.
Meanwhile, CF

bats will add a brief frequency sweep at the end of their pulses to better judge

the distance to their prey.
*11 Researchers have called this sensitive band the acoustic fovea, after the part of the retina where visual acuity is sharpest.
It’s a decent analogy, but

also a little off.
The fovea is a region of physical space where vision is

sharpest, but the acoustic fovea describes a region of informational space

where the bat’s hearing is most acute.
It’s more like walking around with eyes

that are inordinately good at seeing a particular shade of green.
*12 In this way, CF bats use the potential problem of the Doppler effect to their advantage.
FM bats must keep their calls short to avoid overlaps with the

returning echo.
But CF bats separate their calls and echoes in frequency

rather than time.
Thanks to the Doppler effect, the echoes are usually higher

in pitch than the calls, and more obvious to the bat’s finely tuned ears.
That’s

why their calls can afford to be long—long enough to return an acoustic glint

and reveal the presence of fluttering prey.
*13 Dorothy Dunning and Kenneth Roeder first demonstrated this in 1965,

showing that the clicks can stop little brown bats from successfully catching

their prey.
The duo had trained the bats to catch mealworms that were shot

into the air—a task they did almost perfectly.
But when they heard recordings

of tiger moth clicks, they usually missed.
*14 Around half of hawkmoths—another major group of around 1,500 species—

can also jam bats.
But unlike the tiger moths, hawkmoths produce their

confounding clicks by rubbing their genitals together.
They seem to have

evolved this ability on three separate occasions, with each group repurposing

a different section of their sex organs into bat-befuddling instruments.
But

bats, in turn, have evolved counters to moth defenses.
At least two species—

the barbastelle of Europe and the Townsend’s big-eared bat of North America

—make very quiet calls that allow them to sneak up on moths unnoticed.
With

their stealthy whispers, they can get so close that their prey don’t have time to

either dodge or jam.
*15 It’s still unclear how the tails work.
The echoes they produce might fuse with those from the moth’s body, tricking the bat into thinking that it’s hunting

a much larger animal that’s closer to its jaws.
Alternatively, they might sound

like entirely separate targets, or more conspicuous ones.
Whatever the case,

they work.
Moths have evolved long tails on at least four separate occasions,

and some of these can be twice as long as the rest of the insects’ wings.
*16 In the 1950s, Arthur McBride wondered if dolphins, porpoises, and other

toothed whales might share the same ability.
After watching porpoises evading

fishing nets in the dark, he was reminded of bats.
Ken Norris carried out a

particularly illuminating experiment in 1959 when he trained a bottlenose

dolphin named Kathy to wear latex suction cups over her eyes.
Without vision,

Kathy could still find floating pieces of fish by releasing volleys of rapid clicks,

or swim through a maze of vertical pipes just like the bats flew through

curtains of wires.
If anything, she was more agile.
While Griffin’s bats would

often brush the wires with their wingtips, Kathy only ever once bumped a pipe

in two months of testing—and even then, she seemed to do it on purpose.
*17 A brief note on terminology: Dolphins, whales, and their relatives all belong to the group known as the cetaceans, which are colloquially just known as

whales.
There are two main groups: baleen whales (mysticetes) and toothed

whales (odontocetes).
Dolphins are one group within the toothed whales, and

they include killer whales and pilot whales.
Dolphins and porpoises are

different kinds of toothed whales, but the two terms have sometimes been

used interchangeably; some early echolocation papers refer to “bottlenose

porpoises.” So, to recap, dolphins are whales, killer whales are dolphins, and

porpoises are not dolphins, except when they are.
*18 Why are sperm whale calls so ridiculously loud?
It might be so that they

can detect the ocean floor when they dive after prey.
With a top speed of 9

miles per hour and bodies that can weigh 40 tons, it takes some time for them

to stop.
It might also be that they mainly feed on squid, whose soft bodies are

harder to detect through sonar.
*19 It helps that dolphin sonar pulses tend to be shorter, louder, and more

focused than those of bats.
A bottlenose’s click can contain 40,000 times more

energy than a big brown’s call.
*20 Most fish cannot hear very high frequencies, but there are exceptions.
The American shad, the Gulf menhaden, and a few other species have evolved ears

that can hear dolphin sonar, just as some moths can hear the cries of bats.
*21 Griffin predicted that owls might echolocate—and they don’t.
After the

discovery of echolocation in dolphins, some scientists suspected that seals

might share the same skill—and they don’t.
Why don’t seals echolocate?
One

reason might be that they are amphibious.
A dolphin is completely tied to the

water, but seals and sea lions must venture out onto land, and it is very hard

to develop a sonar system that works in both worlds.
Instead of sonar, they

rely on their eyes, their ears, and the incredible wake-sensing whiskers that

we met in Chapter 6.
Notably, every species that’s known to echolocate is

warm-blooded, and none of the countless invertebrates are known to use this

ability.
Is there some reason for that, or have scientists just not looked hard

enough?
*22 Toph’s skill is more like the seismic senses of treehoppers, while Daredevil doesn’t have to make sound to use his “radar sense,” so neither is true

echolocation.
Also, Kish and other human echolocators are often described as

“real-life Batmen,” which is an appropriate comparison since bats echolocate,

but also an inappropriate one, since Batman does not.
*23 In the Daredevil series that appeared on Netflix, the character’s radar

sense is portrayed differently than in the comics.
He describes it as a “world

on fire,” with one character appearing as a red smudge against a cooler

backdrop.
This, to me, comes a little closer to capturing the textural detail of

actual human echolocation.
*24 Kish tells me that it took him a long time to articulate how his clicks were working; he just knew they worked.
*25 Kish says that most blind people use at least a rudimentary version of

echolocation that’s enough for them to avoid walls or walk down corridors.
He

describes this as “monochromatic”—a basic awareness of what’s around.
Even

sighted people can quickly learn to do this.
What distinguishes the most

proficient echolocators is their ability to make out finer details at greater

distances with less effort.
Our sense of hearing, like all our senses, is built to

extract the signal from the noise—speech over background noises, our names

at a cocktail party, a siren across a street.
In the process, we downplay

ambient sounds, including echoes.
“If you’re echolocating, you almost have to

invert that filter because those ambiances and reverberations—sounds that we

would normally dismiss as background—are now actually the elements

needing to be discriminated,” Kish tells me.
For him, signals are embedded in

what most other ears would hear as noise.
That’s why it takes so much

practice.
*26 One might ask whether the “visual cortex” is accurately named, and

whether it’s really a “spatial mapping cortex that’s usually but not always

connected to the eyes.”





10.
Living Batteries

Electric Fields

I AM IN ERIC FORTUNE’S LAB in Newark, New Jersey, staring

into an aquarium tank that houses an electric catfish, one

of many fish that can generate electricity.
Stout and russet

brown, it looks like a sweet potato with fins.
Fortune has

named it Blubby.
Its shock, he assures me, is punchy but no

worse than licking a battery.
“If you want to be

electrocuted, you can be,” he says.
Despite a niggling

concern that he does this to haze visiting journalists, I stick

my hand in the tank.
Blubby doesn’t flinch.
I quickly do.
As

the fish’s discharge forces my muscles to contract, I

reflexively yank my arm out of the tank, splashing water

over my notepad.
My fingers tingle for an hour afterward.
“That’s about 90 volts,” Fortune says.
“I’m glad you had

that experience.”

Around 350 species of fish can produce their own

electricity, and humans have known about their ability

since long before anyone knew what electricity was.
Around 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians carved depictions of

Blubby’s ancestors onto tombs.
The Greeks and Romans

wrote about the torpedo ray’s “benumbing” power—a

strange force that could kill small fish, run up a spear into

the arm of the person fishing, and treat everything from

headaches to hemorrhoids.
[*1] The true nature of these

discharges only became clearer in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, when scientists defined electricity as

a physical entity and realized that animals can produce it.
The study of electric fish then became entwined with the

study of electricity itself.
These animals inspired the design

of the first synthetic battery.
They fueled the discovery that

muscles and nerves in all animals run on minute currents.
Indeed, electric fish evolved their unique powers by

modifying their own muscles or nerves into special electric

organs.
These organs consist of cells called electrocytes,

stacked together like towers of pancakes flipped on their

sides.
By controlling the flow of charged particles called

ions through an electrocyte, a fish can create a small

voltage across it.
And by lining these cells up and

triggering them together, it can combine the minuscule

voltages into substantial ones.
None do this better than electric eels.
Their electric

organs take up most of their 7-foot-long bodies, and contain

around 100 stacks of between 5,000 and 10,000

electrocytes.
The most powerful of the three electric eel

species can discharge 860 volts—enough to incapacitate a

horse.
[*2] It uses its brutal powers with sinister finesse.
When hunting small fish and invertebrates, it delivers

pulses that force the muscles of its prey to twitch, giving

away its position.
Stronger pulses then cause those same

muscles to lock, paralyzing the victim.
The electric organ is

both remote control and Taser, allowing the eel to

commandeer the bodies of other animals from afar.
[*3]

Most electric fish are more benign.
Their discharges are

so faint that they can barely be felt by humans.
Known as

weakly electric fish, they belong to two main groups—the

elephantfishes (mormyroids) of Africa, and the knifefishes

(gymnotiforms) of South America.
(The electric eel, despite

its name, is actually a knifefish—and the only member of

the order that produces strong discharges.) Weakly electric

fish perplexed nineteenth-century scientists, including

Charles Darwin.
He correctly theorized that the strong

electric organs of electric eels and torpedo rays must have

evolved from normal muscle via a weaker, intermediate

stage.
But weaker electric organs wouldn’t have evolved at

all if they weren’t of some use.
And if they are too feeble

for offense or defense, what were they for?
“ It is

impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous

organs have been produced,” Darwin wrote in 1859, in his

landmark opus The Origin of Species.
“But this is not

surprising, for we do not even know of what use they are.”

Darwin can rest easy.
After 160 years of research, it is

clear that the knifefishes and elephantfishes use their

electric fields to sense their surroundings, and even to

communicate with each other.
Electricity is to them what

echoes are to bats, smells are to dogs, and light is to

humans—the core of their Umwelt.
—

MALCOLM MACIVER TELLS me to listen and then dips an

electrode into a small tank.
The device detects an electric

field oscillating 900 times a second.
It converts that field

into a sound that emerges from a nearby speaker as a

haunting soprano note, roughly two octaves above middle

C.
This is how we hear the tank’s silent resident—a black

ghost knifefish.
[*4]

The black ghost is as long as my hand.
Its skin is the

color of dark chocolate, and its blade-like body tapers from

a broad head toward a pointed tail.
A single ribbon-like fin

runs along its underside, undulating constantly.
This fin

propels the fish in every possible direction with uncanny

agility.
At first, the fish hovers in the middle of a cylinder at

the bottom of the tank.
It darts out and, with equal ease,

reverses.
It turns upside down.
It zips backward, and just

before it collides with the back wall of the tank it curves its

body and slides up the wall tail-first.
“That’s how Hans

Lissmann worked out what was happening,” MacIver tells

me.
Hans Lissmann was a Ukrainian-born zoologist who

studied with Jakob von Uexküll, the man who coined the

Umwelt concept.
After surviving two world wars, Lissmann

ended up in Britain.
During a fateful visit to the London

Zoo, he watched an African knifefish deftly avoiding

obstacles while reversing around its tank.
In a neighboring

display, he saw an electric eel perform the same feat, and

wondered if both fish were somehow using electricity to

sense the objects around them.
He soon got the chance to

test this idea when a friend gave him a knifefish as a

wedding present.[*5]

In 1951, Lissmann used electrodes to confirm that the

animal produced a continuous electric field from the organ

in its tail.
He realized that objects would distort this field if

they were either more or less electrically conductive than

water.
And by sensing those distortions, a knifefish could

conceivably detect whatever produced them.
Lissmann and

his colleague Ken Machin probed the limits of this ability

and were astonished.
After some training, a knifefish could

distinguish between a clay pot that contained an insulating

glass rod and an identical pot that was empty.
It could even

discriminate between different blends of water that varied

only in their purity.
It clearly had an electric sense unlike

anything that humans possess.
Lissmann and Machin

published their results in 1958, marking the second time in

as many decades that a strange new sense had been

formally documented.
Just 14 years earlier, Donald Griffin

had coined the term echolocation to describe the sonar of

bats.
Fittingly, the equally strange ability of electric fish

became known as active electrolocation.
(Why the “active”

qualifier?
We’ll find out later.)

The electric organ in the fish’s tail is like a small battery.
When it switches on, it creates an electric field that

envelops the animal.
Current flows through the water from

one end of the electric organ to the other.
Nearby

conductors, like animals (whose cells are essentially bags

of salty liquid), increase the flow of that current.
Insulators,

like rocks, reduce it.
These changes affect the voltage on

different parts of the fish’s skin.
The fish can detect these

differences using sensory cells called electroreceptors.
The

black ghost knifefish has 14,000 of these scattered over its

body, and it uses them to work out the position, size, shape,

and distance of the objects around it.
Just as sighted people

create images of the world from patterns of light shining

onto their retinas, an electric fish creates electric images of

its surroundings from patterns of voltage dancing across its

skin.
Conductors shine brightly upon it.
Insulators cast

electric shadows.
An elephantfish produces its own electric field, which is distorted by

conducting and nonconducting objects in its environment.
Visual terms like image and shadow are useful when

describing such an alien and unfamiliar sense.
But

electrolocation is very different from vision.
The fish that

possess this sense care about physical qualities that many

other creatures never notice, while ignoring traits that

seem (quite literally) blindingly obvious.
When Eric Fortune

collects electric fish from the wild, he can shine a flashlight

upon them to no effect.
But once he reaches into the water

with a net, “if there is any exposed metal, you can’t catch

them,” he tells me.
Conductive metal is more of a beacon to

them than actual light.
They are also sensitive to salinity.
In the Amazon basin,

where many knifefishes live, heavy rainfall regularly flushes

ions out of the water.
Against this desalinated background,

the conductive, salt-filled bodies of other animals pop out to

fish that can electrolocate.
But in North American tap

water, which is relatively laden with ions, those same

animals would blend into the background.
MacIver’s lab is

based in Evanston, Illinois; he tells me that if he were to

release his captive black ghost knifefish into a local river, it

would probably struggle to detect any food, and die.
As it

is, he adjusts the ion levels in the fish’s tank to mimic its

natural environment, using a recipe handed down between

generations of electric fish researchers.[*6] The black ghost

is far from the Amazon, but perhaps its water might at least

feel like home.
[*7]

Active electrolocation is similar to echolocation in that it

always involves effort.
In other senses, activity is optional—

noses can sniff, eyes can dart, and hands can stroke, but

these organs can also wait for stimuli to come to them.
Echolocating bats and electrolocating fish cannot wait.
Both must create the stimuli that they then detect.
But

there is one key difference between these senses: Electric

fields do not travel.
Almost all other senses depend on

stimuli that move.
Odor molecules, sound waves, surface

vibrations, and even light must all make journeys from

sources to receivers.
But whenever a knifefish fires its

electric organ, electric fields immediately materialize

around it.
It doesn’t have to wait, as a bat must, for a

returning echo.
Electrolocation is an instantaneous sense.
It is also omnidirectional.
Since an electric fish’s field

extends in every direction, so does its awareness.
That’s

why the black ghost knifefish that I saw, and the African

knifefish that entranced Hans Lissmann, could avoid

obstacles behind them.
These fish have been filmed

swimming backward for meters at a time.
“Imagine walking

backward for five meters—you just wouldn’t,” Fortune tells

me.
“Electric fish can.”

Their wraparound sensing comes with a significant

catch.
Electric fields rapidly weaken the farther they are

from their source, so electrolocation only works at very

short ranges.
The black ghost knifefish eats water fleas that

are just a few millimeters long, and can sense these tiny

morsels as long as they’re within roughly an inch of its

body.
Beyond that, the water fleas are undetectable, and

even larger objects are indistinct.
“I think of the fish as

being in heavy fog all the time,” MacIver tells me.
The

black ghost can extend the range of its awareness by

generating a stronger electric field, and it does this every

night when it starts to forage.
But extra effort can only go

so far.
To double the range of its electric sense, it would

have to expend eight times more energy—and it already

spends a quarter of its total calories on generating its

fields.
[*8]

These limitations help to explain why many of these fish

are so agile.
With their awareness mostly confined to a

small sensory bubble, they must quickly react to whatever

they detect.
By the time they sense an obstacle, they have

to brake suddenly or swerve quickly.
When they detect

something edible, they might have already passed it, and

must backtrack.
MacIver shows me a video in which a

black ghost does exactly that.
It initially swims past a water

flea, but then reverses until its head is close enough to

grab the morsel.
If it did a U-turn, the flea would have left

the range of its electric sense and been lost.
Instead, it

pulled off a parallel-parking maneuver and kept its prey

inside its sensory bubble.
This is another example of the

intimate connections between an animal’s body and its

sensory systems.
The black ghost knifefish’s agility

wouldn’t be much use without its wraparound electric

sense, and its sense would be of little use if the fish weren’t

so agile.
The omnidirectional nature of electrolocation means that

of all the senses we have encountered so far, it is perhaps

most similar to touch.
“We don’t find it weird that we can

sense touch all over our body,” MacIver says.
“Now imagine

that’s extended out a little bit.
That’s what the electric

sense is like, I think.
But who knows what it’s like for the

fish?” Bruce Carlson, who also studies electric fish,

imagines that the fish might feel a kind of pressure on its

skin.
Conductors and insulators might feel different, just as

hot and cold objects or rough and smooth ones do to our

fingers.
“I can imagine that if I swam past a metal ball, I’d

get a small cool sensation like a piece of ice rolling down

one side of my body,” he tells me.
This is speculative, of

course, but electric fish really do behave as if they’re

touching their surroundings from a distance.
They’ll

investigate objects by shimmying back and forth next to

them, just like humans running their fingertips over a

surface.
They’ll wrap their bodies around mystery items to

get clues about their shape, just as we might grasp

unfamiliar things in our hands.
Daniel Kish said that he

thought about echolocation as a tactile sense: He uses

sound to extend his sense of touch and to purposefully

probe his world.
Electric fish use electric fields in the same

way.[*9]

If all this sounds eerily familiar, think back to how

swimming fish create fields of flowing water around their

bodies.
Objects around them distort those flow fields, and

fish can use their lateral lines to sense those distortions.
Sven Dijkgraaf called this “touch at a distance,” which is

exactly what electrolocating fish are doing, only using

electric currents instead of water currents.
This

resemblance isn’t a coincidence.
The electric sense evolved

from the lateral line.
Electroreceptors grow from the same

embryonic tissues that create the lateral line, and both

sense organs contain the same kinds of sensory hair cells

(which are also found in your inner ear).[*10] The electric sense really is a modified form of touch, repurposed for

sensing electric fields instead of flowing water.
[*11]

But if the lateral line already existed, why evolve

electrolocation on top of it?
It might be that electric fields

are more reliable than almost any other stimulus.
They

aren’t distorted by turbulence, so electric fish can thrive in

fast-flowing rivers, where torrents and eddies befuddle the

lateral line.
Electric fields aren’t obscured by darkness or

murkiness, so electric fish can stay active in turbid waters

and nighttime hours.
Electric fields aren’t blocked by

barriers as light and smells are, so electric fish can sense

through solid objects to detect hidden treasures.
Indeed,

it’s very hard to hide from these animals.
They are sensitive

not only to conductance, which is an object’s ability to

carry a current, but also to capacitance, which is its ability

to store a charge.
And in natural environments,

“capacitance is a mark of the living,” MacIver says.
Prey

animals can freeze, hide, and hush to fool predators that

rely on vision and hearing.
But stillness, concealment, and

silence don’t work against electrolocation.
To an electric

fish, all that’s alive stands out against all that isn’t.
And

other electric fish stand out most of all.
—

SHORTLY AFTER THE 9/11 attacks, Eric Fortune got a call

from the dean of his university.
One of Fortune’s colleagues

was part of the Air Force Reserve and had been called for

duty.
The man had been scheduled to go to Ecuador on a

field trip, and his spot was now open.
It was Fortune’s if he

wanted it—and he did.
Fortune ended up in the middle of the Amazon

rainforest, in a lodge overlooking an oxbow lake.
One

evening, while bats gleaned insects off the lake’s surface

and huge spiders fished by its edge, Fortune walked onto a

pier, connected an electrode to an amplifier, and lowered it

into the water.
Immediately, he heard a familiar sound—the

distinctive hum of Eigenmannia, the glass knifefish.
These

are among the most widely studied electric fish, and

Fortune had worked with them before.
But he had only ever

listened to a few dozen in his laboratory.
Standing on that

pier, he heard what must have been hundreds.
He couldn’t

see any of them, but he knew there was a bustling electric

world below his feet.
“It was a moment I can still close my

eyes and go back to,” he tells me.
“It was the most amazing

experience I’ve ever had, and I’m so sad I’m not there right

now.”

For decades, scientists have studied electric fish in

laboratories.
It’s so easy to record, tweak, and play back

the discharges of these animals that they have become

mainstays of research in neuroscience and animal behavior.
Researchers can, for example, play signals that mimic

something moving against a fish’s body, and watch how it

responds.
They’ve been doing this since the 1960s, creating

virtual-reality worlds for electric fish.
But the animals’

actual worlds are still mysterious because they are very

hard to study in the wild.
Both the African elephantfishes

and the South American knifefishes tend to live within

dense rainforests, in murky rivers, and amid tangled

underwater vegetation.
In some places, they are easily the

most common fish around.
But you’d never be able to tell

unless, as Fortune did, you dropped an electrode into the

water and converted their electric chorus into audible

sounds.
Such electrodes have improved over time, from simple

ones you can buy at a local store[*12] to complex grids that

can determine the position of every individual within a

shoal.
These devices have revealed that fish use electric

fields not just to sense their environment but also to

communicate.
They court mates, claim territory, and settle

fights with electric signals in the same way other animals

might use colors or songs.
Electric fields are great for communication because they

don’t get distorted in the way that sounds do.
They aren’t

absorbed by obstacles.
They don’t echo.
They don’t even

travel; instead, they instantly appear in the space between

the fish that generates them and the one that detects them.
[*13] This means that electric fish can encode information

within fine-grained features of their discharges, without

any risk that their messages will be corrupted.
In the

chapter on hearing, we saw that zebra finches pay

attention to the temporal fine structure of their songs—that

is, how notes change from one thousandth of a second to

the next.
Electric fish do the same with their electric

discharges, but they’re sensitive to millionths of a second.
They can cram information into even simple signals.
Some species of electric fish turn their fields on and off

to produce strong staccato pulses, like drumbeats.
The

shape of these pulses—their duration and how their voltage

changes over time—contains information about the

animal’s species, sex, status, and sometimes identity.
Over

short timescales, every individual produces the same pulses

again and again: “I like to think of it as the sound of your

voice,” says Bruce Carlson.
The timing of the pulses,

however, can vary considerably.
If the shape of the pulse

conveys identity, the timing of the pulses conveys meaning.
One rhythm might be as attractive as birdsong; another

could be as threatening as a snarl.
Other species, like the black ghost and glass knifefishes,

produce pulses in such quick succession that they blend

into a single, continuous wave, like an endless violin note.
The frequencies of these waves differ between species (and

sometimes sexes), and the fish control their timing with

unbelievable precision.
The neuroscientist Ted Bullock once

showed that the black ghost’s electric field usually

oscillates once every 0.001 seconds, with an error of just

0.00000014 seconds.
It’s one of the most accurate clocks in

the natural world, and was almost too precise for Bullock’s

instruments to measure.[*14] By minutely changing the

frequencies of these carefully controlled signals, wave-type

electric fish can send messages.
By briefly and sharply

increasing the frequency of their signals, they can produce

“chirps,” which are “short and abrupt during aggressive

encounters but assume a softer and more raspy quality

during courtship,” Mary Hagedorn and Walter Heiligenberg

once wrote.
[*15]

Such

messages

don’t

carry

far,

but

electrocommunication is less limited by range than active

electrolocation.
When electrolocating, a fish can only

extend the range of its sense by producing a stronger

electric field, which, at some point, just takes too much

energy.
But when “listening” to another fish’s electric

signals, it doesn’t need to generate a field at all.
It only

needs more sensitive electroreceptors, and those are easier

to evolve.
A fish might only be able to sense prey an inch

around its body, but it can detect the signals of other

electric fish from a few feet or more away.
Its own kind

shine out in the perceptual fog that Malcolm MacIver

imagined.
Electrocommunication is especially important for one

group of elephantfishes called the mormyrins, which have

taken the skill to extreme heights.
All elephantfishes have a

unique type of supersensitive electroreceptor called the

knollenorgan, which is not used for electrolocation and is

tuned only to the electric signals from other fish.
The

mormyrins have altered these special receptors even

further, retooling them to detect subtle features of electric

signals that other elephantfishes can’t spot.
According to

Bruce Carlson, who discovered these differences, it’s as if

the mormyrins have the electric version of color vision,

while other elephantfishes are stuck with monochrome.
Carlson suspects that these changes were triggered by a

shift in the fishes’ social lives.
The elephantfishes with

simpler knollenorgans live in large schools and open water.
They only need to know if others are around and where

they are.
The mormyrins, however, are mostly solitary,

territorial, and found at the bottom of dark rivers.
“If they

detect another fish, they want to know exactly where that

fish is and who it is,” Carlson says.
“A potential rival?
A

mate?
Another species they don’t care about?” This need to

know about others has changed their electric sense.
It has

also altered the course of their evolution in at least two

important ways.
First, mormyrins are very diverse.
Since they can sense

tiny variations in each other’s electric signals, they can also

develop sexual preferences for those minute quirks.
These

predilections can quickly split a single population of fish

into two, each with its own electric penchants and the

signals to match.
This process is called sexual selection,

and it runs at high gear within the mormyrins.
These fish

have diversified their electric signals 10 times faster than

other elephantfishes and given rise to new species at three

to five times the rate seen elsewhere.
Today, there are at

least 175 species of mormyrins, compared to just 30 or so

species of other elephantfishes.
From precision in their

senses came variety in their forms.
Second, mormyrins have evolved more complex brains,

perhaps in part to process the information that their

souped-up knollenorgans detect.
One species, the Ubangi

elephantfish (or Peters’s elephantnose), has a brain that

makes up 3 percent of its body weight and consumes 60

percent of its oxygen.
[*16] “With such a brain, you’d imagine

that they’re building castles or composing symphonies,”

Nate Sawtell, who studies these fish, tells me.
“We haven’t

seen that, but when you look at them, you can tell they’re

not goldfish.
They’re canny and aware.”

He illustrates this by taking me to see a group of Ubangi

elephantfish that live in his New York lab.
Their bodies are

long, brown, and flattened; their tails are forked; and their

faces

end

in

a

mobile

appendage

called

the

schnauzenorgan.
This is why they’re called elephantfish,

but the appendages are chins, not noses—think pharaoh,

not Pinocchio.
While the other electric fish that I’ve met

were placid and ethereal, these seem frenetic and high-

strung.[*17] They explore the electrode that Sawtell dips in

the water.
They probe the sandy floor of their tanks with

their schnauzenorgans, which are especially rich in

electroreceptors.
Sometimes two individuals line up so that

the electric organs in their tails are right next to the glut of

electroreceptors in their partner’s head.
Then they buzz

frantically, like two people shouting a duet into each other’s

ears.
They chase each other.
They seem to play.
[*18]

As I watch these fish, I wonder what a social life

governed by electric signals must be like.
These animals

can’t hide from each other.
In setting off their electric

discharges to sense their environment, they unavoidably

announce their presence and identities to any other electric

fish within range.
A river full of electric fish must be like a

cocktail party where no one ever shuts up, even when their

mouths are full.
And here’s the part that really baffles me: The fish use

the same discharges for navigation and communication.
The electric fields they generate to send signals to other

fish are the very ones they use when electrolocating.
This

simple fact means that when the fish alter their fields to

convey messages, they must also change their own ability

to navigate or forage.
For example, electric fish that lose

fights will often briefly pause their pulses as a sign of

submission—but this also temporarily shuts down their

awareness of their surroundings.
For them, communication

alters perception.
When you listen to a bird’s song, you

might not be able to hear everything the creature is saying,

but you can be sure it’s saying something.
But if you hear

one electric fish buzzing near another, is it trying to send a

message or work out where the other animal is, or some

combination of the two?
Does the distinction between

navigation and communication even matter to the fish?
“We don’t know much about the richer aspects of their

lives, the cognitive aspects, what you know about your pet

cat or dog,” Sawtell tells me.
After decades of work,

scientists know more about an electric fish’s nervous

system than that of most other animals.
They can draw

detailed maps of the neural circuits that drive the electric

sense, but the sense still seems otherworldly.
And yet, it is

surprisingly common.
—

IN 1678, ITALIAN physician Stefano Lorenzini noticed that

the face of the electric torpedo ray was freckled with small

pores—thousands of them, each opening into a jelly-filled

tube.
Other rays had similar pores and tubes, as did their

close relatives, the sharks.
These structures eventually

became known as the ampullae of Lorenzini, but neither he

nor any of his contemporaries knew what they were for.
Clues slowly trickled in over several centuries.
Better

microscopes revealed that each tube ended in a bulbous

chamber (or ampulla) that was connected to a single nerve

—imagine a butternut squash with a string coming from its

bottom.
They must be sense organs.
But what did they

sense?
In 1960, biologist R.
W.
Murray finally showed that

the ampullae responded to electric fields.
A few years later,

Sven Dijkgraaf and his student Adrianus Kalmijn confirmed

his idea.
The duo showed that sharks will reflexively blink

when exposed to electric fields, but not if the nerves in

their ampullae of Lorenzini have been cut.
These squash-

shaped structures were electroreceptors.
[*19]

The answer to this three-century mystery only raised

more questions.
By the 1960s, Hans Lissmann had already

shown that weakly electric fish could navigate by sensing

their own electric fields.
But sharks and rays couldn’t

possibly be electrolocating because, aside from the torpedo

ray, they didn’t produce their own electricity.
Why, then, did

they have electroreceptors?
It turns out that all living things produce electric fields

when submerged in water.
Remember that animal cells are

bags of salty liquid.
The concentration of those salts differs

from that of the surrounding water, setting up a voltage

across the cells’ membranes.
When charged ions move

across the membranes, they create a current.
This is the

same basic setup as a battery—charged particles create

currents when they move between two salt solutions

separated by a barrier.
Animal bodies, then, are living

batteries, producing bioelectric fields through the mere act

of existing.
These fields are thousands of times fainter than

those produced by even weakly electric fish, and they’re

damped further by insulating coverings like skin and shells.
But at certain exposed body sites like mouths, gills, anuses,

and (important for sharks) wounds, they’re strong enough

to be detected.
Sharks and rays can home in on these fields

to find their prey, even when their other senses fail them.
[*20]

Kalmijn proved as much in 1971.
He showed that the

small-spotted catshark could always detect tasty flounders,

even when the fish were buried in sand, and even if they

were first put in an agar chamber that blocked smells and

mechanical cues.
The sharks only failed when the flounders

were covered by an electrically insulating plastic sheet.
When Kalmijn removed the flounders altogether, and

instead duplicated the fish’s weak electric fields using

buried electrodes, the sharks “dug tenaciously at the

source of the field, responding again and again when

coming across the electrodes,” he wrote.
Wild sharks will

also bite at buried electrodes.
Some do so from birth.
The shark’s electric sense is known as passive

electroreception, and it’s different from what we’ve seen so

far.
Sharks and rays aren’t actively producing their own

electric fields to locate objects around them, but passively

detecting the electric fields of other animals—and mostly

prey.
[*21] They are exceptionally good at that, perhaps more

so than any other group of animals.
[*22] Stephen Kajiura

showed that a small species of hammerhead can detect an

electric field of just one nanovolt—a billionth of a volt—

across a centimeter of water.
[*23] A shark’s electric sense

only works at short range, however.
It can’t sense a buried

fish (or electrode) from across an ocean, or even from

across a pool.
It has to be within an arm’s length of its

target.
Over mile distances, a shark sniffs out its food.
As it

draws near, vision takes over.
Nearer still, the lateral line

chips in.
Its electric sense only enters the fray at the close

of the hunt, to pinpoint the exact position of its prey and

guide its strike.
That’s why the ampullae of Lorenzini are

usually concentrated around the mouth.[*24]

Passive electroreception is especially useful for finding

hidden prey.
Animals, after all, can’t turn off their natural

electric fields.[*25] But if a shark can’t rely on other senses

—say, when its prey are buried, as in Kalmijn’s experiment

—it has to swim around until its ampullae of Lorenzini are

close enough to a target.
Some species have expedited that

search by enlarging their heads.
Instead of conical snouts,

hammerhead sharks have broad, flattened heads that look

like car spoilers.
The undersides of their “hammers” are

loaded with ampullae, and the sharks use these as one

might use metal detectors, sweeping them over the seafloor

in search of buried (edible) riches.
They’re not more

electrically sensitive than other sharks, but their heads

allow them to scan a wider area in a given time.
Sawfish can do this, too.
These animals are actually rays,

but their bodies look more like sharks and their heads look

more like medieval weaponry.
Their snouts end in long,

flattened blades with fiendish teeth protruding from both

sides.
This “saw” can make up a third of its owner’s body

length, and it is packed with ampullae, top and bottom.
It

greatly extends the sawfish’s electrical awareness into the

space ahead of it—a useful trait in turbid water.
“We find

them in rivers where we can’t even see our boat’s

propeller,” says Barbara Wueringer, who studies these

animals.
She showed that the saw doubles as both sensor

and weapon.
When fish swim above the saw, the sawfish

slashes at them, using its sideways teeth to impale, stun,

and bisect.
When the wounded fish fall to the bottom, the

sawfish uses the underside of its saw to find and pin them.
“Whenever I see them, I think: How is this a thing?”

Wueringer tells me.
[*26]

—

THE ABILITY TO detect electric fields is not unique to sharks

and rays.
Among vertebrates, around one in six species

shares this sense.
The list includes lampreys, sinuous fish

with toothy suckers instead of jaws; coelacanths, ancient

fish that were thought to have gone extinct until they were

found alive in the 1930s; other groups of ancient fish

including

paddlefishes,

which

use

their

long,

electroreceptor-rich snouts to find prey much the way

sawfishes

use

their

saws;

the

knifefishes

and

elephantfishes, which can sense the electric fields of other

creatures as well as their own; the thousands of species of

catfish, many of which hunt electric fish; and some

amphibians like salamanders and the worm-like caecilians.
There are even mammals with electric senses.[*27] At

least one species of dolphin—the Guiana dolphin of South

America—has this skill, although it’s hard to imagine what

benefit it could get from just 8 to 14 electroreceptors, when

it already has echolocation at its disposal.
Simi larly, it’s

unclear how the echidnas—egg-laying mammals from

Australia that resemble bulky hedgehogs—use the

electroreceptors on the tips of their snouts.
Perhaps they

sense small insects moving about within moist soil.
Their

close relative, the platypus, also has over 50,000

electroreceptors on its famous duck-like bill.
As it dives for

food, it frenetically sweeps the bill from side to side like a

hammerhead shark.
Underwater, its eyes, ears, and nostrils

are closed; it relies on touch and its electric sense alone.
This extensive cabal of electroreceptive critters tells us

three important things.
First, this is an ancient sense.
Electroreceptors first evolved from the lateral line a long

time ago, and the common ancestor of all living vertebrates

might well have sensed electric fields.
You do not have an

electric sense, but if you traced your family tree back 600

million years, your ancestors almost certainly did.
Second,

vertebrates have lost the electric sense on at least four

occasions during their evolutionary history, which is why

hagfish, frogs, reptiles, birds, almost all mammals, and the

majority of fish don’t have it.
[*28] Third, having lost the

sense, several vertebrate groups, including the platypuses

and echidnas, Guiana dolphins, and electric fish, then

regained the ability that their ancestors had but their

relatives don’t.[*29] The knifefishes and elephantfishes are

special cases.
On opposite sides of the world, they

independently and successively evolved three kinds of

electroreceptors: first, for passively detecting the electric

fields of other fish; then, for actively sensing their own self-

made fields; and finally, for detecting the fields of other

electric fish.
[*30] The history of these two groups is a

spectacular example of convergent evolution, where two

different groups of organisms accidentally show up at life’s

party in the same outfits.
The convoluted history of the electric sense also hints at

something special about electroreceptors.
The language of

the brain is electricity, and as we’ve seen, animals have had

to evolve weird ways of converting light, sound, odorants,

and

other

stimuli

into

electrical

signals.
But

electroreceptors are just translating electricity into

electricity.
They’re the only sense organs that detect the

very entity that powers our thoughts.
Perhaps it’s not that

difficult to evolve an electroreceptor, and that’s why they

repeatedly blink in and out of the vertebrate evolutionary

tree.
Electroreceptors do seem to have one important

limitation: They only work when immersed in a conductive

medium.
Water certainly counts, and it’s no coincidence

that almost every electroreceptive animal we’ve met so far

is aquatic.[*31] Air, by contrast, is an insulator, with a

resistivity 20 billion times higher than water.
For good

reason, scientists have long assumed that an electric sense

simply couldn’t work on land.
And then Daniel Robert did an incredible experiment

with bees.
—

EVERY DAY, AROUND 40,000 thunderstorms crackle around

the world.
Collectively, they turn Earth’s atmosphere into a

giant electric circuit.
Whenever lightning strikes the

ground, electric charge moves upward, so the upper

atmosphere ends up with a positive charge and the planet’s

surface with a negative one.
This is the atmospheric

potential gradient—a strong electric field that stretches

from sky to ground.
Even on calm, sunny days, the air

carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every meter off the

ground.
Whenever I write about this, someone inevitably

tells me that I must have made a misprint, and I assure you

that I have not: There really is a gradient of at least 100

volts per meter outside your door.
Life exists within that planetary electric field and is

affected by it.
Flowers, being full of water, are electrically

grounded, and bear the same negative charge as the soil

from which they sprout.
Bees, meanwhile, build up positive

charges as they fly, possibly because electrons are torn

from their surface when they collide with dust and other

small particles.
When positively charged bees arrive at

negatively charged flowers, sparks don’t fly, but pollen

does.
Attracted by their opposing charges, pollen grains

will leap from a flower onto a bee, even before the insect

lands.
This phenomenon was described decades ago.
But

when Daniel Robert read about it, he realized there must

be more to the electric world of bees and flowers.
(We met

Robert in the chapter on hearing because of his work on

the Ormia fly.)

Although flowers are negatively charged, they grow into

the positively charged air.
Their very presence greatly

strengthens the electric fields around them, and this effect

is especially pronounced at points and edges, like leaf tips,

petal rims, stigmas, and anthers.
Based on its shape and

size, every flower is surrounded by its own distinctive

electric field.
As Robert pondered these fields, “suddenly

the question came: Do bees know about this?” he recalls.
“And the answer was yes.”

In 2013, Robert and his colleagues tested bumblebees

with artificial “e-flowers,” whose electric fields they could

control.
They baited a charged e-flower with sweet nectar,

and a charge-less one with bitter liquid.
The fake blooms

were otherwise identical, but the bees quickly learned to

tell them apart using electric cues alone.
They could even

distinguish between e-flowers with differently shaped

electric fields—one with voltage spread evenly over its

petals, and another with a field shaped like a bullseye.[*32]

These patterns are artificial, of course, but real flowers

have similar ones.
Robert’s team visualized these by

spraying foxgloves, petunias, and gerberas with charged

colored powder.
The powder settled around the edges of

petals, demarcating patterns that would be otherwise

invisible.
Alongside the bright colors that we can see (and

the ultraviolet ones we cannot), flowers are also

surrounded by invisible electric halos.
And bumblebees can

sense these.
“We just jumped to the ceiling when we saw

what the bees were telling us,” Robert tells me.[*33]

Bumblebees don’t have ampullae of Lorenzini.
Instead,

their electroreceptors are the tiny hairs that make them so

endearingly fuzzy.
These hairs are sensitive to air currents

and trigger nervous signals when they are deflected.
But

the electric fields around flowers are also strong enough to

move them.
Bees, though very different from electric fish or

sharks, also seem to detect electric fields with an extended

sense of touch.
And they are almost certainly not the only

land-based animals to do so.
As we saw in Chapter 6, many

insects, spiders, and other arthropods are covered in touch-

sensitive hairs.
If these hairs can also be deflected by

electric fields, and Robert suspects they can, then electric

senses might be even more common on land than in the

water.
The

mere

possibility

of

widespread

aerial

electroreception has staggering implications.
Just think

about pollination.
Have flowers evolved shapes that

produce especially attractive electric patterns?
Honeybees

tell each other about food sources through their famous

waggle dances, and they can sense the electric fields

produced by waggling hive-mates; do these fields add

another layer of meaning to the dance?
A visiting bee

temporarily changes a flower’s electric field; could this tell

other bees that a flower has been recently visited and

might be out of nectar?
Could flowers lie to bees by quickly

resetting their fields to signify that they’re open for

business?
Do flowers feel different in rain and fog, when

the atmospheric potential gradient can be 10 times

stronger than on clear days?
“We don’t feel it,” Robert

says, “but do they?”

What about other arthropods?
Atmospheric electric

fields are most strongly distorted by the extremities of

plants, but many insects that live on plants have spikes,

hairs, and strange protrusions.
Could these be antennae for

detecting the charges of incoming threats?
Could they be

similar to a luna moth’s long tails—decoys that alter the

way these insects appear to electrically sensitive

predators?
The answer to all these questions might well be

no, but what if the answer to just a few of them is yes?
We’ve already seen that the insect world must be radically

richer than what we imagine, full of subtle air currents,

vibrational signals, and other stimuli to which we are

oblivious.
Now we must add electric fields to the mix.
It’s

telling that just five years after his bumblebee experiments,

Robert found evidence of electroreception in another

familiar group of arthropods.
He found that spiders can

sense Earth’s electric field and ride it.
Many spiders travel over long distances by “ballooning.”

They stand on tiptoe, raise their abdomens to the sky,

extrude strands of silk, and take off.
Carried aloft, they can

float for miles.
It is commonly said that the silk catches the

wind and pulls the spider along, but spiders can still

balloon successfully on calm days.[*34] In 2018, Robert’s

colleague Erica Morley found a better explanation.
Spider

silk picks up a negative charge as it leaves a spider’s body,

and is repelled by the negatively charged plants on which

they sit.
That force, though tiny, is enough to launch the

spider into the air.
And since the electric fields around

plants are strongest at points and edges, spiders can

ensure a vigorous takeoff by ballooning from twigs and

blades of grass.
In her lab, Morley gave them cardboard

strips instead of grass.
She then exposed them to artificial

electric fields that mimicked those outside.
When the fields

ruffled the sensory hairs on the spiders’ legs, the animals

adopted the characteristic tiptoe posture and began

releasing silk.
Even without the slightest breeze around

them, some managed to take off.
“I could see them

levitating,” she tells me, “and if I switched the electric field

on and off, they would move up and down.”

Through these experiments, Morley proved a very old

idea.
Back in 1828, another scientist had suggested that

spiders ride electrostatic forces, but the idea was dismissed

by a rival who favored the wind idea (and wrote a very

long-winded letter about it).
The rival won, and the

electrostatic idea fell out of favor for two centuries.
“Wind

is tangible,” Robert tells me.
“People could feel it.
Electrics

were more elusive.”

They still are.
Electric senses are still hard to study,

though Robert is trying.
His work on bumblebees and

spiders has changed the way he thinks about the insect and

arachnid world.
In his own garden, he noticed that young

ladybugs will drop to the ground when he brings a charged

acrylic rod near them.
These larvae have tiny tufts of hair

on their backs, and Robert wonders if they can sense the

electric charge of an approaching predator.
This is what he

does now—reimagining his own backyard in a way that

reminds me of Rex Cocroft prospecting for new vibrational

songs.
But while Cocroft can easily convert vibrations into

audible noises, Robert can’t do the same for electric fields.
There are no cameras that can photograph those fields.
There’s no rich lexicon of words for describing them.
Current, voltage, and potential carry none of the evocative

appeal that sweet, red, and soft possess.
“It is very hard to

put myself in the skin [of an insect] and imagine what is

happening,” he tells me.
“This is a young science.
But I

don’t think we can ignore it.”

The electric sense might stretch his imagination, but at

least he knows that some insects have it.
He can guess

what the others might do with it, and design experiments to

test those reactions.
And he knows what the likely

receptors are, and how they might work.
These are all

important boons, and they shouldn’t be taken for granted.
There is another sense whose scholars are not so lucky.
SKIP NOTES

*1 The Greeks referred to the torpedo ray as nárkē, from which the modern

word narcotic derives.
The history of electric fish and their contributions to

science is fascinating, and far richer than the meager paragraph I’ve allotted

to it.
For a fuller account, try The Shocking History of Electric Fishes by

Stanley Finger and Marco Piccolino.
*2 This is not apocryphal hyperbole.
In 1800, Chayma fishers in South America helped the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt collect electric eels by driving

30 horses and mules into a pool filled with the fish.
The eels leapt out of the

water, pressed themselves against the horses, and electrocuted them.
After

the chaos died down, the exhausted fish could be easily scooped up.
Two

horses died in the process.
*3 Though electric eels have been known for centuries, much of what we know

about them was only discovered recently.
Ken Catania, that eclectic aficionado

of star-nosed moles, earthworms, and crocodiles, showed that they can

remote-control their prey.
And a team led by Carlos David de Santana showed

that the iconic animal is actually three separate species, one of which packs a

much stronger voltage than anyone had previously measured.
*4 MacIver once created a musical installation consisting of 12 electric fish of different species, each housed in a separate tank.
The fish all produced

electric fields at different frequencies, and electrodes in their tanks converted

those fields into musical tones.
Visitors could stand at a mixing board and turn

the volume on each tank up or down, conducting the electric orchestra.
“I was

getting a little tired of people not appreciating electric fish, and I wanted to

highlight that these are amazing animals that can give you a sense of wonder,”

MacIver says.
*5 Confusingly, the species that Lissmann studied is called the African knifefish, but is more closely related to the elephantfishes than the actual knifefishes

(which are all South American).
The black ghost knifefish, you’ll be glad to

know, is actually a knifefish, certainly blackish, and rather ghostly.
*6 The recipe is called Maler’s muck, after pioneering researcher Leonard

Maler.
*7 Some species of electric fish seem to have evolved electric senses that work best within narrow ranges of salinity.
“ A most interesting consequence may

be that these fish might confront invisible barriers when they attempt to

disperse into river systems that differ in water conductivity,” wrote Carl

Hopkins in 2009.
*8 Of course, electric fish have other senses at their disposal, including those, like vision, that work over longer ranges.
Elephantfish eyes seem to be tuned

to large, fast-moving objects at a distance, which might theoretically help

them detect predators before they come within range of the electric sense.
Then again, many of these animals live in murky water, where long-range

vision is impossible.
And in the wild, many knifefish live perfectly well with

parasitic worms in their eyes—a grisly sign that they can survive without

vision.
*9 Angel Caputi has argued that for electric fish, the electric sense likely

combines with the lateral line and proprioception—an animal’s awareness of

its own body—to form a single integrated sense of touch.
*10 It is frankly incredible that the same basic sensor—the hair cell—has been adapted for sensing sound, water flow, and electrical fields.
*11 This isn’t as much of a stretch as it might seem.
The neuromasts of the

lateral line are already electrically sensitive, but a hundred to a thousand

times less so than the electroreceptors of electric fish.
*12 “One of the worst things that happened to our field was when RadioShack went out of business,” Fortune tells me.
*13 They aren’t much troubled by ambient noise, either, with one exception—

distant lightning storms create electromagnetic waves that travel for

thousands of miles.
These create clicks that electrodes can certainly detect,

and that electric fish possibly could.
*14 In Sensory Exotica, Howard Hughes wrote that if you set a clock by a black ghost knifefish’s electric field, the device would only lose an hour every year.
*15 If two Eigenmannia meet and their electric discharges are close in

frequency, they’ll shift their signals away from each other.
This is called the

jamming avoidance response, and it’s one of the most thoroughly studied

behaviors in any vertebrate.
*16 For comparison, human brains make up around 2 to 2.5 percent of our

body weight and soak up 20 percent of our oxygen.
One can’t directly compare

these proportions between animals of different sizes and that are variously

warm-blooded and cold-blooded.
Also, intelligence can’t be measured by brain

size alone.
Still, the point remains: The elephantfish is unusually big-brained.
*17 Carlson has shown that one mormyrid—the Cornish jack—hunts in packs.
“In the lab, if we were to put two of them in the same tank, at least one of

them would die, and quite possibly both,” he tells me, because they would

fight to the death.
But in Lake Malawi (one of the few electric fish habitats

with water clear enough to see through), the jacks would come out at night,

gang up with the same group of peers, and chase after smaller fish.
They often

produce bursts of electric pulses when reuniting, which might act as a mutual

acknowledgment—a signal that keeps the pack together.
*18 Bruce Carlson tells me he has seen large elephantfish playing with the

tubes in their tanks.
“They’ll swim into one, lift it up to the surface, and try to

balance it there as long as they can until it falls,” he says.
“Then they go and

do it again.”

*19 The jelly inside the ampullae of Lorenzini is extremely conductive.
It acts like a cable, transferring the electric field of the surrounding water into the

bottom of the ampullae, where it is detected by a layer of sensory cells.
The

cells compare those properties to those of the animal’s own body, and relay

that information to the brain.
By combining the signals from these cells across

thousands of ampullae, the shark can build up a sense of the electric field

around it.
*20 It’s sometimes said that sharks and rays detect electric fields produced by moving muscles.
But while such movements do produce electric fields, they

are typically below the detection range of electroreceptors.
*21 Not always, though.
Some stingrays use electric fields to find buried mates.
And some embryonic sharks freeze when they detect the electric fields of

passing predators—a feat that reminds me of Karen Warkentin’s tree frogs.
*22 Technically, even humans can sense electricity if it is strong enough.
We just don’t have any sense organs dedicated to the task.
Instead, strong

currents indiscriminately stimulate our nerves, producing tingling, pain, and

twitching.
Even then, we can only feel electric fields of 0.1 to 1 volt per

centimeter.
Sharks are around a billion times more sensitive, and the

experience for them doesn’t suck.
*23 It’s often said that to set up a field that faint with a normal AA battery, you’d have to connect its ends to electrodes dipped into opposite sides of the

Atlantic.
This metaphor, though evocative, conjures up an entirely

inappropriate sense of scale.
In reality, sharks are after electric fields

considerably fainter than those of a battery, and said fields weaken with

distance, which is why a shark’s electric sense only works at short range.
*24 It’s also why electric fields trigger the blinking reflex that Dijkgraaf and Kalmijn saw: Sharks protect their eyes in anticipation of a lunge.
*25 They can reduce their fields, though.
When cuttlefish see the looming

shapes of sharks, they’ll stop moving, hold their breath, and cover their gill

cavities.
Christine Bedore showed that these acts reduce the voltage of their

electric fields by almost 90 percent, and halve their risk of being bitten.
Cuttlefish don’t behave in this way when menaced by crabs, which can’t sense

electric fields.
*26 Wueringer founded an organization called Sharks and Rays Australia to

save sawfish and their relatives.
The same saws that make them masters of

electroreception also make dramatic trophies, and get easily caught in nets.
The five species are all endangered, three of them critically so.
*27 There’s a paper claiming that star-nosed moles have an electric sense, but Ken Catania, who looked for such a sense when he first studied the animal,

tells me he found no evidence for it.
*28 No one really knows why so many creatures have lost electroreception,

especially since the sense is so useful for finding hidden prey underwater.
Bruce Carlson tells me he hasn’t even heard any good hypotheses.
“It’s kind of

a mystery,” he says.
*29 Each of these groups ended up with its own distinctive electroreceptors

(and only those in sharks and rays bear Lorenzini’s name).
But despite their

variety, these organs share the same basic structure.
There’s almost always a

pore that leads from the surface into a jelly-filled chamber, with sensory cells

at its base.
In many cases, these structures are derived from the lateral line.
But the Guiana dolphin evolved its electroreceptors by modifying whisker pits,

which are now devoid of hairs and full of conductive jelly.
*30 These events happened at roughly the same times, too.
Both groups of fish evolved passive electroreceptors between 110 and 120 million years ago,

before evolving active electroreceptors after another 15 to 20 million years.
*31 Echidnas are the exception, but they still probably have to dip their

electroreceptors into wet soil.
*32 The bees also learned to more quickly distinguish between flowers of

similar colors if electric cues were present as well.
*33 Although other scientists had already shown that cockroaches, flies, and

other insects can react to electric fields, they normally ran experiments with

fields that are much stronger than natural ones.
That’s not very instructive:

Even humans can detect extremely strong electric fields, because our hairs

stand on end.
Robert’s study was important because it showed that

bumblebees detect electric fields at biologically relevant strengths, that they

can use that information to guide actual meaningful behaviors like choosing

where to drink, and that they sense subtle cues like the bullseye pattern.
*34 The wind explanation also makes no sense because most spiders don’t

shoot silk from their abdomens.
The silk must be pulled out.
Spiders normally

do this with their legs, or by first attaching the silk to a surface.
But

ballooning spiders are doing neither, and it’s unlikely that gentle breezes are

strong enough to yank out the threads.
Electrostatic forces are.
11.
They Know the Way

Magnetic Fields

AFTER SUNSET, WHEN THE HIKERS and tourists have all

gone, Eric Warrant and I drive into Kosciuszko National

Park, a protected area within Australia’s Snowy Mountains.
The kangaroos and wombats are out, but we ignore them

on our search for much smaller fauna.
At 1,600 meters

above sea level, we pull over into a quiet spot.
I warm my

hands on a cup of tea, while Warrant hangs a vertical white

sheet between two trees.
From below, he illuminates the

sheet with a huge light that he calls the Eye of Sauron.
From the sheet’s corners, he hangs two smaller lamps,

whose ultraviolet hues are calibrated to attract insects.
We

know there are plenty about, because we can hear the

echolocation calls of bats hunting above us.
Soon, we also

hear the loud thud of a large insect hitting the sheet.
As it

drops to the grass, so does Warrant, who giddily scoops it

up.
“Yeah, that’s definitely a bogong,” he tells me, holding

up a plastic jar.
Inside is an inch-long moth with drab, bark-

colored wings.
Outwardly, it’s not obvious why this creature

should so warrant Warrant’s delight.
“They really don’t look like much,” I say.
“No,” Warrant says with a chuckle, “and that belies their

hidden talents.”

Hinting at said talents, the moth in the jar flutters

furiously.
Many captured insects will sit calmly, but this one

seems possessed by a manic energy, some intense

compulsion to be elsewhere.
“It’s flighty as hell,” Warrant

says.
“It’s got places to go.”

Every spring, billions of bogongs emerge from their

pupal stage in the dry plains of southeastern Australia.
Anticipating the arrival of the baking summer, they flee

toward cooler climes.
And somehow, despite never having

flown before, let alone migrated, they know which way to

go.
They fly over 600 miles and arrive at a few select alpine

caves.
Within these caves, every square meter of wall might

be tiled by 17,000 bogongs, their wings overlapping like

the scales of a fish.
Safe and cool, they ride out the summer

in a state of dormancy before making the return trip in

autumn.
On some nights when Warrant goes out to collect

them with the Eye of Sauron he is “literally inundated by

thousands of them,” he says.
The only other insect known to make such long

migrations to such specific destinations is the monarch

butterfly of North America.
But while monarchs navigate

during the day by using the sun as a compass, the bogongs

only fly at night.
How do they know the right direction?
Warrant, who grew up among the Snowy Mountains and

has loved the local insects since he was a child, has always

wanted to find out.
At first, he thought they might be using

their sensitive eyes to observe the stars.
And while he was

right about that, on his first night of observing captive

bogongs he noticed that they could still fly in the right

direction without being able to see the sky.
Warrant

realized that they must be able to sense Earth’s magnetic

field.
Earth’s core is a solid iron sphere surrounded by molten

iron and nickel.
The churning movements of that liquid

metal turn the entire planet into a giant bar magnet.
Its

magnetic field can be depicted in the style of a school



textbook: Lines emerge near the south pole, curve around

the globe, and reenter near the north pole.
This

geomagnetic field is always present.
It doesn’t change

across the day or through the seasons.
It’s not affected by

weather or obstacles.
Consequently, it is a boon for

travelers, who can always use it to establish their bearings.
Humans have done so for more than a thousand years,

using compasses.
Other animals—sea turtles, spiny

lobsters, songbirds, and many others—have done so for

millions of years, without help.
Their ability, known as magnetoreception, allows them

to navigate even when celestial bodies are obscured by

clouds or darkness, when large landmarks are wreathed in

fog or murk, and when the skies and oceans are devoid of

telltale scents.
You might think that Warrant, having

learned that his precious bogongs are members of the

magnetoreception club, would be excited about studying

such a fantastical sense.
Instead, he jokes, “When I realized

that the magnetic sense was important for the bogong, I

thought: Oh no.”

Magnetoreception research has been polluted by fierce

rivalries and confusing errors, and the sense itself is

famously difficult both to study and to comprehend.
There

are open questions about all the senses, but at least with

vision, smell, or even electroreception, researchers know

roughly how they work and which sense organs are

involved.
Neither is true for magnetoreception.
It remains

the sense that we know least about, even though its

existence was confirmed decades ago.
—

THE GEOMAGNETIC FIELD envelops the entire planet and

guides animals over migrations that can span continents.
But even the most epic journeys must begin with a few

tentative steps, and it was through such steps that

magnetoreception was first discovered.
When the time comes for birds to migrate, they become

visibly restless.
Even in captivity, they’ll hop, flit, and

flutter.
These frantic movements are known as Zugunruhe

—a German word that means “migration anxiety.” The birds

know it’s time.
They long to get going.
And as German

ornithologist Friedrich Merkel realized in the 1950s, they

know the way.
Merkel and his students Hans Fromme and

Wolfgang Wiltschko captured European robins in the

autumn and noticed the birds’ migration anxiety wasn’t

random.[*1] At night, they tended to hop toward the

southwest—exactly the direction that, were it not for their

cages, would take them to sunny Spain.
They did so

outdoors when they could see the night sky.
But they also

kept their bearings in shuttered rooms, where celestial

landmarks were hidden from view.
This was the same

pattern that Warrant would observe in the bogongs half a

century later.
And in the 1950s, it led Merkel’s team to the

same epiphany: The birds had to be using another cue, and

the geomagnetic field was a possibility.
The idea of magnetoreception wasn’t new.
In 1859, the

zoologist Alexander von Middendorff had suggested that

birds, “those sailors of the air,” might “possess an inner

magnetic feeling.” But, for a century, neither he nor anyone

else had any data to back up this seemingly outlandish

idea.
Absent such proof, even Donald Griffin, who was no

stranger to unusual animal senses, was skeptical.
In 1944,

the same year that Griffin coined the word echolocation, he

wrote that a magnetic sense was “extremely unlikely.” The

concept was worth taking seriously only because nothing

else seemed to adequately explain how migrating birds

know where to fly.
Magnetoreception was an idea that

survived in the absence of better ones.
It was a hypothesis

in want of evidence.
Merkel and Wiltschko provided that evidence.[*2] First,

they recorded the direction of the robins’ hops by placing

them in an octagonal chamber with a perch on each wall.
Every time a bird jumped onto a perch, it triggered a

weight-sensitive switch that punched a record of its

movements onto paper tape.
Later, the team used a simpler

but more effective method.
They put the birds in a funnel

with an ink pad at its base and blotting paper on its sides.
Then they counted the inky footprints that the birds left as

they tried to jump out.[*3] These were tedious experiments

that could only be done in the narrow annual window when

birds experience Zugunruhe.
But they provided clear

quantitative evidence that the robins head southwest in the

fall.
To confirm that the birds rely on a magnetic sense,

Wiltschko flipped the magnetic field around them.
In the

1960s, he began putting their cages in the middle of

Helmholtz coils—pairs of looped wires that can generate

artificial magnetic fields between them.
When Wiltschko

used the coils to rotate the fields around the robins, the

birds shifted the direction of their hops accordingly.
They

had an internal biological compass.
These experiments were still met with skepticism, and

for good reason.
Earth’s magnetic field is extremely weak.
It is so faint that the random jiggling movements of an

animal’s molecules can carry 200 billion times more energy.
No creature should be able to sense such an absurdly weak

stimulus.
And yet the robins clearly could.
[*4] They’re not

unique, either.
Many scientists, including Wiltschko and his

wife, Roswitha, have repeated the original robin

experiments with several other bird species, including

garden warblers and indigo buntings, whitethroats and

blackcaps, goldcrests and silvereyes.
The “inner magnetic

feeling” that Middendorff imagined not only exists but is

common.
Since Merkel’s robins took their pioneering footsteps,

scientists have found evidence of magnetoreception

throughout the animal kingdom.
Yet unlike almost every

other sense we’ve met so far, this one is not used for

communication.
Animals don’t produce magnetic fields, and

the only such field that they have evolved to detect is

Earth’s.
They do so mostly to navigate over distances large

and small.
After a busy night of insect-catching, big brown

bats use a compass sense to return to their home roosts.
After an early life in the open ocean, baby cardinal fish use

a compass sense to swim back to the coral reefs where they

were born.
Mole-rats use their compass to find their way

through their dark underground tunnels.
And bogong

moths, as Warrant found, use theirs to orient on their trans-

Australian flights.
Most of these animals have been tested with some

variation of the Wiltschkos’ classic experiment: Put the

animal in an arena, change the magnetic field around it,

and see if it moves in a different direction.
That’s possible

with an animal the size of a robin or a moth.
“You can’t

really do that with a whale,” says biophysicist Jesse

Granger.
“But whales have some of the most insane

migrations of any animals on the planet.
Some of them

almost go from the equator to the poles, and with

astounding precision, traveling to the exact same area year

after year.” It’s easy to think that they, too, have a magnetic

sense.
To see if they do, Granger looked to the sun itself.
The

sun periodically throws cosmic tantrums and produces

solar storms—streams of radiation and charged particles

that affect Earth’s magnetic field.
Such storms could

conceivably mess up the compasses of magnetically

sensitive whales, and if these animals are close to a

shoreline, even a small navigational error might send them

aground.
To test this idea, Granger collated 33 years’ worth

of records of healthy, uninjured gray whales inexplicably

stranding themselves.
She compared the timing of these

incidents to data on solar activity, wrangled by her

astronomer colleague Lucianne Walkowicz.
A striking

pattern emerged: On days with the most intense solar

storms, gray whales were four times more likely to beach

themselves.
[*5]

This correlation doesn’t prove that whales have a

compass, but it strongly hints that they do.
More than that,

it speaks to the awesome nature of magnetoreception.
Here

is a sense in which the forces produced by a planetary layer

of molten metal collide with those unleashed by a

tempestuous star, together swaying the mind of a

wandering animal and determining whether it finds its way

successfully or loses it for good.
—

FEW MIGRATIONS ARE as treacherous or as lengthy as those

undertaken by sea turtles.
Hatching from an egg that was

buried in a sandy beach, a baby turtle must run a gauntlet

of crab claws and bird beaks on its ungainly crawl toward

the ocean.
Once in the water, it must flee from the coastal

shallows, where it can be easily grabbed from above by

seabirds and from below by predatory fish.
To find some

semblance of safety, it must reach the open ocean as

quickly as possible.
For a turtle that hatches in Florida, that

means swimming due east until it reaches the North

Atlantic gyre—a clockwise current that spans the ocean

between North America and Europe.
The hatchling

somehow stays within this loop for 5 to 10 years, hiding out

among clumps of floating seaweed and slowly gaining in

size.
By the time it completes its full (and very slow) lap of

the Atlantic and returns to North American waters, it is

invulnerable to all but the largest sharks.[*6]

By the 1990s, no one had worked out how inexperienced

turtles could pull off such grand migrations—a state of

ignorance that the late Archie Carr lamented as “an insult

to science.” At first, Ken Lohmann couldn’t understand the

fuss.
Armed with a newly acquired PhD and the hubris of

youth, he thought the answer was obvious: The turtles must

use a magnetic compass.
It would be a simple matter to

build his own magnetic coils and put hatchlings through

some version of the then-classic robin experiments.
He had

signed up for a two-year project, and “my main concern

was what I would do for the second year,” he tells me.
“That was over 30 years ago.
The only part I got right was

that they have a magnetic sense.” He didn’t realize that

they have two.
As Lohmann suspected, and as he showed in 1991,

turtles have a compass.
But their other magnetic sense

proved to be even more impressive.
It hinges on two

properties of the geomagnetic field.
The first is inclination

—the angle at which the geomagnetic field lines meet

Earth’s surface.
At the equator, those lines run parallel to

the ground; at the magnetic poles, they are perpendicular.
The second property is intensity—differences in the field’s

strength.
Both inclination and intensity vary around the

globe, and most spots in the ocean have a unique

combination of the two.
Together, they act like coordinates,

much like latitude and longitude.
They allow the

geomagnetic field to act as an oceanic map.
And turtles, as

Lohmann found, can read that map.
In the mid-1990s, he and his wife, Catherine, took

captive loggerhead hatchlings on a magnetic tour of the

Atlantic.
They exposed the babies to the same inclinations

and intensities that they would experience at various places

along their long circuit.
Amazingly, the turtles knew what

to do at each point, and would swim in directions that

would keep them within the gyre.
This would only be

possible if the turtles had both a compass to tell them

which way to go and a map to tell them where they were.
Only with both senses can they change direction at the

appropriate places.[*7]

The turtles’ abilities are especially impressive because

they are innate.
The Lohmanns collected individuals who

had only just hatched, kept them in captivity for a single

night, and tested them just once.
These hatchlings couldn’t

have learned how to interpret magnetic signals from other

turtles.
They hadn’t even been in the ocean before.
Their

magnetic maps must be genetically encoded.
Lohmann

thinks it’s unlikely that they’re born with a full mental atlas

of the entire Atlantic, against which they cross-reference

the magnetic readings they feel.
Instead, they probably rely

on a few instincts that kick in at specific combinations of

inclination and intensity that act as magnetic signposts.
When the magnetic field feels like A, head east.
When it

feels like B, go south.
“The turtle doesn’t need to have a

conception of where it actually is.
It can swim along a

pretty elaborate migratory route without needing a lot of

information,” Lohmann says.
“But of course, there’s no way

of knowing what goes on inside a turtle’s head.”

Loggerheads that survive their North Atlantic migration

end up back in Florida, where they settle down.
As they

age, they learn, and their magnetic maps get richer.
If the

Lohmanns captured these older turtles and exposed them

to magnetic fields from different parts of the Florida

coastline, the animals always swam in directions that would

lead them home.
They weren’t just relying on the sparse

signposts that they used as hatchlings.
They seemed to

know the magnetic topography of their home waters in

richer detail.
Magnetic maps have an important limitation: From a

given position, a turtle can sense the properties of the

magnetic field immediately around it, but it can’t tell what

the field is like over there.
To do that, it has to move.
And it

likely has to move over long distances, because magnetic

information isn’t especially accurate over short ones.
You

could use a magnetic sense to travel from Europe to Africa

but not to find your bathroom from your bedroom.
For this

reason, most of the species that convincingly have a map

sense use it to travel over long distances.
[*8]

Some songbirds recognize magnetic signposts on their

migration routes, just as turtle hatchlings do.
Every winter,

thrush nightingales must cross the immense Sahara Desert

on their way from Europe to southern Africa.
Once they

sense the magnetic field of northern Egypt, they react by

packing on more fat, in anticipation of the arduous desert

crossing ahead.
Other migrating songbirds can use these

magnetic maps to adjust their bearing if they’re blown off

course by strong winds—or flown off course by curious

scientists.
Eurasian reed warblers, for example, normally

migrate northeast in the spring, but after Nikita

Chernetsov flew some of these birds hundreds of miles to

the east, they headed northwest instead.
Many animals, including salmon, turtles, and Manx

shearwaters (a kind of seabird), can also imprint on the

magnetic signature of their birthplaces, etching it deep

within their memory so they can find the same sites as

adults.
Turtles use these imprints to lay eggs on the same

beaches from which they hatched.
Their accuracy is

uncanny.
Green turtles that nest on Ascension Island can

find that same tiny nub of land in the middle of the Atlantic

after a 1,200-mile journey to and from Brazil.
This “natal

homing” instinct is so strong that turtles will sometimes

swim for hundreds of miles to their beach of birth, even

though there’s a perfectly good alternative right next to

them.
[*9] Perhaps that’s because good nest sites are hard to

find.
They must be accessible from the water.
The sand

grains must be large enough to let oxygen through.
The

temperature must be exactly right, since turtles develop as

males or females depending on how hot or cold their eggs

are.
“A turtle might say: Well, the one place in the world I

know works is the beach where I developed myself,”

Lohmann says.
And its magnetic map allows it to relocate

that sure-bet nursery after years away at sea.
Lohmann is still studying turtles decades after his

supposed two-year project.
[*10] He has learned so much

about their navigational skills, but there is so much left to

learn.
How quickly can they learn a set of magnetic

coordinates?
How do their brains represent inclination and

intensity?
And how do they (or any other animals) even

sense magnetic fields at all?
I asked Lohmann if he has any

thoughts on that last vexing question.
He laughs heartily.
“Many thoughts and little evidence,” he tells me.
“I’m

optimistic that it’ll eventually get solved, but whether it’ll

be in my lifetime or not is an open question.”

—

IT’S NOT USUALLY difficult to find sense organs.
Their job is

to gather stimuli from an animal’s surroundings, and, since

most stimuli are distorted by the tissues of an animal’s

body, sense organs are almost always exposed directly to

the environment or connected to it by an opening like a

pupil or nostril.
Such openings can be big clues.
Scientists

recognized that a rattlesnake’s pits, a shark’s ampullae of

Lorenzini, and a fish’s lateral line were sense organs long

before working out what they sensed.
But researchers who

study magnetoreception have no such hints.
Magnetic

fields can pass unimpeded through biological matter, so the

cells that detect them—magnetoreceptors—could be

anywhere.
They don’t need openings like pupils and pits, or

focusing structures like lenses and ear flaps.
They could be

in heads, in toes, or in anything from head to toe.
They

could be buried deep within flesh.
They could even be

scattered throughout different body parts and not

concentrated into sense organs at all.
They could be

indistinguishable from the tissues around them.
Trying to

find them, in the words of Sonke Johnsen, might be like

searching for a “needle in a needle stack.”

At the time of writing, magnetoreception remains the

only sense without a known sensor.
Magnetoreceptors are

“the holy grail of sensory biology,” Eric Warrant tells me.
“There may even be a Nobel Prize in finding them.”

Researchers have amassed many important clues about

their identity and whereabouts but also several false leads.
And without knowing for sure what these receptors are, or

even where they are, it is fiendishly difficult to know how

they might work.
There are, however, three plausible ideas.
The first involves a magnetic iron mineral known as

magnetite.
In the 1970s, scientists discovered that some

bacteria turn themselves into living compass needles by

growing chains of magnetite crystals inside their cells.
When these microbes are shaken, they tend to swim either

north or south.
Animals could theoretically build their own

magnetite compasses, too.
Imagine a magnetite needle

that’s tethered to a sensory cell.
As the animal turns, the

needle tugs upon its tether.
The cell registers that tension

and triggers a nervous signal.
In this way, cells could turn

an abstract magnetic stimulus into something more

tangible—a physical yank.
“I think that’s an utterly

plausible idea,” Warrant tells me, “but where those cells

are is anybody’s guess.” Despite several frustrating false

leads, nobody’s ever found them.
[*11]

The second hypothesis for how magnetoreceptors could

work involves a phenomenon called electromagnetic

induction, which mostly applies to sharks and rays.
As a

shark swims, it induces weak electric currents in the

surrounding water, and the strength of those currents

changes depending on the shark’s angle relative to the

geomagnetic field.
By sensing these tiny variations with the

electroreceptors we met in the last chapter, the shark could

potentially determine its heading.
Again, no one knows if

this actually happens, but it’s plausible.
A shark’s electric

sense could double as a magnetic sense.
The induction explanation is often ignored because it’s

hard to imagine how it would work in animals like birds,

which aren’t immersed in a conductive fluid like water.
But

there is a way in which induction might apply to them.
The

French zoologist Camille Viguier predicted it in 1882, well

before magnetoreception had even been confirmed.
He

noted that a bird’s inner ear contains three canals full of

conductive fluid.
As a bird flies, the geomagnetic field could

theoretically induce a detectable voltage in that fluid.
Almost 130 years later, David Keays confirmed that he was

right.
Moreover, he found that these birds have the same

protein in their inner ears that sharks use to sense electric

fields.
“I think induction is a realistic mechanism by which

birds can detect magnetic fields, and we’re testing it

further at the moment,” Keays tells me.
[*12]

The third explanation for magnetoreception is the most

complicated, but also the one that has gained the most

momentum.
It involves two molecules known as a radical

pair, whose chemical reaction can be influenced by

magnetic fields.
To understand this deeply, you must delve

into the strange realm of quantum physics.
But to

understand it well enough, you need only to imagine that

the two molecules are dancing.
Light triggers the dance,

cuing the partners to take hold of each other.
Once in this

excited state, they can be affected by magnetic fields,

which alter the tempo of their dance, and thus its final

steps.
The partners’ final positions offer a record of the

magnetic fields that shaped their previous movements.
Through their dance, the radical pair transforms a

magnetic stimulus that is hard to detect into a chemical

stimulus that is simple to assess.
[*13]

In the 1970s, chemists were mostly studying radical pair

reactions in test tubes.
But in 1978 the German chemist

Klaus Schulten suggested that these obscure reactions

might also exist in the cells of birds, and explain their

compass-like responses to magnetic fields.
He submitted a

paper describing this idea to the prestigious journal

Science, and received a memorable rejection: A less bold

scientist may have designated this idea to the wastepaper

basket.
Undeterred, he published the paper anyway.
Unfortunately, he placed it in an obscure German journal,

and wrote it in a way that was incomprehensible to any

biologist who wasn’t already well versed in quantum

physics—which is to say, almost all of them.
In retrospect,

however, Schulten was well ahead of his time, and his

insight about radical pairs was just the first of several

major epiphanies.
[*14]

The next occurred when Schulten presented his ideas in

a lecture, and an attending Nobel laureate asked: If radical

pair reactions are triggered by light, where is the light in

the bird?
Schulten realized that if magnetoreceptors

depend on radical pairs, then they can’t be found anywhere

in an animal’s body.
Instead, they’re probably in the organs

best suited to collecting light.
A songbird’s compass, he

suggested, lies in its eyes.
This idea lay fallow until 1998,

when Schulten read about a new discovery.
A group of

molecules called cryptochromes, which were thought to

only exist in animal brains, had also been found in their

eyes.
“I just fell off my chair,” Schulten told me, because he

remembered that cryptochromes can form radical pairs

with partner molecules called flavins.
Here was the missing

piece of his theory—a molecule that could take part in the

dance he envisioned, and that happened to exist in just the

right place.
In 2000, Schulten and his student Thorsten Ritz

published a paper arguing that the songbird compass

depends on cryptochromes in the eye.
It was game-

changing.
Thanks to Ritz, it was finally comprehensible to

biologists.
It also gave those biologists something concrete

to work with—an actual molecule that they could study.
Experiment after experiment, researchers confirmed many

of Schulten’s predictions.
The Wiltschkos, for example,

discovered that the songbird compass does indeed depend

on light—and on blue or green light in particular.
[*15]

Henrik Mouritsen, a Danish birdwatcher-turned-biologist

who is now one of the leading figures in magnetoreception,

also confirmed that light matters.
[*16] He placed robins and

garden warblers in a moonlit room, and filmed them with

infrared cameras.
When the birds started showing

Zugunruhe, Mouritsen looked in their brains to see if any

regions were especially active.
He found one.
Known as

cluster N, it sits at the very front of the brain.
It’s active

when and only when migratory songbirds (and not non-

migratory ones) are orienting with their compasses at night

when they travel (and not during the day when they don’t).
Cluster N seems to be the magnetic processing center of

the bird’s brain.
And, tellingly, it’s also part of the brain’s

visual centers.
Cluster N gets information from the retinas,

and only buzzes with activity if a bird’s eyes are uncovered

and if there’s some light around.
[*17] “I think this is one of

the strongest pieces of evidence that exists” for the light-

dependent radical pair idea, Mouritsen tells me.
These lines of evidence hint at a startling conclusion:

Songbirds might be able to see Earth’s magnetic field,

perhaps as a subtle visual cue that overlays their normal

field of view.
“That’s the most likely scenario, but we don’t

know because we can’t ask the birds,” Mouritsen says.
Perhaps a flying robin always sees a bright spot in the

direction of north.
Perhaps it sees a gradient of shade

painted over the landscape.
“We have these drawings, and

even though they’re probably all wrong, they’re good for

imagining what the birds could be seeing.”

While the radical pair idea looks most likely, [*18] all three

hypotheses—magnetite, induction, and radical pairs—might

be correct.
“I think it’s very clear that there is more than

one mechanism,” Keays tells me.
And yet, many scientists

have formed camps around the different hypotheses, as if

one and only one can be correct.
As if studying

magnetoreception wasn’t hard enough, toxic feuds have

emerged.
One conference infamously descended into farce,

as grown adults stood up and screamed at each other.
“Everybody wants to be the first to find the

magnetoreceptor, which instantly makes people much more

competitive and less likely to be nice to one another,”

Warrant tells me.
It also makes them sloppier.
—

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, we’ve heard stories of scientists

who were mocked or dismissed for ideas about animal

senses that ultimately proved to be right.
But the opposite

phenomenon is just as frequent, if not more so: Discoveries

that were thought to be right are later refuted.
Such cases

are rife in magnetoreception.
A 1997 study claimed that honeybees can detect

magnetic fields.[*19] Two decades later, another group

showed that the original team had made such a big

statistical error that they might as well have been studying

random number generators instead of bees.
In 1999, an

American team claimed that monarch butterflies have a

compass sense; they later retracted their paper when they

realized that the insects had actually been orienting to light

reflected off their clothes.
In 2002, the Wiltschkos

published a classic paper claiming that a robin only has a

compass in its right eye and cannot orient with its left

alone.
A decade later, Henrik Mouritsen and his colleagues

showed through careful experiments that both eyes contain

compasses.
In 2015, an American team allegedly found the

magnetoreceptor in a nematode worm, while a Chinese

group said they had found it in fruit flies.
Neither study

could be replicated by other researchers, and the fruit fly

study was said to conflict with “the basic laws of physics.”

To a degree, this is how science is meant to work.
Scientists check each other’s findings by repeating each

other’s experiments, building upon what can be replicated

and debunking what cannot.
But magnetoreception has

been plagued by an unusual number of splashy studies that

later prove incorrect.
Some animals that supposedly have

this sense likely don’t.
[*20] “We have spent a long time

chasing other people’s assertions, and been very patient,”

David Keays tells me wearily.
“But so many are just

fallacious.” Science self-corrects, but the science of

magnetoreception seems to require more correction than

most.
Many claims about this sense are wrong.
Throughout

this book, we have seen that animal Umwelten are hard to

appreciate because they are inherently subjective and

because our senses hold us back from making the requisite

imaginative leaps.
But there’s a simpler barrier that stops

us from properly understanding other Umwelten: It is easy

to study animal senses in misleading ways.
The study of animal behavior is also plagued by human

behavior.
People tend to see the patterns they want to see.
Is that set of scratchy bird footprints really denser in the

southwest corner, or are you just interpreting them that

way because you expected the bird to head southwest?[*21]

Scientists are no less prone to such biases than the average

person, but they do have ways of preventing those biases

from interfering with their work.
For example, they can

“blind” a study, withholding key pieces of information until

the very last moment, even from themselves.
This should be

standard practice for all experiments.
It isn’t.
Making matters worse, the quest to find the elusive

magnetoreceptor has become a race.
The promise of glory

and prizes for the winner has created incentives for fast

research and big claims, rather than careful and

methodical work.
Researchers might run experiments with

only a few animals, producing results that might just be

flukes.
They might tweak their experimental plans on the

fly in a bid to find something exciting—a practice known as

p-hacking.
They might cherry-pick the best data while

leaving out findings that don’t fit their ideas.
Even if scientists do everything right, they might still

flounder because magnetic fields are imperceptible.
A

researcher who studies vision or hearing would quickly

realize if her equipment was accidentally producing bright

flashes or loud screeches.
But with magnetoreception, “you

simply don’t notice if you do something stupid,” Mouritsen

tells me.
You might be exposing animals to erratic or

unnatural fields, and you’d have no idea unless you were

constantly

doing

checks

with

the

highest-quality

equipment.
You can dip into the Umwelt of an electric fish

or a treehopper using equipment you can buy at a local

store.
But with magnetoreception, “you can’t work with

cheap equipment,” Mouritsen says.
“It’s very expensive to

measure properly.”

Magnetic fields are also deeply counterintuitive.
As the

Insane Clown Posse famously noted, “Fuckin’ magnets, how

do they work?” Or as Warrant said to me, “I have enough

trouble even understanding the stimulus, never mind trying

to understand what an animal might perceive from it.”

Other

unusual

senses

like

echolocation

and

electroreception can at least be compared to more familiar

ones like hearing or touch.
But I have no idea how to begin

thinking about the Umwelt of a loggerhead turtle.
I wonder if this is partly why the radical pair explanation

has gained so much traction.
Complicated though it is, it

brings magnetoreception into the realm of vision, a sense

that we can readily appreciate.
Similarly, we talk of

compasses because they offer a familiar gateway into the

abstract world of magnetism.
But the compass metaphor

can be misleading.
Compasses are precise and dependable.
They have to point north, and they cannot waver.
But Sonke

Johnsen, Ken Lohmann, and Eric Warrant suspect that

biological compasses are inherently noisy.
That is, it might

be impossible for them to instantly get a precise, accurate

read on Earth’s magnetic field because that field is so

weak.
Animals might have to keep a running average of the

signals from their magnetoreceptors over long periods of

time.
This limitation makes magnetoreception slow,

cumbersome, and deeply paradoxical.
It detects one of the

most pervasive and reliable stimuli on the planet—the

geomagnetic field—but does so in an inherently unreliable

way.
This might explain why so many magnetoreception

studies have been hard to replicate.
“It could be genuinely

difficult to get a consistent result even if you do the same

excellent experiment more than once,” Warrant tells me.
[*22]

Let’s say an animal needs five minutes to gather enough

information from its erratically swinging compass to

determine the right bearing.
If experimenters expose it to a

magnetic field and record its reactions after a minute, the

results will be all over the place.
I chose these windows of

time arbitrarily, but the point is we don’t know the right

ones.
We are used to senses like vision or hearing that offer

nigh-instantaneous

information.
Magnetoreception

probably doesn’t work like that, but we don’t know the

timescales over which it does work.
Without knowing that,

or without even realizing that you need to find out, it’s hard

to design good experiments.
As I wrote in the introduction,

a scientist’s data are influenced by the questions she asks,

which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by

her senses.
The boundaries of our own Umwelt corral our

ability to understand the Umwelten of others.
The noisy and erratic nature of magnetoreception might

also explain why no animal relies on it alone.
Instead, they

seem to use it as a backup sense in case more reliable ones

like vision fail.
“If you’re a migrating animal,

magnetoreception is probably the least important sense,

unless you’re completely lost,” Keays says.
In the absence

of magnetic cues, bogong moths can still navigate by

looking at the pattern of stars in the night sky.
Turtle

hatchlings ignore magnetic fields when they first enter the

water and use the direction of the waves to guide them out

to sea.
Animals never use a single sense exclusively.
“They use

every damn piece of information they can get their hands

on,” Warrant tells me.
“They are multisensory in every

possible way.”

SKIP NOTES

*1 The European robin is a completely different bird from the one Americans

call a robin.
Though both have red breasts, the latter is a medium-sized thrush

that was named for the former, which is a small flycatcher.
*2 At roughly the same time, other researchers showed that simple animals like flatworms and mud snails can also respond to magnetic fields.
*3 This setup is called the Emlen funnel after its creator, Steve Emlen.
Cheap and easy to use, it revolutionized the study of bird migration.
It is still used

today, although the inkpads and blotting paper have been replaced by Tipp-Ex

paper or thermal paper that changes color when heated.
*4 In lab experiments, they can detect a 5-degree shift in the direction of the field they experience.
In the wild, where they aren’t stressed by confinement,

they’re probably more precise.
*5 Robins can also be sent off course by artificial magnetic fields that simulate the effects of a solar storm.
*6 It’s estimated that only 1 in every 10,000 hatchlings makes it this far.
*7 Over the last 83 million years, the geomagnetic field has reversed 183 times.
Magnetic north becomes magnetic south and vice versa.
These flips probably

occur over thousands of years, so they’re unlikely to throw any individual

turtle off course.
But each turtle species must have experienced many

magnetic reversals over their evolutionary history—and their magnetic maps

must have adapted accordingly.
*8 Even apparently simple animals make use of magnetic maps.
Caribbean spiny lobsters live in dens within coral reefs but will wander afar in search of

food.
As long as they don’t wind up on restaurant plates, they usually end up

back in their own dens.
Lohmann demonstrated this by capturing lobsters in

the Florida Keys, driving them to a marine lab 23 miles away, and doing

everything possible to confuse them along the way.
He covered their eyes and

sealed them in dark plastic containers.
He hung swinging magnets above

them.
He even drove erratically.
And yet, once the lobsters were released, they

walked off in the exact direction that would take them home.
*9 The geomagnetic field changes very slightly from year to year, which affects the magnetic signatures of turtle nesting beaches.
Lohmann found that in

years when the signatures of adjacent beaches converge on each other,

nesting turtles crowd together.
In years when the signatures diverge, the

turtles spread out.
These slight variations aren’t enough to throw the animals

significantly off course, though.
*10 When I visit his lab in Raleigh, North Carolina, he is caring for 16 baby loggerheads that were collected in September and will be released the

following June.
Each year’s cohort of turtles is named with a different theme,

and this year’s is pasta.
Lasagne, Ziti, Bowtie, and—my favorite—Turtellini are

all swimming around their tanks.
*11 For decades, many scientists were sure that they had found magnetite-

loaded neurons in the beaks of pigeons and other birds.
When David Keays

started working on magnetoreception, his plan was to study those neurons.
But despite using “every method we could think of,” he tells me, he couldn’t

find any.
In 2012, Keays published a bombshell study showing that the alleged

magnetite neurons that others had found aren’t neurons at all.
They’re

macrophages, a type of white blood cell.
And while they do contain iron, it

isn’t in the form of magnetite.
That same year, another team developed what

looked like a surefire way of identifying magnetite-based receptors.
Under a

microscope, they saw that some cells in the nose of a trout would spin when

placed in a rotating magnetic field.
These spinning cells must be magnetic,

and they seemed to contain deposits of magnetite.
But Keays debunked this

finding, too.
He showed that the spinning cells just have flecks of iron stuck to

their surfaces.
They weren’t magnetoreceptors.
They were just dirty.
*12 It’s also notable that, in 2011, Le-Qing Wu and David Dickman identified

neurons in a pigeon’s brain that respond to magnetic fields, and that are

connected to the inner ear.
*13 Here’s the longer version.
When light hits the two partner molecules, one donates an electron to the other, leaving both of them with an unpaired

electron.
Molecules with unpaired electrons are called radicals: hence, the

radical pair.
Electrons have a property called spin, whose exact nature we can

leave to the quantum physicists.
What matters to biologists is that spin can

either be up or down; the radical pair can either have the same spins or

opposite ones; they flip between these two states several million times a

second; and the magnetic field can change the frequency of these flips.
So

depending on the magnetic field, the two molecules end up in one state or

another, which in turn affects how chemically reactive they are.
*14 I interviewed Klaus Schulten in 2010, well before I had the idea for this book.
Schulten died in 2016.
*15 These wavelengths have exactly the right amount of energy to turn

cryptochrome and flavin into a radical pair.
Under red light alone, a bird’s

compass doesn’t work.
*16 Mouritsen has been a birdwatcher since he was 10 years old, and he has

seen more than 4,000 species in his lifetime.
He originally wanted to be a high

school teacher because the vacations were long and would allow him to go on

extended birding trips.
And even though he ended up as a biology professor,

“when I have time to go out, I’m still a birdwatcher,” he says.
“That’s what I

miss the most in this coronavirus time: I can’t travel anywhere.” It is an ironic

turn of events for someone who studies animals that migrate over continents.
*17 Robins are nocturnal migrants, so it’s odd that they should rely on a light-activated compass.
But even at night, there’s always a bit of light around.
Theoretical calculations suggest that even a moonless and slightly cloudy

night has enough light to activate the compass.
*18 Even if the radical pair idea is the only correct one, it leaves many

unanswered questions.
Birds have several cryptochromes, so which is involved

in the compass?
( One called Cry4 has emerged as a frontrunner; robins mass-

produce it during the migratory season, and specifically within the cone cells

of their retinas.) How do the final steps of the radical pair dance get converted

into a nervous signal?
How do the birds separate magnetic information from

what they normally see?
And why, as Mouritsen showed, can a bird’s compass

be disrupted by the extremely weak radiofrequency fields of the kind produced

by certain electrical equipment or used in AM radio?
Such fields carry no

useful information and have only become commonplace in the last century of

human activity.
Birds can’t have evolved the ability to sense them—so why are

they affected?
“We must be missing something major that makes the sensor

much more sensitive than we think it should be,” says physicist Peter Hore.
“This means that our theories aren’t fully developed.
We haven’t come up with

the definitive experiment.” He and Mouritsen are trying, though.
They have

started an ambitious project, whose details Hore only tells me about on the

strict understanding that I don’t write about them.
*19 This flawed experiment aside, there is good evidence that honeybees can

sense magnetic fields.
*20 There’s even controversy about whether humans have a magnetic sense.
In

the 1980s, British zoologist Robin Baker drove blindfolded undergraduates on

winding routes before asking them to point the way home.
They did so more

often than expected, but not if they wore magnets on their heads.
Baker

published his results in Science, one of the world’s premier journals.
But while

he repeatedly found the same results, others could not.
“We are forced to

wonder about the ecological importance of a magnetic sense, the existence of

which is so difficult to demonstrate,” one duo wrote.
More recently,

geophysicist Joseph Kirschvink, who was a vocal critic of Baker’s experiments,

showed that certain brain waves in human volunteers change when an

artificial magnetic field is rotated around them.
Kirschvink has taken this to

mean that humans have magnetoreception.
Others aren’t convinced.
“I guess I

can only speak for myself, but I absolutely cannot detect magnetic fields,”

Keays tells me.
“I use an iPhone with a nice compass app, and that’s my

magnetoreceptor.” Kirschvink has argued that humans are unconsciously

aware of magnetic stimuli, but he still needs to show that said awareness is

useful in some way.
Otherwise, so what?
Why would it matter for us to have a

sense that we are unaware of and that we don’t use for anything?
*21 To be clear, the early songbird experiments from the 1950s and 1960s,

which confirmed that these animals have a magnetic compass, are solid.
Those

same results have been replicated by many labs, working with many species.
*22 Both echolocation and electroreception were discovered at roughly the

same time, but neither is plagued by anywhere near the level of irreproducible

or controversial results as magnetoreception.
12.
Every Window at

Once

Uniting the Senses

I’M TRYING TO CONVINCE MYSELF that I’m not really itchy.
It’s just that I’m surrounded by tens of thousands of

mosquitoes.
They all belong to the same species—Aedes

aegypti, which is responsible for spreading Zika, dengue,

and yellow fever.
Mercifully, in the small, sealed room in

which I’m standing, the insects are all restrained in white

mesh cages.
Neuroscientist Krithika Venkataraman pulls

one of these cages off a shelf and sets it on the table next to

us while she tells me how mosquitoes track their hosts.
After talking to her for a few minutes, I look down at the

cage and notice, to my horror, that almost all the

mosquitoes inside are now perched on the side that’s

closest to us.
They’re probing through the mesh with their

bloodsucking snouts, which look like a field of black hairs,

erupting and subsiding.
My itch intensifies.
Venkataraman

tells me that the mosquitoes are drawn to the carbon

dioxide in our breath and the odors emanating from our

skin.
They can smell us.
To demonstrate this, she picks up a

different cage, and I exhale along one side of it.
Within

minutes, almost all the mosquitoes have swarmed onto that

side and are probing away.
Leslie Vosshall, who runs the lab where Venkataraman

works, spent years trying to protect people from Aedes

aegypti by befuddling its olfactory abilities.
First, she tried

to disable a gene called orco, which seems to underlie a

mosquito’s entire sense of smell.
This approach worked

when Daniel Kronauer, who works down the hall from

Vosshall, tried it in clonal raider ants, as we saw earlier.
But it failed when Vosshall tried it on mosquitoes: Without

orco, they ignored human body odor but they were still

drawn to carbon dioxide.
Switching tactics, Vosshall’s team

tried to create mutant mosquitoes that could no longer

smell carbon dioxide.
That didn’t work either: The insects

could still easily home in on humans.
“The results kinda

sucked,” Vosshall tells me.
Mosquitoes can’t be thrown off with any one strategy

because they aren’t beholden to any one sense.
Instead,

they use a multitude of cues that interact in complicated

ways.
They’re attracted to the heat of warm-blooded hosts,

but only if they first smell carbon dioxide.
When Vosshall’s

student Molly Liu placed the insects in a chamber and

slowly heated one of the walls, most of them had buzzed off

by the time the surface hit human body temperature.
But if

Liu sprayed a puff of carbon dioxide into the chamber, the

mosquitoes swarmed the hot wall and stayed there.
In

carbon dioxide’s absence, heat is repulsive and a sign of

danger.
In its presence, heat is attractive and a sign of a

meal.
[*1] Vosshall still believes she can find a way of

cloaking humans from mosquitoes, but she’ll need to

consider many senses at once—smell, vision, heat, taste,

and more.
Aedes aegypti has “a plan B at every point,” she

tells me.
[*2]

The mosquito’s senses have been honed over millennia

of evolution.
Aedes aegypti originally hailed from forests in

sub-Saharan Africa, where it drank from a wide variety of

animals.
But thousands of years ago, one particular lineage

got a taste for humans, who had recently started living in

densely populated settlements.
Drawn to these sites, Aedes

aegypti transformed into an urban animal that prefers

towns over forests, and a parasite whose Umwelt is tuned

to the distinctive cues of our bodies above all else.
This

mosquito is now among the planet’s most effective hunters

of humans, and it is extremely picky about anything else.
That’s why, to feed captive mosquitoes, scientists like

Venkataraman often just stick their arms inside their insect

cages.
“It takes about 10 minutes,” she says.
“I don’t do it

regularly, so I still react to the bites, but if you don’t

scratch, it’s fine.” It’s hard to imagine not scratching.
Imagine, instead, what it might be like to be a mosquito.
Flying through a thick soup of tropical air, your antennae

slice through plumes of odorants until they catch a whiff of

carbon dioxide.
Enticed, you turn into the plume,

zigzagging when you lose track of it, and surging ahead

whenever you pick it up.
You spot a dark silhouette and fly

over to investigate.
You enter into a cloud of lactic acid,

ammonia, and sulcatone—molecules released by human

skin.
Finally, the clincher: an alluring burst of heat.
You

land, and your feet pick up an explosion of salt, lipids, and

other tastes.
Your senses, working together, have once

again found a human.
You find a blood vessel and drink

your fill.
In the introduction, we saw that Jakob von Uexküll,

pioneer of the Umwelt concept, once compared an animal’s

body to a house, with many sensory windows overlooking

an outlying garden.
Over the subsequent 11 chapters, we

peered through each of those windows one by one, to

better understand what makes each sense unique.
Many

sensory biologists do the same, looking through a single

window over their entire careers.
Animals don’t.
Like the

Aedes mosquitoes, they combine and cross-reference the

information from all of their senses at once.
We must follow

their lead.
To truly appreciate their Umwelten, and to bring

our voyage through the senses to a close, we have to

consider Uexküll’s metaphorical house in its entirety.
We

must study the architecture of the house itself to see how

the form of an animal’s entire body defines the nature of its

Umwelt.
We have to look within the house to see how

animals combine the sensory information from the outside

world with that from inside their own bodies.
And we have

to gaze through every window at once, to see how animals

use their senses together.
—

EACH SENSE HAS pros and cons, and each stimulus is useful

in some circumstances and useless in others.
That’s why

animals tap into as many streams of information as their

nervous systems can handle, using the strengths of one

sense to compensate for the shortcomings of another.
No

species uses a single sense to the exclusion of every other.
Even animals that are paragons of one sensory domain

have several at their disposal.
Dogs are masters of smell, but note their large ears.
Owls are masters of hearing, but note their large eyes.
Jumping spiders depend on their large eyes, but they’re

also sensitive to surface vibrations traveling through their

feet and to airborne sounds that deflect their sensitive,

body-wide hairs.
Seals use their whiskers to track the

hydrodynamic wakes of fish, but their eyes and ears also

help them to hunt.
The star-nosed mole hunts along its

tunnels using touch, but it can also forage underwater,

blowing bubbles out of its star and re-inhaling them to

detect the odors of prey.
Smell dominates the lives of ants,

but sounds matter enough that some parasites can inveigle

their way into ant nests by mimicking the noises of queens.
Smells also guide sharks to their food over mile distances,

but vision and the lateral line take over as the distance

diminishes, and the electric sense chips in during the final

moments of a strike.
The Ubangi elephantnose fish creates

electric fields to detect small objects close to its body, but

its eyes are tuned to spotting large, fast-moving objects like

predators that lie beyond the range of its electric sense.
Songbirds and bogong moths use Earth’s magnetic field to

tell them where to go, but they also depend on celestial

sights to guide their migrations.
Daniel Kish echolocates

when he walks around his neighborhood, but he also uses a

long cane.
Beyond complementing each other, the senses can also

combine.
Some people experience synesthesia, where

different senses seem to bleed into one another.
To some

synesthetes, sounds might have textures or colors.
To

others, words might have tastes.
This perceptual blurring is

special among humans, but standard to other creatures.
The platypus’s duck-like bill, for example, contains some

receptors that detect electric fields, and others that are

sensitive to touch.
But in its brain, the neurons that receive

signals from the former also receive signals from the latter.
The platypus might just have a single sense of electrotouch.
As it dives in search of food, it might detect the electric

field that a crayfish generates before sensing the flowing

water that it stirs up.
Some researchers have suggested

that the platypus uses the time lag between these signals to

judge how far away the crayfish is, just as we can gauge

the distance to a storm by the gap between lightning and

thunder.
Mosquitoes, meanwhile, have neurons that seem to

respond to both temperatures and chemicals.
I ask Leslie

Vosshall if this means the insects can taste body heat.
She

shrugs.
“The simplest way to sense the world would be to

have the senses be separate—to have neurons that taste, or

smell, or see,” she tells me.
“Everything would be very tidy.
But the more we look, the more we see that a single cell

can do multiple things at the same time.” For example, the

antennae of ants and other insects are organs of both smell

and touch.
In an ant’s brain, “ these probably fuse to

produce a single sensation,” wrote entomologist William

Morton Wheeler in 1910.
Imagine if we had delicate noses

on our fingertips, he suggested.
“If we moved about,

touching objects to the right and left along our path, our

environment would appear to us to be made up of shaped

odors, and we should speak of smells that are spherical,

triangular, pointed, etc.
Our mental processes would be

largely determined by a world of chemical configurations,

as they are now by a world of visual (i.e., color) shapes.”

Even when the senses don’t fuse, they can converge.
As

we saw in Chapter 9, a dolphin can visually recognize a

hidden object that it had previously scanned using

echolocation, using one of its senses to build mental

representations that are accessible to the others.
This feat

is called cross-modal object recognition, and it’s not limited

to big-brained species like dolphins and humans.
Electric

fish that learn to visually distinguish between crosses and

spheres can also tell them apart with their electric sense

(and vice versa).
Even bumblebees can tell objects apart

using touch after learning the visual differences between

them.
Some senses also look inward, informing animals about

the state of their bodies.
There’s proprioception, the

awareness of the body’s position and movement.
There’s

equilibrioception, the sense of balance.
[*3] These internal

senses are seldom discussed.
Aristotle left them out of his

five-sense classification, and I have largely ignored them on

this journey through nature’s Umwelten.
But that’s not

because they are unimportant.
It’s because they’re so

important that we take them for granted.
We can get by

without vision or hearing, but internal senses are non-

negotiable.
In telling animals about themselves, they help

them to make sense of everything else.
And they’re

especially important because animal bodies do something

that Uexküll’s metaphorical houses do not.
They move.
—

WHEN ANIMALS MOVE, their sense organs provide two kinds

of information.
There’s exafference, signals produced by

stuff happening in the world.
There’s also reafference,

signals produced by an animal’s own actions.
I still struggle

to remember the difference between these, and if you share

that problem, you can think of them as other-produced and

self-produced.
From my desk, I can see the branches of a

tree rustling in the wind.
That’s exafference—other-

produced.
But to see those branches, I had to look to my

left—a sudden, jarring movement that sent patterns of light

sweeping across my retinas.
That’s reafference—self-

produced.
Every animal, for each of its senses, has to

distinguish between these two kinds of signals.
But here’s

the catch: These signals are the same from the point of

view of the sense organs.
Consider a simple earthworm.
When it burrows through

the soil, the touch receptors in its head register pressure.
But if you prod the worm in the head, the same touch

receptors register the same kind of pressure.
So how does

the worm know if a given sensation comes from its own

movement (reafference) or someone else’s (exafference)?
How does it know if it is touching something, or if it has

been touched?
Similarly, if a fish’s lateral line detects

flowing water, is that because something is swimming

toward it, or because it is itself swimming?
If you see

movement, is that because something around you moved or

because your eyes did?
If an animal can’t tell other-

produced signals from self-produced ones, its Umwelt

would be an unintelligible mess.
This problem is so fundamental that very different

creatures have solved it in the same way.
[*4] When an

animal decides to move, its nervous system issues a motor

command—a set of neural signals that tell its muscles what

to do.
But on its way to the muscles, this command is

duplicated.
The copy heads to the sensory systems, which

use it to simulate the consequences of the intended

movement.
When the movement actually occurs, the senses

have already predicted the self-produced signals that they

are about to experience.
And by comparing that prediction

against reality, they can work out which signals are actually

coming from the outside world and react to them

appropriately.
[*5] All of this happens unconsciously, and

while it isn’t intuitive, it is central to our experience of the

world.
The information detected by the senses is always a

mix of self-produced (reafference) and other-produced

(exafference), and animals can tell the two apart because

their nervous systems are constantly simulating the former.
Philosophers and scholars have speculated about this

process for centuries.
In 1613, the Belgian physicist

François d’Aguilon wrote that “an internal faculty of the

soul perceives the movement of the eye.” In 1811, German

physician

Johann

Georg

Steinbuch

wrote

about

Bewegideen, or “motion ideas”—brain signals that control

movements and that interact with sensory information.
In

1854, another German physician, Hermann von Helmholtz,

referred to the Bewegidee as Willensanstrengung, or

“effort of will.” As of 1950, the duplicated motor commands

have been called efference copies or—my favorite of these

terms—corollary

discharges.[*6]

There

are

subtle

differences between these terms, but the underlying idea is

the same.
Whenever an animal moves, it unconsciously

creates a mirror version of its own will, which it uses to

predict the sensory consequences of its actions.
With every

action, the senses are forewarned about what to expect and

can prepare themselves accordingly.
Scientists have learned a lot about corollary discharges

from studying elephantfish, which use them to coordinate

their electric senses.
As we saw in Chapter 10, they have

three different kinds of electroreceptors.
One set detects

the elephantfish’s own electric pulses.
A second detects the

communicative signals of other elephantfish.
And a third

detects the weaker electric fields produced by potential

prey.
[*7] The second and third groups can only work if they

ignore the fish’s own electric pulses, and they do so

through corollary discharges.
These are created whenever

the electric organ fires, and they prep parts of the brain

that receive signals from the second and third groups of

receptors to ignore the fish’s own pulses.
In this way, an

elephantfish can tell which signals are being passively

produced by potential prey, which are being actively

produced by other electric fish, and which are being

actively produced by itself.
Electric fish are exceptional creatures, but “almost all

animals have some mechanism that’s more or less like

this,” Bruce Carlson tells me.
Corollary discharges explain

why you can’t tickle yourself: You automatically predict the

sensations that your writhing fingers would produce, which

cancels out the actual sensations that you feel.
They’re why

your view is stable even though your eyes are constantly

darting around.
[*8] They’re how chirping crickets can block

out the sounds of their own calls.
They’re why fish can

sense the flows created by other fish without being

confused by their own swimming, and why earthworms can

crawl ahead without reflexively recoiling.
[*9]

These feats are so profound that they don’t feel like feats

at all.
It feels self-evident that we own our bodies, that we

exist within the world, and that we can tell the former from

the latter.
But these are not axiomatic properties.
Distinguishing self from other isn’t a given; it’s a difficult

problem that nervous systems have to solve.
“This is largely

what sentience is,” neuroscientist Michael Hendricks tells

me.
“And perhaps it’s why sentience is: It’s the process of

sorting perceptual experiences into self-generated and

other-generated.”

That sorting process doesn’t require consciousness, or

any advanced mental abilities.
“It isn’t some fancy, late-

added thing in evolution,” Hendricks says.
It exists in

nervous systems with a few hundred neurons and those

with tens of billions.
It’s a foundational condition of animal

existence, which flows from the simplest acts of sensing

and moving.
Animals cannot make sense of what’s around

them without first making sense of themselves.
And this

means that an animal’s Umwelt is the product not just of its

sense organs but of its entire nervous system acting in

concert.
If the sense organs acted alone, nothing would

make sense.
Throughout this book, we have explored the

senses as separate parts.
But to truly understand them, we

need to think about them as part of a unified whole.
—

IN JUNE 2019, during a panel discussion on animal

intelligence at the World Science Festival, psychologist

Frank Grasso brought a two-spot octopus named Qualia

onto the stage.
He then offered the animal a black-lidded

jar containing a tasty crab.
He hoped that she would

unscrew the lid and extract the crab—a party trick that

many octopuses are capable of, and that’s often offered as

evidence for their intelligence.
Qualia had unscrewed many

jars in her time, but Grasso warned the audience that she

may instead “decide to have a little pout and hang out in

the corner.” Sure enough, that’s what she did.
She’s still

doing that a month later, when I visit Grasso at his New

York lab.
Qualia used to swim to the front of her tank when

strangers entered, but in her old age, she hunches in a

corner.
Ra, another two-spot octopus, has taken her place

as the lab’s attention hog.
She’s actively sidling across her

tank, suckers pressing against the glass.
Two of Grasso’s

undergraduate students drop a jar with a crab into her

tank, and she quickly descends upon it.
The web of her

arms envelops the lid, her skin darkens in color…and then

nothing happens.
She seems to lose interest and jets off.
Later, she extends a single arm and touches the jar but

then retracts it.
The lid remains unscrewed; the crab,

uneaten.
“There was a time when both these animals were

avidly opening bottles,” Grasso tells me.
But now they don’t

bother.
They’ll readily pounce upon a loose crab, and they

can certainly get at the bottled ones.
They just don’t.
Grasso now wonders if the octopuses can even see the

bottled crabs at all.
“It might be that all the jar opening

that we’ve been seeing is a result of them just being

curious about this novel object,” he tells me, and “they

can’t see through the rounded glass to know if there’s a

crab in there.”

To work out why an octopus would unscrew a jar and

why they would stop, we need to understand their Umwelt.
We can start by exploring their eyes, their suckers, and

their other sense organs in turn.
But we must then

understand how the octopus’s entire nervous system works,

how it controls a body of almost unfettered flexibility, and

how its brain and body combine to create not just one

Umwelt but arguably two.
An octopus’s central nervous system contains around

500 million neurons—a total that dwarfs that of all other

invertebrates and that’s comparable to the number found

in small mammals.
[*10] But only a third of these neurons are

located in the animal’s head, within the central brain and

the adjacent optic lobes that receive information from the

eyes.
The remaining 320 million are in the arms.
Each arm

“has a large and relatively complete nervous system, which

seems barely to communicate with the other arms,” Robyn

Crook once wrote.
“ An octopus effectively has nine brains

that have their own agendas.”

Even the 300 suckers on each arm are somewhat

independent.
Once a sucker makes contact with something,

it reshapes itself to create a seal and then sticks by

creating suction.
Meanwhile, it simultaneously touches and

tastes using 10,000 mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors

on its rim.
Our tongues perceive flavor and mouthfeel as

separate qualities, but given the wiring of the sucker, an

octopus likely doesn’t.
Its sensations of taste and touch

“are probably inextricably fused” in a way that resembles

synesthesia, Grasso tells me.
Depending on the flavors it

feels, or the textures it tastes, the sucker might continue

sucking or let go.
And it can make that decision on its own,

since each sucker is served by its own mini-brain—a

dedicated cluster of neurons called the sucker ganglion.
The suckers’ independence is obvious when watching

disembodied arms, which are often found stuck to the sides

of fish, but will never stick to other arms from the same

octopus.
Each sucker ganglion connects to another cluster of

neurons in the center of the arm called the brachial

ganglion.
All the brachial ganglia are then connected in a

long row running down the arm: Think of them as a string

of fairy lights, and the sucker ganglia as their bulbs.
The

sucker ganglia don’t communicate with each other, but the

brachial ganglia do.[*11] They coordinate the individual

suckers and allow the entire arm to act in an organized

way.
And they can also accomplish a lot on their own,

without involving the central brain.
The arm contains all

the circuitry it needs to reach out, grab objects, and pull

them back in.
For example, neurobiologist Binyamin

Hochner found that when the arm touches an object, two

waves of neural signals travel down its length, one from the

contact point and one from the base.
Where these waves

meet, the arm forms a temporary elbow, bending to draw

the object toward the octopus’s mouth.
“There’s so much

information and behavior that’s stored in the arms,” Grasso

tells me.
[*12]

The central brain can control the arms, but it’s a relaxed

boss.
It doesn’t like to micromanage but coordinates its

team of eight when needed.
A single arm can snake its way

through an opaque maze, using taste-touch to find the right

route with no input from the rest of the animal.
But

Hochner’s colleague Tamar Gutnick has shown that

octopuses can also solve problems that stump individual

arms.
She set up a transparent maze in which the correct

path forced the arm out of the water, depriving it of

chemical cues.
The octopuses could still find that path by

guiding their arms with their eyes, but it didn’t come

naturally to them.
It took a while for them to learn how to

do it, and one individual out of seven never did.
Letizia Zullo, another member of Hochner’s team, found

more evidence of the arms’ autonomy in the way the

central brain is organized.
The human brain contains rough

maps of the body.
Tactile sensations from different body

parts, like each finger, are processed by separate clusters

of neurons.
Similarly, distinct parts of the brain drive

specific movements: Stimulate the right spot, and your arm

might rise or your hand might reach out.
But Zullo found

that the octopus has no such maps.
Whenever she

stimulated a part of the brain that made one arm extend,

other arms would stretch out, too.
Would an octopus be

aware if the twentieth sucker on its first arm touches a

crab, just as I know when my right index finger has just

pressed the Y key?
Maybe not!
It’s possible that the animal

simply knows that arm number one has found food, while

delegating the specifics to the arm itself.
Does an octopus

even know where its limbs are, just as I can visualize my

body without looking at it?
Again, maybe not!
The arms

certainly contain proprioceptors, which help them to

coordinate their movements, but that coordination might

be entirely local.
Martin Wells, a late pioneer of octopus

research, was convinced that these animals don’t really

have a sense of where their limbs are, or an internal image

of their shape.
Perhaps that’s just as well.
Controlling a human body is

relatively simple for a human brain because our bones and

joints constrain our movements.
There are only so many

ways in which, for example, you can pick up a mug.
But as

philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in Other Minds, an

octopus has “ a body of pure possibility.” Aside from its

hard beak, it is soft, malleable, and free to contort.
Its skin

can change color and texture at a whim.
Its arms can

extend, contract, bend, and rotate anywhere along their

lengths, and have practically infinite ways of performing

even simple movements.
How could a brain, even a large

one, keep track of such boundless options?
The question

turns out to be irrelevant.
The brain doesn’t have to.
It can

mostly let the arms sort themselves out, while imposing the

occasional guiding nudge.[*13]

The octopus, then, arguably has two distinct Umwelten.
The arms live in a world of taste and touch.
The head is

dominated by vision.
There’s undoubtedly some cross-talk

between these sides, but Grasso suspects that the

information exchanged between the head and the arms is

simplified.
To extend Uexküll’s metaphor of animal bodies

as houses with sensory windows, the octopus’s body

consists of two semidetached houses with utterly different

architectural styles and a small connecting door between

them.
Never mind what it’s like to be a bat, as Nagel

pondered.
How can we possibly know what it is like to be

an octopus?
Its unusual senses challenge our imagination,

but so does the way it brings those senses together.
Its

component threads are unfamiliar, the weave is exotic, and

the tapestry that results is utterly alien.
—

THE ACT OF sensing creates an illusion that, ironically,

makes it harder to appreciate how the senses work.
When I

looked at Qualia and Ra, I didn’t have any conscious

awareness of the photoreceptors firing in my eyes.
I simply

saw.
When I touched their tanks, I didn’t feel the

mechanoreceptors in my fingers reacting to pressure.
I

simply felt.
Our experiences of the world feel disconnected

from the very sense organs that produce them, which

makes it easy to believe that they are purely mental

constructs divorced from physical reality.
That’s why our

stories and myths are so full of characters who can transfer

their consciousness into the bodies of animals—the Norse

god Odin, for example, or Bran from the once-popular

series Game of Thrones.
Such feats, in which humans

literally step into the sensory worlds of other animals, feel

like the ultimate form of Umwelt-appreciation.
But they

also fundamentally misunderstand the concept.
An animal’s

sensory world is the result of solid tissues that detect real

stimuli and produce cascades of electrical signals.
It is not

separate from the body, but of it.
You can’t simply imagine

how a human mind would work in a bat’s body or an

octopus’s, because it wouldn’t work.
When Qualia and Ra began opening crab-filled jars, they

looked like they were deliberately solving a problem in

pursuit of a goal.
But were their central brains even

involved, or were their arms simply exploring new objects

on their own?
If the latter is true, is their behavior any less

intelligent than it seemed, or does the octopus’s

intelligence manifest through the autonomous curiosity of

its limbs?
(Can an octopus’s arms be curious?) When Qualia

and Ra stopped opening those jars, were they getting bored

or were their arms?
(Can an octopus’s arms get bored?)

Was there some conflict between their dual Umwelten—

between what their eyes were seeing and what their arms

were feel-tasting?
These questions are extraordinarily hard to answer, but

they become impossibly hard if we look at each part of the

octopus separately.
The workings of its suckers or its eyes

can’t tell us what the whole animal perceives.
The

movements of its body can be easily misinterpreted without

knowing the structure of its nervous system.
This is why

Nagel’s challenge about imagining another creature’s

conscious experience is so vexing: To stand any chance of

knowing what it is like to be another animal, we need to

know almost everything about that animal.
We need to

know about all of its senses, its nervous system and the rest

of its body, its needs and its environment, its evolutionary

past and its ecological present.
We should approach this

work humbly, recognizing how easily our intuitions can lead

us astray.
We should move forward hopefully, knowing that

even a partially successful attempt will reveal wonders that

were previously hidden to us.
And we should act quickly,

knowing that our time is running out.
SKIP NOTES

*1 Our senses undergo similar flips.
If you show someone a picture of a dirty sock and let them sniff isovaleric acid, they’ll find it disgusting, but pair the

same chemical with a picture of fine Époisses cheese and it’ll smell delectable.
*2 After all, that’s likely what DEET does.
Developed by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture in 1944, DEET has a long history of initially protecting troops in

tropical countries and then civilians around the world.
It works—but no one

really knows why.
Vosshall originally suspected that it blocks orco but now

thinks that it bamboozles mosquitoes’ sense of smell (and taste) in more

complicated ways.
If she can duplicate this effect, she hopes to find

substances that are more effective than DEET, longer-lasting, and safer for

infants.
*3 Millions of people live perfectly well without vision, smell, or hearing.
But to lose proprioception is far more debilitating.
In 1971, a 19-year-old butcher

named Ian Waterman came down with an infection, which triggered an

autoimmune attack that robbed him of proprioception.
Without feedback from

his limbs, he could no longer coordinate his movements.
He wasn’t paralyzed,

but he couldn’t stand or walk.
If he couldn’t see his body, he didn’t know

where it was.
Only after 17 months of intense training did Waterman relearn

how to move his body using visual control.
*4 Technically, it’s a problem shared only by animals that move.
If you are

completely immobile, you can be pretty sure that any information from your

sense organs is produced by changes in the outside world rather than your

own actions.
But no animals are completely immobile; even sponges, which

have no nervous systems and sit anchored onto rocks, can expel waste from

their bodies by “sneezing.”

*5 It’s frankly astonishing that this works.
Look to your left.
Your brain just sent a simple signal that told some of the muscles around your eyeball to contract.
How did your nervous system then use that signal to predict how the scene

around you would change?
We know that it did, but the actual computations

that occurred are still a mystery.
“How do you go from a motor command to a

signal that a sensory structure can work with?” Nate Sawtell, who works with

electric fish, asks me.
“That’s the core problem.”

*6 For a full history of these terms and the idea behind them, there’s an

excellent paper by Otto-Joachim Grüsser.
*7 For ampullary receptors and knollenorgans, as for most other sense organs, reafference is noise and exafference is the signal.
But for tuberous receptors,

which detect the fish’s own signals, the opposite is true: Reafference is the

signal and exafference is the noise.
*8 Corollary discharges apply to other senses, too.
A brain area that controls the movement of your diaphragm sends signals to the olfactory bulb—the

smell center of the brain.
That bulb processes signals differently depending on

whether you are inhaling or exhaling.
*9 Some scientists have suggested that schizophrenia is fundamentally a

disorder of corollary discharges.
People with the condition might experience

hallucinations and delusions because they can’t distinguish their own inner

speech from the voices around them.
A failure to sort self from other might

also explain some of schizophrenia’s stranger symptoms, like the ability to

tickle yourself.
Might there be schizophrenic elephantfish that can’t tell their

own discharges from those of other fish?
“It’s certainly possible,” Carlson tells

me.
“I would expect dramatically disrupted behavior.”

*10 In humans, the central nervous system includes everything in the brain and spine, while the peripheral nervous system includes the nerves in our limbs,

organs, and other body parts.
But in the octopus, this distinction breaks down.
The nerves in the brachial and sucker ganglia are very much part of the

central nervous system, even though they exist in the arms.
*11 Between them, each sucker ganglion and its corresponding brachial

ganglion contain around 10,000 neurons.
That’s roughly as many as in an

entire leech or sea slug.
A single octopus arm contains roughly as many

neurons as a lobster.
*12 In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Wells removed large parts of the brain

from some octopuses and showed that these “decerebrate” animals could still

use their suckers to manipulate objects, open clamshells, and feed.
*13 Godfrey-Smith marvelously compares the central brain to a conductor and

the arms to “jazz players, inclined to improvisation, who will accept only so

much direction.”





13.
Save the Quiet,

Preserve the Dark

Threatened Sensescapes

WITHIN THE 310,000 ACRES OF Wyoming’s Grand Teton

National Park, the largest piece of human-made

infrastructure is a parking lot at the village of Colter Bay.
Beyond its far edge, nestled among some trees, is a foul-

smelling sewage-processing building that Jesse Barber calls

the Shiterator.
Beneath its metal awning, sitting quietly

within a crevice and illuminated by Barber’s flashlight,

there is a little brown bat.
And on the bat’s back, there is a

white device the size of a rice grain.
“That’s the radio tag,”

Barber tells me.
He’d previously affixed it to the bat so that

he could track its movements.
He has returned tonight to

tag a few more.
From inside the Shiterator, I can hear the chirps of other

roosting bats.
As the sun sets, they start to emerge.
Navigating more through memory than echolocation, they

fail to notice the large mist net that Barber has strung

between two trees.
A few become entangled.
Barber frees

them, and his students Hunter Cole and Abby Krahling

carefully examine each one to check that they’re healthy

and heavy enough to carry a tag.
One individual opens its

mouth, filling the air with a stream of sonar pulses that I

can’t hear.
Cole daubs a spot of surgical cement between

its shoulder blades.
He attaches the tiny tag, and waits for

the cement to dry.
“It’s a little bit of an art project, the

tagging of a bat,” Barber tells me.
After a few minutes,

Cole places the bat on the trunk of the nearest tree.
It

crawls upward and takes off, carrying $175 worth of radio

equipment into the woods.
As the hours wear on, the darkness intensifies.
The

echolocating bats don’t mind.
Neither does the sharp-eared

owl that flies overhead, nor the carbon-dioxide-tracking

mosquitoes that bite me through my shirt.
But Barber and

his students can only continue their work using their

headlamps, whose beams have attracted clouds of insects.
Ironically, that’s why Barber is here.
He’s one of a growing

number of sensory biologists who fear that humans are

polluting the world with too much light, to the detriment of

other species.
Even here, in the middle of a national park,

light intrudes upon the darkness.
It spews forth from the

headlamps of passing vehicles, from the fluorescent bulbs

of the visitor center, and from the lampposts encircling the

parked cars.
“The parking lot is lit up like a Walmart

because no one thought about the implications for wildlife,”

Barber tells me.
Through centuries of effort, people have learned much

about the sensory worlds of other species.
But in a fraction

of the time, we have upended those worlds.
We now live in

the Anthropocene—a geological epoch defined and

dominated by the deeds of our species.
We have changed

the climate and acidified the oceans by releasing titanic

amounts of greenhouse gases.
We have shuffled wildlife

across continents, replacing indigenous species with

invasive ones.
We have instigated what some scientists

have called an era of “biological annihilation,” comparable

to the five great mass extinction events of prehistory.
And

amid this already dispiriting ledger of ecological sins, there

is one that should be especially easy to appreciate and yet

is often ignored—sensory pollution.
Instead of stepping into

the Umwelten of other animals, we have forced them to live

in ours by barraging them with stimuli of our own making.
We have filled the night with light, the silence with noise,

and the soil and water with unfamiliar molecules.
We have

distracted animals from what they actually need to sense,

drowned out the cues they depend upon, and lured them,

like moths to a flame, into sensory traps.
Many flying insects are fatally attracted to streetlights,

mistaking them for celestial lights and hovering below

them until they succumb to exhaustion.
Some bats exploit

their confusion, feasting on the disoriented swarms.
Other,

slow-moving species, like the little brown bats that Barber

tagged, stay clear of the light, perhaps because it makes

them easier prey for owls.
Lights reshape the animal

communities around them, drawing some in and pushing

others away, with consequences that are hard to predict.
Could the light-averse bats do badly because their

habitable zones have shrunk and their insect prey have

been pulled away?
Might the light-attracted bats

temporarily benefit but eventually suffer as the local insect

populations crash?
To find out, Barber convinced the

National Park Service to let him try an unusual experiment.
In 2019, he refitted all 32 streetlights in the Colter Bay

parking lot with special bulbs that can change color.
They

can either produce white light, which strongly affects the

behavior of insects and bats, or red light, which doesn’t

seem to.[*1] Every three days, Barber’s team flips their

color.
Funnel-shaped traps hanging below the lamps collect

the gathering insects, while radio transponders pick up the

signals from the tagged bats.
These data should reveal how

normal white lights affect the local animals, and whether

red lights can help to rewild the night sky.
Cole gives me a little demonstration by flipping the

lights to red.
At first, the parking lot looks disquietingly

infernal, as if we have stepped into a horror movie.
But as

my eyes adjust, the red hues feel less dramatic and become

almost pleasant.
It is amazing how much we can still see.
The cars and the surrounding foliage are all visible.
I look

up, and notice that fewer insects seem to be gathered

beneath the lamps.
I look up even further, and see the

stripe of the Milky Way, cutting across the sky.
It’s an

achingly beautiful sight, which I have never before seen in

the Northern Hemisphere.
In 2001, when astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano and his

colleagues created the first global atlas of light pollution,

they calculated that two-thirds of the world’s population

lived in light-polluted areas, where the nights were at least

10 percent brighter than natural darkness.
Around 40

percent of humankind is permanently bathed in the

equivalent of perpetual moonlight, and around 25 percent

constantly experiences an artificial twilight that exceeds

the full moon.
“ ‘Night’ never really comes for them,” the

researchers wrote.
In 2016, when the team updated their

atlas, they found that the problem was even worse.
By

then, around 83 percent of people—and more than 99

percent of Americans and Europeans—were living under

light-polluted skies.
Every year, the proportion of the planet

covered by artificial light gets 2 percent bigger and 2

percent brighter.
A luminous fog now smothers a quarter of

Earth’s surface and is thick enough in many places to blot

out the stars.
Over a third of humanity, and almost 80

percent of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky

Way.
“ The thought of light traveling billions of years from

distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth

of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall

depresses me no end,” vision scientist Sonke Johnsen once

wrote.
At Colter Bay, Cole flips the lights back to white, and I

wince.
The extra illumination feels harsh and unpleasant.
The Milky Way seems fainter now, and consequently, the

world feels smaller.
Sensory pollution is the pollution of

disconnection.
It detaches us from the cosmos.
It drowns

out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and

to each other.
In making the planet brighter and louder, we

have also fragmented it.
While razing rainforests and

bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory

environments.
That must now change.
We have to save the

quiet, and preserve the dark.
—

EVERY YEAR, ON September 11, the sky above New York City

is pierced by two columns of intense blue light.
This annual

art installation, known as Tribute in Light, commemorates

the terrorist attacks of 2001, with the ascending beams

standing in for the fallen Twin Towers.
Each is produced by

44 xenon bulbs with 7,000-watt intensities.
Their light can

be seen from 60 miles away.
From closer up, onlookers

often notice small flecks, dancing amid the beams like

gentle flurries of snow.
Those flecks are birds.
Thousands of

them.
This annual ritual unfortunately occurs within the

autumn migratory season, when billions of small songbirds

undergo long flights through North American skies.
Navigating under cover of darkness, they fly in such large

numbers that they show up on radar.
And by analyzing

radar images, Benjamin van Doren showed that the Tribute

in Light, across seven nights of operation, waylaid around

1.1 million birds.
The beams reach so high that even at

altitudes of several miles, passing birds are drawn into

them.
Warblers and other small species congregate within

the light at densities up to 150 times their normal levels.
They circle slowly, as if trapped within an incorporeal cage.
They call frequently and intensely.
They occasionally crash

into nearby buildings.
Migrations are grueling affairs that push small birds to

their physiological limit.
Even a nightlong detour could

prematurely sap their energy reserves to fatal effect.
So

whenever a thousand birds or more are caught within the

Tribute in Light, the bulbs are turned off for 20 minutes to

let them regain their bearing.
But that’s just one source of

light among many, and though intense and vertical, it only

shines once a year.
At other times, light pours out of sports

stadia and tourist attractions, oil rigs and office buildings.
It pushes back the dark and pulls in migrating birds.
In

1886, shortly after Edison commercialized the electric

lightbulb, nearly 1,000 birds died after colliding with an

electrically illuminated tower in Decatur, Illinois.
Over a

century later, environmental scientist Travis Longcore and

his colleagues calculated that almost 7 million birds a year

die in the United States and Canada after flying into

communication towers.[*2] The red lights of those towers

are meant to warn aircraft pilots, but they also disrupt the

orientation of nocturnal avian fliers, which then veer into

wires or each other.
Many of these deaths could be avoided

simply by replacing steady lights with blinking ones.
“We too quickly forget that we don’t perceive the world

in the same way as other species, and consequently, we

ignore impacts that we shouldn’t,” Longcore tells me.
Our

eyes are among the sharpest in the animal kingdom, but

their high resolution comes with the inescapable cost of

low sensitivity.
Unlike most other mammals, our vision fails

us at night, and our culture reflects our diurnal Umwelt.
Light has come to symbolize safety, progress, knowledge,

hope, and good.
Darkness epitomizes danger, stagnation,

ignorance, despair, and evil.
From campfires to computer

screens, we have craved more light, not less.[*3] It is jarring

for us to think of light as a pollutant, but it becomes one

when it creeps into times and places where it doesn’t

belong.
Many of the other planetary changes we have wrought

have natural counterparts: Modern climate change is

unquestionably the result of human influence, but the

planet’s climate does change naturally over much slower

timescales.
Light at night, however, is a uniquely

anthropogenic force.
The daily and seasonal rhythms of

bright and dark remained inviolate throughout all of

evolutionary time—a 4-billion-year streak that began to

falter in the nineteenth century.
Astronomers and physicists

were among the first to talk about light pollution, which

dimmed their view of the stars.
Biologists only started

seriously paying attention in the 2000s, Longcore tells me.
[*4] In part, that’s because biologists are themselves

diurnal.
At night, while they sleep, the dramatic changes

that occur around them go unstudied.
But “the problem is

right in front of you once you open your eyes to look for it,”

Longcore says.
When sea turtle hatchlings emerge from their nests,

they crawl away from the dark shapes of dune vegetation

toward the brighter oceanic horizon.
But lit roads and

beach resorts can steer them in the wrong direction, where

they are easily picked off by predators or squashed by

vehicles.
In Florida alone, artificial lights kill baby turtles in

the thousands every year.
They’ve wandered into active

baseball games and, more horrifyingly, abandoned beach

fires.
The caretaker of one property found hundreds of

dead hatchlings piled beneath a single mercury-vapor lamp.
Artificial lights can also fatally attract insects and might

be contributing to their alarming global declines.
A single

streetlamp can lure moths from 25 yards away, and a well-

lit road might as well be a prison.
Many of the insects that

gather around streetlamps will likely be eaten or dead from

exhaustion by sunrise.
Those that zoom toward vehicle

headlights probably won’t last that long.
The consequences

of these losses can ripple across ecosystems and into the

day.
In 2014, as part of an experiment, ecologist Eva Knop

installed streetlamps in seven Swiss meadows.
After

sunset, she then prowled these fields with night-vision

goggles, peering into flowers to search for moths and other

pollinators.
By comparing these sites to others that had

been kept dark, Knop showed that the illuminated flowers

received 62 percent fewer visits from pollinating insects.
One plant produced 13 percent less fruit even though it

was also visited by a day shift of bees and butterflies.
It’s not just the presence of light that matters but also

its nature.
Insects with aquatic larvae like mayflies and

dragonflies will fruitlessly lay their eggs on wet roads,

windows, and car roofs, because these reflect horizontally

polarized light in the same way as bodies of water.
Flickering lightbulbs can cause headaches and other

neurological problems in humans, even though our eyes are

usually too slow to detect these changes; what, then, would

they do to animals with faster vision, like insects and small

birds?
Colors matter, too.
Red can disrupt migrating birds but

is better for bats and insects.
[*5] Yellow doesn’t bother

insects and turtles but can disrupt salamanders.
No

wavelength is perfect, Longcore says, but blue and white

are worst of all.
Blue light disrupts body clocks and

strongly attracts insects.
It is also easily scattered,

increasing the spread of light pollution.
It is, however,

cheap and efficient to produce.
The new generation of

energy-efficient white LEDs contain a lot of blue light, and,

if the world switches to them from traditional yellow-

orange sodium lights, the amount of global light pollution

would increase by two or three times.
“We can make better

choices by tuning lights with intention,” Longcore says.
“And we shouldn’t use full-spectrum at night.
We shouldn’t

want to give everything the signal that it’s constantly

daytime.”

After talking to Longcore at his office in Los Angeles, I

return home on a red-eye flight.
As the plane takes off, I

peer out the window at the illuminated city.
The twinkling

grid of lights still stirs the same primordial awe that comes

from watching a starry sky or a moonlit sea.
Humans

equate light with knowledge.
We draw lightbulbs to

symbolize ideas, we describe intelligent people as bright

sparks and luminaries, and we illuminated a path out of the

Dark Ages.
But as Los Angeles recedes beneath my window,

that familiar awe is now tinged with unease.
Light pollution

is no longer just an urban problem, either.
Light travels,

metastasizing even into protected places that are otherwise

untouched by human influence.
The light from Los Angeles

reaches Death Valley, the largest national park in the

continental United States, 200 miles away.
True darkness is

increasingly hard to find.
So is true silence.
—

IT’S A SUNNY April morning in Boulder, Colorado, and I’ve

hiked up to a rocky hillside, about 6,000 feet above sea

level.
The world feels wider here, not just because of the

panoramic view over conifer forests but also because it is

blissfully quiet.
Away from urban ruckus, quieter sounds

are unmasked and become audible over greater distances.
On the hillside, a chipmunk is rustling.
Grasshoppers snap

their wings together as they fly.
A woodpecker pounds its

beak against a nearby trunk.
Wind rushes past.
The longer

I sit, the more I seem to hear.
Two men puncture the tranquility.
I can’t see them, but

they’re somewhere on the trail below, intent on

broadcasting their opinions to all of Colorado.
Further

away, I can hear vehicles zooming along a highway beyond

the trees.
Denver hums in the distance, an ambient

backdrop that I had all but blocked out.
I notice a plane

flying overhead, engines roaring.
“I’ve been backpacking

since the mid-sixties, and in that time, the number of

aircraft has increased by a factor of six or seven,” says Kurt

Fristrup, whom I meet after my hike.
“One of my favorite

parlor tricks when friends visit is to ask, at the end of the

hike, if they heard any aircraft.
People will say they

remember one or two.
And I’ll say there were twenty-three

jets and two helicopters.”

Fristrup works at the Natural Sounds and Night Skies

Division of the National Park Service, a group that

endeavors to safeguard (among other things) the United

States’ natural soundscapes.
To protect them, the team first

had to map them, and, unlike light, sound can’t be detected

by satellites.
Fristrup and his colleagues spent years

lugging recording equipment to almost 500 sites around

the country, capturing nearly 1.5 million hours of audio.
They found that human activity has doubled the

background noise levels in 63 percent of protected spaces,

and increased them tenfold in 21 percent.
In the latter

places, “if you could have heard something 100 feet away,

now you can only hear it 10 feet away,” Rachel Buxton of

the NPS tells me.
Aircraft and roads are the main culprits,

but so are industries like oil and gas extraction, mining,

and forestry.
Even the most heavily protected areas are

under acoustic siege.
In towns and cities, the problem is worse, and not just in

the United States.
Two-thirds of Europeans are immersed

in ambient noise equivalent to perpetual rainfall.
Such

conditions are difficult for the many animals that

communicate through calls and songs.
In 2003, Hans

Slabbekoorn and Margriet Peet found that noisy

neighborhoods in Leiden, Netherlands, compel great tits to

sing at higher frequencies, so their notes don’t get masked

by the city’s low-pitched hubbub.
A year later, Henrik

Brumm found that the nightingales of Berlin, Germany, are

forced to belt out their tunes more loudly to be heard over

the urban din.
These influential studies spurred a wave of

research into noise pollution, which showed that urban and

industrial noise can also change the timing of a bird

chorus, suppress the complexity of their songs, and prevent

them from finding mates.
Even for city birds, noise hurts.
Noise pollution masks not only the sounds that animals

deliberately make but also the “web of unintended sounds

that ties communities together,” Fristrup tells me.
He

means the gentle rustles that tell owls where their prey

are, or the faint flaps that warn mice about impending

doom.
“They are the most vulnerable parts of the

soundscape to intrusion, and we’re cutting them off,”

Fristrup says.
Sound levels are measured in decibels,

where a soft whisper is usually 30 decibels, normal

conversation is around 60, and a rock concert is about 110.
Every extra 3 decibels can halve the range over which

natural sounds can be heard.
Noise shrinks an animal’s

perceptual world.
And while some species like great tits

and nightingales stay and make the best of it, others just

leave.
In 2012, Jesse Barber, Heidi Ware, and Christopher

McClure built a phantom road.
On a ridge in Idaho that

acts as a stopover for migrating birds, the team set up a

half-mile corridor of speakers and played looped recordings

of passing cars.
At the sound of these disembodied noises, a

third of the usual birds stayed away.
Many of those that

stayed paid a price for persisting.
With tires and horns

drowning out the sounds of predators, the birds spent more

time looking for danger and less time looking for food.
They

put on less weight, and were weaker as they continued

their arduous migrations.
The phantom road experiment

was pivotal in showing that wildlife could be deterred by

noise and noise alone, detached from the sight of vehicles

or the stench of exhaust.
Hundreds of studies have come to

similar conclusions.
[*6] In noisy conditions, prairie dogs

spend more time underground.
Owls flub their attacks.
Parasitic Ormia flies struggle to find their cricket hosts.
Sage grouse abandon their breeding sites (and those that

stay are more stressed).
Sounds can travel over long distances, at all times of

day, and through solid obstacles.
These qualities make

them excellent stimuli for animals but also pollutants par

excellence.
The concept of pollution calls forth images of

chemicals billowing from smokestacks, scum-covered

rivers, and other visible signs of degradation.
But noise can

degrade habitats that look otherwise idyllic, and make

otherwise livable places unlivable.
It can act as an invisible

bulldozer that pushes animals out of their normal ranges.
[*7] And where will they go?
More than 83 percent of the

continental United States lies within a kilometer of a road.
Even the seas can’t offer silence.
Although Jacques

Cousteau once described the ocean as a silent world, it is

anything but.
It naturally teems with the sounds of

breaking waves and blowing winds, bubbling hydrothermal

vents and calving icebergs, all of which carry further and

travel faster underwater than in air.
Marine animals are

noisy, too.
Whales sing, toadfish hum, cod grunt, and

bearded seals trill.
Thousands of snapping shrimps, which

stun passing fish with the shockwaves produced by their

large claws, fill coral reefs with what sounds like sizzling

bacon, or Rice Krispies popping in milk.
Some of this

soundscape has been muted as humans have netted,

hooked, and harpooned the oceans’ residents.
Other

natural noises have been drowned out by those that we

added: the scrapes of nets that trawl the seafloor; the

staccato beats of seismic charges used to scout for oil and

gas; the pings of military sonar; and, as a ubiquitous

backing track for all this hubbub, the sound of ships.
[*8]

“Think about where your shoes come from,” marine

mammal expert John Hildebrand says as we talk in his

office.
I look; unsurprisingly, it’s China.
Some tanker

carried those shoes across the Pacific, belching out a wake

of sound that radiated for miles.
Between World War II and

2008, the global shipping fleet more than tripled, and

began moving 10 times more cargo at higher speeds.
Together, they raised the levels of low-frequency noise in

the oceans by 32 times—a 15-decibel increase over levels

that Hildebrand suspects were already around 15 decibels

louder than in primordial pre-propeller seas.
Since giant

whales can live for a century or more, there are likely

individuals alive today who have personally witnessed this

growing underwater racket and who now only hear over a

tenth of their former range.
As ships pass in the night,

humpback whales stop singing, orcas stop foraging, and

right whales become stressed.
Crabs stop feeding,

cuttlefish change colors, damselfish are more easily caught.
“If I said that I’m going to increase the noise level in your

office by 30 decibels, OSHA would come in and say you’d

need to wear earplugs,” Hildebrand tells me.
“ We’re

conducting an experiment on marine animals by exposing

them to these high levels of noise, and it’s not an

experiment we’d allow to be conducted on ourselves.”

—

THE PREVIOUS 12 chapters of this book represent centuries

of hard-won knowledge about the sensory worlds of other

species.
But in the time it took to accumulate that

knowledge, we have radically remolded those worlds.
We

are closer than ever to understanding what it is like to be

another animal, but we have made it harder than ever for

other animals to be.
Senses that have served their owners well for millions of

years are now liabilities.
Smooth vertical surfaces, which

don’t exist in nature, return echoes that sound like open

air; perhaps that’s why bats so often crash into windows.
DMS, the seaweed-y chemical that once reliably guided

seabirds to food, now also guides them to the millions of

tons of plastic waste that humans have dumped into the

oceans; perhaps that’s why an estimated 90 percent of

seabirds eventually swallow plastic.
The currents produced

by objects moving in the water can be detected by the

body-wide hairs of manatees, but not with enough notice to

avoid a fast-moving speedboat; boat collisions are

responsible for at least a quarter of deaths among Florida’s

manatees.
Odorants in river water can guide salmon back

to their streams of birth, but not if pesticides in that same

water weaken their sense of smell.
Weak electric fields at

the bottom of the sea can guide sharks to buried prey, but

also to high-voltage cables.
Some animals have come to tolerate the sights and

sounds of modernity.
Others even flourish among them.
Some urban moths have evolved to become less attracted

to light.
Some urban spiders have gone in the opposite

direction, spinning webs beneath streetlights to feast on

the attracted insects.
In the towns of Panama, nighttime

lights drive frog-eating bats away, allowing male túngara

frogs to add more sexy chucks to their songs without the

risk of attracting predators.
Animals can adapt, either by

changing their behavior over an individual lifetime or by

evolving new behaviors over many generations.
But adaptation is not always possible.
Species with slow

lives and long generations can’t evolve quickly enough to

keep pace with levels of light and noise pollution that

double every few decades.
Creatures that have already

been confined to narrow corners of shrinking habitats can’t

just up and leave.
Those that rely on specialized senses

can’t just retune their entire Umwelt.
Coping with sensory

pollution isn’t a simple matter of habituation.
“I don’t think

people quite understand that if you can’t hear something,

you don’t suddenly become able to hear it,” Clinton Francis

tells me.
“When your sensory organ cannot perceive a

signal, you don’t just get used to that.”

Our influence is not inherently destructive, but it is often

homogenizing.
In pushing out sensitive species that cannot

abide our sensory onslaughts, we leave behind smaller and

less diverse communities.
We flatten the undulating

sensescapes that have generated the wondrous variety of

animal Umwelten.
Consider Lake Victoria in East Africa.
Once, it was home to over 500 species of cichlid fish,

almost all of which were found nowhere else.
That

extraordinary diversity arose partly because of light.
In

deeper parts of the lake, light tends to be yellow or orange,

while blue is more plentiful in shallower waters.
These

differences affected the eyes of the local cichlids and, in

turn, their mating choices.
Evolutionary biologist Ole

Seehausen found that female cichlids from deeper waters

prefer redder males, while those in the shallows have their

eyes set on bluer ones.
These diverging penchants acted

like physical barriers, splitting the cichlids into a spectrum

of differently colored forms.
Diversity in light led to

diversity in vision, in colors, and in species.
But over the

last century, runoff from farms, mines, and sewage filled

the lake with nutrients that spurred the growth of clouding,

choking algae.
The old light gradients flattened in some

places, the cichlids’ colors and visual proclivities no longer

mattered, and the number of species collapsed.
By turning

off the light in the lake, humans also switched off the

sensory engine of diversity, leading to what Seehausen has

called “the fastest large-scale extinction event ever

observed.” [*9]

A cynic might ask why it matters that a lake has fewer

species of similar fish.
Why get worked up about a

woodland that has 21 species of birds instead of 32?
In

2020, science writer Maya Kapoor pondered these

questions in a story about the Yaqui catfish, an endangered

species from the western United States that’s similar to the

extremely common channel catfish.
“I wondered whether

the loss of a species that looked just like one of the most

common fish species on the planet really mattered,” Kapoor

wrote.
“Only later did it occur to me that…their seeming

interchangeability

said

more

about

my

limited

understanding than it did about their limited distinctions.”

Her epiphany also applies to the cichlids, and to the many

groups of animals where closely related members can have

starkly different senses.
As those species go extinct, so too

do their Umwelten.
With every creature that vanishes, we

lose a way of making sense of the world.
Our sensory

bubbles shield us from the knowledge of those losses.
But

they don’t protect us from the consequences.
In the woodlands of New Mexico, Clinton Francis and

Catherine Ortega found that the Woodhouse’s scrub-jay

would flee from the noise of compressors used in extracting

natural gas.
The scrub-jay spreads the seeds of the pinyon

pine tree, and a single bird can bury between 3,000 and

4,000 pine seeds a year.
They are so important to the

forests that in quiet areas where they still thrive, pine

seedlings are four times more common than in noisy areas

that they have abandoned.
Pinyon pines are the foundation

of the ecosystem around them—a single species that

provides food and shelter for hundreds of others, including

Indigenous Americans.
To lose three-quarters of them

would be disastrous.
And since they grow slowly, “noise

might have hundred-plus-year consequences for the entire

ecosystem,” Francis tells me.
—

A BETTER UNDERSTANDING of the senses can show us how

we’re defiling the natural world.
It can also point to ways of

saving it.
In 2016, marine biologist Tim Gordon traveled to

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to begin his PhD work.
He

should have spent months swimming among the corals’

vivid splendor.
Instead, “I watched in horror as my study

site got completely obliterated,” he tells me.
A heat wave

had forced the corals to expel the symbiotic algae that give

them nutrients and colors.
Without these partners, the

corals starved and whitened in the worst bleaching event

on record, and the first of several to come.
Snorkeling

through the rubble, Gordon found that the reefs had been

not only bleached but also silenced.
Snapping shrimps no

longer snapped.
Parrotfish no longer crunched.
Those

sounds normally help to guide baby fish back to the reef

after their first vulnerable months out at sea.
Soundless

reefs were much less attractive.
Gordon feared that if fish

avoided the degraded reefs, the seaweed they normally eat

would run amok, overgrowing the bleached corals and

preventing them from rebounding.
But in 2017, “we went

back and thought: Can we flip that on its head?” he says.
He and his colleagues set up loudspeakers that

continuously played recordings of healthy reefs over

patches of coral rubble.
The team would dive every few

days to survey the local animals.
“And on day 30,” Gordon

says, “I remember moseying around with my dive buddies

and saying, ‘There’s a big pattern here, isn’t there?’ ” After

40 days, he ran the numbers and saw that the acoustically

enriched reefs had twice as many young fish as silent ones

and 50 percent more species.
They had not only been

attracted by the sounds but stayed and formed a

community.
“It was a lovely experiment to do,” Gordon

says.
It showed what conservationists can accomplish by

“seeing the world through the perceptions of the animals

you’re trying to protect.” [*10]

Realistically, this is a small-scale solution: Loudspeakers

are expensive, and coral reefs are big.
Without reducing

carbon emissions and forestalling climate change, reefs are

in for a grim future, no matter how attractive they sound.
Still, with half of the Great Barrier Reef already dead,

corals need all the help they can get.
Restoring their

natural sounds might give them a fighting chance and make

the task of saving them a little less Herculean.
Gordon’s experiment was only possible because the

team could still find healthy, unbleached reefs whose

sounds they could record.
Natural sensescapes still exist.
There is still time to preserve and restore them before the

last echo of the last reef fades into memory.
In most cases,

instead of adding stimuli that we have removed, we can

simply remove those that we added—a luxury that doesn’t

apply to most pollutants.
Radioactive waste can take

millennia to degrade.
Persistent chemicals like the

pesticide DDT can thread their way through the bodies of

animals long after they are banned.
Plastics will continue to

despoil the oceans for centuries even if all plastic

production halts tomorrow.
But light pollution ceases as

soon as lights are turned off.
Noise pollution abates once

engines and propellers wind down.
Sensory pollution is an

ecological gimme—a rare example of a planetary problem

that can be immediately and effectively addressed.
And in

the spring of 2020, the world did unknowingly address it.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread, public spaces closed.
Flights were grounded.
Cars stayed parked.
Cruise ships

stayed docked.
Around 4.5 billion people—almost three-

fifths of the world’s population—were told or encouraged to

stay at home.
As a result, many places became substantially

darker and quieter.
With fewer planes and cars on the

move, the night skies around Berlin, Germany, were half as

bright as normal.
Seismic vibrations around the world were

half as intense for months—the longest such reduction on

record.
Alaska’s Glacier Bay, a sanctuary for humpback

whales, was half as loud as the previous year, as were cities

in California, New York, Florida, and Texas.[*11] Sounds that

would normally be muffled became clearer.
City-dwellers

around the world suddenly noticed singing birds.
“People

realized that there are all these animals around them that

they hadn’t sensed before,” Francis tells me.
“The sensory

worlds of people in their backyards are huge compared to

pre-COVID.” [*12]

In a multitude of ways, the pandemic revealed the

problems that societies had come to tolerate and the

changes they were actually prepared to make.
It showed

that sensory pollution can be reduced if people are

sufficiently motivated.
Such reductions are possible without

the debilitating consequences of a global lockdown.
In the

summer of 2007, Kurt Fristrup and his colleagues did a

simple experiment at Muir Woods National Monument in

California.
On a random schedule, they stuck up signs that

declared one of the most popular parts of the park a quiet

zone and encouraged visitors to silence their phones and

lower their voices.
These simple steps, with no

accompanying enforcement, reduced the noise levels in the

park by 3 decibels, equivalent to 1,200 fewer visitors.
But personal responsibility cannot compensate for

societal irresponsibility.
To truly make a dent in sensory

pollution, bigger steps are needed.
Lights can be dimmed

or switched off when buildings and streets are not in use.
They can be shielded so that they stop shining above the

horizon.
LEDs can be changed from blue or white to red.
Quiet pavements with porous surfaces can absorb the noise

from passing vehicles.
Sound-absorbing barriers, including

berms on land and bubble nets in the water, can soften the

din of traffic and industry.
Vehicles can be diverted from

important areas of wilderness, or they can be forced to

slow down: In 2007, when commercial ships in the

Mediterranean began slowing down by just 12 percent,

they produced half as much noise.
Such vessels can also be

fitted with quieter hulls and propellers, which are already

used to muffle military ships (and would make commercial

ones more fuel-efficient).
Many helpful technologies

already exist, but the economic incentives to make them

cheaper or to deploy them en masse are lacking.
We could

regulate industries causing sensory pollution, but there’s

not enough societal will.
“Plastic pollution in the sea looks

hideous and everyone is worried, but noise pollution in the

sea is something we don’t experience, so no one’s up in

arms about it,” Gordon tells me.
We normalize the abnormal, and accept the

unacceptable.
Remember that more than 80 percent of

people live under light-polluted skies, and that two-thirds of

Europeans are immersed in noise equivalent to constant

rainfall.
Many people have no idea what true darkness or

quiet feels like.
Within that inexperience, vicious cycles

begin to spin.
As we desecrate sensory environments, we

become accustomed to the results.
As we push animals

away, we get used to their absence.
As the problem of

sensory pollution grows, our willingness to address it

subsides.
How do we solve a problem that we don’t realize

exists?
—

IN 1995, ENVIRONMENTAL historian William Cronon wrote

that “the time has come to rethink wilderness.” In a searing

essay, he argued that the concept of wilderness, especially

as perceived in the United States, had become unjustly

synonymous with grandeur.
Eighteenth-century thinkers

believed that vast and magnificent landscapes reminded

people of their own mortality and brought them closer to

glimpsing the divine.
“God was on the mountaintop, in the

chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the

rainbow, in the sunset,” Cronon wrote.
“One has only to

think of the sites that Americans chose for their first

national parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon,

Rainier, Zion—to realize that virtually all of them fit one or

more of these categories.
Less sublime landscapes simply

did not appear worthy of such protection; not until the

1940s, for instance, would the first swamp be honored, in

Everglades National Park, and to this day there is no

national park in the grasslands.”

Equating wilderness with otherworldly magnificence

treats it as something remote, accessible only to those with

the privilege to travel and explore.
It imagines that nature

is something separate from humanity rather than

something we exist within.
“Idealizing a distant wilderness

too often means not idealizing the environment in which we

actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call

home,” Cronon wrote.
I couldn’t agree more.
The majesty of nature is not

restricted to canyons and mountains.
It can be found in the

wilds of perception—the sensory spaces that lie outside our

Umwelt and within those of other animals.
To perceive the

world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity,

and the sacred in the mundane.
Wonders exist in a

backyard garden, where bees take the measure of a

flower’s electric fields, leafhoppers send vibrational

melodies through the stems of plants, and birds behold the

hidden palettes of rurples and grurples.
In writing this

book, I have found the sublime while confined to my home

by a pandemic, watching tetrachromatic starlings

gathering in the trees outside and playing sniffing games

with my dog, Typo.
Wilderness is not distant.
We are

continually immersed in it.
It is there for us to imagine, to

savor, and to protect.
—

IN 1934, AFTER considering the senses of ticks, dogs,

jackdaws, and wasps, Jakob von Uexküll wrote about the

Umwelt of the astronomer.
“Through gigantic optical aids,”

he wrote, this unique creature has eyes that “are capable of

penetrating outer space as far as the most distant stars.
In

its [Umwelt], suns and planets circle at a solemn pace.”

The tools of astronomy can capture stimuli that no animal

can naturally sense—X-rays, radio waves, and gravitational

waves from colliding black holes.
They extend the human

Umwelt across the extent of the universe and back to its

very beginning.
The tools of biologists are more modest in scale, but they

too offer a glimpse into the infinite.
Elizabeth Jakob used an

eye tracker to watch the gaze of jumping spiders.
Almut

Kelber used night-vision goggles to watch elephant

hawkmoths drinking from flowers in the dark.
Paloma

Gonzalez-Bellido used high-speed cameras to determine

how fast killer flies see, and Ken Catania used them to work

out how star-nosed moles hunt by touch.
With lasers, Kurt

Schwenk visualized the vortices that snakes make when

they flick their tongues.
With an ultrasound detector,

Donald Griffin discovered the sonar of bats.
Laser

vibrometers and clip-on microphones allow Rex Cocroft to

eavesdrop on leafhoppers.
The Navy’s SOSUS hydrophones

allowed Chris Clark to confirm how far blue whale calls can

travel.
With simple electrodes, Eric Fortune and other

electric fish researchers can listen in on the pulses of

knifefish and elephantfish.
With microscopes, cameras,

speakers, satellites, recorders, and even paper-lined cages

with inkpads at their bases, people have explored other

sensory worlds.
We have used technology to make the

invisible visible and the inaudible audible.
This ability to dip into other Umwelten is our greatest

sensory skill.
Think back to the hypothetical room that we

envisioned at the start of this book, with the elephant, the

rattlesnake, and all the rest.
Among that imaginary

menagerie, the human—Rebecca—lacked ultraviolet vision,

magnetoreception, echolocation, and an infrared sense.
But

she was the only creature capable of knowing what the

others were sensing and, perhaps, the only one who might

care.
A bogong moth will never know what a zebra finch hears

in its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of

a black ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see through

the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a mantis shrimp will never

smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never understand

what it is like to be a bat.
We will never fully do any of

these things either, but we are the only animal that can

even come close.
We may not ever know what it is to be an

octopus, but at least we know that octopuses exist, and that

their experiences differ from ours.
Through patient

observation, through the technologies at our disposal,

through the scientific method, and, above all else, through

our curiosity and imagination, we can try to step into their

worlds.
We must choose to do so, and to have that choice is

a gift.
It is not a blessing we have earned, but it is one we

must cherish.
SKIP NOTES

*1 A team of Dutch scientists led by Kamiel Spoelstra discovered this pattern in 2017.
In response, a neighborhood within the town of Nieuwkoop, which sits

next to a nature reserve, switched its streetlights to bat-friendly red LEDs.
*2 As we’ve seen, migrating birds use a variety of senses to guide their way.
Collisions with communication towers seem to happen when all of their senses

are befuddled at once—when bad weather prevents them from seeing visual

landmarks, and when red lights disable their compasses.
*3 Scientific studies on light pollution tend to use the acronym ALAN to refer to artificial light at night.
Unfortunately, this means that a lot of papers read like

they are passive-aggressively shouting at some guy called Alan, who is single-

handedly screwing things up for wildlife.
“ALAN may affect a diverse array of

nocturnally active animals,” says one.
“The biological impact of even low

intensities of ALAN may be marked,” claims another.
*4 There had been earlier accounts of birds crashing into lit buildings and

turtle hatchlings heading toward lit cities.
But Longcore says that an

international conference in 2002 marked a moment when a smattering of

concerned researchers started becoming a coherent field.
*5 The red lights that Barber used in the Grand Tetons shouldn’t be a problem because they’re not high enough to waylay migrating birds.
*6 In one experiment, ladybird beetles ate fewer aphids when exposed to either urban sounds or the music of AC/DC, disproving the band’s hypothesis that

“rock and roll ain’t noise pollution.”

*7 In the summer of 2017, ecologist Justin Suraci did a version of Barber’s

experiment by playing the sound of human speech through speakers set up in

the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Whether it was Suraci reading poetry or Rush

Limbaugh spewing bile, mountain lions, bobcats, and other predators moved

away when they heard the voices.
This isn’t an issue of noise pollution in the

classic sense, though.
It’s more that humans are terrifying superpredators,

whose very voices are enough to unnerve other hunters.
*8 Beaked whales have repeatedly stranded en masse after exposure to naval

sonar, prompting waves of research and litigation.
War of the Whales by

Joshua Horwitz offers a masterly account of the events that connected naval

sonar to whale strandings, and the legal battles that ensued.
“Indisputably,

you can use sonar and get a beaked whale to strand,” John Hildebrand tells

me.
“Why they do that is still a mystery.” It’s unclear if the sound physically

injures them or causes them to swim erratically and get the bends.
Either way,

sonar clearly disturbs them.
*9 Lake Victoria’s cichlids also suffered because of overfishing and exploding numbers of the invasive Nile perch.
But even when the perch declined and

cichlid numbers bounced back, the diversity of cichlid species remained much

lower in cloudy waters.
Note that light conditions are just one of several

factors that explained the incredible diversity of Lake Victoria’s cichlids.
*10 Conversely, conservation attempts can backfire if they fail to account for different Umwelten.
Wire cages that are sometimes put up to protect turtle

nests from raccoons and foxes could distort the magnetic fields around those

nests and disrupt the hatchlings’ ability to learn the magnetic signatures of

their home beaches.
*11 Behavioral ecologist Elizabeth Derryberry found that the songs of white-

crowned sparrows in the Bay Area were a third quieter during the lockdown of

spring 2020, when they had less urban noise to contend with.
*12 Similar reductions in noise pollution followed other recent disasters.
Oceanic noise fell in the waters off California after the financial collapse of

2008, and in the Bay of Fundy, Canada, after the September 11 terrorist

attacks of 2001.
The latter change seemed to reduce stress among right

whales.
The side-facing slits of a dog’s nostrils allow its

exhalations to waft more odors into its nose.
Clonal raider ants have been marked with paint so

they can be easily tracked.
Organs of smell come in varied forms, including the

trunks of elephants, the beaks of albatrosses, and the

forked tongues of snakes.
With receptors on their feet, butterflies and other

insects can taste things by landing on them.
Catfish are swimming tongues, with taste buds dotted

all over their skins.
A jumping spider’s central eyes offer sharp vision,

while the pair on the side tracks movements.
The killer fly’s ultrafast vision allows it to capture

quick-flying insects in the span of a human blink.
The bay scallop has dozens of bright blue eyes along

the rim of its shell.
The brittle star’s entire body is an eye, but only

during the daytime.
The huge top part of a male mayfly’s eye allows it to

spot passing females.
A chameleon can look forward and behind

simultaneously with its independent eyes.
With two eyes fused into a single cylinder, Streetsia

challengeri can see above, below, and to the sides,

but not in front.
In darkness so intense that you couldn’t see your own

hand, this nocturnal sweat bee can still spot its small

jungle nest.
The elephant hawkmoth can see the colors of flowers,

even under dim starlight.
Typo the corgi, a very good boy, is modeling the

difference between the trichromatic color vision of

(most) humans and the dichromatic vision of dogs.
Many natural patterns, including the markings on

flowers and the facial stripes of the ambon

damselfish, are visible only to eyes that can see

ultraviolet.
The bib of the broad-tailed hummingbird and the

wing bars of the Heliconius erato butterflies reflect

ultraviolet colors that humans can’t perceive.
The peacock mantis shrimp sees color in a completely

different way than other animals do, using the

midband of its three-part eyes.
The naked mole-rat is insensitive to the pain of acids

and capsaicin, the chemical that gives chilies their

kick.
The thirteen-lined ground squirrel can hibernate

through the winter because it is insensitive to cold

temperatures that we’d find painful.
These animals can all sense the infrared radiation

emanating from warm objects.
Fire-chaser beetles do

so to find burning forests, while vampire bats and

rattlesnakes track down warm-blooded prey.
Sea otters use their sensitive paws to quickly feel for

prey they can’t see, while red knots do the same by

probing into sand with their bills.
Tactile organs come in many forms—the nose of the

star-nosed mole, the sting of the emerald jewel wasp,

the facial feathers of the crested auklet, and the

whiskers of a mouse.
Manatees manipulate objects and greet each other

with their exquisitely touch-sensitive lips.
The bumps on a crocodile’s snout can detect gentle

ripples made by its prey.
Even while blindfolded, Sprouts the harbor seal can

track fish by using his whiskers to follow the invisible

trails they leave in the water.
Courting peacocks create airflow patterns that they

can sense with their crest feathers.
With their sensitive hairs, tiger wandering spiders

can detect the air currents created by passing flies.
Treehoppers communicate by sending vibrations

through the plants on which they stand.
When

converted into sound, these normally inaudible songs

can resemble those of birds, monkeys, or musical

instruments.
Sand scorpions sense the footfalls of their prey.
Golden moles detect the thrums of wind blowing over

termite-rich sand dunes.
Treefrog tadpoles hatch

when they feel the vibrations of chewing snakes.
The Nephila spider’s orb web is an extension of its

own sensory system and mind—but the small

Argyrodes spider can hack into it.
These masters of hearing excel at pinpointing the

locations of sound.
The barn owl listens for scuttling

rodents, while the parasitic Ormia fly listens out for

courting crickets.
The call of the male túngara frog was shaped by the

sensory bias of the female frog’s ear.
Zebra finches listen for fast details that humans

cannot perceive in their songs.
Blue whales and Asian elephants can communicate

over long distances with low-pitched infrasonic calls.
In quieter eras, the whales’ calls could carry across

entire oceans.
The Philippine tarsier communicates in ultrasonic

frequencies that are inaudible to us.
The greater wax moth hears higher frequencies than

any other known animal.
Strangely, the blue-throated hummingbird sings

ultrasonic notes that it cannot hear.
A big brown bat attacks a luna moth.
The colored

spectrogram represents echolocation: As the bat

closes in, its calls become faster and shorter,

providing it with crisper detail.
Dolphins can use their sonar to find buried objects,

coordinate formations, and distinguish fish by the

shape of their air-filled gas bladders.
The black ghost knifefish, the electric eel, the glass

knifefish, and the Ubangi elephantfish all produce

their own electric fields, which they use to sense the

world around them.
Tiny pores called ampullae of Lorenzini allow sharks

and rays to detect the minute electric fields produced

by their prey.
These ampullae are especially common

on the heads of sawfish and hammerhead sharks.
The platypus’s bill can sense both pressure and

electric fields, which it might combine into a single

sense of electrotouch.
Bumblebees can sense the electric fields of flowers.
Bogong moths, European robins, and loggerhead

turtles can all navigate over long distances by

sensing Earth’s magnetic field.
An octopus’s arms are partly independent; they can

sense and explore the world without direction from

the central brain.
For Liz Neeley, who sees me





Acknowledgments

AT THE END OF 2018, I was sitting in a London café with

my wife, Liz Neeley, telling her that while I very much

wanted to write a second book, my well of ideas had run

dry.
Liz listened patiently, and then gently suggested that I

could write about how animals perceive the world.
This

kind of thing happens a lot.
The idea drew from our shared interest in nature.
It

flowed naturally from our entire careers: Liz had started

her marine biology PhD on the visual systems of coral reef

fish, and I had written about sensory biology for over a

decade.
It reflected our desire to tell the stories of those

whose lives often go overlooked or unheard.
I’m profoundly

grateful to Liz not just for seeding the idea of this book and

supporting me through its creation, but for embodying its

values and instilling them in me.
She is relentlessly joyful,

curious, and empathetic, and she brings those same

qualities out in people who have the privilege to know her.
To spend time with Liz is to see the world and its

inhabitants in new ways—exactly the feeling that I hope

you, dear reader, got from the preceding pages.
For shepherding this book from concept to finished

product, my deepest thanks go to: Will Francis, my British

agent and friend, who saw the promise in this idea from the

start and helped to nurture it into life; PJ Mark, my

American agent; Hilary Redmon, my American publisher

and intellectual co-conspirator, who edited the early drafts

into shape; and Stuart Williams, my British publisher, who

also provided incisive notes on the manuscript.
All four of

them were also involved in my first book, I Contain

Multitudes, and getting to work with them again was like

coming home.
Sarah Laskow and Ross Andersen, my editors at The

Atlantic, deserve huge credit for everything they’ve taught

me about writing over the last years; they didn’t directly

work on this book, but their influence in these pages runs

deep.
They, together with Robert Brenner, Meehan Crist,

Tom Cunliffe, Rose Eveleth, Natalie Omundsen, Sarah

Ramey, Rebecca Skloot, Beck Smith, Maddie Sofia, and

Maryam Zaringhalam, also kept me afloat in a very difficult

year, when I turned my attention from the delightful realms

of animal senses to the more grueling and tragic world of

the COVID-19 pandemic.
I spoke to more scientists in the course of writing this

book than I could reasonably list, many of whom were

incredibly generous with their time.
My deepest thanks to

Jesse Barber, Bruce Carlson, Rex Cocroft, Robyn Crook,

Heather Eisthen, Ken Lohmann, Colleen Reichmuth, Cassie

Stoddard, and Eric Warrant for crucial feedback on various

chapters and deep discussions.
Thanks also to most of the

above, and to Whitlow Au, Gordon Bauer, Adriana Briscoe,

Astra Bryant, Rulon Clark, Tom Cronin, Molly Cummings,

Elena Gracheva, Frank Grasso, Alexandra Horowitz, Martin

How, Elizabeth Jakob, Sonke Johnsen, Suzanne Amador

Kane, Daniel Kish, Daniel Kronauer, Travis Longcore,

Malcolm MacIver, Justin Marshall, Beth Mortimer, Cindy

Moss, Paul Nachtigall, Dan-Eric Nilsson, Thomas Park,

Daniel Robert, Nicholas Roberts, Mike Ryan, Nate Sawtell,

Kurt Schwenk, Jim Simmons, Daphne Soares, Amy Streets,

Leslie Vosshall, Karen Warkentin, and George Wittemyer

for variously showing me their labs, their animals, or their

lives.
Special thanks to Matthew Cobb for early

encouragement and a very useful set of slides, Catherine

Williams for helping me think through the chapter on pain

in the early stages, Michael Hendricks for his help in

shaping the chapter on unifying the senses, Eleanor Caves

for creating a bespoke figure based on her acuity work; and

Brian Branstetter, Ken Catania, Kurt Fristrup, Amanda

Melin, Nate Morehouse, and Aude Pacini for especially

helpful discussions.
I’m also profoundly grateful to Ashley Shew, a brilliant

thinker on the intersection between technology and

disability, for giving the manuscript a thorough sensitivity

read, and helping me to avoid the insidiously ableist

language and ideas that characterize so much writing

about the senses.
(Any lingering errors in the text are mine

and mine alone.)

It was a pleasure to meet Finn the dog, Margaret the

rattlesnake, Sprouts the harbor seal, Hugh and Buffett the

manatees, Zipper the big brown bat, Blubby the electric

catfish, Qualia and Ra the octopuses, and the unnamed

mantis shrimp who punched me in the finger.
And finally,

thanks to Moro, Ellers, Athena, Ruby, Midge, Ezra, Bingo,

Nellie, Bennet, Margaux, Canela, Dolly, Tim, Janet,

Clarence, Zako, Whiskey, Caleb, Posey, Tesla, Crosby, Bing,

Bear, Buddy, Mickey, and especially to my dearest Typo for

teaching me to have animals in my heart and home as well

as in my head.
To all the other very good dogs (and cats)

whom I’m sure I have forgotten, I am so sorry.
It’s a good

thing you can’t read.
Notes

INTRODUCTION

It was defined and popularized: (Uexküll, 1909)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Uexküll compared an animal’s body: A modern translation of Uexküll’s

seminal work is Uexküll (2010).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“Each house has a number of windows”: (Uexküll, 2010, p.
200)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“They move finished and complete”: (Beston, 2003, p.
25)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To sense the world: A classic work on the basics of sensory biology is

Dusenbery (1992).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver thinks: (Mugan and MacIver, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Animals have to keep the neurons: (Niven and Laughlin, 2008; Moran,

Softley, and Warrant, 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1987, German scientist Rüdiger Wehner: (Wehner, 1987)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“constricted and transformed”: (Uexküll, 2010, p.
51)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Giant whales have: (Pyenson et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Inspired by that conversation: (Johnsen, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But according to the philosopher Fiona Macpherson: (Macpherson, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“senses cannot be clearly divided”: (Macpherson, 2011, p.
36)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“there is no reason to suppose”: (Nagel, 1974, pp.
438–439)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Zoologist Donald Griffin: (Griffin, 1974)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“an informed imaginative leap”: (Horowitz, 2010, p.
243)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“The only true voyage”: (Proust, 1993, p.
343)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 1

Horowitz is an expert: For more on dogs and their sense of smell, I highly

recommend two books by Alexandra Horowitz (2010, 2016).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Those faces are now easier: (Kaminski et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But when a dog sniffs: (Craven, Paterson, and Settles, 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Humans share the same basic: (Quignon et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The shape of their nostrils: (Craven, Paterson, and Settles, 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In one experiment: (Steen et al., 1996)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Scientists have tried to find: (Krestel et al., 1984; Walker et al., 2006;

Wackermannová, Pinc, and Jebavý, 2016) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In one study, two dogs: (Krestel et al., 1984)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In past experiments: (Hepper, 1988)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They could detect a single fingerprint: (Hepper and Wells, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They could work out which direction: (King, Becker, and Markee, 1964)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Depending on the species, stressed frogs: (Smith et al., 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One possible exception is the puff adder: (Miller, Maritz, et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Horowitz tallied every study: (Horowitz and Franks, 2020)

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In front of each animal: (Duranton and Horowitz, 2019)

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Some dislike that dogs get treated: (Pihlström et al., 2005)

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In some cases, humans do better: (Laska, 2017) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

IN TEXT

McGann traced the origin: (McGann, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2019, Tali Weiss identified: (Weiss et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“of extremely slight service”: (Darwin, 1871, volume 1, p.
24)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“smell does not allow itself”: (Kant, 2007, p.
270)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The English language confirms his view: (Majid, 2015)

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“is the one without words”: (Ackerman, 1991, p.
6)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The Jahai people of Malaysia: (Majid et al., 2017; Majid and Kruspe, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2006, neuroscientist Jess Porter: (Porter et al., 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their signals can then be detected: (Silpe and Bassler, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Chemicals, then, are the most ancient: (Dusenbery, 1992)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The variation among possible odorants: An excellent review on the basics

of olfaction is Keller and Vosshall (2004b).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When mixed, some pairs of odors: (Keller and Vosshall, 2004b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist: (Ravia et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their noses are kings of infinite space: Reviews on smell: Eisthen (2002);

Ache and Young (2005); Bargmann (2006).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In work that would earn them a Nobel: (Firestein, 2005)

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One widely popularized theory: (Keller and Vosshall, 2004a)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For example, the OR7D4 gene: (Keller et al., 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Male moths, for example: (Vogt and Riddiford, 1981)

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Smell is so important to them: (Kalberer, Reisenman, and Hildebrand, 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Moths have been described as: (Atema, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By mimicking female moth odors: (Haynes et al., 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The chemicals they use are pheromones: A review on animal pheromones is

Wyatt (2015a).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Indeed, despite the existence of pheromone parties: (Wyatt, 2015b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Human pheromones likely exist: (Wyatt, 2015b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ant pheromones are another story: (Leonhardt et al., 2016)

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Leafcutter ants are so sensitive: (Tumlinson et al., 1971)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Known as cuticular hydrocarbons: (Sharma et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Queens also use these substances: (Monnin et al., 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Red ants will look after: (Lenoir et al., 2001)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Army ants are so committed: (Schneirla, 1944)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In September 2020, I noted: (Yong, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many ants use pheromones to discern dead: (Wilson, Durlach, and Roth,

1958)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“The ant world is a tumult”: (Treisman, 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ant civilizations are among the most impressive: (D’Ettorre, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ants are essentially a group of: (Moreau et al., 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Along the way, their repertoire of odorant receptor genes: (McKenzie and

Kronauer, 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Why?
Here are three clues: (McKenzie and Kronauer, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Kronauer deprived his clonal raiders: (Trible et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Back in 1874, the Swiss scientist: (Forel, 1874)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Female lobsters urinate into the faces: (Atema, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Male mice produce a pheromone: (Roberts et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The early spider-orchid deceives male bees: (Schiestl et al., 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“We live, all the time”: (Wilson, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

You don’t need to know about an elephant’s: (Niimura, Matsui, and

Touhara, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

African elephants can use their trunks: (McArthur et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can learn unfamiliar smells: (Miller, Hensman, et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Two of those same elephants: (von Dürckheim et al., 2018)

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Asian elephants are no slouches, either: (Plotnik et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When the animals approached washed garments: (Bates et al., 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When African elephants reunite: (Moss, 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Few people have done more to study elephant odors: (Hurst et al., 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1996, after 15 years of work: (Rasmussen et al., 1996)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Rasmussen eventually discovered that elephants: (Rasmussen and

Schulte, 1998)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

As they walk the time-worn trails: (Hurst et al., 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2007, Lucy Bates found: (Bates et al., 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Elephants that have returned to postwar Angola: (Miller, Hensman, et al.,

2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’ve been known to dig wells: (Ramey et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Rasmussen once speculated: (Rasmussen and Krishnamurthy, 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Salmon can return: (Wisby and Hasler, 1954)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Whip spiders use the smell sensors: (Bingman et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Polar bears might: (Owen et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These examples are so common: (Jacobs, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

John James Audubon, the avid naturalist: (Stager, 1964; Birkhead, 2013; Eaton, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These birds, he claimed in 1826: (Audubon, 1826)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ornithologist Kenneth Stager: (Stager, 1964)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Betsy Bang revitalized it: A historical look at Bang and Wenzel’s influence is

Nevitt and Hagelin (2009).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Concerned that the textbooks were spouting misinformation: (Bang,

1960; Bang and Cobb, 1968) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For them, “olfaction is of primary importance”: (Nevitt and Hagelin, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By scanning the skulls: (Zelenitsky, Therrien, and Kobayashi, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Elsewhere in California, Bernice Wenzel: (Sieck and Wenzel, 1969)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She repeated that test: (Wenzel and Sieck, 1972)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Both Bang and Wenzel: (Nevitt and Hagelin, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the varying levels of the chemical: (Nevitt, 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Once back on her feet, Nevitt: (Nevitt, Veit, and Kareiva, 1995)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She calculated that they can detect: (Nevitt and Bonadonna, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She showed that some tubenoses: (Bonadonna et al., 2006; Van Buskirk and

Nevitt, 2008) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Henri Weimerskirch fitted wandering albatrosses: (Nevitt, Losekoot, and

Weimerskirch, 2008) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The smellscapes that seabirds track: (Nevitt, 2008; Nevitt, Losekoot, and

Weimerskirch, 2008) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She transported a few Cory’s shearwaters: (Gagliardo et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“What may be featureless to us”: (Nicolson, 2018, p.
230)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By comparing the odorants: (Sobel et al., 1999)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Whatever the case, serious scholars: (Schwenk, 1994)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Using its tongue, a male garter snake: (Shine et al., 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By comparing what she deposited: (Ford and Low, 1984)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Schwenk reasoned that the fork: (Schwenk, 1994)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Rulon Clark, whom we’ll meet: (Clark, 2004; Clark and Ramirez, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Aside from lethal toxins: (Durso, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The snakes can use these aromas: (Chiszar et al., 1983, 1999; Chiszar,

Walters, and Smith, 2008) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Chuck Smith, one of Schwenk’s former students: (Smith et al., 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Bill Ryerson, another of Schwenk’s students: (Ryerson, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For some reason, humans lost our vomeronasal: (Baxi, Dorries, and

Eisthen, 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Without it, garter snakes stop following: (Kardong and Berkhoudt, 1999)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In other animals, the organ is a mystery: (Baxi, Dorries, and Eisthen, 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Adults vary so much: (Pain, 2001)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And while smell can be put: (Yarmolinsky, Zuker, and Ryba, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When a python swallows a pig: (Secor, 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Bees can detect the sweetness: (de Brito Sanchez et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Flies can taste the apple: (Thoma et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Parasitic wasps can use taste sensors: (Van Lenteren et al., 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But if that arm is covered with bitter-tasting DEET: (Dennis, Goldman,

and Vosshall, 2019) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some have taste receptors on their wings: (Raad et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Flies will start grooming themselves: (Yanagawa, Guigue, and Marion-Poll,

2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The most extensive sense of taste: (Atema, 1971; Caprio et al., 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They have taste buds: (Kasumyan, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’re exquisitely sensitive to amino acids: (Caprio, 1975)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

So in the mid-1990s: (Caprio et al., 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Cats, spotted hyenas: (Jiang et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Vampire bats, which drink only blood: (Shan et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Other leaf-eating specialists, like koalas: (Johnson et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2014, evolutionary biologist Maude Baldwin: (Toda et al., 2021)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Baldwin also showed that hummingbirds: (Baldwin et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This is how all animals see: (Nilsson, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 2

The Portia species are famed: (Cross et al., 2020) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

And unlike other spiders: (Morehouse, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The late British neurobiologist Mike Land: Land wrote great accounts of

his own work in Land (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1968, he developed an ophthalmoscope: (Land, 1969a, 1969b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“an exhilarating but very weird”: (Land, 2018, p.
107)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And here’s the truly bizarre part: (Jakob et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The eyes of the giant squid: (Nilsson et al., 2012; Polilov, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Squid, jumping spiders, and humans: A review of animal eyes is Nilsson

(2009).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Animal eyes can be bifocal: (Stowasser et al., 2010; Thomas, Robison, and

Johnsen, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can have lenses: (Li et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Jakob’s colleague Nate Morehouse: (Goté et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

vision “is about light”: (Johnsen, 2012, p.
2)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Every animal that sees does: (Porter et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2012, evolutionary biologist Megan Porter: (Porter et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Vision is diverse: The textbook Visual Ecology is a fantastic and very readable

primer on vision and its many uses (Cronin et al., 2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The biologist Dan-Eric Nilsson: (Nilsson, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The hydra, a relative of jellyfish: (Plachetzki, Fong, and Oakley, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Olive sea snakes have photoreceptors: (Crowe-Riddell, Simões, et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Octopuses, cuttlefish, and other cephalopods: (Kingston et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly: (Arikawa, 2001)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This flurry of evolutionary innovation: (Parker, 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“To suppose that the eye”: (Darwin, 1958, p.
171)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The jellyfish alone have evolved: (Picciani et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1994, Nilsson and Susanne Pelger: (Nilsson and Pelger, 1994)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

As we saw in the introduction: (Garm and Nilsson, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Consider the freshwater bacterium Synechocystis: (Schuergers et al.,

2016) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The warnowiids, a group of single-celled algae: (Gavelis et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Caro had become the latest: (Caro, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She and Caro calculated that: (Melin et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Caro has a definitive answer: to ward off bloodsucking flies: (Caro et al.,

2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

An animal’s visual acuity: An excellent review of visual acuity in animals is

Caves, Brandley, and Johnsen (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The current record, at 138 cycles per degree: (Reymond, 1985; Mitkus et

al., 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One oft-quoted study from the 1970s: (Fox, Lehmkuhle, and Westendorf,

1976)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sensory biologist Eleanor Caves: (Caves, Brandley, and Johnsen, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Octopuses (46 cpd): (Veilleux and Kirk, 2014; Caves, Brandley, and Johnsen,

2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Robber flies manage: (Feller et al., 2021)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For a fly’s eye: (Kirschfeld, 1976)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Each half of a scallop’s: (Mitkus et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s even stranger that those eyes: (Land, 1966)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And both are found in the scallop: (Speiser and Johnsen, 2008a)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

He strapped their shells: (Speiser and Johnsen, 2008b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1964, Mike Land: (Land, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Guanine crystals don’t naturally form squares: (Palmer et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Chitons are mollusks: (Li et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Fan worms look like: (Bok, Capa, and Nilsson, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Giant clams look like: (Land, 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2018, Lauren Sumner-Rooney: (Sumner-Rooney et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Like brittle stars, sea urchins: (Ullrich-Luter et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Weirder still, it’s only an eye: (Sumner-Rooney et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In one Spanish province alone: (Carrete et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2012, Martin and his colleagues: (Martin, Portugal, and Murn, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A soaring vulture: See Martin (2012), which also reviews and cites Martin’s

many papers on bird visual fields.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“The human visual world”: (Martin, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many animals have an area: (Moore et al., 2017; Baden, Euler, and Berens,

2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When a chicken investigates: (Stamp Dawkins, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many birds of prey: (Mitkus et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When a peregrine falcon: (Potier et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The left half of a chick’s brain: A wide range of experiments is reviewed in

Rogers (2012).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A seal’s visual field: (Hanke, Römer, and Dehnhardt, 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Cows and other livestock: (Hughes, 1977)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The same is true: An excellent review of regionalization in animal retinas is

Baden, Euler, and Berens (2020).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Elephants, hippos, rhinos, whales: (Mass and Supin, 1995; Baden, Euler,

and Berens, 2020) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A whale’s pupil doesn’t constrict: (Mass and Supin, 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Chameleons don’t have to turn: (Katz et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many male flies focus upward: (Perry and Desplan, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The fish Anableps anableps: (Owens et al., 2012) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

IN TEXT

The brownsnout spookfish: (Partridge et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

So can the cock-eyed squid: (Thomas, Robison, and Johnsen, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Meanwhile, the deep-sea crustacean Streetsia: (Meyer-Rochow, 1978) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If you can coax a killer fly: (Simons, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By filming these pursuits: (Wardill et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their ultrafast hunts are guided: (Gonzalez-Bellido, Wardill, and Juusola,

2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Compared to the photoreceptors of a fruit fly: (Gonzalez-Bellido, Wardill,

and Juusola, 2011) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By contrast, it takes between 30: (Masland, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In general, animals tend to have higher CFFs: (Laughlin and Weckström,

1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Compared to human vision: Several values of animal CFFs can be found in

Healy et al.
(2013); Inger et al.
(2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Those of swordfish: (Fritsches, Brill, and Warrant, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many birds have naturally fast vision: (Boström et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Traditional fluorescent lights flicker at 100 Hz: (Evans et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And those insects have eyes: (Ruck, 1958)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By filming the insect: (Warrant et al., 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The first is obvious: (O’Carroll and Warrant, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The second challenge is less intuitive: (O’Carroll and Warrant, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It takes a lot of energy: (Niven and Laughlin, 2008; Moran, Softley, and

Warrant, 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Others unsubscribe from vision entirely: (Porter and Sumner-Rooney, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

There are many ways to break an eye: (Porter and Sumner-Rooney, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some use neural tricks: (Warrant, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The structure of a reindeer’s tapetum: (Stokkan et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The tarsiers—small primates: (Collins, Hendrickson, and Kaas, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To dive into the ocean: (Warrant and Locket, 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At 10 meters down: Two great reviews about vision in the ocean are Warrant

and Locket (2004); Johnsen (2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To be more respectful of deep-sea: (Widder, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The footage was unmistakable: (Johnsen and Widder, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But no other creature: (Nilsson et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sonke Johnsen, Eric Warrant, and Dan-Eric Nilsson: (Nilsson et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The first natural footage was captured in 2012: (Schrope, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Then, in 2002, Eric Warrant: (Kelber, Balkenius, and Warrant, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 3

One textbook claimed that: (Tansley, 1965)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And yet, very few species: (Neitz, Geist, and Jacobs, 1989)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Dogs do see color: (Neitz, Geist, and Jacobs, 1989)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Light comes in a range: For excellent primers on color vision, check out

Osorio and Vorobyev (2008); Cuthill et al.
(2017); and Chapter 7 of Cronin et al.
(2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Daphnia water fleas: A review of unusual color vision is Marshall and Arikawa

(2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Consider the story of the artist: (Sacks and Wasserman, 1987)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some, like sloths and armadillos: (Emerling and Springer, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Others, like raccoons and sharks: (Peichl, 2005; Hart et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Whales have just one cone, too: (Peichl, Behrmann, and Kröger, 2001)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Surprisingly, the cephalopods: (Hanke and Kelber, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The firefly squid: (Seidou et al., 1990)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Physiologist Vadim Maximov suggested: (Maximov, 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Dogs have two cones: (Neitz, Geist, and Jacobs, 1989)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This means that horses struggle: (Paul and Stevens, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Color-blind people might be confused: (Colour Blind Awareness, n.d.)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The first primates: (Carvalho et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

That’s exactly what happened: (Carvalho et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Each extra opsin increases: (Pointer and Attridge, 1998; Neitz, Carroll, and

Neitz, 2001) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Since the nineteenth century: (Mollon, 1989; Osorio and Vorobyev, 1996;

Smith et al., 2003) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

More recently, some researchers: (Dominy and Lucas, 2001; Dominy,

Svenning, and Li, 2003) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1984, Gerald Jacobs: (Jacobs, 1984)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These monkeys never developed: (Jacobs and Neitz, 1987)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Howler monkeys: (Saito et al., 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Females might inherit two: (Jacobs and Neitz, 1987)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Neither group, she found: (Fedigan et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The trichromats are indeed better: (Melin et al., 2007, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2007, the Neitzes: (Mancuso et al., 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the 1880s, John Lubbock: (Lubbock, 1881)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

There’s only a narrow Goldilocks: (Dusenbery, 1992)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At the time, some scientists: For an excellent overview on UV vision and its

history, see Cronin and Bok (2016).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But after another half century: (Goldsmith, 1980)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Still wrong: In 1991: (Jacobs, Neitz, and Deegan, 1991)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Not so: In the 2010s: (Douglas and Jeffery, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This happened to the painter Claude Monet: (Zimmer, 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Most animals that can see color: (Tedore and Nilsson, 2019) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some scientists think: (Marshall, Carleton, and Cronin, 2015) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Reindeer can quickly: (Tyler et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Flowers use dramatic UV patterns: (Primack, 1982)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Crab spiders lurk: (Herberstein, Heiling, and Cheng, 2009) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1998, two independent teams: (Andersson, Ornborg, and Andersson,

1998; Hunt et al., 1998) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The same is true: (Eaton, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The swordtail fish: (Cummings, Rosenthal, and Ryan, 2003) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Ulrike Siebeck found: (Siebeck et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Scientists have often attributed: (Stevens and Cuthill, 2007) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1995, a Finnish team: (Viitala et al., 1995)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2013, she and her colleagues: (Lind et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Exploiting the hummingbirds’ natural instinct: (Stoddard et al., 2020) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Picture trichromatic human vision: A classic paper on visualizing color

vision is Kelber, Vorobyev, and Osorio (2003).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Stoddard found that these non-spectral: (Stoddard et al., 2020) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many supposedly “white” bird feathers: (Stoddard et al., 2019) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Reptiles, insects, and freshwater fish: (Neumeyer, 1992)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By looking at tetrachromats: (Collin et al., 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In any one place, these two species: (Hines et al., 2011) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

But in 2010, Briscoe discovered: (Briscoe et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even birds, with their single UV opsin: (Finkbeiner et al., 2017) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2016, Briscoe’s student: (McCulloch, Osorio, and Briscoe, 2016) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Somewhere in Newcastle, England: (Jordan et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Around one in eight women: (Greenwood, 2012; Jordan and Mollon, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At least three kinds: (Zimmermann et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Kentaro Arikawa has found: (Koshitaka et al., 2008; Chen et al., 2016;

Arikawa, 2017) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The clubs of a large smasher: (Patek, Korff, and Caldwell, 2004) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Marshall looked at the midband: (Marshall, 1988)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And to their shock: (Cronin and Marshall, 1989a, 1989b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The midband consists: An excellent review of mantis shrimp vision is Cronin,

Marshall, and Caldwell (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Mantis shrimps have more classes: (Marshall and Oberwinkler, 1999; Bok et

al., 2014) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The Oatmeal: (Inman, 2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2014, Marshall’s student: (Thoen et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Nigel’s eyes are constantly moving: (Daly et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Mantis shrimps do something similar: (Marshall, Land, and Cronin, 2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When it spots something: (Land et al., 1990)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Humans are largely oblivious: (Marshall et al., 2019b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Cephalopods are more sensitive: (Temple et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And as Marshall’s postdoc: (Chiou et al., 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can also rotate their eyes: (Daly et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One species reflects it: (Gagnon et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Tom Cronin thinks: (Cronin, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The red faces: (Hiramatsu et al., 2017; Moreira et al., 2019) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

But the fish themselves: (Marshall et al., 2019a)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But as Molly Cummings: (Maan and Cummings, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1992, Lars Chittka: (Chittka and Menzel, 1992)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their style of trichromacy: (Chittka, 1997)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 4

I highly recommend the paper: (Braude et al., 2021)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Naked mole-rats are so weird: (Park, Lewin, and Buffenstein, 2010; Braude

et al., 2021) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their lower incisors: (Catania and Remple, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their sperm are misshapen: (Van der Horst et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can survive for up: (Park et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’ve also been forced: (Zions et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Park demonstrated this with: an arena: (Park et al., 2017) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’ll sniff strong vinegary fumes: (LaVinka and Park, 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

They don’t register drops of acid: (Park et al., 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They dislike pinches and burns: (Poulson et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Our experience of pain depends: The basics of nociception are reviewed in

Kavaliers (1988); Lewin, Lu, and Park (2004); Tracey (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But theirs are fewer in number: (Smith, Park, and Lewin, 2020) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Those that would normally be activated: (Smith et al., 2011) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Several hibernating mammals: (Liu et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Birds that carry the seeds: (Jordt and Julius, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Humans are insensitive to nepetalactone: (Melo et al., 2021) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The grasshopper mouse: (Rowe et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the early 1900s: (Sherrington, 1903)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Over a century later: Excellent reviews of nociception and pain are Sneddon

(2018); Williams et al.
(2019).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Other people are congenitally indifferent: (Cox et al., 2006; Goldberg et al.,

2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One Pakistani boy: (Cox et al., 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

I highly recommend Leigh Cowart’s: (Cowart, 2021)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

People (and especially women): The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious

Illness by Sarah Ramey (2020) and Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (2018) are

excellent books on this topic.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It is so widespread and consistent: A review of pain in animals is Sneddon

(2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The signs of pain: (Bateson, 1991)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For many historical thinkers: (Sullivan, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But fierce debates are still raging: (Sneddon et al., 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Until the 1980s: (Anand, Sippell, and Aynsley-Green, 1987) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

That distinction “is a relic”: (Broom, 2001)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Humans have taste receptors: (Li, 2013; Lu et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the early 2000s, Lynne Sneddon: (Sneddon, Braithwaite, and Gentle,

2003a, 2003b) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When fish nociceptors fire: (Dunlop and Laming, 2005; Reilly et al., 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sure enough, when the animals: (Bjørge et al., 2011; Mettam et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In one experiment, Sneddon showed: (Sneddon, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In another study, Sarah Millsopp: (Millsopp and Laming, 2008) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“There is as much evidence”: (Braithwaite, 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But a group of vocal critics: (Rose et al., 2014; Key, 2016) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

For a sense of the debate: (Rose et al., 2014; Key, 2016; Sneddon, 2019) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“Fishes are neurologically equipped”: (Rose et al., 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ironically, this argument: (Braithwaite and Droege, 2016) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

And by the same faulty logic: (Dinets, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For perspective, crabs and lobsters: (Marder and Bucher, 2007) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

What matters is not just the total tally: (Garcia-Larrea and Bastuji, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But such links are much sparser: (Adamo, 2016, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Elwood and his colleague: (Appel and Elwood, 2009; Elwood and Appel,

2009) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These data, Elwood says: (Elwood, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But notably, Adamo, Sneddon, and Elwood: (Sneddon et al., 2014) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Evolution has pushed: (Chittka and Niven, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some scientists suggest: (Bateson, 1991; Elwood, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Engineers have designed robots: (Stiehl, Lalla, and Breazeal, 2004; Lee-

Johnson and Carnegie, 2010; Ikinamo, 2011) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

TEXT

But they also have: (Hochner, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And, as the EU noted: (European Parliament, Council of the European Union,

2010) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She began to bridge that gap: (Crook et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even more surprisingly, Crook found: (Crook, Hanlon, and Walters, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By setting their entire bodies: (Crook et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Crook confirmed this: (Alupay, Hadjisolomou, and Crook, 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Octopuses will sometimes break off: (Alupay, Hadjisolomou, and Crook,

2014) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In her latest study: (Crook, 2021)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“We could simply accept”: (Chatigny, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Insects, for example: (Eisemann et al., 1984)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These behaviors “strongly suggest”: (Eisemann et al., 1984) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 5

Hibernation isn’t sleep: (Geiser, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The two processes are so different: (Daan, Barnes, and Strijkstra, 1991) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Its heart, which beats: (Andrews, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A thirteen-lined ground squirrel: (Matos-Cruz et al., 2017) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Vanessa Matos-Cruz, who worked with Gracheva: (Matos-Cruz et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The limits of that zone vary: The temperature ranges that animals tolerate

are reviewed in McKemy (2007); Sengupta and Garrity (2013).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Animals use a variety: (Matos-Cruz et al., 2017; Hoffstaetter, Bagriantsev,

and Gracheva, 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In a rat, that set point: (Hoffstaetter, Bagriantsev, and Gracheva, 2018) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Fish seem to lack TRPM8 altogether: (Gracheva and Bagriantsev, 2015) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Matos-Cruz found that: (Matos-Cruz et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

There’s a version of: the human TRPM8: (Key et al., 2018) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The TRPV1 sensor: (Hoffstaetter, Bagriantsev, and Gracheva, 2018) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In Gracheva’s hotplate tests: (Laursen et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The Saharan silver ant: (Gehring and Wehner, 1995; Ravaux et al., 2013) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Snow flies are active: (Hartzell et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The air 5 millimeters above: (Corfas and Vosshall, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If it landed on my head: (Heinrich, 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Neuroscientist Marco Gallio demonstrated: (Simões et al., 2021) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Fish, from tiny larvae: (Wurtsbaugh and Neverman, 1988; Thums et al.,

2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sulfide worms that live: (Bates et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Butterflies that are warming: (Tsai et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Turtle embryos can even: (Du et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At 11:20 A.M.
on August 10, 1925: (Schmitz and Bousack, 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

These black, half-inch-long insects: (Linsley, 1943)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One summer, Linsley saw them: (Linsley and Hurd, 1957)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Arriving at a fire: (Schmitz, Schmitz, and Schneider, 2016) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

And though their antennae: (Schütz et al., 1999)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The atoms and molecules: (Dusenbery, 1992; Schmitz, Schmitz, and

Schneider, 2016) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When zoologist Helmut Schmitz: (Schmitz and Bleckmann, 1998) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Based on this distance: (Schmitz and Bousack, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

During flight, their beating wings: (Schneider, Schmitz, and Schmitz, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The 11 species of Melanophila: (Schmitz, Schmitz, and Schneider, 2016) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The exceptions include the species: (Bisoffi et al., 2013) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

So is heat: (Bryant and Hallem, 2018; Bryant et al., 2018) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s likely that the majority: (Windsor, 1998; Forbes et al., 2018) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s no surprise that at least: (Lazzari, 2009; Chappuis et al., 2013; Corfas

and Vosshall, 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The vampire’s heat sensors: (Kürten and Schmidt, 1982)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Elena Gracheva studied those neurons: (Gracheva et al., 2011) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ann Carr and Vincent Salgado: (Carr and Salgado, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Heat-sensitive pits have evolved: (Goris, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And yet, Elena Gracheva: found: (Gracheva et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

No one hit on the right answer: (Ros, 1935)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Rattlesnakes will strike at warm objects: (Noble and Schmidt, 1937) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even a congenitally blind rattlesnake: (Kardong and Mackessy, 1991) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’ll respond if the membrane: (Bullock and Diecke, 1956) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

This astonishing sensitivity means: (Ebert and Westhoff, 2006) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

There, the two streams are combined: (Hartline, Kass, and Loop, 1978;

Newman and Hartline, 1982) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“It is a fallacy”: (Goris, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When confronted, they raise their tails: (Rundus et al., 2007) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

He got grainy images: (Bakken and Krochmal, 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sidewinders tend to point: (Schraft, Bakken, and Clark, 2019) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

And on China’s Shedao Island: (Shine et al., 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Chinese herpetologist Yezhong Tang: (Chen et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The nerves in their membranes: (Goris, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ecologist Burt Kotler: (Bleicher et al., 2018; Embar et al., 2018) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Schraft found that blindfolded sidewinders: (Schraft and Clark, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Schraft presented them with lizard carcasses: (Schraft, Goodman, and

Clark, 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2013, Viviana Cadena: (Cadena et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In a refreshing act of: (Bakken et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Kröger found that: (Gläser and Kröger, 2017; Kröger and Goiricelaya, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

His team successfully trained three dogs: (Bálint et al., 2020) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 6

Orphaned and stranded: (Monterey Bay Aquarium, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They do have the densest fur: (Kuhn et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To stay warm: (Costa and Kooyman, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’re always diving: (Yeates, Williams, and Fink, 2007) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The sensitivity of their paws: (Radinsky, 1968)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Different sections of the somatosensory cortex: (Wilson and Moore, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To measure what these mittens: (Strobel et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Likewise, Strobel found that humans: (Strobel et al., 2018) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

It will only stay submerged: (Thometz et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Touch is one of the mechanical senses: A review of touch is Prescott and

Dürr (2015).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These cells come in several varieties: The various kinds of touch sensors

are reviewed in Zimmerman, Bai, and Ginty (2014); Moayedi, Nakatani, and

Lumpkin (2015).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But exactly how this happens: (Walsh, Bautista, and Lumpkin, 2015) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In one experiment: (Carpenter et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In another test: (Skedung et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These incredible feats are possible: (Prescott, Diamond, and Wing, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Mark Rutland, who led: (Skedung et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The star-nosed mole: Catania’s account of his work with the star-nosed mole

is Catania (2011).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Scientists have long speculated: (Catania, 1995b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A star-nosed mole embryo: (Catania, Northcutt, and Kaas, 1999) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The mole’s somatosensory cortex: (Catania et al., 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Around 5 percent of star-nosed moles: (Catania and Kaas, 1997b) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The 11th pair of rays: (Catania, 1995a)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By filming the mole: (Catania and Kaas, 1997a)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By analyzing such footage: (Catania and Remple, 2004, 2005) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

In chickens, which rely heavily: (Gentle and Breward, 1986) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

But in some ducks: (Schneider et al., 2014, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“Imagine being given a bowl”: (Birkhead, 2013, p.
78)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Compared to other ducks: (Schneider et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But in 1995, Theunis Piersma: (Piersma et al., 1995)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This simple experiment revealed: (Piersma et al., 1998)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ibises use the technique: (Cunningham, Castro, and Alley, 2007;

Cunningham et al., 2010) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ram Gal and Frederic Libersat: (Gal et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The remoras, or suckerfishes: (Cohen et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The round goby: (Hardy and Hale, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The whiskered auklet: (Seneviratne and Jones, 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Sampath Seneviratne placed: (Seneviratne and Jones, 2008) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s more likely that they’re touch sensors: (Cunningham, Alley, and Castro,

2011) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s clear that birds evolved: (Persons and Currie, 2015) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Mammalian hair might have: (Prescott and Dürr, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’re called vibrissae: A review of mammalian vibrissae is Prescott, Mitchinson, and Grant (2011).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This action, delightfully known as whisking: (Bush, Solla, and Hartmann,

2016) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The rodent constantly scans: (Grant, Breakell, and Prescott, 2018) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If it senses something: (Grant, Sperber, and Prescott, 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

If we turn our: head: (Arkley et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Mammals have been using whiskers: (Mitchinson et al., 2011) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Grant showed that the opossum: (Mitchinson et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The disk is muscular: (Marshall, Clark, and Reep, 1998)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

There are around 2,000: The vibrissae of manatees are reviewed in Reep and

Sarko (2009); Bauer, Reep, and Marshall (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But when it’s time to eat: (Marshall et al., 1998)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2012, Bauer tested Hugh: (Bauer et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A few other mammals: (Crish, Crish, and Comer, 2015; Sarko, Rice, and

Reep, 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Manatees use these body-wide whiskers: (Reep, Marshall, and Stoll, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Bauer and his colleagues: (Gaspard et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sprouts has around a hundred facial whiskers: (Hanke and Dehnhardt,

2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sprouts can use them: (Murphy, Reichmuth, and Mann, 2015) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The seals actively keep: the whiskers: (Dehnhardt, Mauck, and Hyvärinen,

1998) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This ability was only discovered in 2001: (Dehnhardt et al., 2001) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The Rostock team: showed: (Hanke et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

From those impressions alone: (Wieskotten et al., 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It can discriminate between the wakes: (Wieskotten et al., 2011) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In one experiment, Henry: (Niesterok et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The lateral line is found: A review of the lateral line is Montgomery,

Bleckmann, and Coombs (2013).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

After describing the pores: (Dijkgraaf, 1989)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the 1930s, the biologist: (Dijkgraaf, 1989)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1908, the ichthyologist Bruno Hofer: (Hofer, 1908)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If it swims toward an aquarium: (Dijkgraaf, 1963)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1963, Dijkgraaf summarized: (Dijkgraaf, 1963)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

With the lateral line: (Webb, 2013; Mogdans, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Schooling fish use their lateral lines: (Partridge and Pitcher, 1980) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Blind fish can still school: (Pitcher, Partridge, and Wardle, 1976) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Though all fish share: (Webb, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Surface-feeding fish: (Mogdans, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Halfbeaks have massive underbites: (Montgomery and Saunders, 1985) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Blind cavefish have lost their sight: (Yoshizawa et al., 2014; Lloyd et al.,

2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some blind cavefish have evolved: (Patton, Windsor, and Coombs, 2010) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Examining it under a microscope: (Haspel et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Soares showed that the joysticks: (Haspel et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The bumps, she discovered: (Soares, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Crocodilians—alligators, crocodiles: (Soares, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And yet, they are covered: (Leitch and Catania, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many snakes have thousands: (Crowe-Riddell, Williams, et al., 2019) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Spinosaurus, an enormous sail-backed dinosaur: (Ibrahim et al., 2014) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Daspletosaurus, a close relative of Tyrannosaurus: (Carr et al., 2017) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To find out if they: (Kane, Van Beveren, and Dakin, 2018) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

These results suggest that a peahen: (Kane, Van Beveren, and Dakin, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But filoplumes are especially important: (Necker, 1985; Clark and de Cruz,

1989) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This rarely happens, in part because filoplumes: (Brown and Fedde, 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They are covered with a smattering: (Sterbing-D’Angelo et al., 2017) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Sterbing treated bat wings: (Sterbing-D’Angelo and Moss, 2014) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1960, a shipment of bananas: Barth’s account of his work with the tiger

wandering spider is Barth (2002).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Its legs are covered in hundreds: (Barth, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If it is running: (Seyfarth, 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even air that’s moving: (Barth and Höller, 1999)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It grabs the fly from the air: (Klopsch, Kuhlmann, and Barth, 2012, 2013) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many have airflow sensors: (Casas and Dangles, 2010)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It is fast, but Casas found: (Dangles, Casas, and Coolen, 2006; Casas and

Steinmann, 2014) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“Spiders can detect danger”: (Di Silvestro, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These hairs are a hundred times: (Shimozawa, Murakami, and Kumagai,

2003) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For example, in 1978, Jürgen Tautz: (Tautz and Markl, 1978) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Thirty years later, Tautz showed: (Tautz and Rostás, 2008) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 7

They collected batches of eggs: (Warkentin, 1995)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their experiments showed: (Cohen, Seid, and Warkentin, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By recording different vibrations: (Warkentin, 2005; Caldwell, McDaniel,

and Warkentin, 2010) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can clearly sense the world: A review of environmentally cued

hatching in embryos is Warkentin (2011).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But they don’t respond to snakes: (Jung et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

So Jung built a jury-rigged: (Jung et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By watching them with infrared cameras: (Caldwell, McDaniel, and

Warkentin, 2010) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Male fiddler crabs: (Takeshita and Murai, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Termite soldiers drum their heads: (Hager and Kirchner, 2013) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Water striders—insects that skate: (Han and Jablonski, 2010) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Scientists call these substrate-borne vibrations: (Hill, 2009; Hill and

Wessel, 2016; Mortimer, 2017) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Surface waves, by contrast: (Hill, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“We have encountered it, but”: A seminal text by Peggy Hill about

vibrational communication is Hill (2008).
The quote appears on page 2.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By rapidly contracting muscles: Insect vibrational communication is reviewed in Cocroft and Rodríguez (2005); Cocroft (2011).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Insects exploit that property: (Cokl and Virant-Doberlet, 2003) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Cocroft now has a library: It can be found at treehoppers.insectmuseum.org.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A treehopper can produce: (Cocroft and Rodríguez, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some babies produce synchronized vibrations: (Cocroft, 1999) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some mothers produce vibrations: (Hamel and Cocroft, 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

They court each other: (Legendre, Marting, and Cocroft, 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many duetting insects will jam: (Eriksson et al., 2012; Polajnar et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Masked birch caterpillars scrape: (Yadav, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Acacia ants vigorously defend: (Hager and Krausa, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1949, three decades before: (Ossiannilsson, 1949)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“Gentle disturbances of the sand”: Brownell’s account of his sand scorpion

work is Brownell (1984).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Brownell and Farley tested this idea: (Brownell and Farley, 1979c) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Its sensors lie in its feet: (Brownell and Farley, 1979a) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The first time this happens: (Brownell and Farley, 1979b) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Can animals sense earthquakes: (Woith et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The footfalls of an ant: (Fertin and Casas, 2007; Martinez et al., 2020) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It reacts by tossing sand: (Mencinger-Vračko and Devetak, 2008) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ken Catania—the same man: (Catania, 2008; Mitra et al., 2009) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“if the ground is beaten”: (Darwin, 1890)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But it is highly sensitive: (Mason, 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The golden mole forages at night: (Lewis et al., 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Peter Narins has suggested: (Narins and Lewis, 1984; Mason and Narins,

2002) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The golden mole’s version: (Mason, 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“The lying about”: (Hill, 2008, p.
120)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the early 1990s, Caitlin O’Connell: O’Connell’s account of her own

elephant work is O’Connell (2008).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The animals seemed to be listening: (O’Connell-Rodwell, Hart, and

Arnason, 2001) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2002, O’Connell returned: (O’Connell-Rodwell et al., 2006) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

“All these years of planning”: (O’Connell, 2008, p.
180)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A few years later, she repeated: (O’Connell-Rodwell et al., 2007) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The vibrations can travel over: (O’Connell, Arnason, and Hart, 1997;

Günther, O’Connell-Rodwell, and Klemperer, 2004) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

IN TEXT

As we spread around the globe: (Smith et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Between 30 and 60 million bison: (Phippen, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“The Lakota…loved the earth”: (Standing Bear, 2006, p.
192) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Spiders have been around: An excellent book on spider silk and its evolution

is Brunetta and Craig (2012).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Though light and elastic: (Agnarsson, Kuntner, and Blackledge, 2010) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The orb web is a trap: (Blackledge, Kuntner, and Agnarsson, 2011) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

From this position: (Masters, 1984)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can probably work out: (Landolfa and Barth, 1996)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can assess the size: (Robinson and Mirick, 1971; Suter, 1978) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If the prey stops moving: (Klärner and Barth, 1982)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The small dewdrop spider Argyrodes: (Vollrath, 1979a, 1979b) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some assassin bugs: (Wignall and Taylor, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Portia, a jumping spider: (Wilcox, Jackson, and Gentile, 1996) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

“a small woven world”: (Barth, 2002, p.
19)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By using gas guns: (Mortimer et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It can do this every time it builds: (Mortimer et al., 2016) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Zoologist Takeshi Watanabe showed: (Watanabe, 1999, 2000) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Orb-weavers will also: (Nakata, 2010, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The web, then, is not just: A great review of spiderwebs as examples of

extended cognition is Japyassú and Laland (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Biophysicist Natasha Mhatre showed that: (Mhatre, Sivalinghem, and

Mason, 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 8

To test this idea: Payne’s account of his own work on barn owls is Payne

(1971).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Over the next four years: (Payne, 1971)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If a mouse rustles: (Dusenbery, 1992)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The barn owl’s ear: (Konishi, 1973, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their hair cells regenerate: (Krumm et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Masakazu Konishi and Eric Knudsen: (Knudsen, Blasdel, and Konishi, 1979)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

An owl’s ears, however: (Payne, 1971)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The owl’s brain uses: (Carr and Christensen-Dalsgaard, 2015, 2016) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

William Stebbins once encapsulated this beautifully: An old but good

review of animal hearing is Stebbins (1983).
The quote is from page 1.
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Fortunately, the owl has soft feathers: (Weger and Wagner, 2016; Clark,

LePiane, and Liu, 2020) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The noise it does make: (Konishi, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These little hopping rodents: (Webster and Webster, 1980) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

So they’re especially difficult: (Webster, 1962; Stangl et al., 2005) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can even hear the sounds: (Webster and Webster, 1971) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

They have also evolved ears: Insect ears are reviewed in Fullard and Yack

(1993); Göpfert and Hennig (2016).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

After all, the first insects: (Göpfert and Hennig, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They had to evolve ears: (Robert, Mhatre, and McDonagh, 2010) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ears exist on the knees: (Göpfert, Surlykke, and Wasserthal, 2002;

Montealegre-Z et al., 2012) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Mosquitoes hear with their antennae: (Menda et al., 2019) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Monarch caterpillars hear: (Taylor and Yack, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The bladder grasshopper: (Yager and Hoy, 1986; Van Staaden et al., 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“In later years some further ears”: (Pye, 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Insect ears are so diverse: (Fullard and Yack, 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Accordingly, many insects seem: (Strauß and Stumpner, 2015) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many butterflies, including: (Lane, Lucas, and Yack, 2008) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Instead, Jayne Yack has shown: (Fournier et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Fossilized insects that have: (Gu et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Daniel Robert is so familiar: (Robert, Amoroso, and Hoy, 1992) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It can turn toward a singing cricket: (Mason, Oshinsky, and Hoy, 2001;

Müller and Robert, 2002) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Robert and his mentor: (Miles, Robert, and Hoy, 1995) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Through several painstaking studies, Barbara Webb: (Webb, 1996) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Webb even built a simple robot: (Webb, 1996)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This happened within 20 generations: (Zuk, Rotenberry, and Tinghitella,

2006; Schneider et al., 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

the túngara frog: (Ryan, 1980)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ryan knows this because he spent: (Ryan, 1980)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Females almost always go for males: (Ryan et al., 1990)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ryan found that the frog’s inner ear: (Ryan and Rand, 1993) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ryan discovered the actual story: (Ryan and Rand, 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This discovery flipped Ryan’s narrative: (Ryan and Rand, 1993) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ryan calls this phenomenon “sensory exploitation”: His account of his

work on túngara frogs is Ryan (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Alexandra Basolo found: (Basolo, 1990)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Tuttle and Ryan showed: (Tuttle and Ryan, 1981)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One of Ryan’s students, Rachel Page: (Page and Ryan, 2008) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Another of Ryan’s students, Ximena Bernal: (Bernal, Rand, and Ryan,

2006) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Bird enthusiasts have long suspected: Bird hearing is reviewed in Dooling

and Prior (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A mockingbird doesn’t need: (Birkhead, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the 1960s, before his work: (Konishi, 1969)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

From the 1970s onward: (Dooling, Lohr, and Dent, 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Dooling confirmed this through: (Dooling et al., 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Beth Vernaleo: (Vernaleo and Dooling, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They completely shuffled the order: (Lawson et al., 2018) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

A zebra finch’s song: (Dooling and Prior, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Not all species: (Fishbein et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Dooling’s colleague Nora Prior: (Prior et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

He and his colleagues placed electrodes: (Lucas et al., 2002) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Likewise, ears can have exceptional: (Henry et al., 2011) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Lucas found that in the fall: (Lucas et al., 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The hearing of the white-breasted nuthatch: (Lucas et al., 2007) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This might explain why: (Noirot et al., 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Lucas and his colleague Megan Gall: (Gall, Salameh, and Lucas, 2013) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It might get duller with age: (Caras, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Males of the plainfin midshipman fish: (Sisneros, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Green tree frogs: (Gall and Wilczynski, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the 1960s: (Kwon, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One, based on recordings that Payne: (Payne and McVay, 1971) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The second showed that fin whales: (Payne and Webb, 1971) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The actual source only became clear: (Schevill, Watkins, and Backus, 1964)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Below those frequencies: (Narins, Stoeger, and O’Connell-Rodwell, 2016) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Knowing that fin whales: (Payne and Webb, 1971)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Amid the spectrograms: (Clark and Gagnon, 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

On his first day, Clark: (Costa, 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Geophysicists can certainly use: (Kuna and Nábělek, 2021) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

He also suspects that the animals: (Tyack and Clark, 2000) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

That might seem preposterous: (Goldbogen et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Those ancestral creatures: (Mourlam and Orliac, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The mysticetes achieved their huge size: (Shadwick, Potvin, and

Goldbogen, 2019) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In May 1984, Katy Payne: Her account of her own elephant research is Payne

(1999).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“It had been like the feeling”: (Payne, 1999, p.
20)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But when Payne sped up the recordings: (Payne, Langbauer, and Thomas,

1986) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She accepted, and in 1986: (Poole et al., 1988)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At close range: (Poole et al., 1988)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A few hours after sunset: (Garstang et al., 1995)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Her work strongly suggests: (Ketten, 1997)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These superlatively big animals: (Miles, Robert, and Hoy, 1995) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the winter of 1877: (Sidebotham, 1877)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Roughly a century later: (Noirot, 1966; Zippelius, 1974; Sales, 2010) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Pups that are separated: (Sewell, 1970)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Rats that are tickled: (Panksepp and Burgdorf, 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Richardson’s ground squirrels: (Wilson and Hare, 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Male mice that sniff: (Holy and Guo, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Females attracted to these serenades: (Neunuebel et al., 2015) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It refers to sound waves: A review of ultrasonic communication is Arch and

Narins (2008).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A dog can hear 45 kHz: (Heffner, 1983; Heffner and Heffner, 1985, 2018;

Kojima, 1990; Ridgway and Au, 2009; Reynolds et al., 2010) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Rickye and Henry Heffner: (Heffner and Heffner, 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Subterranean animals are a striking exception: (Heffner and Heffner,

2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This means that ultrasonic calls: (Arch and Narins, 2008) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

This is also why devices: (Aflitto and DeGomez, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

That’s what Marissa Ramsier noticed: (Ramsier et al., 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The blue-throated hummingbird: (Pytte, Ficken, and Moiseff, 2004) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Several other hummingbirds: (Olson et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This orange frog is: insensitive: (Goutte et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

More than half of the 160,000 species: The battle between insects and bats

is reviewed in Conner and Corcoran (2012).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The greater wax moth: (Moir, Jackson, and Windmill, 2013) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some moths do make ultrasonic: (Nakano et al., 2009, 2010) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The most likely answer: (Kawahara et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Moth ears almost always evolved: (Kawahara et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 9

By listening for the returning echoes: Echolocation is thoroughly reviewed

in Surlykke et al.
(2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

During the day, sharp-eyed predators: (Boonman et al., 2013) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s actually the other way round: (Kalka, Smith, and Kalko, 2008) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the 1790s, the Italian priest: The history of echolocation research is

reviewed in Griffin (1974); Grinnell, Gould, and Fenton (2016).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The meaning of these observations: Donald Griffin’s classic work on

echolocation and his research is Griffin (1974).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For over a century: (Griffin, 1974)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“We were surprised and delighted”: (Griffin, 1974, p.
67) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

A year later, Griffin: (Griffin and Galambos, 1941; Galambos and Griffin,

1942) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But the duo did mean it: (Griffin, 1944a)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sitting by a pond near Ithaca: (Griffin, 1953)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s also how bats hunt: (Griffin, Webster, and Michael, 1960) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

“Our scientific imaginations”: (Griffin, 2001)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The origins of echolocation: (Jones and Teeling, 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The basic process seems straightforward: (Schnitzler and Kalko, 2001; Fenton et al., 2016; Moss, 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

An average bat can only: (Surlykke and Kalko, 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Anything farther away is probably imperceptible: (Holderied and von

Helversen, 2003) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

That’s because bats concentrate: (Jakobsen, Ratcliffe, and Surlykke, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The big brown bat: (Ghose, Moss, and Horiuchi, 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Annemarie Surlykke showed that: (Hulgard et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even the so-called whispering bats: (Brinkløv, Kalko, and Surlykke, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This desensitizes their hearing: (Henson, 1965; Suga and Schlegel, 1972)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This is called acoustic gain control: (Kick and Simmons, 1984) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

John Ratcliffe showed that: (Elemans et al., 2011; Ratcliffe et al., 2013) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And as James Simmons: (Simmons, Ferragamo, and Moss, 1998) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

All of these frequencies: (Simmons and Stein, 1980; Moss and Schnitzler,

1995) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It knows the insect’s position: (Zagaeski and Moss, 1994) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

A bat must constantly adjust its sonar: (Moss and Surlykke, 2010; Moss,

Chiu, and Surlykke, 2011) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Bats can race through rugged caves: (Grinnell and Griffin, 1958) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These messy spaces pose special problems: (Surlykke, Simmons, and Moss,

2016) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She also found that: (Chiu, Xian, and Moss, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They also tend to group their calls: (Moss et al., 2006; Kothari et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The chestnut sac-winged bat: (Jung, Kalko, and von Helversen, 2007) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Inga Geipel found that the bat: (Geipel, Jung, and Kalko, 2013; Geipel et al.,

2019) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Big browns do this by: (Chiu and Moss, 2008; Chiu, Xian, and Moss, 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some bats can recognize the sonar: (Yovel et al., 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The greater bulldog bat: (Suthers, 1967)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Researchers have called this the “cocktail party nightmare”: (Ulanovsky

and Moss, 2008; Corcoran and Moss, 2017) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

TEXT

This explains the many historical incidents: (Griffin, 1974)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

an entire section to “bumbling bats”: (Griffin, 1974, p.
160) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can distinguish two grades of sandpaper: (Zagaeski and Moss, 1994)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But around 160 species: (Schnitzler and Denzinger, 2011; Fenton, Faure, and

Ratcliffe, 2012) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler, who: (Kober and Schnitzler, 1990; von der Emde and

Schnitzler, 1990; Koselj, Schnitzler, and Siemers, 2011) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The greater horseshoe bat: (Schuller and Pollak, 1979; Schnitzler and

Denzinger, 2011) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Other species have their own signature: (Grinnell, 1966; Schuller and

Pollak, 1979) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But as Schnitzler discovered in 1967: (Schnitzler, 1967)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And they do this (quite literally): (Schnitzler, 1973)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A horseshoe bat can throw its attention: (Hiryu et al., 2005) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

When not inflaming the airways: (Ntelezos, Guarato, and Windmill, 2016; Neil et al., 2020) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This acoustic armor: (Conner and Corcoran, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

So while bats can hear: (Surlykke and Kalko, 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Others talk back: (Dunning and Roeder, 1965)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Dorothy Dunning and Kenneth Roeder: (Dunning and Roeder, 1965) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many tiger moths are full: (Barber and Conner, 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2009, Aaron Corcoran: (Corcoran, Barber, and Conner, 2009) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The clicks overlapped: (Corcoran et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But unlike the tiger moths: (Barber and Kawahara, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

With their stealthy whispers: (Goerlitz et al., 2010; ter Hofstede and

Ratcliffe, 2016) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

On average, a luna moth: (Barber et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Moths have evolved long tails: (Rubin et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Donald Griffin once described: (Griffin, 2001)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Both groups did so by evolving echolocation: Echolocation in whales and bats is compared in Au and Simmons (2007); Surlykke et al.
(2014).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

After watching porpoises: (Schevill and McBride, 1956)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Ken Norris carried out: (Norris et al., 1961)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

So researchers who study dolphins: Dolphin echolocation research is

reviewed in Au (2011); Nachtigall (2016).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A field station in Hawaii’s: Whitlow Au’s seminal work on dolphin sonar is Au

(1993).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At Kāne‘ohe Bay, where bottlenose dolphins: (Au, 1993) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

IN TEXT

Dolphins could discriminate between different objects: (Au and Turl,

1983)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The animal, Kina, could use: (Brill et al., 1992)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Dolphins can also echolocate on: (Pack and Herman, 1995; Harley, Roitblat,

and Nachtigall, 1996) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At the top of the dolphin’s head: (Cranford, Amundin, and Norris, 1996) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The sperm whale: (Madsen et al., 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At 236 decibels: (Møhl et al., 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Odontocetes also intercept their own echoes: (Mooney, Yamato, and Branstetter, 2012) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When they need more information: (Finneran, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They can adjust the sensitivity: (Nachtigall and Supin, 2008) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

In an early experiment, Au showed: (Au, 1993)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Later studies showed that echolocating dolphins: (Ivanov, 2004; Finneran,

2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Sound also interacts differently: (Madsen and Surlykke, 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

If a dolphin echolocates on you: (Au, 1996)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders: (Au et al., 2009) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The American shad: (Popper et al., 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Pavel Gol’din has suggested: (Gol’din, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But despite their rarity: (Tyack, 1997; Tyack and Clark, 2000) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

One way to find out: (Johnson, Aguilar de Soto, and Madsen, 2009) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Since 2003, one team of researchers: (Johnson et al., 2004; Arranz et al.,

2011; Madsen et al., 2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Kelly Benoit-Bird and Whitlow Au showed: (Benoit-Bird and Au, 2009a,

2009b) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Daniel Kish clicks: (Thaler et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Now in his 50s, Kish: (Kish, 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Small mammals might make ultrasonic: clicks: (Gould, 1965; Eisenberg

and Gould, 1966; Siemers et al., 2009) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Certain fruit bats: (Boonman, Bumrungsri, and Yovel, 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The oilbird, a large South American: (Brinkløv and Warrant, 2017; Brinkløv,

Elemans, and Ratcliffe, 2017) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Swiftlets, small insect-eating birds: (Brinkløv, Fenton, and Ratcliffe, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And as Kish and: (Thaler and Goodale, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Why don’t seals echolocate?: (Schusterman et al., 2000)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Since at least 1749: (Diderot, 1749; Supa, Cotzin, and Dallenbach, 1944;

Kish, 1995) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the 1940s: (Supa, Cotzin, and Dallenbach, 1944)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Supa referenced the bat studies: (Griffin, 1944a)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Neuroscientist Lore Thaler: (Thaler, Arnott, and Goodale, 2011) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Without vision, the brain: (Norman and Thaler, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

His memory, his cane: (Thaler et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 10

Around 350 species of fish: For primers on electric fish, see Hopkins (2009);

Carlson et al.
(2019).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Around 5,000 years ago: For a history of electric fish, see Wu (1984); Zupanc

and Bullock (2005); Carlson and Sisneros (2019).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For a fuller account, try: (Finger and Piccolino, 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

None do this better than electric eels: (Catania, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1800, Chayma fishers: (Catania, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And a team led by: (de Santana et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their discharges are so faint: (Hopkins, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“It is impossible to conceive”: (Darwin, 1958, p.
178)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Hans Lissmann was a Ukrainian-born: Lissmann’s eventful life is detailed in

Alexander (1996).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

During a fateful visit: (Turkel, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1951, Lissmann used electrodes: (Lissmann, 1951)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And by sensing those distortions: (Lissmann, 1958)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Lissmann and Machin published their results: (Lissmann and Machin,

1958) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The fish can detect these differences: Good reviews on active

electrolocation include Lewis (2014); Caputi (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The black ghost knifefish: (von der Emde, 1990, 1999; von der Emde et al.,

1998; Snyder et al., 2007) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“A most interesting consequence”: (Hopkins, 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It is also omnidirectional: (Snyder et al., 2007)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To double the range: (Salazar, Krahe, and Lewis, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Elephantfish eyes seem to be tuned: (von der Emde and Ruhl, 2016) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The omnidirectional nature of electrolocation: (Caputi et al., 2013) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’ll wrap their bodies: (Caputi, Aguilera, and Pereira, 2011) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Angel Caputi has argued: (Caputi et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The electric sense evolved from: (Baker, 2019) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

TEXT

Electroreceptors grow from the same: (Modrell et al., 2011; Baker, Modrell,

and Gillis, 2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Electric fields aren’t blocked by barriers: (Lewis, 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

They are sensitive not only to conductance: (von der Emde, 1990) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For decades, scientists have studied: (Carlson and Sisneros, 2019) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But the animals’ actual worlds: For some of the challenges of field research,

see Hagedorn (2004).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Such electrodes have improved over time: (Henninger et al., 2018; Madhav

et al., 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They court mates, claim territory: For more on electrocommunication, see

Zupanc and Bullock (2005); Baker and Carlson (2019).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The shape of these pulses: (Hopkins, 1981; McGregor and Westby, 1992;

Carlson, 2002) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One rhythm might be as attractive: (Hopkins and Bass, 1981) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The neuroscientist Ted Bullock: (Bullock, Behrend, and Heiligenberg, 1975)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In Sensory Exotica: (Hughes, 2001) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By minutely changing the frequencies: (Bullock, 1969)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By briefly and sharply increasing: (Hagedorn and Heiligenberg, 1985) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

If two Eigenmannia meet: (Bullock, Behrend, and Heiligenberg, 1975) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The mormyrins have altered: (Carlson and Arnegard, 2011; Vélez, Ryoo, and

Carlson, 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Carlson suspects that these changes: (Baker, Huck, and Carlson, 2015) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One species, the Ubangi elephantfish: (Nilsson, 1996; Sukhum et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Carlson has shown that one mormyrid: (Arnegard and Carlson, 2005) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They probe the sandy floor: (Amey-Özel et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1960, biologist R.
W.
Murray: (Murray, 1960)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A few years later, Sven Dijkgraaf: (Dijkgraaf and Kalmijn, 1962) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The jelly inside the ampullae: (Josberger et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It turns out that all living things: (Kalmijn, 1974) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

IN TEXT

These fields are thousands of times: (Kalmijn, 1974; Bedore and Kajiura,

2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Kalmijn proved as much in 1971: (Kalmijn, 1971)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Wild sharks will also bite: (Kalmijn, 1982)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some do so from birth: (Kajiura, 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The shark’s electric sense: For reviews on passive electroreception, see

Hopkins (2005, 2009).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some stingrays use electric fields: (Tricas, Michael, and Sisneros, 1995) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And some embryonic sharks: (Kempster, Hart, and Collin, 2013) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A shark’s electric sense only works: (Kajiura and Holland, 2002) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Over mile distances, a shark: (Gardiner et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s also why electric fields trigger: (Dijkgraaf and Kalmijn, 1962) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When cuttlefish see the looming shapes: (Bedore, Kajiura, and Johnsen,

2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Instead of conical snouts, hammerhead sharks: (Kajiura, 2001) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It greatly extends the sawfish’s: (Wueringer, Squire, et al., 2012a) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

She showed that the saw: (Wueringer, Squire, et al., 2012b) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Wueringer founded an organization: (Wueringer, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The ability to detect electric fields: Electroreception is reviewed in Collin

(2019); Crampton (2019).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Among vertebrates, around one in six: (Albert and Crampton, 2006) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At least one species of dolphin: (Czech-Damal et al., 2012) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Similarly, it’s unclear how the echidnas: (Gregory et al., 1989) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their close relative, the platypus: (Pettigrew, Manger, and Fine, 1998;

Proske and Gregory, 2003) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

This extensive cabal of electroreceptive critters: (Baker, Modrell, and

Gillis, 2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The knifefishes and elephantfishes are special cases: (Lavoué et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These events happened at roughly: (Lavoué et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Air, by contrast, is an insulator: (Czech-Damal et al., 2013) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

This is the atmospheric potential gradient: (Feynman, 1964) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Attracted by their opposing charges: (Corbet, Beament, and Eisikowitch,

1982; Vaknin et al., 2000) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2013, Robert and his colleagues: (Clarke et al., 2013) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The bees also learned to more quickly: (Clarke et al., 2013) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Instead, their electroreceptors are: (Sutton et al., 2016) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

The mere possibility of widespread aerial electroreception: Aerial

electroreception is reviewed in Clarke, Morley, and Robert (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2018, Robert’s colleague Erica Morley: (Morley and Robert, 2018) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

another scientist had suggested: that spiders: (Blackwall, 1830) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The rival won: It was resurrected in Gorham (2013).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 11

Every spring, billions of bogongs: (Warrant et al., 2016) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Warrant realized that: (Dreyer et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Their

ability,

known

as

magnetoreception:

For

reviews

of

magnetoreception, see Johnsen and Lohmann (2005); Mouritsen (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Merkel and his students: (Merkel and Fromme, 1958; Pollack, 2012) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1859, the zoologist: (Middendorff, 1855)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Absent such proof, even Donald Griffin: (Griffin, 1944b)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Merkel and Wiltschko provided that evidence: (Wiltschko and Merkel,

1965; Wiltschko, 1968) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At roughly the same time: (Brown, 1962; Brown, Webb, and Barnwell, 1964)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Earth’s magnetic field: (Johnsen and Lohmann, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many scientists, including Wiltschko: (Wiltschko and Wiltschko, 2019) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Since Merkel’s robins took: (Lohmann et al., 1995; Deutschlander, Borland,

and Phillips, 1999; Sumner-Rooney et al., 2014; Scanlan et al., 2018) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

After a busy night of insect-catching: (Holland et al., 2006) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

After an early life: (Bottesch et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Mole-rats use their compass: (Kimchi, Etienne, and Terkel, 2004) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And bogong moths: (Dreyer et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To see if they do, Granger: (Granger et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Robins can also be sent off course: (Bianco, Ilieva, and Åkesson, 2019) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Few migrations are as treacherous: A review of sea turtle migrations is

Lohmann and Lohmann (2019).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

By the 1990s, no one: (Carr, 1995)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

As Lohmann suspected: (Lohmann, 1991)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the mid-1990s: (Lohmann and Lohmann, 1994, 1996)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But each turtle species: (Lohmann, Putman, and Lohmann, 2008) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The turtles’ abilities are especially impressive: (Lohmann et al., 2001) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Loggerheads that survive: (Lohmann et al., 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Lohmann demonstrated this by capturing lobsters: (Boles and Lohmann,

2003) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Every winter, thrush nightingales: (Fransson et al., 2001) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Eurasian reed warblers: (Chernetsov, Kishkinev, and Mouritsen, 2008) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many animals, including salmon: (Putman et al., 2013; Wynn et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Turtles use these imprints: (Lohmann, Putman, and Lohmann, 2008) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Green turtles that nest on Ascension Island: (Mortimer and Portier, 1989)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The geomagnetic field changes very slightly: (Brothers and Lohmann,

2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Trying to find them: (Johnsen, 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

At the time of writing: (Nordmann, Hochstoeger, and Keays, 2017) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The first involves a magnetic iron mineral: (Wiltschko and Wiltschko, 2013;

Shaw et al., 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the 1970s, scientists discovered: (Blakemore, 1975)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For decades, many scientists were sure: (Fleissner et al., 2003, 2007) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2012, Keays published a bombshell study: (Treiber et al., 2012) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

That same year, another team: (Eder et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Keays debunked this finding: (Edelman et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

As a shark swims: (Paulin, 1995)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The French zoologist Camille Viguier: (Viguier, 1882)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Almost 130 years later, David Keays: (Nimpf et al., 2019) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

It’s also notable that, in 2011: (Wu and Dickman, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

It involves two molecules: A good review of the radical pair hypothesis is

Hore and Mouritsen (2016).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

He submitted a paper: (Schulten, personal communication, 2010) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Undeterred, he published the paper: (Schulten, Swenberg, and Weller,

1978) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2000, Schulten and his student: (Ritz, Adem, and Schulten, 2000) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Known as cluster N: (Mouritsen et al., 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Cluster N gets information: (Heyers et al., 2007; Zapka et al., 2009) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

One called Cry4: (Einwich et al., 2020; Hochstoeger et al., 2020) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And why, as Mouritsen showed: (Engels et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A 1997 study claimed that honeybees: (Kirschvink et al., 1997) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Two decades later, another group: (Baltzley and Nabity, 2018) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1999, an American team: (Etheredge et al., 1999)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2002, the Wiltschkos: (Wiltschko et al., 2002)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A decade later, Henrik Mouritsen: (Hein et al., 2011; Engels et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2015, an American team: (Vidal-Gadea et al., 2015; Qin et al., 2016) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Neither study could be replicated: (Meister, 2016; Winklhofer and

Mouritsen, 2016; Friis, Sjulstok, and Solov’yov, 2017; Landler et al., 2018) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Baker published his results: (Baker, 1980)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

More recently, geophysicist Joseph Kirschvink: (Wang et al., 2019) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They might tweak their experimental plans: A review of the many issues

with irreproducible science is Aschwanden (2015).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Sonke Johnsen, Ken Lohmann: (Johnsen, Lohmann, and Warrant, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Instead, they seem to use it: Magnetoreception and other means of animal

navigation are reviewed in Mouritsen (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 12

Venkataraman tells me that the mosquitoes: The sensory cues that

mosquitoes use to find their hosts are reviewed in Wolff and Riffell (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But it failed when Vosshall: (DeGennaro et al., 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Switching tactics, Vosshall’s team tried: (McMeniman et al., 2014) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When Vosshall’s student Molly Liu: (Liu and Vosshall, 2019) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

After all, that’s likely what DEET: (Dennis, Goldman, and Vosshall, 2019) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But thousands of years ago: (McBride et al., 2014; McBride, 2016) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Jumping spiders depend on: (Shamble et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The star-nosed mole hunts: (Catania, 2006)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Smell dominates the lives of ants: (Barbero et al., 2009) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Smells also guide sharks: (Gardiner et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The Ubangi elephantnose fish: (von der Emde and Ruhl, 2016) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Songbirds and bogong moths: (Dreyer et al., 2018; Mouritsen, 2018) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some people experience synesthesia: (Ward, 2013)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The platypus’s duck-like bill: (Pettigrew, Manger, and Fine, 1998) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“these probably fuse”: (Wheeler, 1910, p.
510)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Electric fish that learn: (Schumacher et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even bumblebees can tell: (Solvi, Gutierrez Al-Khudhairy, and Chittka, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

There’s proprioception, the awareness: Proprioception is reviewed in

Tuthill and Azim (2018).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1971, a 19-year-old butcher: (Cole, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When animals move, their sense organs: The concepts of exafference,

reafference, and corollary discharges are reviewed in Cullen (2004); Crapse

and Sommer (2008).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Consider a simple earthworm: (Merker, 2005)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But no animals are completely immobile: (Ludeman et al., 2014) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Philosophers and scholars have speculated: For a full history of this idea,

see Grüsser (1994).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

As of 1950, the duplicated motor commands: (von Holst and Mittelstaedt,

1950; Sperry, 1950) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For a full history: (Grüsser, 1994)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Scientists have learned a lot: Corollary discharges in electric fish are

reviewed in Sawtell (2017); Fukutomi and Carlson (2020).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

They’re how chirping crickets: (Poulet and Hedwig, 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some scientists have suggested that schizophrenia: (Pynn and DeSouza,

2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

An octopus’s central nervous system: The neurobiology of the octopus is

reviewed in Grasso (2014); Levy and Hochner (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“An octopus effectively has nine brains”: (Crook and Walters, 2014) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Meanwhile, it simultaneously touches and tastes: (Graziadei and Gagne,

1976) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The suckers’ independence is obvious: (Nesher et al., 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Between them, each sucker ganglion: (Grasso, 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

For example, neurobiologist Binyamin Hochner: (Sumbre et al., 2006) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

But Hochner’s colleague Tamar Gutnick: (Gutnick et al., 2011) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Letizia Zullo, another member of Hochner’s team: (Zullo et al., 2009;

Hochner, 2013) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“a body of pure possibility”: (Godfrey-Smith, 2016, p.
48) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Godfrey-Smith marvelously compares: (Godfrey-Smith, 2016, p.
105) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The octopus, then, arguably has two: (Grasso, 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

CHAPTER 13

We have instigated: The sixth extinction of wildlife is documented in Kolbert

(2014); Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Dirzo (2017).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Instead of stepping into the Umwelten: Sensory pollution is reviewed in

Swaddle et al.
(2015); Dominoni et al.
(2020).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Other, slow-moving species: (Spoelstra et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A team of Dutch scientists: (D’Estries, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2001, when astronomer Pierantonio Cinzano: (Cinzano, Falchi, and

Elvidge, 2001) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2016, when the team updated: (Falchi et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Every year, the proportion: (Kyba et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“The thought of light”: (Johnsen, 2012, p.
57)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

And by analyzing radar images: (Van Doren et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1886, shortly after Edison: (Longcore and Rich, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Over a century later, environmental scientist: (Longcore et al., 2012) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Many of these deaths: (Gehring, Kerlinger, and Manville, 2009) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Light at night: Light pollution and its effects on wildlife are reviewed in Sanders et al.
(2021).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In part, that’s because biologists: (Gaston, 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

When sea turtle hatchlings emerge: (Witherington and Martin, 2003) GO

TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Artificial lights can also fatally attract: (Owens et al., 2020) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

A single streetlamp: (Degen et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2014, as part of an experiment: (Knop et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Insects with aquatic larvae: (Horváth et al., 2009)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Flickering lightbulbs can cause headaches: (Inger et al., 2014) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The new generation of energy-efficient white LEDs: (Falchi et al., 2016;

Longcore, 2018) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To protect them, the team first: (Buxton et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even the most heavily protected areas: Noise pollution and its effects are

reviewed in Barber, Crooks, and Fristrup (2010); Shannon et al.
(2016).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Two-thirds of Europeans: (Swaddle et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2003, Hans Slabbekoorn: (Slabbekoorn and Peet, 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

A year later, Henrik Brumm: (Brumm, 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

These influential studies spurred: (Leonard and Horn, 2008; Gross,

Pasinelli, and Kunc, 2010; Montague, Danek-Gontard, and Kunc, 2013; Gil et

al., 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Every extra 3 decibels: (Francis et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2012, Jesse Barber, Heidi Ware: (Ware et al., 2015)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In one experiment, ladybird beetles: (Barton et al., 2018) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

In noisy conditions, prairie dogs: (Shannon et al., 2014) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Owls flub their attacks: (Senzaki et al., 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Parasitic Ormia flies struggle: (Phillips et al., 2019) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

IN TEXT

Sage grouse abandon: (Blickley et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the summer of 2017: (Suraci et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

More than 83 percent: (Riitters and Wickham, 2003)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Even the seas can’t offer silence: Natural and anthropogenic noises in the

ocean are reviewed in Duarte et al.
(2021).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

War of the Whales: (Horwitz, 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Either way, sonar clearly disturbs them: (DeRuiter et al., 2013; Miller,

Kvadsheim, et al., 2015) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Between World War II and 2008: (Frisk, 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Since giant whales can live: (Payne and Webb, 1971)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

As ships pass in the night: (Rolland et al., 2012; Erbe, Dunlop, and Dolman,

2018; Tsujii et al., 2018; Erbe et al., 2019) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Crabs stop feeding: (Kunc et al., 2014; Simpson et al., 2016; Murchy et al.,

2019) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

“We’re conducting an experiment”: For more on shipping noise, see

Hildebrand (2005); Malakoff (2010).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Smooth vertical surfaces: (Greif et al., 2017)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

DMS, the seaweed-y chemical: (Wilcox, Van Sebille, and Hardesty, 2015;

Savoca et al., 2016) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The currents produced by objects: (Rycyk et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Odorants in river water: (Tierney et al., 2008)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Weak electric fields: (Gill et al., 2014)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some urban moths: (Altermatt and Ebert, 2016)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Some urban spiders: (Czaczkes et al., 2018)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the towns of Panama: (Halfwerk et al., 2019)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

That extraordinary diversity arose: (Seehausen et al., 2008) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

By turning off the light: (Seehausen, van Alphen, and Witte, 1997) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Lake Victoria’s cichlids also suffered: (Witte et al., 2013) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2020, science writer Maya Kapoor: (Kapoor, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the woodlands of New Mexico: (Francis et al., 2012)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 2016, marine biologist Tim Gordon: (Gordon et al., 2018, 2019) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Wire cages that are: (Irwin, Horner, and Lohmann, 2004)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

With fewer planes and cars: (Jechow and Hölker, 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Seismic vibrations around the world: (Lecocq et al., 2020) GO TO NOTE

REFERENCE IN TEXT

Alaska’s Glacier Bay: (Calma, 2020; Smith et al., 2020)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Behavioral ecologist Elizabeth Derryberry: (Derryberry et al., 2020) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the summer of 2007: (Stack et al., 2011)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

To truly make a dent: Ways of reducing sensory pollution are reviewed in

Longcore and Rich (2016); Duarte et al.
(2021).
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1995, environmental historian William Cronon: (Cronon, 1996) GO TO

NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In 1934, after considering: (Uexküll, 2010, p.
133)

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT





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Insert Photo Credits

1: (dog nose): Gunn Shots !
2: (ants): Daniel Kronauer

3: top (elephants): sheilapic76; center (albatross): Seabird

NZ; bottom (snake): Lisa Zins 4: (butterfly): Tambako the

Jaguar

5: (catfish): Mathias Appel

6: (jumping spider): Artur Rydzewski 7: (fly): janetgraham84

8: (scallop eyes): Sonke Johnsen

9: (brittle star): Ophiocoma wendtii (Müller & Troschel,

1842), observed in Puerto Rico by Kent Miller 10:

(mayfly): treegrow

11: (chameleon): VVillamon

12: (Streetsia): E.
A.
Lazo-Wasem, Yale Peabody Museum

13: (sweat bee): Eric Warrant

14: (hawkmoth): Nick Goodrum Photography 15: Ed Yong; bottom photo created using the Dog Vision Tool by

András Péter 16: top (black-eyed Susan): adrian davies /

Alamy Stock Photo; bottom (damselfish): Ulrike Siebeck

17: top (hummingbird): Larry Lamsa; bottom

(butterflies): berniedup 18: top and bottom (mantis

shrimp and eye): prilfish 19: (naked mole rat): John

Brighenti 20: (ground squirrel): Ed Yong

21: top (beetle): Helmut Schmitz; center (bat): Acatenazzi

at English Wikipedia; bottom (rattlesnake): bamyers4az

22: top (sea otter): Colleen Reichmuth; bottom (red

knots): U.
S.
Fish and Wildlife Service—Northeast Region

23: top (star-nosed mole): gordonramsaysubmissions;

center (jewel wasp): Ken Catania; bottom left (crested

auklet): USFWS Headquarters; bottom right (mouse):

JohannPiber 24: (manatee): USFWS Endangered Species

25: (crocodile): JustinJensen

26: top (harbor seal): Colleen Reichmuth; bottom (harbor

seal): Ed Yong 27: (peacock): onecog2many

28: (tiger wandering spider): Hakan Soderholm / Alamy

Stock Photo 29: (treehoppers): USGS Bee Inventory and

Monitoring Lab 30: top (scorpion): Xbuzzi; center (golden

moles): Galen Rathbun, courtesy of California Academy of

Sciences; bottom (snake): Karen Warkentin 31: top

(Nephila spider): srikaanth.srikar ; bottom (Argyrodes

spider): spiderman (Frank) 32: top (barn owl): AHisgett;

bottom (fly): treegrow 33: (frog): brian.gratwicke

34: (finch): archer10 (Dennis)

35: top (whale): greyloch; bottom (elephant): Kumaravel

36: (tarsier): berniedup

37: (wax moth): Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren 38:

(hummingbird): Bettina Arrigoni 39: (bat): Jesse Barber

40: (dolphins): J.
D.
Ebberly

41: top (black ghost knifefish): blickwinkel / Alamy Stock

Photo; center right (electric eel): chrisbb@prodigy.net ;

center left (glass knifefish): Charles & Clint; bottom

(elephantfish): Imagebroker / Alamy Stock Photo 42: top

(shark ampullae): Albert kok; center (sawfish): Simon

Fraser University; bottom (hammerhead): Numinosity by

Gary J.
Wood 43: (platypus): Klaus

44: (bumblebee): wwarby

45: top (moth): CSIRO; center (robin): tallpomlin; bottom

(turtle): Dionysisa303

46: (octopus): Joe Parks





Index

The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version

of the book.
Each link will take you to the beginning of the

corresponding print page.
You may need to scroll forward

from that location to find the corresponding reference on

your e-reader.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V

W X Y Z

A

acid and naked mole-rats, 118, 119

Ackerman, Diane, 25

active electrolocation, 279–81

See also electric fish

Adamo, Shelley, 127, 129–30

African elephants, sense of smell of, 33–35, 36–37

ALAN, 340

alligators, 180–81

ambon damselfish, 95

amino acids, 50

animals

ability to sense earthquakes, 198

as automata, 122–23

consciousness in, 11, 122, 126–27, 129, 130, 133,

247–48

extinction and size of, 203

human inability to truly know, 11, 248, 254, 317, 332–

34

as multisensory, 319, 320–24

number of sensory organs of specific, 10

sensory systems and bodies of, 282–83, 319

sensory systems convergence, 324

Umwelten of, 3–7

See also specific animals

antennation, 30

Anthropocene, 336

anthropomorphism,  12

ants

as multisensory, 323

multisensory organs, 324

sense of smell, 30–33

vision, 92, 93

Appel, Mirjam, 127–28

Arikawa, Kentaro, 13, 90, 103–4

Aristotle

forked tongue of snakes, 43

humans’ sense of touch, 158

number of senses, 10

omission of internal senses, 325

on sense of smell, 25

armadillos, vision of, 87

Au, Whitlow, 262, 265, 268

Audubon, John James, 38

Axel, Richard, 27–28

B

Bagriantsev, Slav, 166

Baker, Robin, 316

Bakken, George, 150, 152, 153, 154

Baldwin, Maude, 51–52

Bálint, Anna, 155

Bang, Betsy, 39, 40

Barber, Jesse

bat research, 242, 243, 244–45, 335, 336

human pollution research, 336, 337, 344

moth research, 258–60

Barth, Friedrich, 185, 187, 207

Basolo, Alexandra, 222

Bates, Lucy, 33–35, 36–37

Bates, Tim, 40–41

bats

brain, 250

communication, 253

constant-frequency (CF), 255, 256–58

echolocation, 242, 245–54, 257–58, 260

effect of red wavelength light, 341

effect of white wavelength light, 337

evolution, 248, 261

frequency-modulated (FM), 255, 256, 257

human light pollution and, 337

hunting by, 223, 244–45, 252–53, 258–59, 260

magnetoreception, 305

mechanoreceptors, 183–84

sense of hearing, 249

success of, 255

Bauer, Gordon, 170–74

beaked whales, 266–67, 345

Bedore, Christine, 292

bees

color vision, 95

convergence of sensory systems, 324

electroreceptors, 296–97

UV vision, 94

vision of nocturnal, 77–79

beetles, 344

Being a Dog (Horowitz), 24

Benoit-Bird, Kelly, 268

Bernal, Ximena, 223

Beston, Henry, 7

big brown bats

echolocation, 250, 251, 252

hearing, 249

hunting, 252, 253, 259

magnetoreception, 305

bioluminescence, 80–82

birds

brain, 71–72, 314

CFF vision, 76

color vision, 96–99

detectability of sweetness, 51–52

ears, 213, 312

effect of red wavelength light, 341

electromagnetic induction, 312, 313–14

eyes, 313

hearing, 224–27, 228–31

light pollution by humans, 339, 340

magnetoreception, 309

migrations, 303, 304, 306, 309

as multisensory, 323

noise pollution by humans, 343, 344, 348–49

sense of smell, 38–42

sense of touch, 157, 165–67, 168, 182–83

UV markings on, 94

visual field, 70, 72

See also birds of prey; songbirds

Bird Sense (Birkhead), 165–66

birds of prey

ears, 213

eyes, 71–72, 249

visual acuity, 62–63, 71–72

visual field, 69–70

Birkhead, Tim, 165–66

bitterness

detectability of, 51

as warning of toxins, 48, 50–51

black ghost knifefishes, 278–79, 280, 281, 282, 286

described, 278–79

Blix, Magnus, 137

blood, as food, 147

blue whales

foraging by, 234–35

vocalizations, 232, 233

bogong moths, 301, 323

bottlenose dolphins, 262

brain

bat, 250

bird, 71–72, 314

color vision and, 86, 116

color vision of mantis shrimp, 108

consciousness and, 126–27

electricity and, 295

elephantfish, 288

human

as maps of body, 331

as percent of body weight and oxygen use, 288

human echolocation and, 274–75

octopus, 330, 331–32

pain and, 120–21, 126

processing of visual images by, 75–76

sections controlling senses, 48

somatosensory cortex, 157, 162–63

Braithwaite, Victoria, 124–25

Branstetter, Brian, 264

Briscoe, Adriana, 99

brittle stars, 68–69

Broca, Paul, 24

Broom, Donald, 123, 124

Brownell, Philip, 197–98

Brumm, Henrik, 343

Bryant, Astra, 145, 146

Buck, Linda, 27–28

Bullock, Ted, 286

bumblebees, 296–97, 324

butterflies

color vision, 100–101

hearing, 241

migrations, 301

photoreceptors, 59, 103–4

as prey, 99–100

visual acuity, 63, 64

Buxton, Rachel, 343

C

Caldwell, Michael, 190

Cambrian explosion, 60

Caprio, John

on catfish’s sense of taste, 47–48, 50

capsaicin and naked mole-rats, 118, 119

Caputi, Angel, 283

carbon dioxide and naked mole-rats, 118

Carlson, Bruce, 283, 286, 287, 288, 289, 294, 327

Caro, Tim, 61–62

Carr, Ann, 148

Carr, Archie, 307

Casas, Jerome, 186, 187

“The Case of the Colorblind Painter” (Sacks and

Wasserman), 86

Catania, Ken

electric eels, 277

electroreceptors of star-nosed moles, 293

research tools of, 354

on sensitivity of animals’ sense of touch, 161, 181

touch sensors of star-nosed moles, 162–63, 164, 165

worms and vibrations, 199–200

catfish, sense of taste, 50

cats, CFF vision, 76

Caves, Eleanor, 62, 63

central nervous systems, 126–27, 328, 330–31

See also brain

cephalopods

pain and, 130–31, 133–34

photoreceptors, 58–59, 87

polarized light and, 112

See also octopuses

chameleons, 72–73

Chatigny, Frederic, 133

cheetahs, visual acuity, 63

chemical senses, 10, 26–27

See also smell, sense of; taste, sense of

Chernetsov, Nikita, 309

chickens, mechanoreceptors of, 165

Chiou, Tsyr-Huei, 112

Chittka, Lars, 115

chromophores, 58

cichlid fish, 347–48

Cinzano, Pierantonio, 337–38

circular polarization, 112–14

Clark, Chris, 232–34, 238, 354

Clark, Rulon, 44, 149, 154, 215

cleaner shrimp, visual acuity of, 63

clonal raider ants, 29–30, 32–33

cockroaches, 167–68

Cocroft, Rex

insect vibrations, 14, 192–95, 196–97

music and, 205

research tools of, 196, 354

Ryan and, 13, 220

cold-blooded animals, TRP channels of, 138

Cole, Hunter, 335–36, 337, 338

“color-blind” people, 88–89

color vision

bee, 95

bird, 96–99

brain and, 86, 116

dichromacy, 88–89

dog, 84–85, 88

evolution and, 87–88, 89, 90, 98, 114, 115

human, 85–86, 88–89, 97, 103

mantis shrimp, 106–9

non-spectral colors and, 97, 98–99

opponency as basis, 86

opsins and, 85–86, 89, 90

predator-prey relationships and, 115

snake, 151–52

subjectivity of, 86

test of dogs’, 84–85

UV, 92–95, 107

zebrafish, 103

consciousness

ability to imagine, experiences of other animals, 11,

247–48

nervous systems and, 126–27, 328

pain and, 122, 129, 130, 133

conservation attempts, 349–50, 351–52

constant-frequency (CF) bats, 255, 256–58

Coombs, Sheryl, 178

Corcoran, Aaron, 258–59

corollary discharges, 327–28

COVID-19, 350–51

crabs

noise pollution by humans, 346

pain and, 127

vibrations and, 191

crickets, 186–87, 218, 219

critical flicker-fusion frequencies (CFFs), 75–76

Cronin, Tom, 106, 109, 111, 113

Cronon, William, 352–53

Crook, Robyn

on central nervous system of octopus, 330

consciousness and animals’ nervous systems, 127

on pain, 121, 122, 124, 130

cross-modal object recognition, 324

crustaceans and polarized light, 112

Cummings, Molly, 94–95, 115

Cunningham, Susan, 167

Cuthill, Innes, 95

cuttlefish and noise pollution by humans, 346

D

d’Aguilon, François, 326–27

damselfish, 95, 346

Daniel Kronauer, 320–21

Darwin, Charles

on electric fish, 278

on evolution of modern complex eye, 60

on sense of smell, 25

on worms and vibrations, 200

deep-sea animals

effects of human-made light on, 80

eyes, 56, 73, 81–82

DEET, 321

Dehnhardt, Guido, 174, 175

depth perception, 70

Derryberry, Elizabeth, 351

Descartes, René, 122

d’Ettorre, Patrizia, 32

dichromacy, 88–89, 90–91

Dickman, David, 312

Dijkgraaf, Sven, 177–78, 246, 283, 290

dinosaurs

sense of smell, 39

sense of touch, 168–69, 181–82

vision, 98

directionality, 50, 281–82

See also migrations

Di Silvestro, Roger, 186

distributed vision, 67–69

Do Fish Feel Pain?
(Braithwaite), 124–25

dogs

color vision, 84–85, 88

domestication and faces of, 18

as multisensory, 323

nose as infrared sensor, 154–55

sense of smell, 17–24, 26

sense of smell compared to African elephants’, 34

sense of smell compared to humans’, 18–19, 23, 24,

26

dolphins

convergence of sensory systems, 324

echolocation, 262, 263, 265–66

electroreceptors, 293, 294

evolution, 261

hunting by, 267, 268

research and characteristics of, 261–62

vocalizations, 264, 265

domestication and dog’s face, 18

Donaldson, Henry, 137

doodlebugs, 199

Dooling, Robert, 225–26, 237

Doppler effect, 257–58

dragonflies

CFF vision, 76

hunting by, 75

light pollution by humans, 341

ducks, mechanoreceptors of, 165–66

Dunning, Dorothy, 259

Duranton, Charlotte, 22

E

ears

bird, 213, 312

evolution of, 216

frog, 221–22

human, 211–12

insect, 216, 217, 218–19

mammalian similarities, 215

tradeoff between exceptional temporal resolution or

exceptional pitch sensitivity, 228

earthquakes

animals’ ability to sense, 198

earthworms, 325–26

echidnas, 294, 295

echolocation

acoustic tags to study, 267

bat, 242, 245–54, 257–58, 260

coining of term, 279

distance and, 265–66, 267–68

dolphin, 262, 263, 265–66

evolution and, 242, 248

fictional characters, 270–71

frequencies changes, 252

human, 268–69, 270–75

owls, 270

toothed whale, 263

as touching and seeing with sound, 263, 266, 271–74,

275

volume of call, 249

whale, 267

Eimer’s organs, 162, 163

Eisemann, Craig, 133

electric eels, 277

electric fields on Earth, 295–98

electric fish, 276–77, 279–81, 293, 324

See also electrolocation

electromagnetic induction, 311–12

electromagnetic spectrum, 92

electroreception

advantages of, 285–86

as communication, 286–89

conduction of electricity in water, 279, 280

corollary discharges, 327–28

distance and, 282, 287

electrolocation, 279–80, 282, 283, 294–95

as form of sense of touch, 283

hunting and, 284

as instantaneous sense, 281

mammalian, 293–94

as omnidirectional sense, 281–82

passive, 291–92

platypus, 323–24

reliability of, 284

study of, 285

water salinity and, 281

See also electric fish

electroreceptors

ampullae of Lorenzini of sharks, 290, 291, 292

bumblebee, 296–97

elephantfish’s knollenorgan, 287, 327

evolution and, 294–95

fish, 280, 283–84, 289

mammalian, 293–95

elephantfishes, 278, 285, 287–89, 294–95, 327

elephant hawkmoths, 83

elephants

infrasounds made by, 235–37

sense of smell, 33–38

vibrations and, 201–2, 236–37

vomeronasal organ and, 46

The Elephant’s Secret Sense (O’Connell), 202

Elwood, Robert, 127–28, 132

emerald jewel wasps, 167–68

Emlen, Steve, 304

endothermic animals

parasites and, 146–47

TRP channels, 138

equilibrioception, 10, 325

evolution

ability to see over long distances and, 8, 15

bat, 248, 261

bone-conduction of vibrations and, 200

color vision and, 87–88, 89, 90, 98, 114, 115

diversity of species, 347–48

dolphin, 261

echolocation and, 242, 248

electroreceptors, 294–95

elephantfishes, 287–88

extinction, 348

of eyes, 58, 59–60

hearing and, 212, 215–16, 217, 242

insects, 168

mosquito, 321–22

moth, 260

nociceptors and, 119

pain and, 129

sensory exploitation, 222

sexual selection and, 288

whale, 234

whisking and, 170

exafference signals, 325–28

extremophiles, 139–40

eyes

animal, 54–57

bird, 71–72, 249, 313

cryptochromes in, 313–14, 315

evolution of, 58, 59–60

fairy wasps, 56

giant squid, 56, 81–82

human, 213

jellyfish, 60

mantis shrimp, 106–8, 109–10, 111, 112, 114

movement detection and, 111

polarized light and, 112

primate, 61

scallop, 65–67, 76

shrimp, 105–7, 109–10

snake, 151–53

spider, 186

squid, 56, 73, 81–82

starfish, 60–61

swordfish, 81

tapetum in, 79

vulture, 70

whale, 72, 87

F

fairy wasps, eyes of, 56

false killer whales, 263, 266

Farley, Roger, 197–98

fiddler crabs, 191

filoplumes, 183

fin whales, vocalizations of, 231, 232, 233

fire-chaser beetles, 142–45

fish

diversity of species, 347–48

electric, 276–77, 279–81, 293, 324

electrolocation, 294–95

hearing and mating, 230

hearing frequency, 266

in Lake Victoria, 347–48

lateral line, 177–79, 326

magnetoreception, 305

mechanoreceptors, 168

as multisensory, 323

noise pollution by humans, 346

pain and, 124–26, 130

soundless Great Barrier Reef and, 349–50

sound made by, 285

with UV stripes, 95

Fishbein, Adam, 226

flies

CFF vision, 76

ears, 218, 219

nociceptors, 127

noise pollution by humans, 344

photoreceptors, 75

temperature sensors, 140–41

visual acuity, 64

visual field, 73

Forel, Auguste, 33

Fortune, Eric, 276, 280–81, 282, 284–85, 354

four-eyed fish, 73

Francis, Clinton, 347, 348–49, 351

frequency-modulated (FM) bats, 255, 256, 257

Fristrup, Kurt, 343, 344, 351

frogs

ears, 221–22, 241

embryos, 188–90

mating by, 220–23

as prey, 115

vibrations and, 189–90

Fromme, Hans, 303

fruit flies, 127, 140–41

G

Gagliardo, Anna, 42

Gal, Ram, 167–68

Galambos, Robert, 246

Gall, Megan, 229

Gallio, Marco, 140, 141

garter snakes, 44, 46

Geipel, Inga, 253

Gentle, Mike, 124–25

geomagnetic fields.
See magnetic fields

giant squid

eyes, 56, 81–82

first seen, by humans, 82

giraffes, visual acuity of, 63

glass knifefish, 285, 286

Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 332

golden moles, 200–201

goldfish, 97, 125

Gol’din, Pavel, 266

Goldscheider, Alfred, 137

Gonzalez-Bellido, Paloma, 74, 76, 354

Gordon, Tim, 349–50, 352

Goris, Richard, 151

G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), 52

Gracheva, Elena

animals’ heat comfort level, 136-37, 139

bats’ detection of heat and, 147–48

duck sense of touch, 166

heat sensors of snakes, 150, 151

Granger, Jesse, 305–6

Grant, Robyn, 169, 170

Grasso, Frank, 329, 330

gray whales, 306

Great Barrier Reef, 349–50

Griffin, Donald

“bumbling bats,” 254

coining of term echolocation, 279

echolocation by bats, 245–47, 260

on magnetoreception, 304

research tools of, 354

“simplicity filters” of biologists, 12

griffin vultures, vision of, 69–70

ground squirrels

heat comfort level, 136–37, 139

hibernation, 135–36

rattlesnakes and, 152

TRP channels, 138

ultrasonic vocalizations, 239

Grüsser, Otto-Joachim, 327

Guiana dolphins, 293, 294

gustation.
See sense of taste

Gutnick, Tamar, 331

H

habitats and Umwelten, 9

Hagedorn, Mary, 287

hair of mammals, 169

Hallem, Elissa, 146

harbor seals, 174–77

Hartridge, Hamilton, 246

Hasler, Arthur, 38

hawkmoths, 259

hearing, sense of

See also ears; echolocation; vibrations

ability to measure properties of sound waves, 27

bat, 223, 249

bird, 224–27, 228–31

butterflies, 241

communication and, 217

as detection of movement of waves, 211

distance and, 214, 239–40

evolution and, 212, 215–16, 217, 242

fish, 266, 349–50

frequency, 224, 231, 239–40

frog, 241

human, 213, 231

hummingbirds, 142, 241

hunting and, 214, 217, 218

insect, 187

mating and, 229–30

nightfall and, 237

owl, 210–11, 212–13

ranges of mammals, 239–41

temporal nature of sounds, 225–27

volume and frequency range, 231

whales, 231–34, 237–38

heat

animals’ varying comfort levels of, 136–37, 138, 139

bats’ sensors, 147

distance and, 155

from infrared light, 143–44

parasites and parasitism, 146–47

snakes’ sensors, 150–52

ticks’ sensors, 148–49

Heffner, Henry, 239–40

Heffner, Rickye, 239–40

Heiligenberg, Walter, 287

Heliconius erato butterflies, 99–101

Heliconius melpomene butterflies, 99–100

Helmholtz, Hermann von, 327

Hendricks, Michael, 328

hermit crabs, 127

hibernation, described, 135–36

Hildebrand, John, 345, 346

Hill, Peggy, 192, 201–2

Hofer, Bruno, 177

honeybees, CFF vision of, 76

Hopkins, Carl, 281

Hore, Peter, 315

Horowitz, Alexandra

on dogs’ constant use of smell, 17–18

on humans’ use of smell, 22, 23

“informed imaginative leap” needed for

understanding, 13

on studying dogs’ sense of smell, 20, 21

horseflies and zebras, 62

horses, color vision of, 88

Horwitz, Joshua, 345

How, Martin, 109–10, 111

Hoy, Ron, 218

Hughes, Howard, 286

humans

bias in understanding sensory systems of animals, 317

brain, 274–75, 288, 331

central nervous system, 330

changes during Anthropocene, 336–49

convergence of sensory systems, 324

ears, 211–12

echolocation, 268–69, 270–75

experiences of, as disconnected from sense organs, 333

eyes, 56, 213

hearing, 213, 224, 231, 255–57

inability to truly know animals, 11, 248, 254, 317,

323–34

light pollution by, 80, 336–42, 350–51

magnetoreceptive ability, 316

as multisensory, 323

noise pollution by, 80, 343–46, 351

number of sensory organs, 10–11

pain, 121, 131

pheromones, 30

reaction to dogs’ sniffing, 21–22, 23

sense of smell, 19, 22, 23, 28

sense of smell compared to dogs’, 18–19, 23, 24, 26

sense of touch, 158, 160–61, 331

sensing of electricity by, 291–92

study of Umwelten of other animals as deeply, 9

tactile sensitive areas of body, 157

TRP channels, 138

Umwelten as expanding experiences of, 14–15

Umwelten of, compared to animals’, 3–7, 12

Umwelten of astronomers, 353–54

vibrations and, 203–4, 211, 214

vision imposed on animals by, 12

vomeronasal organ and, 46

humans: vision

acuity of, 62–63, 71

color, 85–86, 88–89, 97, 101–2, 103

compared to whisking, 169–70

echolocation as form of, 271–74

eyes of, 56

primacy of, 11, 69

UV light, 93

visual field, 70

wavelength range of, 92

humility, need for, 12–13

hummingbirds

color vision, 96, 97

detectability of sweetness, 51–52

hearing frequency range of, 241

vocalizations by, 241

humpback whales

noise pollution by humans, 346, 351

vocalizations, 231

hunter-gatherer peoples and sense of smell, 25

hunting

by bats, 223, 244–45, 252–53, 258–59, 260

by blue whales, 234–35

butterflies as prey, 99–100

color vision and predator-prey relationships, 115

by dolphins, 267, 268

by dragonflies, 75

by electric eels, 277

electroreception and, 284

elephantfish, 327

frogs as prey, 115

hearing and, 214, 217, 218

by insects, 223

by jumping spiders, 54

by mosquitoes, 320–21, 322

passive electroreception and, 291–92

by platypuses, 324

by rays, 291, 292–93

by sharks, 291–92

smell and, 214

by snakes, 152

by spiders, 53–54

vibrations and, 199–200, 201

vision and, 214

by whales, 234–35

hydra, photoreceptors of, 58

hydrodynamic sense, 159, 173, 174–76, 180–81

hyenas, visual acuity of, 62

hyraxes, 172

I

“informed imaginative leaps,” 13

infrared light, 143–44

infrasounds, 231–32, 235–36

insects

ears, 216, 217, 218–19

effect of blue wavelength light, 341

effect of red wavelength light, 341

effect of white wavelength light, 337

evolution, 168

eyes of, 56–57

hearing, 187, 241–42

hunting by, 223

light pollution by humans, 336–37, 341

magnetic fields, 304

as multisensory, 323

multisensory organs, 324

pain and, 129–30, 133

polarized light and, 112

taste receptors of, 49–50

touch receptors of, 167–68

vibrations and, 4–5, 14, 191, 193–99

intelligence and vision, 53

J

Jacobs, Gerald, 90–91, 93

Jacobson’s organ, 10, 43, 46

Jahai, 25

Jakob, Elizabeth

on jumping spiders, 53–55

research tools of, 354

Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly, photoreceptors of, 59

Jeffery, Glen, 93

jellyfish, eyes of, 60

Johnsen, Sonke

background, 13

on effects of human-made light, 80, 338

on giant squid, 82

on magnetoreceptors, 310, 318

on scallops, 66

on scientific knowledge, 10

on stepping beyond one’s Umwelten,  13

on using Medusa, 80

on vision as being about light, 57

Jordan, Gabriele, 101, 102

jumping spiders

eyes, 54–55, 56

hunting tactics, 54

intelligence, 53–54

as multisensory, 323

vision and aging, 57

Jung, Julie, 190

Junkins, Maddy, 135, 136

K

Kaas, Jon, 163

Kajiura, Stephen, 291–92

Kalmijn, Adrianus, 290, 291

Kane, Suzanne Amador, 13, 182

kangaroo rats, 215

Kant, 25

Kapoor, Maya, 348

Keays, David, 311, 312, 315, 316, 319

Kelber, Almut, 71, 83, 95, 354

Ketten, Darlene, 238

killer flies, 74–76

Kirschvink, Joseph, 316

Kish, Daniel, 268–69, 270–71, 272–75, 323

knifefishes, 278–82, 285, 286, 294–95

knollenorgans, 287, 288, 327

Knop, Eva, 341

Knudsen, Eric, 212–13

Konishi, Masakazu, 212–13, 224

Kotler, Burt, 153

Krahling, Abby, 335, 336

Kröger, Ronald, 154–55

Kronauer, Daniel, 30, 32–33

L

ladybird beetles, 344

Lake Victoria (East Africa), 347–48

Laming, Peter, 125

Land, Mike

Marshall and, 106

on observing moving eyes of other sentient creatures,

55

scallop eyes, 67

study of jumping spiders’ vision and, 54

language and sensory world, 11

lateral lines, 177–79, 283–84, 292, 326

Lawson, Shelby, 226

Leitch, Duncan, 181

Libersat, Frederic, 167–68

light

diversity in, 347–48

infrared, 143–44

in ocean, 79–80

photoreceptors and, 83

polarized, 112

pollution by humans, 80, 336–42, 350–51

properties of, 58

radical pairs and magnetoreception, 312–15

stage at which light detection becomes vision, 59

ultraviolet, 92–95, 107

vision in areas of little or no, 78

vision speed and, 76

wavelength impact, 337, 341–42

wavelength ranges, 85–86, 87–88, 92

See also photoreceptors

Linsley, Earle Gorton, 142

lions, visual acuity of, 62

Lissman, Hans, 279, 290

Listening in the Dark (Griffin), 246, 254

little brown bats, 335, 337

Liu, Molly, 321

lobsters, 308–9

loggerhead turtles, 307–8

Lohmann, Catherine, 307, 308

Lohmann, Ken, 307, 308–10, 318

Longcore, Travis, 339–40, 342

longfin squid, 130–31

Lorenzini, Stefano, 290

Lubbock, John, 92–93

Lucas, Jeffrey, 227–28, 229

luna moths, 259–60

M

Maan, Martine, 115

Machin, Ken, 279

MacIver, Malcolm

on electrolocation, 278–279, 281–284

on importance of ability to see over long distances, 8,

15

Macpherson, Fiona, 10

magnetic fields

birds’ migrations and, 303, 304, 306, 309

changes in, and magnetic signatures, 309

as counterintuitive, 318

depiction of Earth’s, 301

distance and, 308

flipping of Earth’s, 307–8

insects’ response to, 304

magnetoreception and weakness of Earth’s, 304–5,

318

properties, 307

researching, 317

solar storms effect on, 305–6

songbirds’ ability to see, 314–15

magnetite, 311

magnetoreception, sense of

See also migrations

bat, 305

bird, 309

distance and, 308

fish, 305

human, 316

lobster, 308–9

mechanism for, 310–16, 317–18

naked mole-rats, 305

as noisy, 318–19

research, 302–3, 304, 316, 317–19

turtle, 307–8

used with other senses, 319

weakness of Earth’s magnetic fields, 304–5, 318

Majid, Asifa, 25

Malebranche, Nicolas, 122–23

Maler, Leonard, 281

mammals

ability to see UV light, 93

ear similarities, 215

echolocation, 268–69

electroreceptors, 293–95

hair, 169

hearing ranges, 239–41

localized nature of pain, 131

mechanoreceptors, 169

visual acuity, 62–63

See also humans; humans: vision

manatees, 170–73

mantis shrimp, 105–10, 111, 112–14

Marshall, Justin, 105–6, 108, 111

Martin, Graham, 69–70

mating

by fish, 230, 287

by frogs, 220–23

hearing and, 229–30

by mormyrin, 288

by moths, 242

vibrations and, 190–91, 195, 203

Matos-Cruz, Vanessa, 136–37, 138

Maxim, Hiram, 246

Maximov, Vadim, 87

mayflies, 73, 341

McBride, Arthur, 261

McClure, Christopher, 344

McGann, John, 24

mechanical senses, 10–11

See also hearing, sense of; touch, sense of; vibrations

mechanoreceptors, 8

bat, 183–84

bird, 165–67, 168, 183

fish, 168

insects, 167–68, 185, 186–87

mammalian, 169

operation of, 160, 214

types of, 159–60

Medusa (stealth camera), 80–81, 82

Meissner corpuscles, 160

Melchers, Mechthild, 184

Melin, Amanda, 61–62, 90, 91, 103

Menzel, Randolf, 115

Merkel, Friedrich, 303, 304

Merkel nerve endings, 159–60

Mexican free-tailed bats, 253

Mhatre, Natasha, 208

mice

sense of touch by whisking, 4, 157, 169–70

ultrasonic vocalizations, 238

Middendorff, Alexander von, 303

migrations

bird, 303, 304, 306, 309

butterfly, 301

moth, 301

New York City Tribute in Light and, 339

salmon, 37–38, 346–47

sea turtle, 306–8

whale, 305–6

Miller, Ashadee Kay, 21

Millsopp, Sarah, 125

monarch butterflies, 301

Monet, Claude, 93

monkeys of Americas, 90–92

monochromacy, 87–88, 90

Morehouse, Nate, 57

Morley, Erica, 298

mormyrins, 287–89

Mortimer, Beth, 204–5, 207

mosquitoes

detection of vibrations, 4–5

evolution, 321–22

hunting by, 320–21, 322

multisensory neurons, 324

taste receptors, 49

Moss, Cindy, 247–48, 250, 252

Moss, Cynthia, 35, 236

moths

evolution, 260

hearing, 241–42, 258–59

light pollution by humans, 341

mating by, 242

migration, 301

as multisensory, 323

pheromones, 30, 36

sense of smell, 29

Mouritsen, Henrik, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318

Murray, R.
W., 290

mustelids, 158

mysticete whales, hearing range of, 237–38

N

Nachtigall, Paul, 262, 263

Nagel, Thomas, 11, 247–48, 254, 334

naked mole-rats

basic facts about, 117–18

failure to respond to acids, capsaicin, and carbon

dioxide, 118, 119

sense of touch, 157, 172

Narins, Peter, 201

“natal homing,” 309

Nature, 238

navigation and sense of smell, 37–38, 42

Neeley, Liz, 149

Neitz, Jay, 84–85, 90–92, 93

Neitz, Maureen, 84, 91–92

nematodes, 145–46

Nephila spiders, 204–7

nervous systems and consciousness, 126–27, 328

neural arithmetic, 86

neuromasts, 177–79

Nevitt, Gabrielle, 40–41, 42

Nicolson, Adam, 42

Nilsson, Dan-Eric, 58–59, 60

nociceptors/nociception

basic facts about, 118–19

evolution and, 119, 129

fruit flies, 127

pain and, 118–22, 124

squid, 131

as widespread and consistent across animal kingdom,

122

nocturnal animals, vision of, 77–79

noise pollution, 343–46, 348–49, 351

non-spectral colors, 97

Norris, Ken, 261, 265

nosework classes, 22

O

O’Connell, Caitlin, 202–3, 236–37

octopuses

arms, 330–31, 332

as “body of pure possibility,” 332

central nervous system, 330–31

fusing of senses of touch and taste, 330

impossibility of human truly knowing, 329–30, 332–34

pain and, 131–32

photoreceptors, 58–59

visual acuity, 63

odontocetes, 262–63, 265, 267–68

See also specific species

odorants

animals, 21

compared to odors, 17

diffusion of, 20

memories and, 37–38, 346–47

receptors, 27–28, 32, 52

sensitivity of humans to, compared to dogs, 19, 24

variations in, 27

odors, 17

olfaction.
See sense of smell

olfactory bulbs

bird, 39, 40

dinosaur, 39

dog, 18

human, 24, 328

olive sea snakes, photoreceptors of, 58

Olivos Cisneros, Leonora, 29–30, 33

opponency, 86, 88

opsins

as basis of vision, 52

chromophores and, 57–58

color vision and, 85–86, 89, 90

The Optics of Life (Johnsen), 57

orb-weavers.
See spiders

orcas, 346

The Origin of Species (Darwin), 60, 278

oripulation, 171

Ortega, Catherine, 348–49

Ossiannilsson, Frej, 196, 205

Other Minds (Godfrey-Smith), 332

owls

echolocation by, 270

hearing, 210–11, 212–13

as multisensory, 323

noise pollution by humans, 344

P

Pacini, Aude, 266

Pacinian corpuscles, 160

Page, Rachel, 223

pain

animals’ ability to feel, 126–32, 133

brain and, 120–21, 126

cephalopods, 130–32, 133–34

consciousness and, 122, 129, 130, 133

crabs, 127

danger and, 128, 129

detecting among animals, 122

evolution and, 129

fish, 124–26, 130

human, 121, 131

as inherently subjective and variable, 120

insects, 129–30, 133

localized nature of mammalian, 131

morality and ethics of studying, 124, 132

nociception and, 118–22, 124

squid, 130–31

survival and, 120, 121

as unwanted sense, 124

parasites and heat, 146–47

parasitic wasps, stinger as receptor, 49

Park, Thomas, 118, 119

passive electroreception, 291–92

Paul, Sarah Catherine, 88

Payne, Katy, 231, 232, 235–36, 237

Payne, Roger, 210–11, 231, 232, 235

peacock mantis shrimp, 105–10, 111, 112–14

peacocks, 182–83

Peet, Margriet, 343

Peichl, Leo, 87

Pelger, Susanne, 60

pheromones

animal, 33

as being sculpted through experience, 48

ant, 30–33

described, 30

moths, 30

vomeronasal organ and, 46

photoreceptors

brittle star, 68

butterfly, 103–4

ciliary and rhabdomeric, 65

cones and rods, 82–83, 85–86, 87

false alarms from, 78

flies, 75

function of, 8

locations of, 58–59

mantis shrimp, 107

nocturnal animals, 78

opsins and chromophores, 57–58

polarized light and, 112

sensitivity versus resolution, 64–65

visual acuity and, 62, 71

Pierce, Naomi, 142

Piersma, Theunis, 166, 167

pinnipeds

visual field, 72

whiskers, 174–76

pit vipers, 150–51, 152–54

Plato, 25

platypuses

electrolocation, 294

electroreception, 323–24

most tactile sensitive area of body, 157

polarized light, 112

pollution

addressing sensory, 350

during COVID-19, 350–51

light, 80, 336–42, 350–51

multiple types of human, 346–47

noise, 343–46, 348–49, 351

Poole, Joyce, 236

Porter, Jess, 25–26

Porter, Megan, 58

positive judgment bias, 22

prairie dogs, 344

Prior, Nora, 227

proprioception, 10, 325

Proust, Marcel, 16

puff adders, 21

Pye, David, 216

R

raccoons, vision of, 87

radical pairs and magnetoreception, 312–15, 318

Ramsier, Marissa, 241

raptors, visual acuity of, 62–63

Rasmussen, Bets, 35–36, 37

Ratcliffe, John, 249–50

rats, ultrasonic vocalizations by, 239

rattlesnakes

heat and predation by, 154

heat sensors, 150

hunting by, 152

sense of smell, 44–45, 46

rays (animals)

electromagnetic induction, 311–12

hunting by, 291, 292–93

reafference signals, 325–28

receptors

detection of stimuli and, 7–8

G-protein-coupled, 52

odorant, 27–28, 32, 52

sense of taste, 49

See also magnetoreception, sense of; photoreceptors

Redetzke, Nate, 149–50

red postman butterflies, 90

Reep, Roger, 172

Reichmuth, Colleen, 15, 173–74, 175

“remote touch,” 167

Remple, Fiona, 164

right whales and noise pollution by humans, 346

Ritz, Thorsten, 313

robber flies, visual acuity of, 64

Robert, Daniel, 218, 296–97, 298, 299

Roberts, Nicholas, 109–10

Robinson, Nathan, 80

Rochon-Duvigneaud, André, 183

rodents, ultrasonic vocalizations by, 238–39

Roeder, Kenneth, 259

Ros, Margaret, 150

Rose, J.
D., 126

Rosenthal, Gil, 94–95

Rubin, Juliette, 244–45, 258, 259–60

Ruffini nerve endings, 160

Rutland, Mark, 161

Ryan, Mike, 13–14, 193, 220–23

Ryerson, Bill, 45

S

Sacks, Oliver, 86

sage grouse, 344

salamanders, 341

Salgado, Vincent, 148

salmon migrations, 37–38, 346–47

sand scorpions, 197–98

Santana, Carlos David de, 277

sawfish, 292–93

Sawtell, Nate, 288, 289

scallops

eyes, 65–67, 76

sense of smell, 66, 67

schizophrenia, 328

Schmitz, Helmut, 143–44, 145

Schnitzler, Hans-Ulrich, 256–57

Schraft, Hannes, 153

Schulten, Klaus, 313

Schwenk, Kurt, 43, 44, 45, 49, 354

Science, 316

Scientific American, 197

scrub-jays, 348–49

The Seabird’s Cry (Nicolson), 42

seals

as multisensory, 323

visual field, 72

whiskers, 174–76

sea otters, 155–59

sea turtles, migrations of, 306–8

sea urchins, vision of, 68

Seehausen, Ole, 347–48

seismic sense.
See vibrations

Seneviratne, Sampath, 168

sense organs

described, 8

exafference and reafference signals, 325–28

finding, 310

human experiences as disconnected from, 333

part of unified whole as crucial to understanding, 328–

29

See also sensory systems; specific organs/receptors

The Senses (Macpherson), 10

Sensory Exotica (Hughes), 286

sensory exploitation, 222

sensory systems

as combined and cross-referenced by animals at same

time, 319, 320–24

convergence of, 324

described, 8

human bias in understanding animals’, 11, 317

inward focused, 325

number of, 10

perpetual state of readiness of, 8–9

relationship of animal’s body to, 282–83

as stimuli filter, 9

subjectivity and, 11

sentience, 328

sexual selection and evolution, 288

sharks

electromagnetic induction, 311–12

hunting by, 291–92

as multisensory, 323

vision, 87

Sherrington, Charles Scott, 120

shorebirds, 166–67

shrimp

color vision, 106–9

eyes, 105–7, 109–10

vision, 111, 112–14

visual acuity, 63

Sidebotham, Joseph, 238

Siebeck, Ulrike, 95

sight, sense of.
See color vision; humans: vision; vision

Silent Thunder (Katy Payne), 235

Simmons, James, 248, 250

“simplicity filters,” 12

Slabbekoorn, Hans, 343

sloths, vision of, 87

smell, sense of

African elephant, 33–35, 36–37

animals navigating using, 37–38

animals with excellent, 24

ants, 29–30

bird, 38–41

comparing among different animals, 28, 29

dinosaur, 39

distance and, 155

dog, 17–24, 26

of dogs compared to African elephants’, 34

elephants, 33–38

experiences and, 48

human, 19, 23, 28

human compared to dogs’, 18–19, 23, 24, 26

hunter-gatherers and, 25

hunting and, 214

moths, 29

as navigation tool, 37–38

pheromones, 30–33, 46, 48

scallop, 66, 67

sense of taste compared to, 47–48, 52

sensing and reacting to stimulus without awareness,

123

snakes, 42–47, 49

as stereo, 42, 44

vibrations and, 28

vocabulary to describe, 25

Western view of, 25

Smith, Chuck, 45

snakes

eating habits, 48–49

eyes, 151–53

heat sensors, 150–52

hunting by, 152

photoreceptors, 58

sense of smell, 42–47, 49

sense of touch, 181

Sneddon, Lynne, 124–25

Soares, Daphne, 179, 180

Sobel, Noam, 27

solar storms, 306

sonar, 7, 345

See also echolocation

songbirds

ability to see Earth’s magnetic field, 314–15

detectability of sweetness, 51

electromagnetic induction and cryptochromes in eyes,

313–14

migrations, 309

as multisensory, 323

sound waves

density and, 266

distance and, 344–45

Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 245

Speiser, Daniel, 65, 66–67

sperm whales

bioluminescence triggered by, 81–82

vocalizations, 264–65

spiders

activity level, 53

electroreception, 298–99

eyes, 54–55, 56, 186

hunting tactics, 53–54

intelligence, 53–54

mechanoreceptors sense of touch, 184–85

as multisensory, 323

properties of silk spun by, 205, 207, 298

sense of touch, 186–87

UV vision, 94

vibrations and, 205–7

vision and aging, 57

webs as extensions of mind of, 208

spinner dolphins, 268

spiny lobsters, 308–9

Spoelstra, Kamiel, 337

sponges, 326

squid

eyes, 56, 73, 81–82

first seen giant, by humans, 82

nociception and, 131

pain, 130–31

squirrel monkeys, 90–91

squirrels

heat comfort level, 136–37, 139

hibernation, 135–36

rattlesnakes and, 152

TRP channels, 138

ultrasonic vocalizations, 239

Stager, Kenneth, 39

Standing Bear, Luther, 204

starfish, eyes of, 60–61

star-nosed moles, 161–65, 293, 323

Stebbins, William, 214

Stein, Rick, 127

Steinbuch, Johann Georg, 327

Sterbing, Susanne, 184

Stevens, Martin, 88

stimuli

detection of, 7–8

as information, 8

sensory system filtration of, 9

Stoddard, Mary Caswell “Cassie,” 96, 97, 98

strawberry poison frogs, 115

Streets, Amy, 104, 105, 109

Strobel, Sarah, 156–57, 158

subjectivity and senses, 11

Sumner-Rooney, Lauren, 68–69

Supa, Michael, 272

Suraci, Justin, 345

Surlykke, Annemarie, 249

sweat bees, vision of, 77–79

sweetness, detectability of, 49, 50, 51

swordfish

CFF vision, 76

eyes, 81

UV markings on tails, 94–95

synesthesia, 323–24

T

tactile organs.
See mechanoreceptors; touch, sense of;

whiskers and whisking

tadpoles, 188–90

Tang, Yezhong, 152–53

tapetum, 79

tarsiers, 241

taste, sense of

catfish, 50

as coarsest of senses, 48

insect receptors, 49–50

octopus, 330

as omnidirectional, 50

reflexive nature of, 47–48

sense of smell compared to, 47–48, 52

sensing and reacting to stimulus without awareness,

123–24

Tautz, Jürgen, 187

temperature

animals’ varying comfort levels of, 136–37, 138, 139

flies’ sensors, 140–41

TRP channels as sensors of, 137–39

See also heat

Temple, Shelby, 112

terminal buzz, 250

tetrachromacy, 96–99, 101–2

Thaler, Lore, 274, 275

thermotaxis, 141

Thoen, Hanne, 107

threadworms, 145–46

thrush nightingales, 309

ticks, 9, 148–49

tick-trefoil treehoppers, 193–95

tiger moths, 259

tiger wandering spiders, 184–85

timber rattlesnakes, 44–45

toads, CFF vision of, 76

toothed whales, 262–63

torpedo rays, 290

touch, sense of

See also mechanoreceptors

alligator, 180–81

birds, 182–83

brain region for, 157

cricket, 186–87

dinosaur, 181–82

distance and, 159, 173, 174–76, 177–79

echolocation as form of, 275

electrolocation as form of, 283

emerald jewel wasp, 167–68

fish, 177–79

harbor seals, 174–76

manatee oral disk, 171–72

most tactile sensitive areas of animals, 157–58

movement and, 161

octopus, 330

processing of human, 331

“remote touch,” 167

sensitivity of, 160–61

snake, 181

spider, 186–87

star-nosed mole, 162–63

tiger wandering spider, 184–85

vibrations and, 160, 161, 162

treehoppers, 14, 192–95

Tribute in Light (New York City), 338–39

trichromacy, 88, 90, 91, 100–102, 114

trout, 124–25

TRP channels, 137–39, 147–48, 151

tsetse flies and zebras, 62

tubenoses, 39, 40–41, 42

túngara frogs, 220–23

turkey vultures, 38–39

turtles

CFF vision, 76

imprinting magnetic signature of birthplace by, 309

light pollution by humans, 340–41

magnetic fields and, 307–8

U

Ubangi elephant fish (Peters’s elephantnose), 288, 321,

323

Uexküll, Jakob von

all animals as sentient entities, 6

animals’ bodies as their houses, 6, 322

on astronomer’s Umwelt, 353

stepping between Umwelten,  15

term Umwelt coined by, 5

ticks and, 9, 148

ultrasounds, 238–42, 247

See also echolocation

ultraviolet (UV) light and vision, 92–95, 107

umami, detectability of, 50, 51, 52

Umwelten

anthropomorphism and, 12

of astronomers, 353–54

as expanding human experiences, 14–15

expansion of, 15

of humans compared to animals’, 3–7, 12

on stepping beyond one’s, 13

study of, of other animals as deeply human, 9

term coined, 5

U.S.
Navy

dolphins and, 262

Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), 231, 232, 233

V

vampire bats, 147–48

Van Beveren, Daniel, 182

van Doren, Benjamin, 339

Venkataraman, Krithika, 320, 322

Vernaleo, Beth, 226

vibrations

alligators and, 180–81

bone-conduction of, 200–201

crabs and, 191

elephants and, 201–2, 236–37

fish and, 178

frogs and, 189–90

humans and, 203–4, 211, 212

hunting and, 199–200, 201

insects and, 4–5, 191, 193–99

mating and, 190–91, 195, 203

owl, 212

research and surface sound waves, 192

sense of touch and, 160, 161, 162

smells and, 28

songs from, 193–94, 196

spiders and, 205–7

treehopper communication by, 14

vision and, 112

vocabulary used to describe, 191

worms and, 199–200

See also whiskers and whisking

vibrissae (whiskers).
See whiskers and whisking

Viguier, Camille, 312

vision

ability to measure properties of light waves, 27

in areas of little or no light, 78

blind spots in, 69–70

brittle star, 68–69

CFFs of animals, 75–76

depth perception, 70

detecting movement as more important than color,

110–11

dinosaurs, 98

distance and, 155

distributed, 67–69

diversification of animals and, 59–60

experience and interpretation of world and, 56, 123

griffin vulture, 69–70

hunting and, 214

intelligence and, 53

jumping spiders, 53

killer fly, 74–76

monochromats, 87–88

of nocturnal animals, 77–79

opsins and, 52

scallop, 66–67

sea urchin, 68

shrimp, 111, 112–14

speed of, 76

speed of brain processing of images, 75–76

stage at which light detection becomes, 59

vibrations and, 112

See also color vision; humans: vision

visual acuity

animals with more than one acute zone, 72

bird, 62–63, 71–72

butterfly, 63, 64

cleaner shrimp, 63

human, 62–63, 71

mammal, 62–63

octopus, 63

robber fly, 64

visual field

bird, 69–70, 72

habitats of animals and, 72

human, 71

mallards, 70

primates, 70

seal, 72

vomeronasal organ, 10, 43, 46

Vosshall, Leslie, 47, 49, 320, 321, 324

vultures, 38–39, 69–70

W

Walkowicz, Lucianne, 306

Ware, Heidi, 344

Warkentin, Karen, 188–90

warm-blooded animals

parasites and, 146–47

TRP channels, 138

See also mammals; specific kinds

War of the Whales (Horwitz), 345

Warrant, Eric

elephant hawkmoth experiment, 83

magnetoreception research, 302, 318

magnetoreceptors, 310, 315

moths, 300, 301

multisensory nature of animals, 319

vision of nocturnal animals, 77–79

wasps

eyes of, 56

sense of taste, 49

sense of touch, 167–68

Wasserman, Robert, 86

Watanabe, Takeshi, 207–8

water fleas, color vision of, 86

Waterman, Ian, 325

Webb, Barbara, 219

Webb, Douglas, 232

Wehner, Rüdiger, 9

Weimerskirch, Henri, 41

Weiss, Tali, 24

Wells, Martin, 331, 332

Wenzel Bernice, 39–40

whales

disruption in magnetic fields, 305–6

echolocation, 266–67

evolution, 234

eyes, 72, 87

foraging by, 234–35

hearing range, 237–38

main groups, 262–63

migrations, 305–6

noise pollution by humans, 345, 346

vocalizations, 231, 232–33, 238, 264–65

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat” (Nagel), 11

Wheeler, William Morton, 324

whiskers and whisking

evolution and, 170

harbor seal, 174, 175

human vision compared to, 169–70

hyrax, 172

manatee, 171–72, 173

mouse, 4, 169–70

naked mole-rat, 172

seal, 174

whispering bats, 249

Widder, Edith, 80–81, 82

wilderness, concept of, 352–53

Williams, Brandy, 196

Williams, Catherine, 134

Wilson, E.
O., 31, 33

Wiltschko, Roswitha, 305, 314, 316

Wiltschko, Wolfgang, 303, 304, 305, 314, 316

Wittemyer, George, 37

wolves, 155

wood crickets, 186–87

Woodhouse’s scrub-jays, 348–49

worms, 199–200

Wu, Le-Qing, 312

Wueringer, Barbara, 293

X

X chromosome and trichromacy, 91, 100–102

Y

Yack, Jayne, 217, 218

Yaqui catfish, 348

Yu, Nanfang, 142

Z

zebra finches, 224, 226, 227

zebrafish, color vision of, 103

zebras, stripes of, 61–62

Zelenitsky, Darla, 39

Zullo, Letizia, 331–32

Zylinski, Sarah, 13

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V

W X Y Z





BY ED YONG

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes

Within Us and a Grander View of

Life

An Immense World: How Animal

Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms

Around Us





About the Author

ED YONG is an award-winning science writer on the staff of

The Atlantic, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory

Reporting and the George Polk Award for Science Reporting,

among other honors.
His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was

a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards.
His

work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic,

Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and other

publications.
He lives in Washington, D.C.
Twitter: @edyong209

To inquire about booking Ed Yong for a speaking

engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House

Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com.
Wat’s next on

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author.
Sign up now.
First published in July 2021.
New Enterprise House

St Helens Street

Derby

DE1 3GY

UK

email: gareth.icke @davidicke.com

Copyright © 2021 David Icke

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the

Publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

Cover Design: Gareth Icke

Book Design: Neil Hague

British Library Cataloguing-in

Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

eISBN 978-18384153-1-0





Dedication:

To Freeeeeedom!
Renegade:

Adjective

‘Having rejected tradition: Unconventional.’

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Acquiescence to tyranny is the death of the spirit

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be.
And one day,

some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to

stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some

great cause.
And you refuse to do it because you are afraid

… You refuse to do it because you want to live longer …

You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid

that you will be criticised or that you will lose your

popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or

shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the

stand.
Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just

as dead at 38 as you would be at 90.
And the cessation of

breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an

earlier death of the spirit.
Martin Luther King

How the few control the many and always have – the many do

whatever they’re told

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to le of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)



The mist is li ing slowly

I can see the way ahead

And I’ve le behind the empty streets

That once inspired my life

And the strength of the emotion

Is like thunder in the air

’Cos the promise that we made each other

Haunts me to the end

The secret of your beauty

And the mystery of your soul

I’ve been searching for in everyone I meet

And the times I’ve been mistaken

It’s impossible to say

And the grass is growing

Underneath our feet

The words that I remember

From my childhood still are true

That there’s none so blind

As those who will not see

And to those who lack the courage

And say it’s dangerous to try

Well they just don’t know

That love eternal will not be denied

I know you’re out there somewhere

Somewhere, somewhere

I know you’re out there somewhere

Somewhere you can hear my voice

I know I’ll find you somehow

Somehow, somehow

I know I’ll find you somehow

And somehow I’ll return again to you

The Moody Blues

Are you a gutless wonder - or a Renegade Mind?
Monuments put from pen to paper,

Turns me into a gutless wonder,

And if you tolerate this,

Then your children will be next.
Gravity keeps my head down,

Or is it maybe shame...
Manic Street Preachers



Rise like lions a er slumber

In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep have fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.
Percy Shelley





Contents

CHAPTER 1

‘I’m thinking’ – Oh, but are you?
CHAPTER 2

Renegade perception

CHAPTER 3

The Pushbacker sting

CHAPTER 4

‘Covid’: The calculated catastrophe

CHAPTER 5

There is no ‘virus’

CHAPTER 6

Sequence of deceit

CHAPTER 7

War on your mind

CHAPTER 8

‘Reframing’ insanity

CHAPTER 9

We must have it?
So what is it?
CHAPTER 10

Human 2.0

CHAPTER 11

Who controls the Cult?
CHAPTER 12

Escaping Wetiko



Postscript



APPENDIX

Cowan-Kaufman-Morell Statement on Virus Isolation

BIBLIOGRAPHY



INDEX





CHAPTER ONE

I’m thinking’ – Oh, but are you?
Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too

Voltaire

French-born philosopher, mathematician and scientist René

Descartes became famous for his statement in Latin in the 17th

century which translates into English as: ‘I think, therefore I am.’

On the face of it that is true.
Thought reflects perception and

perception leads to both behaviour and self-identity.
In that sense

‘we’ are what we think.
But who or what is doing the thinking and is

thinking the only route to perception?
Clearly, as we shall see, ‘we’

are not always the source of ‘our’ perception, indeed with regard to

humanity as a whole this is rarely the case; and thinking is far from

the only means of perception.
Thought is the village idiot compared

with other expressions of consciousness that we all have the

potential to access and tap into.
This has to be true when we are

those other expressions of consciousness which are infinite in nature.
We have forgo en this, or, more to the point, been manipulated to

forget.
These are not just the esoteric musings of the navel.
The whole

foundation of human control and oppression is control of

perception.
Once perception is hijacked then so is behaviour which

is dictated by perception.
Collective perception becomes collective

behaviour and collective behaviour is what we call human society.
Perception is all and those behind human control know that which is

why perception is the target 24/7 of the psychopathic manipulators

that I call the Global Cult.
They know that if they dictate perception

they will dictate behaviour and collectively dictate the nature of

human society.
They are further aware that perception is formed

from information received and if they control the circulation of

information they will to a vast extent direct human behaviour.
Censorship of information and opinion has become globally Nazi-

like in recent years and never more blatantly than since the illusory

‘virus pandemic’ was triggered out of China in 2019 and across the

world in 2020.
Why have billions submi ed to house arrest and

accepted fascistic societies in a way they would have never believed

possible?
Those controlling the information spewing from

government, mainstream media and Silicon Valley (all controlled by

the same Global Cult networks) told them they were in danger from

a ‘deadly virus’ and only by submi ing to house arrest and

conceding their most basic of freedoms could they and their families

be protected.
This monumental and provable lie became the

perception of the billions and therefore the behaviour of the billions.
In

those few words you have the whole structure and modus operandi

of human control.
Fear is a perception – False Emotion Appearing

Real – and fear is the currency of control.
In short … get them by the

balls (or give them the impression that you have) and their hearts

and minds will follow.
Nothing grips the dangly bits and freezes the

rear-end more comprehensively than fear.
World number 1

There are two ‘worlds’ in what appears to be one ‘world’ and the

prime difference between them is knowledge.
First we have the mass

of human society in which the population is maintained in coldly-

calculated ignorance through control of information and the

‘education’ (indoctrination) system.
That’s all you really need to

control to enslave billions in a perceptual delusion in which what are

perceived to be their thoughts and opinions are ever-repeated

mantras that the system has been downloading all their lives

through ‘education’, media, science, medicine, politics and academia

in which the personnel and advocates are themselves

overwhelmingly the perceptual products of the same repetition.
Teachers and academics in general are processed by the same

programming machine as everyone else, but unlike the great

majority they never leave the ‘education’ program.
It gripped them

as students and continues to grip them as programmers of

subsequent generations of students.
The programmed become the

programmers – the programmed programmers.
The same can

largely be said for scientists, doctors and politicians and not least

because as the American writer Upton Sinclair said: ‘It is difficult to

get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon

his not understanding it.’ If your career and income depend on

thinking the way the system demands then you will – bar a few free-

minded exceptions – concede your mind to the Perceptual

Mainframe that I call the Postage Stamp Consensus.
This is a tiny

band of perceived knowledge and possibility ‘taught’ (downloaded)

in the schools and universities, pounded out by the mainstream

media and on which all government policy is founded.
Try thinking,

and especially speaking and acting, outside of the ‘box’ of consensus

and see what that does for your career in the Mainstream Everything

which bullies, harasses, intimidates and ridicules the population into

compliance.
Here we have the simple structure which enslaves most

of humanity in a perceptual prison cell for an entire lifetime and I’ll

go deeper into this process shortly.
Most of what humanity is taught

as fact is nothing more than programmed belief.
American science

fiction author Frank Herbert was right when he said: ‘Belief can be

manipulated.
Only knowledge is dangerous.’ In the ‘Covid’ age

belief is promoted and knowledge is censored.
It was always so, but

never to the extreme of today.
World number 2

A ‘number 2’ is slang for ‘doing a poo’ and how appropriate that is

when this other ‘world’ is doing just that on humanity every minute

of every day.
World number 2 is a global network of secret societies

and semi-secret groups dictating the direction of society via

governments, corporations and authorities of every kind.
I have

spent more than 30 years uncovering and exposing this network that

I call the Global Cult and knowing its agenda is what has made my

books so accurate in predicting current and past events.
Secret

societies are secret for a reason.
They want to keep their hoarded

knowledge to themselves and their chosen initiates and to hide it

from the population which they seek through ignorance to control

and subdue.
The whole foundation of the division between World 1

and World 2 is knowledge.
What number 1 knows number 2 must not.
Knowledge they have worked so hard to keep secret includes (a) the

agenda to enslave humanity in a centrally-controlled global

dictatorship, and (b) the nature of reality and life itself.
The la er (b)

must be suppressed to allow the former (a) to prevail as I shall be

explaining.
The way the Cult manipulates and interacts with the

population can be likened to a spider’s web.
The ‘spider’ sits at the

centre in the shadows and imposes its will through the web with

each strand represented in World number 2 by a secret society,

satanic or semi-secret group, and in World number 1 – the world of

the seen – by governments, agencies of government, law

enforcement, corporations, the banking system, media

conglomerates and Silicon Valley (Fig 1 overleaf).
The spider and the

web connect and coordinate all these organisations to pursue the

same global outcome while the population sees them as individual

entities working randomly and independently.
At the level of the

web governments are the banking system are the corporations are the

media are Silicon Valley are the World Health Organization working

from their inner cores as one unit.
Apparently unconnected

countries, corporations, institutions, organisations and people are on

the same team pursuing the same global outcome.
Strands in the web

immediately around the spider are the most secretive and exclusive

secret societies and their membership is emphatically restricted to

the Cult inner-circle emerging through the generations from

particular bloodlines for reasons I will come to.
At the core of the

core you would get them in a single room.
That’s how many people

are dictating the direction of human society and its transformation



through the ‘Covid’ hoax and other means.
As the web expands out

from the spider we meet the secret societies that many people will be

aware of – the Freemasons, Knights Templar, Knights of Malta, Opus

Dei, the inner sanctum of the Jesuit Order, and such like.
Note how

many are connected to the Church of Rome and there is a reason for

that.
The Roman Church was established as a revamp, a rebranding,

of the relocated ‘Church’ of Babylon and the Cult imposing global

tyranny today can be tracked back to Babylon and Sumer in what is

now Iraq.
Figure 1: The global web through which the few control the many.
(Image Neil Hague.)

Inner levels of the web operate in the unseen away from the public

eye and then we have what I call the cusp organisations located at

the point where the hidden meets the seen.
They include a series of

satellite organisations answering to a secret society founded in

London in the late 19th century called the Round Table and among

them are the Royal Institute of International Affairs (UK, founded in

1920); Council on Foreign Relations (US, 1921); Bilderberg Group

(worldwide, 1954); Trilateral Commission (US/worldwide, 1972); and

the Club of Rome (worldwide, 1968) which was created to exploit

environmental concerns to justify the centralisation of global power

to ‘save the planet’.
The Club of Rome instigated with others the

human-caused climate change hoax which has led to all the ‘green

new deals’ demanding that very centralisation of control.
Cusp

organisations, which include endless ‘think tanks’ all over the world,

are designed to coordinate a single global policy between political

and business leaders, intelligence personnel, media organisations

and anyone who can influence the direction of policy in their own

sphere of operation.
Major players and regular a enders will know

what is happening – or some of it – while others come and go and

are kept overwhelmingly in the dark about the big picture.
I refer to

these cusp groupings as semi-secret in that they can be publicly

identified, but what goes on at the inner-core is kept very much ‘in

house’ even from most of their members and participants through a

fiercely-imposed system of compartmentalisation.
Only let them

know what they need to know to serve your interests and no more.
The structure of secret societies serves as a perfect example of this

principle.
Most Freemasons never get higher than the bo om three

levels of ‘degree’ (degree of knowledge) when there are 33 official

degrees of the Sco ish Rite.
Initiates only qualify for the next higher

‘compartment’ or degree if those at that level choose to allow them.
Knowledge can be carefully assigned only to those considered ‘safe’.
I went to my local Freemason’s lodge a few years ago when they

were having an ‘open day’ to show how cuddly they were and when

I cha ed to some of them I was astonished at how li le the rank and

file knew even about the most ubiquitous symbols they use.
The

mushroom technique – keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit

– applies to most people in the web as well as the population as a

whole.
Sub-divisions of the web mirror in theme and structure

transnational corporations which have a headquarters somewhere in

the world dictating to all their subsidiaries in different countries.
Subsidiaries operate in their methodology and branding to the same

centrally-dictated plan and policy in pursuit of particular ends.
The

Cult web functions in the same way.
Each country has its own web

as a subsidiary of the global one.
They consist of networks of secret

societies, semi-secret groups and bloodline families and their job is

to impose the will of the spider and the global web in their particular

country.
Subsidiary networks control and manipulate the national

political system, finance, corporations, media, medicine, etc.
to

ensure that they follow the globally-dictated Cult agenda.
These

networks were the means through which the ‘Covid’ hoax could be

played out with almost every country responding in the same way.
The ‘Yessir’ pyramid

Compartmentalisation is the key to understanding how a tiny few

can dictate the lives of billions when combined with a top-down

sequence of imposition and acquiescence.
The inner core of the Cult

sits at the peak of the pyramidal hierarchy of human society (Fig 2

overleaf).
It imposes its will – its agenda for the world – on the level

immediately below which acquiesces to that imposition.
This level

then imposes the Cult will on the level below them which acquiesces

and imposes on the next level.
Very quickly we meet levels in the

hierarchy that have no idea there even is a Cult, but the sequence of

imposition and acquiescence continues down the pyramid in just the

same way.
‘I don’t know why we are doing this but the order came

from “on-high” and so we be er just do it.’ Alfred Lord Tennyson

said of the cannon fodder levels in his poem The Charge of the Light

Brigade: ‘Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.’ The next

line says that ‘into the valley of death rode the six hundred’ and they

died because they obeyed without question what their perceived

‘superiors’ told them to do.
In the same way the population

capitulated to ‘Covid’.
The whole hierarchical pyramid functions

like this to allow the very few to direct the enormous many.
Eventually imposition-acquiescence-imposition-acquiescence comes

down to the mass of the population at the foot of the pyramid.
If

they acquiesce to those levels of the hierarchy imposing on them

(governments/law enforcement/doctors/media) a circuit is

completed between the population and the handful of super-

psychopaths in the Cult inner core at the top of the pyramid.
Without a circuit-breaking refusal to obey, the sequence of

imposition and acquiescence allows a staggeringly few people to

impose their will upon the entirety of humankind.
We are looking at

the very sequence that has subjugated billions since the start of 2020.
Our freedom has not been taken from us.
Humanity has given it



away.
Fascists do not impose fascism because there are not enough

of them.
Fascism is imposed by the population acquiescing to

fascism.
Put another way allowing their perceptions to be

programmed to the extent that leads to the population giving their

freedom away by giving their perceptions – their mind – away.
If this

circuit is not broken by humanity ceasing to cooperate with their

own enslavement then nothing can change.
For that to happen

people have to critically think and see through the lies and window

dressing and then summon the backbone to act upon what they see.
The Cult spends its days working to stop either happening and its

methodology is systematic and highly detailed, but it can be

overcome and that is what this book is all about.
Figure 2: The simple sequence of imposition and compliance that allows a handful of people at the peak of the pyramid to dictate the lives of billions.
The Life Program

Okay, back to world number 1 or the world of the ‘masses’.
Observe

the process of what we call ‘life’ and it is a perceptual download

from cradle to grave.
The Cult has created a global structure in

which perception can be programmed and the program continually

topped-up with what appears to be constant confirmation that the

program is indeed true reality.
The important word here is ‘appears’.
This is the structure, the fly-trap, the Postage Stamp Consensus or

Perceptual Mainframe, which represents that incredibly narrow

band of perceived possibility delivered by the ‘education’ system,

mainstream media, science and medicine.
From the earliest age the

download begins with parents who have themselves succumbed to

the very programming their children are about to go through.
Most

parents don’t do this out of malevolence and mostly it is quite the

opposite.
They do what they believe is best for their children and

that is what the program has told them is best.
Within three or four

years comes the major transition from parental programming to full-

blown state (Cult) programming in school, college and university

where perceptually-programmed teachers and academics pass on

their programming to the next generations.
Teachers who resist are

soon marginalised and their careers ended while children who resist

are called a problem child for whom Ritalin may need to be

prescribed.
A few years a er entering the ‘world’ children are under

the control of authority figures representing the state telling them

when they have to be there, when they can leave and when they can

speak, eat, even go to the toilet.
This is calculated preparation for a

lifetime of obeying authority in all its forms.
Reflex-action fear of

authority is instilled by authority from the start.
Children soon learn

the carrot and stick consequences of obeying or defying authority

which is underpinned daily for the rest of their life.
Fortunately I

daydreamed through this crap and never obeyed authority simply

because it told me to.
This approach to my alleged ‘be ers’ continues

to this day.
There can be consequences of pursuing open-minded

freedom in a world of closed-minded conformity.
I spent a lot of time

in school corridors a er being ejected from the classroom for not

taking some of it seriously and now I spend a lot of time being

ejected from Facebook, YouTube and Twi er.
But I can tell you that

being true to yourself and not compromising your self-respect is far

more exhilarating than bowing to authority for authority’s sake.
You

don’t have to be a sheep to the shepherd (authority) and the sheep

dog (fear of not obeying authority).
The perceptual download continues throughout the formative

years in school, college and university while script-reading

‘teachers’, ‘academics’ ‘scientists’, ‘doctors’ and ‘journalists’ insist

that ongoing generations must be as programmed as they are.
Accept the program or you will not pass your ‘exams’ which confirm

your ‘degree’ of programming.
It is tragic to think that many parents

pressure their offspring to work hard at school to download the

program and qualify for the next stage at college and university.
The

late, great, American comedian George Carlin said: ‘Here’s a bumper

sticker I’d like to see: We are proud parents of a child who has

resisted his teachers’ a empts to break his spirit and bend him to the

will of his corporate masters.’ Well, the best of luck finding many of

those, George.
Then comes the moment to leave the formal

programming years in academia and enter the ‘adult’ world of work.
There you meet others in your chosen or prescribed arena who went

through the same Postage Stamp Consensus program before you

did.
There is therefore overwhelming agreement between almost

everyone on the basic foundations of Postage Stamp reality and the

rejection, even contempt, of the few who have a mind of their own

and are prepared to use it.
This has two major effects.
Firstly, the

consensus confirms to the programmed that their download is really

how things are.
I mean, everyone knows that, right?
Secondly, the

arrogance and ignorance of Postage Stamp adherents ensure that

anyone questioning the program will have unpleasant consequences

for seeking their own truth and not picking their perceptions from

the shelf marked: ‘Things you must believe without question and if

you don’t you’re a dangerous lunatic conspiracy theorist and a

harebrained nu er’.
Every government, agency and corporation is founded on the

same Postage Stamp prison cell and you can see why so many

people believe the same thing while calling it their own ‘opinion’.
Fusion of governments and corporations in pursuit of the same

agenda was the definition of fascism described by Italian dictator

Benito Mussolini.
The pressure to conform to perceptual norms

downloaded for a lifetime is incessant and infiltrates society right

down to family groups that become censors and condemners of their

own ‘black sheep’ for not, ironically, being sheep.
We have seen an

explosion of that in the ‘Covid’ era.
Cult-owned global media

unleashes its propaganda all day every day in support of the Postage

Stamp and targets with abuse and ridicule anyone in the public eye

who won’t bend their mind to the will of the tyranny.
Any response

to this is denied (certainly in my case).
They don’t want to give a

platform to expose official lies.
Cult-owned-and-created Internet

giants like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twi er delete you for

having an unapproved opinion.
Facebook boasts that its AI censors

delete 97-percent of ‘hate speech’ before anyone even reports it.
Much of that ‘hate speech’ will simply be an opinion that Facebook

and its masters don’t want people to see.
Such perceptual oppression

is widely known as fascism.
Even Facebook executive Benny

Thomas, a ‘CEO Global Planning Lead’, said in comments secretly

recorded by investigative journalism operation Project Veritas that

Facebook is ‘too powerful’ and should be broken up:

I mean, no king in history has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is …

And he’s 36.
That’s too much for a 36-year-old...
You should not have power over two billion

people.
I just think that’s wrong.
Thomas said Facebook-owned platforms like Instagram, Oculus, and

WhatsApp needed to be separate companies.
‘It’s too much power

when they’re all one together’.
That’s the way the Cult likes it,

however.
We have an executive of a Cult organisation in Benny

Thomas that doesn’t know there is a Cult such is the

compartmentalisation.
Thomas said that Facebook and Google ‘are

no longer companies, they’re countries’.
Actually they are more

powerful than countries on the basis that if you control information

you control perception and control human society.
I love my oppressor

Another expression of this psychological trickery is for those who

realise they are being pressured into compliance to eventually

convince themselves to believe the official narratives to protect their

self-respect from accepting the truth that they have succumbed to

meek and subservient compliance.
Such people become some of the

most vehement defenders of the system.
You can see them

everywhere screaming abuse at those who prefer to think for

themselves and by doing so reminding the compliers of their own

capitulation to conformity.
‘You are talking dangerous nonsense you

Covidiot!!’ Are you trying to convince me or yourself?
It is a potent

form of Stockholm syndrome which is defined as: ‘A psychological

condition that occurs when a victim of abuse identifies and a aches,

or bonds, positively with their abuser.’ An example is hostages

bonding and even ‘falling in love’ with their kidnappers.
The

syndrome has been observed in domestic violence, abused children,

concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war and many and various

Satanic cults.
These are some traits of Stockholm syndrome listed at

goodtherapy.org :



• Positive regard towards perpetrators of abuse or captor [see

‘Covid’].
• Failure to cooperate with police and other government authorities

when it comes to holding perpetrators of abuse or kidnapping

accountable [or in the case of ‘Covid’ cooperating with the police

to enforce and defend their captors’ demands].
• Li le or no effort to escape [see ‘Covid’].
• Belief in the goodness of the perpetrators or kidnappers [see

‘Covid’].
• Appeasement of captors.
This is a manipulative strategy for

maintaining one’s safety.
As victims get rewarded – perhaps with

less abuse or even with life itself – their appeasing behaviours are

reinforced [see ‘Covid’].
• Learned helplessness.
This can be akin to ‘if you can’t beat ‘em,

join ‘em’.
As the victims fail to escape the abuse or captivity, they

may start giving up and soon realize it’s just easier for everyone if

they acquiesce all their power to their captors [see ‘Covid’].
Feelings of pity toward the abusers, believing they are actually

• victims themselves.
Because of this, victims may go on a crusade

or mission to ‘save’ [protect] their abuser [see the venom

unleashed on those challenging the official ‘Covid’ narrative].
• Unwillingness to learn to detach from their perpetrators and heal.
In essence, victims may tend to be less loyal to themselves than to

their abuser [ definitely see ‘Covid’].
Ponder on those traits and compare them with the behaviour of

great swathes of the global population who have defended

governments and authorities which have spent every minute

destroying their lives and livelihoods and those of their children and

grandchildren since early 2020 with fascistic lockdowns, house arrest

and employment deletion to ‘protect’ them from a ‘deadly virus’ that

their abusers’ perceptually created to bring about this very outcome.
We are looking at mass Stockholm syndrome.
All those that agree to

concede their freedom will believe those perceptions are originating

in their own independent ‘mind’ when in fact by conceding their

reality to Stockholm syndrome they have by definition conceded any

independence of mind.
Listen to the ‘opinions’ of the acquiescing

masses in this ‘Covid’ era and what gushes forth is the repetition of

the official version of everything delivered unprocessed, unfiltered

and unquestioned.
The whole programming dynamic works this

way.
I must be free because I’m told that I am and so I think that I

am.
You can see what I mean with the chapter theme of ‘I’m thinking –

Oh, but are you?’ The great majority are not thinking, let alone for

themselves.
They are repeating what authority has told them to

believe which allows them to be controlled.
Weaving through this

mentality is the fear that the ‘conspiracy theorists’ are right and this

again explains the o en hysterical abuse that ensues when you dare

to contest the official narrative of anything.
Denial is the mechanism

of hiding from yourself what you don’t want to be true.
Telling

people what they want to hear is easy, but it’s an infinitely greater

challenge to tell them what they would rather not be happening.
One is akin to pushing against an open door while the other is met

with vehement resistance no ma er what the scale of evidence.
I

don’t want it to be true so I’ll convince myself that it’s not.
Examples

are everywhere from the denial that a partner is cheating despite all

the signs to the reflex-action rejection of any idea that world events

in which country a er country act in exactly the same way are

centrally coordinated.
To accept the la er is to accept that a force of

unspeakable evil is working to destroy your life and the lives of your

children with nothing too horrific to achieve that end.
Who the heck

wants that to be true?
But if we don’t face reality the end is duly

achieved and the consequences are far worse and ongoing than

breaking through the walls of denial today with the courage to make

a stand against tyranny.
Connect the dots – but how?
A crucial aspect of perceptual programming is to portray a world in

which everything is random and almost nothing is connected to

anything else.
Randomness cannot be coordinated by its very nature

and once you perceive events as random the idea they could be

connected is waved away as the rantings of the tinfoil-hat brigade.
You can’t plan and coordinate random you idiot!
No, you can’t, but

you can hide the coldly-calculated and long-planned behind the

illusion of randomness.
A foundation manifestation of the Renegade

Mind is to scan reality for pa erns that connect the apparently

random and turn pixels and dots into pictures.
This is the way I

work and have done so for more than 30 years.
You look for

similarities in people, modus operandi and desired outcomes and

slowly, then ever quicker, the picture forms.
For instance: There

would seem to be no connection between the ‘Covid pandemic’ hoax

and the human-caused global-warming hoax and yet they are masks

(appropriately) on the same face seeking the same outcome.
Those

pushing the global warming myth through the Club of Rome and

other Cult agencies are driving the lies about ‘Covid’ – Bill Gates is

an obvious one, but they are endless.
Why would the same people be

involved in both when they are clearly not connected?
Oh, but they

are.
Common themes with personnel are matched by common goals.
The ‘solutions’ to both ‘problems’ are centralisation of global power

to impose the will of the few on the many to ‘save’ humanity from

‘Covid’ and save the planet from an ‘existential threat’ (we need

‘zero Covid’ and ‘zero carbon emissions’).
These, in turn, connect

with the ‘dot’ of globalisation which was coined to describe the

centralisation of global power in every area of life through incessant

political and corporate expansion, trading blocks and superstates

like the European Union.
If you are the few and you want to control

the many you have to centralise power and decision-making.
The

more you centralise power the more power the few at the centre will

have over the many; and the more that power is centralised the more

power those at the centre have to centralise even quicker.
The

momentum of centralisation gets faster and faster which is exactly

the process we have witnessed.
In this way the hoaxed ‘pandemic’

and the fakery of human-caused global warming serve the interests

of globalisation and the seizure of global power in the hands of the

Cult inner-circle which is behind ‘Covid’, ‘climate change’ and

globalisation.
At this point random ‘dots’ become a clear and

obvious picture or pa ern.
Klaus Schwab, the classic Bond villain who founded the Cult’s

Gates-funded World Economic Forum, published a book in 2020, The

Great Reset, in which he used the ‘problem’ of ‘Covid’ to justify a

total transformation of human society to ‘save’ humanity from

‘climate change’.
Schwab said: ‘The pandemic represents a rare but

narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our

world.’ What he didn’t mention is that the Cult he serves is behind

both hoaxes as I show in my book The Answer.
He and the Cult don’t

have to reimagine the world.
They know precisely what they want

and that’s why they destroyed human society with ‘Covid’ to ‘build

back be er’ in their grand design.
Their job is not to imagine, but to

get humanity to imagine and agree with their plans while believing

it’s all random.
It must be pure coincidence that ‘The Great Reset’

has long been the Cult’s code name for the global imposition of

fascism and replaced previous code-names of the ‘New World



Order’ used by Cult frontmen like Father George Bush and the ‘New

Order of the Ages’ which emerged from Freemasonry and much

older secret societies.
New Order of the Ages appears on the reverse

of the Great Seal of the United States as ‘Novus ordo seclorum’

underneath the Cult symbol used since way back of the pyramid and

all seeing-eye (Fig 3).
The pyramid is the hierarchy of human control

headed by the illuminated eye that symbolises the force behind the

Cult which I will expose in later chapters.
The term ‘Annuit Coeptis’

translates as ‘He favours our undertaking’.
We are told the ‘He’ is

the Christian god, but ‘He’ is not as I will be explaining.
Figure 3: The all-seeing eye of the Cult ‘god’ on the Freemason-designed Great Seal of the United States and also on the dollar bill.
Having you on

Two major Cult techniques of perceptual manipulation that relate to

all this are what I have called since the 1990s Problem-Reaction-

Solution (PRS) and the Totalitarian Tiptoe (TT).
They can be

uncovered by the inquiring mind with a simple question: Who

benefits?
The answer usually identifies the perpetrators of a given

action or happening through the concept of ‘he who most benefits

from a crime is the one most likely to have commi ed it’.
The Latin

‘Cue bono?’ – Who benefits?
– is widely a ributed to the Roman

orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero.
No wonder it goes back

so far when the concept has been relevant to human behaviour since

history was recorded.
Problem-Reaction-Solution is the technique

used to manipulate us every day by covertly creating a problem (or

the illusion of one) and offering the solution to the problem (or the

illusion of one).
In the first phase you create the problem and blame

someone or something else for why it has happened.
This may relate

to a financial collapse, terrorist a ack, war, global warming or

pandemic, anything in fact that will allow you to impose the

‘solution’ to change society in the way you desire at that time.
The

‘problem’ doesn’t have to be real.
PRS is manipulation of perception

and all you need is the population to believe the problem is real.
Human-caused global warming and the ‘Covid pandemic’ only have

to be perceived to be real for the population to accept the ‘solutions’ of

authority.
I refer to this technique as NO-Problem-Reaction-Solution.
Billions did not meekly accept house arrest from early 2020 because

there was a real deadly ‘Covid pandemic’ but because they

perceived – believed – that to be the case.
The antidote to Problem-

Reaction-Solution is to ask who benefits from the proposed solution.
Invariably it will be anyone who wants to justify more control

through deletion of freedom and centralisation of power and

decision-making.
The two world wars were Problem-Reaction-Solutions that

transformed and realigned global society.
Both were manipulated

into being by the Cult as I have detailed in books since the mid-

1990s.
They dramatically centralised global power, especially World

War Two, which led to the United Nations and other global bodies

thanks to the overt and covert manipulations of the Rockefeller

family and other Cult bloodlines like the Rothschilds.
The UN is a

stalking horse for full-blown world government that I will come to

shortly.
The land on which the UN building stands in New York was

donated by the Rockefellers and the same Cult family was behind

Big Pharma scalpel and drug ‘medicine’ and the creation of the

World Health Organization as part of the UN.
They have been

stalwarts of the eugenics movement and funded Hitler’s race-purity

expert’ Ernst Rudin.
The human-caused global warming hoax has

been orchestrated by the Club of Rome through the UN which is

manufacturing both the ‘problem’ through its Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change and imposing the ‘solution’ through its

Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030 which demand the total centralisation

of global power to ‘save the world’ from a climate hoax the United

Nations is itself perpetrating.
What a small world the Cult can be

seen to be particularly among the inner circles.
The bedfellow of

Problem-Reaction-Solution is the Totalitarian Tiptoe which became

the Totalitarian Sprint in 2020.
The technique is fashioned to hide the

carefully-coordinated behind the cover of apparently random events.
You start the sequence at ‘A’ and you know you are heading for ‘Z’.
You don’t want people to know that and each step on the journey is

presented as a random happening while all the steps strung together

lead in the same direction.
The speed may have quickened

dramatically in recent times, but you can still see the incremental

approach of the Tiptoe in the case of ‘Covid’ as each new imposition

takes us deeper into fascism.
Tell people they have to do this or that

to get back to ‘normal’, then this and this and this.
With each new

demand adding to the ones that went before the population’s

freedom is deleted until it disappears.
The spider wraps its web

around the flies more comprehensively with each new diktat.
I’ll

highlight this in more detail when I get to the ‘Covid’ hoax and how

it has been pulled off.
Another prime example of the Totalitarian

Tiptoe is how the Cult-created European Union went from a ‘free-

trade zone’ to a centralised bureaucratic dictatorship through the

Tiptoe of incremental centralisation of power until nations became

mere administrative units for Cult-owned dark suits in Brussels.
The antidote to ignorance is knowledge which the Cult seeks

vehemently to deny us, but despite the systematic censorship to that

end the Renegade Mind can overcome this by vociferously seeking

out the facts no ma er the impediments put in the way.
There is also

a method of thinking and perceiving – knowing – that doesn’t even

need names, dates, place-type facts to identify the pa erns that

reveal the story.
I’ll get to that in the final chapter.
All you need to

know about the manipulation of human society and to what end is

still out there – at the time of writing – in the form of books, videos

and websites for those that really want to breach the walls of

programmed perception.
To access this knowledge requires the

abandonment of the mainstream media as a source of information in

the awareness that this is owned and controlled by the Cult and

therefore promotes mass perceptions that suit the Cult.
Mainstream

media lies all day, every day.
That is its function and very reason for

being.
Where it does tell the truth, here and there, is only because the

truth and the Cult agenda very occasionally coincide.
If you look for

fact and insight to the BBC, CNN and virtually all the rest of them

you are asking to be conned and perceptually programmed.
Know the outcome and you’ll see the journey

Events seem random when you have no idea where the world is

being taken.
Once you do the random becomes the carefully

planned.
Know the outcome and you’ll see the journey is a phrase I

have been using for a long time to give context to daily happenings

that appear unconnected.
Does a problem, or illusion of a problem,

trigger a proposed ‘solution’ that further drives society in the

direction of the outcome?
Invariably the answer will be yes and the

random – abracadabra – becomes the clearly coordinated.
So what is

this outcome that unlocks the door to a massively expanded

understanding of daily events?
I will summarise its major aspects –

the fine detail is in my other books – and those new to this

information will see that the world they thought they were living in

is a very different place.
The foundation of the Cult agenda is the

incessant centralisation of power and all such centralisation is

ultimately in pursuit of Cult control on a global level.
I have

described for a long time the planned world structure of top-down

dictatorship as the Hunger Games Society.
The term obviously

comes from the movie series which portrayed a world in which a

few living in military-protected hi-tech luxury were the overlords of

a population condemned to abject poverty in isolated ‘sectors’ that

were not allowed to interact.
‘Covid’ lockdowns and travel bans

anyone?
The ‘Hunger Games’ pyramid of structural control has the

inner circle of the Cult at the top with pre y much the entire

population at the bo om under their control through dependency

for survival on the Cult.
The whole structure is planned to be

protected and enforced by a military-police state (Fig 4).
Here you have the reason for the global lockdowns of the fake

pandemic to coldly destroy independent incomes and livelihoods

and make everyone dependent on the ‘state’ (the Cult that controls

the ‘states’).
I have warned in my books for many years about the

plan to introduce a ‘guaranteed income’ – a barely survivable

pi ance – designed to impose dependency when employment was

destroyed by AI technology and now even more comprehensively at

great speed by the ‘Covid’ scam.
Once the pandemic was played and

lockdown consequences began to delete independent income the

authorities began to talk right on cue about the need for a

guaranteed income and a ‘Great Reset’.
Guaranteed income will be

presented as benevolent governments seeking to help a desperate

people – desperate as a direct result of actions of the same

governments.
The truth is that such payments are a trap.
You will

only get them if you do exactly what the authorities demand

including mass vaccination (genetic manipulation).
We have seen

this theme already in Australia where those dependent on

government benefits have them reduced if parents don’t agree to

have their children vaccinated according to an insane health-

destroying government-dictated schedule.
Calculated economic

collapse applies to governments as well as people.
The Cult wants

rid of countries through the creation of a world state with countries

broken up into regions ruled by a world government and super

states like the European Union.
Countries must be bankrupted, too,

to this end and it’s being achieved by the trillions in ‘rescue

packages’ and furlough payments, trillions in lost taxation, and

money-no-object spending on ‘Covid’ including constant all-

medium advertising (programming) which has made the media

dependent on government for much of its income.
The day of

reckoning is coming – as planned – for government spending and

given that it has been made possible by printing money and not by

production/taxation there is inflation on the way that has the



potential to wipe out monetary value.
In that case there will be no

need for the Cult to steal your money.
It just won’t be worth

anything (see the German Weimar Republic before the Nazis took

over).
Many have been okay with lockdowns while ge ing a

percentage of their income from so-called furlough payments

without having to work.
Those payments are dependent, however,

on people having at least a theoretical job with a business considered

non-essential and ordered to close.
As these business go under

because they are closed by lockdown a er lockdown the furlough

stops and it will for everyone eventually.
Then what?
The ‘then

what?’ is precisely the idea.
Figure 4: The Hunger Games Society structure I have long warned was planned and now the

‘Covid’ hoax has made it possible.
This is the real reason for lockdowns.
Hired hands

Between the Hunger Games Cult elite and the dependent population

is planned to be a vicious military-police state (a fusion of the two

into one force).
This has been in the making for a long time with

police looking ever more like the military and carrying weapons to

match.
The pandemic scam has seen this process accelerate so fast as

lockdown house arrest is brutally enforced by carefully recruited

fascist minds and gormless system-servers.
The police and military

are planned to merge into a centrally-directed world army in a

global structure headed by a world government which wouldn’t be

elected even by the election fixes now in place.
The world army is

not planned even to be human and instead wars would be fought,

primarily against the population, using robot technology controlled

by artificial intelligence.
I have been warning about this for decades

and now militaries around the world are being transformed by this

very AI technology.
The global regime that I describe is a particular

form of fascism known as a technocracy in which decisions are not

made by clueless and co-opted politicians but by unelected

technocrats – scientists, engineers, technologists and bureaucrats.
Cult-owned-and-controlled Silicon Valley giants are examples of

technocracy and they already have far more power to direct world

events than governments.
They are with their censorship selecting

governments.
I know that some are calling the ‘Great Reset’ a

Marxist communist takeover, but fascism and Marxism are different

labels for the same tyranny.
Tell those who lived in fascist Germany

and Stalinist Russia that there was a difference in the way their

freedom was deleted and their lives controlled.
I could call it a fascist

technocracy or a Marxist technocracy and they would be equally

accurate.
The Hunger Games society with its world government

structure would oversee a world army, world central bank and single

world cashless currency imposing its will on a microchipped

population (Fig 5).
Scan its different elements and see how the

illusory pandemic is forcing society in this very direction at great

speed.
Leaders of 23 countries and the World Health Organization

(WHO) backed the idea in March, 2021, of a global treaty for

‘international cooperation’ in ‘health emergencies’ and nations

should ‘come together as a global community for peaceful

cooperation that extends beyond this crisis’.
Cut the Orwellian

bullshit and this means another step towards global government.
The plan includes a cashless digital money system that I first warned

about in 1993.
Right at the start of ‘Covid’ the deeply corrupt Tedros



Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the crooked and merely gofer ‘head’ of the

World Health Organization, said it was possible to catch the ‘virus’

by touching cash and it was be er to use cashless means.
The claim

was ridiculous nonsense and like the whole ‘Covid’ mind-trick it

was nothing to do with ‘health’ and everything to do with pushing

every aspect of the Cult agenda.
As a result of the Tedros lie the use

of cash has plummeted.
The Cult script involves a single world

digital currency that would eventually be technologically embedded

in the body.
China is a massive global centre for the Cult and if you

watch what is happening there you will know what is planned for

everywhere.
The Chinese government is developing a digital

currency which would allow fines to be deducted immediately via

AI for anyone caught on camera breaking its fantastic list of laws

and the money is going to be programmable with an expiry date to

ensure that no one can accrue wealth except the Cult and its

operatives.
Figure 5: The structure of global control the Cult has been working towards for so long and this has been enormously advanced by the ‘Covid’ illusion.
Serfdom is so smart

The Cult plan is far wider, extreme, and more comprehensive than

even most conspiracy researchers appreciate and I will come to the

true depths of deceit and control in the chapters ‘Who controls the

Cult?’ and ‘Escaping Wetiko’.
Even the world that we know is crazy

enough.
We are being deluged with ever more sophisticated and

controlling technology under the heading of ‘smart’.
We have smart

televisions, smart meters, smart cards, smart cars, smart driving,

smart roads, smart pills, smart patches, smart watches, smart skin,

smart borders, smart pavements, smart streets, smart cities, smart

communities, smart environments, smart growth, smart planet...
smart everything around us.
Smart technologies and methods of

operation are designed to interlock to create a global Smart Grid

connecting the entirety of human society including human minds to

create a centrally-dictated ‘hive’ mind.
‘Smart cities’ is code for

densely-occupied megacities of total surveillance and control

through AI.
Ever more destructive frequency communication

systems like 5G have been rolled out without any official testing for

health and psychological effects (colossal).
5G/6G/7G systems are

needed to run the Smart Grid and each one becomes more

destructive of body and mind.
Deleting independent income is

crucial to forcing people into these AI-policed prisons by ending

private property ownership (except for the Cult elite).
The Cult’s

Great Reset now openly foresees a global society in which no one

will own any possessions and everything will be rented while the

Cult would own literally everything under the guise of government

and corporations.
The aim has been to use the lockdowns to destroy

sources of income on a mass scale and when the people are destitute

and in unrepayable amounts of debt (problem) Cult assets come

forward with the pledge to write-off debt in return for handing over

all property and possessions (solution).
Everything – literally

everything including people – would be connected to the Internet

via AI.
I was warning years ago about the coming Internet of Things

(IoT) in which all devices and technology from your car to your

fridge would be plugged into the Internet and controlled by AI.
Now we are already there with much more to come.
The next stage

is the Internet of Everything (IoE) which is planned to include the

connection of AI to the human brain and body to replace the human

mind with a centrally-controlled AI mind.
Instead of perceptions

being manipulated through control of information and censorship

those perceptions would come direct from the Cult through AI.
What do you think?
You think whatever AI decides that you think.
In human terms there would be no individual ‘think’ any longer.
Too

incredible?
The ravings of a lunatic?
Not at all.
Cult-owned crazies

in Silicon Valley have been telling us the plan for years without

explaining the real motivation and calculated implications.
These

include Google executive and ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil who highlights

the year 2030 for when this would be underway.
He said:

Our thinking...
will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking...
humans will be

able to extend their limitations and ‘think in the cloud’...
We’re going to put gateways to the

cloud in our brains...
We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves...
In my view,

that’s the nature of being human – we transcend our limitations.
As the technology becomes vastly superior to what we are then the small proportion that is

still human gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it’s just utterly negligible.
The sales-pitch of Kurzweil and Cult-owned Silicon Valley is that

this would make us ‘super-human’ when the real aim is to make us

post-human and no longer ‘human’ in the sense that we have come

to know.
The entire global population would be connected to AI and

become the centrally-controlled ‘hive-mind’ of externally-delivered

perceptions.
The Smart Grid being installed to impose the Cult’s will

on the world is being constructed to allow particular locations – even

one location – to control the whole global system.
From these prime

control centres, which absolutely include China and Israel, anything

connected to the Internet would be switched on or off and

manipulated at will.
Energy systems could be cut, communication

via the Internet taken down, computer-controlled driverless

autonomous vehicles driven off the road, medical devices switched

off, the potential is limitless given how much AI and Internet

connections now run human society.
We have seen nothing yet if we

allow this to continue.
Autonomous vehicle makers are working

with law enforcement to produce cars designed to automatically pull

over if they detect a police or emergency vehicle flashing from up to

100 feet away.
At a police stop the car would be unlocked and the

window rolled down automatically.
Vehicles would only take you

where the computer (the state) allowed.
The end of petrol vehicles

and speed limiters on all new cars in the UK and EU from 2022 are

steps leading to electric computerised transport over which

ultimately you have no control.
The picture is far bigger even than

the Cult global network or web and that will become clear when I

get to the nature of the ‘spider’.
There is a connection between all

these happenings and the instigation of DNA-manipulating

‘vaccines’ (which aren’t ‘vaccines’) justified by the ‘Covid’ hoax.
That

connection is the unfolding plan to transform the human body from

a biological to a synthetic biological state and this is why synthetic

biology is such a fast-emerging discipline of mainstream science.
‘Covid vaccines’ are infusing self-replicating synthetic genetic

material into the cells to cumulatively take us on the Totalitarian

Tiptoe from Human 1.0 to the synthetic biological Human 2.0 which

will be physically and perceptually a ached to the Smart Grid to one

hundred percent control every thought, perception and deed.
Humanity needs to wake up and fast.
This is the barest explanation of where the ‘outcome’ is planned to

go but it’s enough to see the journey happening all around us.
Those

new to this information will already see ‘Covid’ in a whole new

context.
I will add much more detail as we go along, but for the

minutiae evidence see my mega-works, The Answer, The Trigger and

Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told.
Now – how does a Renegade Mind see the ‘world’?
CHAPTER TWO

Renegade Perception

It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise

George R.R.
Martin

Asimple definition of the difference between a programmed

mind and a Renegade Mind would be that one sees only dots

while the other connects them to see the picture.
Reading reality

with accuracy requires the observer to (a) know the planned

outcome and (b) realise that everything, but everything, is connected.
The entirety of infinite reality is connected – that’s its very nature –

and with human society an expression of infinite reality the same

must apply.
Simple cause and effect is a connection.
The effect is

triggered by the cause and the effect then becomes the cause of

another effect.
Nothing happens in isolation because it can’t.
Life in

whatever reality is simple choice and consequence.
We make choices

and these lead to consequences.
If we don’t like the consequences we

can make different choices and get different consequences which

lead to other choices and consequences.
The choice and the

consequence are not only connected they are indivisible.
You can’t

have one without the other as an old song goes.
A few cannot

control the world unless those being controlled allow that to happen

– cause and effect, choice and consequence.
Control – who has it and

who doesn’t – is a two-way process, a symbiotic relationship,

involving the controller and controlled.
‘They took my freedom

away!!’ Well, yes, but you also gave it to them.
Humanity is

subjected to mass control because humanity has acquiesced to that

control.
This is all cause and effect and literally a case of give and

take.
In the same way world events of every kind are connected and

the Cult works incessantly to sell the illusion of the random and

coincidental to maintain the essential (to them) perception of dots

that hide the picture.
Renegade Minds know this and constantly

scan the world for pa erns of connection.
This is absolutely pivotal

in understanding the happenings in the world and without that

perspective clarity is impossible.
First you know the planned

outcome and then you identify the steps on the journey – the day-by-

day apparently random which, when connected in relation to the

outcome, no longer appear as individual events, but as the

proverbial chain of events leading in the same direction.
I’ll give you

some examples:

Political puppet show

We are told to believe that politics is ‘adversarial’ in that different

parties with different beliefs engage in an endless tussle for power.
There may have been some truth in that up to a point – and only a

point – but today divisions between ‘different’ parties are rhetorical

not ideological.
Even the rhetorical is fusing into one-speak as the

parties eject any remaining free thinkers while others succumb to the

ever-gathering intimidation of anyone with the ‘wrong’ opinion.
The

Cult is not a new phenomenon and can be traced back thousands of

years as my books have documented.
Its intergenerational initiates

have been manipulating events with increasing effect the more that

global power has been centralised.
In ancient times the Cult secured

control through the system of monarchy in which ‘special’

bloodlines (of which more later) demanded the right to rule as kings

and queens simply by birthright and by vanquishing others who

claimed the same birthright.
There came a time, however, when

people had matured enough to see the unfairness of such tyranny

and demanded a say in who governed them.
Note the word –

governed them.
Not served them – governed them, hence government

defined as ‘the political direction and control exercised over the

actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities,

societies, and states; direction of the affairs of a state, community,

etc.’ Governments exercise control over rather than serve just like the

monarchies before them.
Bizarrely there are still countries like the

United Kingdom which are ruled by a monarch and a government

that officially answers to the monarch.
The UK head of state and that

of Commonwealth countries such as Canada, Australia and New

Zealand is ‘selected’ by who in a single family had unprotected sex

with whom and in what order.
Pinch me it can’t be true.
Ouch!
Shit,

it is.
The demise of monarchies in most countries offered a potential

vacuum in which some form of free and fair society could arise and

the Cult had that base covered.
Monarchies had served its interests

but they couldn’t continue in the face of such widespread opposition

and, anyway, replacing a ‘royal’ dictatorship that people could see

with a dictatorship ‘of the people’ hiding behind the concept of

‘democracy’ presented far greater manipulative possibilities and

ways of hiding coordinated tyranny behind the illusion of ‘freedom’.
Democracy is quite wrongly defined as government selected by

the population.
This is not the case at all.
It is government selected

by some of the population (and then only in theory).
This ‘some’

doesn’t even have to be the majority as we have seen so o en in first-

past-the-post elections in which the so-called majority party wins

fewer votes than the ‘losing’ parties combined.
Democracy can give

total power to a party in government from a minority of the votes

cast.
It’s a sleight of hand to sell tyranny as freedom.
Seventy-four

million Trump-supporting Americans didn’t vote for the

‘Democratic’ Party of Joe Biden in the distinctly dodgy election in

2020 and yet far from acknowledging the wishes and feelings of that

great percentage of American society the Cult-owned Biden

government set out from day one to destroy them and their right to a

voice and opinion.
Empty shell Biden and his Cult handlers said

they were doing this to ‘protect democracy’.
Such is the level of

lunacy and sickness to which politics has descended.
Connect the

dots and relate them to the desired outcome – a world government

run by self-appointed technocrats and no longer even elected

politicians.
While operating through its political agents in

government the Cult is at the same time encouraging public distain

for politicians by pu ing idiots and incompetents in theoretical

power on the road to deleting them.
The idea is to instil a public

reaction that says of the technocrats: ‘Well, they couldn’t do any

worse than the pathetic politicians.’ It’s all about controlling

perception and Renegade Minds can see through that while

programmed minds cannot when they are ignorant of both the

planned outcome and the manipulation techniques employed to

secure that end.
This knowledge can be learned, however, and fast if

people choose to get informed.
Politics may at first sight appear very difficult to control from a

central point.
I mean look at the ‘different’ parties and how would

you be able to oversee them all and their constituent parts?
In truth,

it’s very straightforward because of their structure.
We are back to

the pyramid of imposition and acquiescence.
Organisations are

structured in the same way as the system as a whole.
Political parties

are not open forums of free expression.
They are hierarchies.
I was a

national spokesman for the British Green Party which claimed to be

a different kind of politics in which influence and power was

devolved; but I can tell you from direct experience – and it’s far

worse now – that Green parties are run as hierarchies like all the

others however much they may try to hide that fact or kid

themselves that it’s not true.
A very few at the top of all political

parties are directing policy and personnel.
They decide if you are

elevated in the party or serve as a government minister and to do

that you have to be a yes man or woman.
Look at all the maverick

political thinkers who never ascended the greasy pole.
If you want to

progress within the party or reach ‘high-office’ you need to fall into

line and conform.
Exceptions to this are rare indeed.
Should you

want to run for parliament or Congress you have to persuade the

local or state level of the party to select you and for that you need to

play the game as dictated by the hierarchy.
If you secure election and

wish to progress within the greater structure you need to go on

conforming to what is acceptable to those running the hierarchy

from the peak of the pyramid.
Political parties are perceptual gulags

and the very fact that there are party ‘Whips’ appointed to ‘whip’

politicians into voting the way the hierarchy demands exposes the

ridiculous idea that politicians are elected to serve the people they

are supposed to represent.
Cult operatives and manipulation has

long seized control of major parties that have any chance of forming

a government and at least most of those that haven’t.
A new party

forms and the Cult goes to work to infiltrate and direct.
This has

reached such a level today that you see video compilations of

‘leaders’ of all parties whether Democrats, Republicans,

Conservative, Labour and Green parroting the same Cult mantra of

‘Build Back Be er’ and the ‘Great Reset’ which are straight off the

Cult song-sheet to describe the transformation of global society in

response to the Cult-instigated hoaxes of the ‘Covid pandemic’ and

human-caused ‘climate change’.
To see Caroline Lucas, the Green

Party MP that I knew when I was in the party in the 1980s, speaking

in support of plans proposed by Cult operative Klaus Schwab

representing the billionaire global elite is a real head-shaker.
Many parties – one master

The party system is another mind-trick and was instigated to change

the nature of the dictatorship by swapping ‘royalty’ for dark suits

that people believed – though now ever less so – represented their

interests.
Understanding this trick is to realise that a single force (the

Cult) controls all parties either directly in terms of the major ones or

through manipulation of perception and ideology with others.
You

don’t need to manipulate Green parties to demand your

transformation of society in the name of ‘climate change’ when they

are obsessed with the lie that this is essential to ‘save the planet’.
You

just give them a platform and away they go serving your interests

while believing they are being environmentally virtuous.
America’s

political structure is a perfect blueprint for how the two or multi-

party system is really a one-party state.
The Republican Party is

controlled from one step back in the shadows by a group made up of

billionaires and their gofers known as neoconservatives or Neocons.
I have exposed them in fine detail in my books and they were the

driving force behind the policies of the imbecilic presidency of Boy

George Bush which included 9/11 (see The Trigger for a

comprehensive demolition of the official story), the subsequent ‘war

on terror’ (war of terror) and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The la er was a No-Problem-Reaction-Solution based on claims by

Cult operatives, including Bush and British Prime Minister Tony

Blair, about Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which

did not exist as war criminals Bush and Blair well knew.
Figure 6: Different front people, different parties – same control system.
The Democratic Party has its own ‘Neocon’ group controlling

from the background which I call the ‘Democons’ and here’s the

penny-drop – the Neocons and Democons answer to the same

masters one step further back into the shadows (Fig 6).
At that level

of the Cult the Republican and Democrat parties are controlled by

the same people and no ma er which is in power the Cult is in

power.
This is how it works in almost every country and certainly in

Britain with Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green

parties now all on the same page whatever the rhetoric may be in

their feeble a empts to appear different.
Neocons operated at the

time of Bush through a think tank called The Project for the New

American Century which in September, 2000, published a document

entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources

For a New Century demanding that America fight ‘multiple,

simultaneous major theatre wars’ as a ‘core mission’ to force regime-

change in countries including Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Neocons

arranged for Bush (‘Republican’) and Blair (‘Labour Party’) to front-

up the invasion of Iraq and when they departed the Democons

orchestrated the targeting of Libya and Syria through Barack Obama

(‘Democrat’) and British Prime Minister David Cameron

(‘Conservative Party’).
We have ‘different’ parties and ‘different’

people, but the same unfolding script.
The more the Cult has seized

the reigns of parties and personnel the more their policies have

transparently pursued the same agenda to the point where the

fascist ‘Covid’ impositions of the Conservative junta of Jackboot

Johnson in Britain were opposed by the Labour Party because they

were not fascist enough.
The Labour Party is likened to the US

Democrats while the Conservative Party is akin to a British version

of the Republicans and on both sides of the Atlantic they all speak

the same language and support the direction demanded by the Cult

although some more enthusiastically than others.
It’s a similar story

in country a er country because it’s all centrally controlled.
Oh, but

what about Trump?
I’ll come to him shortly.
Political ‘choice’ in the

‘party’ system goes like this: You vote for Party A and they get into

government.
You don’t like what they do so next time you vote for

Party B and they get into government.
You don’t like what they do

when it’s pre y much the same as Party A and why wouldn’t that be

with both controlled by the same force?
Given that only two,

sometimes three, parties have any chance of forming a government

to get rid of Party B that you don’t like you have to vote again for

Party A which … you don’t like.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what

they call ‘democracy’ which we are told – wrongly – is a term

interchangeable with ‘freedom’.
The cult of cults

At this point I need to introduce a major expression of the Global

Cult known as Sabbatian-Frankism.
Sabbatian is also spelt as

Sabbatean.
I will summarise here.
I have published major exposés

and detailed background in other works.
Sabbatian-Frankism

combines the names of two frauds posing as ‘Jewish’ men, Sabbatai

Zevi (1626-1676), a rabbi, black magician and occultist who

proclaimed he was the Jewish messiah; and Jacob Frank (1726-1791),

the Polish ‘Jew’, black magician and occultist who said he was the

reincarnation of ‘messiah’ Zevi and biblical patriarch Jacob.
They

worked across two centuries to establish the Sabbatian-Frankist cult

that plays a major, indeed central, role in the manipulation of human

society by the Global Cult which has its origins much further back in

history than Sabbatai Zevi.
I should emphasise two points here in

response to the shrill voices that will scream ‘anti-Semitism’: (1)

Sabbatian-Frankists are NOT Jewish and only pose as such to hide

their cult behind a Jewish façade; and (2) my information about this

cult has come from Jewish sources who have long realised that their

society and community has been infiltrated and taken over by

interloper Sabbatian-Frankists.
Infiltration has been the foundation

technique of Sabbatian-Frankism from its official origin in the 17th

century.
Zevi’s Sabbatian sect a racted a massive following

described as the biggest messianic movement in Jewish history,

spreading as far as Africa and Asia, and he promised a return for the

Jews to the ‘Promised Land’ of Israel.
Sabbatianism was not Judaism

but an inversion of everything that mainstream Judaism stood for.
So

much so that this sinister cult would have a feast day when Judaism

had a fast day and whatever was forbidden in Judaism the

Sabbatians were encouraged and even commanded to do.
This

included incest and what would be today called Satanism.
Members

were forbidden to marry outside the sect and there was a system of

keeping their children ignorant of what they were part of until they

were old enough to be trusted not to unknowingly reveal anything

to outsiders.
The same system is employed to this day by the Global

Cult in general which Sabbatian-Frankism has enormously

influenced and now largely controls.
Zevi and his Sabbatians suffered a setback with the intervention

by the Sultan of the Islamic O oman Empire in the Middle East and

what is now the Republic of Turkey where Zevi was located.
The

Sultan gave him the choice of proving his ‘divinity’, converting to

Islam or facing torture and death.
Funnily enough Zevi chose to

convert or at least appear to.
Some of his supporters were

disillusioned and dri ed away, but many did not with 300 families

also converting – only in theory – to Islam.
They continued behind

this Islamic smokescreen to follow the goals, rules and rituals of

Sabbatianism and became known as ‘crypto-Jews’ or the ‘Dönmeh’

which means ‘to turn’.
This is rather ironic because they didn’t ‘turn’

and instead hid behind a fake Islamic persona.
The process of

appearing to be one thing while being very much another would

become the calling card of Sabbatianism especially a er Zevi’s death

and the arrival of the Satanist Jacob Frank in the 18th century when

the cult became Sabbatian-Frankism and plumbed still new depths

of depravity and infiltration which included – still includes – human

sacrifice and sex with children.
Wherever Sabbatians go paedophilia

and Satanism follow and is it really a surprise that Hollywood is so

infested with child abuse and Satanism when it was established by

Sabbatian-Frankists and is still controlled by them?
Hollywood has

been one of the prime vehicles for global perceptual programming

and manipulation.
How many believe the version of ‘history’

portrayed in movies when it is a travesty and inversion (again) of the

truth?
Rabbi Marvin Antelman describes Frankism in his book, To

Eliminate the Opiate, as ‘a movement of complete evil’ while Jewish

professor Gershom Scholem said of Frank in The Messianic Idea in

Judaism: ‘In all his actions [he was] a truly corrupt and degenerate

individual...
one of the most frightening phenomena in the whole of

Jewish history.’ Frank was excommunicated by traditional rabbis, as

was Zevi, but Frank was undeterred and enjoyed vital support from

the House of Rothschild, the infamous banking dynasty whose

inner-core are Sabbatian-Frankists and not Jews.
Infiltration of the

Roman Church and Vatican was instigated by Frank with many

Dönmeh ‘turning’ again to convert to Roman Catholicism with a

view to hijacking the reins of power.
This was the ever-repeating

modus operandi and continues to be so.
Pose as an advocate of the

religion, culture or country that you want to control and then

manipulate your people into the positions of authority and influence

largely as advisers, administrators and Svengalis for those that

appear to be in power.
They did this with Judaism, Christianity

(Christian Zionism is part of this), Islam and other religions and

nations until Sabbatian-Frankism spanned the world as it does

today.
Sabbatian Saudis and the terror network

One expression of the Sabbatian-Frankist Dönmeh within Islam is

the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, through which

came the vile distortion of Islam known as Wahhabism.
This is the

violent creed followed by terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS or

Islamic State.
Wahhabism is the hand-chopping, head-chopping

‘religion’ of Saudi Arabia which is used to keep the people in a

constant state of fear so the interloper House of Saud can continue to

rule.
Al-Qaeda and Islamic State were lavishly funded by the House

of Saud while being created and directed by the Sabbatian-Frankist

network in the United States that operates through the Pentagon,

CIA and the government in general of whichever ‘party’.
The front

man for the establishment of Wahhabism in the middle of the 18th

century was a Sabbatian-Frankist ‘crypto-Jew’ posing as Islamic

called Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
His daughter would marry

the son of Muhammad bin Saud who established the first Saudi state

before his death in 1765 with support from the British Empire.
Bin

Saud’s successors would establish modern Saudi Arabia in league

with the British and Americans in 1932 which allowed them to seize

control of Islam’s major shrines in Mecca and Medina.
They have

dictated the direction of Sunni Islam ever since while Iran is the

major centre of the Shiite version and here we have the source of at

least the public conflict between them.
The Sabbatian network has

used its Wahhabi extremists to carry out Problem-Reaction-Solution

terrorist a acks in the name of ‘Al-Qaeda’ and ‘Islamic State’ to

justify a devastating ‘war on terror’, ever-increasing surveillance of

the population and to terrify people into compliance.
Another

insight of the Renegade Mind is the streetwise understanding that

just because a country, location or people are a acked doesn’t mean

that those apparently representing that country, location or people

are not behind the a ackers.
O en they are orchestrating the a acks

because of the societal changes that can be then justified in the name

of ‘saving the population from terrorists’.
I show in great detail in The Trigger how Sabbatian-Frankists were

the real perpetrators of 9/11 and not ‘19 Arab hijackers’ who were

blamed for what happened.
Observe what was justified in the name

of 9/11 alone in terms of Middle East invasions, mass surveillance

and control that fulfilled the demands of the Project for the New

American Century document published by the Sabbatian Neocons.
What appear to be enemies are on the deep inside players on the

same Sabbatian team.
Israel and Arab ‘royal’ dictatorships are all

ruled by Sabbatians and the recent peace agreements between Israel

and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and others are

only making formal what has always been the case behind the

scenes.
Palestinians who have been subjected to grotesque tyranny

since Israel was bombed and terrorised into existence in 1948 have

never stood a chance.
Sabbatian-Frankists have controlled Israel (so

the constant theme of violence and war which Sabbatians love) and

they have controlled the Arab countries that Palestinians have

looked to for real support that never comes.
‘Royal families’ of the

Arab world in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, etc., are all Sabbatians

with allegiance to the aims of the cult and not what is best for their

Arabic populations.
They have stolen the oil and financial resources

from their people by false claims to be ‘royal dynasties’ with a

genetic right to rule and by employing vicious militaries to impose

their will.
Satanic ‘illumination’

The Satanist Jacob Frank formed an alliance in 1773 with two other

Sabbatians, Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the

Rothschild banking dynasty, and Jesuit-educated fraudulent Jew,

Adam Weishaupt, and this led to the formation of the Bavarian

Illuminati, firstly under another name, in 1776.
The Illuminati would

be the manipulating force behind the French Revolution (1789-1799)

and was also involved in the American Revolution (1775-1783)

before and a er the Illuminati’s official creation.
Weishaupt would

later become (in public) a Protestant Christian in archetypal

Sabbatian style.
I read that his name can be decoded as Adam-Weis-

haupt or ‘the first man to lead those who know’.
He wasn’t a leader

in the sense that he was a subordinate, but he did lead those below

him in a crusade of transforming human society that still continues

today.
The theme was confirmed as early as 1785 when a horseman

courier called Lanz was reported to be struck by lighting and

extensive Illuminati documents were found in his saddlebags.
They

made the link to Weishaupt and detailed the plan for world takeover.
Current events with ‘Covid’ fascism have been in the making for a

very long time.
Jacob Frank was jailed for 13 years by the Catholic

Inquisition a er his arrest in 1760 and on his release he headed for

Frankfurt, Germany, home city and headquarters of the House of

Rothschild where the alliance was struck with Mayer Amschel

Rothschild and Weishaupt.
Rothschild arranged for Frank to be

given the title of Baron and he became a wealthy nobleman with a

big following of Jews in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire

and other European countries.
Most of them would have believed he

was on their side.
The name ‘Illuminati’ came from the Zohar which is a body of

works in the Jewish mystical ‘bible’ called the Kabbalah.
‘Zohar’ is

the foundation of Sabbatian-Frankist belief and in Hebrew ‘Zohar’

means ‘splendour’, ‘radiance’, ‘illuminated’, and so we have

‘Illuminati’.
They claim to be the ‘Illuminated Ones’ from their

knowledge systematically hidden from the human population and

passed on through generations of carefully-chosen initiates in the

global secret society network or Cult.
Hidden knowledge includes

an awareness of the Cult agenda for the world and the nature of our

collective reality that I will explore later.
Cult ‘illumination’ is

symbolised by the torch held by the Statue of Liberty which was

gi ed to New York by French Freemasons in Paris who knew exactly

what it represents.
‘Liberty’ symbolises the goddess worshipped in



Babylon as Queen Semiramis or Ishtar.
The significance of this will

become clear.
Notice again the ubiquitous theme of inversion with

the Statue of ‘Liberty’ really symbolising mass control (Fig 7).
A

mirror-image statute stands on an island in the River Seine in Paris

from where New York Liberty originated (Fig 8).
A large replica of

the Liberty flame stands on top of the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris

where Princess Diana died in a Cult ritual described in The Biggest

Secret.
Lucifer ‘the light bringer’ is related to all this (and much more

as we’ll see) and ‘Lucifer’ is a central figure in Sabbatian-Frankism

and its associated Satanism.
Sabbatians reject the Jewish Torah, or

Pentateuch, the ‘five books of Moses’ in the Old Testament known as

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy which are

claimed by Judaism and Christianity to have been dictated by ‘God’

to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Sabbatians say these do not apply to them

and they seek to replace them with the Zohar to absorb Judaism and

its followers into their inversion which is an expression of a much

greater global inversion.
They want to delete all religions and force

humanity to worship a one-world religion – Sabbatian Satanism that

also includes worship of the Earth goddess.
Satanic themes are being

more and more introduced into mainstream society and while

Christianity is currently the foremost target for destruction the

others are planned to follow.
Figure 7: The Cult goddess of Babylon disguised as the Statue of Liberty holding the flame of Lucifer the ‘light bringer’.
Figure 8: Liberty’s mirror image in Paris where the New York version originated.
Marx brothers

Rabbi Marvin Antelman connects the Illuminati to the Jacobins in To

Eliminate the Opiate and Jacobins were the force behind the French

Revolution.
He links both to the Bund der Gerechten, or League of

the Just, which was the network that inflicted communism/Marxism

on the world.
Antelman wrote:

The original inner circle of the Bund der Gerechten consisted of born Catholics, Protestants

and Jews [Sabbatian-Frankist infiltrators], and those representatives of respective subdivisions

formulated schemes for the ultimate destruction of their faiths.
The heretical Catholics laid

plans which they felt would take a century or more for the ultimate destruction of the church;

the apostate Jews for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish religion.
Sabbatian-created communism connects into this anti-religion

agenda in that communism does not allow for the free practice of

religion.
The Sabbatian ‘Bund’ became the International Communist

Party and Communist League and in 1848 ‘Marxism’ was born with

the Communist Manifesto of Sabbatian assets Karl Marx and

Friedrich Engels.
It is absolutely no coincidence that Marxism, just a

different name for fascist and other centrally-controlled tyrannies, is

being imposed worldwide as a result of the ‘Covid’ hoax and nor

that Marxist/fascist China was the place where the hoax originated.
The reason for this will become very clear in the chapter ‘Covid: The

calculated catastrophe’.
The so-called ‘Woke’ mentality has hijacked

traditional beliefs of the political le and replaced them with far-

right make-believe ‘social justice’ be er known as Marxism.
Woke

will, however, be swallowed by its own perceived ‘revolution’ which

is really the work of billionaires and billionaire corporations feigning

being ‘Woke’.
Marxism is being touted by Wokers as a replacement

for ‘capitalism’ when we don’t have ‘capitalism’.
We have cartelism

in which the market is stitched up by the very Cult billionaires and

corporations bankrolling Woke.
Billionaires love Marxism which

keeps the people in servitude while they control from the top.
Terminally naïve Wokers think they are ‘changing the world’ when

it’s the Cult that is doing the changing and when they have played

their vital part and become surplus to requirements they, too, will be

targeted.
The Illuminati-Jacobins were behind the period known as

‘The Terror’ in the French Revolution in 1793 and 1794 when Jacobin

Maximillian de Robespierre and his Orwellian ‘Commi ee of Public

Safety’ killed 17,000 ‘enemies of the Revolution’ who had once been

‘friends of the Revolution’.
Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose Sabbatian

creed of Marxism has cost the lives of at least 100 million people, is a

hero once again to Wokers who have been systematically kept

ignorant of real history by their ‘education’ programming.
As a

result they now promote a Sabbatian ‘Marxist’ abomination destined

at some point to consume them.
Rabbi Antelman, who spent decades

researching the Sabbatian plot, said of the League of the Just and

Karl Marx:

Contrary to popular opinion Karl Marx did not originate the Communist Manifesto.
He was

paid for his services by the League of the Just, which was known in its country of origin,

Germany, as the Bund der Geaechteten.
Antelman said the text a ributed to Marx was the work of other

people and Marx ‘was only repeating what others already said’.
Marx was ‘a hired hack – lackey of the wealthy Illuminists’.
Marx

famously said that religion was the ‘opium of the people’ (part of the

Sabbatian plan to demonise religion) and Antelman called his books,

To Eliminate the Opiate.
Marx was born Jewish, but his family

converted to Christianity (Sabbatian modus operandi) and he

a acked Jews, not least in his book, A World Without Jews.
In doing

so he supported the Sabbatian plan to destroy traditional Jewishness

and Judaism which we are clearly seeing today with the vindictive

targeting of orthodox Jews by the Sabbatian government of Israel

over ‘Covid’ laws.
I don’t follow any religion and it has done much

damage to the world over centuries and acted as a perceptual

straightjacket.
Renegade Minds, however, are always asking why

something is being done.
It doesn’t ma er if they agree or disagree

with what is happening – why is it happening is the question.
The

‘why?’ can be answered with regard to religion in that religions

create interacting communities of believers when the Cult wants to

dismantle all discourse, unity and interaction (see ‘Covid’

lockdowns) and the ultimate goal is to delete all religions for a one-

world religion of Cult Satanism worshipping their ‘god’ of which

more later.
We see the same ‘why?’ with gun control in America.
I

don’t have guns and don’t want them, but why is the Cult seeking to

disarm the population at the same time that law enforcement

agencies are armed to their molars and why has every tyrant in

history sought to disarm people before launching the final takeover?
They include Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao who followed

confiscation with violent seizing of power.
You know it’s a Cult

agenda by the people who immediately race to the microphones to

exploit dead people in multiple shootings.
Ultra-Zionist Cult lackey

Senator Chuck Schumer was straight on the case a er ten people

were killed in Boulder, Colorado in March, 2121.
Simple rule … if

Schumer wants it the Cult wants it and the same with his ultra-

Zionist mate the wild-eyed Senator Adam Schiff.
At the same time

they were calling for the disarmament of Americans, many of whom

live a long way from a police response, Schumer, Schiff and the rest

of these pampered clowns were si ing on Capitol Hill behind a

razor-wired security fence protected by thousands of armed troops

in addition to their own armed bodyguards.
Mom and pop in an

isolated home?
They’re just potential mass shooters.
Zion Mainframe

Sabbatian-Frankists and most importantly the Rothschilds were

behind the creation of ‘Zionism’, a political movement that

demanded a Jewish homeland in Israel as promised by Sabbatai

Zevi.
The very symbol of Israel comes from the German meaning of

the name Rothschild.
Dynasty founder Mayer Amschel Rothschild

changed the family name from Bauer to Rothschild, or ‘Red-Shield’

in German, in deference to the six-pointed ‘Star of David’ hexagram

displayed on the family’s home in Frankfurt.
The symbol later

appeared on the flag of Israel a er the Rothschilds were centrally

involved in its creation.
Hexagrams are not a uniquely Jewish

symbol and are widely used in occult (‘hidden’) networks o en as a

symbol for Saturn (see my other books for why).
Neither are

Zionism and Jewishness interchangeable.
Zionism is a political

movement and philosophy and not a ‘race’ or a people.
Many Jews

oppose Zionism and many non-Jews, including US President Joe

Biden, call themselves Zionists as does Israel-centric Donald Trump.
America’s support for the Israel government is pre y much a gimme

with ultra-Zionist billionaires and corporations providing fantastic

and dominant funding for both political parties.
Former

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has told how she was

approached immediately she ran for office to ‘sign the pledge’ to

Israel and confirm that she would always vote in that country’s best

interests.
All American politicians are approached in this way.
Anyone who refuses will get no support or funding from the

enormous and all-powerful Zionist lobby that includes organisations

like mega-lobby group AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs

Commi ee.
Trump’s biggest funder was ultra-Zionist casino and

media billionaire Sheldon Adelson while major funders of the

Democratic Party include ultra-Zionist George Soros and ultra-

Zionist financial and media mogul, Haim Saban.
Some may reel back

at the suggestion that Soros is an Israel-firster (Sabbatian-controlled

Israel-firster), but Renegade Minds watch the actions not the words

and everywhere Soros donates his billions the Sabbatian agenda

benefits.
In the spirit of Sabbatian inversion Soros pledged $1 billion

for a new university network to promote ‘liberal values and tackle

intolerance’.
He made the announcement during his annual speech

at the Cult-owned World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in

January, 2020, a er his ‘harsh criticism’ of ‘authoritarian rulers’

around the world.
You can only laugh at such brazen mendacity.
How he doesn’t laugh is the mystery.
Translated from the Orwellian

‘liberal values and tackle intolerance’ means teaching non-white

people to hate white people and for white people to loathe

themselves for being born white.
The reason for that will become

clear.
The ‘Anti-Semitism’ fraud

Zionists support the Jewish homeland in the land of Palestine which

has been the Sabbatian-Rothschild goal for so long, but not for the

benefit of Jews.
Sabbatians and their global Anti-Semitism Industry

have skewed public and political opinion to equate opposing the

violent extremes of Zionism to be a blanket a ack and condemnation

of all Jewish people.
Sabbatians and their global Anti-Semitism

Industry have skewed public and political opinion to equate

opposing the violent extremes of Zionism to be a blanket a ack and

condemnation of all Jewish people.
This is nothing more than a

Sabbatian protection racket to stop legitimate investigation and

exposure of their agendas and activities.
The official definition of

‘anti-Semitism’ has more recently been expanded to include criticism

of Zionism – a political movement – and this was done to further stop

exposure of Sabbatian infiltrators who created Zionism as we know

it today in the 19th century.
Renegade Minds will talk about these

subjects when they know the shit that will come their way.
People

must decide if they want to know the truth or just cower in the

corner in fear of what others will say.
Sabbatians have been trying to

label me as ‘anti-Semitic’ since the 1990s as I have uncovered more

and more about their background and agendas.
Useless, gutless,

fraudulent ‘journalists’ then just repeat the smears without question

and on the day I was writing this section a pair of unquestioning

repeaters called Ben Quinn and Archie Bland (how appropriate)

outright called me an ‘anti-Semite’ in the establishment propaganda

sheet, the London Guardian, with no supporting evidence.
The

Sabbatian Anti-Semitism Industry said so and who are they to

question that?
They wouldn’t dare.
Ironically ‘Semitic’ refers to a

group of languages in the Middle East that are almost entirely

Arabic.
‘Anti-Semitism’ becomes ‘anti-Arab’ which if the

consequences of this misunderstanding were not so grave would be

hilarious.
Don’t bother telling Quinn and Bland.
I don’t want to

confuse them, bless ‘em.
One reason I am dubbed ‘anti-Semitic’ is

that I wrote in the 1990s that Jewish operatives (Sabbatians) were

heavily involved in the Russian Revolution when Sabbatians

overthrew the Romanov dynasty.
This apparently made me ‘anti-

Semitic’.
Oh, really?
Here is a section from The Trigger:

British journalist Robert Wilton confirmed these themes in his 1920 book The Last Days of the Romanovs when he studied official documents from the Russian government to identify the

members of the Bolshevik ruling elite between 1917 and 1919.
The Central Committee

included 41 Jews among 62 members; the Council of the People’s Commissars had 17 Jews

out of 22 members; and 458 of the 556 most important Bolshevik positions between 1918 and

1919 were occupied by Jewish people.
Only 17 were Russian.
Then there were the 23 Jews

among the 36 members of the vicious Cheka Soviet secret police established in 1917 who

would soon appear all across the country.
Professor Robert Service of Oxford University, an expert on 20th century Russian history,

found evidence that [‘Jewish’] Leon Trotsky had sought to make sure that Jews were enrolled

in the Red Army and were disproportionately represented in the Soviet civil bureaucracy that

included the Cheka which performed mass arrests, imprisonment and executions of ‘enemies

of the people’.
A US State Department Decimal File (861.00 /5339) dated November 13th,

1918, names [Rothschild banking agent in America] Jacob Schiff and a list of ultra-Zionists as

funders of the Russian Revolution leading to claims of a ‘Jewish plot’, but the key point missed

by all is they were not ‘Jews’ – they were Sabbatian-Frankists.
Britain’s Winston Churchill made the same error by mistake or

otherwise.
He wrote in a 1920 edition of the Illustrated Sunday Herald

that those behind the Russian revolution were part of a ‘worldwide

conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the

reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of

envious malevolence, and impossible equality’ (see ‘Woke’ today

because that has been created by the same network).
Churchill said

there was no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of

Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian

Revolution ‘by these international and for the most part atheistical

Jews’ [‘atheistical Jews’ = Sabbatians].
Churchill said it is certainly a

very great one and probably outweighs all others: ‘With the notable

exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.’ He

went on to describe, knowingly or not, the Sabbatian modus

operandi of placing puppet leaders nominally in power while they

control from the background:

Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.
Thus

Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate, Litvinoff, and the

influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of

Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews.
In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing.
And the

prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the

Extraordinary Commissions for Combatting Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and

in some notable cases by Jewesses.
What I said about seriously disproportionate involvement in the

Russian Revolution by Jewish ‘revolutionaries’ (Sabbatians) is

provable fact, but truth is no defence against the Sabbatian Anti-

Semitism Industry, its repeater parrots like Quinn and Bland, and

the now breathtaking network of so-called ‘Woke’ ‘anti-hate’ groups

with interlocking leaderships and funding which have the role of

discrediting and silencing anyone who gets too close to exposing the

Sabbatians.
We have seen ‘truth is no defence’ confirmed in legal

judgements with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission in

Canada decreeing this: ‘Truthful statements can be presented in a

manner that would meet the definition of hate speech, and not all

truthful statements must be free from restriction.’ Most ‘anti-hate’

activists, who are themselves consumed by hatred, are too stupid

and ignorant of the world to know how they are being used.
They

are far too far up their own virtue-signalling arses and it’s far too

dark for them to see anything.
The ‘revolution’ game

The background and methods of the ‘Russian’ Revolution are

straight from the Sabbatian playbook seen in the French Revolution

and endless others around the world that appear to start as a

revolution of the people against tyrannical rule and end up with a

regime change to more tyrannical rule overtly or covertly.
Wars,

terror a acks and regime overthrows follow the Sabbatian cult

through history with its agents creating them as Problem-Reaction-

Solutions to remove opposition on the road to world domination.
Sabbatian dots connect the Rothschilds with the Illuminati, Jacobins

of the French Revolution, the ‘Bund’ or League of the Just, the

International Communist Party, Communist League and the

Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that would

lead to the Rothschild-funded Russian Revolution.
The sequence

comes under the heading of ‘creative destruction’ when you advance

to your global goal by continually destroying the status quo to install

a new status quo which you then also destroy.
The two world wars

come to mind.
With each new status quo you move closer to your

planned outcome.
Wars and mass murder are to Sabbatians a

collective blood sacrifice ritual.
They are obsessed with death for

many reasons and one is that death is an inversion of life.
Satanists

and Sabbatians are obsessed with death and o en target churches

and churchyards for their rituals.
Inversion-obsessed Sabbatians

explain the use of inverted symbolism including the inverted

pentagram and inverted cross.
The inversion of the cross has been

related to targeting Christianity, but the cross was a religious symbol

long before Christianity and its inversion is a statement about the

Sabbatian mentality and goals more than any single religion.
Sabbatians operating in Germany were behind the rise of the

occult-obsessed Nazis and the subsequent Jewish exodus from

Germany and Europe to Palestine and the United States a er World

War Two.
The Rothschild dynasty was at the forefront of this both as

political manipulators and by funding the operation.
Why would

Sabbatians help to orchestrate the horrors inflicted on Jews by the

Nazis and by Stalin a er they organised the Russian Revolution?
Sabbatians hate Jews and their religion, that’s why.
They pose as

Jews and secure positions of control within Jewish society and play

the ‘anti-Semitism’ card to protect themselves from exposure

through a global network of organisations answering to the

Sabbatian-created-and-controlled globe-spanning intelligence

network that involves a stunning web of military-intelligence

operatives and operations for a tiny country of just nine million.
Among them are Jewish assets who are not Sabbatians but have been

convinced by them that what they are doing is for the good of Israel

and the Jewish community to protect them from what they have

been programmed since childhood to believe is a Jew-hating hostile

world.
The Jewish community is just a highly convenient cover to

hide the true nature of Sabbatians.
Anyone ge ing close to exposing

their game is accused by Sabbatian place-people and gofers of ‘anti-

Semitism’ and claiming that all Jews are part of a plot to take over

the world.
I am not saying that.
I am saying that Sabbatians – the real

Jew-haters – have infiltrated the Jewish community to use them both

as a cover and an ‘anti-Semitic’ defence against exposure.
Thus we

have the Anti-Semitism Industry targeted researchers in this way

and most Jewish people think this is justified and genuine.
They

don’t know that their ‘Jewish’ leaders and institutions of state,

intelligence and military are not controlled by Jews at all, but cultists

and stooges of Sabbatian-Frankism.
I once added my name to a pro-

Jewish freedom petition online and the next time I looked my name

was gone and text had been added to the petition blurb to a ack me

as an ‘anti-Semite’ such is the scale of perceptual programming.
Moving on America

I tell the story in The Trigger and a chapter called ‘Atlantic Crossing’

how particularly a er Israel was established the Sabbatians moved

in on the United States and eventually grasped control of

government administration, the political system via both Democrats

and Republicans, the intelligence community like the CIA and

National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon and mass media.
Through this seriously compartmentalised network Sabbatians and

their operatives in Mossad, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and US

agencies pulled off 9/11 and blamed it on 19 ‘Al-Qaeda hijackers’

dominated by men from, or connected to, Sabbatian-ruled Saudi

Arabia.
The ‘19’ were not even on the planes let alone flew those big

passenger jets into buildings while being largely incompetent at

piloting one-engine light aircra.
‘Hijacker’ Hani Hanjour who is

said to have flown American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon

with a turn and manoeuvre most professional pilots said they would

have struggled to do was banned from renting a small plane by

instructors at the Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland, just six weeks

earlier on the grounds that he was an incompetent pilot.
The Jewish

population of the world is just 0.2 percent with even that almost

entirely concentrated in Israel (75 percent Jewish) and the United

States (around two percent).
This two percent and globally 0.2

percent refers to Jewish people and not Sabbatian interlopers who are

a fraction of that fraction.
What a sobering thought when you think

of the fantastic influence on world affairs of tiny Israel and that the

Project for the New America Century (PNAC) which laid out the

blueprint in September, 2000, for America’s war on terror and regime

change wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria was founded and dominated by

Sabbatians known as ‘Neocons’.
The document conceded that this

plan would not be supported politically or publicly without a major

a ack on American soil and a Problem-Reaction-Solution excuse to

send troops to war across the Middle East.
Sabbatian Neocons said:
...
[The] process of transformation...
[war and regime change]...
is likely to be a long one,

absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.
Four months later many of those who produced that document

came to power with their inane puppet George Bush from the long-

time Sabbatian Bush family.
They included Sabbatian Dick Cheney

who was officially vice-president, but really de-facto president for

the entirety of the ‘Bush’ government.
Nine months a er the ‘Bush’

inauguration came what Bush called at the time ‘the Pearl Harbor of

the 21st century’ and with typical Sabbatian timing and symbolism

2001 was the 60th anniversary of the a ack in 1941 by the Japanese

Air Force on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which allowed President

Franklin Delano Roosevelt to take the United States into a Sabbatian-

instigated Second World War that he said in his election campaign

that he never would.
The evidence is overwhelming that Roosevelt

and his military and intelligence networks knew the a ack was

coming and did nothing to stop it, but they did make sure that

America’s most essential naval ships were not in Hawaii at the time.
Three thousand Americans died in the Pearl Harbor a acks as they

did on September 11th.
By the 9/11 year of 2001 Sabbatians had

widely infiltrated the US government, military and intelligence

operations and used their compartmentalised assets to pull off the

‘Al-Qaeda’ a acks.
If you read The Trigger it will blow your mind to

see the u erly staggering concentration of ‘Jewish’ operatives

(Sabbatian infiltrators) in essential positions of political, security,

legal, law enforcement, financial and business power before, during,

and a er the a acks to make them happen, carry them out, and then

cover their tracks – and I do mean staggering when you think of that

0.2 percent of the world population and two percent of Americans

which are Jewish while Sabbatian infiltrators are a fraction of that.
A

central foundation of the 9/11 conspiracy was the hijacking of

government, military, Air Force and intelligence computer systems

in real time through ‘back-door’ access made possible by Israeli

(Sabbatian) ‘cyber security’ so ware.
Sabbatian-controlled Israel is

on the way to rivalling Silicon Valley for domination of cyberspace

and is becoming the dominant force in cyber-security which gives

them access to entire computer systems and their passcodes across

the world.
Then add to this that Zionists head (officially) Silicon

Valley giants like Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Google-

owned YouTube (Susan Wojcicki), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg and

Sheryl Sandberg), and Apple (Chairman Arthur D.
Levinson), and

that ultra-Zionist hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer has a $1 billion

stake in Twi er which is only nominally headed by ‘CEO’ pothead

Jack Dorsey.
As cable news host Tucker Carlson said of Dorsey:

‘There used to be debate in the medical community whether

dropping a ton of acid had permanent effects and I think that debate

has now ended.’ Carlson made the comment a er Dorsey told a

hearing on Capitol Hill (if you cut through his bullshit) that he

believed in free speech so long as he got to decide what you can hear

and see.
These ‘big names’ of Silicon Valley are only front men and

women for the Global Cult, not least the Sabbatians, who are the true

controllers of these corporations.
Does anyone still wonder why

these same people and companies have been ferociously censoring

and banning people (like me) for exposing any aspect of the Cult

agenda and especially the truth about the ‘Covid’ hoax which

Sabbatians have orchestrated?
The Jeffrey Epstein paedophile ring was a Sabbatian operation.
He

was officially ‘Jewish’ but he was a Sabbatian and women abused by

the ring have told me about the high number of ‘Jewish’ people

involved.
The Epstein horror has Sabbatian wri en all over it and

matches perfectly their modus operandi and obsession with sex and

ritual.
Epstein was running a Sabbatian blackmail ring in which

famous people with political and other influence were provided

with young girls for sex while everything was being filmed and

recorded on hidden cameras and microphones at his New York

house, Caribbean island and other properties.
Epstein survivors

have described this surveillance system to me and some have gone

public.
Once the famous politician or other figure knew he or she

was on video they tended to do whatever they were told.
Here we go

again …when you’ve got them by the balls their hearts and minds

will follow.
Sabbatians use this blackmail technique on a wide scale

across the world to entrap politicians and others they need to act as

demanded.
Epstein’s private plane, the infamous ‘Lolita Express’,

had many well-known passengers including Bill Clinton while Bill

Gates has flown on an Epstein plane and met with him four years

a er Epstein had been jailed for paedophilia.
They subsequently met

many times at Epstein’s home in New York according to a witness

who was there.
Epstein’s infamous side-kick was Ghislaine Maxwell,

daughter of Mossad agent and ultra-Zionist mega-crooked British

businessman, Bob Maxwell, who at one time owned the Daily Mirror

newspaper.
Maxwell was murdered at sea on his boat in 1991 by

Sabbatian-controlled Mossad when he became a liability with his

business empire collapsing as a former Mossad operative has

confirmed (see The Trigger).
Money, money, money, funny money …

Before I come to the Sabbatian connection with the last three US

presidents I will lay out the crucial importance to Sabbatians of

controlling banking and finance.
Sabbatian Mayer Amschel

Rothschild set out to dominate this arena in his family’s quest for

total global control.
What is freedom?
It is, in effect, choice.
The

more choices you have the freer you are and the fewer your choices

the more you are enslaved.
In the global structure created over

centuries by Sabbatians the biggest decider and restrictor of choice is

… money.
Across the world if you ask people what they would like

to do with their lives and why they are not doing that they will reply

‘I don’t have the money’.
This is the idea.
A global elite of multi-

billionaires are described as ‘greedy’ and that is true on one level;

but control of money – who has it and who doesn’t – is not primarily

about greed.
It’s about control.
Sabbatians have seized ever more

control of finance and sucked the wealth of the world out of the

hands of the population.
We talk now, a er all, about the ‘One-

percent’ and even then the wealthiest are a lot fewer even than that.
This has been made possible by a money scam so outrageous and so

vast it could rightly be called the scam of scams founded on creating

‘money’ out of nothing and ‘loaning’ that with interest to the

population.
Money out of nothing is called ‘credit’.
Sabbatians have

asserted control over governments and banking ever more

completely through the centuries and secured financial laws that

allow banks to lend hugely more than they have on deposit in a

confidence trick known as fractional reserve lending.
Imagine if you

could lend money that doesn’t exist and charge the recipient interest

for doing so.
You would end up in jail.
Bankers by contrast end up in

mansions, private jets, Malibu and Monaco.
Banks are only required to keep a fraction of their deposits and

wealth in their vaults and they are allowed to lend ‘money’ they

don’t have called ‘credit.
Go into a bank for a loan and if you succeed

the banker will not move any real wealth into your account.
They

will type into your account the amount of the agreed ‘loan’ – say

£100,000.
This is not wealth that really exists; it is non-existent, fresh-

air, created-out-of-nothing ‘credit’ which has never, does not, and

will never exist except in theory.
Credit is backed by nothing except

wind and only has buying power because people think that it has

buying power and accept it in return for property, goods and

services.
I have described this situation as like those cartoon

characters you see chasing each other and when they run over the

edge of a cliff they keep running forward on fresh air until one of

them looks down, realises what’s happened, and they all crash into

the ravine.
The whole foundation of the Sabbatian financial system is

to stop people looking down except for periodic moments when they

want to crash the system (as in 2008 and 2020 ongoing) and reap the

rewards from all the property, businesses and wealth their borrowers

had signed over as ‘collateral’ in return for a ‘loan’ of fresh air.
Most

people think that money is somehow created by governments when

it comes into existence from the start as a debt through banks

‘lending’ illusory money called credit.
Yes, the very currency of

exchange is a debt from day one issued as an interest-bearing loan.
Why don’t governments create money interest-free and lend it to

their people interest-free?
Governments are controlled by Sabbatians

and the financial system is controlled by Sabbatians for whom

interest-free money would be a nightmare come true.
Sabbatians

underpin their financial domination through their global network of

central banks, including the privately-owned US Federal Reserve

and Britain’s Bank of England, and this is orchestrated by a

privately-owned central bank coordination body called the Bank for

International Se lements in Basle, Switzerland, created by the usual

suspects including the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.
Central bank

chiefs don’t answer to governments or the people.
They answer to

the Bank for International Se lements or, in other words, the Global

Cult which is dominated today by Sabbatians.
Built-in disaster

There are so many constituent scams within the overall banking

scam.
When you take out a loan of thin-air credit only the amount of

that loan is theoretically brought into circulation to add to the

amount in circulation; but you are paying back the principle plus

interest.
The additional interest is not created and this means that

with every ‘loan’ there is a shortfall in the money in circulation

between what is borrowed and what has to be paid back.
There is

never even close to enough money in circulation to repay all

outstanding public and private debt including interest.
Coldly

weaved in the very fabric of the system is the certainty that some

will lose their homes, businesses and possessions to the banking

‘lender’.
This is less obvious in times of ‘boom’ when the amount of

money in circulation (and the debt) is expanding through more

people wanting and ge ing loans.
When a downturn comes and the

money supply contracts it becomes painfully obvious that there is

not enough money to service all debt and interest.
This is less

obvious in times of ‘boom’ when the amount of money in circulation

(and the debt) is expanding through more people wanting and

ge ing loans.
When a downturn comes and the money supply

contracts and it becomes painfully obvious – as in 2008 and currently

– that there is not enough money to service all debt and interest.
Sabbatian banksters have been leading the human population

through a calculated series of booms (more debt incurred) and busts

(when the debt can’t be repaid and the banks get the debtor’s

tangible wealth in exchange for non-existent ‘credit’).
With each

‘bust’ Sabbatian bankers have absorbed more of the world’s tangible

wealth and we end up with the One-percent.
Governments are in

bankruptcy levels of debt to the same system and are therefore

owned by a system they do not control.
The Federal Reserve,

‘America’s central bank’, is privately-owned and American

presidents only nominally appoint its chairman or woman to

maintain the illusion that it’s an arm of government.
It’s not.
The

‘Fed’ is a cartel of private banks which handed billions to its

associates and friends a er the crash of 2008 and has been Sabbatian-

controlled since it was manipulated into being in 1913 through the

covert trickery of Rothschild banking agents Jacob Schiff and Paul

Warburg, and the Sabbatian Rockefeller family.
Somehow from a

Jewish population of two-percent and globally 0.2 percent (Sabbatian

interlopers remember are far smaller) ultra-Zionists headed the

Federal Reserve for 31 years between 1987 and 2018 in the form of

Alan Greenspan, Bernard Bernanke and Janet Yellen (now Biden’s

Treasury Secretary) with Yellen’s deputy chairman a Israeli-

American duel citizen and ultra-Zionist Stanley Fischer, a former

governor of the Bank of Israel.
Ultra-Zionist Fed chiefs spanned the

presidencies of Ronald Reagan (‘Republican’), Father George Bush

(‘Republican’), Bill Clinton (‘Democrat’), Boy George Bush

(‘Republican’) and Barack Obama (‘Democrat’).
We should really

add the pre-Greenspan chairman, Paul Adolph Volcker, ‘appointed’

by Jimmy Carter (‘Democrat’) who ran the Fed between 1979 and

1987 during the Carter and Reagan administrations before

Greenspan took over.
Volcker was a long-time associate and business

partner of the Rothschilds.
No ma er what the ‘party’ officially in

power the United States economy was directed by the same force.
Here are members of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations

and see if you can make out a common theme.
Barack Obama (‘Democrat’)

Ultra-Zionists Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner

ran the US Treasury in the Clinton administration and two of them

reappeared with Obama.
Ultra-Zionist Fed chairman Alan

Greenspan had manipulated the crash of 2008 through deregulation

and jumped ship just before the disaster to make way for ultra-

Zionist Bernard Bernanke to hand out trillions to Sabbatian ‘too big

to fail’ banks and businesses, including the ubiquitous ultra-Zionist

Goldman Sachs which has an ongoing staff revolving door operation

between itself and major financial positions in government

worldwide.
Obama inherited the fallout of the crash when he took

office in January, 2009, and fortunately he had the support of his

ultra-Zionist White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, son of a

terrorist who helped to bomb Israel into being in 1948, and his ultra-

Zionist senior adviser David Axelrod, chief strategist in Obama’s two

successful presidential campaigns.
Emmanuel, later mayor of

Chicago and former senior fundraiser and strategist for Bill Clinton,

is an example of the Sabbatian policy a er Israel was established of

migrating insider families to America so their children would be

born American citizens.
‘Obama’ chose this financial team

throughout his administration to respond to the Sabbatian-instigated

crisis:

Timothy Geithner (ultra-Zionist) Treasury Secretary; Jacob J.
Lew,

Treasury Secretary; Larry Summers (ultra-Zionist), director of the

White House National Economic Council; Paul Adolph Volcker

(Rothschild business partner), chairman of the Economic Recovery

Advisory Board; Peter Orszag (ultra-Zionist), director of the Office of

Management and Budget overseeing all government spending;

Penny Pritzker (ultra-Zionist), Commerce Secretary; Jared Bernstein

(ultra-Zionist), chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice

President Joe Biden; Mary Schapiro (ultra-Zionist), chair of the

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); Gary Gensler (ultra-

Zionist), chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission

(CFTC); Sheila Bair (ultra-Zionist), chair of the Federal Deposit

Insurance Corporation (FDIC); Karen Mills (ultra-Zionist), head of

the Small Business Administration (SBA); Kenneth Feinberg (ultra-

Zionist), Special Master for Executive [bail-out] Compensation.
Feinberg would be appointed to oversee compensation (with strings)

to 9/11 victims and families in a campaign to stop them having their

day in court to question the official story.
At the same time ultra-

Zionist Bernard Bernanke was chairman of the Federal Reserve and

these are only some of the ultra-Zionists with allegiance to

Sabbatian-controlled Israel in the Obama government.
Obama’s

biggest corporate donor was ultra-Zionist Goldman Sachs which had

employed many in his administration.
Donald Trump (‘Republican’)

Trump claimed to be an outsider (he wasn’t) who had come to ‘drain

the swamp’.
He embarked on this goal by immediately appointing

ultra-Zionist Steve Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs employee for 17

years, as his Treasury Secretary.
Others included Gary Cohn (ultra-

Zionist), chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, his first Director

of the National Economic Council and chief economic adviser, who

was later replaced by Larry Kudlow (ultra-Zionist).
Trump’s senior

adviser throughout his four years in the White House was his

sinister son-in-law Jared Kushner, a life-long friend of Israel Prime

Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Kushner is the son of a convicted

crook who was pardoned by Trump in his last days in office.
Other

ultra-Zionists in the Trump administration included: Stephen Miller,

Senior Policy Adviser; Avrahm Berkowitz, Deputy Adviser to Trump

and his Senior Adviser Jared Kushner; Ivanka Trump, Adviser to the

President, who converted to Judaism when she married Jared

Kushner; David Friedman, Trump lawyer and Ambassador to Israel;

Jason Greenbla , Trump Organization executive vice president and

chief legal officer, who was made Special Representative for

International Negotiations and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Rod

Rosenstein, Deputy A orney General; Elliot Abrams, Special

Representative for Venezuela, then Iran; John Eisenberg, National

Security Council Legal Adviser and Deputy Council to the President

for National Security Affairs; Anne Neuberger, Deputy National

Manager, National Security Agency; Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Acting

Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Elan Carr, Special Envoy

to monitor and combat anti-Semitism; Len Khodorkovsky, Deputy

Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism; Reed Cordish,

Assistant to the President, Intragovernmental and Technology

Initiatives.
Trump Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State

Mike Pompeo, both Christian Zionists, were also vehement

supporters of Israel and its goals and ambitions.
Donald ‘free-speech believer’ Trump pardoned a number of

financial and violent criminals while ignoring calls to pardon Julian

Assange and Edward Snowden whose crimes are revealing highly

relevant information about government manipulation and

corruption and the widespread illegal surveillance of the American

people by US ‘security’ agencies.
It’s so good to know that Trump is

on the side of freedom and justice and not mega-criminals with

allegiance to Sabbatian-controlled Israel.
These included a pardon

for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard who was jailed for life in 1987 under

the Espionage Act.
Aviem Sella, the Mossad agent who recruited

Pollard, was also pardoned by Trump while Assange sat in jail and

Snowden remained in exile in Russia.
Sella had ‘fled’ (was helped to

escape) to Israel in 1987 and was never extradited despite being

charged under the Espionage Act.
A Trump White House statement

said that Sella’s clemency had been ‘supported by Benjamin

Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, Israel’s US Ambassador, David Friedman,

US Ambassador to Israel and Miriam Adelson, wife of leading

Trump donor Sheldon Adelson who died shortly before.
Other

friends of Jared Kushner were pardoned along with Sholom Weiss

who was believed to be serving the longest-ever white-collar prison

sentence of more than 800 years in 2000.
The sentence was

commuted of Ponzi-schemer Eliyahu Weinstein who defrauded Jews

and others out of $200 million.
I did mention that Assange and

Snowden were ignored, right?
Trump gave Sabbatians almost

everything they asked for in military and political support, moving

the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem with its critical symbolic

and literal implications for Palestinian statehood, and the ‘deal of the

Century’ designed by Jared Kushner and David Friedman which

gave the Sabbatian Israeli government the green light to

substantially expand its already widespread program of building

illegal Jewish-only se lements in the occupied land of the West

Bank.
This made a two-state ‘solution’ impossible by seizing all the

land of a potential Palestinian homeland and that had been the plan

since 1948 and then 1967 when the Arab-controlled Gaza Strip, West

Bank, Sinai Peninsula and Syrian Golan Heights were occupied by

Israel.
All the talks about talks and road maps and delays have been

buying time until the West Bank was physically occupied by Israeli

real estate.
Trump would have to be a monumentally ill-informed

idiot not to see that this was the plan he was helping to complete.
The Trump administration was in so many ways the Kushner

administration which means the Netanyahu administration which

means the Sabbatian administration.
I understand why many

opposing Cult fascism in all its forms gravitated to Trump, but he

was a crucial part of the Sabbatian plan and I will deal with this in

the next chapter.
Joe Biden (‘Democrat’)

A barely cognitive Joe Biden took over the presidency in January,

2021, along with his fellow empty shell, Vice-President Kamala

Harris, as the latest Sabbatian gofers to enter the White House.
Names on the door may have changed and the ‘party’ – the force

behind them remained the same as Zionists were appointed to a

stream of pivotal areas relating to Sabbatian plans and policy.
They

included: Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, former head of the Federal

Reserve, and still another ultra-Zionist running the US Treasury a er

Mnuchin (Trump), Lew and Geithner (Obama), and Summers and

Rubin (Clinton); Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State; Wendy

Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State (so that’s ‘Biden’s’ Sabbatian

foreign policy sorted); Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus

coordinator; Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease

Control; Rachel Levine, transgender deputy health secretary (that’s

‘Covid’ hoax policy under control); Merrick Garland, A orney

General; Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security; Cass

Sunstein, Homeland Security with responsibility for new

immigration laws; Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence;

Anne Neuberger, National Security Agency cybersecurity director

(note, cybersecurity); David Cohen, CIA Deputy Director; Ronald

Klain, Biden’s Chief of Staff (see Rahm Emanuel); Eric Lander, a

‘leading geneticist’, Office of Science and Technology Policy director

(see Smart Grid, synthetic biology agenda); Jessica Rosenworcel,

acting head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

which controls Smart Grid technology policy and electromagnetic

communication systems including 5G.
How can it be that so many

pivotal positions are held by two-percent of the American

population and 0.2 percent of the world population administration

a er administration no ma er who is the president and what is the

party?
It’s a coincidence?
Of course it’s not and this is why

Sabbatians have built their colossal global web of interlocking ‘anti-

hate’ hate groups to condemn anyone who asks these glaring

questions as an ‘anti-Semite’.
The way that Jewish people horrifically

abused in Sabbatian-backed Nazi Germany are exploited to this end

is stomach-turning and disgusting beyond words.
Political fusion

Sabbatian manipulation has reversed the roles of Republicans and

Democrats and the same has happened in Britain with the

Conservative and Labour Parties.
Republicans and Conservatives

were always labelled the ‘right’ and Democrats and Labour the ‘le ’,

but look at the policy positions now and the Democrat-Labour ‘le ’

has moved further to the ‘right’ than Republicans and Conservatives

under the banner of ‘Woke’, the Cult-created far-right tyranny.
Where once the Democrat-Labour ‘le ’ defended free speech and

human rights they now seek to delete them and as I said earlier

despite the ‘Covid’ fascism of the Jackboot Johnson Conservative

government in the UK the Labour Party of leader Keir Starmer

demanded even more extreme measures.
The Labour Party has been

very publicly absorbed by Sabbatians a er a political and media

onslaught against the previous leader, the weak and inept Jeremy

Corbyn, over made-up allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ both by him

and his party.
The plan was clear with this ‘anti-Semite’ propaganda

and what was required in response was a swi and decisive ‘fuck

off’ from Corbyn and a statement to expose the Anti-Semitism

Industry (Sabbatian) a empt to silence Labour criticism of the Israeli

government (Sabbatians) and purge the party of all dissent against

the extremes of ultra-Zionism (Sabbatians).
Instead Corbyn and his

party fell to their knees and appeased the abusers which, by

definition, is impossible.
Appeasing one demand leads only to a new

demand to be appeased until takeover is complete.
Like I say – ‘fuck

off’ would have been a much more effective policy and I have used it

myself with great effect over the years when Sabbatians are on my

case which is most of the time.
I consider that fact a great

compliment, by the way.
The outcome of the Labour Party

capitulation is that we now have a Sabbatian-controlled

Conservative Party ‘opposed’ by a Sabbatian-controlled Labour

Party in a one-party Sabbatian state that hurtles towards the

extremes of tyranny (the Sabbatian cult agenda).
In America the

situation is the same.
Labour’s Keir Starmer spends his days on his

knees with his tongue out pointing to Tel Aviv, or I guess now

Jerusalem, while Boris Johnson has an ‘anti-Semitism czar’ in the

form of former Labour MP John Mann who keeps Starmer company

on his prayer mat.
Sabbatian influence can be seen in Jewish members of the Labour

Party who have been ejected for criticism of Israel including those

from families that suffered in Nazi Germany.
Sabbatians despise real

Jewish people and target them even more harshly because it is so

much more difficult to dub them ‘anti-Semitic’ although in their

desperation they do try.
CHAPTER THREE

The Pushbacker sting

Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you

remain the puppet of someone else’s game

Evita Ochel

Iwill use the presidencies of Trump and Biden to show how the

manipulation of the one-party state plays out behind the illusion

of political choice across the world.
No two presidencies could – on

the face of it – be more different and apparently at odds in terms of

direction and policy.
A Renegade Mind sees beyond the obvious and focuses on

outcomes and consequences and not image, words and waffle.
The

Cult embarked on a campaign to divide America between those who

blindly support its agenda (the mentality known as ‘Woke’) and

those who are pushing back on where the Cult and its Sabbatians

want to go.
This presents infinite possibilities for dividing and ruling

the population by se ing them at war with each other and allows a

perceptual ring fence of demonisation to encircle the Pushbackers in

a modern version of the Li le Big Horn in 1876 when American

cavalry led by Lieutenant Colonel George Custer were drawn into a

trap, surrounded and killed by Native American tribes defending

their land of thousands of years from being seized by the

government.
In this modern version the roles are reversed and it’s

those defending themselves from the Sabbatian government who are

surrounded and the government that’s seeking to destroy them.
This

trap was set years ago and to explain how we must return to 2016

and the emergence of Donald Trump as a candidate to be President

of the United States.
He set out to overcome the best part of 20 other

candidates in the Republican Party before and during the primaries

and was not considered by many in those early stages to have a

prayer of living in the White House.
The Republican Party was said

to have great reservations about Trump and yet somehow he won

the nomination.
When you know how American politics works –

politics in general – there is no way that Trump could have become

the party’s candidate unless the Sabbatian-controlled ‘Neocons’ that

run the Republican Party wanted that to happen.
We saw the proof

in emails and documents made public by WikiLeaks that the

Democratic Party hierarchy, or Democons, systematically

undermined the campaign of Bernie Sanders to make sure that

Sabbatian gofer Hillary Clinton won the nomination to be their

presidential candidate.
If the Democons could do that then the

Neocons in the Republican Party could have derailed Trump in the

same way.
But they didn’t and at that stage I began to conclude that

Trump could well be the one chosen to be president.
If that was the

case the ‘why’ was pre y clear to see – the goal of dividing America

between Cult agenda-supporting Wokers and Pushbackers who

gravitated to Trump because he was telling them what they wanted

to hear.
His constituency of support had been increasingly ignored

and voiceless for decades and profoundly through the eight years of

Sabbatian puppet Barack Obama.
Now here was someone speaking

their language of pulling back from the incessant globalisation of

political and economic power, the exporting of American jobs to

China and elsewhere by ‘American’ (Sabbatian) corporations, the

deletion of free speech, and the mass immigration policies that had

further devastated job opportunities for the urban working class of

all races and the once American heartlands of the Midwest.
Beware the forked tongue

Those people collectively sighed with relief that at last a political

leader was apparently on their side, but another trait of the

Renegade Mind is that you look even harder at people telling you

what you want to hear than those who are telling you otherwise.
Obviously as I said earlier people wish what they want to hear to be

true and genuine and they are much more likely to believe that than

someone saying what they don’t want to here and don’t want to be

true.
Sales people are taught to be skilled in eliciting by calculated

questioning what their customers want to hear and repeating that

back to them as their own opinion to get their targets to like and

trust them.
Assets of the Cult are also sales people in the sense of

selling perception.
To read Cult manipulation you have to play the

long and expanded game and not fall for the Vaudeville show of

party politics.
Both American parties are vehicles for the Cult and

they exploit them in different ways depending on what the agenda

requires at that moment.
Trump and the Republicans were used to

be the focus of dividing America and isolating Pushbackers to open

the way for a Biden presidency to become the most extreme in

American history by advancing the full-blown Woke (Cult) agenda

with the aim of destroying and silencing Pushbackers now labelled

Nazi Trump supporters and white supremacists.
Sabbatians wanted Trump in office for the reasons described by

ultra-Zionist Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) who was promoting the Woke

philosophy through ‘community organising’ long before anyone had

heard of it.
In those days it still went by its traditional name of

Marxism.
The reason for the manipulated Trump phenomenon was

laid out in Alinsky’s 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, which was his

blueprint for overthrowing democratic and other regimes and

replacing them with Sabbatian Marxism.
Not surprisingly his to-do

list was evident in the Sabbatian French and Russian ‘Revolutions’

and that in China which will become very relevant in the next

chapter about the ‘Covid’ hoax.
Among Alinsky’s followers have

been the deeply corrupt Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

and Hillary Clinton who described him as a ‘hero’.
All three are

Sabbatian stooges with Pelosi personifying the arrogant corrupt

idiocy that so widely fronts up for the Cult inner core.
Predictably as

a Sabbatian advocate of the ‘light-bringer’ Alinsky features Lucifer

on the dedication page of his book as the original radical who gained

his own kingdom (‘Earth’ as we shall see).
One of Alinsky’s golden

radical rules was to pick an individual and focus all a ention, hatred

and blame on them and not to target faceless bureaucracies and

corporations.
Rules for Radicals is really a Sabbatian handbook with

its contents repeatedly employed all over the world for centuries and

why wouldn’t Sabbatians bring to power their designer-villain to be

used as the individual on which all a ention, hatred and blame was

bestowed?
This is what they did and the only question for me is how

much Trump knew that and how much he was manipulated.
A bit of

both, I suspect.
This was Alinsky’s Trump technique from a man

who died in 1972.
The technique has spanned history:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies.
Identify a responsible individual.
Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.
From the moment Trump came to illusory power everything was

about him.
It wasn’t about Republican policy or opinion, but all

about Trump.
Everything he did was presented in negative,

derogatory and abusive terms by the Sabbatian-dominated media

led by Cult operations such as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times

and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post – ‘Pick the target, freeze it,

personalize it, polarize it.’ Trump was turned into a demon to be

vilified by those who hated him and a demi-god loved by those who

worshipped him.
This, in turn, had his supporters, too, presented as

equally demonic in preparation for the punchline later down the line

when Biden was about to take office.
It was here’s a Trump, there’s a

Trump, everywhere a Trump, Trump.
Virtually every news story or

happening was filtered through the lens of ‘The Donald’.
You loved

him or hated him and which one you chose was said to define you as

Satan’s spawn or a paragon of virtue.
Even supporting some Trump

policies or statements and not others was enough for an assault on

your character.
No shades of grey were or are allowed.
Everything is

black and white (literally and figuratively).
A Californian I knew had

her head u erly scrambled by her hatred for Trump while telling

people they should love each other.
She was so totally consumed by

Trump Derangement Syndrome as it became to be known that this

glaring contradiction would never have occurred to her.
By

definition anyone who criticised Trump or praised his opponents

was a hero and this lady described Joe Biden as ‘a kind, honest

gentleman’ when he’s a provable liar, mega-crook and vicious piece

of work to boot.
Sabbatians had indeed divided America using

Trump as the fall-guy and all along the clock was ticking on the

consequences for his supporters.
In hock to his masters

Trump gave Sabbatians via Israel almost everything they wanted in

his four years.
Ask and you shall receive was the dynamic between

himself and Benjamin Netanyahu orchestrated by Trump’s ultra-

Zionist son-in-law Jared Kushner, his ultra-Zionist Ambassador to

Israel, David Friedman, and ultra-Zionist ‘Israel adviser’, Jason

Greenbla.
The last two were central to the running and protecting

from collapse of his business empire, the Trump Organisation, and

colossal business failures made him forever beholding to Sabbatian

networks that bailed him out.
By the start of the 1990s Trump owed

$4 billion to banks that he couldn’t pay and almost $1billion of that

was down to him personally and not his companies.
This mega-

disaster was the result of building two new casinos in Atlantic City

and buying the enormous Taj Mahal operation which led to

crippling debt payments.
He had borrowed fantastic sums from 72

banks with major Sabbatian connections and although the scale of

debt should have had him living in a tent alongside the highway

they never foreclosed.
A plan was devised to li Trump from the

mire by BT Securities Corporation and Rothschild Inc.
and the case

was handled by Wilber Ross who had worked for the Rothschilds for

27 years.
Ross would be named US Commerce Secretary a er

Trump’s election.
Another crucial figure in saving Trump was ultra-

Zionist ‘investor’ Carl Icahn who bought the Taj Mahal casino.
Icahn

was made special economic adviser on financial regulation in the

Trump administration.
He didn’t stay long but still managed to find

time to make a tidy sum of a reported $31.3 million when he sold his

holdings affected by the price of steel three days before Trump

imposed a 235 percent tariff on steel imports.
What amazing bits of

luck these people have.
Trump and Sabbatian operatives have long

had a close association and his mentor and legal adviser from the

early 1970s until 1986 was the dark and genetically corrupt ultra-

Zionist Roy Cohn who was chief counsel to Senator Joseph

McCarthy’s ‘communist’ witch-hunt in the 1950s.
Esquire magazine

published an article about Cohn with the headline ‘Don’t mess with

Roy Cohn’.
He was described as the most feared lawyer in New York

and ‘a ruthless master of dirty tricks...
[with]...
more than one Mafia

Don on speed dial’.
Cohn’s influence, contacts, support and

protection made Trump a front man for Sabbatians in New York

with their connections to one of Cohn’s many criminal employers,

the ‘Russian’ Sabbatian Mafia.
Israel-centric media mogul Rupert

Murdoch was introduced to Trump by Cohn and they started a long

friendship.
Cohn died in 1986 weeks a er being disbarred for

unethical conduct by the Appellate Division of the New York State

Supreme Court.
The wheels of justice do indeed run slow given the

length of Cohn’s crooked career.
QAnon-sense

We are asked to believe that Donald Trump with his fundamental

connections to Sabbatian networks and operatives has been leading

the fight to stop the Sabbatian agenda for the fascistic control of

America and the world.
Sure he has.
A man entrapped during his

years in the White House by Sabbatian operatives and whose biggest

financial donor was casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson who was

Sabbatian to his DNA??
Oh, do come on.
Trump has been used to

divide America and isolate Pushbackers on the Cult agenda under

the heading of ‘Trump supporters’, ‘insurrectionists’ and ‘white

supremacists’.
The US Intelligence/Mossad Psyop or psychological

operation known as QAnon emerged during the Trump years as a

central pillar in the Sabbatian campaign to lead Pushbackers into the

trap set by those that wished to destroy them.
I knew from the start

that QAnon was a scam because I had seen the same scenario many

times before over 30 years under different names and I had wri en

about one in particular in the books.
‘Not again’ was my reaction

when QAnon came to the fore.
The same script is pulled out every

few years and a new name added to the le erhead.
The story always

takes the same form: ‘Insiders’ or ‘the good guys’ in the government-

intelligence-military ‘Deep State’ apparatus were going to instigate

mass arrests of the ‘bad guys’ which would include the Rockefellers,

Rothschilds, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, etc., etc.
Dates are given for when the ‘good guys’ are going to move in, but

the dates pass without incident and new dates are given which pass

without incident.
The central message to Pushbackers in each case is

that they don’t have to do anything because there is ‘a plan’ and it is

all going to be sorted by the ‘good guys’ on the inside.
‘Trust the

plan’ was a QAnon mantra when the only plan was to misdirect

Pushbackers into pu ing their trust in a Psyop they believed to be

real.
Beware, beware, those who tell you what you want to hear and

always check it out.
Right up to Biden’s inauguration QAnon was

still claiming that ‘the Storm’ was coming and Trump would stay on

as president when Biden and his cronies were arrested and jailed.
It

was never going to happen and of course it didn’t, but what did

happen as a result provided that punchline to the Sabbatian

Trump/QAnon Psyop.
On January 6th, 2021, a very big crowd of Trump supporters

gathered in the National Mall in Washington DC down from the

Capitol Building to protest at what they believed to be widespread

corruption and vote fraud that stopped Trump being re-elected for a

second term as president in November, 2020.
I say as someone that

does not support Trump or Biden that the evidence is clear that

major vote-fixing went on to favour Biden, a man with cognitive

problems so advanced he can o en hardly string a sentence together

without reading the words wri en for him on the Teleprompter.
Glaring ballot discrepancies included serious questions about

electronic voting machines that make vote rigging a comparative

cinch and hundreds of thousands of paper votes that suddenly

appeared during already advanced vote counts and virtually all of

them for Biden.
Early Trump leads in crucial swing states suddenly

began to close and disappear.
The pandemic hoax was used as the

excuse to issue almost limitless numbers of mail-in ballots with no

checks to establish that the recipients were still alive or lived at that

address.
They were sent to streams of people who had not even

asked for them.
Private organisations were employed to gather these

ballots and who knows what they did with them before they turned

up at the counts.
The American election system has been

manipulated over decades to become a sick joke with more holes

than a Swiss cheese for the express purpose of dictating the results.
Then there was the criminal manipulation of information by

Sabbatian tech giants like Facebook, Twi er and Google-owned

YouTube which deleted pro-Trump, anti-Biden accounts and posts

while everything in support of Biden was le alone.
Sabbatians

wanted Biden to win because a er the dividing of America it was

time for full-on Woke and every aspect of the Cult agenda to be

unleashed.
Hunter gatherer

Extreme Silicon Valley bias included blocking information by the

New York Post exposing a Biden scandal that should have ended his

bid for president in the final weeks of the campaign.
Hunter Biden,

his monumentally corrupt son, is reported to have sent a laptop to

be repaired at a local store and failed to return for it.
Time passed

until the laptop became the property of the store for non-payment of

the bill.
When the owner saw what was on the hard drive he gave a

copy to the FBI who did nothing even though it confirmed

widespread corruption in which the Joe Biden family were using his

political position, especially when he was vice president to Obama,

to make multiple millions in countries around the world and most

notably Ukraine and China.
Hunter Biden’s one-time business

partner Tony Bobulinski went public when the story broke in the

New York Post to confirm the corruption he saw and that Joe Biden

not only knew what was going on he also profited from the spoils.
Millions were handed over by a Chinese company with close

connections – like all major businesses in China – to the Chinese

communist party of President Xi Jinping.
Joe Biden even boasted at a

meeting of the Cult’s World Economic Forum that as vice president

he had ordered the government of Ukraine to fire a prosecutor.
What

he didn’t mention was that the same man just happened to be

investigating an energy company which was part of Hunter Biden’s

corrupt portfolio.
The company was paying him big bucks for no

other reason than the influence his father had.
Overnight Biden’s

presidential campaign should have been over given that he had lied

publicly about not knowing what his son was doing.
Instead almost

the entire Sabbatian-owned mainstream media and Sabbatian-

owned Silicon Valley suppressed circulation of the story.
This alone

went a mighty way to rigging the election of 2020.
Cult assets like

Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook also spent hundreds of millions to be

used in support of Biden and vote ‘administration’.
The Cult had used Trump as the focus to divide America and was

now desperate to bring in moronic, pliable, corrupt Biden to

complete the double-whammy.
No way were they going to let li le

things like the will of the people thwart their plan.
Silicon Valley

widely censored claims that the election was rigged because it was

rigged.
For the same reason anyone claiming it was rigged was

denounced as a ‘white supremacist’ including the pathetically few

Republican politicians willing to say so.
Right across the media

where the claim was mentioned it was described as a ‘false claim’

even though these excuses for ‘journalists’ would have done no

research into the subject whatsoever.
Trump won seven million more

votes than any si ing president had ever achieved while somehow a

cognitively-challenged soon to be 78-year-old who was hidden away

from the public for most of the campaign managed to win more

votes than any presidential candidate in history.
It makes no sense.
You only had to see election rallies for both candidates to witness the

enthusiasm for Trump and the apathy for Biden.
Tens of thousands

would a end Trump events while Biden was speaking in empty car

parks with o en only television crews a ending and framing their

shots to hide the fact that no one was there.
It was pathetic to see

footage come to light of Biden standing at a podium making

speeches only to TV crews and party fixers while reading the words

wri en for him on massive Teleprompter screens.
So, yes, those

protestors on January 6th had a point about election rigging, but

some were about to walk into a trap laid for them in Washington by

the Cult Deep State and its QAnon Psyop.
This was the Capitol Hill

riot ludicrously dubbed an ‘insurrection’.
The spider and the fly

Renegade Minds know there are not two ‘sides’ in politics, only one

side, the Cult, working through all ‘sides’.
It’s a stage show, a puppet

show, to direct the perceptions of the population into focusing on

diversions like parties and candidates while missing the puppeteers

with their hands holding all the strings.
The Capitol Hill

‘insurrection’ brings us back to the Li le Big Horn.
Having created

two distinct opposing groupings – Woke and Pushbackers – the trap

was about to be sprung.
Pushbackers were to be encircled and

isolated by associating them all in the public mind with Trump and

then labelling Trump as some sort of Confederate leader.
I knew

immediately that the Capitol riot was a set-up because of two things.
One was how easy the rioters got into the building with virtually no

credible resistance and secondly I could see – as with the ‘Covid’

hoax in the West at the start of 2020 – how the Cult could exploit the

situation to move its agenda forward with great speed.
My

experience of Cult techniques and activities over more than 30 years

has showed me that while they do exploit situations they haven’t

themselves created this never happens with events of fundamental

agenda significance.
Every time major events giving cultists the

excuse to rapidly advance their plan you find they are manipulated

into being for the specific reason of providing that excuse – Problem-

Reaction-Solution.
Only a tiny minority of the huge crowd of

Washington protestors sought to gain entry to the Capitol by

smashing windows and breaching doors.
That didn’t ma er.
The

whole crowd and all Pushbackers, even if they did not support

Trump, were going to be lumped together as dangerous

insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists.
The la er term came into

widespread use through a CIA memo in the 1960s aimed at

discrediting those questioning the nonsensical official story of the

Kennedy assassination and it subsequently became widely

employed by the media.
It’s still being used by inept ‘journalists’

with no idea of its origin to discredit anyone questioning anything

that authority claims to be true.
When you are perpetrating a

conspiracy you need to discredit the very word itself even though

the dictionary definition of conspiracy is merely ‘the activity of

secretly planning with other people to do something bad or illegal‘

and ‘a general agreement to keep silent about a subject for the

purpose of keeping it secret’.
On that basis there are conspiracies

almost wherever you look.
For obvious reasons the Cult and its

lapdog media have to claim there are no conspiracies even though

the word appears in state laws as with conspiracy to defraud, to

murder, and to corrupt public morals.
Agent provocateurs are widely used by the Cult Deep State to

manipulate genuine people into acting in ways that suit the desired

outcome.
By genuine in this case I mean protestors genuinely

supporting Trump and claims that the election was stolen.
In among

them, however, were agents of the state wearing the garb of Trump

supporters and QAnon to pump-prime the Capital riot which some

genuine Trump supporters naively fell for.
I described the situation

as ‘Come into my parlour said the spider to the fly’.
Leaflets

appeared through the Woke paramilitary arm Antifa, the anti-fascist

fascists, calling on supporters to turn up in Washington looking like

Trump supporters even though they hated him.
Some of those

arrested for breaching the Capitol Building were sourced to Antifa

and its stable mate Black Lives Ma er.
Both organisations are funded

by Cult billionaires and corporations.
One man charged for the riot

was according to his lawyer a former FBI agent who had held top

secret security clearance for 40 years.
A orney Thomas Plofchan said

of his client, 66-year-old Thomas Edward Caldwell:

He has held a Top Secret Security Clearance since 1979 and has undergone multiple Special

Background Investigations in support of his clearances.
After retiring from the Navy, he

worked as a section chief for the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2009-2010 as a GS-12

[mid-level employee].
He also formed and operated a consulting firm performing work, often classified, for U.S

government customers including the US.
Drug Enforcement Agency, Department of Housing

and Urban Development, the US Coast Guard, and the US Army Personnel Command.
A judge later released Caldwell pending trial in the absence of

evidence about a conspiracy or that he tried to force his way into the

building.
The New York Post reported a ‘law enforcement source‘ as

saying that ‘at least two known Antifa members were spo ed’ on

camera among Trump supporters during the riot while one of the

rioters arrested was John Earle Sullivan, a seriously extreme Black

Lives Ma er Trump-hater from Utah who was previously arrested

and charged in July, 2020, over a BLM-Antifa riot in which drivers

were threatened and one was shot.
Sullivan is the founder of Utah-

based Insurgence USA which is an affiliate of the Cult-created-and-

funded Black Lives Ma er movement.
Footage appeared and was

then deleted by Twi er of Trump supporters calling out Antifa

infiltrators and a group was filmed changing into pro-Trump

clothing before the riot.
Security at the building was pathetic – as

planned.
Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, a man with long experience

in covert operations working with the US security apparatus, once

described the tell-tale sign to identify who is involved in an

assassination.
He said:

No one has to direct an assassination – it happens.
The active role is played secretly by

permitting it to happen.
This is the greatest single clue.
Who has the power to call off or

reduce the usual security precautions?
This principle applies to many other situations and certainly to the

Capitol riot of January 6th, 2021.
The sting

With such a big and potentially angry crowd known to be gathering

near the Capitol the security apparatus would have had a major

police detail to defend the building with National Guard troops on

standby given the strength of feeling among people arriving from all

over America encouraged by the QAnon Psyop and statements by

Donald Trump.
Instead Capitol Police ‘security’ was flimsy, weak,

and easily breached.
The same number of officers was deployed as

on a regular day and that is a blatant red flag.
They were not staffed

or equipped for a possible riot that had been an obvious possibility

in the circumstances.
No protective and effective fencing worth the

name was put in place and there were no contingency plans.
The

whole thing was basically a case of standing aside and waving

people in.
Once inside police mostly backed off apart from one

Capitol police officer who ridiculously shot dead unarmed Air Force

veteran protestor Ashli Babbi without a warning as she climbed

through a broken window.
The ‘investigation’ refused to name or

charge the officer a er what must surely be considered a murder in

the circumstances.
They just li ed a carpet and swept.
The story was

endlessly repeated about five people dying in the ‘armed

insurrection’ when there was no report of rioters using weapons.
Apart from Babbi the other four died from a heart a ack, strokes

and apparently a drug overdose.
Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick

was reported to have died a er being bludgeoned with a fire

extinguisher when he was alive a er the riot was over and died later

of what the Washington Medical Examiner’s Office said was a stroke.
Sicknick had no external injuries.
The lies were delivered like rapid

fire.
There was a narrative to build with incessant repetition of the lie

until the lie became the accepted ‘everybody knows that’ truth.
The

‘Big Lie’ technique of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels is

constantly used by the Cult which was behind the Nazis and is

today behind the ‘Covid’ and ‘climate change’ hoaxes.
Goebbels

said:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the

political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
It thus becomes vitally important

for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Most protestors had a free run of the Capitol Building.
This

allowed pictures to be taken of rioters in iconic parts of the building

including the Senate chamber which could be used as propaganda

images against all Pushbackers.
One Congresswoman described the

scene as ‘the worst kind of non-security anybody could ever

imagine’.
Well, the first part was true, but someone obviously did

imagine it and made sure it happened.
Some photographs most

widely circulated featured people wearing QAnon symbols and now

the Psyop would be used to dub all QAnon followers with the

ubiquitous fit-all label of ‘white supremacist’ and ‘insurrectionists’.
When a Muslim extremist called Noah Green drove his car at two

police officers at the Capitol Building killing one in April, 2021, there

was no such political and media hysteria.
They were just

disappointed he wasn’t white.
The witch-hunt

Government prosecutor Michael Sherwin, an aggressive, dark-eyed,

professional Ro weiler led the ‘investigation’ and to call it over the

top would be to understate reality a thousand fold.
Hundreds were

tracked down and arrested for the crime of having the wrong

political views and people were jailed who had done nothing more

than walk in the building, commi ed no violence or damage to

property, took a few pictures and le.
They were labelled a ‘threat to

the Republic’ while Biden sat in the White House signing executive

orders wri en for him that were dismantling ‘the Republic’.
Even

when judges ruled that a mother and son should not be in jail the

government kept them there.
Some of those arrested have been

badly beaten by prison guards in Washington and lawyers for one

man said he suffered a fractured skull and was made blind in one

eye.
Meanwhile a woman is shot dead for no reason by a Capitol

Police officer and we are not allowed to know who he is never mind

what has happened to him although that will be nothing.
The Cult’s

QAnon/Trump sting to identify and isolate Pushbackers and then

target them on the road to crushing and deleting them was a

resounding success.
You would have thought the Russians had

invaded the building at gunpoint and lined up senators for a firing

squad to see the political and media reaction.
Congresswoman

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a child in a woman’s body, a terrible-

twos, me, me, me, Woker narcissist of such proportions that words

have no meaning.
She said she thought she was going to die when

‘insurrectionists’ banged on her office door.
It turned out she wasn’t

even in the Capitol Building when the riot was happening and the

‘banging’ was a Capitol Police officer.
She referred to herself as a

‘survivor’ which is an insult to all those true survivors of violent and

sexual abuse while she lives her pampered and privileged life

talking drivel for a living.
Her Woke colleague and fellow mega-

narcissist Rashida Tlaib broke down describing the devastating

effect on her, too, of not being in the building when the rioters were

there.
Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib are members of a fully-Woke group

of Congresswomen known as ‘The Squad’ along with Ilhan Omar

and Ayanna Pressley.
The Squad from what I can see can be

identified by its vehement anti-white racism, anti-white men agenda,

and, as always in these cases, the absence of brain cells on active

duty.
The usual suspects were on the riot case immediately in the form

of Democrat ultra-Zionist senators and operatives Chuck Schumer

and Adam Schiff demanding that Trump be impeached for ‘his part

in the insurrection’.
The same pair of prats had led the failed

impeachment of Trump over the invented ‘Russia collusion’

nonsense which claimed Russia had helped Trump win the 2016

election.
I didn’t realise that Tel Aviv had been relocated just outside

Moscow.
I must find an up-to-date map.
The Russia hoax was a

Sabbatian operation to keep Trump occupied and impotent and to

stop any rapport with Russia which the Cult wants to retain as a

perceptual enemy to be pulled out at will.
Puppet Biden began

a acking Russia when he came to office as the Cult seeks more

upheaval, division and war across the world.
A two-year stage show

‘Russia collusion inquiry’ headed by the not-very-bright former 9/11

FBI chief Robert Mueller, with support from 19 lawyers, 40 FBI

agents plus intelligence analysts, forensic accountants and other

staff, devoured tens of millions of dollars and found no evidence of

Russia collusion which a ten-year-old could have told them on day

one.
Now the same moronic Schumer and Schiff wanted a second

impeachment of Trump over the Capitol ‘insurrection’ (riot) which

the arrested development of Schumer called another ‘Pearl Harbor’

while others compared it with 9/11 in which 3,000 died and, in the

case of CNN, with the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s in which an

estimated 500,000 to 600,000 were murdered, between 250, 000 and

500,000 women were raped, and populations of whole towns were

hacked to death with machetes.
To make those comparisons purely

for Cult political reasons is beyond insulting to those that suffered

and lost their lives and confirms yet again the callous inhumanity

that we are dealing with.
Schumer is a monumental idiot and so is

Schiff, but they serve the Cult agenda and do whatever they’re told

so they get looked a er.
Talking of idiots – another inane man who

spanned the Russia and Capitol impeachment a empts was Senator

Eric Swalwell who had the nerve to accuse Trump of collusion with

the Russians while sleeping with a Chinese spy called Christine Fang

or ‘Fang Fang’ which is straight out of a Bond film no doubt starring

Klaus Schwab as the bloke living on a secret island and controlling

laser weapons positioned in space and pointing at world capitals.
Fang Fang plays the part of Bond’s infiltrator girlfriend which I’m

sure she would enjoy rather more than sharing a bed with the

brainless Swalwell, lying back and thinking of China.
The FBI

eventually warned Swalwell about Fang Fang which gave her time

to escape back to the Chinese dictatorship.
How very thoughtful of

them.
The second Trump impeachment also failed and hardly

surprising when an impeachment is supposed to remove a si ing

president and by the time it happened Trump was no longer

president.
These people are running your country America, well,

officially anyway.
Terrifying isn’t it?
Outcomes tell the story - always

The outcome of all this – and it’s the outcome on which Renegade

Minds focus, not the words – was that a vicious, hysterical and

obviously pre-planned assault was launched on Pushbackers to

censor, silence and discredit them and even targeted their right to

earn a living.
They have since been condemned as ‘domestic

terrorists’ that need to be treated like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
‘Domestic terrorists’ is a label the Cult has been trying to make stick

since the period of the Oklahoma bombing in 1995 which was

blamed on ‘far-right domestic terrorists’.
If you read The Trigger you

will see that the bombing was clearly a Problem-Reaction-Solution

carried out by the Deep State during a Bill Clinton administration so

corrupt that no dictionary definition of the term would even nearly

suffice.
Nearly 30, 000 troops were deployed from all over America

to the empty streets of Washington for Biden’s inauguration.
Ten

thousand of them stayed on with the pretext of protecting the capital

from insurrectionists when it was more psychological programming

to normalise the use of the military in domestic law enforcement in

support of the Cult plan for a police-military state.
Biden’s fascist

administration began a purge of ‘wrong-thinkers’ in the military

which means anyone that is not on board with Woke.
The Capitol

Building was surrounded by a fence with razor wire and the Land of

the Free was further symbolically and literally dismantled.
The circle

was completed with the installation of Biden and the exploitation of

the QAnon Psyop.
America had never been so divided since the civil war of the 19th

century, Pushbackers were isolated and dubbed terrorists and now,

as was always going to happen, the Cult immediately set about

deleting what li le was le of freedom and transforming American

society through a swish of the hand of the most controlled

‘president’ in American history leading (officially at least) the most

extreme regime since the country was declared an independent state

on July 4th, 1776.
Biden issued undebated, dictatorial executive

orders almost by the hour in his opening days in office across the

whole spectrum of the Cult wish-list including diluting controls on

the border with Mexico allowing thousands of migrants to illegally

enter the United States to transform the demographics of America

and import an election-changing number of perceived Democrat

voters.
Then there were Biden deportation amnesties for the already

illegally resident (estimated to be as high as 20 or even 30 million).
A

bill before Congress awarded American citizenship to anyone who

could prove they had worked in agriculture for just 180 days in the

previous two years as ‘Big Ag’ secured its slave labour long-term.
There were the plans to add new states to the union such as Puerto

Rico and making Washington DC a state.
They are all parts of a plan

to ensure that the Cult-owned Woke Democrats would be

permanently in power.
Border – what border?
I have exposed in detail in other books how mass immigration into

the United States and Europe is the work of Cult networks fuelled by

the tens of billions spent to this and other ends by George Soros and

his global Open Society (open borders) Foundations.
The impact can

be seen in America alone where the population has increased by 100

million in li le more than 30 years mostly through immigration.
I

wrote in The Answer that the plan was to have so many people

crossing the southern border that the numbers become unstoppable

and we are now there under Cult-owned Biden.
El Salvador in

Central America puts the scale of what is happening into context.
A

third of the population now lives in the United States, much of it

illegally, and many more are on the way.
The methodology is to

crush Central and South American countries economically and

spread violence through machete-wielding psychopathic gangs like

MS-13 based in El Salvador and now operating in many American

cities.
Biden-imposed lax security at the southern border means that

it is all but open.
He said before his ‘election’ that he wanted to see a

surge towards the border if he became president and that was the

green light for people to do just that a er election day to create the

human disaster that followed for both America and the migrants.
When that surge came the imbecilic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it

wasn’t a ‘surge’ because they are ‘children, not insurgents’ and the

term ‘surge’ (used by Biden) was a claim of ‘white supremacists’.
This disingenuous lady may one day enter the realm of the most

basic intelligence, but it won’t be any time soon.
Sabbatians and the Cult are in the process of destroying America

by importing violent people and gangs in among the genuine to

terrorise American cities and by overwhelming services that cannot

cope with the sheer volume of new arrivals.
Something similar is

happening in Europe as Western society in general is targeted for

demographic and cultural transformation and upheaval.
The plan

demands violence and crime to create an environment of

intimidation, fear and division and Soros has been funding the

election of district a orneys across America who then stop

prosecuting many crimes, reduce sentences for violent crimes and

free as many violent criminals as they can.
Sabbatians are creating

the chaos from which order – their order – can respond in a classic

Problem-Reaction-Solution.
A Freemasonic moto says ‘Ordo Ab

Chao’ (Order out of Chaos) and this is why the Cult is constantly

creating chaos to impose a new ‘order’.
Here you have the reason

the Cult is constantly creating chaos.
The ‘Covid’ hoax can be seen

with those entering the United States by plane being forced to take a

‘Covid’ test while migrants flooding through southern border

processing facilities do not.
Nothing is put in the way of mass

migration and if that means ignoring the government’s own ‘Covid’

rules then so be it.
They know it’s all bullshit anyway.
Any pushback

on this is denounced as ‘racist’ by Wokers and Sabbatian fronts like

the ultra-Zionist Anti-Defamation League headed by the appalling

Jonathan Greenbla which at the same time argues that Israel should

not give citizenship and voting rights to more Palestinian Arabs or

the ‘Jewish population’ (in truth the Sabbatian network) will lose

control of the country.
Society-changing numbers

Biden’s masters have declared that countries like El Salvador are so

dangerous that their people must be allowed into the United States

for humanitarian reasons when there are fewer murders in large

parts of many Central American countries than in US cities like

Baltimore.
That is not to say Central America cannot be a dangerous

place and Cult-controlled American governments have been making

it so since way back, along with the dismantling of economies, in a

long-term plan to drive people north into the United States.
Parts of

Central America are very dangerous, but in other areas the story is

being greatly exaggerated to justify relaxing immigration criteria.
Migrants are being offered free healthcare and education in the

United States as another incentive to head for the border and there is

no requirement to be financially independent before you can enter to

prevent the resources of America being drained.
You can’t blame

migrants for seeking what they believe will be a be er life, but they

are being played by the Cult for dark and nefarious ends.
The

numbers since Biden took office are huge.
In February, 2021, more

than 100,000 people were known to have tried to enter the US

illegally through the southern border (it was 34,000 in the same

month in 2020) and in March it was 170,000 – a 418 percent increase

on March, 2020.
These numbers are only known people, not the ones

who get in unseen.
The true figure for migrants illegally crossing the

border in a single month was estimated by one congressman at

250,000 and that number will only rise under Biden’s current policy.
Gangs of murdering drug-running thugs that control the Mexican

side of the border demand money – thousands of dollars – to let

migrants cross the Rio Grande into America.
At the same time gun

ba les are breaking out on the border several times a week between

rival Mexican drug gangs (which now operate globally) who are

equipped with sophisticated military-grade weapons, grenades and

armoured vehicles.
While the Capitol Building was being ‘protected’

from a non-existent ‘threat’ by thousands of troops, and others were

still deployed at the time in the Cult Neocon war in Afghanistan, the

southern border of America was le to its fate.
This is not

incompetence, it is cold calculation.
By March, 2021, there were 17,000 unaccompanied children held at

border facilities and many of them are ensnared by people traffickers

for paedophile rings and raped on their journey north to America.
This is not conjecture – this is fact.
Many of those designated

children are in reality teenage boys or older.
Meanwhile Wokers

posture their self-purity for encouraging poor and tragic people to

come to America and face this nightmare both on the journey and at

the border with the disgusting figure of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

giving disingenuous speeches about caring for migrants.
The

woman’s evil.
Wokers condemned Trump for having children in

cages at the border (so did Obama, Shhhh), but now they are sleeping

on the floor without access to a shower with one border facility 729

percent over capacity.
The Biden insanity even proposed flying

migrants from the southern border to the northern border with

Canada for ‘processing’.
The whole shambles is being overseen by

ultra-Zionist Secretary of Homeland Security, the moronic liar

Alejandro Mayorkas, who banned news cameras at border facilities

to stop Americans seeing what was happening.
Mayorkas said there

was not a ban on news crews; it was just that they were not allowed

to film.
Alongside him at Homeland Security is another ultra-Zionist

Cass Sunstein appointed by Biden to oversee new immigration laws.
Sunstein despises conspiracy researchers to the point where he

suggests they should be banned or taxed for having such views.
The

man is not bonkers or anything.
He’s perfectly well-adjusted, but

adjusted to what is the question.
Criticise what is happening and

you are a ‘white supremacist’ when earlier non-white immigrants

also oppose the numbers which effect their lives and opportunities.
Black people in poor areas are particularly damaged by uncontrolled

immigration and the increased competition for work opportunities

with those who will work for less.
They are also losing voting power

as Hispanics become more dominant in former black areas.
It’s a

downward spiral for them while the billionaires behind the policy

drone on about how much they care about black people and

‘racism’.
None of this is about compassion for migrants or black

people – that’s just wind and air.
Migrants are instead being

mercilessly exploited to transform America while the countries they

leave are losing their future and the same is true in Europe.
Mass

immigration may now be the work of Woke Democrats, but it can be

traced back to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (it

wasn’t) signed into law by Republican hero President Ronald

Reagan which gave amnesty to millions living in the United States

illegally and other incentives for people to head for the southern

border.
Here we have the one-party state at work again.
Save me syndrome

Almost every aspect of what I have been exposing as the Cult

agenda was on display in even the first days of ‘Biden’ with silencing

of Pushbackers at the forefront of everything.
A Renegade Mind will

view the Trump years and QAnon in a very different light to their

supporters and advocates as the dots are connected.
The

QAnon/Trump Psyop has given the Cult all it was looking for.
We

may not know how much, or li le, that Trump realised he was being

used, but that’s a side issue.
This pincer movement produced the

desired outcome of dividing America and having Pushbackers

isolated.
To turn this around we have to look at new routes to

empowerment which do not include handing our power to other

people and groups through what I will call the ‘Save Me Syndrome’

– ‘I want someone else to do it so that I don’t have to’.
We have seen

this at work throughout human history and the QAnon/Trump

Psyop is only the latest incarnation alongside all the others.
Religion

is an obvious expression of this when people look to a ‘god’ or priest

to save them or tell them how to be saved and then there are ‘save

me’ politicians like Trump.
Politics is a diversion and not a ‘saviour’.
It is a means to block positive change, not make it possible.
Save Me Syndrome always comes with the same repeating theme

of handing your power to whom or what you believe will save you

while your real ‘saviour’ stares back from the mirror every morning.
Renegade Minds are constantly vigilant in this regard and always

asking the question ‘What can I do?’ rather than ‘What can someone

else do for me?’ Gandhi was right when he said: ‘You must be the

change you want to see in the world.’ We are indeed the people we

have been waiting for.
We are presented with a constant ra of

reasons to concede that power to others and forget where the real

power is.
Humanity has the numbers and the Cult does not.
It has to

use diversion and division to target the unstoppable power that

comes from unity.
Religions, governments, politicians, corporations,

media, QAnon, are all different manifestations of this power-

diversion and dilution.
Refusing to give your power to governments

and instead handing it to Trump and QAnon is not to take a new

direction, but merely to recycle the old one with new names on the

posters.
I will explore this phenomenon as we proceed and how to

break the cycles and recycles that got us here through the mists of

repeating perception and so repeating history.
For now we shall turn to the most potent example in the entire

human story of the consequences that follow when you give your

power away.
I am talking, of course, of the ‘Covid’ hoax.
CHAPTER FOUR

‘Covid’: Calculated catastrophe

Facts are threatening to those invested in fraud

DaShanne Stokes

We can easily unravel the real reason for the ‘Covid pandemic’

hoax by employing the Renegade Mind methodology that I

have outlined this far.
We’ll start by comparing the long-planned

Cult outcome with the ‘Covid pandemic’ outcome.
Know the

outcome and you’ll see the journey.
I have highlighted the plan for the Hunger Games Society which

has been in my books for so many years with the very few

controlling the very many through ongoing dependency.
To create

this dependency it is essential to destroy independent livelihoods,

businesses and employment to make the population reliant on the

state (the Cult) for even the basics of life through a guaranteed

pi ance income.
While independence of income remained these Cult

ambitions would be thwarted.
With this knowledge it was easy to

see where the ‘pandemic’ hoax was going once talk of ‘lockdowns’

began and the closing of all but perceived ‘essential’ businesses to

‘save’ us from an alleged ‘deadly virus’.
Cult corporations like

Amazon and Walmart were naturally considered ‘essential’ while

mom and pop shops and stores had their doors closed by fascist

decree.
As a result with every new lockdown and new regulation

more small and medium, even large businesses not owned by the

Cult, went to the wall while Cult giants and their frontmen and

women grew financially fa er by the second.
Mom and pop were

denied an income and the right to earn a living and the wealth of

people like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and

Sergei Brin and Larry Page (Google/Alphabet) have reached record

levels.
The Cult was increasing its own power through further

dramatic concentrations of wealth while the competition was being

destroyed and brought into a state of dependency.
Lockdowns have

been instigated to secure that very end and were never anything to

do with health.
My brother Paul spent 45 years building up a bus

repair business, but lockdowns meant buses were running at a

fraction of normal levels for months on end.
Similar stories can told

in their hundreds of millions worldwide.
Efforts of a lifetime coldly

destroyed by Cult multi-billionaires and their lackeys in government

and law enforcement who continued to earn their living from the

taxation of the people while denying the right of the same people to

earn theirs.
How different it would have been if those making and

enforcing these decisions had to face the same financial hardships of

those they affected, but they never do.
Gates of Hell

Behind it all in the full knowledge of what he is doing and why is

the psychopathic figure of Cult operative Bill Gates.
His puppet

Tedros at the World Health Organization declared ‘Covid’ a

pandemic in March, 2020.
The WHO had changed the definition of a

‘pandemic’ in 2009 just a month before declaring the ‘swine flu

pandemic’ which would not have been so under the previous

definition.
The same applies to ‘Covid’.
The definition had

included… ‘an infection by an infectious agent, occurring

simultaneously in different countries, with a significant mortality

rate relative to the proportion of the population infected’.
The new

definition removed the need for ‘significant mortality’.
The

‘pandemic’ has been fraudulent even down to the definition, but

Gates demanded economy-destroying lockdowns, school closures,

social distancing, mandatory masks, a ‘vaccination’ for every man,

woman and child on the planet and severe consequences and

restrictions for those that refused.
Who gave him this power?
The

Cult did which he serves like a li le boy in short trousers doing

what his daddy tells him.
He and his psychopathic missus even

smiled when they said that much worse was to come (what they

knew was planned to come).
Gates responded in the ma er-of-fact

way of all psychopaths to a question about the effect on the world

economy of what he was doing:

Well, it won’t go to zero but it will shrink.
Global GDP is probably going to take the biggest

hit ever [Gates was smiling as he said this] … in my lifetime this will be the greatest economic

hit.
But you don’t have a choice.
People act as if you have a choice.
People don’t feel like

going to the stadium when they might get infected … People are deeply affected by seeing

these stats, by knowing they could be part of the transmission chain, old people, their parents

and grandparents, could be affected by this, and so you don’t get to say ignore what is going

on here.
There will be the ability to open up, particularly in rich countries, if things are done well over the next few months, but for the world at large normalcy only returns when we have largely

vaccinated the entire population.
The man has no compassion or empathy.
How could he when he’s

a psychopath like all Cult players?
My own view is that even beyond

that he is very seriously mentally ill.
Look in his eyes and you can

see this along with his crazy flailing arms.
You don’t do what he has

done to the world population since the start of 2020 unless you are

mentally ill and at the most extreme end of psychopathic.
You

especially don’t do it when to you know, as we shall see, that cases

and deaths from ‘Covid’ are fakery and a product of monumental

figure massaging.
‘These stats’ that Gates referred to are based on a

‘test’ that’s not testing for the ‘virus’ as he has known all along.
He

made his fortune with big Cult support as an infamously ruthless

so ware salesman and now buys global control of ‘health’ (death)

policy without the population he affects having any say.
It’s a

breathtaking outrage.
Gates talked about people being deeply

affected by fear of ‘Covid’ when that was because of him and his

global network lying to them minute-by-minute supported by a

lying media that he seriously influences and funds to the tune of

hundreds of millions.
He’s handed big sums to media operations

including the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, Univision, PBS NewsHour,

ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The

Atlantic, Texas Tribune, USA Today publisher Ganne , Washington

Monthly, Le Monde, Center for Investigative Reporting, Pulitzer

Center on Crisis Reporting, National Press Foundation, International

Center for Journalists, Solutions Journalism Network, the Poynter

Institute for Media Studies, and many more.
Gates is everywhere in

the ‘Covid’ hoax and the man must go to prison – or a mental facility

– for the rest of his life and his money distributed to those he has

taken such enormous psychopathic pleasure in crushing.
The Muscle

The Hunger Games global structure demands a police-military state

– a fusion of the two into one force – which viciously imposes the

will of the Cult on the population and protects the Cult from public

rebellion.
In that regard, too, the ‘Covid’ hoax just keeps on giving.
O en unlawful, ridiculous and contradictory ‘Covid’ rules and

regulations have been policed across the world by moronic

automatons and psychopaths made faceless by face-nappy masks

and acting like the Nazi SS and fascist blackshirts and brownshirts of

Hitler and Mussolini.
The smallest departure from the rules decreed

by the psychos in government and their clueless gofers were jumped

upon by the face-nappy fascists.
Brutality against public protestors

soon became commonplace even on girls, women and old people as

the brave men with the batons – the Face-Nappies as I call them –

broke up peaceful protests and handed out fines like confe i to

people who couldn’t earn a living let alone pay hundreds of pounds

for what was once an accepted human right.
Robot Face-Nappies of

No ingham police in the English East Midlands fined one group

£11,000 for a ending a child’s birthday party.
For decades I charted

the transformation of law enforcement as genuine, decent officers

were replaced with psychopaths and the brain dead who would

happily and brutally do whatever their masters told them.
Now they

were let loose on the public and I would emphasise the point that

none of this just happened.
The step-by-step change in the dynamic

between police and public was orchestrated from the shadows by

those who knew where this was all going and the same with the

perceptual reframing of those in all levels of authority and official

administration through ‘training courses’ by organisations such as

Common Purpose which was created in the late 1980s and given a

massive boost in Blair era Britain until it became a global

phenomenon.
Supposed public ‘servants’ began to view the

population as the enemy and the same was true of the police.
This

was the start of the explosion of behaviour manipulation

organisations and networks preparing for the all-war on the human

psyche unleashed with the dawn of 2020.
I will go into more detail

about this later in the book because it is a core part of what is

happening.
Police desecrated beauty spots to deter people gathering and

arrested women for walking in the countryside alone ‘too far’ from

their homes.
We had arrogant, clueless sergeants in the Isle of Wight

police where I live posting on Facebook what they insisted the

population must do or else.
A schoolmaster sergeant called Radford

looked young enough for me to ask if his mother knew he was out,

but he was posting what he expected people to do while a Sergeant

Wilkinson boasted about fining lads for meeting in a McDonald’s car

park where they went to get a lockdown takeaway.
Wilkinson added

that he had even cancelled their order.
What a pair of prats these

people are and yet they have increasingly become the norm among

Jackboot Johnson’s Yellowshirts once known as the British police.
This was the theme all over the world with police savagery common

during lockdown protests in the United States, the Netherlands, and

the fascist state of Victoria in Australia under its tyrannical and

again moronic premier Daniel Andrews.
Amazing how tyrannical

and moronic tend to work as a team and the same combination

could be seen across America as arrogant, narcissistic Woke

governors and mayors such as Gavin Newsom (California), Andrew

Cuomo (New York), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), Lori Lightfoot

(Chicago) and Eric Garce i (Los Angeles) did their Nazi and Stalin

impressions with the full support of the compliant brutality of their

enforcers in uniform as they arrested small business owners defying

fascist shutdown orders and took them to jail in ankle shackles and

handcuffs.
This happened to bistro owner Marlena Pavlos-Hackney

in Gretchen Whitmer’s fascist state of Michigan when police arrived

to enforce an order by a state-owned judge for ‘pu ing the

community at risk’ at a time when other states like Texas were

dropping restrictions and migrants were pouring across the

southern border without any ‘Covid’ questions at all.
I’m sure there

are many officers appalled by what they are ordered to do, but not

nearly enough of them.
If they were truly appalled they would not

do it.
As the months passed every opportunity was taken to have the

military involved to make their presence on the streets ever more

familiar and ‘normal’ for the longer-term goal of police-military

fusion.
Another crucial element to the Hunger Games enforcement

network has been encouraging the public to report neighbours and

others for ‘breaking the lockdown rules’.
The group faced with

£11,000 in fines at the child’s birthday party would have been

dobbed-in by a neighbour with a brain the size of a pea.
The

technique was most famously employed by the Stasi secret police in

communist East Germany who had public informants placed

throughout the population.
A police chief in the UK says his force

doesn’t need to carry out ‘Covid’ patrols when they are flooded with

so many calls from the public reporting other people for visiting the

beach.
Dorset police chief James Vaughan said people were so

enthusiastic about snitching on their fellow humans they were now

operating as an auxiliary arm of the police: ‘We are still ge ing

around 400 reports a week from the public, so we will respond to

reports …We won’t need to be doing hotspot patrols because people

are very quick to pick the phone up and tell us.’ Vaughan didn’t say

that this is a pillar of all tyrannies of whatever complexion and the

means to hugely extend the reach of enforcement while spreading

distrust among the people and making them wary of doing anything

that might get them reported.
Those narcissistic Isle of Wight

sergeants Radford and Wilkinson never fail to add a link to their

Facebook posts where the public can inform on their fellow slaves.
Neither would be self-aware enough to realise they were imitating

the Stasi which they might well never have heard of.
Government

psychologists that I will expose later laid out a policy to turn

communities against each other in the same way.
A coincidence?
Yep, and I can knit fog

I knew from the start of the alleged pandemic that this was a Cult

operation.
It presented limitless potential to rapidly advance the Cult

agenda and exploit manipulated fear to demand that every man,

woman and child on the planet was ‘vaccinated’ in a process never

used on humans before which infuses self-replicating synthetic

material into human cells.
Remember the plan to transform the

human body from a biological to a synthetic biological state.
I’ll deal

with the ‘vaccine’ (that’s not actually a vaccine) when I focus on the

genetic agenda.
Enough to say here that mass global ‘vaccination’

justified by this ‘new virus’ set alarms ringing a er 30 years of

tracking these people and their methods.
The ‘Covid’ hoax officially

beginning in China was also a big red flag for reasons I will be

explaining.
The agenda potential was so enormous that I could

dismiss any idea that the ‘virus’ appeared naturally.
Major

happenings with major agenda implications never occur without

Cult involvement in making them happen.
My questions were

twofold in early 2020 as the media began its campaign to induce

global fear and hysteria: Was this alleged infectious agent released

on purpose by the Cult or did it even exist at all?
I then did what I

always do in these situations.
I sat, observed and waited to see

where the evidence and information would take me.
By March and

early April synchronicity was strongly – and ever more so since then

– pointing me in the direction of there is no ‘virus’.
I went public on

that with derision even from swathes of the alternative media that

voiced a scenario that the Chinese government released the ‘virus’ in

league with Deep State elements in the United States from a top-

level bio-lab in Wuhan where the ‘virus’ is said to have first

appeared.
I looked at that possibility, but I didn’t buy it for several

reasons.
Deaths from the ‘virus’ did not in any way match what they

would have been with a ‘deadly bioweapon’ and it is much more

effective if you sell the illusion of an infectious agent rather than

having a real one unless you can control through injection who has it

and who doesn’t.
Otherwise you lose control of events.
A made-up

‘virus’ gives you a blank sheet of paper on which you can make it do

whatever you like and have any symptoms or mutant ‘variants’ you

choose to add while a real infectious agent would limit you to what

it actually does.
A phantom disease allows you to have endless

ludicrous ‘studies’ on the ‘Covid’ dollar to widen the perceived

impact by inventing ever more ‘at risk’ groups including one study

which said those who walk slowly may be almost four times more

likely to die from the ‘virus’.
People are in psychiatric wards for less.
A real ‘deadly bioweapon’ can take out people in the hierarchy

that are not part of the Cult, but essential to its operation.
Obviously

they don’t want that.
Releasing a real disease means you

immediately lose control of it.
Releasing an illusory one means you

don’t.
Again it’s vital that people are extra careful when dealing with

what they want to hear.
A bioweapon unleashed from a Chinese

laboratory in collusion with the American Deep State may fit a

conspiracy narrative, but is it true?
Would it not be far more effective

to use the excuse of a ‘virus’ to justify the real bioweapon – the

‘vaccine’?
That way your disease agent does not have to be

transmi ed and arrives directly through a syringe.
I saw a French

virologist Luc Montagnier quoted in the alternative media as saying

he had discovered that the alleged ‘new’ severe acute respiratory

syndrome coronavirus , or SARS-CoV-2, was made artificially and

included elements of the human immunodeficiency ‘virus’ (HIV)

and a parasite that causes malaria.
SARS-CoV-2 is alleged to trigger

an alleged illness called Covid-19.
I remembered Montagnier’s name

from my research years before into claims that an HIV ‘retrovirus’

causes AIDs – claims that were demolished by Berkeley virologist

Peter Duesberg who showed that no one had ever proved that HIV

causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or AIDS.
Claims that

become accepted as fact, publicly and medically, with no proof

whatsoever are an ever-recurring story that profoundly applies to

‘Covid’.
Nevertheless, despite the lack of proof, Montagnier’s team

at the Pasteur Institute in Paris had a long dispute with American

researcher Robert Gallo over which of them discovered and isolated

the HIV ‘virus’ and with no evidence found it to cause AIDS.
You will

see later that there is also no evidence that any ‘virus’ causes any

disease or that there is even such a thing as a ‘virus’ in the way it is

said to exist.
The claim to have ‘isolated’ the HIV ‘virus’ will be

presented in its real context as we come to the shocking story – and

it is a story – of SARS-CoV-2 and so will Montagnier’s assertion that

he identified the full SARS-CoV-2 genome.
Hoax in the making

We can pick up the ‘Covid’ story in 2010 and the publication by the

Rockefeller Foundation of a document called ‘Scenarios for the

Future of Technology and International Development’.
The inner

circle of the Rockefeller family has been serving the Cult since John

D.
Rockefeller (1839-1937) made his fortune with Standard Oil.
It is

less well known that the same Rockefeller – the Bill Gates of his day

– was responsible for establishing what is now referred to as ‘Big

Pharma’, the global network of pharmaceutical companies that make

outrageous profits dispensing scalpel and drug ‘medicine’ and are

obsessed with pumping vaccines in ever-increasing number into as

many human arms and backsides as possible.
John D.
Rockefeller

was the driving force behind the creation of the ‘education’ system

in the United States and elsewhere specifically designed to program

the perceptions of generations therea er.
The Rockefeller family

donated exceptionally valuable land in New York for the United

Nations building and were central in establishing the World Health

Organization in 1948 as an agency of the UN which was created

from the start as a Trojan horse and stalking horse for world

government.
Now enter Bill Gates.
His family and the Rockefellers

have long been extremely close and I have seen genealogy which

claims that if you go back far enough the two families fuse into the

same bloodline.
Gates has said that the Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation was inspired by the Rockefeller Foundation and why not

when both are serving the same Cult?
Major tax-exempt foundations

are overwhelmingly criminal enterprises in which Cult assets fund

the Cult agenda in the guise of ‘philanthropy’ while avoiding tax in

the process.
Cult operatives can become mega-rich in their role of

front men and women for the psychopaths at the inner core and

they, too, have to be psychopaths to knowingly serve such evil.
Part

of the deal is that a big percentage of the wealth gleaned from

representing the Cult has to be spent advancing the ambitions of the

Cult and hence you have the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation (and so many more) and people like

George Soros with his global Open Society Foundations spending

their billions in pursuit of global Cult control.
Gates is a global

public face of the Cult with his interventions in world affairs

including Big Tech influence; a central role in the ‘Covid’ and

‘vaccine’ scam; promotion of the climate change shakedown;

manipulation of education; geoengineering of the skies; and his

food-control agenda as the biggest owner of farmland in America,

his GMO promotion and through other means.
As one writer said:

‘Gates monopolizes or wields disproportionate influence over the

tech industry, global health and vaccines, agriculture and food policy

(including biopiracy and fake food), weather modification and other

climate technologies, surveillance, education and media.’ The almost

limitless wealth secured through Microso and other not-allowed-

to-fail ventures (including vaccines) has been ploughed into a long,

long list of Cult projects designed to enslave the entire human race.
Gates and the Rockefellers have been working as one unit with the

Rockefeller-established World Health Organization leading global

‘Covid’ policy controlled by Gates through his mouth-piece Tedros.
Gates became the WHO’s biggest funder when Trump announced

that the American government would cease its donations, but Biden

immediately said he would restore the money when he took office in

January, 2021.
The Gates Foundation (the Cult) owns through

limitless funding the world health system and the major players

across the globe in the ‘Covid’ hoax.
Okay, with that background we return to that Rockefeller

Foundation document of 2010 headed ‘Scenarios for the Future of

Technology and International Development’ and its ‘imaginary’

epidemic of a virulent and deadly influenza strain which infected 20

percent of the global population and killed eight million in seven

months.
The Rockefeller scenario was that the epidemic destroyed

economies, closed shops, offices and other businesses and led to

governments imposing fierce rules and restrictions that included

mandatory wearing of face masks and body-temperature checks to

enter communal spaces like railway stations and supermarkets.
The

document predicted that even a er the height of the Rockefeller-

envisaged epidemic the authoritarian rule would continue to deal

with further pandemics, transnational terrorism, environmental

crises and rising poverty.
Now you may think that the Rockefellers

are our modern-day seers or alternatively, and rather more likely,

that they well knew what was planned a few years further on.
Fascism had to be imposed, you see, to ‘protect citizens from risk

and exposure’.
The Rockefeller scenario document said:

During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed

airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature

checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets.
Even after the

pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities

stuck and even intensified.
In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly

global problems – from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and

rising poverty – leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.
At first, the notion of a more controlled world gained wide acceptance and approval.
Citizens

willingly gave up some of their sovereignty – and their privacy – to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability.
Citizens were more tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight, and national leaders had more latitude to impose order in the

ways they saw fit.
In developed countries, this heightened oversight took many forms: biometric IDs for all

citizens, for example, and tighter regulation of key industries whose stability was deemed vital

to national interests.
In many developed countries, enforced cooperation with a suite of new

regulations and agreements slowly but steadily restored both order and, importantly,

economic growth.
There we have the prophetic Rockefellers in 2010 and three years

later came their paper for the Global Health Summit in Beijing,

China, when government representatives, the private sector,

international organisations and groups met to discuss the next 100

years of ‘global health’.
The Rockefeller Foundation-funded paper

was called ‘Dreaming the Future of Health for the Next 100 Years

and more prophecy ensued as it described a dystopian future: ‘The

abundance of data, digitally tracking and linking people may mean

the ‘death of privacy’ and may replace physical interaction with

transient, virtual connection, generating isolation and raising

questions of how values are shaped in virtual networks.’ Next in the

‘Covid’ hoax preparation sequence came a ‘table top’ simulation in

2018 for another ‘imaginary’ pandemic of a disease called Clade X

which was said to kill 900 million people.
The exercise was

organised by the Gates-funded Johns Hopkins University’s Center

for Health Security in the United States and this is the very same

university that has been compiling the disgustingly and

systematically erroneous global figures for ‘Covid’ cases and deaths.
Similar Johns Hopkins health crisis scenarios have included the Dark

Winter exercise in 2001 and Atlantic Storm in 2005.
Nostradamus 201

For sheer predictive genius look no further prophecy-watchers than

the Bill Gates-funded Event 201 held only six weeks before the

‘coronavirus pandemic’ is supposed to have broken out in China

and Event 201 was based on a scenario of a global ‘coronavirus

pandemic’.
Melinda Gates, the great man’s missus, told the BBC that

he had ‘prepared for years’ for a coronavirus pandemic which told

us what we already knew.
Nostradamugates had predicted in a TED

talk in 2015 that a pandemic was coming that would kill a lot of

people and demolish the world economy.
My god, the man is a

machine – possibly even literally.
Now here he was only weeks

before the real thing funding just such a simulated scenario and

involving his friends and associates at Johns Hopkins, the World

Economic Forum Cult-front of Klaus Schwab, the United Nations,

Johnson & Johnson, major banks, and officials from China and the

Centers for Disease Control in the United States.
What synchronicity

– Johns Hopkins would go on to compile the fraudulent ‘Covid’

figures, the World Economic Forum and Schwab would push the

‘Great Reset’ in response to ‘Covid’, the Centers for Disease Control

would be at the forefront of ‘Covid’ policy in the United States,

Johnson & Johnson would produce a ‘Covid vaccine’, and

everything would officially start just weeks later in China.
Spooky,

eh?
They were even accurate in creating a simulation of a ‘virus’

pandemic because the ‘real thing’ would also be a simulation.
Event

201 was not an exercise preparing for something that might happen;

it was a rehearsal for what those in control knew was going to

happen and very shortly.
Hours of this simulation were posted on

the Internet and the various themes and responses mirrored what

would soon be imposed to transform human society.
News stories

were inserted and what they said would be commonplace a few

weeks later with still more prophecy perfection.
Much discussion

focused on the need to deal with misinformation and the ‘anti-vax

movement’ which is exactly what happened when the ‘virus’ arrived

– was said to have arrived – in the West.
Cult-owned social media banned criticism and exposure of the

official ‘virus’ narrative and when I said there was no ‘virus’ in early

April, 2020, I was banned by one platform a er another including

YouTube, Facebook and later Twi er.
The mainstream broadcast

media in Britain was in effect banned from interviewing me by the

Tony-Blair-created government broadcasting censor Ofcom headed

by career government bureaucrat Melanie Dawes who was

appointed just as the ‘virus’ hoax was about to play out in January,

2020.
At the same time the Ickonic media platform was using Vimeo,

another ultra-Zionist-owned operation, while our own player was

being created and they deleted in an instant hundreds of videos,

documentaries, series and shows to confirm their unbelievable

vindictiveness.
We had copies, of course, and they had to be restored

one by one when our player was ready.
These people have no class.
Sabbatian Facebook promised free advertisements for the Gates-

controlled World Health Organization narrative while deleting ‘false

claims and conspiracy theories’ to stop ‘misinformation’ about the

alleged coronavirus.
All these responses could be seen just a short

while earlier in the scenarios of Event 201.
Extreme censorship was

absolutely crucial for the Cult because the official story was so

ridiculous and unsupportable by the evidence that it could never

survive open debate and the free-flow of information and opinion.
If

you can’t win a debate then don’t have one is the Cult’s approach

throughout history.
Facebook’s li le boy front man – front boy –

Mark Zuckerberg equated ‘credible and accurate information’ with

official sources and exposing their lies with ‘misinformation’.
Silencing those that can see

The censorship dynamic of Event 201 is now the norm with an army

of narrative-supporting ‘fact-checker’ organisations whose entire

reason for being is to tell the public that official narratives are true

and those exposing them are lying.
One of the most appalling of

these ‘fact-checkers’ is called NewsGuard founded by ultra-Zionist

Americans Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill.
Crovitz is a former

publisher of The Wall Street Journal, former Executive Vice President

of Dow Jones, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),

and on the board of the American Association of Rhodes Scholars.
The CFR and Rhodes Scholarships, named a er Rothschild agent

Cecil Rhodes who plundered the gold and diamonds of South Africa

for his masters and the Cult, have featured widely in my books.
NewsGuard don’t seem to like me for some reason – I really can’t

think why – and they have done all they can to have me censored

and discredited which is, to quote an old British politician, like being

savaged by a dead sheep.
They are, however, like all in the

censorship network, very well connected and funded by

organisations themselves funded by, or connected to, Bill Gates.
As

you would expect with anything associated with Gates NewsGuard

has an offshoot called HealthGuard which ‘fights online health care

hoaxes’.
How very kind.
Somehow the NewsGuard European

Managing Director Anna-Sophie Harling, a remarkably young-

looking woman with no broadcasting experience and li le hands-on

work in journalism, has somehow secured a position on the ‘Content

Board’ of UK government broadcast censor Ofcom.
An executive of

an organisation seeking to discredit dissidents of the official

narratives is making decisions for the government broadcast

‘regulator’ about content??
Another appalling ‘fact-checker’ is Full

Fact funded by George Soros and global censors Google and

Facebook.
It’s amazing how many activists in the ‘fact-checking’, ‘anti-hate’,

arena turn up in government-related positions – people like UK

Labour Party activist Imran Ahmed who heads the Center for

Countering Digital Hate founded by people like Morgan

McSweeney, now chief of staff to the Labour Party’s hapless and

useless ‘leader’ Keir Starmer.
Digital Hate – which is what it really is

– uses the American spelling of Center to betray its connection to a

transatlantic network of similar organisations which in 2020

shapeshi ed from a acking people for ‘hate’ to a acking them for

questioning the ‘Covid’ hoax and the dangers of the ‘Covid vaccine’.
It’s just a coincidence, you understand.
This is one of Imran Ahmed’s

hysterical statements: ‘I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers

conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a

national security risk.’ No one could ever accuse this prat of

understatement and he’s including in that those parents who are

now against vaccines a er their children were damaged for life or

killed by them.
He’s such a nice man.
Ahmed does the rounds of the

Woke media ge ing so -ball questions from spineless ‘journalists’

who never ask what right he has to campaign to destroy the freedom

of speech of others while he demands it for himself.
There also

seems to be an overrepresentation in Ofcom of people connected to

the narrative-worshipping BBC.
This incredible global network of

narrative-support was super-vital when the ‘Covid’ hoax was played

in the light of the mega-whopper lies that have to be defended from

the spotlight cast by the most basic intelligence.
Setting the scene

The Cult plays the long game and proceeds step-by-step ensuring

that everything is in place before major cards are played and they

don’t come any bigger than the ‘Covid’ hoax.
The psychopaths can’t

handle events where the outcome isn’t certain and as li le as

possible – preferably nothing – is le to chance.
Politicians,

government and medical officials who would follow direction were

brought to illusory power in advance by the Cult web whether on

the national stage or others like state governors and mayors of

America.
For decades the dynamic between officialdom, law

enforcement and the public was changed from one of service to one

of control and dictatorship.
Behaviour manipulation networks

established within government were waiting to impose the coming

‘Covid’ rules and regulations specifically designed to subdue and

rewire the psyche of the people in the guise of protecting health.
These included in the UK the Behavioural Insights Team part-owned

by the British government Cabinet Office; the Scientific Pandemic

Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B); and a whole web of

intelligence and military groups seeking to direct the conversation

on social media and control the narrative.
Among them are the

cyberwarfare (on the people) 77th Brigade of the British military

which is also coordinated through the Cabinet Office as civilian and

military leadership continues to combine in what they call the

Fusion Doctrine.
The 77th Brigade is a British equivalent of the

infamous Israeli (Sabbatian) military cyberwarfare and Internet

manipulation operation Unit 8200 which I expose at length in The

Trigger.
Also carefully in place were the medical and science advisers

to government – many on the payroll past or present of Bill Gates –

and a whole alternative structure of unelected government stood by

to take control when elected parliaments were effectively closed

down once the ‘Covid’ card was slammed on the table.
The structure

I have described here and so much more was installed in every

major country through the Cult networks.
The top-down control

hierarchy looks like this: The Cult – Cult-owned Gates – the World

Health Organization and Tedros – Gates-funded or controlled chief

medical officers and science ‘advisers’ (dictators) in each country –

political ‘leaders’– law enforcement – The People.
Through this

simple global communication and enforcement structure the policy

of the Cult could be imposed on virtually the entire human

population so long as they acquiesced to the fascism.
With

everything in place it was time for the bu on to be pressed in late

2019/early 2020.
These were the prime goals the Cult had to secure for its will to

prevail:

1) Locking down economies, closing all but designated ‘essential’ businesses (Cult-owned

corporations were ‘essential’), and pu ing the population under house arrest was an

imperative to destroy independent income and employment and ensure dependency on the

Cult-controlled state in the Hunger Games Society.
Lockdowns had to be established as the

global blueprint from the start to respond to the ‘virus’ and followed by pre y much the

entire world.
2) The global population had to be terrified into believing in a deadly ‘virus’ that didn’t

actually exist so they would unquestioningly obey authority in the belief that authority

must know how best to protect them and their families.
So ware salesman Gates would

suddenly morph into the world’s health expert and be promoted as such by the Cult-owned

media.
3) A method of testing that wasn’t testing for the ‘virus’, but was only claimed to be, had to

be in place to provide the illusion of ‘cases’ and subsequent ‘deaths’ that had a very

different cause to the ‘Covid-19’ that would be scribbled on the death certificate.
4) Because there was no ‘virus’ and the great majority testing positive with a test not testing

for the ‘virus’ would have no symptoms of anything the lie had to be sold that people

without symptoms (without the ‘virus’) could still pass it on to others.
This was crucial to

justify for the first time quarantining – house arresting – healthy people.
Without this the

economy-destroying lockdown of everybody could not have been credibly sold.
5) The ‘saviour’ had to be seen as a vaccine which beyond evil drug companies were

working like angels of mercy to develop as quickly as possible, with all corners cut, to save

the day.
The public must absolutely not know that the ‘vaccine’ had nothing to do with a

‘virus’ or that the contents were ready and waiting with a very different motive long before

the ‘Covid’ card was even li ed from the pack.
I said in March, 2020, that the ‘vaccine’ would have been created

way ahead of the ‘Covid’ hoax which justified its use and the

following December an article in the New York Intelligencer

magazine said the Moderna ‘vaccine’ had been ‘designed’ by

January, 2020.
This was ‘before China had even acknowledged that

the disease could be transmi ed from human to human, more than a

week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United

States’.
The article said that by the time the first American death was

announced a month later ‘the vaccine had already been

manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for

the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial’.
The ‘vaccine’ was actually

‘designed’ long before that although even with this timescale you

would expect the article to ask how on earth it could have been done

that quickly.
Instead it asked why the ‘vaccine’ had not been rolled

out then and not months later.
Journalism in the mainstream is truly

dead.
I am going to detail in the next chapter why the ‘virus’ has

never existed and how a hoax on that scale was possible, but first the

foundation on which the Big Lie of ‘Covid’ was built.
The test that doesn’t test

Fraudulent ‘testing’ is the bo om line of the whole ‘Covid’ hoax and

was the means by which a ‘virus’ that did not exist appeared to exist.
They could only achieve this magic trick by using a test not testing

for the ‘virus’.
To use a test that was testing for the ‘virus’ would

mean that every test would come back negative given there was no

‘virus’.
They chose to exploit something called the RT-PCR test

invented by American biochemist Kary Mullis in the 1980s who said

publicly that his PCR test … cannot detect infectious disease.
Yes, the

‘test’ used worldwide to detect infectious ‘Covid’ to produce all the

illusory ‘cases’ and ‘deaths’ compiled by Johns Hopkins and others

cannot detect infectious disease.
This fact came from the mouth of the

man who invented PCR and was awarded the Nobel Prize in

Chemistry in 1993 for doing so.
Sadly, and incredibly conveniently

for the Cult, Mullis died in August, 2019, at the age of 74 just before

his test would be fraudulently used to unleash fascism on the world.
He was said to have died from pneumonia which was an irony in

itself.
A few months later he would have had ‘Covid-19’ on his death

certificate.
I say the timing of his death was convenient because had

he lived Mullis, a brilliant, honest and decent man, would have been

vociferously speaking out against the use of his test to detect ‘Covid’

when it was never designed, or able, to do that.
I know that to be

true given that Mullis made the same point when his test was used

to ‘detect’ – not detect – HIV.
He had been seriously critical of the

Gallo/Montagnier claim to have isolated the HIV ‘virus’ and shown

it to cause AIDS for which Mullis said there was no evidence.
AIDS

is actually not a disease but a series of diseases from which people

die all the time.
When they die from those same diseases a er a

positive ‘test’ for HIV then AIDS goes on their death certificate.
I

think I’ve heard that before somewhere.
Countries instigated a

policy with ‘Covid’ that anyone who tested positive with a test not

testing for the ‘virus’ and died of any other cause within 28 days and

even longer ‘Covid-19’ had to go on the death certificate.
Cases have

come from the test that can’t test for infectious disease and the

deaths are those who have died of anything a er testing positive

with a test not testing for the ‘virus’.
I’ll have much more later about

the death certificate scandal.
Mullis was deeply dismissive of the now US ‘Covid’ star Anthony

Fauci who he said was a liar who didn’t know anything about

anything – ‘and I would say that to his face – nothing.’ He said of

Fauci: ‘The man thinks he can take a blood sample, put it in an

electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there you’ll know it – he

doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand

medicine and shouldn’t be in a position like he’s in.’ That position,

terrifyingly, has made him the decider of ‘Covid’ fascism policy on

behalf of the Cult in his role as director since 1984 of the National

Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) while his record

of being wrong is laughable; but being wrong, so long as it’s the right

kind of wrong, is why the Cult loves him.
He’ll say anything the Cult

tells him to say.
Fauci was made Chief Medical Adviser to the

President immediately Biden took office.
Biden was installed in the

White House by Cult manipulation and one of his first decisions was

to elevate Fauci to a position of even more control.
This is a

coincidence?
Yes, and I identify as a flamenco dancer called Lola.
How does such an incompetent criminal like Fauci remain in that

pivotal position in American health since the 1980s?
When you serve

the Cult it looks a er you until you are surplus to requirements.
Kary Mullis said prophetically of Fauci and his like: ‘Those guys

have an agenda and it’s not an agenda we would like them to have

… they make their own rules, they change them when they want to,

and Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the

people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.’ Fauci has

done that almost daily since the ‘Covid’ hoax began.
Lying is in

Fauci’s DNA.
To make the situation crystal clear about the PCR test

this is a direct quote from its inventor Kary Mullis:

It [the PCR test] doesn’t tell you that you’re sick and doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with was really going to hurt you...’

Ask yourself why governments and medical systems the world over

have been using this very test to decide who is ‘infected’ with the

SARS-CoV-2 ‘virus’ and the alleged disease it allegedly causes,

‘Covid-19’.
The answer to that question will tell you what has been

going on.
By the way, here’s a li le show-stopper – the ‘new’ SARS-

CoV-2 ‘virus’ was ‘identified’ as such right from the start using … the

PCR test not testing for the ‘virus’.
If you are new to this and find that

shocking then stick around.
I have hardly started yet.
Even worse,

other ‘tests’, like the ‘Lateral Flow Device’ (LFD), are considered so

useless that they have to be confirmed by the PCR test!
Leaked emails

wri en by Ben Dyson, adviser to UK ‘Health’ Secretary Ma

Hancock, said they were ‘dangerously unreliable’.
Dyson, executive

director of strategy at the Department of Health, wrote: ‘As of today,

someone who gets a positive LFD result in (say) London has at best a

25 per cent chance of it being a true positive, but if it is a self-

reported test potentially as low as 10 per cent (on an optimistic

assumption about specificity) or as low as 2 per cent (on a more

pessimistic assumption).’ These are the ‘tests’ that schoolchildren

and the public are being urged to have twice a week or more and

have to isolate if they get a positive.
Each fake positive goes in the

statistics as a ‘case’ no ma er how ludicrously inaccurate and the

‘cases’ drive lockdown, masks and the pressure to ‘vaccinate’.
The

government said in response to the email leak that the ‘tests’ were

accurate which confirmed yet again what shocking bloody liars they

are.
The real false positive rate is 100 percent as we’ll see.
In another

‘you couldn’t make it up’ the UK government agreed to pay £2.8

billion to California’s Innova Medical Group to supply the irrelevant

lateral flow tests.
The company’s primary test-making centre is in

China.
Innova Medical Group, established in March, 2020, is owned

by Pasaca Capital Inc, chaired by Chinese-American millionaire

Charles Huang who was born in Wuhan.
How it works – and how it doesn’t

The RT-PCR test, known by its full title of Polymerase chain reaction,

is used across the world to make millions, even billions, of copies of

a DNA/RNA genetic information sample.
The process is called

‘amplification’ and means that a tiny sample of genetic material is

amplified to bring out the detailed content.
I stress that it is not

testing for an infectious disease.
It is simply amplifying a sample of

genetic material.
In the words of Kary Mullis: ‘PCR is … just a

process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of

something.’ To emphasise the point companies that make the PCR

tests circulated around the world to ‘test’ for ‘Covid’ warn on the

box that it can’t be used to detect ‘Covid’ or infectious disease and is

for research purposes only.
It’s okay, rest for a minute and you’ll be

fine.
This is the test that produces the ‘cases’ and ‘deaths’ that have

been used to destroy human society.
All those global and national

medical and scientific ‘experts’ demanding this destruction to ‘save

us’ KNOW that the test is not testing for the ‘virus’ and the cases and

deaths they claim to be real are an almost unimaginable fraud.
Every

one of them and so many others including politicians and

psychopaths like Gates and Tedros must be brought before

Nuremburg-type trials and jailed for the rest of their lives.
The more

the genetic sample is amplified by PCR the more elements of that

material become sensitive to the test and by that I don’t mean

sensitive for a ‘virus’ but for elements of the genetic material which

is naturally in the body or relates to remnants of old conditions of

various kinds lying dormant and causing no disease.
Once the

amplification of the PCR reaches a certain level everyone will test

positive.
So much of the material has been made sensitive to the test

that everyone will have some part of it in their body.
Even lying

criminals like Fauci have said that once PCR amplifications pass 35

cycles everything will be a false positive that cannot be trusted for

the reasons I have described.
I say, like many proper doctors and

scientists, that 100 percent of the ‘positives’ are false, but let’s just go

with Fauci for a moment.
He says that any amplification over 35 cycles will produce false

positives and yet the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have recommended up to 40

cycles and the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain admi ed in

an internal document for staff that it was using 45 cycles of

amplification.
A long list of other countries has been doing the same

and at least one ‘testing’ laboratory has been using 50 cycles.
Have

you ever heard a doctor, medical ‘expert’ or the media ask what level

of amplification has been used to claim a ‘positive’.
The ‘test’ comes

back ‘positive’ and so you have the ‘virus’, end of story.
Now we can

see how the government in Tanzania could send off samples from a

goat and a pawpaw fruit under human names and both came back

positive for ‘Covid-19’.
Tanzania president John Magufuli mocked

the ‘Covid’ hysteria, the PCR test and masks and refused to import

the DNA-manipulating ‘vaccine’.
The Cult hated him and an article

sponsored by the Bill Gates Foundation appeared in the London

Guardian in February, 2021, headed ‘It’s time for Africa to rein in

Tanzania’s anti-vaxxer president’.
Well, ‘reined in’ he shortly was.
Magufuli appeared in good health, but then, in March, 2021, he was

dead at 61 from ‘heart failure’.
He was replaced by Samia Hassan

Suhulu who is connected to Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum

and she immediately reversed Magufuli’s ‘Covid’ policy.
A sample of

cola tested positive for ‘Covid’ with the PCR test in Germany while

American actress and singer-songwriter Erykah Badu tested positive

in one nostril and negative in the other.
Footballer Ronaldo called

the PCR test ‘bullshit’ a er testing positive three times and being

forced to quarantine and miss matches when there was nothing

wrong with him.
The mantra from Tedros at the World Health

Organization and national governments (same thing) has been test,

test, test.
They know that the more tests they can generate the more

fake ‘cases’ they have which go on to become ‘deaths’ in ways I am

coming to.
The UK government has its Operation Moonshot planned

to test multiple millions every day in workplaces and schools with

free tests for everyone to use twice a week at home in line with the

Cult plan from the start to make testing part of life.
A government

advertisement for an ‘Interim Head of Asymptomatic Testing

Communication’ said the job included responsibility for delivering a

‘communications strategy’ (propaganda) ‘to support the expansion

of asymptomatic testing that ‘normalises testing as part of everyday life’.
More tests means more fake ‘cases’, ‘deaths’ and fascism.
I have

heard of, and from, many people who booked a test, couldn’t turn

up, and yet got a positive result through the post for a test they’d

never even had.
The whole thing is crazy, but for the Cult there’s

method in the madness.
Controlling and manipulating the level of

amplification of the test means the authorities can control whenever

they want the number of apparent ‘cases’ and ‘deaths’.
If they want

to justify more fascist lockdown and destruction of livelihoods they

keep the amplification high.
If they want to give the illusion that

lockdowns and the ‘vaccine’ are working then they lower the

amplification and ‘cases’ and ‘deaths’ will appear to fall.
In January,

2021, the Cult-owned World Health Organization suddenly warned

laboratories about over-amplification of the test and to lower the

threshold.
Suddenly headlines began appearing such as: ‘Why ARE

“Covid” cases plummeting?’ This was just when the vaccine rollout

was underway and I had predicted months before they would make

cases appear to fall through amplification tampering when the

‘vaccine’ came.
These people are so predictable.
Cow vaccines?
The question must be asked of what is on the test swabs being poked

far up the nose of the population to the base of the brain?
A nasal

swab punctured one woman’s brain and caused it to leak fluid.
Most

of these procedures are being done by people with li le training or

medical knowledge.
Dr Lorraine Day, former orthopaedic trauma

surgeon and Chief of Orthopaedic Surgery at San Francisco General

Hospital, says the tests are really a ‘vaccine’.
Cows have long been

vaccinated this way.
She points out that masks have to cover the nose

and the mouth where it is claimed the ‘virus’ exists in saliva.
Why

then don’t they take saliva from the mouth as they do with a DNA

test instead of pushing a long swab up the nose towards the brain?
The ethmoid bone separates the nasal cavity from the brain and

within that bone is the cribriform plate.
Dr Day says that when the

swab is pushed up against this plate and twisted the procedure is

‘depositing things back there’.
She claims that among these ‘things’

are nanoparticles that can enter the brain.
Researchers have noted

that a team at the Gates-funded Johns Hopkins have designed tiny,

star-shaped micro-devices that can latch onto intestinal mucosa and

release drugs into the body.
Mucosa is the thin skin that covers the

inside surface of parts of the body such as the nose and mouth and

produces mucus to protect them.
The Johns Hopkins micro-devices

are called ‘theragrippers’ and were ‘inspired’ by a parasitic worm

that digs its sharp teeth into a host’s intestines.
Nasal swabs are also

coated in the sterilisation agent ethylene oxide.
The US National

Cancer Institute posts this explanation on its website:

At room temperature, ethylene oxide is a flammable colorless gas with a sweet odor.
It is used

primarily to produce other chemicals, including antifreeze.
In smaller amounts, ethylene

oxide is used as a pesticide and a sterilizing agent.
The ability of ethylene oxide to damage

DNA makes it an effective sterilizing agent but also accounts for its cancer-causing activity.
The Institute mentions lymphoma and leukaemia as cancers most

frequently reported to be associated with occupational exposure to

ethylene oxide along with stomach and breast cancers.
How does

anyone think this is going to work out with the constant testing

regime being inflicted on adults and children at home and at school

that will accumulate in the body anything that’s on the swab?
Doctors know best

It is vital for people to realise that ‘hero’ doctors ‘know’ only what

the Big Pharma-dominated medical authorities tell them to ‘know’

and if they refuse to ‘know’ what they are told to ‘know’ they are out

the door.
They are mostly not physicians or healers, but repeaters of

the official narrative – or else.
I have seen alleged professional

doctors on British television make shocking statements that we are

supposed to take seriously.
One called ‘Dr’ Amir Khan, who is

actually telling patients how to respond to illness, said that men

could take the birth pill to ‘help slow down the effects of Covid-19’.
In March, 2021, another ridiculous ‘Covid study’ by an American

doctor proposed injecting men with the female sex hormone

progesterone as a ‘Covid’ treatment.
British doctor Nighat Arif told

the BBC that face coverings were now going to be part of ongoing

normal.
Yes, the vaccine protects you, she said (evidence?) … but the

way to deal with viruses in the community was always going to

come down to hand washing, face covering and keeping a physical

distance.
That’s not what we were told before the ‘vaccine’ was

circulating.
Arif said she couldn’t imagine ever again going on the

underground or in a li without a mask.
I was just thanking my

good luck that she was not my doctor when she said – in March,

2021 – that if ‘we are behaving and we are doing all the right things’

she thought we could ‘have our nearest and dearest around us at

home … around Christmas and N ew Year!
Her patronising delivery

was the usual school teacher talking to six-year-olds as she repeated

every government talking point and probably believed them all.
If

we have learned anything from the ‘Covid’ experience surely it must

be that humanity’s perception of doctors needs a fundamental

rethink.
NHS ‘doctor’ Sara Kayat told her television audience that

the ‘Covid vaccine’ would ‘100 percent prevent hospitalisation and

death’.
Not even Big Pharma claimed that.
We have to stop taking

‘experts’ at their word without question when so many of them are

clueless and only repeating the party line on which their careers

depend.
That is not to say there are not brilliants doctors – there are

and I have spoken to many of them since all this began – but you

won’t see them in the mainstream media or quoted by the

psychopaths and yes-people in government.
Remember the name – Christian Drosten

German virologist Christian Drosten, Director of Charité Institute of

Virology in Berlin, became a national star a er the pandemic hoax

began.
He was feted on television and advised the German

government on ‘Covid’ policy.
Most importantly to the wider world

Drosten led a group that produced the ‘Covid’ testing protocol for

the PCR test.
What a remarkable feat given the PCR cannot test for

infectious disease and even more so when you think that Drosten

said that his method of testing for SARS-CoV-2 was developed

‘without having virus material available’.
He developed a test for a

‘virus’ that he didn’t have and had never seen.
Let that sink in as you

survey the global devastation that came from what he did.
The

whole catastrophe of Drosten’s ‘test’ was based on the alleged

genetic sequence published by Chinese scientists on the Internet.
We

will see in the next chapter that this alleged ‘genetic sequence’ has

never been produced by China or anyone and cannot be when there

is no SARS-CoV-2.
Drosten, however, doesn’t seem to let li le details

like that get in the way.
He was the lead author with Victor Corman

from the same Charité Hospital of the paper ‘Detection of 2019 novel

coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time PCR‘ published in a magazine

called Eurosurveillance.
This became known as the Corman-Drosten

paper.
In November, 2020, with human society devastated by the

effects of the Corman-Drosten test baloney, the protocol was publicly

challenged by 22 international scientists and independent

researchers from Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Among them

were senior molecular geneticists, biochemists, immunologists, and

microbiologists.
They produced a document headed ‘External peer

review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-Cov-2 Reveals 10 Major

Flaws At The Molecular and Methodological Level: Consequences

For False-Positive Results’.
The flaws in the Corman-Drosten test

included the following:



• The test is non-specific because of erroneous design

• Results are enormously variable

• The test is unable to discriminate between the whole ‘virus’ and

viral fragments

• It doesn’t have positive or negative controls

• The test lacks a standard operating procedure

• It is unsupported by proper peer view



The scientists said the PCR ‘Covid’ testing protocol was not

founded on science and they demanded the Corman-Drosten paper

be retracted by Eurosurveillance.
They said all present and previous

Covid deaths, cases, and ‘infection rates’ should be subject to a

massive retroactive inquiry.
Lockdowns and travel restrictions

should be reviewed and relaxed and those diagnosed through PCR

to have ‘Covid-19’ should not be forced to isolate.
Dr Kevin Corbe ,

a health researcher and nurse educator with a long academic career

producing a stream of peer-reviewed publications at many UK

universities, made the same point about the PCR test debacle.
He

said of the scientists’ conclusions: ‘Every scientific rationale for the

development of that test has been totally destroyed by this paper.
It’s

like Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the Covid test.’ He said that China

hadn’t given them an isolated ‘virus’ when Drosten developed the

test.
Instead they had developed the test from a sequence in a gene

bank.’ Put another way … they made it up!
The scientists were

supported in this contention by a Portuguese appeals court which

ruled in November, 2020, that PCR tests are unreliable and it is

unlawful to quarantine people based solely on a PCR test.
The point

about China not providing an isolated virus must be true when the

‘virus’ has never been isolated to this day and the consequences of

that will become clear.
Drosten and company produced this useless

‘protocol’ right on cue in January, 2020, just as the ‘virus’ was said to

be moving westward and it somehow managed to successfully pass

a peer-review in 24 hours.
In other words there was no peer-review

for a test that would be used to decide who had ‘Covid’ and who

didn’t across the world.
The Cult-created, Gates-controlled World

Health Organization immediately recommended all its nearly 200

member countries to use the Drosten PCR protocol to detect ‘cases’

and ‘deaths’.
The sting was underway and it continues to this day.
So who is this Christian Drosten that produced the means through

which death, destruction and economic catastrophe would be

justified?
His education background, including his doctoral thesis,

would appear to be somewhat shrouded in mystery and his track

record is dire as with another essential player in the ‘Covid’ hoax,

the Gates-funded Professor Neil Ferguson at the Gates-funded

Imperial College in London of whom more shortly.
Drosten

predicted in 2003 that the alleged original SARS ‘virus’ (SARS-1’)

was an epidemic that could have serious effects on economies and an

effective vaccine would take at least two years to produce.
Drosten’s

answer to every alleged ‘outbreak’ is a vaccine which you won’t be

shocked to know.
What followed were just 774 official deaths

worldwide and none in Germany where there were only nine cases.
That is even if you believe there ever was a SARS ‘virus’ when the

evidence is zilch and I will expand on this in the next chapter.
Drosten claims to be co-discoverer of ‘SARS-1’ and developed a test

for it in 2003.
He was screaming warnings about ‘swine flu’ in 2009

and how it was a widespread infection far more severe than any

dangers from a vaccine could be and people should get vaccinated.
It

would be helpful for Drosten’s vocal chords if he simply recorded

the words ‘the virus is deadly and you need to get vaccinated’ and

copies could be handed out whenever the latest made-up threat

comes along.
Drosten’s swine flu epidemic never happened, but Big

Pharma didn’t mind with governments spending hundreds of

millions on vaccines that hardly anyone bothered to use and many

who did wished they hadn’t.
A study in 2010 revealed that the risk

of dying from swine flu, or H1N1, was no higher than that of the

annual seasonal flu which is what at least most of ‘it’ really was as in

the case of ‘Covid-19’.
A media investigation into Drosten asked

how with such a record of inaccuracy he could be the government

adviser on these issues.
The answer to that question is the same with

Drosten, Ferguson and Fauci – they keep on giving the authorities

the ‘conclusions’ and ‘advice’ they want to hear.
Drosten certainly

produced the goods for them in January, 2020, with his PCR protocol

garbage and provided the foundation of what German internal

medicine specialist Dr Claus Köhnlein, co-author of Virus Mania,

called the ‘test pandemic’.
The 22 scientists in the Eurosurveillance

challenge called out conflicts of interest within the Drosten ‘protocol’

group and with good reason.
Olfert Landt, a regular co-author of

Drosten ‘studies’, owns the biotech company TIB Molbiol

Syntheselabor GmbH in Berlin which manufactures and sells the

tests that Drosten and his mates come up with.
They have done this

with SARS, Enterotoxigenic E.
coli (ETEC), MERS, Zika ‘virus’,

yellow fever, and now ‘Covid’.
Landt told the Berliner Zeitung

newspaper:

The testing, design and development came from the Charité [Drosten and Corman].
We

simply implemented it immediately in the form of a kit.
And if we don’t have the virus, which

originally only existed in Wuhan, we can make a synthetic gene to simulate the genome of the

virus.
That’s what we did very quickly.
This is more confirmation that the Drosten test was designed

without access to the ‘virus’ and only a synthetic simulation which is

what SARS-CoV-2 really is – a computer-generated synthetic fiction.
It’s quite an enterprise they have going here.
A Drosten team decides

what the test for something should be and Landt’s biotech company

flogs it to governments and medical systems across the world.
His

company must have made an absolute fortune since the ‘Covid’ hoax

began.
Dr Reiner Fuellmich, a prominent German consumer

protection trial lawyer in Germany and California, is on Drosten’s

case and that of Tedros at the World Health Organization for crimes

against humanity with a class-action lawsuit being prepared in the

United States and other legal action in Germany.
Why China?
Scamming the world with a ‘virus’ that doesn’t exist would seem

impossible on the face of it, but not if you have control of the

relatively few people that make policy decisions and the great

majority of the global media.
Remember it’s not about changing

‘real’ reality it’s about controlling perception of reality.
You don’t have

to make something happen you only have make people believe that

it’s happening.
Renegade Minds understand this and are therefore

much harder to swindle.
‘Covid-19’ is not a ‘real’ ‘virus’.
It’s a mind

virus, like a computer virus, which has infected the minds, not the

bodies, of billions.
It all started, publically at least, in China and that

alone is of central significance.
The Cult was behind the revolution

led by its asset Mao Zedong, or Chairman Mao, which established

the People’s Republic of China on October 1st, 1949.
It should have

been called The Cult’s Republic of China, but the name had to reflect

the recurring illusion that vicious dictatorships are run by and for

the people (see all the ‘Democratic Republics’ controlled by tyrants).
In the same way we have the ‘Biden’ Democratic Republic of

America officially ruled by a puppet tyrant (at least temporarily) on

behalf of Cult tyrants.
The creation of Mao’s merciless

communist/fascist dictatorship was part of a frenzy of activity by the

Cult at the conclusion of World War Two which, like the First World

War, it had instigated through its assets in Germany, Britain, France,

the United States and elsewhere.
Israel was formed in 1948; the

Soviet Union expanded its ‘Iron Curtain’ control, influence and

military power with the Warsaw Pact communist alliance in 1955;

the United Nations was formed in 1945 as a Cult precursor to world

government; and a long list of world bodies would be established

including the World Health Organization (1948), World Trade

Organization (1948 under another name until 1995), International

Monetary Fund (1945) and World Bank (1944).
Human society was

redrawn and hugely centralised in the global Problem-Reaction-

Solution that was World War Two.
All these changes were

significant.
Israel would become the headquarters of the Sabbatians

and the revolution in China would prepare the ground and control

system for the events of 2019/2020.
Renegade Minds know there are no borders except for public

consumption.
The Cult is a seamless, borderless global entity and to

understand the game we need to put aside labels like borders,

nations, countries, communism, fascism and democracy.
These

delude the population into believing that countries are ruled within

their borders by a government of whatever shade when these are

mere agencies of a global power.
America’s illusion of democracy

and China’s communism/fascism are subsidiaries – vehicles – for the

same agenda.
We may hear about conflict and competition between

America and China and on the lower levels that will be true; but at

the Cult level they are branches of the same company in the way of

the McDonald’s example I gave earlier.
I have tracked in the books

over the years support by US governments of both parties for

Chinese Communist Party infiltration of American society through

allowing the sale of land, even military facilities, and the acquisition

of American business and university influence.
All this is

underpinned by the infamous stealing of intellectual property and

technological know-how.
Cult-owned Silicon Valley corporations

waive their fraudulent ‘morality’ to do business with human-rights-

free China; Cult-controlled Disney has become China’s PR

department; and China in effect owns ‘American’ sports such as

basketball which depends for much of its income on Chinese

audiences.
As a result any sports player, coach or official speaking

out against China’s horrific human rights record is immediately

condemned or fired by the China-worshipping National Basketball

Association.
One of the first acts of China-controlled Biden was to

issue an executive order telling federal agencies to stop making

references to the ‘virus’ by the ‘geographic location of its origin’.
Long-time Congressman Jerry Nadler warned that criticising China,

America’s biggest rival, leads to hate crimes against Asian people in

the United States.
So shut up you bigot.
China is fast closing in on

Israel as a country that must not be criticised which is apt, really,

given that Sabbatians control them both.
The two countries have

developed close economic, military, technological and strategic ties

which include involvement in China’s ‘Silk Road’ transport and

economic initiative to connect China with Europe.
Israel was the first

country in the Middle East to recognise the establishment of Mao’s

tyranny in 1950 months a er it was established.
Project Wuhan – the ‘Covid’ Psyop

I emphasise again that the Cult plays the long game and what is

happening to the world today is the result of centuries of calculated

manipulation following a script to take control step-by-step of every

aspect of human society.
I will discuss later the common force

behind all this that has spanned those centuries and thousands of

years if the truth be told.
Instigating the Mao revolution in China in

1949 with a 2020 ‘pandemic’ in mind is not only how they work – the

71 years between them is really quite short by the Cult’s standards of

manipulation preparation.
The reason for the Cult’s Chinese

revolution was to create a fiercely-controlled environment within

which an extreme structure for human control could be incubated to

eventually be unleashed across the world.
We have seen this happen

since the ‘pandemic’ emerged from China with the Chinese control-

structure founded on AI technology and tyrannical enforcement

sweep across the West.
Until the moment when the Cult went for

broke in the West and put its fascism on public display Western

governments had to pay some lip-service to freedom and democracy

to not alert too many people to the tyranny-in-the-making.
Freedoms

were more subtly eroded and power centralised with covert

government structures put in place waiting for the arrival of 2020

when that smokescreen of ‘freedom’ could be dispensed with.
The

West was not able to move towards tyranny before 2020 anything

like as fast as China which was created as a tyranny and had no

limits on how fast it could construct the Cult’s blueprint for global

control.
When the time came to impose that structure on the world it

was the same Cult-owned Chinese communist/fascist government

that provided the excuse – the ‘Covid pandemic’.
It was absolutely

crucial to the Cult plan for the Chinese response to the ‘pandemic’ –

draconian lockdowns of the entire population – to become the

blueprint that Western countries would follow to destroy the

livelihoods and freedom of their people.
This is why the Cult-

owned, Gates-owned, WHO Director-General Tedros said early on:

The Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to

contain the outbreak.
China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response and it is

not an exaggeration.
Forbes magazine said of China: ‘… those measures protected untold

millions from ge ing the disease’.
The Rockefeller Foundation

‘epidemic scenario’ document in 2010 said ‘prophetically’:

However, a few countries did fare better – China in particular.
The Chinese government’s

quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its

instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.
Once again – spooky.
The first official story was the ‘bat theory’ or rather the bat

diversion.
The source of the ‘virus outbreak’ we were told was a

‘‘wet market’ in Wuhan where bats and other animals are bought

and eaten in horrifically unhygienic conditions.
Then another story

emerged through the alternative media that the ‘virus’ had been

released on purpose or by accident from a BSL-4 (biosafety level 4)

laboratory in Wuhan not far from the wet market.
The lab was

reported to create and work with lethal concoctions and

bioweapons.
Biosafety level 4 is the highest in the World Health

Organization system of safety and containment.
Renegade Minds are

aware of what I call designer manipulation.
The ideal for the Cult is

for people to buy its prime narrative which in the opening salvoes of

the ‘pandemic’ was the wet market story.
It knows, however, that

there is now a considerable worldwide alternative media of

researchers sceptical of anything governments say and they are o en

given a version of events in a form they can perceive as credible

while misdirecting them from the real truth.
In this case let them

think that the conspiracy involved is a ‘bioweapon virus’ released

from the Wuhan lab to keep them from the real conspiracy – there is

no ‘virus’.
The WHO’s current position on the source of the outbreak

at the time of writing appears to be: ‘We haven’t got a clue, mate.’

This is a good position to maintain mystery and bewilderment.
The

inner circle will know where the ‘virus’ came from – nowhere.
The

bo om line was to ensure the public believed there was a ‘virus’ and

it didn’t much ma er if they thought it was natural or had been

released from a lab.
The belief that there was a ‘deadly virus’ was all

that was needed to trigger global panic and fear.
The population was

terrified into handing their power to authority and doing what they

were told.
They had to or they were ‘all gonna die’.
In March, 2020, information began to come my way from real

doctors and scientists and my own additional research which had

my intuition screaming: ‘Yes, that’s it!
There is no virus.’ The

‘bioweapon’ was not the ‘virus’; it was the ‘vaccine’ already being

talked about that would be the bioweapon.
My conclusion was

further enhanced by happenings in Wuhan.
The ‘virus’ was said to

be sweeping the city and news footage circulated of people

collapsing in the street (which they’ve never done in the West with

the same ‘virus’).
The Chinese government was building ‘new

hospitals’ in a ma er of ten days to ‘cope with demand’ such was the

virulent nature of the ‘virus’.
Yet in what seemed like no time the

‘new hospitals’ closed – even if they even opened – and China

declared itself ‘virus-free’.
It was back to business as usual.
This was

more propaganda to promote the Chinese draconian lockdowns in

the West as the way to ‘beat the virus’.
Trouble was that we

subsequently had lockdown a er lockdown, but never business as

usual.
As the people of the West and most of the rest of the world

were caught in an ever-worsening spiral of lockdown, social

distancing, masks, isolated old people, families forced apart, and

livelihood destruction, it was party-time in Wuhan.
Pictures

emerged of thousands of people enjoying pool parties and concerts.
It made no sense until you realised there never was a ‘virus’ and the

whole thing was a Cult set-up to transform human society out of one

its major global strongholds – China.
How is it possible to deceive virtually the entire world population

into believing there is a deadly virus when there is not even a ‘virus’

let alone a deadly one?
It’s nothing like as difficult as you would

think and that’s clearly true because it happened.
Postscript: See end of book Postscript for more on the ‘Wuhan lab

virus release’ story which the authorities and media were pushing

heavily in the summer of 2021 to divert a ention from the truth that

the ‘Covid virus’ is pure invention.
CHAPTER FIVE

There is no ‘virus’

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people

some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time

Abraham Lincoln

The greatest form of mind control is repetition.
The more you

repeat the same mantra of alleged ‘facts’ the more will accept

them to be true.
It becomes an ‘everyone knows that, mate’.
If you

can also censor any other version or alternative to your alleged

‘facts’ you are pre y much home and cooking.
By the start of 2020 the Cult owned the global mainstream media

almost in its entirety to spew out its ‘Covid’ propaganda and ignore

or discredit any other information and view.
Cult-owned social

media platforms in Cult-owned Silicon Valley were poised and

ready to unleash a campaign of ferocious censorship to obliterate all

but the official narrative.
To complete the circle many demands for

censorship by Silicon Valley were led by the mainstream media as

‘journalists’ became full-out enforcers for the Cult both as

propagandists and censors.
Part of this has been the influx of young

people straight out of university who have become ‘journalists’ in

significant positions.
They have no experience and a headful of

programmed perceptions from their years at school and university at

a time when today’s young are the most perceptually-targeted

generations in known human history given the insidious impact of

technology.
They enter the media perceptually prepared and ready

to repeat the narratives of the system that programmed them to

repeat its narratives.
The BBC has a truly pathetic ‘specialist

disinformation reporter’ called Marianna Spring who fits this bill

perfectly.
She is clueless about the world, how it works and what is

really going on.
Her role is to discredit anyone doing the job that a

proper journalist would do and system-serving hacks like Spring

wouldn’t dare to do or even see the need to do.
They are too busy

licking the arse of authority which can never be wrong and, in the

case of the BBC propaganda programme, Panorama, contacting

payments systems such as PayPal to have a donations page taken

down for a film company making documentaries questioning

vaccines.
Even the BBC soap opera EastEnders included a

disgracefully biased scene in which an inarticulate white working

class woman was made to look foolish for questioning the ‘vaccine’

while a well-spoken black man and Asian woman promoted the

government narrative.
It ticked every BBC box and the fact that the

black and minority community was resisting the ‘vaccine’ had

nothing to do with the way the scene was wri en.
The BBC has

become a disgusting tyrannical propaganda and censorship

operation that should be defunded and disbanded and a free media

take its place with a brief to stop censorship instead of demanding it.
A BBC ‘interview’ with Gates goes something like: ‘Mr Gates, sir, if I

can call you sir, would you like to tell our audience why you are

such a great man, a wonderful humanitarian philanthropist, and

why you should absolutely be allowed as a so ware salesman to

decide health policy for approaching eight billion people?
Thank

you, sir, please sir.’ Propaganda programming has been incessant

and merciless and when all you hear is the same story from the

media, repeated by those around you who have only heard the same

story, is it any wonder that people on a grand scale believe absolute

mendacious garbage to be true?
You are about to see, too, why this

level of information control is necessary when the official ‘Covid’

narrative is so nonsensical and unsupportable by the evidence.
Structure of Deceit

The pyramid structure through which the ‘Covid’ hoax has been

manifested is very simple and has to be to work.
As few people as

possible have to be involved with full knowledge of what they are

doing – and why – or the real story would get out.
At the top of the

pyramid are the inner core of the Cult which controls Bill Gates who,

in turn, controls the World Health Organization through his pivotal

funding and his puppet Director-General mouthpiece, Tedros.
Before he was appointed Tedros was chair of the Gates-founded

Global Fund to ‘fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria’, a

board member of the Gates-funded ‘vaccine alliance’ GAVI, and on

the board of another Gates-funded organisation.
Gates owns him

and picked him for a specific reason – Tedros is a crook and worse.
‘Dr’ Tedros (he’s not a medical doctor, the first WHO chief not to be)

was a member of the tyrannical Marxist government of Ethiopia for

decades with all its human rights abuses.
He has faced allegations of

corruption and misappropriation of funds and was exposed three

times for covering up cholera epidemics while Ethiopia’s health

minister.
Tedros appointed the mass-murdering genocidal

Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador

for public health which, as with Tedros, is like appointing a

psychopath to run a peace and love campaign.
The move was so

ridiculous that he had to drop Mugabe in the face of widespread

condemnation.
American economist David Steinman, a Nobel peace

prize nominee, lodged a complaint with the International Criminal

Court in The Hague over alleged genocide by Tedros when he was

Ethiopia’s foreign minister.
Steinman says Tedros was a ‘crucial

decision maker’ who directed the actions of Ethiopia’s security forces

from 2013 to 2015 and one of three officials in charge when those

security services embarked on the ‘killing’ and ‘torturing’ of

Ethiopians.
You can see where Tedros is coming from and it’s

sobering to think that he has been the vehicle for Gates and the Cult

to direct the global response to ‘Covid’.
Think about that.
A

psychopathic Cult dictates to psychopath Gates who dictates to

psychopath Tedros who dictates how countries of the world must

respond to a ‘Covid virus’ never scientifically shown to exist.
At the

same time psychopathic Cult-owned Silicon Valley information

giants like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twi er announced very

early on that they would give the Cult/Gates/Tedros/WHO version

of the narrative free advertising and censor those who challenged

their intelligence-insulting, mendacious story.
The next layer in the global ‘medical’ structure below the Cult,

Gates and Tedros are the chief medical officers and science ‘advisers’

in each of the WHO member countries which means virtually all of

them.
Medical officers and arbiters of science (they’re not) then take

the WHO policy and recommended responses and impose them on

their country’s population while the political ‘leaders’ say they are

deciding policy (they’re clearly not) by ‘following the science’ on the

advice of the ‘experts’ – the same medical officers and science

‘advisers’ (dictators).
In this way with the rarest of exceptions the

entire world followed the same policy of lockdown, people

distancing, masks and ‘vaccines’ dictated by the psychopathic Cult,

psychopathic Gates and psychopathic Tedros who we are supposed

to believe give a damn about the health of the world population they

are seeking to enslave.
That, amazingly, is all there is to it in terms of

crucial decision-making.
Medical staff in each country then follow

like sheep the dictates of the shepherds at the top of the national

medical hierarchies – chief medical officers and science ‘advisers’

who themselves follow like sheep the shepherds of the World Health

Organization and the Cult.
Shepherds at the national level o en

have major funding and other connections to Gates and his Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation which carefully hands out money like

confe i at a wedding to control the entire global medical system

from the WHO down.
Follow the money

Christopher Whi y, Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government at

the centre of ‘virus’ policy, a senior adviser to the government’s

Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), and Executive

Board member of the World Health Organization, was gi ed a grant

of $40 million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for malaria

research in Africa.
The BBC described the unelected Whi y as ‘the

official who will probably have the greatest impact on our everyday

lives of any individual policymaker in modern times’ and so it

turned out.
What Gates and Tedros have said Whi y has done like

his equivalents around the world.
Patrick Vallance, co-chair of SAGE

and the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, is a former executive

of Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline with its fundamental financial

and business connections to Bill Gates.
In September, 2020, it was

revealed that Vallance owned a deferred bonus of shares in

GlaxoSmithKline worth £600,000 while the company was

‘developing’ a ‘Covid vaccine’.
Move along now – nothing to see

here – what could possibly be wrong with that?
Imperial College in

London, a major player in ‘Covid’ policy in Britain and elsewhere

with its ‘Covid-19’ Response Team, is funded by Gates and has big

connections to China while the now infamous Professor Neil

Ferguson, the useless ‘computer modeller’ at Imperial College is also

funded by Gates.
Ferguson delivered the dramatically inaccurate

excuse for the first lockdowns (much more in the next chapter).
The

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in the United

States, another source of outrageously false ‘Covid’ computer

models to justify lockdowns, is bankrolled by Gates who is a

vehement promotor of lockdowns.
America’s version of Whi y and

Vallance, the again now infamous Anthony Fauci, has connections to

‘Covid vaccine’ maker Moderna as does Bill Gates through funding

from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Fauci is director of the

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a

major recipient of Gates money, and they are very close.
Deborah

Birx who was appointed White House Coronavirus Response

Coordinator in February, 2020, is yet another with ties to Gates.
Everywhere you look at the different elements around the world

behind the coordination and decision making of the ‘Covid’ hoax

there is Bill Gates and his money.
They include the World Health

Organization; Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United

States; National Institutes of Health (NIH) of Anthony Fauci;

Imperial College and Neil Ferguson; the London School of Hygiene

where Chris Whi y worked; Regulatory agencies like the UK

Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

which gave emergency approval for ‘Covid vaccines’; Wellcome

Trust; GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance; the Coalition for Epidemic

Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); Johns Hopkins University which

has compiled the false ‘Covid’ figures; and the World Economic

Forum.
A Nationalfile.com article said:

Gates has a lot of pull in the medical world, he has a multi-million dollar relationship with Dr.
Fauci, and Fauci originally took the Gates line supporting vaccines and casting doubt on [the

drug hydroxychloroquine].
Coronavirus response team member Dr.
Deborah Birx, appointed

by former president Obama to serve as United States Global AIDS Coordinator, also sits on the

board of a group that has received billions from Gates’ foundation, and Birx reportedly used a

disputed Bill Gates-funded model for the White House’s Coronavirus effort.
Gates is a big

proponent for a population lockdown scenario for the Coronavirus outbreak.
Another funder of Moderna is the Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency (DARPA), the technology-development arm of the

Pentagon and one of the most sinister organisations on earth.
DARPA had a major role with the CIA covert technology-funding

operation In-Q-Tel in the development of Google and social media

which is now at the centre of global censorship.
Fauci and Gates are

extremely close and openly admit to talking regularly about ‘Covid’

policy, but then why wouldn’t Gates have a seat at every national

‘Covid’ table a er his Foundation commi ed $1.75 billion to the

‘fight against Covid-19’.
When passed through our Orwellian

Translation Unit this means that he has bought and paid for the Cult-

driven ‘Covid’ response worldwide.
Research the major ‘Covid’

response personnel in your own country and you will find the same

Gates funding and other connections again and again.
Medical and

science chiefs following World Health Organization ‘policy’ sit atop

a medical hierarchy in their country of administrators, doctors and

nursing staff.
These ‘subordinates’ are told they must work and

behave in accordance with the policy delivered from the ‘top’ of the

national ‘health’ pyramid which is largely the policy delivered by

the WHO which is the policy delivered by Gates and the Cult.
The

whole ‘Covid’ narrative has been imposed on medical staff by a

climate of fear although great numbers don’t even need that to

comply.
They do so through breathtaking levels of ignorance and

include doctors who go through life simply repeating what Big

Pharma and their hierarchical masters tell them to say and believe.
No wonder Big Pharma ‘medicine’ is one of the biggest killers on

Planet Earth.
The same top-down system of intimidation operates with regard

to the Cult Big Pharma cartel which also dictates policy through

national and global medical systems in this way.
The Cult and Big

Pharma agendas are the same because the former controls and owns

the la er.
‘Health’ administrators, doctors, and nursing staff are told

to support and parrot the dictated policy or they will face

consequences which can include being fired.
How sad it’s been to see

medical staff meekly repeating and imposing Cult policy without

question and most of those who can see through the deceit are only

willing to speak anonymously off the record.
They know what will

happen if their identity is known.
This has le the courageous few to

expose the lies about the ‘virus’, face masks, overwhelmed hospitals

that aren’t, and the dangers of the ‘vaccine’ that isn’t a vaccine.
When

these medical professionals and scientists, some renowned in their

field, have taken to the Internet to expose the truth their articles,

comments and videos have been deleted by Cult-owned Facebook,

Twi er and YouTube.
What a real head-shaker to see YouTube

videos with leading world scientists and highly qualified medical

specialists with an added link underneath to the notorious Cult

propaganda website Wikipedia to find the ‘facts’ about the same

subject.
HIV – the ‘Covid’ trial-run

I’ll give you an example of the consequences for health and truth

that come from censorship and unquestioning belief in official

narratives.
The story was told by PCR inventor Kary Mullis in his

book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field.
He said that in 1984 he

accepted as just another scientific fact that Luc Montagnier of

France’s Pasteur Institute and Robert Gallo of America’s National

Institutes of Health had independently discovered that a ‘retrovirus’

dubbed HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) caused AIDS.
They

were, a er all, Mullis writes, specialists in retroviruses.
This is how

the medical and science pyramids work.
Something is announced or

assumed and then becomes an everybody-knows-that purely through

repetition of the assumption as if it is fact.
Complete crap becomes

accepted truth with no supporting evidence and only repetition of

the crap.
This is how a ‘virus’ that doesn’t exist became the ‘virus’

that changed the world.
The HIV-AIDS fairy story became a multi-

billion pound industry and the media poured out propaganda

terrifying the world about the deadly HIV ‘virus’ that caused the

lethal AIDS.
By then Mullis was working at a lab in Santa Monica,

California, to detect retroviruses with his PCR test in blood

donations received by the Red Cross.
In doing so he asked a

virologist where he could find a reference for HIV being the cause of

AIDS.
‘You don’t need a reference,’ the virologist said … ‘Everybody

knows it.’ Mullis said he wanted to quote a reference in the report he

was doing and he said he felt a li le funny about not knowing the

source of such an important discovery when everyone else seemed

to.
The virologist suggested he cite a report by the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on morbidity and mortality.
Mullis read the report, but it only said that an organism had been

identified and did not say how.
The report did not identify the

original scientific work.
Physicians, however, assumed (key recurring

theme) that if the CDC was convinced that HIV caused AIDS then

proof must exist.
Mullis continues:

I did computer searches.
Neither Montagnier, Gallo, nor anyone else had published papers

describing experiments which led to the conclusion that HIV probably caused AIDS.
I read

the papers in Science for which they had become well known as AIDS doctors, but all they

had said there was that they had found evidence of a past infection by something which was

probably HIV in some AIDS patients.
They found antibodies.
Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past

disease, not present disease.
Antibodies signaled that the virus had been defeated.
The patient

had saved himself.
There was no indication in these papers that this virus caused a disease.
They didn’t show that everybody with the antibodies had the disease.
In fact they found some

healthy people with antibodies.
Mullis asked why their work had been published if Montagnier

and Gallo hadn’t really found this evidence, and why had they been

fighting so hard to get credit for the discovery?
He says he was

hesitant to write ‘HIV is the probable cause of AIDS’ until he found

published evidence to support that.
‘Tens of thousands of scientists

and researchers were spending billions of dollars a year doing

research based on this idea,’ Mullis writes.
‘The reason had to be

there somewhere; otherwise these people would not have allowed

their research to se le into one narrow channel of investigation.’ He

said he lectured about PCR at numerous meetings where people

were always talking about HIV and he asked them how they knew

that HIV was the cause of AIDS:

Everyone said something.
Everyone had the answer at home, in the office, in some drawer.
They all knew, and they would send me the papers as soon as they got back.
But I never got

any papers.
Nobody ever sent me the news about how AIDS was caused by HIV.
Eventually Mullis was able to ask Montagnier himself about the

reference proof when he lectured in San Diego at the grand opening

of the University of California AIDS Research Center.
Mullis says

this was the last time he would ask his question without showing

anger.
Montagnier said he should reference the CDC report.
‘I read

it’, Mullis said, and it didn’t answer the question.
‘If Montagnier

didn’t know the answer who the hell did?’ Then one night Mullis

was driving when an interview came on National Public Radio with

Peter Duesberg, a prominent virologist at Berkeley and a California

Scientist of the Year.
Mullis says he finally understood why he could

not find references that connected HIV to AIDS – there weren’t any!
No one had ever proved that HIV causes AIDS even though it had

spawned a multi-billion pound global industry and the media was

repeating this as fact every day in their articles and broadcasts

terrifying the shit out of people about AIDS and giving the

impression that a positive test for HIV (see ‘Covid’) was a death

sentence.
Duesberg was a threat to the AIDS gravy train and the

agenda that underpinned it.
He was therefore abused and castigated

a er he told the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

there was no good evidence implicating the new ‘virus’.
Editors

rejected his manuscripts and his research funds were deleted.
Mullis

points out that the CDC has defined AIDS as one of more than 30

diseases if accompanied by a positive result on a test that detects

antibodies to HIV; but those same diseases are not defined as AIDS

cases when antibodies are not detected:

If an HIV-positive woman develops uterine cancer, for example, she is considered to have

AIDS.
If she is not HIV positive, she simply has uterine cancer.
An HIV-positive man with

tuberculosis has AIDS; if he tests negative he simply has tuberculosis.
If he lives in Kenya or

Colombia, where the test for HIV antibodies is too expensive, he is simply presumed to have

the antibodies and therefore AIDS, and therefore he can be treated in the World Health

Organization’s clinic.
It’s the only medical help available in some places.
And it’s free,

because the countries that support WHO are worried about AIDS.
Mullis accuses the CDC of continually adding new diseases (see ever

more ‘Covid symptoms’) to the grand AIDS definition and of

virtually doctoring the books to make it appear as if the disease

continued to spread.
He cites how in 1993 the CDC enormously

broadened its AIDS definition and county health authorities were

delighted because they received $2,500 per year from the Federal

government for every reported AIDS case.
Ladies and gentlemen, I

have just described, via Kary Mullis, the ‘Covid pandemic’ of 2020

and beyond.
Every element is the same and it’s been pulled off in the

same way by the same networks.
The ‘Covid virus’ exists?
Okay – prove it.
Er … still waiting

What Kary Mullis described with regard to ‘HIV’ has been repeated

with ‘Covid’.
A claim is made that a new, or ‘novel’, infection has

been found and the entire medical system of the world repeats that

as fact exactly as they did with HIV and AIDS.
No one in the

mainstream asks rather relevant questions such as ‘How do you

know?’ and ‘Where is your proof?’ The SARS-Cov-2 ‘virus’ and the

‘Covid-19 disease’ became an overnight ‘everybody-knows-that’.
The origin could be debated and mulled over, but what you could

not suggest was that ‘SARS-Cov-2’ didn’t exist.
That would be

ridiculous.
‘Everybody knows’ the ‘virus’ exists.
Well, I didn’t for

one along with American proper doctors like Andrew Kaufman and

Tom Cowan and long-time American proper journalist Jon

Rappaport.
We dared to pursue the obvious and simple question:

‘Where’s the evidence?’ The overwhelming majority in medicine,

journalism and the general public did not think to ask that.
A er all,

everyone knew there was a new ‘virus’.
Everyone was saying so and I

heard it on the BBC.
Some would eventually argue that the ‘deadly

virus’ was nothing like as deadly as claimed, but few would venture

into the realms of its very existence.
Had they done so they would

have found that the evidence for that claim had gone AWOL as with

HIV causes AIDS.
In fact, not even that.
For something to go AWOL

it has to exist in the first place and scientific proof for a ‘SARS-Cov-2’

can be filed under nothing, nowhere and zilch.
Dr Andrew Kaufman is a board-certified forensic psychiatrist in

New York State, a Doctor of Medicine and former Assistant

Professor and Medical Director of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate

Medical University, and Medical Instructor of Hematology and

Oncology at the Medical School of South Carolina.
He also studied

biology at the Massachuse s Institute of Technology (MIT) and

trained in Psychiatry at Duke University.
Kaufman is retired from

allopathic medicine, but remains a consultant and educator on

natural healing, I saw a video of his very early on in the ‘Covid’ hoax

in which he questioned claims about the ‘virus’ in the absence of any

supporting evidence and with plenty pointing the other way.
I did

everything I could to circulate his work which I felt was asking the

pivotal questions that needed an answer.
I can recommend an

excellent pull-together interview he did with the website The Last

Vagabond entitled Dr Andrew Kaufman: Virus Isolation, Terrain Theory

and Covid-19 and his website is andrewkaufmanmd.com.
Kaufman is

not only a forensic psychiatrist; he is forensic in all that he does.
He

always reads original scientific papers, experiments and studies

instead of second-third-fourth-hand reports about the ‘virus’ in the

media which are repeating the repeated repetition of the narrative.
When he did so with the original Chinese ‘virus’ papers Kaufman

realised that there was no evidence of a ‘SARS-Cov-2’.
They had

never – from the start – shown it to exist and every repeat of this

claim worldwide was based on the accepted existence of proof that

was nowhere to be found – see Kary Mullis and HIV.
Here we go

again.
Let’s postulate

Kaufman discovered that the Chinese authorities immediately

concluded that the cause of an illness that broke out among about

200 initial patients in Wuhan was a ‘new virus’ when there were no

grounds to make that conclusion.
The alleged ‘virus’ was not

isolated from other genetic material in their samples and then shown

through a system known as Koch’s postulates to be the causative

agent of the illness.
The world was told that the SARS-Cov-2 ‘virus’

caused a disease they called ‘Covid-19’ which had ‘flu-like’

symptoms and could lead to respiratory problems and pneumonia.
If it wasn’t so tragic it would almost be funny.
‘Flu-like’ symptoms’?
Pneumonia?
Respiratory disease?
What in CHINA and particularly in

Wuhan, one of the most polluted cities in the world with a resulting

epidemic of respiratory disease??
Three hundred thousand people

get pneumonia in China every year and there are nearly a billion

cases worldwide of ‘flu-like symptoms’.
These have a whole range of

causes – including pollution in Wuhan – but no other possibility was

credibly considered in late 2019 when the world was told there was a

new and deadly ‘virus’.
The global prevalence of pneumonia and

‘flu-like systems’ gave the Cult networks unlimited potential to re-

diagnose these other causes as the mythical ‘Covid-19’ and that is

what they did from the very start.
Kaufman revealed how Chinese

medical and science authorities (all subordinates to the Cult-owned

communist government) took genetic material from the lungs of

only a few of the first patients.
The material contained their own

cells, bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms living in their bodies.
The only way you could prove the existence of the ‘virus’ and its

responsibility for the alleged ‘Covid-19’ was to isolate the virus from

all the other material – a process also known as ‘purification’ – and

then follow the postulates sequence developed in the late 19th

century by German physician and bacteriologist Robert Koch which

became the ‘gold standard’ for connecting an alleged causation

agent to a disease:

1.
The microorganism (bacteria, fungus, virus, etc.) must be present in every case of the

disease and all patients must have the same symptoms.
It must also not be present in healthy

individuals.
2.
The microorganism must be isolated from the host with the disease.
If the microorganism

is a bacteria or fungus it must be grown in a pure culture.
If it is a virus, it must be purified (i.e.
containing no other material except the virus particles) from a clinical sample.
3.
The specific disease, with all of its characteristics, must be reproduced when the

infectious agent (the purified virus or a pure culture of bacteria or fungi) is inoculated into a healthy, susceptible host.
4.
The microorganism must be recoverable from the experimentally infected host as in step

2.
Not one of these criteria has been met in the case of ‘SARS-Cov-2’ and

‘Covid-19’.
Not ONE.
EVER.
Robert Koch refers to bacteria and not

viruses.
What are called ‘viral particles’ are so minute (hence masks

are useless by any definition) that they could only be seen a er the

invention of the electron microscope in the 1930s and can still only

be observed through that means.
American bacteriologist and

virologist Thomas Milton Rivers, the so-called ‘Father of Modern

Virology’ who was very significantly director of the Rockefeller

Institute for Medical Research in the 1930s, developed a less

stringent version of Koch’s postulates to identify ‘virus’ causation

known as ‘Rivers criteria’.
‘Covid’ did not pass that process either.
Some even doubt whether any ‘virus’ can be isolated from other

particles containing genetic material in the Koch method.
Freedom

of Information requests in many countries asking for scientific proof

that the ‘Covid virus’ has been purified and isolated and shown to

exist have all come back with a ‘we don’t have that’ and when this

happened with a request to the UK Department of Health they

added this comment:

However, outside of the scope of the [Freedom of Information Act] and on a discretionary basis, the following information has been advised to us, which may be of interest.
Most

infectious diseases are caused by viruses, bacteria or fungi.
Some bacteria or fungi have the

capacity to grow on their own in isolation, for example in colonies on a petri dish.
Viruses are

different in that they are what we call ‘obligate pathogens’ – that is, they cannot survive or

reproduce without infecting a host...
… For some diseases, it is possible to establish causation between a microorganism and a

disease by isolating the pathogen from a patient, growing it in pure culture and reintroducing

it to a healthy organism.
These are known as ‘Koch’s postulates’ and were developed in 1882.
However, as our understanding of disease and different disease-causing agents has advanced,

these are no longer the method for determining causation [Andrew Kaufman asks why in that

case are there two published articles falsely claiming to satisfy Koch’s postulates].
It has long been known that viral diseases cannot be identified in this way as viruses cannot

be grown in ‘pure culture’.
When a patient is tested for a viral illness, this is normally done by looking for the presence of antigens, or viral genetic code in a host with molecular biology

techniques [Kaufman asks how you could know the origin of these chemicals without having

a pure culture for comparison].
For the record ‘antigens’ are defined so:

Invading microorganisms have antigens on their surface that the human body can recognise as

being foreign – meaning not belonging to it.
When the body recognises a foreign antigen,

lymphocytes (white blood cells) produce antibodies, which are complementary in shape to

the antigen.
Notwithstanding that this is open to question in relation to ‘SARS-

Cov-2’ the presence of ‘antibodies’ can have many causes and they

are found in people that are perfectly well.
Kary Mullis said:

‘Antibodies … had always been considered evidence of past disease,

not present disease.’

‘Covid’ really is a computer ‘virus’

Where the UK Department of Health statement says ‘viruses’ are

now ‘diagnosed’ through a ‘viral genetic code in a host with

molecular biology techniques’, they mean … the PCR test which its

inventor said cannot test for infectious disease.
They have no

credible method of connecting a ‘virus’ to a disease and we will see

that there is no scientific proof that any ‘virus’ causes any disease or

there is any such thing as a ‘virus’ in the way that it is described.
Tenacious Canadian researcher Christine Massey and her team made

some 40 Freedom of Information requests to national public health

agencies in different countries asking for proof that SARS-CoV-2 has

been isolated and not one of them could supply that information.
Massey said of her request in Canada: ‘Freedom of Information

reveals Public Health Agency of Canada has no record of ‘SARS-

COV-2’ isolation performed by anyone, anywhere, ever.’ If you

accept the comment from the UK Department of Health it’s because

they can’t isolate a ‘virus’.
Even so many ‘science’ papers claimed to

have isolated the ‘Covid virus’ until they were questioned and had

to admit they hadn’t.
A reply from the Robert Koch Institute in

Germany was typical: ‘I am not aware of a paper which purified

isolated SARS-CoV-2.’ So what the hell was Christian Drosten and

his gang using to design the ‘Covid’ testing protocol that has

produced all the illusory Covid’ cases and ‘Covid’ deaths when the

head of the Chinese version of the CDC admi ed there was a

problem right from the start in that the ‘virus’ had never been

isolated/purified?
Breathe deeply: What they are calling ‘Covid’ is

actually created by a computer program i.e.
they made it up – er, that’s

it.
They took lung fluid, with many sources of genetic material, from

one single person alleged to be infected with Covid-19 by a PCR test

which they claimed, without clear evidence, contained a ‘virus’.
They

used several computer programs to create a model of a theoretical

virus genome sequence from more than fi y-six million small

sequences of RNA, each of an unknown source, assembling them

like a puzzle with no known solution.
The computer filled in the

gaps with sequences from bits in the gene bank to make it look like a

bat SARS-like coronavirus!
A wave of the magic wand and poof, an

in silico (computer-generated) genome, a scientific fantasy, was

created.
UK health researcher Dr Kevin Corbe made the same point

with this analogy:

… It’s like giving you a few bones and saying that’s your fish.
It could be any fish.
Not even a

skeleton.
Here’s a few fragments of bones.
That’s your fish … It’s all from gene bank and the

bits of the virus sequence that weren’t there they made up.
They synthetically created them to fill in the blanks.
That’s what genetics is; it’s a code.
So it’s ABBBCCDDD and you’re missing some what you think is EEE so you put it in.
It’s all

synthetic.
You just manufacture the bits that are missing.
This is the end result of the geneticization of virology.
This is basically a computer virus.
Further confirmation came in an email exchange between British

citizen journalist Frances Leader and the government’s Medicines &

Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (the Gates-funded MHRA)

which gave emergency permission for untested ‘Covid vaccines’ to

be used.
The agency admi ed that the ‘vaccine’ is not based on an

isolated ‘virus’, but comes from a computer-generated model.
Frances

Leader was naturally banned from Cult-owned fascist Twi er for

making this exchange public.
The process of creating computer-

generated alleged ‘viruses’ is called ‘in silico’ or ‘in silicon’ –

computer chips – and the term ‘in silico’ is believed to originate with

biological experiments using only a computer in 1989.
‘Vaccines’

involved with ‘Covid’ are also produced ‘in silico’ or by computer

not a natural process.
If the original ‘virus’ is nothing more than a

made-up computer model how can there be ‘new variants’ of

something that never existed in the first place?
They are not new

‘variants’; they are new computer models only minutely different to

the original program and designed to further terrify the population

into having the ‘vaccine’ and submi ing to fascism.
You want a ‘new

variant’?
Click, click, enter – there you go.
Tell the medical

profession that you have discovered a ‘South African variant’, ‘UK

variants’ or a ‘Brazilian variant’ and in the usual HIV-causes-AIDS

manner they will unquestioningly repeat it with no evidence

whatsoever to support these claims.
They will go on television and

warn about the dangers of ‘new variants’ while doing nothing more

than repeating what they have been told to be true and knowing that

any deviation from that would be career suicide.
Big-time insiders

will know it’s a hoax, but much of the medical community is clueless

about the way they are being played and themselves play the public

without even being aware they are doing so.
What an interesting

‘coincidence’ that AstraZeneca and Oxford University were

conducting ‘Covid vaccine trials’ in the three countries – the UK,

South Africa and Brazil – where the first three ‘variants’ were

claimed to have ‘broken out’.
Here’s your ‘virus’ – it’s a unicorn

Dr Andrew Kaufman presented a brilliant analysis describing how

the ‘virus’ was imagined into fake existence when he dissected an

article published by Nature and wri en by 19 authors detailing

alleged ‘sequencing of a complete viral genome’ of the ‘new SARS-

CoV-2 virus’.
This computer-modelled in silico genome was used as a

template for all subsequent genome sequencing experiments that

resulted in the so-called variants which he said now number more

than 6,000.
The fake genome was constructed from more than 56

million individual short strands of RNA.
Those li le pieces were

assembled into longer pieces by finding areas of overlapping

sequences.
The computer programs created over two million

possible combinations from which the authors simply chose the

longest one.
They then compared this to a ‘bat virus’ and the

computer ‘alignment’ rearranged the sequence and filled in the gaps!
They called this computer-generated abomination the ‘complete

genome’.
Dr Tom Cowan, a fellow medical author and collaborator

with Kaufman, said such computer-generation constitutes scientific

fraud and he makes this superb analogy:

Here is an equivalency: A group of researchers claim to have found a unicorn because they

found a piece of a hoof, a hair from a tail, and a snippet of a horn.
They then add that

information into a computer and program it to re-create the unicorn, and they then claim this

computer re-creation is the real unicorn.
Of course, they had never actually seen a unicorn so

could not possibly have examined its genetic makeup to compare their samples with the

actual unicorn’s hair, hooves and horn.
The researchers claim they decided which is the real genome of SARS-CoV-2 by ‘consensus’,

sort of like a vote.
Again, different computer programs will come up with different versions of

the imaginary ‘unicorn’, so they come together as a group and decide which is the real

imaginary unicorn.
This is how the ‘virus’ that has transformed the world was brought

into fraudulent ‘existence’.
Extraordinary, yes, but as the Nazis said

the bigger the lie the more will believe it.
Cowan, however, wasn’t

finished and he went on to identify what he called the real

blockbuster in the paper.
He quotes this section from a paper wri en

by virologists and published by the CDC and then explains what it

means:

Therefore, we examined the capacity of SARS-CoV-2 to infect and replicate in several

common primate and human cell lines, including human adenocarcinoma cells (A549),

human liver cells (HUH 7.0 ), and human embryonic kidney cells (HEK-293T).
In addition to

Vero E6 and Vero CCL81 cells....
Each cell line was inoculated at high multiplicity of

infection and examined 24h post-infection.
No CPE was observed in any of the cell lines except in Vero cells, which grew to greater than

10 to the 7th power at 24 h post-infection.
In contrast, HUH 7.0 and 293T showed only

modest viral replication, and A549 cells were incompatible with SARS CoV-2 infection.
Cowan explains that when virologists a empt to prove infection

they have three possible ‘hosts’ or models on which they can test.
The first was humans.
Exposure to humans was generally not done

for ethical reasons and has never been done with SARS-CoV-2 or any

coronavirus.
The second possible host was animals.
Cowan said that

forge ing for a moment that they never actually use purified virus

when exposing animals they do use solutions that they claim contain

the virus.
Exposure to animals has been done with SARS-CoV-2 in

an experiment involving mice and this is what they found: None of

the wild (normal) mice got sick.
In a group of genetically-modified

mice, a statistically insignificant number lost weight and had slightly

bristled fur, but they experienced nothing like the illness called

‘Covid-19’.
Cowan said the third method – the one they mostly rely

on – is to inoculate solutions they say contain the virus onto a variety

of tissue cultures.
This process had never been shown to kill tissue

unless the sample material was starved of nutrients and poisoned as

part of the process.
Yes, incredibly, in tissue experiments designed to

show the ‘virus’ is responsible for killing the tissue they starve the

tissue of nutrients and add toxic drugs including antibiotics and they

do not have control studies to see if it’s the starvation and poisoning

that is degrading the tissue rather than the ‘virus’ they allege to be in

there somewhere.
You want me to pinch you?
Yep, I understand.
Tom Cowan said this about the whole nonsensical farce as he

explains what that quote from the CDC paper really means:

The shocking thing about the above quote is that using their own methods, the virologists found that solutions containing SARS-CoV-2 – even in high amounts – were NOT, I repeat

NOT, infective to any of the three human tissue cultures they tested.
In plain English, this

means they proved, on their terms, that this ‘new coronavirus’ is not infectious to human

beings.
It is ONLY infective to monkey kidney cells, and only then when you add two potent

drugs (gentamicin and amphotericin), known to be toxic to kidneys, to the mix.
My friends, read this again and again.
These virologists, published by the CDC, performed a

clear proof, on their terms, showing that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is harmless to human beings.
That is the only possible conclusion, but, unfortunately, this result is not even mentioned in

their conclusion.
They simply say they can provide virus stocks cultured only on monkey Vero

cells, thanks for coming.
Cowan concluded: ‘If people really understood how this “science”

was done, I would hope they would storm the gates and demand

honesty, transparency and truth.’ Dr Michael Yeadon, former Vice

President and Chief Scientific Adviser at drug giant Pfizer has been a

vocal critic of the ‘Covid vaccine’ and its potential for multiple harm.
He said in an interview in April, 2021, that ‘not one [vaccine] has the

virus.
He was asked why vaccines normally using a ‘dead’ version of

a disease to activate the immune system were not used for ‘Covid’

and instead we had the synthetic methods of the ‘mRNA Covid

vaccine’.
Yeadon said that to do the former ‘you’d have to have some

of [the virus] wouldn’t you?’ He added: ‘No-one’s got any –

seriously.’ Yeadon said that surely they couldn’t have fooled the

whole world for a year without having a virus, ‘but oddly enough

ask around – no one’s got it’.
He didn’t know why with all the ‘great

labs’ around the world that the virus had not been isolated – ‘Maybe

they’ve been too busy running bad PCR tests and vaccines that

people don’t need.’ What is today called ‘science’ is not ‘science’ at

all.
Science is no longer what is, but whatever people can be

manipulated to believe that it is.
Real science has been hijacked by the

Cult to dispense and produce the ‘expert scientists’ and contentions

that suit the agenda of the Cult.
How big-time this has happened

with the ‘Covid’ hoax which is entirely based on fake science

delivered by fake ‘scientists’ and fake ‘doctors’.
The human-caused

climate change hoax is also entirely based on fake science delivered

by fake ‘scientists’ and fake ‘climate experts’.
In both cases real

scientists, climate experts and doctors have their views suppressed

and deleted by the Cult-owned science establishment, media and

Silicon Valley.
This is the ‘science’ that politicians claim to be

‘following’ and a common denominator of ‘Covid’ and climate are

Cult psychopaths Bill Gates and his mate Klaus Schwab at the Gates-

funded World Economic Forum.
But, don’t worry, it’s all just a

coincidence and absolutely nothing to worry about.
Zzzzzzzz.
What is a ‘virus’ REALLY?
Dr Tom Cowan is one of many contesting the very existence of

viruses let alone that they cause disease.
This is understandable

when there is no scientific evidence for a disease-causing ‘virus’.
German virologist Dr Stefan Lanka won a landmark case in 2017 in

the German Supreme Court over his contention that there is no such

thing as a measles virus.
He had offered a big prize for anyone who

could prove there is and Lanka won his case when someone sought

to claim the money.
There is currently a prize of more than 225,000

euros on offer from an Isolate Truth Fund for anyone who can prove

the isolation of SARS-CoV-2 and its genetic substance.
Lanka wrote

in an article headed ‘The Misconception Called Virus’ that scientists

think a ‘virus’ is causing tissue to become diseased and degraded

when in fact it is the processes they are using which do that – not a

‘virus’.
Lanka has done an important job in making this point clear

as Cowan did in his analysis of the CDC paper.
Lanka says that all

claims about viruses as disease-causing pathogens are wrong and

based on ‘easily recognisable, understandable and verifiable

misinterpretations.’ Scientists believed they were working with

‘viruses’ in their laboratories when they were really working with

‘typical particles of specific dying tissues or cells …’ Lanka said that

the tissue decaying process claimed to be caused by a ‘virus’ still

happens when no alleged ‘virus’ is involved.
It’s the process that does

the damage and not a ‘virus’.
The genetic sample is deprived of

nutrients, removed from its energy supply through removal from

the body and then doused in toxic antibiotics to remove any bacteria.
He confirms again that establishment scientists do not (pinch me)

conduct control experiments to see if this is the case and if they did

they would see the claims that ‘viruses’ are doing the damage is

nonsense.
He adds that during the measles ‘virus’ court case he

commissioned an independent laboratory to perform just such a

control experiment and the result was that the tissues and cells died

in the exact same way as with alleged ‘infected’ material.
This is

supported by a gathering number of scientists, doctors and

researchers who reject what is called ‘germ theory’ or the belief in

the body being infected by contagious sources emi ed by other

people.
Researchers Dawn Lester and David Parker take the same

stance in their highly-detailed and sourced book What Really Makes

You Ill – Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong

which was recommended to me by a number of medical

professionals genuinely seeking the truth.
Lester and Parker say

there is no provable scientific evidence to show that a ‘virus’ can be

transmi ed between people or people and animals or animals and

people:

The definition also claims that viruses are the cause of many diseases, as if this has been

definitively proven.
But this is not the case; there is no original scientific evidence that

definitively demonstrates that any virus is the cause of any disease.
The burden of proof for

any theory lies with those who proposed it; but none of the existing documents provides

‘proof’ that supports the claim that ‘viruses’ are pathogens.
Dr Tom Cowan employs one of his clever analogies to describe the

process by which a ‘virus’ is named as the culprit for a disease when

what is called a ‘virus’ is only material released by cells detoxing

themselves from infiltration by chemical or radiation poisoning.
The

tidal wave of technologically-generated radiation in the ‘smart’

modern world plus all the toxic food and drink are causing this to

happen more than ever.
Deluded ‘scientists’ misread this as a

gathering impact of what they wrongly label ‘viruses’.
Paper can infect houses

Cowan said in an article for davidicke.com – with his tongue only

mildly in his cheek – that he believed he had made a tremendous

discovery that may revolutionise science.
He had discovered that

small bits of paper are alive, ‘well alive-ish’, can ‘infect’ houses, and

then reproduce themselves inside the house.
The result was that this

explosion of growth in the paper inside the house causes the house

to explode, blowing it to smithereens.
His evidence for this new

theory is that in the past months he had carefully examined many of

the houses in his neighbourhood and found almost no scraps of

paper on the lawns and surrounds of the house.
There was an

occasional stray label, but nothing more.
Then he would return to

these same houses a week or so later and with a few, not all of them,

particularly the old and decrepit ones, he found to his shock and

surprise they were li ered with stray bits of paper.
He knew then

that the paper had infected these houses, made copies of itself, and

blew up the house.
A young boy on a bicycle at one of the sites told

him he had seen a demolition crew using dynamite to explode the

house the previous week, but Cowan dismissed this as the idle

thoughts of silly boys because ‘I was on to something big’.
He was

on to how ‘scientists’ mistake genetic material in the detoxifying

process for something they call a ‘virus’.
Cowan said of his house

and paper story:

If this sounds crazy to you, it’s because it should.
This scenario is obviously nuts.
But consider this admittedly embellished, for effect, current viral theory that all scientists, medical doctors and virologists currently believe.
He takes the example of the ‘novel SARS-Cov2’ virus to prove the

point.
First they take someone with an undefined illness called

‘Covid-19’ and don’t even a empt to find any virus in their sputum.
Never mind the scientists still describe how this ‘virus’, which they

have not located a aches to a cell receptor, injects its genetic

material, in ‘Covid’s’ case, RNA, into the cell.
The RNA once inserted

exploits the cell to reproduce itself and makes ‘thousands, nay

millions, of copies of itself … Then it emerges victorious to claim its

next victim’:

If you were to look in the scientific literature for proof, actual scientific proof, that uniform SARS-CoV2 viruses have been properly isolated from the sputum of a sick person, that actual

spike proteins could be seen protruding from the virus (which has not been found), you would

find that such evidence doesn’t exist.
If you go looking in the published scientific literature for actual pictures, proof, that these

spike proteins or any viral proteins are ever attached to any receptor embedded in any cell

membrane, you would also find that no such evidence exists.
If you were to look for a video

or documented evidence of the intact virus injecting its genetic material into the body of the

cell, reproducing itself and then emerging victorious by budding off the cell membrane, you

would find that no such evidence exists.
The closest thing you would find is electron micrograph pictures of cellular particles, possibly

attached to cell debris, both of which to be seen were stained by heavy metals, a process that

completely distorts their architecture within the living organism.
This is like finding bits of

paper stuck to the blown-up bricks, thereby proving the paper emerged by taking pieces of the

bricks on its way out.
The Enders baloney

Cowan describes the ‘Covid’ story as being just as make-believe as

his paper story and he charts back this fantasy to a Nobel Prize

winner called John Enders (1897-1985), an American biomedical

scientist who has been dubbed ‘The Father of Modern Vaccines’.
Enders is claimed to have ‘discovered’ the process of the viral

culture which ‘proved’ that a ‘virus’ caused measles.
Cowan

explains how Enders did this ‘by using the EXACT same procedure

that has been followed by every virologist to find and characterize

every new virus since 1954’.
Enders took throat swabs from children

with measles and immersed them in 2ml of milk.
Penicillin (100u/ml)

and the antibiotic streptomycin (50,g/ml) were added and the whole

mix was centrifuged – rotated at high speed to separate large cellular

debris from small particles and molecules as with milk and cream,

for example.
Cowan says that if the aim is to find li le particles of

genetic material (‘viruses’) in the snot from children with measles it

would seem that the last thing you would do is mix the snot with

other material – milk –that also has genetic material.
‘How are you

ever going to know whether whatever you found came from the snot

or the milk?’ He points out that streptomycin is a ‘nephrotoxic’ or

poisonous-to-the-kidney drug.
You will see the relevance of that

shortly.
Cowan says that it gets worse, much worse, when Enders

describes the culture medium upon which the virus ‘grows’: ‘The

culture medium consisted of bovine amniotic fluid (90%), beef

embryo extract (5%), horse serum (5%), antibiotics and phenol red as

an indicator of cell metabolism.’ Cowan asks incredulously: ‘Did he

just say that the culture medium also contained fluids and tissues

that are themselves rich sources of genetic material?’ The genetic

cocktail, or ‘medium’, is inoculated onto tissue and cells from rhesus

monkey kidney tissue.
This is where the importance of streptomycin

comes in and currently-used antimicrobials and other drugs that are

poisonous to kidneys and used in ALL modern viral cultures (e.g.
gentamicin, streptomycin, and amphotericin).
Cowan asks: ‘How are

you ever going to know from this witch’s brew where any genetic

material comes from as we now have five different sources of rich

genetic material in our mix?’ Remember, he says, that all genetic

material, whether from monkey kidney tissues, bovine serum, milk,

etc., is made from the exact same components.
The same central

question returns: ‘How are you possibly going to know that it was

the virus that killed the kidney tissue and not the toxic antibiotic and

starvation rations on which you are growing the tissue?’ John Enders

answered the question himself – you can’t:

A second agent was obtained from an uninoculated culture of monkey kidney cells.
The

cytopathic changes [death of the cells] it induced in the unstained preparations could not be

distinguished with confidence from the viruses isolated from measles.
The death of the cells (‘cytopathic changes’) happened in exactly

the same manner, whether they inoculated the kidney tissue with the

measles snot or not, Cowan says.
‘This is evidence that the

destruction of the tissue, the very proof of viral causation of illness,

was not caused by anything in the snot because they saw the same

destructive effect when the snot was not even used … the cytopathic,

i.e., cell-killing, changes come from the process of the culture itself,

not from any virus in any snot, period.’ Enders quotes in his 1957

paper a virologist called Ruckle as reporting similar findings ‘and in

addition has isolated an agent from monkey kidney tissue that is so

far indistinguishable from human measles virus’.
In other words,

Cowan says, these particles called ‘measles viruses’ are simply and

clearly breakdown products of the starved and poisoned tissue.
For

measles ‘virus’ see all ‘viruses’ including the so-called ‘Covid virus’.
Enders, the ‘Father of Modern Vaccines’, also said:

There is a potential risk in employing cultures of primate cells for the production of vaccines

composed of attenuated virus, since the presence of other agents possibly latent in primate

tissues cannot be definitely excluded by any known method.
Cowan further quotes from a paper published in the journal

Viruses in May, 2020, while the ‘Covid pandemic’ was well

underway in the media if not in reality.
‘EVs’ here refers to particles

of genetic debris from our own tissues, such as exosomes of which

more in a moment: ‘The remarkable resemblance between EVs and

viruses has caused quite a few problems in the studies focused on

the analysis of EVs released during viral infections.’ Later the paper

adds that to date a reliable method that can actually guarantee a

complete separation (of EVs from viruses) DOES NOT EXIST.
This

was published at a time when a fairy tale ‘virus’ was claimed in total

certainty to be causing a fairy tale ‘viral disease’ called ‘Covid-19’ – a

fairy tale that was already well on the way to transforming human

society in the image that the Cult has worked to achieve for so long.
Cowan concludes his article:

To summarize, there is no scientific evidence that pathogenic viruses exist.
What we think of

as ‘viruses’ are simply the normal breakdown products of dead and dying tissues and cells.
When we are well, we make fewer of these particles; when we are starved, poisoned,

suffocated by wearing masks, or afraid, we make more.
There is no engineered virus circulating and making people sick.
People in laboratories all

over the world are making genetically modified products to make people sick.
These are

called vaccines.
There is no virome, no ‘ecosystem’ of viruses, viruses are not 8%, 50% or

100 % of our genetic material.
These are all simply erroneous ideas based on the

misconception called a virus.
What is ‘Covid’?
Load of bollocks

The background described here by Cowan and Lanka was

emphasised in the first video presentation that I saw by Dr Andrew

Kaufman when he asked whether the ‘Covid virus’ was in truth a

natural defence mechanism of the body called ‘exosomes’.
These are

released by cells when in states of toxicity – see the same themes

returning over and over.
They are released ever more profusely as

chemical and radiation toxicity increases and think of the potential

effect therefore of 5G alone as its destructive frequencies infest the

human energetic information field with a gathering pace (5G went

online in Wuhan in 2019 as the ‘virus’ emerged).
I’ll have more about

this later.
Exosomes transmit a warning to the rest of the body that

‘Houston, we have a problem’.
Kaufman presented images of

exosomes and compared them with ‘Covid’ under an electron

microscope and the similarity was remarkable.
They both a ach to

the same cell receptors ( claimed in the case of ‘Covid’), contain the

same genetic material in the form of RNA or ribonucleic acid, and

both are found in ‘viral cell cultures’ with damaged or dying cells.
James Hildreth MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the

Meharry Medical College at Johns Hopkins, said: ‘The virus is fully

an exosome in every sense of the word.’ Kaufman’s conclusion was

that there is no ‘virus’: ‘This entire pandemic is a completely

manufactured crisis … there is no evidence of anyone dying from

[this] illness.’ Dr Tom Cowan and Sally Fallon Morell, authors of The

Contagion Myth, published a statement with Dr Kaufman in

February, 2021, explaining why the ‘virus’ does not exist and you can

read it that in full in the Appendix.
‘Virus’ theory can be traced to the ‘cell theory’ in 1858 of German

physician Rudolf Virchow (1821-1920) who contended that disease

originates from a single cell infiltrated by a ‘virus’.
Dr Stefan Lanka

said that findings and insights with respect to the structure, function

and central importance of tissues in the creation of life, which were

already known in 1858, comprehensively refute the cell theory.
Virchow ignored them.
We have seen the part later played by John

Enders in the 1950s and Lanka notes that infection theories were

only established as a global dogma through the policies and

eugenics of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany (creation of the same

Sabbatian cult behind the ‘Covid’ hoax).
Lanka said: ‘Before 1933,

scientists dared to contradict this theory; a er 1933, these critical

scientists were silenced’.
Dr Tom Cowan’s view is that ill-heath is

caused by too much of something, too li le of something, or

toxification from chemicals and radiation – not contagion.
We must

also highlight as a major source of the ‘virus’ theology a man still

called the ‘Father of Modern Virology’ – Thomas Milton Rivers

(1888-1962).
There is no way given the Cult’s long game policy that it

was a coincidence for the ‘Father of Modern Virology’ to be director

of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research from 1937 to 1956

when he is credited with making the Rockefeller Institute a leader in

‘viral research’.
Cult Rockefellers were the force behind the creation

of Big Pharma ‘medicine’, established the World Health

Organisation in 1948, and have long and close associations with the

Gates family that now runs the WHO during the pandemic hoax

through mega-rich Cult gofer and psychopath Bill Gates.
Only a Renegade Mind can see through all this bullshit by asking

the questions that need to be answered, not taking ‘no’ or

prevarication for an answer, and certainly not hiding from the truth

in fear of speaking it.
Renegade Minds have always changed the

world for the be er and they will change this one no ma er how

bleak it may currently appear to be.
CHAPTER SIX

Sequence of deceit

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything

Mark Twain

Against the background that I have laid out this far the sequence

that took us from an invented ‘virus’ in Cult-owned China in

late 2019 to the fascist transformation of human society can be seen

and understood in a whole new context.
We were told that a deadly disease had broken out in Wuhan and

the world media began its campaign (coordinated by behavioural

psychologists as we shall see) to terrify the population into

unquestioning compliance.
We were shown images of Chinese

people collapsing in the street which never happened in the West

with what was supposed to be the same condition.
In the earliest

days when alleged cases and deaths were few the fear register was

hysterical in many areas of the media and this would expand into

the common media narrative across the world.
The real story was

rather different, but we were never told that.
The Chinese

government, one of the Cult’s biggest centres of global operation,

said they had discovered a new illness with flu-like and pneumonia-

type symptoms in a city with such toxic air that it is overwhelmed

with flu-like symptoms, pneumonia and respiratory disease.
Chinese

scientists said it was a new – ‘novel’ – coronavirus which they called

Sars-Cov-2 and that it caused a disease they labelled ‘Covid-19’.
There was no evidence for this and the ‘virus’ has never to this day

been isolated, purified and its genetic code established from that.
It

was from the beginning a computer-generated fiction.
Stories of

Chinese whistleblowers saying the number of deaths was being

supressed or that the ‘new disease’ was related to the Wuhan bio-lab

misdirected mainstream and alternative media into cul-de-sacs to

obscure the real truth – there was no ‘virus’.
Chinese scientists took genetic material from the lung fluid of just

a few people and said they had found a ‘new’ disease when this

material had a wide range of content.
There was no evidence for a

‘virus’ for the very reasons explained in the last two chapters.
The

‘virus’ has never been shown to (a) exist and (b) cause any disease.
People were diagnosed on symptoms that are so widespread in

Wuhan and polluted China and with a PCR test that can’t detect

infectious disease.
On this farce the whole global scam was sold to

the rest of the world which would also diagnose respiratory disease

as ‘Covid-19’ from symptoms alone or with a PCR test not testing for

a ‘virus’.
Flu miraculously disappeared worldwide in 2020 and into

2021 as it was redesignated ‘Covid-19’.
It was really the same old flu

with its ‘flu-like’ symptoms a ributed to ‘flu-like’ ‘Covid-19’.
At the

same time with very few exceptions the Chinese response of

draconian lockdown and fascism was the chosen weapon to respond

across the West as recommended by the Cult-owned Tedros at the

Cult-owned World Health Organization run by the Cult-owned

Gates.
All was going according to plan.
Chinese scientists –

everything in China is controlled by the Cult-owned government –

compared their contaminated RNA lung-fluid material with other

RNA sequences and said it appeared to be just under 80 percent

identical to the SARS-CoV-1 ‘virus’ claimed to be the cause of the

SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) ‘outbreak’ in 2003.
They

decreed that because of this the ‘new virus’ had to be related and

they called it SARS-CoV-2.
There are some serious problems with

this assumption and assumption was all it was.
Most ‘factual’ science

turns out to be assumptions repeated into everyone-knows-that.
A

match of under 80-percent is meaningless.
Dr Kaufman makes the

point that there’s a 96 percent genetic correlation between humans

and chimpanzees, but ‘no one would say our genetic material is part

of the chimpanzee family’.
Yet the Chinese authorities were claiming

that a much lower percentage, less than 80 percent, proved the

existence of a new ‘coronavirus’.
For goodness sake human DNA is

60 percent similar to a banana.
You are feeling sleepy

The entire ‘Covid’ hoax is a global Psyop, a psychological operation

to program the human mind into believing and fearing a complete

fantasy.
A crucial aspect of this was what appeared to happen in Italy.
It was all very well streaming out daily images of an alleged

catastrophe in Wuhan, but to the Western mind it was still on the

other side of the world in a very different culture and se ing.
A

reaction of ‘this could happen to me and my family’ was still nothing

like as intense enough for the mind-doctors.
The Cult needed a

Western example to push people over that edge and it chose Italy,

one of its major global locations going back to the Roman Empire.
An Italian ‘Covid’ crisis was manufactured in a particular area called

Lombardy which just happens to be notorious for its toxic air and

therefore respiratory disease.
Wuhan, China, déjà vu.
An hysterical

media told horror stories of Italians dying from ‘Covid’ in their

droves and how Lombardy hospitals were being overrun by a tidal

wave of desperately ill people needing treatment a er being struck

down by the ‘deadly virus’.
Here was the psychological turning

point the Cult had planned.
Wow, if this is happening in Italy, the

Western mind concluded, this indeed could happen to me and my

family.
Another point is that Italian authorities responded by

following the Chinese blueprint so vehemently recommended by the

Cult-owned World Health Organization.
They imposed fascistic

lockdowns on the whole country viciously policed with the help of

surveillance drones sweeping through the streets seeking out anyone

who escaped from mass house arrest.
Livelihoods were destroyed

and psychology unravelled in the way we have witnessed since in all

lockdown countries.
Crucial to the plan was that Italy responded in

this way to set the precedent of suspending freedom and imposing

fascism in a ‘Western liberal democracy’.
I emphasised in an

animated video explanation on davidicke.com posted in the summer of 2020 how important it was to the Cult to expand the Chinese

lockdown model across the West.
Without this, and the bare-faced lie

that non-symptomatic people could still transmit a ‘disease’ they

didn’t have, there was no way locking down the whole population,

sick and not sick, could be pulled off.
At just the right time and with

no evidence Cult operatives and gofers claimed that people without

symptoms could pass on the ‘disease’.
In the name of protecting the

‘vulnerable’ like elderly people, who lockdowns would kill by the

tens of thousands, we had for the first time healthy people told to

isolate as well as the sick.
The great majority of people who tested

positive had no symptoms because there was nothing wrong with

them.
It was just a trick made possible by a test not testing for the

‘virus’.
Months a er my animated video the Gates-funded Professor Neil

Ferguson at the Gates-funded Imperial College confirmed that I was

right.
He didn’t say it in those terms, naturally, but he did say it.
Ferguson will enter the story shortly for his outrageously crazy

‘computer models’ that led to Britain, the United States and many

other countries following the Chinese and now Italian methods of

response.
Put another way, following the Cult script.
Ferguson said

that SAGE, the UK government’s scientific advisory group which has

controlled ‘Covid’ policy from the start, wanted to follow the

Chinese lockdown model (while they all continued to work and be

paid), but they wondered if they could possibly, in Ferguson’s

words, ‘get away with it in Europe’.
‘Get away with it’?
Who the hell

do these moronic, arrogant people think they are?
This appalling

man Ferguson said that once Italy went into national lockdown they

realised they, too, could mimic China:

It’s a communist one-party state, we said.
We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought

… and then Italy did it.
And we realised we could.
Behind this garbage from Ferguson is a

simple fact: Doing the same as China in every country was the plan from the start and

Ferguson’s ‘models’ would play a central role in achieving that.
It’s just a coincidence, of

course, and absolutely nothing to worry your little head about.
Oops, sorry, our mistake

Once the Italian segment of the Psyop had done the job it was

designed to do a very different story emerged.
Italian authorities

revealed that 99 percent of those who had ‘died from Covid-19’ in

Italy had one, two, three, or more ‘co-morbidities’ or illnesses and

health problems that could have ended their life.
The US Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a figure of 94

percent for Americans dying of ‘Covid’ while having other serious

medical conditions – on average two to three (some five or six) other

potential causes of death.
In terms of death from an unproven ‘virus’

I say it is 100 percent.
The other one percent in Italy and six percent

in the US would presumably have died from ‘Covid’s’ flu-like

symptoms with a range of other possible causes in conjunction with

a test not testing for the ‘virus’.
Fox News reported that even more

startling figures had emerged in one US county in which 410 of 422

deaths a ributed to ‘Covid-19’ had other potentially deadly health

conditions.
The Italian National Health Institute said later that the

average age of people dying with a ‘Covid-19’ diagnosis in Italy was

about 81.
Ninety percent were over 70 with ten percent over 90.
In

terms of other reasons to die some 80 percent had two or more

chronic diseases with half having three or more including

cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer.
Why is the phantom ‘Covid-19’ said to kill overwhelmingly old

people and hardly affect the young?
Old people continually die of

many causes and especially respiratory disease which you can re-

diagnose ‘Covid-19’ while young people die in tiny numbers by

comparison and rarely of respiratory disease.
Old people ‘die of

Covid’ because they die of other things that can be redesignated

‘Covid’ and it really is that simple.
Flu has flown

The blueprint was in place.
Get your illusory ‘cases’ from a test not

testing for the ‘virus’ and redesignate other causes of death as

‘Covid-19’.
You have an instant ‘pandemic’ from something that is

nothing more than a computer-generated fiction.
With near-on a

billion people having ‘flu-like’ symptoms every year the potential

was limitless and we can see why flu quickly and apparently

miraculously disappeared worldwide by being diagnosed ‘Covid-19’.
The painfully bloody obvious was explained away by the childlike

media in headlines like this in the UK ‘ Independent’: ‘Not a single

case of flu detected by Public Health England this year as Covid

restrictions suppress virus’.
I kid you not.
The masking, social

distancing and house arrest that did not make the ‘Covid virus’

disappear somehow did so with the ‘flu virus’.
Even worse the

article, by a bloke called Samuel Love , suggested that maybe the

masking, sanitising and other ‘Covid’ measures should continue to

keep the flu away.
With a ridiculousness that disturbs your breathing

(it’s ‘Covid-19’) the said Love wrote: ‘With widespread social

distancing and mask-wearing measures in place throughout the UK,

the usual routes of transmission for influenza have been blocked.’

He had absolutely no evidence to support that statement, but look at

the consequences of him acknowledging the obvious.
With flu not

disappearing at all and only being relabelled ‘Covid-19’ he would

have to contemplate that ‘Covid’ was a hoax on a scale that is hard to

imagine.
You need guts and commitment to truth to even go there

and that’s clearly something Samuel Love does not have in

abundance.
He would never have got it through the editors anyway.
Tens of thousands die in the United States alone every winter from

flu including many with pneumonia complications.
CDC figures

record 45 million Americans diagnosed with flu in 2017-2018 of

which 61,000 died and some reports claim 80,000.
Where was the

same hysteria then that we have seen with ‘Covid-19’?
Some 250,000

Americans are admi ed to hospital with pneumonia every year with

about 50,000 cases proving fatal.
About 65 million suffer respiratory

disease every year and three million deaths makes this the third

biggest cause of death worldwide.
You only have to redesignate a

portion of all these people ‘Covid-19’ and you have an instant global

pandemic or the appearance of one.
Why would doctors do this?
They

are told to do this and all but a few dare not refuse those who must

be obeyed.
Doctors in general are not researching their own

knowledge and instead take it direct and unquestioned from the

authorities that own them and their careers.
The authorities say they

must now diagnose these symptoms ‘Covid-19’ and not flu, or

whatever, and they do it.
Dark suits say put ‘Covid-19’ on death

certificates no ma er what the cause of death and the doctors do it.
Renegade Minds don’t fall for the illusion that doctors and medical

staff are all highly-intelligent, highly-principled, seekers of medical

truth.
Some are, but not the majority.
They are repeaters, gofers, and

yes sir, no sir, purveyors of what the system demands they purvey.
The ‘Covid’ con is not merely confined to diseases of the lungs.
Instructions to doctors to put ‘Covid-19’ on death certificates for

anyone dying of anything within 28 days (or much more) of a

positive test not testing for the ‘virus’ opened the floodgates.
The

term dying with ‘Covid’ and not of ‘Covid’ was coined to cover the

truth.
Whether it was a with or an of they were all added to the death

numbers a ributed to the ‘deadly virus’ compiled by national

governments and globally by the Gates-funded Johns Hopkins

operation in the United States that was so involved in those

‘pandemic’ simulations.
Fraudulent deaths were added to the ever-

growing list of fraudulent ‘cases’ from false positives from a false

test.
No wonder Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific advisor to the

Italian minister of health, said a er the Lombardy hysteria had done

its job that ‘Covid’ death rates were due to Italy having the second

oldest population in the world and to how hospitals record deaths:

The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the

people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.
On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates

have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died

have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three.
This is extraordinary enough when you consider the propaganda

campaign to use Italy to terrify the world, but how can they even say

twelve percent were genuine when the ‘virus’ has not been shown to

exist, its ‘code’ is a computer program, and diagnosis comes from a

test not testing for it?
As in China, and soon the world, ‘Covid-19’ in

Italy was a redesignation of diagnosis.
Lies and corruption were to

become the real ‘pandemic’ fuelled by a pathetically-compliant

medical system taking its orders from the tiny few at the top of their

national hierarchy who answered to the World Health Organization

which answers to Gates and the Cult.
Doctors were told – ordered –

to diagnose a particular set of symptoms ‘Covid-19’ and put that on

the death certificate for any cause of death if the patient had tested

positive with a test not testing for the virus or had ‘Covid’ symptoms

like the flu.
The United States even introduced big financial

incentives to manipulate the figures with hospitals receiving £4,600

from the Medicare system for diagnosing someone with regular

pneumonia, $13,000 if they made the diagnosis from the same

symptoms ‘Covid-19’ pneumonia, and $39, 000 if they put a ‘Covid’

diagnosed patient on a ventilator that would almost certainly kill

them.
A few – painfully and pathetically few – medical

whistleblowers revealed (before Cult-owned YouTube deleted their

videos) that they had been instructed to ‘let the patient crash’ and

put them straight on a ventilator instead of going through a series of

far less intrusive and dangerous methods as they would have done

before the pandemic hoax began and the financial incentives kicked

in.
We are talking cold-blooded murder given that ventilators are so

damaging to respiratory systems they are usually the last step before

heaven awaits.
Renegade Minds never fall for the belief that people

in white coats are all angels of mercy and cannot be full-on

psychopaths.
I have explained in detail in The Answer how what I am

describing here played out across the world coordinated by the

World Health Organization through the medical hierarchies in

almost every country.
Medical scientist calls it

Information about the non-existence of the ‘virus’ began to emerge

for me in late March, 2020, and mushroomed a er that.
I was sent an

email by Sir Julian Rose, a writer, researcher, and organic farming

promotor, from a medical scientist friend of his in the United States.
Even at that early stage in March the scientist was able to explain

how the ‘Covid’ hoax was being manipulated.
He said there were no

reliable tests for a specific ‘Covid-19 virus’ and nor were there any

reliable agencies or media outlets for reporting numbers of actual

‘Covid-19’ cases.
We have seen in the long period since then that he

was absolutely right.
‘Every action and reaction to Covid-19 is based

on totally flawed data and we simply cannot make accurate

assessments,’ he said.
Most people diagnosed with ‘Covid-19’ were

showing nothing more than cold and flu-like symptoms ‘because

most coronavirus strains are nothing more than cold/flu-like

symptoms’.
We had farcical situations like an 84-year-old German

man testing positive for ‘Covid-19’ and his nursing home ordered to

quarantine only for him to be found to have a common cold.
The

scientist described back then why PCR tests and what he called the

‘Mickey Mouse test kits’ were useless for what they were claimed to

be identifying.
‘The idea these kits can isolate a specific virus like

Covid-19 is nonsense,’ he said.
Significantly, he pointed out that ‘if

you want to create a totally false panic about a totally false pandemic

– pick a coronavirus’.
This is exactly what the Cult-owned Gates,

World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University did with

their Event 201 ‘simulation’ followed by their real-life simulation

called the ‘pandemic’.
The scientist said that all you had to do was

select the sickest of people with respiratory-type diseases in a single

location – ‘say Wuhan’ – and administer PCR tests to them.
You can

then claim that anyone showing ‘viral sequences’ similar to a

coronavirus ‘which will inevitably be quite a few’ is suffering from a

‘new’ disease:

Since you already selected the sickest flu cases a fairly high proportion of your sample will go

on to die.
You can then say this ‘new’ virus has a CFR [case fatality rate] higher than the flu

and use this to infuse more concern and do more tests which will of course produce more

‘cases’, which expands the testing, which produces yet more ‘cases’ and so on and so on.
Before long you have your ‘pandemic’, and all you have done is use a simple test kit trick to

convert the worst flu and pneumonia cases into something new that doesn’t ACTUALLY EXIST

[my emphasis].
He said that you then ‘just run the same scam in other countries’

and make sure to keep the fear message running high ‘so that people

will feel panicky and less able to think critically’.
The only problem

to overcome was the fact there is no actual new deadly pathogen and

only regular sick people.
This meant that deaths from the ‘new

deadly pathogen’ were going to be way too low for a real new

deadly virus pandemic, but he said this could be overcome in the

following ways – all of which would go on to happen:

1.
You can claim this is just the beginning and more deaths are imminent [you underpin this

with fantasy ‘computer projections’].
Use this as an excuse to quarantine everyone and then

claim the quarantine prevented the expected millions of dead.
2.
You can [say that people] ‘minimizing’ the dangers are irresponsible and bully them into

not talking about numbers.
3.
You can talk crap about made up numbers hoping to blind people with pseudoscience.
4.
You can start testing well people (who, of course, will also likely have shreds of

coronavirus [RNA] in them) and thus inflate your ‘case figures’ with ‘asymptomatic

carriers’ (you will of course have to spin that to sound deadly even though any virologist

knows the more symptom-less cases you have the less deadly is your pathogen).
The scientist said that if you take these simple steps ‘you can have

your own entirely manufactured pandemic up and running in

weeks’.
His analysis made so early in the hoax was brilliantly

prophetic of what would actually unfold.
Pulling all the information

together in these recent chapters we have this is simple 1, 2, 3, of

how you can delude virtually the entire human population into

believing in a ‘virus’ that doesn’t exist:



• A ‘Covid case’ is someone who tests positive with a test not

testing for the ‘virus’.
• A ‘Covid death’ is someone who dies of any cause within 28 days

(or much longer) of testing positive with a test not testing for the

‘virus.
• Asymptomatic means there is nothing wrong with you, but they

claim you can pass on what you don’t have to justify locking

down (quarantining) healthy people in totality.
The foundations of the hoax are that simple.
A study involving ten

million people in Wuhan, published in November, 2020, demolished

the whole lie about those without symptoms passing on the ‘virus’.
They found ‘300 asymptomatic cases’ and traced their contacts to

find that not one of them was detected with the ‘virus’.
‘Asymptomatic’ patients and their contacts were isolated for no less

than two weeks and nothing changed.
I know it’s all crap, but if you

are going to claim that those without symptoms can transmit ‘the

virus’ then you must produce evidence for that and they never have.
Even World Health Organization official Dr Maria Van Kerkhove,

head of the emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said as early as

June, 2020, that she doubted the validity of asymptomatic

transmission.
She said that ‘from the data we have, it still seems to

be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a

secondary individual’ and by ‘rare’ she meant that she couldn’t cite

any case of asymptomatic transmission.
The Ferguson factor

The problem for the Cult as it headed into March, 2020, when the

script had lockdown due to start, was that despite all the

manipulation of the case and death figures they still did not have

enough people alleged to have died from ‘Covid’ to justify mass

house arrest.
This was overcome in the way the scientist described:

‘You can claim this is just the beginning and more deaths are

imminent … Use this as an excuse to quarantine everyone and then

claim the quarantine prevented the expected millions of dead.’ Enter

one Professor Neil Ferguson, the Gates-funded ‘epidemiologist’ at

the Gates-funded Imperial College in London.
Ferguson is Britain’s

Christian Drosten in that he has a dire record of predicting health

outcomes, but is still called upon to advise government on the next

health outcome when another ‘crisis’ comes along.
This may seem to

be a strange and ridiculous thing to do.
Why would you keep

turning for policy guidance to people who have a history of being

monumentally wrong?
Ah, but it makes sense from the Cult point of

view.
These ‘experts’ keep on producing predictions that suit the

Cult agenda for societal transformation and so it was with Neil

Ferguson as he revealed his horrific (and clearly insane) computer

model predictions that allowed lockdowns to be imposed in Britain,

the United States and many other countries.
Ferguson does not have

even an A-level in biology and would appear to have no formal

training in computer modelling, medicine or epidemiology,

according to Derek Winton, an MSc in Computational Intelligence.
He wrote an article somewhat aghast at what Ferguson did which

included taking no account of respiratory disease ‘seasonality’ which

means it is far worse in the winter months.
Who would have thought

that respiratory disease could be worse in the winter?
Well, certainly

not Ferguson.
The massively China-connected Imperial College and its bizarre

professor provided the excuse for the long-incubated Chinese model

of human control to travel westward at lightning speed.
Imperial

College confirms on its website that it collaborates with the Chinese

Research Institute; publishes more than 600 research papers every

year with Chinese research institutions; has 225 Chinese staff; 2,600

Chinese students – the biggest international group; 7,000 former

students living in China which is the largest group outside the UK;

and was selected for a tour by China’s President Xi Jinping during

his state visit to the UK in 2015.
The college takes major donations

from China and describes itself as the UK’s number one university

collaborator with Chinese research institutions.
The China

communist/fascist government did not appear phased by the woeful

predictions of Ferguson and Imperial when during the lockdown

that Ferguson induced the college signed a five-year collaboration

deal with China tech giant Huawei that will have Huawei’s indoor

5G network equipment installed at the college’s West London tech

campus along with an ‘AI cloud platform’.
The deal includes Chinese

sponsorship of Imperial’s Venture Catalyst entrepreneurship

competition.
Imperial is an example of the enormous influence the

Chinese government has within British and North American

universities and research centres – and further afield.
Up to 200

academics from more than a dozen UK universities are being

investigated on suspicion of ‘unintentionally’ helping the Chinese

government build weapons of mass destruction by ‘transferring

world-leading research in advanced military technology such as

aircra , missile designs and cyberweapons’.
Similar scandals have

broken in the United States, but it’s all a coincidence.
Imperial

College serves the agenda in many other ways including the

promotion of every aspect of the United Nations Agenda 21/2030

(the Great Reset) and produced computer models to show that

human-caused ‘climate change’ is happening when in the real world

it isn’t.
Imperial College is driving the climate agenda as it drives the

‘Covid’ agenda (both Cult hoaxes) while Patrick Vallance, the UK

government’s Chief Scientific Adviser on ‘Covid’, was named Chief

Scientific Adviser to the UN ‘climate change’ conference known as

COP26 hosted by the government in Glasgow, Scotland.
‘Covid’ and

‘climate’ are fundamentally connected.
Professor Woeful

From Imperial’s bosom came Neil Ferguson still advising

government despite his previous disasters and it was announced

early on that he and other key people like UK Chief Medical Adviser

Chris Whi y had caught the ‘virus’ as the propaganda story was

being sold.
Somehow they managed to survive and we had Prime

Minister Boris Johnson admi ed to hospital with what was said to be

a severe version of the ‘virus’ in this same period.
His whole policy

and demeanour changed when he returned to Downing Street.
It’s a

small world with these government advisors – especially in their

communal connections to Gates – and Ferguson had partnered with

Whi y to write a paper called ‘Infectious disease: Tough choices to

reduce Ebola transmission’ which involved another scare-story that

didn’t happen.
Ferguson’s ‘models’ predicted that up to150, 000

could die from ‘mad cow disease’, or BSE, and its version in sheep if

it was transmi ed to humans.
BSE was not transmi ed and instead

triggered by an organophosphate pesticide used to treat a pest on

cows.
Fewer than 200 deaths followed from the human form.
Models

by Ferguson and his fellow incompetents led to the unnecessary

culling of millions of pigs, ca le and sheep in the foot and mouth

outbreak in 2001 which destroyed the lives and livelihoods of

farmers and their families who had o en spent decades building

their herds and flocks.
Vast numbers of these animals did not have

foot and mouth and had no contact with the infection.
Another

‘expert’ behind the cull was Professor Roy Anderson, a computer

modeller at Imperial College specialising in the epidemiology of

human, not animal, disease.
Anderson has served on the Bill and

Melinda Gates Grand Challenges in Global Health advisory board

and chairs another Gates-funded organisation.
Gates is everywhere.
In a precursor to the ‘Covid’ script Ferguson backed closing

schools ‘for prolonged periods’ over the swine flu ‘pandemic’ in 2009

and said it would affect a third of the world population if it

continued to spread at the speed he claimed to be happening.
His

mates at Imperial College said much the same and a news report

said: ‘One of the authors, the epidemiologist and disease modeller

Neil Ferguson, who sits on the World Health Organisation’s

emergency commi ee for the outbreak, said the virus had “full

pandemic potential”.’ Professor Liam Donaldson, the Chris Whi y

of his day as Chief Medical Officer, said the worst case could see 30

percent of the British people infected by swine flu with 65,000 dying.
Ferguson and Donaldson were indeed proved correct when at the

end of the year the number of deaths a ributed to swine flu was 392.
The term ‘expert’ is rather liberally applied unfortunately, not least

to complete idiots.
Swine flu ‘projections’ were great for

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) as millions rolled in for its Pandemrix

influenza vaccine which led to brain damage with children most

affected.
The British government (taxpayers) paid out more than £60

million in compensation a er GSK was given immunity from

prosecution.
Yet another ‘Covid’ déjà vu.
Swine flu was supposed to

have broken out in Mexico, but Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, a German

doctor, former member of parliament and critic of the ‘Covid’ hoax,

observed ‘the spread of swine flu’ in Mexico City at the time.
He

said: ‘What we experienced in Mexico City was a very mild flu

which did not kill more than usual – which killed even fewer people

than usual.’ Hyping the fear against all the facts is not unique to

‘Covid’ and has happened many times before.
Ferguson is reported

to have over-estimated the projected death toll of bird flu (H5N1) by

some three million-fold, but bird flu vaccine makers again made a

killing from the scare.
This is some of the background to the Neil

Ferguson who produced the perfectly-timed computer models in

early 2020 predicting that half a million people would die in Britain

without draconian lockdown and 2.2 million in the United States.
Politicians panicked, people panicked, and lockdowns of alleged

short duration were instigated to ‘fla en the curve’ of cases gleaned

from a test not testing for the ‘virus’.
I said at the time that the public

could forget the ‘short duration’ bit.
This was an agenda to destroy

the livelihoods of the population and force them into mass control

through dependency and there was going to be nothing ‘short’ about

it.
American researcher Daniel Horowitz described the consequences

of the ‘models’ spewed out by Gates-funded Ferguson and Imperial

College:

What led our government and the governments of many other countries into panic was a

single Imperial College of UK study, funded by global warming activists, that predicted 2.2

million deaths if we didn’t lock down the country.
In addition, the reported 8-9% death rate in

Italy scared us into thinking there was some other mutation of this virus that they got, which

might have come here.
Together with the fact that we were finally testing and had the ability to actually report new

cases, we thought we were headed for a death spiral.
But again … we can’t flatten a curve if

we don’t know when the curve started.
How about it never started?
Giving them what they want

An investigation by German news outlet Welt Am Sonntag (World on

Sunday) revealed how in March, 2020, the German government

gathered together ‘leading scientists from several research institutes

and universities’ and ‘together, they were to produce a [modelling]

paper that would serve as legitimization for further tough political

measures’.
The Cult agenda was justified by computer modelling not

based on evidence or reality; it was specifically constructed to justify

the Cult demand for lockdowns all over the world to destroy the

independent livelihoods of the global population.
All these

modellers and everyone responsible for the ‘Covid’ hoax have a date

with a trial like those in Nuremberg a er World War Two when

Nazis faced the consequences of their war crimes.
These corrupt-

beyond-belief ‘modellers’ wrote the paper according to government

instructions and it said that that if lockdown measures were li ed

then up to one million Germans would die from ‘Covid-19’ adding

that some would die ‘agonizingly at home, gasping for breath’

unable to be treated by hospitals that couldn’t cope.
All lies.
No

ma er – it gave the Cult all that it wanted.
What did long-time

government ‘modeller’ Neil Ferguson say?
If the UK and the United

States didn’t lockdown half a million would die in Britain and 2.2

million Americans.
Anyone see a theme here?
‘Modellers’ are such a

crucial part of the lockdown strategy that we should look into their

background and follow the money.
Researcher Rosemary Frei

produced an excellent article headlined ‘The Modelling-paper

Mafiosi’.
She highlights a guy called John Edmunds, a British

epidemiologist, and professor in the Faculty of Epidemiology and

Population Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical

Medicine.
He studied at Imperial College.
Edmunds is a member of

government ‘Covid’ advisory bodies which have been dictating

policy, the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory

Group (NERVTAG) and the Scientific Advisory Group for

Emergencies (SAGE).
Ferguson, another member of NERVTAG and SAGE, led the way

with the original ‘virus’ and Edmunds has followed in the ‘variant’

stage and especially the so-called UK or Kent variant known as the

‘Variant of Concern’ (VOC) B.1.1.7.
He said in a co-wri en report for

the Centre for Mathematical modelling of Infectious Diseases at the

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with input from

the Centre’s ‘Covid-19’ Working Group, that there was ‘a realistic

possibility that VOC B.1.1.7 is associated with an increased risk of

death compared to non-VOC viruses’.
Fear, fear, fear, get the

vaccine, fear, fear, fear, get the vaccine.
Rosemary Frei reveals that

almost all the paper’s authors and members of the modelling centre’s

‘Covid-19’ Working Group receive funding from the Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation and/or the associated Gates-funded

Wellcome Trust.
The paper was published by e-journal Medr χ iv

which only publishes papers not peer-reviewed and the journal was

established by an organisation headed by Facebook’s Mark

Zuckerberg and his missus.
What a small world it is.
Frei discovered

that Edmunds is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Coalition for

Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) which was established

by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Klaus Schwab’s Davos

World Economic Forum and Big Pharma giant Wellcome.
CEPI was

‘launched in Davos [in 2017] to develop vaccines to stop future

epidemics’, according to its website.
‘Our mission is to accelerate the

development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and

enable equitable access to these vaccines for people during

outbreaks.’ What kind people they are.
Rosemary Frei reveals that

Public Health England (PHE) director Susan Hopkins is an author of

her organisation’s non-peer-reviewed reports on ‘new variants’.
Hopkins is a professor of infectious diseases at London’s Imperial

College which is gi ed tens of millions of dollars a year by the Bill

and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates-funded modelling disaster

Neil Ferguson also co-authors Public Health England reports and he

spoke in December, 2020, about the potential danger of the B.1.1.7.
‘UK variant’ promoted by Gates-funded modeller John Edmunds.
When I come to the ‘Covid vaccines’ the ‘new variants’ will be

shown for what they are – bollocks.
Connections, connections

All these people and modellers are lockdown-obsessed or, put

another way, they demand what the Cult demands.
Edmunds said in

January, 2021, that to ease lockdowns too soon would be a disaster

and they had to ‘vaccinate much, much, much more widely than the

elderly’.
Rosemary Frei highlights that Edmunds is married to

Jeanne Pimenta who is described in a LinkedIn profile as director of

epidemiology at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and she held shares in the

company.
Patrick Vallance, co-chair of SAGE and the government’s

Chief Scientific Adviser, is a former executive of GSK and has a

deferred bonus of shares in the company worth £600,000.
GSK has

serious business connections with Bill Gates and is collaborating

with mRNA-’vaccine’ company CureVac to make ‘vaccines’ for the

new variants that Edmunds is talking about.
GSK is planning a

‘Covid vaccine’ with drug giant Sanofi.
Puppet Prime Minister Boris

Johnson announced in the spring of 2021 that up to 60 million

vaccine doses were to be made at the GSK facility at Barnard Castle

in the English North East.
Barnard Castle, with a population of just

6,000, was famously visited in breach of lockdown rules in April,

2020, by Johnson aide Dominic Cummings who said that he drove

there ‘to test his eyesight’ before driving back to London.
Cummings

would be be er advised to test his integrity – not that it would take

long.
The GSK facility had nothing to do with his visit then although

I’m sure Patrick Vallance would have been happy to arrange an

introduction and some tea and biscuits.
Ruthless psychopath Gates

has made yet another fortune from vaccines in collaboration with Big

Pharma companies and gushes at the phenomenal profits to be made

from vaccines – more than a 20-to-1 return as he told one

interviewer.
Gates also tweeted in December, 2019, with the

foreknowledge of what was coming: ‘What’s next for our

foundation?
I’m particularly excited about what the next year could

mean for one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.’

Modeller John Edmunds is a big promotor of vaccines as all these

people appear to be.
He’s the dean of the London School of Hygiene

& Tropical Medicine’s Faculty of Epidemiology and Population

Health which is primarily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates

Foundation and the Gates-established and funded GAVI vaccine

alliance which is the Gates vehicle to vaccinate the world.
The

organisation Doctors Without Borders has described GAVI as being

‘aimed more at supporting drug-industry desires to promote new

products than at finding the most efficient and sustainable means for

fighting the diseases of poverty’.
But then that’s why the psychopath

Gates created it.
John Edmunds said in a video that the London

School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is involved in every aspect of

vaccine development including large-scale clinical trials.
He

contends that mathematical modelling can show that vaccines

protect individuals and society.
That’s on the basis of shit in and shit

out, I take it.
Edmunds serves on the UK Vaccine Network as does

Ferguson and the government’s foremost ‘Covid’ adviser, the grim-

faced, dark-eyed Chris Whi y.
The Vaccine Network says it works

‘to support the government to identify and shortlist targeted

investment opportunities for the most promising vaccines and

vaccine technologies that will help combat infectious diseases with

epidemic potential, and to address structural issues related to the

UK’s broader vaccine infrastructure’.
Ferguson is acting Director of

the Imperial College Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium which

has funding from the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation and the

Gates-created GAVI ‘vaccine alliance’.
Anyone wonder why these

characters see vaccines as the answer to every problem?
Ferguson is

wildly enthusiastic in his support for GAVI’s campaign to vaccine

children en masse in poor countries.
You would expect someone like

Gates who has constantly talked about the need to reduce the

population to want to fund vaccines to keep more people alive.
I’m

sure that’s why he does it.
The John Edmunds London School of

Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) has a Vaccines

Manufacturing Innovation Centre which develops, tests and

commercialises vaccines.
Rosemary Frei writes:

The vaccines centre also performs affiliated activities like combating ‘vaccine hesitancy’.
The

latter includes the Vaccine Confidence Project.
The project’s stated purpose is, among other

things, ‘to provide analysis and guidance for early response and engagement with the public

to ensure sustained confidence in vaccines and immunisation’.
The Vaccine Confidence

Project’s director is LSHTM professor Heidi Larson.
For more than a decade she’s been

researching how to combat vaccine hesitancy.
How the bloody hell can blokes like John Edmunds and Neil

Ferguson with those connections and financial ties model ‘virus’ case

and death projections for the government and especially in a way

that gives their paymasters like Gates exactly what they want?
It’s

insane, but this is what you find throughout the world.
‘Covid’ is not dangerous, oops, wait, yes it is

Only days before Ferguson’s nightmare scenario made Jackboot

Johnson take Britain into a China-style lockdown to save us from a

deadly ‘virus’ the UK government website gov.uk was reporting

something very different to Ferguson on a page of official

government guidance for ‘high consequence infectious diseases

(HCID)’.
It said this about ‘Covid-19’:

As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious

diseases (HCID) in the UK [my emphasis].
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an

interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID.
This was based

on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information

available during the early stages of the outbreak.
Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed

the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria.
They have

determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is

available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a

specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
The

Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19

should no longer be classified as an HCID.
Soon a er the government had been exposed for downgrading the

risk they upgraded it again and everyone was back to singing from

the same Cult hymn book.
Ferguson and his fellow Gates clones

indicated that lockdowns and restrictions would have to continue

until a Gates-funded vaccine was developed.
Gates said the same

because Ferguson and his like were repeating the Gates script which

is the Cult script.
‘Fla en the curve’ became an ongoing nightmare of

continuing lockdowns with periods in between of severe restrictions

in pursuit of destroying independent incomes and had nothing to do

with protecting health about which the Cult gives not a shit.
Why

wouldn’t Ferguson be pushing a vaccine ‘solution’ when he’s owned

by vaccine-obsessive Gates who makes a fortune from them and

when Ferguson heads the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium at

Imperial College funded by the Gates Foundation and GAVI, the

‘vaccine alliance’, created by Gates as his personal vaccine

promotion operation?
To compound the human catastrophe that

Ferguson’s ‘models’ did so much to create he was later exposed for

breaking his own lockdown rules by having sexual liaisons with his

married girlfriend Antonia Staats at his home while she was living at

another location with her husband and children.
Staats was a

‘climate’ activist and senior campaigner at the Soros-funded Avaaz

which I wouldn’t trust to tell me that grass is green.
Ferguson had to

resign as a government advisor over this hypocrisy in May, 2020, but

a er a period of quiet he was back being quoted by the ridiculous

media on the need for more lockdowns and a vaccine rollout.
Other

government-advising ‘scientists’ from Imperial College’ held the fort

in his absence and said lockdown could be indefinite until a vaccine

was found.
The Cult script was being sung by the payrolled choir.
I

said there was no intention of going back to ‘normal’ when the

‘vaccine’ came because the ‘vaccine’ is part of a very different agenda

that I will discuss in Human 2.0.
Why would the Cult want to let the

world go back to normal when destroying that normal forever was

the whole point of what was happening?
House arrest, closing

businesses and schools through lockdown, (un)social distancing and

masks all followed the Ferguson fantasy models.
Again as I

predicted (these people are so predictable) when the ‘vaccine’

arrived we were told that house arrest, lockdown, (un)social

distancing and masks would still have to continue.
I will deal with

the masks in the next chapter because they are of fundamental

importance.
Where’s the ‘pandemic’?
Any mildly in-depth assessment of the figures revealed what was

really going on.
Cult-funded and controlled organisations still have

genuine people working within them such is the number involved.
So it is with Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the

Applied Economics master’s degree program at Johns Hopkins

University.
She analysed the impact that ‘Covid-19’ had on deaths

from all causes in the United States using official data from the CDC

for the period from early February to early September, 2020.
She

found that allegedly ‘Covid’ related-deaths exceeded those from

heart disease which she found strange with heart disease always the

biggest cause of fatalities.
Her research became even more significant

when she noted the sudden decline in 2020 of all non-’Covid’ deaths:

‘This trend is completely contrary to the pa ern observed in all

previous years … the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost

exactly equals the increase in deaths by Covid-19.’ This was such a

game, set and match in terms of what was happening that Johns

Hopkins University deleted the article on the grounds that it ‘was

being used to support false and dangerous inaccuracies about the

impact of the pandemic’.
No – because it exposed the scam from

official CDC figures and this was confirmed when those figures were

published in January, 2021.
Here we can see the effect of people

dying from heart a acks, cancer, road accidents and gunshot

wounds – anything – having ‘Covid-19’ on the death certificate along

with those diagnosed from ‘symptoms’ who had even not tested

positive with a test not testing for the ‘virus’.
I am not kidding with

the gunshot wounds, by the way.
Brenda Bock, coroner in Grand

County, Colorado, revealed that two gunshot victims tested positive

for the ‘virus’ within the previous 30 days and were therefore

classified as ‘Covid deaths’.
Bock said: ‘These two people had tested

positive for Covid, but that’s not what killed them.
A gunshot

wound is what killed them.’ She said she had not even finished her

investigation when the state listed the gunshot victims as deaths due

to the ‘virus’.
The death and case figures for ‘Covid-19’ are an

absolute joke and yet they are repeated like parrots by the media,

politicians and alleged medical ‘experts’.
The official Cult narrative

is the only show in town.
Genevieve Briand found that deaths from all causes were not

exceptional in 2020 compared with previous years and a Spanish

magazine published figures that said the same about Spain which

was a ‘Covid’ propaganda hotspot at one point.
Discovery Salud, a

health and medicine magazine, quoted government figures which

showed how 17,000 fewer people died in Spain in 2020 than in 2019

and more than 26,000 fewer than in 2018.
The age-standardised

mortality rate for England and Wales when age distribution is taken

into account was significantly lower in 2020 than the 1970s, 80s and

90s, and was only the ninth highest since 2000.
Where is the

‘pandemic’?
Post mortems and autopsies virtually disappeared for ‘Covid’

deaths amid claims that ‘virus-infected’ bodily fluids posed a risk to

those carrying out the autopsy.
This was rejected by renowned

German pathologist and forensic doctor Klaus Püschel who said that

he and his staff had by then done 150 autopsies on ‘Covid’ patients

with no problems at all.
He said they were needed to know why

some ‘Covid’ patients suffered blood clots and not severe respiratory

infections.
The ‘virus’ is, a er all, called SARS or ‘severe acute

respiratory syndrome’.
I highlighted in the spring of 2020 this

phenomenon and quoted New York intensive care doctor Cameron

Kyle-Sidell who posted a soon deleted YouTube video to say that

they had been told to prepare to treat an infectious disease called

‘Covid-19’, but that was not what they were dealing with.
Instead he

likened the lung condition of the most severely ill patients to what

you would expect with cabin depressurisation in a plane at 30,000

feet or someone dropped on the top of Everest without oxygen or

acclimatisation.
I have never said this is not happening to a small

minority of alleged ‘Covid’ patients – I am saying this is not caused

by a phantom ‘contagious virus’.
Indeed Kyle-Sidell said that

‘Covid-19’ was not the disease they were told was coming their way.
‘We are operating under a medical paradigm that is untrue,’ he said,

and he believed they were treating the wrong disease: ‘These people

are being slowly starved of oxygen.’ Patients would take off their

oxygen masks in a state of fear and stress and while they were blue

in the face on the brink of death.
They did not look like patients

dying of pneumonia.
You can see why they don’t want autopsies

when their virus doesn’t exist and there is another condition in some

people that they don’t wish to be uncovered.
I should add here that

the 5G system of millimetre waves was being rapidly introduced

around the world in 2020 and even more so now as they fire 5G at

the Earth from satellites.
At 60 gigahertz within the 5G range that

frequency interacts with the oxygen molecule and stops people

breathing in sufficient oxygen to be absorbed into the bloodstream.
They are installing 5G in schools and hospitals.
The world is not

mad or anything.
5G can cause major changes to the lungs and blood

as I detail in The Answer and these consequences are labelled ‘Covid-

19’, the alleged symptoms of which can be caused by 5G and other

electromagnetic frequencies as cells respond to radiation poisoning.
The ‘Covid death’ scam

Dr Sco Jensen, a Minnesota state senator and medical doctor,

exposed ‘Covid’ Medicare payment incentives to hospitals and death

certificate manipulation.
He said he was sent a seven-page document

by the US Department of Health ‘coaching’ him on how to fill out

death certificates which had never happened before.
The document

said that he didn’t need to have a laboratory test for ‘Covid-19’ to

put that on the death certificate and that shocked him when death

certificates are supposed to be about facts.
Jensen described how

doctors had been ‘encouraged, if not pressured’ to make a diagnosis

of ‘Covid-19’ if they thought it was probable or ‘presumed’.
No

positive test was necessary – not that this would have ma ered

anyway.
He said doctors were told to diagnose ‘Covid’ by symptoms

when these were the same as colds, allergies, other respiratory

problems, and certainly with influenza which ‘disappeared’ in the

‘Covid’ era.
A common sniffle was enough to get the dreaded

verdict.
Ontario authorities decreed that a single care home resident

with one symptom from a long list must lead to the isolation of the

entire home.
Other courageous doctors like Jensen made the same

point about death figure manipulation and how deaths by other

causes were falling while ‘Covid-19 deaths’ were rising at the same

rate due to re-diagnosis.
Their videos rarely survive long on

YouTube with its Cult-supporting algorithms courtesy of CEO Susan

Wojcicki and her bosses at Google.
Figure-tampering was so glaring

and ubiquitous that even officials were le ing it slip or outright

saying it.
UK chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance said on one

occasion that ‘Covid’ on the death certificate doesn’t mean ‘Covid’

was the cause of death (so why the hell is it there?) and we had the

rare sight of a BBC reporter telling the truth when she said:

‘Someone could be successfully treated for Covid, in say April,

discharged, and then in June, get run over by a bus and die … That

person would still be counted as a Covid death in England.’ Yet the

BBC and the rest of the world media went on repeating the case and

death figures as if they were real.
Illinois Public Health Director Dr

Ngozi Ezike revealed the deceit while her bosses must have been

clenching their bu ocks:

If you were in a hospice and given a few weeks to live and you were then found to have

Covid that would be counted as a Covid death.
[There might be] a clear alternate cause, but it

is still listed as a Covid death.
So everyone listed as a Covid death doesn’t mean that was the

cause of the death, but that they had Covid at the time of death.
Yes, a ‘Covid virus’ never shown to exist and tested for with a test

not testing for the ‘virus’.
In the first period of the pandemic hoax

through the spring of 2020 the process began of designating almost

everything a ‘Covid’ death and this has continued ever since.
I sat in

a restaurant one night listening to a loud conversation on the next

table where a family was discussing in bewilderment how a relative

who had no symptoms of ‘Covid’, and had died of a long-term

problem, could have been diagnosed a death by the ‘virus’.
I could

understand their bewilderment.
If they read this book they will

know why this medical fraud has been perpetrated the world over.
Some media truth shock

The media ignored the evidence of death certificate fraud until

eventually one columnist did speak out when she saw it first-hand.
Bel Mooney is a long-time national newspaper journalist in Britain

currently working for the Daily Mail.
Her article on February 19th,

2021, carried this headline: ‘My dad Ted passed three Covid tests

and died of a chronic illness yet he’s officially one of Britain’s 120,000

victims of the virus and is far from alone...
so how many more are

there?’ She told how her 99-year-old father was in a care home with

a long-standing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and vascular

dementia.
Maybe, but he was still aware enough to tell her from the

start that there was no ‘virus’ and he refused the ‘vaccine’ for that

reason.
His death was not unexpected given his chronic health

problems and Mooney said she was shocked to find that ‘Covid-19’

was declared the cause of death on his death certificate.
She said this

was a ‘bizarre and unacceptable untruth’ for a man with long-time

health problems who had tested negative twice at the home for the

‘virus’.
I was also shocked by this story although not by what she

said.
I had been highlighting the death certificate manipulation for

ten months.
It was the confirmation that a professional full-time

journalist only realised this was going on when it affected her

directly and neither did she know that whether her dad tested

positive or negative was irrelevant with the test not testing for the

‘virus’.
Where had she been?
She said she did not believe in

‘conspiracy theories’ without knowing I’m sure that this and

‘conspiracy theorists’ were terms put into widespread circulation by

the CIA in the 1960s to discredit those who did not accept the

ridiculous official story of the Kennedy assassination.
A blanket

statement of ‘I don’t believe in conspiracy theories’ is always bizarre.
The dictionary definition of the term alone means the world is

drowning in conspiracies.
What she said was even more da when

her dad had just been affected by the ‘Covid’ conspiracy.
Why else

does she think that ‘Covid-19’ was going on the death certificates of

people who died of something else?
To be fair once she saw from personal experience what was

happening she didn’t mince words.
Mooney was called by the care

home on the morning of February 9th to be told her father had died

in his sleep.
When she asked for the official cause of death what

came back was ‘Covid-19’.
Mooney challenged this and was told

there had been deaths from Covid on the dementia floor (confirmed

by a test not testing for the ‘virus’) so they considered it ‘reasonable

to assume’.
‘But doctor,’ Mooney rightly protested, ‘an assumption

isn’t a diagnosis.’ She said she didn’t blame the perfectly decent and

sympathetic doctor – ‘he was just doing his job’.
Sorry, but that’s

bullshit.
He wasn’t doing his job at all.
He was pu ing a false cause of

death on the death certificate and that is a criminal offence for which

he should be brought to account and the same with the millions of

doctors worldwide who have done the same.
They were not doing

their job they were following orders and that must not wash at new

Nuremberg trials any more than it did at the first ones.
Mooney’s

doctor was ‘assuming’ (presuming) as he was told to, but ‘just

following orders’ makes no difference to his actions.
A doctor’s job is

to serve the patient and the truth, not follow orders, but that’s what

they have done all over the world and played a central part in

making the ‘Covid’ hoax possible with all its catastrophic

consequences for humanity.
Shame on them and they must answer

for their actions.
Mooney said her disquiet worsened when she

registered her father’s death by telephone and was told by the

registrar there had been very many other cases like hers where ‘the

deceased’ had not tested positive for ‘Covid’ yet it was recorded as

the cause of death.
The test may not ma er, but those involved at

their level think it ma ers and it shows a callous disregard for

accurate diagnosis.
The pressure to do this is coming from the top of

the national ‘health’ pyramids which in turn obey the World Health

Organization which obeys Gates and the Cult.
Mooney said the

registrar agreed that this must distort the national figures adding

that ‘the strangest thing is that every winter we record countless

deaths from flu, and this winter there have been none.
Not one!’ She

asked if the registrar thought deaths from flu were being

misdiagnosed and lumped together with ‘Covid’ deaths.
The answer

was a ‘puzzled yes’.
Mooney said that the funeral director said the

same about ‘Covid’ deaths which had nothing to do with ‘Covid’.
They had lost count of the number of families upset by this and

other funeral companies in different countries have had the same

experience.
Mooney wrote:

The nightly shroud-waving and shocking close-ups of pain imposed on us by the TV news bewildered and terrified the population into eager compliance with lockdowns.
We were

invited to ‘save the NHS’ and to grieve for strangers – the real-life loved ones behind those

shocking death counts.
Why would the public imagine what I now fear, namely that the way

Covid-19 death statistics are compiled might make the numbers seem greater than they are?
Oh, just a li le bit – like 100 percent.
Do the maths

Mooney asked why a country would wish to skew its mortality

figures by wrongly certifying deaths?
What had been going on?
Well, if you don’t believe in conspiracies you will never find the

answer which is that it’s a conspiracy.
She did, however, describe

what she had discovered as a ‘national scandal’.
In reality it’s a

global scandal and happening everywhere.
Pillars of this conspiracy

were all put into place before the bu on was pressed with the

Drosten PCR protocol and high amplifications to produce the cases

and death certificate changes to secure illusory ‘Covid’ deaths.
Mooney notes that normally two doctors were needed to certify a

death, with one having to know the patient, and how the rules were

changed in the spring of 2020 to allow one doctor to do this.
In the

same period ‘Covid deaths’ were decreed to be all cases where

Covid-19 was put on the death certificate even without a positive test

or any symptoms.
Mooney asked: ‘How many of the 30,851 (as of

January 15) care home resident deaths with Covid-19 on the

certificate (32.4 per cent of all deaths so far) were based on an

assumption, like that of my father?
And what has that done to our

national psyche?’All of them is the answer to the first question and it

has devastated and dismantled the national psyche, actually the

global psyche, on a colossal scale.
In the UK case and death data is

compiled by organisations like Public Health England (PHE) and the

Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Mooney highlights the insane

policy of counting a death from any cause as ‘Covid-19’ if this

happens within 28 days of a positive test (with a test not testing for

the ‘virus’) and she points out that ONS statistics reflect deaths

‘involving Covid’ ‘or due to Covid’ which meant in practice any

death where ‘Covid-19’ was mentioned on the death certificate.
She

described the consequences of this fraud:

Most people will accept the narrative they are fed, so panicky governments here and in

Europe witnessed the harsh measures enacted in totalitarian China and jumped into

lockdown.
Headlines about Covid deaths tolled like the knell that would bring doomsday to

us all.
Fear stalked our empty streets.
Politicians parroted the frankly ridiculous aim of ‘zero

Covid’ and shut down the economy, while most British people agreed that lockdown was

essential and (astonishingly to me, as a patriotic Brit) even wanted more restrictions.
For what?
Lies on death certificates?
Never mind the grim toll of lives ruined, suicides, schools closed, rising inequality, depression, cancelled hospital treatments, cancer patients in a torture of waiting, poverty, economic devastation, loneliness, families kept apart, and so on.
How

many lives have been lost as a direct result of lockdown?
She said that we could join in a national chorus of shock and horror

at reaching the 120,000 death toll which was surely certain to have

been totally skewed all along, but what about the human cost of

lockdown justified by these ‘death figures’?
The British Medical

Journal had reported a 1,493 percent increase in cases of children

taken to Great Ormond Street Hospital with abusive head injuries

alone and then there was the effect on families:

Perhaps the most shocking thing about all this is that families have been kept apart – and

obeyed the most irrational, changing rules at the whim of government – because they

believed in the statistics.
They succumbed to fear, which his generation rejected in that war

fought for freedom.
Dad (God rest his soul) would be angry.
And so am I.
Another theme to watch is that in the winter months when there

are more deaths from all causes they focus on ‘Covid’ deaths and in

the summer when the British Lung Foundation says respiratory

disease plummets by 80 percent they rage on about ‘cases’.
Either

way fascism on population is always the answer.
Nazi eugenics in the 21st century

Elderly people in care homes have been isolated from their families

month a er lonely month with no contact with relatives and

grandchildren who were banned from seeing them.
We were told

that lockdown fascism was to ‘protect the vulnerable’ like elderly

people.
At the same time Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders were

placed on their medical files so that if they needed resuscitation it

wasn’t done and ‘Covid-19’ went on their death certificates.
Old

people were not being ‘protected’ they were being culled –

murdered in truth.
DNR orders were being decreed for disabled and

young people with learning difficulties or psychological problems.
The UK Care Quality Commission, a non-departmental body of the

Department of Health and Social Care, found that 34 percent of

those working in health and social care were pressured into placing

‘do not a empt cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ orders on ‘Covid’

patients who suffered from disabilities and learning difficulties

without involving the patient or their families in the decision.
UK

judges ruled that an elderly woman with dementia should have the

DNA-manipulating ‘Covid vaccine’ against her son’s wishes and that

a man with severe learning difficulties should have the jab despite

his family’s objections.
Never mind that many had already died.
The

judiciary always supports doctors and government in fascist

dictatorships.
They wouldn’t dare do otherwise.
A horrific video was

posted showing fascist officers from Los Angeles police forcibly

giving the ‘Covid’ shot to women with special needs who were

screaming that they didn’t want it.
The same fascists are seen giving

the jab to a sleeping elderly woman in a care home.
This is straight

out of the Nazi playbook.
Hitler’s Nazis commi ed mass murder of

the mentally ill and physically disabled throughout Germany and

occupied territories in the programme that became known as Aktion

T4, or just T4.
Sabbatian-controlled Hitler and his grotesque crazies

set out to kill those they considered useless and unnecessary.
The

Reich Commi ee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and

Congenital Illnesses registered the births of babies identified by

physicians to have ‘defects’.
By 1941 alone more than 5,000 children

were murdered by the state and it is estimated that in total the

number of innocent people killed in Aktion T4 was between 275,000

and 300,000.
Parents were told their children had been sent away for

‘special treatment’ never to return.
It is rather pathetic to see claims

about plans for new extermination camps being dismissed today

when the same force behind current events did precisely that 80

years ago.
Margaret Sanger was a Cult operative who used ‘birth

control’ to sanitise her programme of eugenics.
Organisations she

founded became what is now Planned Parenthood.
Sanger proposed

that ‘the whole dysgenic population would have its choice of

segregation or sterilization’.
These included epileptics, ‘feeble-

minded’, and prostitutes.
Sanger opposed charity because it

perpetuated ‘human waste‘.
She reveals the Cult mentality and if

anyone thinks that extermination camps are a ‘conspiracy theory’

their naivety is touching if breathtakingly stupid.
If you don’t believe that doctors can act with callous disregard for

their patients it is worth considering that doctors and medical staff

agreed to put government-decreed DNR orders on medical files and

do nothing when resuscitation is called for.
I don’t know what you

call such people in your house.
In mine they are Nazis from the Josef

Mengele School of Medicine.
Phenomenal numbers of old people

have died worldwide from the effects of lockdown, depression, lack

of treatment, the ‘vaccine’ (more later) and losing the will to live.
A

common response at the start of the manufactured pandemic was to

remove old people from hospital beds and transfer them to nursing

homes.
The decision would result in a mass cull of elderly people in

those homes through lack of treatment – not ‘Covid’.
Care home

whistleblowers have told how once the ‘Covid’ era began doctors

would not come to their homes to treat patients and they were

begging for drugs like antibiotics that o en never came.
The most

infamous example was ordered by New York governor Andrew

Cuomo, brother of a moronic CNN host, who amazingly was given

an Emmy Award for his handling of the ‘Covid crisis’ by the

ridiculous Wokers that hand them out.
Just how ridiculous could be

seen in February, 2021, when a Department of Justice and FBI

investigation began into how thousands of old people in New York

died in nursing homes a er being discharged from hospital to make

way for ‘Covid’ patients on Cuomo’s say-so – and how he and his

staff covered up these facts.
This couldn’t have happened to a nicer

psychopath.
Even then there was a ‘Covid’ spin.
Reports said that

thousands of old people who tested positive for ‘Covid’ in hospital

were transferred to nursing homes to both die of ‘Covid’ and

transmit it to others.
No – they were in hospital because they were ill

and the fact that they tested positive with a test not testing for the

‘virus’ is irrelevant.
They were ill o en with respiratory diseases

ubiquitous in old people near the end of their lives.
Their transfer

out of hospital meant that their treatment stopped and many would

go on to die.
They’re old.
Who gives a damn?
I have exposed in the books for decades the Cult plan to cull the

world’s old people and even to introduce at some point what they

call a ‘demise pill’ which at a certain age everyone would take and

be out of here by law.
In March, 2021, Spain legalised euthanasia and

assisted suicide following the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg

and Canada on the Tiptoe to the demise pill.
Treatment of old people

by many ‘care’ homes has been a disgrace in the ‘Covid’ era.
There

are many, many, caring staff – I know some.
There have, however,

been legions of stories about callous treatment of old people and

their families.
Police were called when families came to take their

loved ones home in the light of isolation that was killing them.
They

became prisoners of the state.
Care home residents in insane, fascist

Ontario, Canada, were not allowed to leave their room once the

‘Covid’ hoax began.
UK staff have even wheeled elderly people

away from windows where family members were talking with them.
Oriana Criscuolo from Stockport in the English North West dropped

off some things for her 80-year-old father who has Parkinson’s

disease and dementia and she wanted to wave to him through a

ground-floor window.
She was told that was ‘illegal’.
When she went

anyway they closed the curtains in the middle of the day.
Oriana

said:

It’s just unbelievable.
I cannot understand how care home staff – people who are being paid

to care – have become so uncaring.
Their behaviour is inhumane and cruel.
It’s beyond belief.
She was right and this was not a one-off.
What a way to end your life

in such loveless circumstances.
UK registered nurse Nicky Millen, a

proper old school nurse for 40 years, said that when she started her

career care was based on dignity, choice, compassion and empathy.
Now she said ‘the things that are important to me have gone out of

the window.’ She was appalled that people were dying without their

loved ones and saying goodbye on iPads.
Nicky described how a

distressed 89-year-old lady stroked her face and asked her ‘how

many paracetamol would it take to finish me off’.
Life was no longer

worth living while not seeing her family.
Nicky said she was

humiliated in front of the ward staff and patients for le ing the lady

stroke her face and giving her a cuddle.
Such is the dehumanisation

that the ‘Covid’ hoax has brought to the surface.
Nicky worked in

care homes where patients told her they were being held prisoner.
‘I

want to live until I die’, one said to her.
‘I had a lady in tears because

she hadn’t seen her great-grandson.’ Nicky was compassionate old

school meeting psychopathic New Normal.
She also said she had

worked on a ‘Covid’ ward with no ‘Covid’ patients.
Jewish writer

Shai Held wrote an article in March, 2020, which was headlined ‘The

Staggering, Heartless Cruelty Toward the Elderly’.
What he

described was happening from the earliest days of lockdown.
He

said ‘the elderly’ were considered a group and not unique

individuals (the way of the Woke).
Shai Held said:

Notice how the all-too-familiar rhetoric of dehumanization works: ‘The elderly’ are bunched

together as a faceless mass, all of them considered culprits and thus effectively deserving of

the suffering the pandemic will inflict upon them.
Lost entirely is the fact that the elderly are individual human beings, each with a distinctive face and voice, each with hopes and

dreams, memories and regrets, friendships and marriages, loves lost and loves sustained.
‘The elderly’ have become another dehumanised group for which

anything goes and for many that has resulted in cold disregard for

their rights and their life.
The distinctive face that Held talks about is

designed to be deleted by masks until everyone is part of a faceless

mass.
‘War-zone’ hospitals myth

Again and again medical professionals have told me what was really

going on and how hospitals ‘overrun like war zones’ according to

the media were virtually empty.
The mantra from medical

whistleblowers was please don’t use my name or my career is over.
Citizen journalists around the world sneaked into hospitals to film

evidence exposing the ‘war-zone’ lie.
They really were largely empty

with closed wards and operating theatres.
I met a hospital worker in

my town on the Isle of Wight during the first lockdown in 2020 who

said the only island hospital had never been so quiet.
Lockdown was

justified by the psychopaths to stop hospitals being overrun.
At the

same time that the island hospital was near-empty the military

arrived here to provide extra beds.
It was all propaganda to ramp up

the fear to ensure compliance with fascism as were never-used

temporary hospitals with thousands of beds known as Nightingales

and never-used make-shi mortuaries opened by the criminal UK

government.
A man who helped to install those extra island beds

a ributed to the army said they were never used and the hospital

was empty.
Doctors and nurses ‘stood around talking or on their

phones, wandering down to us to see what we were doing’.
There

were no masks or social distancing.
He accused the useless local

island paper, the County Press, of ‘pumping the fear as if our hospital

was overrun and we only have one so it should have been’.
He

described ambulances parked up with crews outside in deck chairs.
When his brother called an ambulance he was told there was a two-

hour backlog which he called ‘bullshit’.
An old lady on the island fell

‘and was in a bad way’, but a caller who rang for an ambulance was

told the situation wasn’t urgent enough.
Ambulance stations were

working under capacity while people would hear ambulances with

sirens blaring driving through the streets.
When those living near

the stations realised what was going on they would follow them as

they le , circulated around an urban area with the sirens going, and

then came back without stopping.
All this was to increase levels of

fear and the same goes for the ‘ventilator shortage crisis’ that cost

tens of millions for hastily produced ventilators never to be used.
Ambulance crews that agreed to be exploited in this way for fear

propaganda might find themselves a mirror.
I wish them well with

that.
Empty hospitals were the obvious consequence of treatment

and diagnoses of non-’Covid’ conditions cancelled and those

involved handed a death sentence.
People have been dying at home

from undiagnosed and untreated cancer, heart disease and other life-

threatening conditions to allow empty hospitals to deal with a

‘pandemic’ that wasn’t happening.
Death of the innocent

‘War-zones’ have been laying off nursing staff, even doctors where

they can.
There was no work for them.
Lockdown was justified by

saving lives and protecting the vulnerable they were actually killing

with DNR orders and preventing empty hospitals being ‘overrun’.
In

Britain the mantra of stay at home to ‘save the NHS’ was everywhere

and across the world the same story was being sold when it was all

lies.
Two California doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi at

Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, held a news conference in

April, 2020, to say that intensive care units in California were ‘empty,

essentially’, with hospitals shu ing floors, not treating patients and

laying off doctors.
The California health system was working at

minimum capacity ‘ge ing rid of doctors because we just don’t have

the volume’.
They said that people with conditions such as heart

disease and cancer were not coming to hospital out of fear of ‘Covid-

19’.
Their video was deleted by Susan Wojcicki’s Cult-owned

YouTube a er reaching five million views.
Florida governor Ron

Desantis, who rejected the severe lockdowns of other states and is

being targeted for doing so, said that in March, 2020, every US

governor was given models claiming they would run out of hospital

beds in days.
That was never going to happen and the ‘modellers’

knew it.
Deceit can be found at every level of the system.
Urgent

children’s operations were cancelled including fracture repairs and

biopsies to spot cancer.
Eric Nicholls, a consultant paediatrician, said

‘this is obviously concerning and we need to return to normal

operating and to increase capacity as soon as possible’.
Psychopaths

in power were rather less concerned because they are psychopaths.
Deletion of urgent care and diagnosis has been happening all over

the world and how many kids and others have died as a result of the

actions of these cold and heartless lunatics dictating ‘health’ policy?
The number must be stratospheric.
Richard Sullivan, professor of

cancer and global health at King’s College London, said people

feared ‘Covid’ more than cancer such was the campaign of fear.
‘Years of lost life will be quite dramatic’, Sullivan said, with ‘a huge

amount of avoidable mortality’.
Sarah Woolnough, executive

director for policy at Cancer Research UK, said there had been a 75

percent drop in urgent referrals to hospitals by family doctors of

people with suspected cancer.
Sullivan said that ‘a lot of services

have had to scale back – we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in the

amount of elective cancer surgery’.
Lockdown deaths worldwide has

been absolutely fantastic with the New York Post reporting how data

confirmed that ‘lockdowns end more lives than they save’:

There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks

because patients didn’t receive prompt treatment.
Many fewer people were screened for

cancer.
Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands

of “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.
As unemployment surged

and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported

levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales

and fatal drug overdoses.
This has been happening while nurses and other staff had so much

time on their hands in the ‘war-zones’ that Tic-Tok dancing videos

began appearing across the Internet with medical staff dancing

around in empty wards and corridors as people died at home from

causes that would normally have been treated in hospital.
Mentions in dispatches

One brave and truth-commi ed whistleblower was Louise

Hampton, a call handler with the UK NHS who made a viral

Internet video saying she had done ‘fuck all’ during the ‘pandemic’

which was ‘a load of bollocks’.
She said that ‘Covid-19’ was

rebranded flu and of course she lost her job.
This is what happens in

the medical and endless other professions now when you tell the

truth.
Louise filmed inside ‘war-zone’ accident and emergency

departments to show they were empty and I mean empty as in no

one there.
The mainstream media could have done the same and

blown the gaff on the whole conspiracy.
They haven’t to their eternal

shame.
Not that most ‘journalists’ seem capable of manifesting

shame as with the psychopaths they slavishly repeat without

question.
The relative few who were admi ed with serious health

problems were le to die alone with no loved ones allowed to see

them because of ‘Covid’ rules and they included kids dying without

the comfort of mum and dad at their bedside while the evil behind

this couldn’t give a damn.
It was all good fun to them.
A Sco ish

NHS staff nurse publicly quit in the spring of 2021 saying: ‘I can no

longer be part of the lies and the corruption by the government.’ She

said hospitals ‘aren’t full, the beds aren’t full, beds have been shut,

wards have been shut’.
Hospitals were never busy throughout

‘Covid’.
The staff nurse said that Nicola Sturgeon, tragically the

leader of the Sco ish government, was on television saying save the

hospitals and the NHS – ‘but the beds are empty’ and ‘we’ve not

seen flu, we always see flu every year’.
She wrote to government and

spoke with her union Unison (the unions are Cult-compromised and

useless, but nothing changed.
Many of her colleagues were scared of

losing their jobs if they spoke out as they wanted to.
She said

nursing staff were being affected by wearing masks all day and ‘my

head is spli ing every shi from wearing a mask’.
The NHS is part

of the fascist tyranny and must be dismantled so we can start again

with human beings in charge.
(Ironically, hospitals were reported to

be busier again when official ‘Covid’ cases fell in spring/summer of

2021 and many other conditions required treatment at the same time

as the fake vaccine rollout.)

I will cover the ‘Covid vaccine’ scam in detail later, but it is

another indicator of the sickening disregard for human life that I am

highlighting here.
The DNA-manipulating concoctions do not fulfil

the definition of a ‘vaccine’, have never been used on humans before

and were given only emergency approval because trials were not

completed and they continued using the unknowing public.
The

result was what a NHS senior nurse with responsibility for ‘vaccine’

procedure said was ‘genocide’.
She said the ‘vaccines’ were not

‘vaccines’.
They had not been shown to be safe and claims about

their effectiveness by drug companies were ‘poetic licence’.
She

described what was happening as a ‘horrid act of human

annihilation’.
The nurse said that management had instigated a

policy of not providing a Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) before

people were ‘vaccinated’ even though health care professionals are

supposed to do this according to protocol.
Patients should also be

told that they are taking part in an ongoing clinical trial.
Her

challenges to what is happening had seen her excluded from

meetings and ridiculed in others.
She said she was told to ‘watch my

step … or I would find myself surplus to requirements’.
The nurse,

who spoke anonymously in fear of her career, said she asked her

NHS manager why he/she was content with taking part in genocide

against those having the ‘vaccines’.
The reply was that everyone had

to play their part and to ‘put up, shut up, and get it done’.
Government was ‘leaning heavily’ on NHS management which was

clearly leaning heavily on staff.
This is how the global ‘medical’

hierarchy operates and it starts with the Cult and its World Health

Organization.
She told the story of a doctor who had the Pfizer jab and when

questioned had no idea what was in it.
The doctor had never read

the literature.
We have to stop treating doctors as intellectual giants

when so many are moral and medical pygmies.
The doctor did not

even know that the ‘vaccines’ were not fully approved or that their

trials were ongoing.
They were, however, asking their patients if

they minded taking part in follow-ups for research purposes – yes,

the ongoing clinical trial.
The nurse said the doctor’s ignorance was

not rare and she had spoken to a hospital consultant who had the jab

without any idea of the background or that the ‘trials’ had not been

completed.
Nurses and pharmacists had shown the same ignorance.
‘My NHS colleagues have forsaken their duty of care, broken their

code of conduct – Hippocratic Oath – and have been brainwashed

just the same as the majority of the UK public through propaganda

…’ She said she had not been able to recruit a single NHS colleague,

doctor, nurse or pharmacist to stand with her and speak out.
Her

union had refused to help.
She said that if the genocide came to light

she would not hesitate to give evidence at a Nuremberg-type trial

against those in power who could have affected the outcomes but

didn’t.
And all for what?
To put the nonsense into perspective let’s say the ‘virus’ does exist

and let’s go completely crazy and accept that the official

manipulated figures for cases and deaths are accurate.
Even then a

study by Stanford University epidemiologist Dr John Ioannidis

published on the World Health Organization website produced an

average infection to fatality rate of … 0.23 percent!
Ioannidis said: ‘If

one could sample equally from all locations globally, the median

infection fatality rate might even be substantially lower than the

0.23 % observed in my analysis.’ For healthy people under 70 it was

… 0.05 percent!
This compares with the 3.4 percent claimed by the

Cult-owned World Health Organization when the hoax was first

played and maximum fear needed to be generated.
An updated

Stanford study in April, 2021, put the ‘infection’ to ‘fatality’ rate at

just 0.15 percent.
Another team of scientists led by Megan O’Driscoll

and Henrik Salje studied data from 45 countries and published their

findings on the Nature website.
For children and young people the

figure is so small it virtually does not register although authorities

will be hyping dangers to the young when they introduce DNA-

manipulating ‘vaccines’ for children.
The O’Driscoll study produced

an average infection-fatality figure of 0.003 for children from birth to

four; 0.001 for 5 to 14; 0.003 for 15 to 19; and it was still only 0.456 up

to 64.
To claim that children must be ‘vaccinated’ to protect them

from ‘Covid’ is an obvious lie and so there must be another reason

and there is.
What’s more the average age of a ‘Covid’ death is akin

to the average age that people die in general.
The average age of

death in England is about 80 for men and 83 for women.
The average

age of death from alleged ‘Covid’ is between 82 and 83.
California

doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, said at their April media

conference that projection models of millions of deaths had been

‘woefully inaccurate’.
They produced detailed figures showing that

Californians had a 0.03 chance of dying from ‘Covid’ based on the

number of people who tested positive (with a test not testing for the

‘virus’).
Erickson said there was a 0.1 percent chance of dying from

‘Covid’ in the state of New York, not just the city, and a 0.05 percent

chance in Spain, a centre of ‘Covid-19’ hysteria at one stage.
The

Stanford studies supported the doctors’ data with fatality rate

estimates of 0.23 and 0.15 percent.
How close are these figures to my

estimate of zero?
Death-rate figures claimed by the World Health

Organization at the start of the hoax were some 15 times higher.
The

California doctors said there was no justification for lockdowns and

the economic devastation they caused.
Everything they had ever

learned about quarantine was that you quarantine the sick and not

the healthy.
They had never seen this before and it made no medical

sense.
Why in the in the light of all this would governments and medical

systems the world over say that billions must go under house arrest;

lose their livelihood; in many cases lose their mind, their health and

their life; force people to wear masks dangerous to health and

psychology; make human interaction and even family interaction a

criminal offence; ban travel; close restaurants, bars, watching live

sport, concerts, theatre, and any activity involving human

togetherness and discourse; and closing schools to isolate children

from their friends and cause many to commit suicide in acts of

hopelessness and despair?
The California doctors said lockdown

consequences included increased child abuse, partner abuse,

alcoholism, depression, and other impacts they were seeing every

day.
Who would do that to the entire human race if not mentally-ill

psychopaths of almost unimaginable extremes like Bill Gates?
We

must face the reality of what we are dealing with and come out of

denial.
Fascism and tyranny are made possible only by the target

population submi ing and acquiescing to fascism and tyranny.
The

whole of human history shows that to be true.
Most people naively

and unquestioning believed what they were told about a ‘deadly

virus’ and meekly and weakly submi ed to house arrest.
Those who

didn’t believe it – at least in total – still submi ed in fear of the

consequences of not doing so.
For the rest who wouldn’t submit

draconian fines have been imposed, brutal policing by psychopaths

for psychopaths, and condemnation from the meek and weak who

condemn the Pushbackers on behalf of the very force that has them,

too, in its gunsights.
‘Pathetic’ does not even begin to suffice.
Britain’s brainless ‘Health’ Secretary Ma Hancock warned anyone

lying to border officials about returning from a list of ‘hotspot’

countries could face a jail sentence of up to ten years which is more

than for racially-aggravated assault, incest and a empting to have

sex with a child under 13.
Hancock is a lunatic, but he has the state

apparatus behind him in a Cult-led chain reaction and the same with

UK ‘Vaccine Minister’ Nadhim Zahawi, a prominent member of the

mega-Cult secret society, Le Cercle, which featured in my earlier

books.
The Cult enforces its will on governments and medical

systems; government and medical systems enforce their will on

business and police; business enforces its will on staff who enforce it

on customers; police enforce the will of the Cult on the population

and play their essential part in creating a world of fascist control that

their own children and grandchildren will have to live in their entire

lives.
It is a hierarchical pyramid of imposition and acquiescence

and, yes indeedy, of clinical insanity.
Does anyone bright enough to read this book have to ask what the

answer is?
I think not, but I will reveal it anyway in the fewest of

syllables: Tell the psychos and their moronic lackeys to fuck off and

let’s get on with our lives.
We are many – They are few.
CHAPTER SEVEN

War on your mind

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe

them

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Ihave described the ‘Covid’ hoax as a ‘Psyop’ and that is true in

every sense and on every level in accordance with the definition of

that term which is psychological warfare.
Break down the ‘Covid

pandemic’ to the foundation themes and it is psychological warfare

on the human individual and collective mind.
The same can be said for the entire human belief system involving

every subject you can imagine.
Huxley was right in his contention

that people believe what they are conditioned to believe and this

comes from the repetition throughout their lives of the same

falsehoods.
They spew from government, corporations, media and

endless streams of ‘experts’ telling you what the Cult wants you to

believe and o en believing it themselves (although far from always).
‘Experts’ are rewarded with ‘prestigious’ jobs and titles and as

agents of perceptual programming with regular access to the media.
The Cult has to control the narrative – control information – or they

lose control of the vital, crucial, without-which-they-cannot-prevail

public perception of reality.
The foundation of that control today is

the Internet made possible by the Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency (DARPA), the incredibly sinister technological arm

of the Pentagon.
The Internet is the result of military technology.
DARPA openly brags about establishing the Internet which has been

a long-term project to lasso the minds of the global population.
I

have said for decades the plan is to control information to such an

extreme that eventually no one would see or hear anything that the

Cult does not approve.
We are closing in on that end with ferocious

censorship since the ‘Covid’ hoax began and in my case it started

back in the 1990s in terms of books and speaking venues.
I had to

create my own publishing company in 1995 precisely because no one

else would publish my books even then.
I think they’re all still

running.
Cult Internet

To secure total control of information they needed the Internet in

which pre-programmed algorithms can seek out ‘unclean’ content

for deletion and even stop it being posted in the first place.
The Cult

had to dismantle print and non-Internet broadcast media to ensure

the transfer of information to the appropriate-named ‘Web’ – a

critical expression of the Cult web.
We’ve seen the ever-quickening

demise of traditional media and control of what is le by a tiny

number of corporations operating worldwide.
Independent

journalism in the mainstream is already dead and never was that

more obvious than since the turn of 2020.
The Cult wants all

information communicated via the Internet to globally censor and

allow the plug to be pulled any time.
Lockdowns and forced

isolation has meant that communication between people has been

through electronic means and no longer through face-to-face

discourse and discussion.
Cult psychopaths have targeted the bars,

restaurants, sport, venues and meeting places in general for this

reason.
None of this is by chance and it’s to stop people gathering in

any kind of privacy or number while being able to track and monitor

all Internet communications and block them as necessary.
Even

private messages between individuals have been censored by these

fascists that control Cult fronts like Facebook, Twi er, Google and

YouTube which are all officially run by Sabbatian place-people and

from the background by higher-level Sabbatian place people.
Facebook, Google, Amazon and their like were seed-funded and

supported into existence with money-no-object infusions of funds

either directly or indirectly from DARPA and CIA technology arm

In-Q-Tel.
The Cult plays the long game and prepares very carefully

for big plays like ‘Covid’.
Amazon is another front in the

psychological war and pre y much controls the global market in

book sales and increasingly publishing.
Amazon’s limitless funds

have deleted fantastic numbers of independent publishers to seize

global domination on the way to deciding which books can be sold

and circulated and which cannot.
Moves in that direction are already

happening.
Amazon’s leading light Jeff Bezos is the grandson of

Lawrence Preston Gise who worked with DARPA predecessor

ARPA.
Amazon has big connections to the CIA and the Pentagon.
The plan I have long described went like this:

1.
Employ military technology to establish the Internet.
2.
Sell the Internet as a place where people can freely communicate without censorship and

allow that to happen until the Net becomes the central and irreversible pillar of human

society.
If the Internet had been highly censored from the start many would have rejected it.
3.
Fund and manipulate major corporations into being to control the circulation of

information on your Internet using cover stories about geeks in garages to explain how they

came about.
Give them unlimited funds to expand rapidly with no need to make a profit for

years while non-Cult companies who need to balance the books cannot compete.
You know

that in these circumstances your Googles, YouTubes, Facebooks and Amazons are going to

secure near monopolies by either crushing or buying up the opposition.
4.
Allow freedom of expression on both the Internet and communication platforms to draw

people in until the Internet is the central and irreversible pillar of human society and your

communication corporations have reached a stage of near monopoly domination.
5.
Then unleash your always-planned frenzy of censorship on the basis of ‘where else are

you going to go?’ and continue to expand that until nothing remains that the Cult does not

want its human targets to see.
The process was timed to hit the ‘Covid’ hoax to ensure the best

chance possible of controlling the narrative which they knew they

had to do at all costs.
They were, a er all, about to unleash a ‘deadly

virus’ that didn’t really exist.
If you do that in an environment of

free-flowing information and opinion you would be dead in the

water before you could say Gates is a psychopath.
The network was

in place through which the Cult-created-and-owned World Health

Organization could dictate the ‘Covid’ narrative and response policy

slavishly supported by Cult-owned Internet communication giants

and mainstream media while those telling a different story were

censored.
Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twi er openly

announced that they would do this.
What else would we expect from

Cult-owned operations like Facebook which former executives have

confirmed set out to make the platform more addictive than

cigare es and coldly manipulates emotions of its users to sow

division between people and groups and scramble the minds of the

young?
If Zuckerberg lives out the rest of his life without going to

jail for crimes against humanity, and most emphatically against the

young, it will be a travesty of justice.
Still, no ma er, cause and effect

will catch up with him eventually and the same with Sergey Brin

and Larry Page at Google with its CEO Sundar Pichai who fix the

Google search results to promote Cult narratives and hide the

opposition.
Put the same key words into Google and other search

engines like DuckDuckGo and you will see how different results can

be.
Wikipedia is another intensely biased ‘encyclopaedia’ which

skews its content to the Cult agenda.
YouTube links to Wikipedia’s

version of ‘Covid’ and ‘climate change’ on video pages in which

experts in their field offer a different opinion (even that is

increasingly rare with Wojcicki censorship).
Into this ‘Covid’ silence-

them network must be added government media censors, sorry

‘regulators’, such as Ofcom in the UK which imposed tyrannical

restrictions on British broadcasters that had the effect of banning me

from ever appearing.
Just to debate with me about my evidence and

views on ‘Covid’ would mean breaking the fascistic impositions of

Ofcom and its CEO career government bureaucrat Melanie Dawes.
Gutless British broadcasters tremble at the very thought of fascist

Ofcom.
Psychos behind ‘Covid’

The reason for the ‘Covid’ catastrophe in all its facets and forms can

be seen by whom and what is driving the policies worldwide in such

a coordinated way.
Decisions are not being made to protect health,

but to target psychology.
The dominant group guiding and

‘advising’ government policy are not medical professionals.
They are

psychologists and behavioural scientists.
Every major country has its

own version of this phenomenon and I’ll use the British example to

show how it works.
In many ways the British version has been

affecting the wider world in the form of the huge behaviour

manipulation network in the UK which operates in other countries.
The network involves private companies, government, intelligence

and military.
The Cabinet Office is at the centre of the government

‘Covid’ Psyop and part-owns, with ‘innovation charity’ Nesta, the

Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) which claims to be independent of

government but patently isn’t.
The BIT was established in 2010 and

its job is to manipulate the psyche of the population to acquiesce to

government demands and so much more.
It is also known as the

‘Nudge Unit’, a name inspired by the 2009 book by two ultra-

Zionists, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, called Nudge: Improving

Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
The book, as with the

Behavioural Insights Team, seeks to ‘nudge’ behaviour (manipulate

it) to make the public follow pa erns of action and perception that

suit those in authority (the Cult).
Sunstein is so skilled at this that he

advises the World Health Organization and the UK Behavioural

Insights Team and was Administrator of the White House Office of

Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration.
Biden appointed him to the Department of Homeland Security –

another ultra-Zionist in the fold to oversee new immigration laws

which is another policy the Cult wants to control.
Sunstein is

desperate to silence anyone exposing conspiracies and co-authored a

2008 report on the subject in which suggestions were offered to ban

‘conspiracy theorizing’ or impose ‘some kind of tax, financial or

otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories’.
I guess a

psychiatrist’s chair is out of the question?
Sunstein’s mate Richard Thaler, an ‘academic affiliate’ of the UK

Behavioural Insights Team, is a proponent of ‘behavioural

economics’ which is defined as the study of ‘the effects of

psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the

decisions of individuals and institutions’.
Study the effects so they

can be manipulated to be what you want them to be.
Other leading

names in the development of behavioural economics are ultra-

Zionists Daniel Kahneman and Robert J.
Shiller and they, with

Thaler, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their

work in this field.
The Behavioural Insights Team is operating at the

heart of the UK government and has expanded globally through

partnerships with several universities including Harvard, Oxford,

Cambridge, University College London (UCL) and Pennsylvania.
They claim to have ‘trained’ (reframed) 20,000 civil servants and run

more than 750 projects involving 400 randomised controlled trials in

dozens of countries’ as another version of mind reframers Common

Purpose.
BIT works from its office in New York with cities and their

agencies, as well as other partners, across the United States and

Canada – this is a company part-owned by the British government

Cabinet Office.
An executive order by President Cult-servant Obama

established a US Social and Behavioral Sciences Team in 2015.
They

all have the same reason for being and that’s to brainwash the

population directly and by brainwashing those in positions of

authority.
‘Covid’ mind game

Another prime aspect of the UK mind-control network is the

‘independent’ [joke] Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on

Behaviours (SPI-B) which ‘provides behavioural science advice

aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions

that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts’.
That

means manipulating public perception and behaviour to do

whatever government tells them to do.
It’s disgusting and if they

really want the public to be ‘safe’ this lot should all be under lock

and key.
According to the government website SPI-B consists of

‘behavioural scientists, health and social psychologists,

anthropologists and historians’ and advises the Whi y-Vallance-led

Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) which in turn

advises the government on ‘the science’ (it doesn’t) and ‘Covid’

policy.
When politicians say they are being guided by ‘the science’

this is the rabble in each country they are talking about and that

‘science’ is dominated by behaviour manipulators to enforce

government fascism through public compliance.
The Behaviour

Insight Team is headed by psychologist David Solomon Halpern, a

visiting professor at King’s College London, and connects with a

national and global web of other civilian and military organisations

as the Cult moves towards its goal of fusing them into one fascistic

whole in every country through its ‘Fusion Doctrine’.
The behaviour

manipulation network involves, but is not confined to, the Foreign

Office; National Security Council; government communications

headquarters (GCHQ); MI5; MI6; the Cabinet Office-based Media

Monitoring Unit; and the Rapid Response Unit which ‘monitors

digital trends to spot emerging issues; including misinformation and

disinformation; and identifies the best way to respond’.
There is also the 77th Brigade of the UK military which operates

like the notorious Israeli military’s Unit 8200 in manipulating

information and discussion on the Internet by posing as members of

the public to promote the narrative and discredit those who

challenge it.
Here we have the military seeking to manipulate

domestic public opinion while the Nazis in government are fine with

that.
Conservative Member of Parliament Tobias Ellwood, an

advocate of lockdown and control through ‘vaccine passports’, is a

Lieutenant Colonel reservist in the 77th Brigade which connects with

the military operation jHub, the ‘innovation centre’ for the Ministry

of Defence and Strategic Command.
jHub has also been involved

with the civilian National Health Service (NHS) in ‘symptom

tracing’ the population.
The NHS is a key part of this mind control

network and produced a document in December, 2020, explaining to

staff how to use psychological manipulation with different groups

and ages to get them to have the DNA-manipulating ‘Covid vaccine’

that’s designed to cumulatively rewrite human genetics.
The

document, called ‘Optimising Vaccination Roll Out – Do’s and Dont’s

for all messaging, documents and “communications” in the widest

sense’, was published by NHS England and the NHS Improvement

Behaviour Change Unit in partnership with Public Health England

and Warwick Business School.
I hear the mantra about ‘save the

NHS’ and ‘protect the NHS’ when we need to scrap the NHS and

start again.
The current version is far too corrupt, far too anti-human

and totally compromised by Cult operatives and their assets.
UK

government broadcast media censor Ofcom will connect into this

web – as will the BBC with its tremendous Ofcom influence – to

control what the public see and hear and dictate mass perception.
Nuremberg trials must include personnel from all these

organisations.
The fear factor

The ‘Covid’ hoax has led to the creation of the UK Cabinet Office-

connected Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) which is officially described

as providing ‘expert advice on pandemics’ using its independent [all

Cult operations are ‘independent’] analytical function to provide

real-time analysis about infection outbreaks to identify and respond

to outbreaks of Covid-19’.
Another role is to advise the government

on a response to spikes in infections – ‘for example by closing

schools or workplaces in local areas where infection levels have

risen’.
Put another way, promoting the Cult agenda.
The Joint

Biosecurity Centre is modelled on the Joint Terrorism Analysis

Centre which analyses intelligence to set ‘terrorism threat levels’ and

here again you see the fusion of civilian and military operations and

intelligence that has led to military intelligence producing

documents about ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and how it can be combated.
Domestic civilian ma ers and opinions should not be the business of

the military.
The Joint Biosecurity Centre is headed by Tom Hurd,

director general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism

from the establishment-to-its-fingertips Hurd family.
His father is

former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.
How coincidental that Tom

Hurd went to the elite Eton College and Oxford University with

Boris Johnson.
Imperial College with its ridiculous computer

modeller Neil Ferguson will connect with this gigantic web that will

itself interconnect with similar set-ups in other major and not so

major countries.
Compared with this Cult network the politicians, be

they Boris Johnson, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, are bit-part players

‘following the science’.
The network of psychologists was on the

‘Covid’ case from the start with the aim of generating maximum fear

of the ‘virus’ to ensure compliance by the population.
A government

behavioural science group known as SPI-B produced a paper in

March, 2020, for discussion by the main government science

advisory group known as SAGE.
It was headed ‘Options for

increasing adherence to social distancing measures’ and it said the

following in a section headed ‘Persuasion’:

• A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently

personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the

low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of

concern may be rising.
Having a good understanding of the risk

has been found to be positively associated with adoption of

COVID-19 social distancing measures in Hong Kong.
• The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased

among those who are complacent, using hard-hi ing evaluation

of options for increasing social distancing emotional messaging.
To be effective this must also empower people by making clear

the actions they can take to reduce the threat.
• Responsibility to others: There seems to be insufficient

understanding of, or feelings of responsibility about, people’s role

in transmi ing the infection to others … Messaging about actions

need to be framed positively in terms of protecting oneself and

the community, and increase confidence that they will be effective.
• Some people will be more persuaded by appeals to play by the

rules, some by duty to the community, and some to personal risk.
All these different approaches are needed.
The messaging also

needs to take account of the realities of different people’s lives.
Messaging needs to take account of the different motivational

levers and circumstances of different people.
All this could be achieved the SPI-B psychologists said by using the

media to increase the sense of personal threat which translates as terrify

the shit out of the population, including children, so they all do what

we want.
That’s not happened has it?
Those excuses for ‘journalists’

who wouldn’t know journalism if it bit them on the arse (the great

majority) have played their crucial part in serving this Cult-

government Psyop to enslave their own kids and grandkids.
How

they live with themselves I have no idea.
The psychological war has

been underpinned by constant government ‘Covid’ propaganda in

almost every television and radio ad break, plus the Internet and

print media, which has pounded out the fear with taxpayers footing

the bill for their own programming.
The result has been people

terrified of a ‘virus’ that doesn’t exist or one with a tiny fatality rate

even if you believe it does.
People walk down the street and around

the shops wearing face-nappies damaging their health and

psychology while others report those who refuse to be that naïve to

the police who turn up in their own face-nappies.
I had a cameraman

come to my flat and he was so frightened of ‘Covid’ he came in

wearing a mask and refused to shake my hand in case he caught

something.
He had – naïveitis – and the thought that he worked in

the mainstream media was both depressing and made his behaviour

perfectly explainable.
The fear which has gripped the minds of so

many and frozen them into compliance has been carefully cultivated

by these psychologists who are really psychopaths.
If lives get

destroyed and a lot of young people commit suicide it shows our

plan is working.
SPI-B then turned to compulsion on the public to

comply.
‘With adequate preparation, rapid change can be achieved’,

it said.
Some countries had introduced mandatory self-isolation on a

wide scale without evidence of major public unrest and a large

majority of the UK’s population appeared to be supportive of more

coercive measures with 64 percent of adults saying they would

support pu ing London under a lockdown (watch the ‘polls’ which

are designed to make people believe that public opinion is in favour

or against whatever the subject in hand).
For ‘aggressive protective measures’ to be effective, the SPI-B

paper said, special a ention should be devoted to those population

groups that are more at risk.
Translated from the Orwellian this

means making the rest of population feel guilty for not protecting

the ‘vulnerable’ such as old people which the Cult and its agencies

were about to kill on an industrial scale with lockdown, lack of

treatment and the Gates ‘vaccine’.
Psychopath psychologists sold

their guilt-trip so comprehensively that Los Angeles County

Supervisor Hilda Solis reported that children were apologising (from

a distance) to their parents and grandparents for bringing ‘Covid’

into their homes and ge ing them sick.
‘… These apologies are just

some of the last words that loved ones will ever hear as they die

alone,’ she said.
Gut-wrenchingly Solis then used this childhood

tragedy to tell children to stay at home and ‘keep your loved ones

alive’.
Imagine heaping such potentially life-long guilt on a kid when

it has absolutely nothing to do with them.
These people are deeply

disturbed and the psychologists behind this even more so.
Uncivil war – divide and rule

Professional mind-controllers at SPI-B wanted the media to increase

a sense of responsibility to others (do as you’re told) and promote

‘positive messaging’ for those actions while in contrast to invoke

‘social disapproval’ by the unquestioning, obedient, community of

anyone with a mind of their own.
Again the compliant Goebbels-like

media obliged.
This is an old, old, trick employed by tyrannies the

world over throughout human history.
You get the target population

to keep the target population in line – your line.
SPI-B said this could

‘play an important role in preventing anti-social behaviour or

discouraging failure to enact pro-social behaviour’.
For ‘anti-social’

in the Orwellian parlance of SPI-B see any behaviour that

government doesn’t approve.
SPI-B recommendations said that

‘social disapproval’ should be accompanied by clear messaging and

promotion of strong collective identity – hence the government and

celebrity mantra of ‘we’re all in this together’.
Sure we are.
The mind

doctors have such contempt for their targets that they think some

clueless comedian, actor or singer telling them to do what the

government wants will be enough to win them over.
We have had

UK comedian Lenny Henry, actor Michael Caine and singer Elton

John wheeled out to serve the propagandists by urging people to

have the DNA-manipulating ‘Covid’ non-’vaccine’.
The role of

Henry and fellow black celebrities in seeking to coax a ‘vaccine’

reluctant black community into doing the government’s will was

especially stomach-turning.
An emotion-manipulating script and

carefully edited video featuring these black ‘celebs’ was such an

insult to the intelligence of black people and where’s the self-respect

of those involved selling their souls to a fascist government agenda?
Henry said he heard black people’s ‘legitimate worries and

concerns’, but people must ‘trust the facts’ when they were doing

exactly that by not having the ‘vaccine’.
They had to include the

obligatory reference to Black Lives Ma er with the line … ‘Don’t let

coronavirus cost even more black lives – because we ma er’.
My

god, it was pathetic.
‘I know the vaccine is safe and what it does.’

How?
‘I’m a comedian and it says so in my script.’

SPI-B said social disapproval needed to be carefully managed to

avoid victimisation, scapegoating and misdirected criticism, but they

knew that their ‘recommendations’ would lead to exactly that and

the media were specifically used to stir-up the divide-and-conquer

hostility.
Those who conform like good li le baa, baas, are praised

while those who have seen through the tidal wave of lies are

‘Covidiots’.
The awake have been abused by the fast asleep for not

conforming to fascism and impositions that the awake know are

designed to endanger their health, dehumanise them, and tear

asunder the very fabric of human society.
We have had the curtain-

twitchers and morons reporting neighbours and others to the face-

nappied police for breaking ‘Covid rules’ with fascist police

delighting in posting links and phone numbers where this could be

done.
The Cult cannot impose its will without a compliant police

and military or a compliant population willing to play their part in

enslaving themselves and their kids.
The words of a pastor in Nazi

Germany are so appropriate today:

First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade

unionist.
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.
Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it and so

many are.
‘Covid’ rules: Rewiring the mind

With the background laid out to this gigantic national and global

web of psychological manipulation we can put ‘Covid’ rules into a

clear and sinister perspective.
Forget the claims about protecting

health.
‘Covid’ rules are about dismantling the human mind,

breaking the human spirit, destroying self-respect, and then pu ing

Humpty Dumpty together again as a servile, submissive slave.
Social

isolation through lockdown and distancing have devastating effects

on the human psyche as the psychological psychopaths well know

and that’s the real reason for them.
Humans need contact with each

other, discourse, closeness and touch, or they eventually, and

literarily, go crazy.
Masks, which I will address at some length,

fundamentally add to the effects of isolation and the Cult agenda to

dehumanise and de-individualise the population.
To do this while

knowing – in fact seeking – this outcome is the very epitome of evil

and psychologists involved in this are the epitome of evil.
They must

like all the rest of the Cult demons and their assets stand trial for

crimes against humanity on a scale that defies the imagination.
Psychopaths in uniform use isolation to break enemy troops and

agents and make them subservient and submissive to tell what they

know.
The technique is rightly considered a form of torture and

torture is most certainly what has been imposed on the human

population.
Clinically-insane American psychologist Harry Harlow became

famous for his isolation experiments in the 1950s in which he

separated baby monkeys from their mothers and imprisoned them

for months on end in a metal container or ‘pit of despair’.
They soon

began to show mental distress and depression as any idiot could

have predicted.
Harlow put other monkeys in steel chambers for

three, six or twelve months while denying them any contact with

animals or humans.
He said that the effects of total social isolation

for six months were ‘so devastating and debilitating that we had

assumed initially that twelve months of isolation would not produce

any additional decrement’; but twelve months of isolation ‘almost

obliterated the animals socially’.
This is what the Cult and its

psychopaths are doing to you and your children.
Even monkeys in

partial isolation in which they were not allowed to form

relationships with other monkeys became ‘aggressive and hostile,

not only to others, but also towards their own bodies’.
We have seen

this in the young as a consequence of lockdown.
UK government

psychopaths launched a public relations campaign telling people not

to hug each other even a er they received the ‘Covid-19 vaccine’

which we were told with more lies would allow a return to ‘normal

life’.
A government source told The Telegraph: ‘It will be along the

lines that it is great that you have been vaccinated, but if you are

going to visit your family and hug your grandchildren there is a

chance you are going to infect people you love.’ The source was

apparently speaking from a secure psychiatric facility.
Janet Lord,

director of Birmingham University’s Institute of Inflammation and

Ageing, said that parents and grandparents should avoid hugging

their children.
Well, how can I put it, Ms Lord?
Fuck off.
Yep, that’ll

do.
Destroying the kids – where are the parents?
Observe what has happened to people enslaved and isolated by

lockdown as suicide and self-harm has soared worldwide,

particularly among the young denied the freedom to associate with

their friends.
A study of 49,000 people in English-speaking countries

concluded that almost half of young adults are at clinical risk of

mental health disorders.
A national survey in America of 1,000

currently enrolled high school and college students found that 5

percent reported a empting suicide during the pandemic.
Data from

the US CDC’s National Syndromic Surveillance Program from

January 1st to October 17th, 2020, revealed a 31 percent increase in

mental health issues among adolescents aged 12 to 17 compared

with 2019.
The CDC reported that America in general suffered the

biggest drop in life expectancy since World War Two as it fell by a

year in the first half of 2020 as a result of ‘deaths of despair’ –

overdoses and suicides.
Deaths of despair have leapt by more than

20 percent during lockdown and include the highest number of fatal

overdoses ever recorded in a single year – 81,000.
Internet addiction

is another consequence of being isolated at home which lowers

interest in physical activities as kids fall into inertia and what’s the

point?
Children and young people are losing hope and giving up on

life, sometimes literally.
A 14-year-old boy killed himself in

Maryland because he had ‘given up’ when his school district didn’t

reopen; an 11-year-old boy shot himself during a zoom class; a

teenager in Maine succumbed to the isolation of the ‘pandemic’

when he ended his life a er experiencing a disrupted senior year at

school.
Children as young as nine have taken their life and all these

stories can be repeated around the world.
Careers are being

destroyed before they start and that includes those in sport in which

promising youngsters have not been able to take part.
The plan of

the psycho-psychologists is working all right.
Researchers at

Cambridge University found that lockdowns cause significant harm

to children’s mental health.
Their study was published in the

Archives of Disease in Childhood, and followed 168 children aged

between 7 and 11.
The researchers concluded:

During the UK lockdown, children’s depression symptoms have increased substantially,

relative to before lockdown.
The scale of this effect has direct relevance for the continuation

of different elements of lockdown policy, such as complete or partial school closures …

… Specifically, we observed a statistically significant increase in ratings of depression, with a medium-to-large effect size.
Our findings emphasise the need to incorporate the potential

impact of lockdown on child mental health in planning the ongoing response to the global

pandemic and the recovery from it.
Not a chance when the Cult’s psycho-psychologists were ge ing

exactly what they wanted.
The UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and

Child Health has urged parents to look for signs of eating disorders

in children and young people a er a three to four fold increase.
Specialists say the ‘pandemic’ is a major reason behind the rise.
You

don’t say.
The College said isolation from friends during school

closures, exam cancellations, loss of extra-curricular activities like

sport, and an increased use of social media were all contributory

factors along with fears about the virus (psycho-psychologists

again), family finances, and students being forced to quarantine.
Doctors said young people were becoming severely ill by the time

they were seen with ‘Covid’ regulations reducing face-to-face

consultations.
Nor is it only the young that have been devastated by

the psychopaths.
Like all bullies and cowards the Cult is targeting

the young, elderly, weak and infirm.
A typical story was told by a

British lady called Lynn Parker who was not allowed to visit her

husband in 2020 for the last ten and half months of his life ‘when he

needed me most’ between March 20th and when he died on

December 19th.
This vacates the criminal and enters the territory of

evil.
The emotional impact on the immune system alone is immense

as are the number of people of all ages worldwide who have died as

a result of Cult-demanded, Gates-demanded, lockdowns.
Isolation is torture

The experience of imposing solitary confinement on millions of

prisoners around the world has shown how a large percentage

become ‘actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal’.
Social isolation

has been found to trigger ‘a specific psychiatric syndrome,

characterized by hallucinations; panic a acks; overt paranoia;

diminished impulse control; hypersensitivity to external stimuli; and

difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory’.
Juan Mendez,

a United Nations rapporteur (investigator), said that isolation is a

form of torture.
Research has shown that even a er isolation

prisoners find it far more difficult to make social connections and I

remember cha ing to a shop assistant a er one lockdown who told

me that when her young son met another child again he had no idea

how to act or what to do.
Hannah Flanagan, Director of Emergency

Services at Journey Mental Health Center in Dane County,

Wisconsin, said: ‘The specificity about Covid social distancing and

isolation that we’ve come across as contributing factors to the

suicides are really new to us this year.’ But they are not new to those

that devised them.
They are ge ing the effect they want as the

population is psychologically dismantled to be rebuilt in a totally

different way.
Children and the young are particularly targeted.
They will be the adults when the full-on fascist AI-controlled

technocracy is planned to be imposed and they are being prepared

to meekly submit.
At the same time older people who still have a

memory of what life was like before – and how fascist the new

normal really is – are being deleted.
You are going to see efforts to

turn the young against the old to support this geriatric genocide.
Hannah Flanagan said the big increase in suicide in her county

proved that social isolation is not only harmful, but deadly.
Studies

have shown that isolation from others is one of the main risk factors

in suicide and even more so with women.
Warnings that lockdown

could create a ‘perfect storm’ for suicide were ignored.
A er all this

was one of the reasons for lockdown.
Suicide, however, is only the

most extreme of isolation consequences.
There are many others.
Dr

Dhruv Khullar, assistant professor of healthcare policy at Weill

Cornell Medical College, said in a New York Times article in 2016 long

before the fake ‘pandemic’:

A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us.
Individuals with less social

connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and

higher levels of stress hormones.
One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of

heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent.
Another analysis that pooled data from

70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent

higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age.
Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions.
These effects start

early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after

controlling for other factors.
All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.
There you have proof from that one article alone four years before

2020 that those who have enforced lockdown, social distancing and

isolation knew what the effect would be and that is even more so

with professional psychologists that have been driving the policy

across the globe.
We can go back even further to the years 2000 and

2003 and the start of a major study on the effects of isolation on

health by Dr Janine Gronewold and Professor Dirk M.
Hermann at

the University Hospital in Essen, Germany, who analysed data on

4,316 people with an average age of 59 who were recruited for the

long-term research project.
They found that socially isolated people

are more than 40 percent more likely to have a heart a ack, stroke,

or other major cardiovascular event and nearly 50 percent more

likely to die from any cause.
Given the financial Armageddon

unleashed by lockdown we should note that the study found a

relationship between increased cardiovascular risk and lack of

financial support.
A er excluding other factors social isolation was

still connected to a 44 percent increased risk of cardiovascular

problems and a 47 percent increased risk of death by any cause.
Lack

of financial support was associated with a 30 percent increase in the

risk of cardiovascular health events.
Dr Gronewold said it had been

known for some time that feeling lonely or lacking contact with close

friends and family can have an impact on physical health and the

study had shown that having strong social relationships is of high

importance for heart health.
Gronewold said they didn’t understand

yet why people who are socially isolated have such poor health

outcomes, but this was obviously a worrying finding, particularly

during these times of prolonged social distancing.
Well, it can be

explained on many levels.
You only have to identify the point in the

body where people feel loneliness and missing people they are

parted from – it’s in the centre of the chest where they feel the ache

of loneliness and the ache of missing people.
‘My heart aches for

you’ … ‘My heart aches for some company.’ I will explain this more

in the chapter Escaping Wetiko, but when you realise that the body

is the mind – they are expressions of each other – the reason why

state of the mind dictates state of the body becomes clear.
American psychologist Ranjit Powar was highlighting the effects

of lockdown isolation as early as April, 2020.
She said humans have

evolved to be social creatures and are wired to live in interactive

groups.
Being isolated from family, friends and colleagues could be

unbalancing and traumatic for most people and could result in short

or even long-term psychological and physical health problems.
An

increase in levels of anxiety, aggression, depression, forgetfulness

and hallucinations were possible psychological effects of isolation.
‘Mental conditions may be precipitated for those with underlying

pre-existing susceptibilities and show up in many others without

any pre-condition.’ Powar said personal relationships helped us cope

with stress and if we lost this outlet for le ing off steam the result

can be a big emotional void which, for an average person, was

difficult to deal with.
‘Just a few days of isolation can cause

increased levels of anxiety and depression’ – so what the hell has

been the effect on the global population of 18 months of this at the

time of writing?
Powar said: ‘Add to it the looming threat of a

dreadful disease being repeatedly hammered in through the media

and you have a recipe for many shades of mental and physical

distress.’ For those with a house and a garden it is easy to forget that

billions have had to endure lockdown isolation in tiny overcrowded

flats and apartments with nowhere to go outside.
The psychological

and physical consequences of this are unimaginable and with lunatic

and abusive partners and parents the consequences have led to

tremendous increases in domestic and child abuse and alcoholism as

people seek to shut out the horror.
Ranjit Powar said:

Staying in a confined space with family is not all a rosy picture for everyone.
It can be

extremely oppressive and claustrophobic for large low-income families huddled together in

small single-room houses.
Children here are not lucky enough to have many board/electronic

games or books to keep them occupied.
Add to it the deep insecurity of running out of funds for food and basic necessities.
On the other hand, there are people with dysfunctional family dynamics, such as domineering,

abusive or alcoholic partners, siblings or parents which makes staying home a period of trial.
Incidence of suicide and physical abuse against women has shown a worldwide increase.
Heightened anxiety and depression also affect a person’s immune system, making them more

susceptible to illness.
To think that Powar’s article was published on April 11th, 2020.
Six-feet fantasy

Social (unsocial) distancing demanded that people stay six feet or

two metres apart.
UK government advisor Robert Dingwall from the

New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group said

in a radio interview that the two-metre rule was ‘conjured up out of

nowhere’ and was not based on science.
No, it was not based on

medical science, but it didn’t come out of nowhere.
The distance

related to psychological science.
Six feet/two metres was adopted in

many countries and we were told by people like the criminal

Anthony Fauci and his ilk that it was founded on science.
Many

schools could not reopen because they did not have the space for six-

feet distancing.
Then in March, 2021, a er a year of six-feet ‘science’,

a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases involving more

than 500,000 students and almost 100,000 staff over 16 weeks

revealed no significant difference in ‘Covid’ cases between six feet

and three feet and Fauci changed his tune.
Now three feet was okay.
There is no difference between six feet and three inches when there is

no ‘virus’ and they got away with six feet for psychological reasons

for as long as they could.
I hear journalists and others talk about

‘unintended consequences’ of lockdown.
They are not unintended at

all; they have been coldly-calculated for a specific outcome of human

control and that’s why super-psychopaths like Gates have called for

them so vehemently.
Super-psychopath psychologists have

demanded them and psychopathic or clueless, spineless, politicians

have gone along with them by ‘following the science’.
But it’s not

science at all.
‘Science’ is not what is; it’s only what people can be

manipulated to believe it is.
The whole ‘Covid’ catastrophe is

founded on mind control.
Three word or three statement mantras

issued by the UK government are a well-known mind control

technique and so we’ve had ‘Stay home/protect the NHS/save lives’,

‘Stay alert/control the virus/save lives’ and ‘hands/face/space’.
One

of the most vocal proponents of extreme ‘Covid’ rules in the UK has

been Professor Susan Michie, a member of the British Communist

Party, who is not a medical professional.
Michie is the director of the

Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London.
She is a

behavioural psychologist and another filthy rich ‘Marxist’ who praised

China’s draconian lockdown.
She was known by fellow students at

Oxford University as ‘Stalin’s nanny’ for her extreme Marxism.
Michie is an influential member of the UK government’s Scientific

Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and behavioural

manipulation groups which have dominated ‘Covid’ policy.
She is a

consultant adviser to the World Health Organization on ‘Covid-19’

and behaviour.
Why the hell are lockdowns anything to do with her

when they are claimed to be about health?
Why does a behavioural

psychologist from a group charged with changing the behaviour of

the public want lockdown, human isolation and mandatory masks?
Does that question really need an answer?
Michie absolutely has to

explain herself before a Nuremberg court when humanity takes back

its world again and even more so when you see the consequences of

masks that she demands are compulsory.
This is a Michie classic:

The benefits of getting primary school children to wear masks is that regardless of what little

degree of transmission is occurring in those age groups it could help normalise the practice.
Young children wearing masks may be more likely to get their families to accept masks.
Those words alone should carry a prison sentence when you

ponder on the callous disregard for children involved and what a

statement it makes about the mind and motivations of Susan Michie.
What a lovely lady and what she said there encapsulates the

mentality of the psychopaths behind the ‘Covid’ horror.
Let us

compare what Michie said with a countrywide study in Germany

published at researchsquare.com involving 25,000 school children and 17,854 health complaints submi ed by parents.
Researchers

found that masks are harming children physically, psychologically,

and behaviourally with 24 health issues associated with mask

wearing.
They include: shortness of breath (29.7 %); dizziness

(26.4 %); increased headaches (53%); difficulty concentrating (50%);

drowsiness or fatigue (37%); and malaise (42%).
Nearly a third of

children experienced more sleep issues than before and a quarter

developed new fears.
Researchers found health issues and other

impairments in 68 percent of masked children covering their faces

for an average of 4.5 hours a day.
Hundreds of those taking part

experienced accelerated respiration, tightness in the chest, weakness,

and short-term impairment of consciousness.
A reminder of what

Michie said again:

The benefits of getting primary school children to wear masks is that regardless of what little

degree of transmission is occurring in those age groups it could help normalise the practice.
Young children wearing masks may be more likely to get their families to accept masks.
Psychopaths in government and psychology now have children and

young people – plus all the adults – wearing masks for hours on end

while clueless teachers impose the will of the psychopaths on the

young they should be protecting.
What the hell are parents doing?
Cult lab rats

We have some schools already imposing on students microchipped

buzzers that activate when they get ‘too close’ to their pals in the

way they do with lab rats.
How apt.
To the Cult and its brain-dead

servants our children are lab rats being conditioned to be

unquestioning, dehumanised slaves for the rest of their lives.
Children and young people are being weaned and frightened away

from the most natural human instincts including closeness and

touch.
I have tracked in the books over the years how schools were

banning pupils from greeting each other with a hug and the whole

Cult-induced Me Too movement has terrified men and boys from a

relaxed and natural interaction with female friends and work

colleagues to the point where many men try never to be in a room

alone with a woman that’s not their partner.
Airhead celebrities have

as always played their virtue-signalling part in making this happen

with their gross exaggeration.
For every monster like Harvey

Weinstein there are at least tens of thousands of men that don’t treat

women like that; but everyone must be branded the same and policy

changed for them as well as the monster.
I am going to be using the

word ‘dehumanise’ many times in this chapter because that is what

the Cult is seeking to do and it goes very deep as we shall see.
Don’t

let them kid you that social distancing is planned to end one day.
That’s not the idea.
We are seeing more governments and companies

funding and producing wearable gadgets to keep people apart and

they would not be doing that if this was meant to be short-term.
A

tech start-up company backed by GCHQ, the British Intelligence and

military surveillance headquarters, has created a social distancing

wrist sensor that alerts people when they get too close to others.
The

CIA has also supported tech companies developing similar devices.
The wearable sensor was developed by Tended, one of a number of

start-up companies supported by GCHQ (see the CIA and DARPA).
The device can be worn on the wrist or as a tag on the waistband and

will vibrate whenever someone wearing the device breaches social

distancing and gets anywhere near natural human contact.
The

company had a lucky break in that it was developing a distancing

sensor when the ‘Covid’ hoax arrived which immediately provided a

potentially enormous market.
How fortunate.
The government in

big-time Cult-controlled Ontario in Canada is investing $2.5 million

in wearable contact tracing technology that ‘will alert users if they

may have been exposed to the Covid-19 in the workplace and will

beep or vibrate if they are within six feet of another person’.
Facedrive Inc., the technology company behind this, was founded in

2016 with funding from the Ontario Together Fund and obviously

they, too, had a prophet on the board of directors.
The human

surveillance and control technology is called TraceSCAN and would

be worn by the human cyborgs in places such as airports,

workplaces, construction sites, care homes and … schools.
I emphasise schools with children and young people the prime

targets.
You know what is planned for society as a whole if you keep

your eyes on the schools.
They have always been places where the

state program the next generation of slaves to be its compliant

worker-ants – or Woker-ants these days; but in the mist of the

‘Covid’ madness they have been transformed into mind laboratories

on a scale never seen before.
Teachers and head teachers are just as

programmed as the kids – o en more so.
Children are kept apart

from human interaction by walk lanes, classroom distancing,

staggered meal times, masks, and the rolling-out of buzzer systems.
Schools are now physically laid out as a laboratory maze for lab-rats.
Lunatics at a school in Anchorage, Alaska, who should be

prosecuted for child abuse, took away desks and forced children to

kneel (know your place) on a mat for five hours a day while wearing

a mask and using their chairs as a desk.
How this was supposed to

impact on a ‘virus’ only these clinically insane people can tell you

and even then it would be clap-trap.
The school banned recess

(interaction), art classes (creativity), and physical exercise (ge ing

body and mind moving out of inertia).
Everyone behind this outrage

should be in jail or be er still a mental institution.
The behavioural

manipulators are all for this dystopian approach to schools.
Professor Susan Michie, the mind-doctor and British Communist

Party member, said it was wrong to say that schools were safe.
They

had to be made so by ‘distancing’, masks and ventilation (si ing all

day in the cold).
I must ask this lady round for dinner on a night I

know I am going to be out and not back for weeks.
She probably

wouldn’t be able to make it, anyway, with all the visits to her own

psychologist she must have block-booked.
Masking identity

I know how shocking it must be for you that a behaviour

manipulator like Michie wants everyone to wear masks which have

long been a feature of mind-control programs like the infamous

MKUltra in the United States, but, there we are.
We live and learn.
I

spent many years from 1996 to right across the millennium

researching mind control in detail on both sides of the Atlantic and

elsewhere.
I met a large number of mind-control survivors and

many had been held captive in body and mind by MKUltra.
MK

stands for mind-control, but employs the German spelling in

deference to the Nazis spirited out of Germany at the end of World

War Two by Operation Paperclip in which the US authorities, with

help from the Vatican, transported Nazi mind-controllers and

engineers to America to continue their work.
Many of them were

behind the creation of NASA and they included Nazi scientist and

SS officer Wernher von Braun who swapped designing V-2 rockets to

bombard London with designing the Saturn V rockets that powered

the NASA moon programme’s Apollo cra.
I think I may have

mentioned that the Cult has no borders.
Among Paperclip escapees

was Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death in the Nazi concentration

camps where he conducted mind and genetic experiments on

children o en using twins to provide a control twin to measure the

impact of his ‘work’ on the other.
If you want to observe the Cult

mentality in all its extremes of evil then look into the life of Mengele.
I have met many people who suffered mercilessly under Mengele in

the United States where he operated under the name Dr Greene and

became a stalwart of MKUltra programming and torture.
Among his

locations was the underground facility in the Mojave Desert in

California called the China Lake Naval Weapons Station which is

almost entirely below the surface.
My books The Biggest Secret,

Children of the Matrix and The Perception Deception have the detailed

background to MKUltra.
The best-known MKUltra survivor is American Cathy O’Brien.
I

first met her and her late partner Mark Phillips at a conference in

Colorado in 1996.
Mark helped her escape and deprogram from

decades of captivity in an offshoot of MKUltra known as Project

Monarch in which ‘sex slaves’ were provided for the rich and

famous including Father George Bush, Dick Cheney and the

Clintons.
Read Cathy and Mark’s book Trance-Formation of America

and if you are new to this you will be shocked to the core.
I read it in

1996 shortly before, with the usual synchronicity of my life, I found

myself given a book table at the conference right next to hers.
MKUltra never ended despite being very publicly exposed (only a

small part of it) in the 1970s and continues in other guises.
I am still

in touch with Cathy.
She contacted me during 2020 a er masks

became compulsory in many countries to tell me how they were

used as part of MKUltra programming.
I had been observing ‘Covid

regulations’ and the relationship between authority and public for

months.
I saw techniques that I knew were employed on individuals

in MKUltra being used on the global population.
I had read many

books and manuals on mind control including one called Silent

Weapons for Quiet Wars which came to light in the 1980s and was a

guide on how to perceptually program on a mass scale.
‘Silent

Weapons’ refers to mind-control.
I remembered a line from the

manual as governments, medical authorities and law enforcement

agencies have so obviously talked to – or rather at – the adult

population since the ‘Covid’ hoax began as if they are children.
The

document said:

If a person is spoken to by a T.V.
advertiser as if he were a twelve-year-old, then, due to

suggestibility, he will, with a certain probability, respond or react to that suggestion with the uncritical response of a twelve-year-old and will reach in to his economic reservoir and

deliver its energy to buy that product on impulse when he passes it in the store.
That’s why authority has spoken to adults like children since all this

began.
Why did Michael Jackson wear masks?
Every aspect of the ‘Covid’ narrative has mind-control as its central

theme.
Cathy O’Brien wrote an article for davidicke.com about the connection between masks and mind control.
Her daughter Kelly

who I first met in the 1990s was born while Cathy was still held

captive in MKUltra.
Kelly was forced to wear a mask as part of her

programming from the age of two to dehumanise her, target her

sense of individuality and reduce the amount of oxygen her brain

and body received.
Bingo.
This is the real reason for compulsory

masks, why they have been enforced en masse, and why they seek to

increase the number they demand you wear.
First one, then two,

with one disgraceful alleged ‘doctor’ recommending four which is

nothing less than a death sentence.
Where and how o en they must

be worn is being expanded for the purpose of mass mind control

and damaging respiratory health which they can call ‘Covid-19’.
Canada’s government headed by the man-child Justin Trudeau, says

it’s fine for children of two and older to wear masks.
An insane

‘study’ in Italy involving just 47 children concluded there was no

problem for babies as young as four months wearing them.
Even a er

people were ‘vaccinated’ they were still told to wear masks by the

criminal that is Anthony Fauci.
Cathy wrote that mandating masks

is allowing the authorities literally to control the air we breathe

which is what was done in MKUltra.
You might recall how the

singer Michael Jackson wore masks and there is a reason for that.
He

was subjected to MKUltra mind control through Project Monarch

and his psyche was scrambled by these simpletons.
Cathy wrote:

In MKUltra Project Monarch mind control, Michael Jackson had to wear a mask to silence his

voice so he could not reach out for help.
Remember how he developed that whisper voice

when he wasn’t singing?
Masks control the mind from the outside in, like the redefining of

words is doing.
By controlling what we can and cannot say for fear of being labeled racist or

beaten, for example, it ultimately controls thought that drives our words and ultimately actions

(or lack thereof).
Likewise, a mask muffles our speech so that we are not heard, which controls voice … words

… mind.
This is Mind Control.
Masks are an obvious mind control device, and I am disturbed

so many people are complying on a global scale.
Masks depersonalize while making a person

feel as though they have no voice.
It is a barrier to others.
People who would never choose to

comply but are forced to wear a mask in order to keep their job, and ultimately their family

fed, are compromised.
They often feel shame and are subdued.
People have stopped talking

with each other while media controls the narrative.
The ‘no voice’ theme has o en become literal with train

passengers told not to speak to each other in case they pass on the

‘virus’, singing banned for the same reason and bonkers California

officials telling people riding roller coasters that they cannot shout

and scream.
Cathy said she heard every day from healed MKUltra

survivors who cannot wear a mask without flashing back on ways

their breathing was controlled – ‘from ball gags and penises to water

boarding’.
She said that through the years when she saw images of

people in China wearing masks ‘due to pollution’ that it was really

to control their oxygen levels.
‘I knew it was as much of a population

control mechanism of depersonalisation as are burkas’, she said.
Masks are another Chinese communist/fascist method of control that

has been swept across the West as the West becomes China at

lightning speed since we entered 2020.
Mask-19

There are other reasons for mandatory masks and these include

destroying respiratory health to call it ‘Covid-19’ and stunting brain

development of children and the young.
Dr Margarite Griesz-

Brisson MD, PhD, is a Consultant Neurologist and

Neurophysiologist and the Founder and Medical Director of the

London Neurology and Pain Clinic.
Her CV goes down the street

and round the corner.
She is clearly someone who cares about people

and won’t parrot the propaganda.
Griesz-Brisson has a PhD in

pharmacology, with special interest in neurotoxicology,

environmental medicine, neuroregeneration and neuroplasticity (the

way the brain can change in the light of information received).
She

went public in October, 2020, with a passionate warning about the

effects of mask-wearing laws:

The reinhalation of our exhaled air will without a doubt create oxygen deficiency and a

flooding of carbon dioxide.
We know that the human brain is very sensitive to oxygen

deprivation.
There are nerve cells for example in the hippocampus that can’t be longer than 3

minutes without oxygen – they cannot survive.
The acute warning symptoms are headaches,

drowsiness, dizziness, issues in concentration, slowing down of reaction time – reactions of

the cognitive system.
Oh, I know, let’s tell bus, truck and taxi drivers to wear them and

people working machinery.
How about pilots, doctors and police?
Griesz-Brisson makes the important point that while the symptoms

she mentions may fade as the body readjusts this does not alter the

fact that people continue to operate in oxygen deficit with long list of

potential consequences.
She said it was well known that

neurodegenerative diseases take years or decades to develop.
‘If

today you forget your phone number, the breakdown in your brain

would have already started 20 or 30 years ago.’ She said

degenerative processes in your brain are ge ing amplified as your

oxygen deprivation continues through wearing a mask.
Nerve cells

in the brain are unable to divide themselves normally in these

circumstances and lost nerve cells will no longer be regenerated.
‘What is gone is gone.’ Now consider that people like shop workers

and schoolchildren are wearing masks for hours every day.
What in

the name of sanity is going to be happening to them?
‘I do not wear

a mask, I need my brain to think’, Griesz-Brisson said, ‘I want to

have a clear head when I deal with my patients and not be in a

carbon dioxide-induced anaesthesia’.
If you are told to wear a mask

anywhere ask the organisation, police, store, whatever, for their risk

assessment on the dangers and negative effects on mind and body of

enforcing mask-wearing.
They won’t have one because it has never

been done not even by government.
All of them must be subject to

class-action lawsuits as the consequences come to light.
They don’t

do mask risk assessments for an obvious reason.
They know what

the conclusions would be and independent scientific studies that

have been done tell a horror story of consequences.
‘Masks are criminal’

Dr Griesz-Brisson said that for children and adolescents, masks are

an absolute no-no.
They had an extremely active and adaptive

immune system and their brain was incredibly active with so much

to learn.
‘The child’s brain, or the youth’s brain, is thirsting for

oxygen.’ The more metabolically active an organ was, the more

oxygen it required; and in children and adolescents every organ was

metabolically active.
Griesz-Brisson said that to deprive a child’s or

adolescent’s brain of oxygen, or to restrict it in any way, was not only

dangerous to their health, it was absolutely criminal.
‘Oxygen

deficiency inhibits the development of the brain, and the damage

that has taken place as a result CANNOT be reversed.’ Mind

manipulators of MKUltra put masks on two-year-olds they wanted

to neurologically rewire and you can see why.
Griesz-Brisson said a

child needs the brain to learn and the brain needs oxygen to

function.
‘We don’t need a clinical study for that.
This is simple,

indisputable physiology.’ Consciously and purposely induced

oxygen deficiency was an absolutely deliberate health hazard, and

an absolute medical contraindication which means that ‘this drug,

this therapy, this method or measure should not be used, and is not

allowed to be used’.
To coerce an entire population to use an

absolute medical contraindication by force, she said, there had to be

definite and serious reasons and the reasons must be presented to

competent interdisciplinary and independent bodies to be verified

and authorised.
She had this warning of the consequences that were

coming if mask wearing continued:

When, in ten years, dementia is going to increase exponentially, and the younger generations

couldn’t reach their god-given potential, it won’t help to say ‘we didn’t need the masks’.
I

know how damaging oxygen deprivation is for the brain, cardiologists know how damaging it

is for the heart, pulmonologists know how damaging it is for the lungs.
Oxygen deprivation

damages every single organ.
Where are our health departments, our health insurance, our

medical associations?
It would have been their duty to be vehemently against the lockdown

and to stop it and stop it from the very beginning.
Why do the medical boards issue punishments to doctors who give people exemptions?
Does

the person or the doctor seriously have to prove that oxygen deprivation harms people?
What

kind of medicine are our doctors and medical associations representing?
Who is responsible

for this crime?
The ones who want to enforce it?
The ones who let it happen and play along,

or the ones who don’t prevent it?
All of the organisations and people she mentions there either

answer directly to the Cult or do whatever hierarchical levels above

them tell them to do.
The outcome of both is the same.
‘It’s not about

masks, it’s not about viruses, it’s certainly not about your health’,

Griesz-Brisson said.
‘It is about much, much more.
I am not

participating.
I am not afraid.’ They were taking our air to breathe

and there was no unfounded medical exemption from face masks.
Oxygen deprivation was dangerous for every single brain.
It had to

be the free decision of every human being whether they want to

wear a mask that was absolutely ineffective to protect themselves

from a virus.
She ended by rightly identifying where the

responsibility lies for all this:

The imperative of the hour is personal responsibility.
We are responsible for what we think,

not the media.
We are responsible for what we do, not our superiors.
We are responsible for

our health, not the World Health Organization.
And we are responsible for what happens in

our country, not the government.
Halle-bloody-lujah.
But surgeons wear masks, right?
Independent studies of mask-wearing have produced a long list of

reports detailing mental, emotional and physical dangers.
What a

definition of insanity to see police officers imposing mask-wearing

on the public which will cumulatively damage their health while the

police themselves wear masks that will cumulatively damage their

health.
It’s u er madness and both public and police do this because

‘the government says so’ – yes a government of brain-donor idiots

like UK Health Secretary Ma Hancock reading the ‘follow the

science’ scripts of psychopathic, lunatic psychologists.
The response

you get from Stockholm syndrome sufferers defending the very

authorities that are destroying them and their families is that

‘surgeons wear masks’.
This is considered the game, set and match

that they must work and don’t cause oxygen deficit.
Well, actually,

scientific studies have shown that they do and oxygen levels are

monitored in operating theatres to compensate.
Surgeons wear

masks to stop spi le and such like dropping into open wounds – not

to stop ‘viral particles’ which are so miniscule they can only be seen

through an electron microscope.
Holes in the masks are significantly

bigger than ‘viral particles’ and if you sneeze or cough they will

breach the mask.
I watched an incredibly disingenuous ‘experiment’

that claimed to prove that masks work in catching ‘virus’ material

from the mouth and nose.
They did this with a slow motion camera

and the mask did block big stuff which stayed inside the mask and

against the face to be breathed in or cause infections on the face as

we have seen with many children.
‘Viral particles’, however, would

never have been picked up by the camera as they came through the

mask when they are far too small to be seen.
The ‘experiment’ was

therefore disingenuous and useless.
Studies have concluded that wearing masks in operating theatres

(and thus elsewhere) make no difference to preventing infection

while the opposite is true with toxic shite building up in the mask

and this had led to an explosion in tooth decay and gum disease

dubbed by dentists ‘mask mouth’.
You might have seen the Internet

video of a furious American doctor urging people to take off their

masks a er a four-year-old patient had been rushed to hospital the

night before and nearly died with a lung infection that doctors

sourced to mask wearing.
A study in the journal Cancer Discovery

found that inhalation of harmful microbes can contribute to

advanced stage lung cancer in adults and long-term use of masks

can help breed dangerous pathogens.
Microbiologists have said

frequent mask wearing creates a moist environment in which

microbes can grow and proliferate before entering the lungs.
The

Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, or CADTH,

a Canadian national organisation that provides research and

analysis to healthcare decision-makers, said this as long ago as 2013

in a report entitled ‘Use of Surgical Masks in the Operating Room: A

Review of the Clinical Effectiveness and Guidelines’.
It said:



• No evidence was found to support the use of surgical face masks

to reduce the frequency of surgical site infections

• No evidence was found on the effectiveness of wearing surgical

face masks to protect staff from infectious material in the

operating room.
• Guidelines recommend the use of surgical face masks by staff in

the operating room to protect both operating room staff and

patients (despite the lack of evidence).
We were told that the world could go back to ‘normal’ with the

arrival of the ‘vaccines’.
When they came, fraudulent as they are, the

story changed as I knew that it would.
We are in the midst of

transforming ‘normal’, not going back to it.
Mary Ramsay, head of

immunisation at Public Health England, echoed the words of US

criminal Anthony Fauci who said masks and other regulations must

stay no ma er if people are vaccinated.
The Fauci idiot continued to

wear two masks – different colours so both could be clearly seen –

a er he claimed to have been vaccinated.
Senator Rand Paul told

Fauci in one exchange that his double-masks were ‘theatre’ and he

was right.
It’s all theatre.
Mary Ramsay back-tracked on the vaccine-

return-to-normal theme when she said the public may need to wear

masks and social-distance for years despite the jabs.
‘People have got

used to those lower-level restrictions now, and [they] can live with

them’, she said telling us what the idea has been all along.
‘The

vaccine does not give you a pass, even if you have had it, you must

continue to follow all the guidelines’ said a Public Health England

statement which reneged on what we had been told before and

made having the ‘vaccine’ irrelevant to ‘normality’ even by the

official story.
Spain’s fascist government trumped everyone by

passing a law mandating the wearing of masks on the beach and

even when swimming in the sea.
The move would have devastated

what’s le of the Spanish tourist industry, posed potential breathing

dangers to swimmers and had Northern European sunbathers

walking around with their forehead brown and the rest of their face

white as a sheet.
The ruling was so crazy that it had to be retracted

a er pressure from public and tourist industry, but it confirmed

where the Cult wants to go with masks and how clinically insane

authority has become.
The determination to make masks permanent

and hide the serious dangers to body and mind can be seen in the

censorship of scientist Professor Denis Rancourt by Bill Gates-

funded academic publishing website ResearchGate over his papers

exposing the dangers and uselessness of masks.
Rancourt said:

ResearchGate today has permanently locked my account, which I have had since 2015.
Their

reasons graphically show the nature of their attack against democracy, and their corruption of

science … By their obscene non-logic, a scientific review of science articles reporting on harms caused by face masks has a ‘potential to cause harm’.
No criticism of the psychological

device (face masks) is tolerated, if the said criticism shows potential to influence public policy.
This is what happens in a fascist world.
Where are the ‘greens’ (again)?
Other dangers of wearing masks especially regularly relate to the

inhalation of minute plastic fibres into the lungs and the deluge of

discarded masks in the environment and oceans.
Estimates

predicted that more than 1.5 billion disposable masks will end up in

the world’s oceans every year polluting the water with tons of plastic

and endangering marine wildlife.
Studies project that humans are

using 129 billion face masks each month worldwide – about three

million a minute.
Most are disposable and made from plastic, non-

biodegradable microfibers that break down into smaller plastic

particles that become widespread in ecosystems.
They are li ering

cities, clogging sewage channels and turning up in bodies of water.
I

have wri en in other books about the immense amounts of

microplastics from endless sources now being absorbed into the

body.
Rolf Halden, director of the Arizona State University (ASU)

Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, was the

senior researcher in a 2020 study that analysed 47 human tissue

samples and found microplastics in all of them.
‘We have detected

these chemicals of plastics in every single organ that we have

investigated’, he said.
I wrote in The Answer about the world being

deluged with microplastics.
A study by the Worldwide Fund for

Nature (WWF) found that people are consuming on average every

week some 2,000 tiny pieces of plastic mostly through water and also

through marine life and the air.
Every year humans are ingesting

enough microplastics to fill a heaped dinner plate and in a life-time

of 79 years it is enough to fill two large waste bins.
Marco

Lambertini, WWF International director general said: ‘Not only are

plastics polluting our oceans and waterways and killing marine life –

it’s in all of us and we can’t escape consuming plastics,’ American

geologists found tiny plastic fibres, beads and shards in rainwater

samples collected from the remote slopes of the Rocky Mountain

National Park near Denver, Colorado.
Their report was headed: ‘It is

raining plastic.’ Rachel Adams, senior lecturer in Biomedical Science

at Cardiff Metropolitan University, said that among health

consequences are internal inflammation and immune responses to a

‘foreign body’.
She further pointed out that microplastics become

carriers of toxins including mercury, pesticides and dioxins (a

known cause of cancer and reproductive and developmental

problems).
These toxins accumulate in the fa y tissues once they

enter the body through microplastics.
Now this is being

compounded massively by people pu ing plastic on their face and

throwing it away.
Workers exposed to polypropylene plastic fibres known as ‘flock’

have developed ‘flock worker’s lung’ from inhaling small pieces of

the flock fibres which can damage lung tissue, reduce breathing

capacity and exacerbate other respiratory problems.
Now …

commonly used surgical masks have three layers of melt-blown

textiles made of … polypropylene.
We have billions of people

pu ing these microplastics against their mouth, nose and face for

hours at a time day a er day in the form of masks.
How does

anyone think that will work out?
I mean – what could possibly go

wrong?
We posted a number of scientific studies on this at

davidicke.com , but when I went back to them as I was writing this book the links to the science research website where they were

hosted were dead.
Anything that challenges the official narrative in

any way is either censored or vilified.
The official narrative is so

unsupportable by the evidence that only deleting the truth can

protect it.
A study by Chinese scientists still survived – with the

usual twist which it why it was still active, I guess.
Yes, they found

that virtually all the masks they tested increased the daily intake of

microplastic fibres, but people should still wear them because the

danger from the ‘virus’ was worse said the crazy ‘team’ from the

Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan.
Scientists first discovered

microplastics in lung tissue of some patients who died of lung cancer

in the 1990s.
Subsequent studies have confirmed the potential health

damage with the plastic degrading slowly and remaining in the

lungs to accumulate in volume.
Wuhan researchers used a machine

simulating human breathing to establish that masks shed up to

nearly 4,000 microplastic fibres in a month with reused masks

producing more.
Scientists said some masks are laced with toxic

chemicals and a variety of compounds seriously restricted for both

health and environmental reasons.
They include cobalt (used in blue

dye) and formaldehyde known to cause watery eyes, burning

sensations in the eyes, nose, and throat, plus coughing, wheezing

and nausea.
No – that must be ‘Covid-19’.
Mask ‘worms’

There is another and potentially even more sinister content of masks.
Mostly new masks of different makes filmed under a microscope

around the world have been found to contain strange black fibres or

‘worms’ that appear to move or ‘crawl’ by themselves and react to

heat and water.
The nearest I have seen to them are the self-

replicating fibres that are pulled out through the skin of those

suffering from Morgellons disease which has been connected to the

phenomena of ‘chemtrails’ which I will bring into the story later on.
Morgellons fibres continue to grow outside the body and have a

form of artificial intelligence.
Black ‘worm’ fibres in masks have that

kind of feel to them and there is a nanotechnology technique called

‘worm micelles’ which carry and release drugs or anything else you

want to deliver to the body.
For sure the suppression of humanity by

mind altering drugs is the Cult agenda big time and the more

excuses they can find to gain access to the body the more

opportunities there are to make that happen whether through

‘vaccines’ or masks pushed against the mouth and nose for hours on

end.
So let us summarise the pros and cons of masks:

Against masks: Breathing in your own carbon dioxide; depriving the body and brain of sufficient oxygen; build-up of toxins in the mask

that can be breathed into the lungs and cause rashes on the face and

‘mask-mouth’; breathing microplastic fibres and toxic chemicals into

the lungs; dehumanisation and deleting individualisation by literally

making people faceless; destroying human emotional interaction

through facial expression and deleting parental connection with

their babies which look for guidance to their facial expression.
For masks: They don’t protect you from a ‘virus’ that doesn’t exist

and even if it did ‘viral’ particles are so minute they are smaller than

the holes in the mask.
Governments, police, supermarkets, businesses, transport

companies, and all the rest who seek to impose masks have done no

risk assessment on their consequences for health and psychology

and are now open to group lawsuits when the impact becomes clear

with a cumulative epidemic of respiratory and other disease.
Authorities will try to exploit these effects and hide the real cause by

dubbing them ‘Covid-19’.
Can you imagine se ing out to force the

population to wear health-destroying masks without doing any

assessment of the risks?
It is criminal and it is evil, but then how

many people targeted in this way, who see their children told to

wear them all day at school, have asked for a risk assessment?
Billions can’t be imposed upon by the few unless the billions allow it.
Oh, yes, with just a tinge of irony, 85 percent of all masks made

worldwide come from China.
Wash your hands in toxic shite

‘Covid’ rules include the use of toxic sanitisers and again the health

consequences of constantly applying toxins to be absorbed through

the skin is obvious to any level of Renegade Mind.
America’s Food

and Drug Administration (FDA) said that sanitisers are drugs and

issued a warning about 75 dangerous brands which contain

methanol used in antifreeze and can cause death, kidney damage

and blindness.
The FDA circulated the following warning even for

those brands that it claims to be safe:

Store hand sanitizer out of the reach of pets and children, and children should use it only with

adult supervision.
Do not drink hand sanitizer.
This is particularly important for young

children, especially toddlers, who may be attracted by the pleasant smell or brightly colored

bottles of hand sanitizer.
Drinking even a small amount of hand sanitizer can cause alcohol poisoning in children.
(However, there is no need to be concerned if your children eat with or lick their hands after

using hand sanitizer.) During this coronavirus pandemic, poison control centers have had an

increase in calls about accidental ingestion of hand sanitizer, so it is important that adults

monitor young children’s use.
Do not allow pets to swallow hand sanitizer.
If you think your pet has eaten something

potentially dangerous, call your veterinarian or a pet poison control center right away.
Hand

sanitizer is flammable and should be stored away from heat and flames.
When using hand

sanitizer, rub your hands until they feel completely dry before performing activities that may

involve heat, sparks, static electricity, or open flames.
There you go, perfectly safe, then, and that’s without even a mention

of the toxins absorbed through the skin.
Come on kids – sanitise

your hands everywhere you go.
It will save you from the ‘virus’.
Put

all these elements together of the ‘Covid’ normal and see how much

health and psychology is being cumulatively damaged, even

devastated, to ‘protect your health’.
Makes sense, right?
They are

only imposing these things because they care, right?
Right?
Submitting to insanity

Psychological reframing of the population goes very deep and is

done in many less obvious ways.
I hear people say how

contradictory and crazy ‘Covid’ rules are and how they are ever

changing.
This is explained away by dismissing those involved as

idiots.
It is a big mistake.
The Cult is delighted if its cold calculation

is perceived as incompetence and idiocy when it is anything but.
Oh,

yes, there are idiots within the system – lots of them – but they are

administering the Cult agenda, mostly unknowingly.
They are not

deciding and dictating it.
The bulwark against tyranny is self-

respect, always has been, always will be.
It is self-respect that has

broken every tyranny in history.
By its very nature self-respect will

not bow to oppression and its perpetrators.
There is so li le self-

respect that it’s always the few that overturn dictators.
Many may

eventually follow, but the few with the iron spines (self-respect) kick

it off and generate the momentum.
The Cult targets self-respect in

the knowledge that once this has gone only submission remains.
Crazy, contradictory, ever-changing ‘Covid’ rules are systematically

applied by psychologists to delete self-respect.
They want you to see

that the rules make no sense.
It is one thing to decide to do

something when you have made the choice based on evidence and

logic.
You still retain your self-respect.
It is quite another when you

can see what you are being told to do is insane, ridiculous and

makes no sense, and yet you still do it.
Your self-respect is

extinguished and this has been happening as ever more obviously

stupid and nonsensical things have been demanded and the great

majority have complied even when they can see they are stupid and

nonsensical.
People walk around in face-nappies knowing they are damaging

their health and make no difference to a ‘virus’.
They do it in fear of

not doing it.
I know it’s da , but I’ll do it anyway.
When that

happens something dies inside of you and submissive reframing has

begun.
Next there’s a need to hide from yourself that you have

conceded your self-respect and you convince yourself that you have

not really submi ed to fear and intimidation.
You begin to believe

that you are complying with craziness because it’s the right thing to

do.
When first you concede your self-respect of 2+2 = 4 to 2+2 = 5 you

know you are compromising your self-respect.
Gradually to avoid

facing that fact you begin to believe that 2+2=5.
You have been

reframed and I have been watching this process happening in the

human psyche on an industrial scale.
The Cult is working to break

your spirit and one of its major tools in that war is humiliation.
I

read how former American soldier Bradley Manning (later Chelsea

Manning a er a sex-change) was treated a er being jailed for

supplying WikiLeaks with documents exposing the enormity of

government and elite mendacity.
Manning was isolated in solitary

confinement for eight months, put under 24-hour surveillance,

forced to hand over clothing before going to bed, and stand naked

for every roll call.
This is systematic humiliation.
The introduction of

anal swab ‘Covid’ tests in China has been done for the same reason

to delete self-respect and induce compliant submission.
Anal swabs

are mandatory for incoming passengers in parts of China and

American diplomats have said they were forced to undergo the

indignity which would have been calculated humiliation by the

Cult-owned Chinese government that has America in its sights.
Government-people: An abusive relationship

Spirit-breaking psychological techniques include giving people hope

and apparent respite from tyranny only to take it away again.
This

happened in the UK during Christmas, 2020, when the psycho-

psychologists and their political lackeys announced an easing of

restrictions over the holiday only to reimpose them almost

immediately on the basis of yet another lie.
There is a big

psychological difference between ge ing used to oppression and

being given hope of relief only to have that dashed.
Psychologists

know this and we have seen the technique used repeatedly.
Then

there is traumatising people before you introduce more extreme

regulations that require compliance.
A perfect case was the

announcement by the dark and sinister Whi y and Vallance in the

UK that ‘new data’ predicted that 4,000 could die every day over the

winter of 2020/2021 if we did not lockdown again.
I think they call it

lying and a er traumatising people with that claim out came

Jackboot Johnson the next day with new curbs on human freedom.
Psychologists know that a frightened and traumatised mind

becomes suggestable to submission and behaviour reframing.
Underpinning all this has been to make people fearful and

suspicious of each other and see themselves as a potential danger to

others.
In league with deleted self-respect you have the perfect

psychological recipe for self-loathing.
The relationship between

authority and public is now demonstrably the same as that of

subservience to an abusive partner.
These are signs of an abusive

relationship explained by psychologist Leslie Becker-Phelps:

Psychological and emotional abuse: Undermining a partner’s

self-worth with verbal a acks, name-calling, and beli ling.
Humiliating the partner in public, unjustly accusing them of having

an affair, or interrogating them about their every behavior.
Keeping

partner confused or off balance by saying they were just kidding or

blaming the partner for ‘making’ them act this way … Feigning in

public that they care while turning against them in private.
This

leads to victims frequently feeling confused, incompetent, unworthy,

hopeless, and chronically self-doubting.
[Apply these techniques to

how governments have treated the population since New Year, 2020,

and the parallels are obvious.]

Physical abuse: The abuser might physically harm their partner in

a range of ways, such as grabbing, hi ing, punching, or shoving

them.
They might throw objects at them or harm them with a

weapon.
[Observe the physical harm imposed by masks, lockdown,

and so on.]

Threats and intimidation: One way abusers keep their partners in

line is by instilling fear.
They might be verbally threatening, or give

threatening looks or gestures.
Abusers o en make it known that

they are tracking their partner’s every move.
They might destroy

their partner’s possessions, threaten to harm them, or threaten to

harm their family members.
Not surprisingly, victims of this abuse

o en feel anxiety, fear, and panic.
[No words necessary.]

Isolation: Abusers o en limit their partner’s activities, forbidding

them to talk or interact with friends or family.
They might limit

access to a car or even turn off their phone.
All of this might be done

by physically holding them against their will, but is o en

accomplished through psychological abuse and intimidation.
The

more isolated a person feels, the fewer resources they have to help

gain perspective on their situation and to escape from it.
[No words

necessary.]

Economic abuse: Abusers o en make their partners beholden to

them for money by controlling access to funds of any kind.
They

might prevent their partner from ge ing a job or withhold access to

money they earn from a job.
This creates financial dependency that

makes leaving the relationship very difficult.
[See destruction of

livelihoods and the proposed meagre ‘guaranteed income’ so long as

you do whatever you are told.]

Using children: An abuser might disparage their partner’s

parenting skills, tell their children lies about their partner, threaten

to take custody of their children, or threaten to harm their children.
These tactics instil fear and o en elicit compliance.
[See reframed

social service mafia and how children are being mercilessly abused

by the state over ‘Covid’ while their parents look on too frightened

to do anything.]

A further recurring trait in an abusive relationship is the abused

blaming themselves for their abuse and making excuses for the

abuser.
We have the public blaming each other for lockdown abuse

by government and many making excuses for the government while

a acking those who challenge the government.
How o en we have

heard authorities say that rules are being imposed or reimposed only

because people have refused to ‘behave’ and follow the rules.
We

don’t want to do it – it’s you.
Renegade Minds are an antidote to all of these things.
They will

never concede their self-respect no ma er what the circumstances.
Even when apparent humiliation is heaped upon them they laugh in

its face and reflect back the humiliation on the abuser where it

belongs.
Renegade Minds will never wear masks they know are only

imposed to humiliate, suppress and damage both physically and

psychologically.
Consequences will take care of themselves and they

will never break their spirit or cause them to concede to tyranny.
UK

newspaper columnist Peter Hitchens was one of the few in the

mainstream media to speak out against lockdowns and forced

vaccinations.
He then announced he had taken the jab.
He wanted to

see family members abroad and he believed vaccine passports were

inevitable even though they had not yet been introduced.
Hitchens

has a questioning and critical mind, but not a Renegade one.
If he

had no amount of pressure would have made him concede.
Hitchens

excused his action by saying that the ba le has been lost.
Renegade

Minds never accept defeat when freedom is at stake and even if they

are the last one standing the self-respect of not submi ing to tyranny

is more important than any outcome or any consequence.
That’s why Renegade Minds are the only minds that ever changed

anything worth changing.
CHAPTER EIGHT

‘Reframing’ insanity

Insanity is relative.
It depends on who has who locked in what cage

Ray Bradbury

‘Reframing’ a mind means simply to change its perception and

behaviour.
This can be done subconsciously to such an extent

that subjects have no idea they have been ‘reframed’ while to any

observer changes in behaviour and a itudes are obvious.
Human society is being reframed on a ginormous scale since the

start of 2020 and here we have the reason why psychologists rather

than doctors have been calling the shots.
Ask most people who have

succumbed to ‘Covid’ reframing if they have changed and most will

say ‘no’; but they have and fundamentally.
The Cult’s long-game has

been preparing for these times since way back and crucial to that has

been to prepare both population and officialdom mentally and

emotionally.
To use the mind-control parlance they had to reframe

the population with a mentality that would submit to fascism and

reframe those in government and law enforcement to impose

fascism or at least go along with it.
The result has been the fact-

deleted mindlessness of ‘Wokeness’ and officialdom that has either

enthusiastically or unquestioningly imposed global tyranny

demanded by reframed politicians on behalf of psychopathic and

deeply evil cultists.
‘Cognitive reframing’ identifies and challenges

the way someone sees the world in the form of situations,

experiences and emotions and then restructures those perceptions to

view the same set of circumstances in a different way.
This can have

benefits if the a itudes are personally destructive while on the other

side it has the potential for individual and collective mind control

which the subject has no idea has even happened.
Cognitive therapy was developed in the 1960s by Aaron T.
Beck

who was born in Rhode Island in 1921 as the son of Jewish

immigrants from the Ukraine.
He became interested in the

techniques as a treatment for depression.
Beck’s daughter Judith S.
Beck is prominent in the same field and they founded the Beck

Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Philadelphia in 1994.
Cognitive reframing, however, began to be used worldwide by those

with a very dark agenda.
The Cult reframes politicians to change

their a itudes and actions until they are completely at odds with

what they once appeared to stand for.
The same has been happening

to government administrators at all levels, law enforcement, military

and the human population.
Cultists love mind control for two main

reasons: It allows them to control what people think, do and say to

secure agenda advancement and, by definition, it calms their

legendary insecurity and fear of the unexpected.
I have studied mind

control since the time I travelled America in 1996.
I may have been

talking to next to no one in terms of an audience in those years, but

my goodness did I gather a phenomenal amount of information and

knowledge about so many things including the techniques of mind

control.
I have described this in detail in other books going back to

The Biggest Secret in 1998.
I met a very large number of people

recovering from MKUltra and its offshoots and successors and I

began to see how these same techniques were being used on the

population in general.
This was never more obvious than since the

‘Covid’ hoax began.
Reframing the enforcers

I have observed over the last two decades and more the very clear

transformation in the dynamic between the police, officialdom and

the public.
I tracked this in the books as the relationship mutated

from one of serving the public to seeing them as almost the enemy

and certainly a lower caste.
There has always been a class divide

based on income and always been some psychopathic, corrupt, and

big-I-am police officers.
This was different.
Wholesale change was

unfolding in the collective dynamic; it was less about money and far

more about position and perceived power.
An us-and-them was

emerging.
Noses were li ed skyward by government administration

and law enforcement and their a itude to the public they were

supposed to be serving changed to one of increasing contempt,

superiority and control.
The transformation was so clear and

widespread that it had to be planned.
Collective a itudes and

dynamics do not change naturally and organically that quickly on

that scale.
I then came across an organisation in Britain called

Common Purpose created in the late 1980s by Julia Middleton who

would work in the office of Deputy Prime Minister John Presco

during the long and disastrous premiership of war criminal Tony

Blair.
When Blair speaks the Cult is speaking and the man should

have been in jail a long time ago.
Common Purpose proclaims itself

to be one of the biggest ‘leadership development’ organisations in

the world while functioning as a charity with all the financial benefits

which come from that.
It hosts ‘leadership development’ courses and

programmes all over the world and claims to have ‘brought

together’ what it calls ‘leaders’ from more than 100 countries on six

continents.
The modus operandi of Common Purpose can be

compared with the work of the UK government’s reframing network

that includes the Behavioural Insights Team ‘nudge unit’ and

‘Covid’ reframing specialists at SPI-B.
WikiLeaks described

Common Purpose long ago as ‘a hidden virus in our government

and schools’ which is unknown to the general public: ‘It recruits and

trains “leaders” to be loyal to the directives of Common Purpose and

the EU, instead of to their own departments, which they then

undermine or subvert, the NHS [National Health Service] being an

example.’ This is a vital point to understand the ‘Covid’ hoax.
The

NHS, and its equivalent around the world, has been u erly reframed

in terms of administrators and much of the medical personnel with

the transformation underpinned by recruitment policies.
The

outcome has been the criminal and psychopathic behaviour of the

NHS over ‘Covid’ and we have seen the same in every other major

country.
WikiLeaks said Common Purpose trainees are ‘learning to

rule without regard to democracy’ and to usher in a police state

(current events explained).
Common Purpose operated like a ‘glue’

and had members in the NHS, BBC, police, legal profession, church,

many of Britain’s 7,000 quangos, local councils, the Civil Service,

government ministries and Parliament, and controlled many RDA’s

(Regional Development Agencies).
Here we have one answer for

how and why British institutions and their like in other countries

have changed so negatively in relation to the public.
This further

explains how and why the beyond-disgraceful reframed BBC has

become a propaganda arm of ‘Covid’ fascism.
They are all part of a

network pursuing the same goal.
By 2019 Common Purpose was quoting a figure of 85,000 ‘leaders’

that had a ended its programmes.
These ‘students’ of all ages are

known as Common Purpose ‘graduates’ and they consist of

government, state and local government officials and administrators,

police chiefs and officers, and a whole range of others operating

within the national, local and global establishment.
Cressida Dick,

Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, is the Common

Purpose graduate who was the ‘Gold Commander’ that oversaw

what can only be described as the murder of Brazilian electrician

Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005.
He was held down by

psychopathic police and shot seven times in the head by a

psychopathic lunatic a er being mistaken for a terrorist when he

was just a bloke going about his day.
Dick authorised officers to

pursue and keep surveillance on de Menezes and ordered that he be

stopped from entering the underground train system.
Police

psychopaths took her at her word clearly.
She was ‘disciplined’ for

this outrage by being promoted – eventually to the top of the ‘Met’

police where she has been a disaster.
Many Chief Constables

controlling the police in different parts of the UK are and have been

Common Purpose graduates.
I have heard the ‘graduate’ network

described as a sort of Mafia or secret society operating within the

fabric of government at all levels pursuing a collective policy

ingrained at Common Purpose training events.
Founder Julia

Middleton herself has said:

Locally and internationally, Common Purpose graduates will be ‘lighting small fires’ to create

change in their organisations and communities … The Common Purpose effect is best

illustrated by the many stories of small changes brought about by leaders, who themselves

have changed.
A Common Purpose mission statement declared:

Common Purpose aims to improve the way society works by expanding the vision, decision-

making ability and influence of all kinds of leaders.
The organisation runs a variety of

educational programmes for leaders of all ages, backgrounds and sectors, in order to provide

them with the inspirational, information and opportunities they need to change the world.
Yes, but into what?
Since 2020 the answer has become clear.
NLP and the Delphi technique

Common Purpose would seem to be a perfect name or would

common programming be be er?
One of the foundation methods of

reaching ‘consensus’ (group think) is by se ing the agenda theme

and then encouraging, cajoling or pressuring everyone to agree a

‘consensus’ in line with the core theme promoted by Common

Purpose.
The methodology involves the ‘Delphi technique’, or an

adaption of it, in which opinions are expressed that are summarised

by a ‘facilitator or change agent’ at each stage.
Participants are

‘encouraged’ to modify their views in the light of what others have

said.
Stage by stage the former individual opinions are merged into

group consensus which just happens to be what Common Purpose

wants them to believe.
A key part of this is to marginalise anyone

refusing to concede to group think and turn the group against them

to apply pressure to conform.
We are seeing this very technique used

on the general population to make ‘Covid’ group-thinkers hostile to

those who have seen through the bullshit.
People can be reframed by

using perception manipulation methods such as Neuro-Linguistic

Programming (NLP) in which you change perception with the use of

carefully constructed language.
An NLP website described the

technique this way:

… A method of influencing brain behaviour (the ‘neuro’ part of the phrase) through the use of

language (the ‘linguistic’ part) and other types of communication to enable a person to

‘recode’ the way the brain responds to stimuli (that’s the ‘programming’) and manifest new

and better behaviours.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming often incorporates hypnosis and self-

hypnosis to help achieve the change (or ‘programming’) that is wanted.
British alternative media operation UKColumn has done very

detailed research into Common Purpose over a long period.
I quoted

co-founder and former naval officer Brian Gerrish in my book

Remember Who You Are, published in 2011, as saying the following

years before current times:

It is interesting that many of the mothers who have had children taken by the State speak of

the Social Services people being icily cool, emotionless and, as two ladies said in slightly

different words, ‘… like little robots’.
We know that NLP is cumulative, so people can be

given small imperceptible doses of NLP in a course here, another in a few months, next year

etc.
In this way, major changes are accrued in their personality, but the day by day change is

almost unnoticeable.
In these and other ways ‘graduates’ have had their perceptions

uniformly reframed and they return to their roles in the institutions

of government, law enforcement, legal profession, military,

‘education’, the UK National Health Service and the whole swathe of

the establishment structure to pursue a common agenda preparing

for the ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-democratic’ society.
I say ‘preparing’

but we are now there.
‘Post-industrial’ is code for the Great Reset

and ‘post-democratic’ is ‘Covid’ fascism.
UKColumn has spoken to

partners of those who have a ended Common Purpose ‘training’.
They have described how personalities and a itudes of ‘graduates’

changed very noticeably for the worse by the time they had

completed the course.
They had been ‘reframed’ and told they are

the ‘leaders’ – the special ones – who know be er than the

population.
There has also been the very demonstrable recruitment

of psychopaths and narcissists into government administration at all

levels and law enforcement.
If you want psychopathy hire

psychopaths and you get a simple cause and effect.
If you want

administrators, police officers and ‘leaders’ to perceive the public as

lesser beings who don’t ma er then employ narcissists.
These

personalities are identified using ‘psychometrics’ that identifies

knowledge, abilities, a itudes and personality traits, mostly through

carefully-designed questionnaires and tests.
As this policy has

passed through the decades we have had power-crazy, power-

trippers appointed into law enforcement, security and government

administration in preparation for current times and the dynamic

between public and law enforcement/officialdom has been

transformed.
UKColumn’s Brian Gerrish said of the narcissistic

personality:

Their love of themselves and power automatically means that they will crush others who get

in their way.
I received a major piece of the puzzle when a friend pointed out that when they

made public officials re-apply for their own jobs several years ago they were also required to

do psychometric tests.
This was undoubtedly the start of the screening process to get ‘their’

sort of people in post.
How obvious that has been since 2020 although it was clear what

was happening long before if people paid a ention to the changing

public-establishment dynamic.
Change agents

At the centre of events in ‘Covid’ Britain is the National Health

Service (NHS) which has behaved disgracefully in slavishly

following the Cult agenda.
The NHS management structure is awash

with Common Purpose graduates or ‘change agents’ working to a

common cause.
Helen Bevan, a Chief of Service Transformation at

the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, co-authored a

document called ‘Towards a million change agents, a review of the

social movements literature: implications for large scale change in

the NHS‘.
The document compared a project management approach

to that of change and social movements where ‘people change

themselves and each other – peer to peer’.
Two definitions given for

a ‘social movement’ were:

A group of people who consciously attempt to build a radically new social

order; involves people of a broad range of social backgrounds; and deploys

politically confrontational and socially disruptive tactics – Cyrus

Zirakzadeh 1997

Collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in

sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities – Sidney

Tarrow 1994

Helen Bevan wrote another NHS document in which she defined

‘framing’ as ‘the process by which leaders construct, articulate and

put across their message in a powerful and compelling way in order

to win people to their cause and call them to action’.
I think I could

come up with another definition that would be rather more accurate.
The National Health Service and institutions of Britain and the wider

world have been taken over by reframed ‘change agents’ and that

includes everything from the United Nations to national

governments, local councils and social services which have been

kidnapping children from loving parents on an extraordinary and

gathering scale on the road to the end of parenthood altogether.
Children from loving homes are stolen and kidnapped by the state

and put into the ‘care’ (inversion) of the local authority through

council homes, foster parents and forced adoption.
At the same time

children are allowed to be abused without response while many are

under council ‘care’.
UKColumn highlighted the Common Purpose

connection between South Yorkshire Police and Rotherham council

officers in the case of the scandal in that area of the sexual

exploitation of children to which the authorities turned not one blind

eye, but both:

We were alarmed to discover that the Chief Executive, the Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services, the Manager for the Local Strategic Partnership, the Community

Cohesion Manager, the Cabinet Member for Cohesion, the Chief Constable and his

predecessor had all attended Leadership training courses provided by the pseudo-charity

Common Purpose.
Once ‘change agents’ have secured positions of hire and fire within

any organisation things start to move very quickly.
Personnel are

then hired and fired on the basis of whether they will work towards

the agenda the change agent represents.
If they do they are rapidly

promoted even though they may be incompetent.
Those more

qualified and skilled who are pre-Common Purpose ‘old school’ see

their careers stall and even disappear.
This has been happening for

decades in every institution of state, police, ‘health’ and social

services and all of them have been transformed as a result in their

a itudes to their jobs and the public.
Medical professions, including

nursing, which were once vocations for the caring now employ

many cold, callous and couldn’t give a shit personality types.
The

UKColumn investigation concluded:

By blurring the boundaries between people, professions, public and private sectors,

responsibility and accountability, Common Purpose encourages ‘graduates’ to believe that as

new selected leaders, they can work together, outside of the established political and social

structures, to achieve a paradigm shift or CHANGE – so called ‘Leading Beyond Authority’.
In

doing so, the allegiance of the individual becomes ‘reframed’ on CP colleagues and their

NETWORK.
Reframing the Face-Nappies

Nowhere has this process been more obvious than in the police

where recruitment of psychopaths and development of

unquestioning mind-controlled group-thinkers have transformed

law enforcement into a politically-correct ‘Woke’ joke and a travesty

of what should be public service.
Today they wear their face-nappies

like good li le gofers and enforce ‘Covid’ rules which are fascism

under another name.
Alongside the specifically-recruited

psychopaths we have so ware minds incapable of free thought.
Brian Gerrish again:

An example is the policeman who would not get on a bike for a press photo because he had not done the cycling proficiency course.
Normal people say this is political correctness gone

mad.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The policeman has been reframed, and in his

reality it is perfect common sense not to get on the bike ‘because he hasn’t done the cycling

course’.
Another example of this is where the police would not rescue a boy from a pond until they

had taken advice from above on the ‘risk assessment’.
A normal person would have arrived,

perhaps thought of the risk for a moment, and dived in.
To the police now ‘reframed’, they

followed ‘normal’ procedure.
There are shocking cases of reframed ambulance crews doing the

same.
Sheer unthinking stupidity of London Face-Nappies headed

by Common Purpose graduate Cressida Dick can be seen in their

behaviour at a vigil in March, 2021, for a murdered woman, Sarah

Everard.
A police officer had been charged with the crime.
Anyone

with a brain would have le the vigil alone in the circumstances.
Instead they ‘manhandled’ women to stop them breaking ‘Covid

rules’ to betray classic reframing.
Minds in the thrall of perception

control have no capacity for seeing a situation on its merits and

acting accordingly.
‘Rules is rules’ is their only mind-set.
My father

used to say that rules and regulations are for the guidance of the

intelligent and the blind obedience of the idiot.
Most of the

intelligent, decent, coppers have gone leaving only the other kind

and a few old school for whom the job must be a daily nightmare.
The combination of psychopaths and rule-book so ware minds has

been clearly on public display in the ‘Covid’ era with automaton

robots in uniform imposing fascistic ‘Covid’ regulations on the

population without any personal initiative or judging situations on

their merits.
There are thousands of examples around the world, but

I’ll make my point with the infamous Derbyshire police in the

English East Midlands – the ones who think pouring dye into beauty

spots and using drones to track people walking in the countryside

away from anyone is called ‘policing’.
To them there are rules

decreed by the government which they have to enforce and in their

bewildered state a group gathering in a closed space and someone

walking alone in the countryside are the same thing.
It is beyond

idiocy and enters the realm of clinical insanity.
Police officers in Derbyshire said they were ‘horrified’ – horrified –

to find 15 to 20 ‘irresponsible’ kids playing a football match at a

closed leisure centre ‘in breach of coronavirus restrictions’.
When

they saw the police the kids ran away leaving their belongings

behind and the reframed men and women of Derbyshire police were

seeking to establish their identities with a view to fining their

parents.
The most natural thing for youngsters to do – kicking a ball

about – is turned into a criminal activity and enforced by the

moronic so ware programs of Derbyshire police.
You find the same

mentality in every country.
These barely conscious ‘horrified’ officers

said they had to take action because ‘we need to ensure these rules

are being followed’ and ‘it is of the utmost importance that you

ensure your children are following the rules and regulations for

Covid-19’.
Had any of them done ten seconds of research to see if

this parroting of their masters’ script could be supported by any

evidence?
Nope.
Reframed people don’t think – others think for

them and that’s the whole idea of reframing.
I have seen police

officers one a er the other repeating without question word for

word what officialdom tells them just as I have seen great swathes of

the public doing the same.
Ask either for ‘their’ opinion and out

spews what they have been told to think by the official narrative.
Police and public may seem to be in different groups, but their

mentality is the same.
Most people do whatever they are told in fear

not doing so or because they believe what officialdom tells them;

almost the entirety of the police do what they are told for the same

reason.
Ultimately it’s the tiny inner core of the global Cult that’s

telling both what to do.
So Derbyshire police were ‘horrified’.
Oh, really?
Why did they

think those kids were playing football?
It was to relieve the

psychological consequences of lockdown and being denied human

contact with their friends and interaction, touch and discourse vital

to human psychological health.
Being denied this month a er month

has dismantled the psyche of many children and young people as

depression and suicide have exploded.
Were Derbyshire police

horrified by that?
Are you kidding?
Reframed people don’t have those

mental and emotional processes that can see how the impact on the

psychological health of youngsters is far more dangerous than any

‘virus’ even if you take the mendacious official figures to be true.
The

reframed are told (programmed) how to act and so they do.
The

Derbyshire Chief Constable in the first period of lockdown when the

black dye and drones nonsense was going on was Peter Goodman.
He was the man who severed the connection between his force and

the Derbyshire Constabulary Male Voice Choir when he decided that

it was not inclusive enough to allow women to join.
The fact it was a

male voice choir making a particular sound produced by male voices

seemed to elude a guy who terrifyingly ran policing in Derbyshire.
He retired weeks a er his force was condemned as disgraceful by

former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption for their

behaviour over extreme lockdown impositions.
Goodman was

replaced by his deputy Rachel Swann who was in charge when her

officers were ‘horrified’.
The police statement over the boys

commi ing the hanging-offence of playing football included the line

about the youngsters being ‘irresponsible in the times we are all

living through’ missing the point that the real relevance of the ‘times

we are all living through’ is the imposition of fascism enforced by

psychopaths and reframed minds of police officers playing such a

vital part in establishing the fascist tyranny that their own children

and grandchildren will have to live in their entire lives.
As a

definition of insanity that is hard to beat although it might be run

close by imposing masks on people that can have a serious effect on

their health while wearing a face nappy all day themselves.
Once

again public and police do it for the same reason – the authorities tell

them to and who are they to have the self-respect to say no?
Wokers in uniform

How reframed do you have to be to arrest a six-year-old and take him

to court for picking a flower while waiting for a bus?
Brain dead police

and officialdom did just that in North Carolina where criminal

proceedings happen regularly for children under nine.
A orney

Julie Boyer gave the six-year-old crayons and a colouring book

during the ‘flower’ hearing while the ‘adults’ decided his fate.
County Chief District Court Judge Jay Corpening asked: ‘Should a

child that believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth

fairy be making life-altering decisions?’ Well, of course not, but

common sense has no meaning when you have a common purpose

and a reframed mind.
Treating children in this way, and police

operating in American schools, is all part of the psychological

preparation for children to accept a police state as normal all their

adult lives.
The same goes for all the cameras and biometric tracking

technology in schools.
Police training is focused on reframing them

as snowflake Wokers and this is happening in the military.
Pentagon

top brass said that ‘training sessions on extremism’ were needed for

troops who asked why they were so focused on the Capitol Building

riot when Black Lives Ma er riots were ignored.
What’s the

difference between them some apparently and rightly asked.
Actually, there is a difference.
Five people died in the Capitol riot,

only one through violence, and that was a police officer shooting an

unarmed protestor.
BLM riots killed at least 25 people and cost

billions.
Asking the question prompted the psychopaths and

reframed minds that run the Pentagon to say that more ‘education’

(programming) was needed.
Troop training is all based on

psychological programming to make them fodder for the Cult –

‘Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in

foreign policy’ as Cult-to-his-DNA former Secretary of State Henry

Kissinger famously said.
Governments see the police in similar terms

and it’s time for those among them who can see this to defend the

people and stop being enforcers of the Cult agenda upon the people.
The US military, like the country itself, is being targeted for

destruction through a long list of Woke impositions.
Cult-owned

gaga ‘President’ Biden signed an executive order when he took office

to allow taxpayer money to pay for transgender surgery for active

military personnel and veterans.
Are you a man soldier?
No, I’m a

LGBTQIA+ with a hint of Skoliosexual and Spectrasexual.
Oh, good

man.
Bad choice of words you bigot.
The Pentagon announced in

March, 2021, the appointment of the first ‘diversity and inclusion

officer’ for US Special Forces.
Richard Torres-Estrada arrived with

the publication of a ‘D&I Strategic Plan which will guide the

enterprise-wide effort to institutionalize and sustain D&I’.
If you

think a Special Forces ‘Strategic Plan’ should have something to do

with defending America you haven’t been paying a ention.
Defending Woke is now the military’s new role.
Torres-Estrada has

posted images comparing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler and we

can expect no bias from him as a representative of the supposedly

non-political Pentagon.
Cable news host Tucker Carlson said: ‘The

Pentagon is now the Yale faculty lounge but with cruise missiles.’

Meanwhile Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a board member of

weapons-maker Raytheon with stock and compensation interests in

October, 2020, worth $1.4 million, said he was purging the military

of the ‘enemy within’ – anyone who isn’t Woke and supports Donald

Trump.
Austin refers to his targets as ‘racist extremists’ while in true

Woke fashion being himself a racist extremist.
Pentagon documents

pledge to ‘eradicate, eliminate and conquer all forms of racism,

sexism and homophobia’.
The definitions of these are decided by

‘diversity and inclusion commi ees’ peopled by those who see

racism, sexism and homophobia in every situation and opinion.
Woke (the Cult) is dismantling the US military and purging

testosterone as China expands its military and gives its troops

‘masculinity training’.
How do we think that is going to end when

this is all Cult coordinated?
The US military, like the British military,

is controlled by Woke and spineless top brass who just go along with

it out of personal career interests.
‘Woke’ means fast asleep

Mind control and perception manipulation techniques used on

individuals to create group-think have been unleashed on the global

population in general.
As a result many have no capacity to see the

obvious fascist agenda being installed all around them or what

‘Covid’ is really all about.
Their brains are firewalled like a computer

system not to process certain concepts, thoughts and realisations that

are bad for the Cult.
The young are most targeted as the adults they

will be when the whole fascist global state is planned to be fully

implemented.
They need to be prepared for total compliance to

eliminate all pushback from entire generations.
The Cult has been

pouring billions into taking complete control of ‘education’ from

schools to universities via its operatives and corporations and not

least Bill Gates as always.
The plan has been to transform ‘education’

institutions into programming centres for the mentality of ‘Woke’.
James McConnell, professor of psychology at the University of

Michigan, wrote in Psychology Today in 1970:

The day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis, and

astute manipulation of reward and punishment, to gain almost absolute control over an

individual’s behaviour.
It should then be possible to achieve a very rapid and highly effective

type of brainwashing that would allow us to make dramatic changes in a person’s behaviour

and personality...
… We should reshape society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what

society wants us to do.
We have the techniques to do it...
no-one owns his own personality

you acquired, and there’s no reason to believe you should have the right to refuse to acquire a

new personality if your old one is anti-social.
This was the potential for mass brainwashing in 1970 and the

mentality there displayed captures the arrogant psychopathy that

drives it forward.
I emphasise that not all young people have

succumbed to Woke programming and those that haven’t are

incredibly impressive people given that today’s young are the most

perceptually-targeted generations in history with all the technology

now involved.
Vast swathes of the young generations, however, have

fallen into the spell – and that’s what it is – of Woke.
The Woke

mentality and perceptual program is founded on inversion and you

will appreciate later why that is so significant.
Everything with Woke

is inverted and the opposite of what it is claimed to be.
Woke was a

term used in African-American culture from the 1900s and referred

to an awareness of social and racial justice.
This is not the meaning

of the modern version or ‘New Woke’ as I call it in The Answer.
Oh,

no, Woke today means something very different no ma er how

much Wokers may seek to hide that and insist Old Woke and New

Woke are the same.
See if you find any ‘awareness of social justice’

here in the modern variety:

• Woke demands ‘inclusivity’ while excluding anyone with a

different opinion and calls for mass censorship to silence other

views.
• Woke claims to stand against oppression when imposing

oppression is the foundation of all that it does.
It is the driver of

political correctness which is nothing more than a Cult invention

to manipulate the population to silence itself.
• Woke believes itself to be ‘liberal’ while pursuing a global society

that can only be described as fascist (see ‘anti-fascist’ fascist

Antifa).
• Woke calls for ‘social justice’ while spreading injustice wherever it

goes against the common ‘enemy’ which can be easily identified

as a differing view.
• Woke is supposed to be a metaphor for ‘awake’ when it is solid-

gold asleep and deep in a Cult-induced coma that meets the

criteria for ‘off with the fairies’.
I state these points as obvious facts if people only care to look.
I

don’t do this with a sense of condemnation.
We need to appreciate

that the onslaught of perceptual programming on the young has

been incessant and merciless.
I can understand why so many have

been reframed, or, given their youth, framed from the start to see the

world as the Cult demands.
The Cult has had access to their minds

day a er day in its ‘education’ system for their entire formative

years.
Perception is formed from information received and the Cult-

created system is a life-long download of information delivered to

elicit a particular perception, thus behaviour.
The more this has

expanded into still new extremes in recent decades and ever-

increasing censorship has deleted other opinions and information

why wouldn’t that lead to a perceptual reframing on a mass scale?
I

have described already cradle-to-grave programming and in more

recent times the targeting of young minds from birth to adulthood

has entered the stratosphere.
This has taken the form of skewing

what is ‘taught’ to fit the Cult agenda and the omnipresent

techniques of group-think to isolate non-believers and pressure them

into line.
There has always been a tendency to follow the herd, but

we really are in a new world now in relation to that.
We have parents

who can see the ‘Covid’ hoax told by their children not to stop them

wearing masks at school, being ‘Covid’ tested or having the ‘vaccine’

in fear of the peer-pressure consequences of being different.
What is

‘peer-pressure’ if not pressure to conform to group-think?
Renegade

Minds never group-think and always retain a set of perceptions that

are unique to them.
Group-think is always underpinned by

consequences for not group-thinking.
Abuse now aimed at those

refusing DNA-manipulating ‘Covid vaccines’ are a potent example

of this.
The biggest pressure to conform comes from the very group

which is itself being manipulated.
‘I am programmed to be part of a

hive mind and so you must be.’

Woke control structures in ‘education’ now apply to every

mainstream organisation.
Those at the top of the ‘education’

hierarchy (the Cult) decide the policy.
This is imposed on

governments through the Cult network; governments impose it on

schools, colleges and universities; their leadership impose the policy

on teachers and academics and they impose it on children and

students.
At any level where there is resistance, perhaps from a

teacher or university lecturer, they are targeted by the authorities

and o en fired.
Students themselves regularly demand the dismissal

of academics (increasingly few) at odds with the narrative that the

students have been programmed to believe in.
It is quite a thought

that students who are being targeted by the Cult become so

consumed by programmed group-think that they launch protests

and demand the removal of those who are trying to push back

against those targeting the students.
Such is the scale of perceptual

inversion.
We see this with ‘Covid’ programming as the Cult

imposes the rules via psycho-psychologists and governments on

shops, transport companies and businesses which impose them on

their staff who impose them on their customers who pressure

Pushbackers to conform to the will of the Cult which is in the

process of destroying them and their families.
Scan all aspects of

society and you will see the same sequence every time.
Fact free Woke and hijacking the ‘left’

There is no more potent example of this than ‘Woke’, a mentality

only made possible by the deletion of factual evidence by an

‘education’ system seeking to produce an ever more uniform society.
Why would you bother with facts when you don’t know any?
Deletion of credible history both in volume and type is highly

relevant.
Orwell said: ‘Who controls the past controls the future:

who controls the present controls the past.’ They who control the

perception of the past control the perception of the future and they

who control the present control the perception of the past through

the writing and deleting of history.
Why would you oppose the

imposition of Marxism in the name of Wokeism when you don’t

know that Marxism cost at least 100 million lives in the 20th century

alone?
Watch videos and read reports in which Woker generations

are asked basic historical questions – it’s mind-blowing.
A survey of

2,000 people found that six percent of millennials (born

approximately early1980s to early 2000s) believed the Second World

War (1939-1945) broke out with the assassination of President

Kennedy (in 1963) and one in ten thought Margaret Thatcher was

British Prime Minister at the time.
She was in office between 1979

and 1990.
We are in a post-fact society.
Provable facts are no defence

against the fascism of political correctness or Silicon Valley

censorship.
Facts don’t ma er anymore as we have witnessed with

the ‘Covid’ hoax.
Sacrificing uniqueness to the Woke group-think

religion is all you are required to do and that means thinking for

yourself is the biggest Woke no, no.
All religions are an expression of

group-think and censorship and Woke is just another religion with

an orthodoxy defended by group-think and censorship.
Burned at

the stake becomes burned on Twi er which leads back eventually to

burned at the stake as Woke humanity regresses to ages past.
The biggest Woke inversion of all is its creators and funders.
I

grew up in a traditional le of centre political household on a

council estate in Leicester in the 1950s and 60s – you know, the le

that challenged the power of wealth-hoarding elites and threats to

freedom of speech and opinion.
In those days students went on

marches defending freedom of speech while today’s Wokers march

for its deletion.
What on earth could have happened?
Those very

elites (collectively the Cult) that we opposed in my youth and early

life have funded into existence the antithesis of that former le and

hijacked the ‘brand’ while inverting everything it ever stood for.
We

have a mentality that calls itself ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ while

acting like fascists.
Cult billionaires and their corporations have

funded themselves into control of ‘education’ to ensure that Woke

programming is unceasing throughout the formative years of

children and young people and that non-Wokers are isolated (that

word again) whether they be students, teachers or college professors.
The Cult has funded into existence the now colossal global network

of Woke organisations that have spawned and promoted all the

‘causes’ on the Cult wish-list for global transformation and turned

Wokers into demanders of them.
Does anyone really think it’s a

coincidence that the Cult agenda for humanity is a carbon (sorry)

copy of the societal transformations desired by Woke??
These are

only some of them:

Political correctness: The means by which the Cult deletes all public

debates that it knows it cannot win if we had the free-flow of

information and evidence.
Human-caused ‘climate change’: The means by which the Cult

seeks to transform society into a globally-controlled dictatorship

imposing its will over the fine detail of everyone’s lives ‘to save the

planet’ which doesn’t actually need saving.
Transgender obsession: Preparing collective perception to accept the

‘new human’ which would not have genders because it would be

created technologically and not through procreation.
I’ll have much

more on this in Human 2.0.
Race obsession: The means by which the Cult seeks to divide and

rule the population by triggering racial division through the

perception that society is more racist than ever when the opposite is

the case.
Is it perfect in that regard?
No.
But to compare today with

the racism of apartheid and segregation brought to an end by the

civil rights movement in the 1960s is to insult the memory of that

movement and inspirations like Martin Luther King.
Why is the

‘anti-racism’ industry (which it is) so dominated by privileged white

people?
White supremacy: This is a label used by privileged white people to

demonise poor and deprived white people pushing back on tyranny

to marginalise and destroy them.
White people are being especially

targeted as the dominant race by number within Western society

which the Cult seeks to transform in its image.
If you want to change

a society you must weaken and undermine its biggest group and

once you have done that by using the other groups you next turn on

them to do the same … ‘Then they came for the Jews and I was not a

Jew so I did nothing.’

Mass migration: The mass movement of people from the Middle

East, Africa and Asia into Europe, from the south into the United

States and from Asia into Australia are another way the Cult seeks to

dilute the racial, cultural and political influence of white people on

Western society.
White people ask why their governments appear to

be working against them while being politically and culturally

biased towards incoming cultures.
Well, here’s your answer.
In the

same way sexually ‘straight’ people, men and women, ask why the

authorities are biased against them in favour of other sexualities.
The

answer is the same – that’s the way the Cult wants it to be for very

sinister motives.
These are all central parts of the Cult agenda and central parts of the

Woke agenda and Woke was created and continues to be funded to

an immense degree by Cult billionaires and corporations.
If anyone

begins to say ‘coincidence’ the syllables should stick in their throat.
Billionaire ‘social justice warriors’

Joe Biden is a 100 percent-owned asset of the Cult and the Wokers’

man in the White House whenever he can remember his name and

for however long he lasts with his rapidly diminishing cognitive

function.
Even walking up the steps of an aircra without falling on

his arse would appear to be a challenge.
He’s not an empty-shell

puppet or anything.
From the minute Biden took office (or the Cult

did) he began his executive orders promoting the Woke wish-list.
You will see the Woke agenda imposed ever more severely because

it’s really the Cult agenda.
Woke organisations and activist networks

spawned by the Cult are funded to the extreme so long as they

promote what the Cult wants to happen.
Woke is funded to promote

‘social justice’ by billionaires who become billionaires by destroying

social justice.
The social justice mantra is only a cover for

dismantling social justice and funded by billionaires that couldn’t

give a damn about social justice.
Everything makes sense when you

see that.
One of Woke’s premier funders is Cult billionaire financier

George Soros who said: ‘I am basically there to make money, I

cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.’ This

is the same Soros who has given more than $32 billion to his Open

Society Foundations global Woke network and funded Black Lives

Ma er, mass immigration into Europe and the United States,

transgender activism, climate change activism, political correctness

and groups targeting ‘white supremacy’ in the form of privileged

white thugs that dominate Antifa.
What a scam it all is and when

you are dealing with the unquestioning fact-free zone of Woke

scamming them is child’s play.
All you need to pull it off in all these

organisations are a few in-the-know agents of the Cult and an army

of naïve, reframed, uninformed, narcissistic, know-nothings

convinced of their own self-righteousness, self-purity and virtue.
Soros and fellow billionaires and billionaire corporations have

poured hundreds of millions into Black Lives Ma er and connected

groups and promoted them to a global audience.
None of this is

motivated by caring about black people.
These are the billionaires

that have controlled and exploited a system that leaves millions of

black people in abject poverty and deprivation which they do

absolutely nothing to address.
The same Cult networks funding

BLM were behind the slave trade!
Black Lives Ma er hijacked a

phrase that few would challenge and they have turned this laudable

concept into a political weapon to divide society.
You know that

BLM is a fraud when it claims that All Lives Ma er, the most

inclusive statement of all, is ‘racist’.
BLM and its Cult masters don’t

want to end racism.
To them it’s a means to an end to control all of

humanity never mind the colour, creed, culture or background.
What has destroying the nuclear family got to do with ending

racism?
Nothing – but that is one of the goals of BLM and also

happens to be a goal of the Cult as I have been exposing in my books

for decades.
Stealing children from loving parents and giving

schools ever more power to override parents is part of that same

agenda.
BLM is a Marxist organisation and why would that not be

the case when the Cult created Marxism and BLM?
Patrisse Cullors, a

BLM co-founder, said in a 2015 video that she and her fellow

organisers, including co-founder Alicia Garza, are ‘trained Marxists’.
The lady known a er marriage as Patrisse Khan-Cullors bought a

$1.4 million home in 2021 in one of the whitest areas of California

with a black population of just 1.6 per cent and has so far bought four

high-end homes for a total of $3.2 million.
How very Marxist.
There

must be a bit of spare in the BLM coffers, however, when Cult

corporations and billionaires have handed over the best part of $100

million.
Many black people can see that Black Lives Ma er is not

working for them, but against them, and this is still more

confirmation.
Black journalist Jason Whitlock, who had his account

suspended by Twi er for simply linking to the story about the

‘Marxist’s’ home buying spree, said that BLM leaders are ‘making

millions of dollars off the backs of these dead black men who they

wouldn’t spit on if they were on fire and alive’.
Black Lies Matter

Cult assets and agencies came together to promote BLM in the wake

of the death of career criminal George Floyd who had been jailed a

number of times including for forcing his way into the home of a

black woman with others in a raid in which a gun was pointed at her

stomach.
Floyd was filmed being held in a Minneapolis street in 2020

with the knee of a police officer on his neck and he subsequently

died.
It was an appalling thing for the officer to do, but the same

technique has been used by police on peaceful protestors of

lockdown without any outcry from the Woke brigade.
As

unquestioning supporters of the Cult agenda Wokers have

supported lockdown and all the ‘Covid’ claptrap while a acking

anyone standing up to the tyranny imposed in its name.
Court

documents would later include details of an autopsy on Floyd by

County Medical Examiner Dr Andrew Baker who concluded that

Floyd had taken a fatal level of the drug fentanyl.
None of this

ma ered to fact-free, question-free, Woke.
Floyd’s death was

followed by worldwide protests against police brutality amid calls to

defund the police.
Throwing babies out with the bathwater is a

Woke speciality.
In the wake of the murder of British woman Sarah

Everard a Green Party member of the House of Lords, Baroness

Jones of Moulescoomb (Nincompoopia would have been be er),

called for a 6pm curfew for all men.
This would be in breach of the

Geneva Conventions on war crimes which ban collective

punishment, but that would never have crossed the black and white

Woke mind of Baroness Nincompoopia who would have been far

too convinced of her own self-righteousness to compute such details.
Many American cities did defund the police in the face of Floyd riots

and a er $15 million was deleted from the police budget in

Washington DC under useless Woke mayor Muriel Bowser car-

jacking alone rose by 300 percent and within six months the US

capital recorded its highest murder rate in 15 years.
The same

happened in Chicago and other cities in line with the Cult/Soros

plan to bring fear to streets and neighbourhoods by reducing the

police, releasing violent criminals and not prosecuting crime.
This is

the mob-rule agenda that I have warned in the books was coming for

so long.
Shootings in the area of Minneapolis where Floyd was

arrested increased by 2,500 percent compared with the year before.
Defunding the police over George Floyd has led to a big increase in

dead people with many of them black.
Police protection for

politicians making these decisions stayed the same or increased as

you would expect from professional hypocrites.
The Cult doesn’t

actually want to abolish the police.
It wants to abolish local control

over the police and hand it to federal government as the

psychopaths advance the Hunger Games Society.
Many George

Floyd protests turned into violent riots with black stores and

businesses destroyed by fire and looting across America fuelled by

Black Lives Ma er.
Woke doesn’t do irony.
If you want civil rights

you must loot the liquor store and the supermarket and make off

with a smart TV.
It’s the only way.
It’s not a race war – it’s a class war

Black people are patronised by privileged blacks and whites alike

and told they are victims of white supremacy.
I find it extraordinary

to watch privileged blacks supporting the very system and bloodline

networks behind the slave trade and parroting the same Cult-serving

manipulative crap of their privileged white, o en billionaire,

associates.
It is indeed not a race war but a class war and colour is

just a diversion.
Black Senator Cory Booker and black

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, more residents of Nincompoopia,

personify this.
Once you tell people they are victims of someone else

you devalue both their own responsibility for their plight and the

power they have to impact on their reality and experience.
Instead

we have: ‘You are only in your situation because of whitey – turn on

them and everything will change.’ It won’t change.
Nothing changes

in our lives unless we change it.
Crucial to that is never seeing

yourself as a victim and always as the creator of your reality.
Life is a

simple sequence of choice and consequence.
Make different choices

and you create different consequences.
You have to make those

choices – not Black Lives Ma er, the Woke Mafia and anyone else

that seeks to dictate your life.
Who are they these Wokers, an

emotional and psychological road traffic accident, to tell you what to

do?
Personal empowerment is the last thing the Cult and its Black

Lives Ma er want black people or anyone else to have.
They claim to

be defending the underdog while creating and perpetuating the

underdog.
The Cult’s worst nightmare is human unity and if they

are going to keep blacks, whites and every other race under

economic servitude and control then the focus must be diverted

from what they have in common to what they can be manipulated to

believe divides them.
Blacks have to be told that their poverty and

plight is the fault of the white bloke living on the street in the same

poverty and with the same plight they are experiencing.
The

difference is that your plight black people is due to him, a white

supremacist with ‘white privilege’ living on the street.
Don’t unite as

one human family against your mutual oppressors and suppressors

– fight the oppressor with the white face who is as financially

deprived as you are.
The Cult knows that as its ‘Covid’ agenda

moves into still new levels of extremism people are going to respond

and it has been spreading the seeds of disunity everywhere to stop a

united response to the evil that targets all of us.
Racist a acks on ‘whiteness’ are ge ing ever more outrageous and

especially through the American Democratic Party which has an

appalling history for anti-black racism.
Barack Obama, Joe Biden,

Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi all eulogised about Senator Robert

Byrd at his funeral in 2010 a er a nearly 60-year career in Congress.
Byrd was a brutal Ku Klux Klan racist and a violent abuser of Cathy

O’Brien in MKUltra.
He said he would never fight in the military

‘with a negro by my side’ and ‘rather I should die a thousand times,

and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to

see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a

throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds’.
Biden called

Byrd a ‘very close friend and mentor’.
These ‘Woke’ hypocrites are

not anti-racist they are anti-poor and anti-people not of their

perceived class.
Here is an illustration of the scale of anti-white

racism to which we have now descended.
Seriously Woke and

moronic New York Times contributor Damon Young described

whiteness as a ‘virus’ that ‘like other viruses will not die until there

are no bodies le for it to infect’.
He went on: ‘… the only way to

stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it.’ Young can say

that as a black man with no consequences when a white man saying

the same in reverse would be facing a jail sentence.
That’s racism.
We

had super-Woke numbskull senators Tammy Duckworth and Mazie

Hirono saying they would object to future Biden Cabinet

appointments if he did not nominate more Asian Americans and

Pacific Islanders.
Never mind the ability of the candidate what do

they look like?
Duckworth said: ‘I will vote for racial minorities and I

will vote for LGBTQ, but anyone else I’m not voting for.’ Appointing

people on the grounds of race is illegal, but that was not a problem

for this ludicrous pair.
They were on-message and that’s a free pass

in any situation.
Critical race racism

White children are told at school they are intrinsically racist as they

are taught the divisive ‘critical race theory’.
This claims that the law

and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race is a socially

constructed concept used by white people to further their economic

and political interests at the expense of people of colour.
White is a

‘virus’ as we’ve seen.
Racial inequality results from ‘social,

economic, and legal differences that white people create between

races to maintain white interests which leads to poverty and

criminality in minority communities‘.
I must tell that to the white

guy sleeping on the street.
The principal of East Side Community

School in New York sent white parents a manifesto that called on

them to become ‘white traitors’ and advocate for full ‘white

abolition’.
These people are teaching your kids when they urgently

need a psychiatrist.
The ‘school’ included a chart with ‘eight white

identities’ that ranged from ‘white supremacist’ to ‘white abolition’

and defined the behaviour white people must follow to end ‘the

regime of whiteness’.
Woke blacks and their privileged white

associates are acting exactly like the slave owners of old and Ku Klux

Klan racists like Robert Byrd.
They are too full of their own self-

purity to see that, but it’s true.
Racism is not a body type; it’s a state

of mind that can manifest through any colour, creed or culture.
Another racial fraud is ‘equity’.
Not equality of treatment and

opportunity – equity.
It’s a term spun as equality when it means

something very different.
Equality in its true sense is a raising up

while ‘equity’ is a race to the bo om.
Everyone in the same level of

poverty is ‘equity’.
Keep everyone down – that’s equity.
The Cult

doesn’t want anyone in the human family to be empowered and

BLM leaders, like all these ‘anti-racist’ organisations, continue their

privileged, pampered existence by perpetuating the perception of

gathering racism.
When is the last time you heard an ‘anti-racist’ or

‘anti-Semitism’ organisation say that acts of racism and

discrimination have fallen?
It’s not in the interests of their fund-

raising and power to influence and the same goes for the

professional soccer anti-racism operation, Kick It Out.
Two things

confirmed that the Black Lives Ma er riots in the summer of 2020

were Cult creations.
One was that while anti-lockdown protests were

condemned in this same period for ‘transmi ing ‘Covid’ the

authorities supported mass gatherings of Black Lives Ma er

supporters.
I even saw self-deluding people claiming to be doctors

say the two types of protest were not the same.
No – the non-existent

‘Covid’ was in favour of lockdowns and a acked those that

protested against them while ‘Covid’ supported Black Lives Ma er

and kept well away from its protests.
The whole thing was a joke

and as lockdown protestors were arrested, o en brutally, by

reframed Face-Nappies we had the grotesque sight of police officers

taking the knee to Black Lives Ma er, a Cult-funded Marxist

organisation that supports violent riots and wants to destroy the

nuclear family and white people.
He’s not white?
Shucks!
Woke obsession with race was on display again when ten people

were shot dead in Boulder, Colorado, in March, 2021.
Cult-owned

Woke TV channels like CNN said the shooter appeared to be a white

man and Wokers were on Twi er condemning ‘violent white men’

with the usual mantras.
Then the shooter’s name was released as

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, an anti-Trump Arab-American, and the sigh

of disappointment could be heard five miles away.
Never mind that

ten people were dead and what that meant for their families.
Race

baiting was all that ma ered to these sick Cult-serving people like

Barack Obama who exploited the deaths to further divide America

on racial grounds which is his job for the Cult.
This is the man that

‘racist’ white Americans made the first black president of the United

States and then gave him a second term.
Not-very-bright Obama has

become filthy rich on the back of that and today appears to have a

big influence on the Biden administration.
Even so he’s still a

downtrodden black man and a victim of white supremacy.
This

disingenuous fraud reveals the contempt he has for black people

when he puts on a Deep South Alabama accent whenever he talks to

them, no, at them.
Another BLM red flag was how the now fully-Woke (fully-Cult)

and fully-virtue-signalled professional soccer authorities had their

teams taking the knee before every match in support of Marxist

Black Lives Ma er.
Soccer authorities and clubs displayed ‘Black

Lives Ma er’ on the players’ shirts and flashed the name on

electronic billboards around the pitch.
Any fans that condemned

what is a Freemasonic taking-the-knee ritual were widely

condemned as you would expect from the Woke virtue-signallers of

professional sport and the now fully-Woke media.
We have reverse

racism in which you are banned from criticising any race or culture

except for white people for whom anything goes – say what you like,

no problem.
What has this got to do with racial harmony and

equality?
We’ve had black supremacists from Black Lives Ma er

telling white people to fall to their knees in the street and apologise

for their white supremacy.
Black supremacists acting like white

supremacist slave owners of the past couldn’t breach their self-

obsessed, race-obsessed sense of self-purity.
Joe Biden appointed a

race-obsessed black supremacist Kristen Clarke to head the Justice

Department Civil Rights Division.
Clarke claimed that blacks are

endowed with ‘greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities’ than

whites.
If anyone reversed that statement they would be vilified.
Clarke is on-message so no problem.
She’s never seen a black-white

situation in which the black figure is anything but a virtuous victim

and she heads the Civil Rights Division which should treat everyone

the same or it isn’t civil rights.
Another perception of the Renegade

Mind: If something or someone is part of the Cult agenda they will

be supported by Woke governments and media no ma er what.
If

they’re not, they will be condemned and censored.
It really is that

simple and so racist Clarke prospers despite (make that because of)

her racism.
The end of culture

Biden’s administration is full of such racial, cultural and economic

bias as the Cult requires the human family to be divided into

warring factions.
We are now seeing racially-segregated graduations

and everything, but everything, is defined through the lens of

perceived ‘racism.
We have ‘racist’ mathematics, ‘racist’ food and

even ‘racist’ plants.
World famous Kew Gardens in London said it

was changing labels on plants and flowers to tell its pre-‘Covid’

more than two million visitors a year how racist they are.
Kew

director Richard Deverell said this was part of an effort to ‘move

quickly to decolonise collections’ a er they were approached by one

Ajay Chhabra ‘an actor with an insight into how sugar cane was

linked to slavery’.
They are plants you idiots.
‘Decolonisation’ in the

Woke manual really means colonisation of society with its mentality

and by extension colonisation by the Cult.
We are witnessing a new

Chinese-style ‘Cultural Revolution’ so essential to the success of all

Marxist takeovers.
Our cultural past and traditions have to be swept

away to allow a new culture to be built-back-be er.
Woke targeting

of long-standing Western cultural pillars including historical

monuments and cancelling of historical figures is what happened in

the Mao revolution in China which ‘purged remnants of capitalist

and traditional elements from Chinese society‘ and installed Maoism

as the dominant ideology‘.
For China see the Western world today

and for ‘dominant ideology’ see Woke.
Be er still see Marxism or

Maoism.
The ‘Covid’ hoax has specifically sought to destroy the arts

and all elements of Western culture from people meeting in a pub or

restaurant to closing theatres, music venues, sports stadiums, places

of worship and even banning singing.
Destruction of Western society

is also why criticism of any religion is banned except for Christianity

which again is the dominant religion as white is the numerically-

dominant race.
Christianity may be fading rapidly, but its history

and traditions are weaved through the fabric of Western society.
Delete the pillars and other structures will follow until the whole

thing collapses.
I am not a Christian defending that religion when I

say that.
I have no religion.
It’s just a fact.
To this end Christianity

has itself been turned Woke to usher its own downfall and its ranks

are awash with ‘change agents’ – knowing and unknowing – at

every level including Pope Francis ( definitely knowing) and the

clueless Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (possibly not, but

who can be sure?).
Woke seeks to coordinate a acks on Western

culture, traditions, and ways of life through ‘intersectionality’

defined as ‘the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of

multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and

classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences

of marginalised individuals or groups’.
Wade through the Orwellian

Woke-speak and this means coordinating disparate groups in a

common cause to overthrow freedom and liberal values.
The entire structure of public institutions has been infested with

Woke – government at all levels, political parties, police, military,

schools, universities, advertising, media and trade unions.
This

abomination has been achieved through the Cult web by appointing

Wokers to positions of power and ba ering non-Wokers into line

through intimidation, isolation and threats to their job.
Many have

been fired in the wake of the empathy-deleted, vicious hostility of

‘social justice’ Wokers and the desire of gutless, spineless employers

to virtue-signal their Wokeness.
Corporations are filled with Wokers

today, most notably those in Silicon Valley.
Ironically at the top they

are not Woke at all.
They are only exploiting the mentality their Cult

masters have created and funded to censor and enslave while the

Wokers cheer them on until it’s their turn.
Thus the Woke ‘liberal

le ’ is an inversion of the traditional liberal le.
Campaigning for

justice on the grounds of power and wealth distribution has been

replaced by campaigning for identity politics.
The genuine

traditional le would never have taken money from today’s

billionaire abusers of fairness and justice and nor would the

billionaires have wanted to fund that genuine le.
It would not have

been in their interests to do so.
The division of opinion in those days

was between the haves and have nots.
This all changed with Cult

manipulated and funded identity politics.
The division of opinion

today is between Wokers and non-Wokers and not income brackets.
Cult corporations and their billionaires may have taken wealth

disparity to cataclysmic levels of injustice, but as long as they speak

the language of Woke, hand out the dosh to the Woke network and

censor the enemy they are ‘one of us’.
Billionaires who don’t give a

damn about injustice are laughing at them till their bellies hurt.
Wokers are not even close to self-aware enough to see that.
The

transformed ‘le ’ dynamic means that Wokers who drone on about

‘social justice’ are funded by billionaires that have destroyed social

justice the world over.
It’s why they are billionaires.
The climate con

Nothing encapsulates what I have said more comprehensively than

the hoax of human-caused global warming.
I have detailed in my

books over the years how Cult operatives and organisations were the

pump-primers from the start of the climate con.
A purpose-built

vehicle for this is the Club of Rome established by the Cult in 1968

with the Rockefellers and Rothschilds centrally involved all along.
Their gofer frontman Maurice Strong, a Canadian oil millionaire,

hosted the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 where the

global ‘green movement’ really expanded in earnest under the

guiding hand of the Cult.
The Earth Summit established Agenda 21

through the Cult-created-and-owned United Nations to use the

illusion of human-caused climate change to justify the

transformation of global society to save the world from climate

disaster.
It is a No-Problem-Reaction-Solution sold through

governments, media, schools and universities as whole generations

have been terrified into believing that the world was going to end in

their lifetimes unless what old people had inflicted upon them was

stopped by a complete restructuring of how everything is done.
Chill, kids, it’s all a hoax.
Such restructuring is precisely what the

Cult agenda demands (purely by coincidence of course).
Today this

has been given the codename of the Great Reset which is only an

updated term for Agenda 21 and its associated Agenda 2030.
The

la er, too, is administered through the UN and was voted into being

by the General Assembly in 2015.
Both 21 and 2030 seek centralised

control of all resources and food right down to the raindrops falling

on your own land.
These are some of the demands of Agenda 21

established in 1992.
See if you recognise this society emerging today:



• End national sovereignty

• State planning and management of all land resources, ecosystems,

deserts, forests, mountains, oceans and fresh water; agriculture;

rural development; biotechnology; and ensuring ‘equity’

• The state to ‘define the role’ of business and financial resources

• Abolition of private property

• ‘Restructuring’ the family unit (see BLM)

• Children raised by the state

• People told what their job will be

• Major restrictions on movement

• Creation of ‘human se lement zones’

• Mass rese lement as people are forced to vacate land where they

live

• Dumbing down education

• Mass global depopulation in pursuit of all the above



The United Nations was created as a Trojan horse for world

government.
With the climate con of critical importance to

promoting that outcome you would expect the UN to be involved.
Oh, it’s involved all right.
The UN is promoting Agenda 21 and

Agenda 2030 justified by ‘climate change’ while also driving the

climate hoax through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC), one of the world’s most corrupt organisations.
The

IPCC has been lying ferociously and constantly since the day it

opened its doors with the global media hanging unquestioningly on

its every mendacious word.
The Green movement is entirely Woke

and has long lost its original environmental focus since it was co-

opted by the Cult.
An obsession with ‘global warming’ has deleted

its values and scrambled its head.
I experienced a small example of

what I mean on a beautiful country walk that I have enjoyed several

times a week for many years.
The path merged into the fields and

forests and you felt at one with the natural world.
Then a ‘Green’

organisation, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, took

over part of the land and proceeded to cut down a large number of

trees, including mature ones, to install a horrible big, bright steel

‘this-is-ours-stay-out’ fence that destroyed the whole atmosphere of

this beautiful place.
No one with a feel for nature would do that.
Day

a er day I walked to the sound of chainsaws and a magnificent

mature weeping willow tree that I so admired was cut down at the

base of the trunk.
When I challenged a Woke young girl in a green

shirt (of course) about this vandalism she replied: ‘It’s a weeping

willow – it will grow back.’ This is what people are paying for when

they donate to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust and

many other ‘green’ organisations today.
It is not the environmental

movement that I knew and instead has become a support-system –

as with Extinction Rebellion – for a very dark agenda.
Private jets for climate justice

The Cult-owned, Gates-funded, World Economic Forum and its

founder Klaus Schwab were behind the emergence of Greta

Thunberg to harness the young behind the climate agenda and she

was invited to speak to the world at … the UN.
Schwab published a

book, Covid-19: The Great Reset in 2020 in which he used the ‘Covid’

hoax and the climate hoax to lay out a new society straight out of

Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030.
Bill Gates followed in early 2021 when

he took time out from destroying the world to produce a book in his

name about the way to save it.
Gates flies across the world in private

jets and admi ed that ‘I probably have one of the highest

greenhouse gas footprints of anyone on the planet … my personal

flying alone is gigantic.’ He has also bid for the planet’s biggest

private jet operator.
Other climate change saviours who fly in private

jets include John Kerry, the US Special Presidential Envoy for

Climate, and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, a ‘UN Messenger of Peace

with special focus on climate change’.
These people are so full of

bullshit they could corner the market in manure.
We mustn’t be

sceptical, though, because the Gates book, How to Avoid a Climate

Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, is a

genuine a empt to protect the world and not an obvious pile of

excrement a ributed to a mega-psychopath aimed at selling his

masters’ plans for humanity.
The Gates book and the other shite-pile

by Klaus Schwab could have been wri en by the same person and

may well have been.
Both use ‘climate change’ and ‘Covid’ as the

excuses for their new society and by coincidence the Cult’s World

Economic Forum and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promote

the climate hoax and hosted Event 201 which pre-empted with a

‘simulation’ the very ‘coronavirus’ hoax that would be simulated for

real on humanity within weeks.
The British ‘royal’ family is

promoting the ‘Reset’ as you would expect through Prince ‘climate

change caused the war in Syria’ Charles and his hapless son Prince

William who said that we must ‘reset our relationship with nature

and our trajectory as a species’ to avoid a climate disaster.
Amazing

how many promotors of the ‘Covid’ and ‘climate change’ control

systems are connected to Gates and the World Economic Forum.
A

‘study’ in early 2021 claimed that carbon dioxide emissions must fall

by the equivalent of a global lockdown roughly every two years for

the next decade to save the planet.
The ‘study’ appeared in the same

period that the Schwab mob claimed in a video that lockdowns

destroying the lives of billions are good because they make the earth

‘quieter’ with less ‘ambient noise’.
They took down the video amid a

public backlash for such arrogant, empathy-deleted stupidity You

see, however, where they are going with this.
Corinne Le Quéré, a

professor at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research,

University of East Anglia, was lead author of the climate lockdown

study, and she writes for … the World Economic Forum.
Gates calls

in ‘his’ book for changing ‘every aspect of the economy’ (long-time

Cult agenda) and for humans to eat synthetic ‘meat’ (predicted in

my books) while cows and other farm animals are eliminated.
Australian TV host and commentator Alan Jones described what

carbon emission targets would mean for farm animals in Australia

alone if emissions were reduced as demanded by 35 percent by 2030

and zero by 2050:

Well, let’s take agriculture, the total emissions from agriculture are about 75 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent.
Now reduce that by 35 percent and you have to come down to

50 million tonnes, I’ve done the maths.
So if you take for example 1.5 million cows, you’re

going to have to reduce the herd by 525,000 [by] 2030, nine years, that’s 58,000 cows a year.
The beef herd’s 30 million, reduce that by 35 percent, that’s 10.5 million, which means 1.2

million cattle have to go every year between now and 2030.
This is insanity!
There are 75 million sheep.
Reduce that by 35 percent, that’s 26 million sheep, that’s almost 3

million a year.
So under the Paris Agreement over 30 million beasts.
dairy cows, cattle, pigs

and sheep would go.
More than 8,000 every minute of every hour for the next decade, do

these people know what they’re talking about?
Clearly they don’t at the level of campaigners, politicians and

administrators.
The Cult does know; that’s the outcome it wants.
We

are faced with not just a war on humanity.
Animals and the natural

world are being targeted and I have been saying since the ‘Covid’

hoax began that the plan eventually was to claim that the ‘deadly

virus’ is able to jump from animals, including farm animals and

domestic pets, to humans.
Just before this book went into production

came this story: ‘Russia registers world’s first Covid-19 vaccine for

cats & dogs as makers of Sputnik V warn pets & farm animals could

spread virus’.
The report said ‘top scientists warned that the deadly

pathogen could soon begin spreading through homes and farms’

and ‘the next stage is the infection of farm and domestic animals’.
Know the outcome and you’ll see the journey.
Think what that

would mean for animals and keep your eye on a term called

zoonosis or zoonotic diseases which transmit between animals and

humans.
The Cult wants to break the connection between animals

and people as it does between people and people.
Farm animals fit

with the Cult agenda to transform food from natural to synthetic.
The gas of life is killing us

There can be few greater examples of Cult inversion than the

condemnation of carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant when it is

the gas of life.
Without it the natural world would be dead and so we

would all be dead.
We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon

dioxide while plants produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide.
It

is a perfect symbiotic relationship that the Cult wants to dismantle

for reasons I will come to in the final two chapters.
Gates, Schwab,

other Cult operatives and mindless repeaters, want the world to be

‘carbon neutral’ by at least 2050 and the earlier the be er.
‘Zero

carbon’ is the cry echoed by lunatics calling for ‘Zero Covid’ when

we already have it.
These carbon emission targets will

deindustrialise the world in accordance with Cult plans – the post-

industrial, post-democratic society – and with so-called renewables

like solar and wind not coming even close to meeting human energy

needs blackouts and cold are inevitable.
Texans got the picture in the

winter of 2021 when a snow storm stopped wind turbines and solar

panels from working and the lights went down along with water

which relies on electricity for its supply system.
Gates wants

everything to be powered by electricity to ensure that his masters

have the kill switch to stop all human activity, movement, cooking,

water and warmth any time they like.
The climate lie is so

stupendously inverted that it claims we must urgently reduce

carbon dioxide when we don’t have enough.
Co2 in the atmosphere is a li le above 400 parts per million when

the optimum for plant growth is 2,000 ppm and when it falls

anywhere near 150 ppm the natural world starts to die and so do we.
It fell to as low as 280 ppm in an 1880 measurement in Hawaii and

rose to 413 ppm in 2019 with industrialisation which is why the

planet has become greener in the industrial period.
How insane then

that psychopathic madman Gates is not satisfied only with blocking

the rise of Co2.
He’s funding technology to suck it out of the

atmosphere.
The reason why will become clear.
The industrial era is

not destroying the world through Co2 and has instead turned

around a potentially disastrous ongoing fall in Co2.
Greenpeace co-

founder and scientist Patrick Moore walked away from Greenpeace

in 1986 and has exposed the green movement for fear-mongering

and lies.
He said that 500 million years ago there was 17 times more

Co2 in the atmosphere than we have today and levels have been

falling for hundreds of millions of years.
In the last 150 million years

Co2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere had reduced by 90 percent.
Moore

said that by the time humanity began to unlock carbon dioxide from

fossil fuels we were at ‘38 seconds to midnight’ and in that sense:

‘Humans are [the Earth’s] salvation.’ Moore made the point that only

half the Co2 emi ed by fossil fuels stays in the atmosphere and we

should remember that all pollution pouring from chimneys that we

are told is carbon dioxide is in fact nothing of the kind.
It’s pollution.
Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas.
William Happer, Professor of Physics at Princeton University and

long-time government adviser on climate, has emphasised the Co2

deficiency for maximum growth and food production.
Greenhouse

growers don’t add carbon dioxide for a bit of fun.
He said that most

of the warming in the last 100 years, a er the earth emerged from

the super-cold period of the ‘Li le Ice Age’ into a natural warming

cycle, was over by 1940.
Happer said that a peak year for warming in

1988 can be explained by a ‘monster El Nino’ which is a natural and

cyclical warming of the Pacific that has nothing to do with ‘climate

change’.
He said the effect of Co2 could be compared to painting a

wall with red paint in that once two or three coats have been applied

it didn’t ma er how much more you slapped on because the wall

will not get much redder.
Almost all the effect of the rise in Co2 has

already happened, he said, and the volume in the atmosphere would

now have to double to increase temperature by a single degree.
Climate hoaxers know this and they have invented the most

ridiculously complicated series of ‘feedback’ loops to try to

overcome this rather devastating fact.
You hear puppet Greta going

on cluelessly about feedback loops and this is why.
The Sun affects temperature?
No you climate denier

Some other nonsense to contemplate: Climate graphs show that rises

in temperature do not follow rises in Co2 – it’s the other way round

with a lag between the two of some 800 years.
If we go back 800

years from present time we hit the Medieval Warm Period when

temperatures were higher than now without any industrialisation

and this was followed by the Li le Ice Age when temperatures

plummeted.
The world was still emerging from these centuries of

serious cold when many climate records began which makes the

ever-repeated line of the ‘ho est year since records began’

meaningless when you are not comparing like with like.
The coldest

period of the Li le Ice Age corresponded with the lowest period of

sunspot activity when the Sun was at its least active.
Proper

scientists will not be at all surprised by this when it confirms the

obvious fact that earth temperature is affected by the scale of Sun

activity and the energetic power that it subsequently emits; but

when is the last time you heard a climate hoaxer talking about the

Sun as a source of earth temperature??
Everything has to be focussed

on Co2 which makes up just 0.117 percent of so-called greenhouse

gases and only a fraction of even that is generated by human activity.
The rest is natural.
More than 90 percent of those greenhouse gases

are water vapour and clouds (Fig 9).
Ban moisture I say.
Have you

noticed that the climate hoaxers no longer use the polar bear as their

promotion image?
That’s because far from becoming extinct polar

bear communities are stable or thriving.
Joe Bastardi, American

meteorologist, weather forecaster and outspoken critic of the climate

lie, documents in his book The Climate Chronicles how weather

pa erns and events claimed to be evidence of climate change have

been happening since long before industrialisation: ‘What happened

before naturally is happening again, as is to be expected given the

cyclical nature of the climate due to the design of the planet.’ If you

read the detailed background to the climate hoax in my other books

you will shake your head and wonder how anyone could believe the

crap which has spawned a multi-trillion dollar industry based on

absolute garbage (see HIV causes AIDs and Sars-Cov-2 causes

‘Covid-19’).
Climate and ‘Covid’ have much in common given they

have the same source.
They both have the contradictory everything

factor in which everything is explained by reference to them.
It’s hot

– ‘it’s climate change’.
It’s cold – ‘it’s climate change’.
I got a sniffle –

‘it’s Covid’.
I haven’t got a sniffle – ‘it’s Covid’.
Not having a sniffle

has to be a symptom of ‘Covid’.
Everything is and not having a

sniffle is especially dangerous if you are a slow walker.
For sheer

audacity I offer you a Cambridge University ‘study’ that actually

linked ‘Covid’ to ‘climate change’.
It had to happen eventually.
They

concluded that climate change played a role in ‘Covid-19’ spreading

from animals to humans because … wait for it … I kid you not … the

two groups were forced closer together as populations grow.
Er, that’s it.
The whole foundation on which this depended was that ‘Bats are the

likely zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2’.
Well, they

are not.
They are nothing to do with it.
Apart from bats not being the

origin and therefore ‘climate change’ effects on bats being irrelevant

I am in awe of their academic insight.
Where would we be without

them?
Not where we are that’s for sure.
Figure 9: The idea that the gas of life is disastrously changing the climate is an insult to brain cell activity.
One other point about the weather is that climate modification is

now well advanced and not every major weather event is natural –

or earthquake come to that.
I cover this subject at some length in

other books.
China is openly planning a rapid expansion of its

weather modification programme which includes changing the

climate in an area more than one and a half times the size of India.
China used weather manipulation to ensure clear skies during the

2008 Olympics in Beijing.
I have quoted from US military documents

detailing how to employ weather manipulation as a weapon of war

and they did that in the 1960s and 70s during the conflict in Vietnam

with Operation Popeye manipulating monsoon rains for military

purposes.
Why would there be international treaties on weather

modification if it wasn’t possible?
Of course it is.
Weather is

energetic information and it can be changed.
How was the climate hoax pulled off?
See ‘Covid’

If you can get billions to believe in a ‘virus’ that doesn’t exist you can

get them to believe in human-caused climate change that doesn’t

exist.
Both are being used by the Cult to transform global society in

the way it has long planned.
Both hoaxes have been achieved in

pre y much the same way.
First you declare a lie is a fact.
There’s a

‘virus’ you call SARS-Cov-2 or humans are warming the planet with

their behaviour.
Next this becomes, via Cult networks, the

foundation of government, academic and science policy and belief.
Those who parrot the mantra are given big grants to produce

research that confirms the narrative is true and ever more

‘symptoms’ are added to make the ‘virus’/’climate change’ sound

even more scary.
Scientists and researchers who challenge the

narrative have their grants withdrawn and their careers destroyed.
The media promote the lie as the unquestionable truth and censor

those with an alternative view or evidence.
A great percentage of the

population believe what they are told as the lie becomes an

everybody-knows-that and the believing-masses turn on those with

a mind of their own.
The technique has been used endlessly

throughout human history.
Wokers are the biggest promotors of the

climate lie and ‘Covid’ fascism because their minds are owned by the

Cult; their sense of self-righteous self-purity knows no bounds; and

they exist in a bubble of reality in which facts are irrelevant and only

get in the way of looking without seeing.
Running through all of this like veins in a blue cheese is control of

information, which means control of perception, which means

control of behaviour, which collectively means control of human

society.
The Cult owns the global media and Silicon Valley fascists

for the simple reason that it has to.
Without control of information it

can’t control perception and through that human society.
Examine

every facet of the Cult agenda and you will see that anything

supporting its introduction is never censored while anything

pushing back is always censored.
I say again: Psychopaths that know

why they are doing this must go before Nuremberg trials and those

that follow their orders must trot along behind them into the same

dock.
‘I was just following orders’ didn’t work the first time and it

must not work now.
Nuremberg trials must be held all over the

world before public juries for politicians, government officials,

police, compliant doctors, scientists and virologists, and all Cult

operatives such as Gates, Tedros, Fauci, Vallance, Whi y, Ferguson,

Zuckerberg, Wojcicki, Brin, Page, Dorsey, the whole damn lot of

them – including, no especially, the psychopath psychologists.
Without them and the brainless, gutless excuses for journalists that

have repeated their lies, none of this could be happening.
Nobody

can be allowed to escape justice for the psychological and economic

Armageddon they are all responsible for visiting upon the human

race.
As for the compliant, unquestioning, swathes of humanity, and the

self-obsessed, all-knowing ignorance of the Wokers … don’t start me.
God help their kids.
God help their grandkids.
God help them.
CHAPTER NINE

We must have it?
So what is it?
Well I won’t back down.
No, I won’t back down.
You can stand me

up at the Gates of Hell.
But I won’t back down

Tom Petty

Iwill now focus on the genetically-manipulating ‘Covid vaccines’

which do not meet this official definition of a vaccine by the US

Centers for Disease Control (CDC): ‘A product that stimulates a

person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease,

protecting the person from that disease.’ On that basis ‘Covid

vaccines’ are not a vaccine in that the makers don’t even claim they

stop infection or transmission.
They are instead part of a multi-levelled conspiracy to change the

nature of the human body and what it means to be ‘human’ and to

depopulate an enormous swathe of humanity.
What I shall call

Human 1.0 is on the cusp of becoming Human 2.0 and for very

sinister reasons.
Before I get to the ‘Covid vaccine’ in detail here’s

some background to vaccines in general.
Government regulators do

not test vaccines – the makers do – and the makers control which

data is revealed and which isn’t.
Children in America are given 50

vaccine doses by age six and 69 by age 19 and the effect of the whole

combined schedule has never been tested.
Autoimmune diseases

when the immune system a acks its own body have soared in the

mass vaccine era and so has disease in general in children and the

young.
Why wouldn’t this be the case when vaccines target the

immune system?
The US government gave Big Pharma drug

companies immunity from prosecution for vaccine death and injury

in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) and

since then the government (taxpayer) has been funding

compensation for the consequences of Big Pharma vaccines.
The

criminal and satanic drug giants can’t lose and the vaccine schedule

has increased dramatically since 1986 for this reason.
There is no

incentive to make vaccines safe and a big incentive to make money

by introducing ever more.
Even against a ridiculously high bar to

prove vaccine liability, and with the government controlling the

hearing in which it is being challenged for compensation, the vaccine

court has so far paid out more than $4 billion.
These are the vaccines

we are told are safe and psychopaths like Zuckerberg censor posts

saying otherwise.
The immunity law was even justified by a ruling

that vaccines by their nature were ‘unavoidably unsafe’.
Check out the ingredients of vaccines and you will be shocked if

you are new to this.
They put that in children’s bodies??
What??
Try

aluminium, a brain toxin connected to dementia, aborted foetal

tissue and formaldehyde which is used to embalm corpses.
World-

renowned aluminium expert Christopher Exley had his research into

the health effect of aluminium in vaccines shut down by Keele

University in the UK when it began taking funding from the Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation.
Research when diseases ‘eradicated’ by

vaccines began to decline and you will find the fall began long before

the vaccine was introduced.
Sometimes the fall even plateaued a er

the vaccine.
Diseases like scarlet fever for which there was no

vaccine declined in the same way because of environmental and

other factors.
A perfect case in point is the polio vaccine.
Polio began

when lead arsenate was first sprayed as an insecticide and residues

remained in food products.
Spraying started in 1892 and the first US

polio epidemic came in Vermont in 1894.
The simple answer was to

stop spraying, but Rockefeller-created Big Pharma had a be er idea.
Polio was decreed to be caused by the poliovirus which ‘spreads from

person to person and can infect a person’s spinal cord’.
Lead

arsenate was replaced by the lethal DDT which had the same effect

of causing paralysis by damaging the brain and central nervous

system.
Polio plummeted when DDT was reduced and then banned,

but the vaccine is still given the credit for something it didn’t do.
Today by far the biggest cause of polio is the vaccines promoted by

Bill Gates.
Vaccine justice campaigner Robert Kennedy Jr, son of

assassinated (by the Cult) US A orney General Robert Kennedy,

wrote:

In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) reluctantly admitted that the global explosion

in polio is predominantly vaccine strain.
The most frightening epidemics in Congo,

Afghanistan, and the Philippines, are all linked to vaccines.
In fact, by 2018, 70% of global

polio cases were vaccine strain.
Vaccines make fortunes for Cult-owned Gates and Big Pharma

while undermining the health and immune systems of the

population.
We had a glimpse of the mentality behind the Big

Pharma cartel with a report on WION (World is One News), an

international English language TV station based in India, which

exposed the extraordinary behaviour of US drug company Pfizer

over its ‘Covid vaccine’.
The WION report told how Pfizer had made

fantastic demands of Argentina, Brazil and other countries in return

for its ‘vaccine’.
These included immunity from prosecution, even

for Pfizer negligence, government insurance to protect Pfizer from

law suits and handing over as collateral sovereign assets of the

country to include Argentina’s bank reserves, military bases and

embassy buildings.
Pfizer demanded the same of Brazil in the form

of waiving sovereignty of its assets abroad; exempting Pfizer from

Brazilian laws; and giving Pfizer immunity from all civil liability.
This is a ‘vaccine’ developed with government funding.
Big Pharma

is evil incarnate as a creation of the Cult and all must be handed

tickets to Nuremberg.
Phantom ‘vaccine’ for a phantom ‘disease’

I’ll expose the ‘Covid vaccine’ fraud and then go on to the wider

background of why the Cult has set out to ‘vaccinate’ every man,

woman and child on the planet for an alleged ‘new disease’ with a

survival rate of 99.77 percent (or more) even by the grotesquely-

manipulated figures of the World Health Organization and Johns

Hopkins University.
The ‘infection’ to ‘death’ ratio is 0.23 to 0.15

percent according to Stanford epidemiologist Dr John Ioannidis and

while estimates vary the danger remains tiny.
I say that if the truth

be told the fake infection to fake death ratio is zero.
Never mind all

the evidence I have presented here and in The Answer that there is no

‘virus’ let us just focus for a moment on that death-rate figure of say

0.23 percent.
The figure includes all those worldwide who have

tested positive with a test not testing for the ‘virus’ and then died

within 28 days or even longer of any other cause – any other cause.
Now subtract all those illusory ‘Covid’ deaths on the global data

sheets from the 0.23 percent.
What do you think you would be le

with?
Zero.
A vaccination has never been successfully developed for

a so-called coronavirus.
They have all failed at the animal testing

stage when they caused hypersensitivity to what they were claiming

to protect against and made the impact of a disease far worse.
Cult-

owned vaccine corporations got around that problem this time by

bypassing animal trials, going straight to humans and making the

length of the ‘trials’ before the public rollout as short as they could

get away with.
Normally it takes five to ten years or more to develop

vaccines that still cause demonstrable harm to many people and

that’s without including the long-term effects that are never officially

connected to the vaccination.
‘Covid’ non-vaccines have been

officially produced and approved in a ma er of months from a

standing start and part of the reason is that (a) they were developed

before the ‘Covid’ hoax began and (b) they are based on computer

programs and not natural sources.
Official non-trials were so short

that government agencies gave emergency, not full, approval.
‘Trials’

were not even completed and full approval cannot be secured until

they are.
Public ‘Covid vaccination’ is actually a continuation of the

trial.
Drug company ‘trials’ are not scheduled to end until 2023 by

which time a lot of people are going to be dead.
Data on which

government agencies gave this emergency approval was supplied by

the Big Pharma corporations themselves in the form of

Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and

others, and this is the case with all vaccines.
By its very nature

emergency approval means drug companies do not have to prove that

the ‘vaccine’ is ‘safe and effective’.
How could they with trials way

short of complete?
Government regulators only have to believe that

they could be safe and effective.
It is criminal manipulation to get

products in circulation with no testing worth the name.
Agencies

giving that approval are infested with Big Pharma-connected place-

people and they act in the interests of Big Pharma (the Cult) and not

the public about whom they do not give a damn.
More human lab rats

‘Covid vaccines’ produced in record time by Pfizer/BioNTech and

Moderna employ a technique never approved before for use on humans.
They are known as mRNA ‘vaccines’ and inject a synthetic version of

‘viral’ mRNA or ‘messenger RNA’.
The key is in the term

‘messenger’.
The body works, or doesn’t, on the basis of information

messaging.
Communications are constantly passing between and

within the genetic system and the brain.
Change those messages and

you change the state of the body and even its very nature and you

can change psychology and behaviour by the way the brain

processes information.
I think you are going to see significant

changes in personality and perception of many people who have had

the ‘Covid vaccine’ synthetic potions.
Insider Aldous Huxley

predicted the following in 1961 and mRNA ‘vaccines’ can be

included in the term ‘pharmacological methods’:

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love

their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of

painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their own

liberties taken away from them, but rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any

desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by

pharmacological methods.
And this seems to be the final revolution.
Apologists claim that mRNA synthetic ‘vaccines’ don’t change the

DNA genetic blueprint because RNA does not affect DNA only the

other way round.
This is so disingenuous.
A process called ‘reverse

transcription’ can convert RNA into DNA and be integrated into

DNA in the cell nucleus.
This was highlighted in December, 2020, by

scientists at Harvard and Massachuse s Institute of Technology

(MIT).
Geneticists report that more than 40 percent of mammalian

genomes results from reverse transcription.
On the most basic level

if messaging changes then that sequence must lead to changes in

DNA which is receiving and transmi ing those communications.
How can introducing synthetic material into cells not change the

cells where DNA is located?
The process is known as transfection

which is defined as ‘a technique to insert foreign nucleic acid (DNA

or RNA) into a cell, typically with the intention of altering the

properties of the cell’.
Researchers at the Sloan Ke ering Institute in

New York found that changes in messenger RNA can deactivate

tumour-suppressing proteins and thereby promote cancer.
This is

what happens when you mess with messaging.
‘Covid vaccine’

maker Moderna was founded in 2010 by Canadian stem cell

biologist Derrick J.
Rossi a er his breakthrough discovery in the field

of transforming and reprogramming stem cells.
These are neutral

cells that can be programmed to become any cell including sperm

cells.
Moderna was therefore founded on the principle of genetic

manipulation and has never produced any vaccine or drug before its

genetically-manipulating synthetic ‘Covid’ shite.
Look at the name –

Mode-RNA or Modify-RNA.
Another important point is that the US

Supreme Court has ruled that genetically-modified DNA, or

complementary DNA (cDNA) synthesized in the laboratory from

messenger RNA, can be patented and owned.
These psychopaths are

doing this to the human body.
Cells replicate synthetic mRNA in the ‘Covid vaccines’ and in

theory the body is tricked into making antigens which trigger

antibodies to target the ‘virus spike proteins’ which as Dr Tom

Cowan said have never been seen.
Cut the crap and these ‘vaccines’

deliver self-replicating synthetic material to the cells with the effect of

changing human DNA.
The more of them you have the more that

process is compounded while synthetic material is all the time self-

replicating.
‘Vaccine’-maker Moderna describes mRNA as ‘like

so ware for the cell’ and so they are messing with the body’s

so ware.
What happens when you change the so ware in a

computer?
Everything changes.
For this reason the Cult is preparing

a production line of mRNA ‘Covid vaccines’ and a long list of

excuses to use them as with all the ‘variants’ of a ‘virus’ never shown

to exist.
The plan is further to transfer the mRNA technique to other

vaccines mostly given to children and young people.
The cumulative

consequences will be a transformation of human DNA through a

constant infusion of synthetic genetic material which will kill many

and change the rest.
Now consider that governments that have given

emergency approval for a vaccine that’s not a vaccine; never been

approved for humans before; had no testing worth the name; and

the makers have been given immunity from prosecution for any

deaths or adverse effects suffered by the public.
The UK government

awarded permanent legal indemnity to itself and its employees for

harm done when a patient is being treated for ‘Covid-19’ or

‘suspected Covid-19’.
That is quite a thought when these are possible

‘side-effects’ from the ‘vaccine’ (they are not ‘side’, they are effects)

listed by the US Food and Drug Administration:

Guillain-Barre syndrome; acute disseminated encephalomyelitis;

transverse myelitis; encephalitis; myelitis; encephalomyelitis;

meningoencephalitis; meningitis; encephalopathy; convulsions;

seizures; stroke; narcolepsy; cataplexy; anaphylaxis; acute

myocardial infarction (heart a ack); myocarditis; pericarditis;

autoimmune disease; death; implications for pregnancy, and birth

outcomes; other acute demyelinating diseases; non anaphylactic

allergy reactions; thrombocytopenia ; disseminated intravascular

coagulation; venous thromboembolism; arthritis; arthralgia; joint

pain; Kawasaki disease; multisystem inflammatory syndrome in

children; vaccine enhanced disease.
The la er is the way the

‘vaccine’ has the potential to make diseases far worse than they

would otherwise be.
UK doctor and freedom campaigner Vernon Coleman described

the conditions in this list as ‘all unpleasant, most of them very

serious, and you can’t get more serious than death’.
The thought that

anyone at all has had the ‘vaccine’ in these circumstances is

testament to the potential that humanity has for clueless,

unquestioning, stupidity and for many that programmed stupidity

has already been terminal.
An insider speaks

Dr Michael Yeadon is a former Vice President, head of research and

Chief Scientific Adviser at vaccine giant Pfizer.
Yeadon worked on

the inside of Big Pharma, but that did not stop him becoming a vocal

critic of ‘Covid vaccines’ and their potential for multiple harms,

including infertility in women.
By the spring of 2021 he went much

further and even used the no, no, term ‘conspiracy’.
When you begin

to see what is going on it is impossible not to do so.
Yeadon spoke

out in an interview with freedom campaigner James Delingpole and

I mentioned earlier how he said that no one had samples of ‘the

virus’.
He explained that the mRNA technique originated in the anti-

cancer field and ways to turn on and off certain genes which could

be advantageous if you wanted to stop cancer growing out of

control.
‘That’s the origin of them.
They are a very unusual

application, really.’ Yeadon said that treating a cancer patient with

an aggressive procedure might be understandable if the alternative

was dying, but it was quite another thing to use the same technique

as a public health measure.
Most people involved wouldn’t catch the

infectious agent you were vaccinating against and if they did they

probably wouldn’t die:

If you are really using it as a public health measure you really want to as close as you can get

to zero sides-effects … I find it odd that they chose techniques that were really cutting their

teeth in the field of oncology and I’m worried that in using gene-based vaccines that have to

be injected in the body and spread around the body, get taken up into some cells, and the

regulators haven’t quite told us which cells they get taken up into … you are going to be

generating a wide range of responses … with multiple steps each of which could go well or

badly.
I doubt the Cult intends it to go well.
Yeadon said that you can put

any gene you like into the body through the ‘vaccine’.
‘You can

certainly give them a gene that would do them some harm if you

wanted.’ I was intrigued when he said that when used in the cancer

field the technique could turn genes on and off.
I explore this process

in The Answer and with different genes having different functions

you could create mayhem – physically and psychologically – if you

turned the wrong ones on and the right ones off.
I read reports of an

experiment by researchers at the University of Washington’s school

of computer science and engineering in which they encoded DNA to

infect computers.
The body is itself a biological computer and if

human DNA can inflict damage on a computer why can’t the

computer via synthetic material mess with the human body?
It can.
The Washington research team said it was possible to insert

malicious malware into ‘physical DNA strands’ and corrupt the

computer system of a gene sequencing machine as it ‘reads gene

le ers and stores them as binary digits 0 and 1’.
They concluded that

hackers could one day use blood or spit samples to access computer

systems and obtain sensitive data from police forensics labs or infect

genome files.
It is at this level of digital interaction that synthetic

‘vaccines’ need to be seen to get the full picture and that will become

very clear later on.
Michael Yeadon said it made no sense to give the

‘vaccine’ to younger people who were in no danger from the ‘virus’.
What was the benefit?
It was all downside with potential effects:

The fact that my government in what I thought was a civilised, rational country, is raining [the

‘vaccine’] on people in their 30s and 40s, even my children in their 20s, they’re getting letters and phone calls, I know this is not right and any of you doctors who are vaccinating you

know it’s not right, too.
They are not at risk.
They are not at risk from the disease, so you are now hoping that the side-effects are so rare that you get away with it.
You don’t give new

technology … that you don’t understand to 100 percent of the population.
Blood clot problems with the AstraZeneca ‘vaccine’ have been

affecting younger people to emphasise the downside risks with no

benefit.
AstraZeneca’s version, produced with Oxford University,

does not use mRNA, but still gets its toxic cocktail inside cells where

it targets DNA.
The Johnson & Johnson ‘vaccine’ which uses a

similar technique has also produced blood clot effects to such an

extent that the United States paused its use at one point.
They are all

‘gene therapy’ (cell modification) procedures and not ‘vaccines’.
The

truth is that once the content of these injections enter cells we have

no idea what the effect will be.
People can speculate and some can

give very educated opinions and that’s good.
In the end, though,

only the makers know what their potions are designed to do and

even they won’t know every last consequence.
Michael Yeadon was

scathing about doctors doing what they knew to be wrong.
‘Everyone’s mute’, he said.
Doctors in the NHS must know this was

not right, coming into work and injecting people.
‘I don’t know how

they sleep at night.
I know I couldn’t do it.
I know that if I were in

that position I’d have to quit.’ He said he knew enough about

toxicology to know this was not a good risk-benefit.
Yeadon had

spoken to seven or eight university professors and all except two

would not speak out publicly.
Their universities had a policy that no

one said anything that countered the government and its medical

advisors.
They were afraid of losing their government grants.
This is

how intimidation has been used to silence the truth at every level of

the system.
I say silence, but these people could still speak out if they

made that choice.
Yeadon called them ‘moral cowards’ – ‘This is

about your children and grandchildren’s lives and you have just

buggered off and le it.’

‘Variant’ nonsense

Some of his most powerful comments related to the alleged

‘variants’ being used to instil more fear, justify more lockdowns, and

introduce more ‘vaccines’.
He said government claims about

‘variants’ were nonsense.
He had checked the alleged variant ‘codes’

and they were 99.7 percent identical to the ‘original’.
This was the

human identity difference equivalent to pu ing a baseball cap on

and off or wearing it the other way round.
A 0.3 percent difference

would make it impossible for that ‘variant’ to escape immunity from

the ‘original’.
This made no sense of having new ‘vaccines’ for

‘variants’.
He said there would have to be at least a 30 percent

difference for that to be justified and even then he believed the

immune system would still recognise what it was.
Gates-funded

‘variant modeller’ and ‘vaccine’-pusher John Edmunds might care to

comment.
Yeadon said drug companies were making new versions

of the ‘vaccine’ as a ‘top up’ for ‘variants’.
Worse than that, he said,

the ‘regulators’ around the world like the MHRA in the UK had got

together and agreed that because ‘vaccines’ for ‘variants’ were so

similar to the first ‘vaccines’ they did not have to do safety studies.
How

transparently sinister that is.
This is when Yeadon said: ‘There is a

conspiracy here.’ There was no need for another vaccine for

‘variants’ and yet we were told that there was and the country had

shut its borders because of them.
‘They are going into hundreds of

millions of arms without passing ‘go’ or any regulator.
Why did they

do that?
Why did they pick this method of making the vaccine?’

The reason had to be something bigger than that it seemed and

‘it’s not protection against the virus’.
It’s was a far bigger project that

meant politicians and advisers were willing to do things and not do

things that knowingly resulted in avoidable deaths – ‘that’s already

happened when you think about lockdown and deprivation of

health care for a year.’ He spoke of people prepared to do something

that results in the avoidable death of their fellow human beings and

it not bother them.
This is the penny-drop I have been working to

get across for more than 30 years – the level of pure evil we are

dealing with.
Yeadon said his friends and associates could not

believe there could be that much evil, but he reminded them of

Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler and of what Stalin had said: ‘One death is a

tragedy.
A million?
A statistic.’ He could not think of a benign

explanation for why you need top-up vaccines ‘which I’m sure you

don’t’ and for the regulators ‘to just get out of the way and wave

them through’.
Why would the regulators do that when they were

still wrestling with the dangers of the ‘parent’ vaccine?
He was

clearly shocked by what he had seen since the ‘Covid’ hoax began

and now he was thinking the previously unthinkable:

If you wanted to depopulate a significant proportion of the world and to do it in a way that doesn’t involve destruction of the environment with nuclear weapons, poisoning everyone

with anthrax or something like that, and you wanted plausible deniability while you had a

multi-year infectious disease crisis, I actually don’t think you could come up with a better plan of work than seems to be in front of me.
I can’t say that’s what they are going to do, but I can’t think of a benign explanation why they are doing it.
He said he never thought that they would get rid of 99 percent of

humans, but now he wondered.
‘If you wanted to that this would be

a hell of a way to do it – it would be unstoppable folks.’ Yeadon had

concluded that those who submi ed to the ‘vaccine’ would be

allowed to have some kind of normal life (but for how long?) while

screws were tightened to coerce and mandate the last few percent.
‘I

think they’ll put the rest of them in a prison camp.
I wish I was

wrong, but I don’t think I am.’ Other points he made included: There

were no coronavirus vaccines then suddenly they all come along at

the same time; we have no idea of the long term affect with trials so

short; coercing or forcing people to have medical procedures is

against the Nuremberg Code instigated when the Nazis did just that;

people should at least delay having the ‘vaccine’; a quick Internet

search confirms that masks don’t reduce respiratory viral

transmission and ‘the government knows that’; they have smashed

civil society and they know that, too; two dozen peer-reviewed

studies show no connection between lockdown and reducing deaths;

he knew from personal friends the elite were still flying around and

going on holiday while the public were locked down; the elite were

not having the ‘vaccines’.
He was also asked if ‘vaccines’ could be

made to target difference races.
He said he didn’t know, but the

document by the Project for the New American Century in

September, 2000, said developing ‘advanced forms of biological

warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological

warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’ Oh,

they’re evil all right.
Of that we can be absolutely sure.
Another cull of old people

We have seen from the CDC definition that the mRNA ‘Covid

vaccine’ is not a vaccine and nor are the others that claim to reduce

‘severity of symptoms’ in some people, but not protect from infection

or transmission.
What about all the lies about returning to ‘normal’ if

people were ‘vaccinated’?
If they are not claimed to stop infection

and transmission of the alleged ‘virus’, how does anything change?
This was all lies to manipulate people to take the jabs and we are

seeing that now with masks and distancing still required for the

‘vaccinated’.
How did they think that elderly people with fragile

health and immune responses were going to be affected by infusing

their cells with synthetic material and other toxic substances?
They

knew that in the short and long term it would be devastating and

fatal as the culling of the old that began with the first lockdowns was

continued with the ‘vaccine’.
Death rates in care homes soared

immediately residents began to be ‘vaccinated’ – infused with

synthetic material.
Brave and commi ed whistleblower nurses put

their careers at risk by exposing this truth while the rest kept their

heads down and their mouths shut to put their careers before those

they are supposed to care for.
A long-time American Certified

Nursing Assistant who gave his name as James posted a video in

which he described emotionally what happened in his care home

when vaccination began.
He said that during 2020 very few residents

were sick with ‘Covid’ and no one died during the entire year; but

shortly a er the Pfizer mRNA injections 14 people died within two

weeks and many others were near death.
‘They’re dropping like

flies’, he said.
Residents who walked on their own before the shot

could no longer and they had lost their ability to conduct an

intelligent conversation.
The home’s management said the sudden

deaths were caused by a ‘super-spreader’ of ‘Covid-19’.
Then how

come, James asked, that residents who refused to take the injections

were not sick?
It was a case of inject the elderly with mRNA

synthetic potions and blame their illness and death that followed on

the ‘virus’.
James described what was happening in care homes as

‘the greatest crime of genocide this country has ever seen’.
Remember the NHS staff nurse from earlier who used the same

word ‘genocide’ for what was happening with the ‘vaccines’ and

that it was an ‘act of human annihilation’.
A UK care home

whistleblower told a similar story to James about the effect of the

‘vaccine’ in deaths and ‘outbreaks’ of illness dubbed ‘Covid’ a er

ge ing the jab.
She told how her care home management and staff

had zealously imposed government regulations and no one was

allowed to even question the official narrative let alone speak out

against it.
She said the NHS was even worse.
Again we see the

results of reframing.
A worker at a local care home where I live said

they had not had a single case of ‘Covid’ there for almost a year and

when the residents were ‘vaccinated’ they had 19 positive cases in

two weeks with eight dying.
It’s not the ‘vaccine’ – honest

The obvious cause and effect was being ignored by the media and

most of the public.
Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt (a former

head of strategy at the World Economic Forum) was admi ed to

hospital a er he had the ‘vaccine’.
He was suffering according to

reports from the skin infection ‘cellulitis’ and it must have been a

severe case to have warranted days in hospital.
Immediately the

authorities said this was nothing to do with the ‘vaccine’ when an

effect of some vaccines is a ‘cellulitis-like reaction’.
We had families

of perfectly healthy old people who died a er the ‘vaccine’ saying

that if only they had been given the ‘vaccine’ earlier they would still

be alive.
As a numbskull rating that is off the chart.
A father of four

‘died of Covid’ at aged 48 when he was taken ill two days a er

having the ‘vaccine’.
The man, a health administrator, had been

‘shielding during the pandemic’ and had ‘not really le the house’

until he went for the ‘vaccine’.
Having the ‘vaccine’ and then falling

ill and dying does not seem to have qualified as a possible cause and

effect and ‘Covid-19’ went on his death certificate.
His family said

they had no idea how he ‘caught the virus’.
A family member said:

‘Tragically, it could be that going for a vaccination ultimately led to

him catching Covid …The sad truth is that they are never going to

know where it came from.’ The family warned people to remember

that the virus still existed and was ‘very real’.
So was their stupidity.
Nurses and doctors who had the first round of the ‘vaccine’ were

collapsing, dying and ending up in a hospital bed while they or their

grieving relatives were saying they’d still have the ‘vaccine’ again

despite what happened.
I kid you not.
You mean if your husband

returned from the dead he’d have the same ‘vaccine’ again that killed

him??
Doctors at the VCU Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia, said

the Johnson & Johnson ‘vaccine’ was to blame for a man’s skin

peeling off.
Patient Richard Terrell said: ‘It all just happened so fast.
My skin peeled off.
It’s still coming off on my hands now.’ He said it

was stinging, burning and itching and when he bent his arms and

legs it was very painful with ‘the skin swollen and rubbing against

itself’.
Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines use mRNA to change

the cell while the Johnson & Johnson version uses DNA in a process

similar to AstraZeneca’s technique.
Johnson & Johnson and

AstraZeneca have both had their ‘vaccines’ paused by many

countries a er causing serious blood problems.
Terrell’s doctor Fnu

Nutan said he could have died if he hadn’t got medical a ention.
It

sounds terrible so what did Nutan and Terrell say about the ‘vaccine’

now?
Oh, they still recommend that people have it.
A nurse in a

hospital bed 40 minutes a er the vaccination and unable to swallow

due to throat swelling was told by a doctor that he lost mobility in

his arm for 36 hours following the vaccination.
What did he say to

the ailing nurse?
‘Good for you for ge ing the vaccination.’ We are

dealing with a serious form of cognitive dissonance madness in both

public and medical staff.
There is a remarkable correlation between

those having the ‘vaccine’ and trumpeting the fact and suffering bad

happenings shortly a erwards.
Witold Rogiewicz, a Polish doctor,

made a video of his ‘vaccination’ and ridiculed those who were

questioning its safety and the intentions of Bill Gates: ‘Vaccinate

yourself to protect yourself, your loved ones, friends and also

patients.
And to mention quickly I have info for anti-vaxxers and

anti-Coviders if you want to contact Bill Gates you can do this

through me.’ He further ridiculed the dangers of 5G.
Days later he

was dead, but naturally the vaccination wasn’t mentioned in the

verdict of ‘heart a ack’.
Lies, lies and more lies

So many members of the human race have slipped into extreme

states of insanity and unfortunately they include reframed doctors

and nursing staff.
Having a ‘vaccine’ and dying within minutes or

hours is not considered a valid connection while death from any

cause within 28 days or longer of a positive test with a test not

testing for the ‘virus’ means ‘Covid-19’ goes on the death certificate.
How could that ‘vaccine’-death connection not have been made

except by calculated deceit?
US figures in the initial rollout period to

February 12th, 2020, revealed that a third of the deaths reported to

the CDC a er ‘Covid vaccines’ happened within 48 hours.
Five men

in the UK suffered an ‘extremely rare’ blood clot problem a er

having the AstraZeneca ‘vaccine’, but no causal link was established

said the Gates-funded Medicines and Healthcare products

Regulatory Agency (MHRA) which had given the ‘vaccine’

emergency approval to be used.
Former Pfizer executive Dr Michael

Yeadon explained in his interview how the procedures could cause

blood coagulation and clots.
People who should have been at no risk

were dying from blood clots in the brain and he said he had heard

from medical doctor friends that people were suffering from skin

bleeding and massive headaches.
The AstraZeneca ‘shot’ was

stopped by some 20 countries over the blood clo ing issue and still

the corrupt MHRA, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the

World Health Organization said that it should continue to be given

even though the EMA admi ed that it ‘still cannot rule out

definitively’ a link between blood clo ing and the ‘vaccine’.
Later

Marco Cavaleri, head of EMA vaccine strategy, said there was indeed

a clear link between the ‘vaccine’ and thrombosis, but they didn’t

know why.
So much for the trials showing the ‘vaccine’ is safe.
Blood

clots were affecting younger people who would be under virtually

no danger from ‘Covid’ even if it existed which makes it all the more

stupid and sinister.
The British government responded to public alarm by wheeling

out June Raine, the terrifyingly weak infant school headmistress

sound-alike who heads the UK MHRA drug ‘regulator’.
The idea

that she would stand up to Big Pharma and government pressure is

laughable and she told us that all was well in the same way that she

did when allowing untested, never-used-on-humans-before,

genetically-manipulating ‘vaccines’ to be exposed to the public in the

first place.
Mass lying is the new normal of the ‘Covid’ era.
The

MHRA later said 30 cases of rare blood clots had by then been

connected with the AstraZeneca ‘vaccine’ (that means a lot more in

reality) while stressing that the benefits of the jab in preventing

‘Covid-19’ outweighed any risks.
A more ridiculous and

disingenuous statement with callous disregard for human health it is

hard to contemplate.
Immediately a er the mendacious ‘all-clears’

two hospital workers in Denmark experienced blood clots and

cerebral haemorrhaging following the AstraZeneca jab and one died.
Top Norwegian health official Pål Andre Holme said the ‘vaccine’

was the only common factor: ‘There is nothing in the patient history

of these individuals that can give such a powerful immune response

… I am confident that the antibodies that we have found are the

cause, and I see no other explanation than it being the vaccine which

triggers it.’ Strokes, a clot or bleed in the brain, were clearly

associated with the ‘vaccine’ from word of mouth and whistleblower

reports.
Similar consequences followed with all these ‘vaccines’ that

we were told were so safe and as the numbers grew by the day it

was clear we were witnessing human carnage.
Learning the hard way

A woman interviewed by UKColumn told how her husband

suffered dramatic health effects a er the vaccine when he’d been in

good health all his life.
He went from being a li le unwell to losing

all feeling in his legs and experiencing ‘excruciating pain’.
Misdiagnosis followed twice at Accident and Emergency (an

‘allergy’ and ‘sciatica’) before he was admi ed to a neurology ward

where doctors said his serious condition had been caused by the

‘vaccine’.
Another seven ‘vaccinated’ people were apparently being

treated on the same ward for similar symptoms.
The woman said he

had the ‘vaccine’ because they believed media claims that it was safe.
‘I didn’t think the government would give out a vaccine that does

this to somebody; I believed they would be bringing out a

vaccination that would be safe.’ What a tragic way to learn that

lesson.
Another woman posted that her husband was transporting

stroke patients to hospital on almost every shi and when he asked

them if they had been ‘vaccinated’ for ‘Covid’ they all replied ‘yes’.
One had a ‘massive brain bleed’ the day a er his second dose.
She

said her husband reported the ‘just been vaccinated’ information

every time to doctors in A and E only for them to ignore it, make no

notes and appear annoyed that it was even mentioned.
This

particular report cannot be verified, but it expresses a common

theme that confirms the monumental underreporting of ‘vaccine’

consequences.
Interestingly as the ‘vaccines’ and their brain blood

clot/stroke consequences began to emerge the UK National Health

Service began a publicity campaign telling the public what to do in

the event of a stroke.
A Sco ish NHS staff nurse who quit in disgust

in March, 2021, said:

I have seen traumatic injuries from the vaccine, they’re not getting reported to the yellow card

[adverse reaction] scheme, they’re treating the symptoms, not asking why, why it’s happening.
It’s just treating the symptoms and when you speak about it you’re dismissed like you’re crazy,

I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy because every other colleague I’ve spoken to is terrified to speak

out, they’ve had enough.
Videos appeared on the Internet of people uncontrollably shaking

a er the ‘vaccine’ with no control over muscles, limbs and even their

face.
A Sco ish mother broke out in a severe rash all over her body

almost immediately a er she was given the AstraZeneca ‘vaccine’.
The pictures were horrific.
Leigh King, a 41-year-old hairdresser

from Lanarkshire said: ‘Never in my life was I prepared for what I

was about to experience … My skin was so sore and constantly hot

… I have never felt pain like this …’ But don’t you worry, the

‘vaccine’ is perfectly safe.
Then there has been the effect on medical

staff who have been pressured to have the ‘vaccine’ by psychopathic

‘health’ authorities and government.
A London hospital consultant

who gave the name K.
Polyakova wrote this to the British Medical

Journal or BMJ:

I am currently struggling with … the failure to report the reality of the morbidity caused by our current vaccination program within the health service and staff population.
The levels of

sickness after vaccination is unprecedented and staff are getting very sick and some with

neurological symptoms which is having a huge impact on the health service function.
Even

the young and healthy are off for days, some for weeks, and some requiring medical

treatment.
Whole teams are being taken out as they went to get vaccinated together.
Mandatory vaccination in this instance is stupid, unethical and irresponsible when it comes to

protecting our staff and public health.
We are in the voluntary phase of vaccination, and

encouraging staff to take an unlicensed product that is impacting on their immediate health …

it is clearly stated that these vaccine products do not offer immunity or stop transmission.
In

which case why are we doing it?
Not to protect health that’s for sure.
Medical workers are lauded by

governments for agenda reasons when they couldn’t give a toss

about them any more than they can for the population in general.
Schools across America faced the same situation as they closed due

to the high number of teachers and other staff with bad reactions to

the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson ‘Covid

vaccines’ all of which were linked to death and serious adverse

effects.
The BMJ took down the consultant’s comments pre y

quickly on the grounds that they were being used to spread

‘disinformation’.
They were exposing the truth about the ‘vaccine’

was the real reason.
The cover-up is breathtaking.
Hiding the evidence

The scale of the ‘vaccine’ death cover-up worldwide can be

confirmed by comparing official figures with the personal experience

of the public.
I heard of many people in my community who died

immediately or soon a er the vaccine that would never appear in the

media or even likely on the official totals of ‘vaccine’ fatalities and

adverse reactions when only about ten percent are estimated to be

reported and I have seen some estimates as low as one percent in a

Harvard study.
In the UK alone by April 29th, 2021, some 757,654

adverse reactions had been officially reported from the

Pfizer/BioNTech, Oxford/AstraZeneca and Moderna ‘vaccines’ with

more than a thousand deaths linked to jabs and that means an

estimated ten times this number in reality from a ten percent

reporting rate percentage.
That’s seven million adverse reactions and

10,000 potential deaths and a one percent reporting rate would be

ten times those figures.
In 1976 the US government pulled the swine

flu vaccine a er 53 deaths.
The UK data included a combined 10,000

eye disorders from the ‘Covid vaccines’ with more than 750 suffering

visual impairment or blindness and again multiply by the estimated

reporting percentages.
As ‘Covid cases’ officially fell hospitals

virtually empty during the ‘Covid crisis’ began to fill up with a

range of other problems in the wake of the ‘vaccine’ rollout.
The

numbers across America have also been catastrophic.
Deaths linked

to all types of vaccine increased by 6,000 percent in the first quarter of

2021 compared with 2020.
A 39-year-old woman from Ogden, Utah,

died four days a er receiving a second dose of Moderna’s ‘Covid

vaccine’ when her liver, heart and kidneys all failed despite the fact

that she had no known medical issues or conditions.
Her family

sought an autopsy, but Dr Erik Christensen, Utah’s chief medical

examiner, said proving vaccine injury as a cause of death almost

never happened.
He could think of only one instance where an

autopsy would name a vaccine as the official cause of death and that

would be anaphylaxis where someone received a vaccine and died

almost instantaneously.
‘Short of that, it would be difficult for us to

definitively say this is the vaccine,’ Christensen said.
If that is true

this must be added to the estimated ten percent (or far less)

reporting rate of vaccine deaths and serious reactions and the

conclusion can only be that vaccine deaths and serious reactions –

including these ‘Covid’ potions’ – are phenomenally understated in

official figures.
The same story can be found everywhere.
Endless

accounts of deaths and serious reactions among the public, medical

and care home staff while official figures did not even begin to

reflect this.
Professional script-reader Dr David Williams, a ‘top public-health

official’ in Ontario, Canada, insulted our intelligence by claiming

only four serious adverse reactions and no deaths from the more

than 380,000 vaccine doses then given.
This bore no resemblance to

what people knew had happened in their owns circles and we had

Dirk Huyer in charge of ge ing millions vaccinated in Ontario while

at the same time he was Chief Coroner for the province investigating

causes of death including possible death from the vaccine.
An aide

said he had stepped back from investigating deaths, but evidence

indicated otherwise.
Rosemary Frei, who secured a Master of Science

degree in molecular biology at the Faculty of Medicine at Canada’s

University of Calgary before turning to investigative journalism, was

one who could see that official figures for ‘vaccine’ deaths and

reactions made no sense.
She said that doctors seldom reported

adverse events and when people got really sick or died a er ge ing

a vaccination they would a ribute that to anything except the

vaccines.
It had been that way for years and anyone who wondered

aloud whether the ‘Covid vaccines’ or other shots cause harm is

immediately branded as ‘anti-vax’ and ‘anti-science’.
This was

‘career-threatening’ for health professionals.
Then there was the

huge pressure to support the push to ‘vaccinate’ billions in the

quickest time possible.
Frei said:

So that’s where we’re at today.
More than half a million vaccine doses have been given to

people in Ontario alone.
The rush is on to vaccinate all 15 million of us in the province by

September.
And the mainstream media are screaming for this to be sped up even more.
That

all adds up to only a very slim likelihood that we’re going to be told the truth by officials

about how many people are getting sick or dying from the vaccines.
What is true of Ontario is true of everywhere.
They KNEW – and still did it

The authorities knew what was going to happen with multiple

deaths and adverse reactions.
The UK government’s Gates-funded

and Big Pharma-dominated Medicines and Healthcare products

Regulatory Agency (MHRA) hired a company to employ AI in

compiling the projected reactions to the ‘vaccine’ that would

otherwise be uncountable.
The request for applications said: ‘The

MHRA urgently seeks an Artificial Intelligence (AI) so ware tool to

process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug

Reaction …’ This was from the agency, headed by the disingenuous

June Raine, that gave the ‘vaccines’ emergency approval and the

company was hired before the first shot was given.
‘We are going to

kill and maim you – is that okay?’ ‘Oh, yes, perfectly fine – I’m very

grateful, thank you, doctor.’ The range of ‘Covid vaccine’ adverse

reactions goes on for page a er page in the MHRA criminally

underreported ‘Yellow Card’ system and includes affects to eyes,

ears, skin, digestion, blood and so on.
Raine’s MHRA amazingly

claimed that the ‘overall safety experience … is so far as expected

from the clinical trials’.
The death, serious adverse effects, deafness

and blindness were expected?
When did they ever mention that?
If

these human tragedies were expected then those that gave approval

for the use of these ‘vaccines’ must be guilty of crimes against

humanity including murder – a definition of which is ‘killing a

person with malice aforethought or with recklessness manifesting

extreme indifference to the value of human life.’ People involved at

the MHRA, the CDC in America and their equivalent around the

world must go before Nuremberg trials to answer for their callous

inhumanity.
We are only talking here about the immediate effects of

the ‘vaccine’.
The longer-term impact of the DNA synthetic

manipulation is the main reason they are so hysterically desperate to

inoculate the entire global population in the shortest possible time.
Africa and the developing world are a major focus for the ‘vaccine’

depopulation agenda and a mass vaccination sales-pitch is

underway thanks to caring people like the Rockefellers and other

Cult assets.
The Rockefeller Foundation, which pre-empted the

‘Covid pandemic’ in a document published in 2010 that ‘predicted’

what happened a decade later, announced an initial $34.95 million

grant in February, 2021, ‘to ensure more equitable access to Covid-19

testing and vaccines’ among other things in Africa in collaboration

with ‘24 organizations, businesses, and government agencies’.
The

pan-Africa initiative would focus on 10 countries: Burkina Faso,

Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania,

Uganda, and Zambia’.
Rajiv Shah, President of the Rockefeller

Foundation and former administrator of CIA-controlled USAID, said

that if Africa was not mass-vaccinated (to change the DNA of its

people) it was a ‘threat to all of humanity’ and not fair on Africans.
When someone from the Rockefeller Foundation says they want to

do something to help poor and deprived people and countries it is

time for a belly-laugh.
They are doing this out of the goodness of

their ‘heart’ because ‘vaccinating’ the entire global population is

what the ‘Covid’ hoax set out to achieve.
Official ‘decolonisation’ of

Africa by the Cult was merely a prelude to financial colonisation on

the road to a return to physical colonisation.
The ‘vaccine’ is vital to

that and the sudden and convenient death of the ‘Covid’ sceptic

president of Tanzania can be seen in its true light.
A lot of people in

Africa are aware that this is another form of colonisation and

exploitation and they need to stand their ground.
The ‘vaccine is working’ scam

A potential problem for the Cult was that the ‘vaccine’ is meant to

change human DNA and body messaging and not to protect anyone

from a ‘virus’ never shown to exist.
The vaccine couldn’t work

because it was not designed to work and how could they make it

appear to be working so that more people would have it?
This was

overcome by lowering the amplification rate of the PCR test to

produce fewer ‘cases’ and therefore fewer ‘deaths’.
Some of us had

been pointing out since March, 2020, that the amplification rate of

the test not testing for the ‘virus’ had been made artificially high to

generate positive tests which they could call ‘cases’ to justify

lockdowns.
The World Health Organization recommended an

absurdly high 45 amplification cycles to ensure the high positives

required by the Cult and then remained silent on the issue until

January 20th, 2021 – Biden’s Inauguration Day.
This was when the

‘vaccinations’ were seriously underway and on that day the WHO

recommended a er discussions with America’s CDC that

laboratories lowered their testing amplification.
Dr David Samadi, a

certified urologist and health writer, said the WHO was encouraging

all labs to reduce their cycle count for PCR tests.
He said the current

cycle was much too high and was ‘resulting in any particle being

declared a positive case’.
Even one mainstream news report I saw

said this meant the number of ‘Covid’ infections may have been

‘dramatically inflated’.
Oh, just a li le bit.
The CDC in America

issued new guidance to laboratories in April, 2021, to use 28 cycles

but only for ‘vaccinated’ people.
The timing of the CDC/WHO

interventions were cynically designed to make it appear the

‘vaccines’ were responsible for falling cases and deaths when the real

reason can be seen in the following examples.
New York’s state lab,

the Wadsworth Center, identified 872 positive tests in July, 2020,

based on a threshold of 40 cycles.
When the figure was lowered to 35

cycles 43 percent of the 872 were no longer ‘positives’.
At 30 cycles

the figure was 63 percent.
A Massachuse s lab found that between

85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive in July with a cycle

threshold of 40 would be negative at 30 cycles, Ashish Jha, MD,

director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said: ‘I’m really

shocked that it could be that high … Boy, does it really change the

way we need to be thinking about testing.’ I’m shocked that I could

see the obvious in the spring of 2020, with no medical background,

and most medical professionals still haven’t worked it out.
No, that’s

not shocking – it’s terrifying.
Three weeks a er the WHO directive to lower PCR cycles the

London Daily Mail ran this headline: ‘Why ARE Covid cases

plummeting?
New infections have fallen 45% in the US and 30%

globally in the past 3 weeks but experts say vaccine is NOT the main

driver because only 8% of Americans and 13% of people worldwide

have received their first dose.’ They acknowledged that the drop

could not be a ributed to the ‘vaccine’, but soon this morphed

throughout the media into the ‘vaccine’ has caused cases and deaths

to fall when it was the PCR threshold.
In December, 2020, there was

chaos at English Channel ports with truck drivers needing negative

‘Covid’ tests before they could board a ferry home for Christmas.
The government wanted to remove the backlog as fast as possible

and they brought in troops to do the ‘testing’.
Out of 1,600 drivers

just 36 tested positive and the rest were given the all clear to cross

the Channel.
I guess the authorities thought that 36 was the least

they could get away with without the unquestioning catching on.
The amplification trick which most people believed in the absence of

information in the mainstream applied more pressure on those

refusing the ‘vaccine’ to succumb when it ‘obviously worked’.
The

truth was the exact opposite with deaths in care homes soaring with

the ‘vaccine’ and in Israel the term used was ‘skyrocket’.
A re-

analysis of published data from the Israeli Health Ministry led by Dr

Hervé Seligmann at the Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical

Diseases at Aix-Marseille University found that Pfizer’s ‘Covid

vaccine’ killed ‘about 40 times more [elderly] people than the disease

itself would have killed’ during a five-week vaccination period and

260 times more younger people than would have died from the

‘virus’ even according to the manipulated ‘virus’ figures.
Dr

Seligmann and his co-study author, Haim Yativ, declared a er

reviewing the Israeli ‘vaccine’ death data: ‘This is a new Holocaust.’

Then, in mid-April, 2021, a er vast numbers of people worldwide

had been ‘vaccinated’, the story changed with clear coordination.
The UK government began to prepare the ground for more future

lockdowns when Nuremberg-destined Boris Johnson told yet

another whopper.
He said that cases had fallen because of lockdowns

not ‘vaccines’.
Lockdowns are irrelevant when there is no ‘virus’ and

the test and fraudulent death certificates are deciding the number of

‘cases’ and ‘deaths’.
Study a er study has shown that lockdowns

don’t work and instead kill and psychologically destroy people.
Meanwhile in the United States Anthony Fauci and Rochelle

Walensky, the ultra-Zionist head of the CDC, peddled the same line.
More lockdown was the answer and not the ‘vaccine’, a line repeated

on cue by the moron that is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Why all the hysteria to get everyone ‘vaccinated’ if lockdowns and

not ‘vaccines’ made the difference?
None of it makes sense on the

face of it.
Oh, but it does.
The Cult wants lockdowns and the

‘vaccine’ and if the ‘vaccine’ is allowed to be seen as the total answer

lockdowns would no longer be justified when there are still

livelihoods to destroy.
‘Variants’ and renewed upward manipulation

of PCR amplification are planned to instigate never-ending

lockdown and more ‘vaccines’.
You must have it – we’re desperate

Israel, where the Jewish and Arab population are ruled by the

Sabbatian Cult, was the front-runner in imposing the DNA-

manipulating ‘vaccine’ on its people to such an extent that Jewish

refusers began to liken what was happening to the early years of

Nazi Germany.
This would seem to be a fantastic claim.
Why would

a government of Jewish people be acting like the Nazis did?
If you

realise that the Sabbatian Cult was behind the Nazis and that

Sabbatians hate Jews the pieces start to fit and the question of why a

‘Jewish’ government would treat Jews with such callous disregard

for their lives and freedom finds an answer.
Those controlling the

government of Israel aren’t Jewish – they’re Sabbatian.
Israeli lawyer

Tamir Turgal was one who made the Nazi comparison in comments

to German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich who is leading a class action

lawsuit against the psychopaths for crimes against humanity.
Turgal

described how the Israeli government was vaccinating children and

pregnant women on the basis that there was no evidence that this

was dangerous when they had no evidence that it wasn’t dangerous

either.
They just had no evidence.
This was medical experimentation

and Turgal said this breached the Nuremberg Code about medical

experimentation and procedures requiring informed consent and

choice.
Think about that.
A Nuremberg Code developed because of

Nazi experimentation on Jews and others in concentration camps by

people like the evil-beyond-belief Josef Mengele is being breached by

the Israeli government; but when you know that it’s a Sabbatian

government along with its intelligence and military agencies like

Mossad, Shin Bet and the Israeli Defense Forces, and that Sabbatians

were the force behind the Nazis, the kaleidoscope comes into focus.
What have we come to when Israeli Jews are suing their government

for violating the Nuremberg Code by essentially making Israelis

subject to a medical experiment using the controversial ‘vaccines’?
It’s a shocker that this has to be done in the light of what happened

in Nazi Germany.
The Anshe Ha-Emet, or ‘People of the Truth’,

made up of Israeli doctors, lawyers, campaigners and public, have

launched a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court.
It says:

When the heads of the Ministry of Health as well as the prime minister presented the vaccine

in Israel and began the vaccination of Israeli residents, the vaccinated were not advised, that,

in practice, they are taking part in a medical experiment and that their consent is required for

this under the Nuremberg Code.
The irony is unbelievable, but easily explained in one word:

Sabbatians.
The foundation of Israeli ‘Covid’ apartheid is the ‘green

pass’ or ‘green passport’ which allows Jews and Arabs who have

had the DNA-manipulating ‘vaccine’ to go about their lives – to

work, fly, travel in general, go to shopping malls, bars, restaurants,

hotels, concerts, gyms, swimming pools, theatres and sports venues,

while non-’vaccinated’ are banned from all those places and

activities.
Israelis have likened the ‘green pass’ to the yellow stars

that Jews in Nazi Germany were forced to wear – the same as the

yellow stickers that a branch of UK supermarket chain Morrisons

told exempt mask-wears they had to display when shopping.
How

very sensitive.
The Israeli system is blatant South African-style

apartheid on the basis of compliance or non-compliance to fascism

rather than colour of the skin.
How appropriate that the Sabbatian

Israeli government was so close to the pre-Mandela apartheid

regime in Pretoria.
The Sabbatian-instigated ‘vaccine passport’ in

Israel is planned for everywhere.
Sabbatians struck a deal with

Pfizer that allowed them to lead the way in the percentage of a

national population infused with synthetic material and the result

was catastrophic.
Israeli freedom activist Shai Dannon told me how

chairs were appearing on beaches that said ‘vaccinated only’.
Health

Minister Yuli Edelstein said that anyone unwilling or unable to get

the jabs that ‘confer immunity’ will be ‘le behind’.
The man’s a liar.
Not even the makers claim the ‘vaccines’ confer immunity.
When

you see those figures of ‘vaccine’ deaths these psychopaths were

saying that you must take the chance the ‘vaccine’ will kill you or

maim you while knowing it will change your DNA or lockdown for

you will be permanent.
That’s fascism.
The Israeli parliament passed

a law to allow personal information of the non-vaccinated to be

shared with local and national authorities for three months.
This was

claimed by its supporters to be a way to ‘encourage’ people to be

vaccinated.
Hadas Ziv from Physicians for Human Rights described

this as a ‘draconian law which crushed medical ethics and the

patient rights’.
But that’s the idea, the Sabbatians would reply.
Your papers, please

Sabbatian Israel was leading what has been planned all along to be a

global ‘vaccine pass’ called a ‘green passport’ without which you

would remain in permanent lockdown restriction and unable to do

anything.
This is how badly – desperately – the Cult is to get everyone

‘vaccinated’.
The term and colour ‘green’ was not by chance and

related to the psychology of fusing the perception of the green

climate hoax with the ‘Covid’ hoax and how the ‘solution’ to both is

the same Great Reset.
Lying politicians, health officials and

psychologists denied there were any plans for mandatory

vaccinations or restrictions based on vaccinations, but they knew

that was exactly what was meant to happen with governments of all

countries reaching agreements to enforce a global system.
‘Free’

Denmark and ‘free’ Sweden unveiled digital vaccine certification.
Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy,

Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, and Spain have all commi ed to a

vaccine passport system and the rest including the whole of the EU

would follow.
The satanic UK government will certainly go this way

despite mendacious denials and at the time of writing it is trying to

manipulate the public into having the ‘vaccine’ so they could go

abroad on a summer holiday.
How would that work without

something to prove you had the synthetic toxicity injected into you?
Documents show that the EU’s European Commission was moving

towards ‘vaccine certificates’ in 2018 and 2019 before the ‘Covid’

hoax began.
They knew what was coming.
Abracadabra – Ursula

von der Leyen, the German President of the Commission,

announced in March, 2021, an EU ‘Digital Green Certificate’ – green

again – to track the public’s ‘Covid status’.
The passport sting is

worldwide and the Far East followed the same pa ern with South

Korea ruling that only those with ‘vaccination’ passports – again the

green pass – would be able to ‘return to their daily lives’.
Bill Gates has been preparing for this ‘passport’ with other Cult

operatives for years and beyond the paper version is a Gates-funded

‘digital ta oo’ to identify who has been vaccinated and who hasn’t.
The ‘ta oo’ is reported to include a substance which is externally

readable to confirm who has been vaccinated.
This is a bio-luminous

light-generating enzyme (think fireflies) called … Luciferase.
Yes,

named a er the Cult ‘god’ Lucifer the ‘light bringer’ of whom more

to come.
Gates said he funded the readable ta oo to ensure children

in the developing world were vaccinated and no one was missed out.
He cares so much about poor kids as we know.
This was just the

cover story to develop a vaccine tagging system for everyone on the

planet.
Gates has been funding the ID2020 ‘alliance’ to do just that in

league with other lovely people at Microso , GAVI, the Rockefeller

Foundation, Accenture and IDEO.org.
He said in interviews in

March, 2020, before any ‘vaccine’ publicly existed, that the world

must have a globalised digital certificate to track the ‘virus’ and who

had been vaccinated.
Gates knew from the start that the mRNA

vaccines were coming and when they would come and that the plan

was to tag the ‘vaccinated’ to marginalise the intelligent and stop

them doing anything including travel.
Evil just doesn’t suffice.
Gates

was exposed for offering a $10 million bribe to the Nigerian House

of Representatives to invoke compulsory ‘Covid’ vaccination of all

Nigerians.
Sara Cunial, a member of the Italian Parliament, called

Gates a ‘vaccine criminal’.
She urged the Italian President to hand

him over to the International Criminal Court for crimes against

humanity and condemned his plans to ‘chip the human race’

through ID2020.
You know it’s a long-planned agenda when war criminal and Cult

gofer Tony Blair is on the case.
With the scale of arrogance only

someone as dark as Blair can muster he said: ‘Vaccination in the end

is going to be your route to liberty.’ Blair is a disgusting piece of

work and he confirms that again.
The media has given a lot of

coverage to a bloke called Charlie Mullins, founder of London’s

biggest independent plumbing company, Pimlico Plumbers, who has

said he won’t employ anyone who has not been vaccinated or have

them go to any home where people are not vaccinated.
He said that

if he had his way no one would be allowed to walk the streets if they

have not been vaccinated.
Gates was cheering at the time while I was

alerting the white coats.
The plan is that people will qualify for

‘passports’ for having the first two doses and then to keep it they

will have to have all the follow ups and new ones for invented

‘variants’ until human genetics is transformed and many are dead

who can’t adjust to the changes.
Hollywood celebrities – the usual

propaganda stunt – are promoting something called the WELL

Health-Safety Rating to verify that a building or space has ‘taken the

necessary steps to prioritize the health and safety of their staff,

visitors and other stakeholders’.
They included Lady Gaga, Jennifer

Lopez, Michael B.
Jordan, Robert DeNiro, Venus Williams, Wolfgang

Puck, Deepak Chopra and 17th Surgeon General Richard Carmona.
Yawn.
WELL Health-Safety has big connections with China.
Parent

company Delos is headed by former Goldman Sachs partner Paul

Scialla.
This is another example – and we will see so many others –

of using the excuse of ‘health’ to dictate the lives and activities of the

population.
I guess one confirmation of the ‘safety’ of buildings is

that only ‘vaccinated’ people can go in, right?
Electronic concentration camps

I wrote decades ago about the plans to restrict travel and here we are

for those who refuse to bow to tyranny.
This can be achieved in one

go with air travel if the aviation industry makes a blanket decree.
The ‘vaccine’ and guaranteed income are designed to be part of a

global version of China’s social credit system which tracks behaviour

24/7 and awards or deletes ‘credits’ based on whether your

behaviour is supported by the state or not.
I mean your entire

lifestyle – what you do, eat, say, everything.
Once your credit score

falls below a certain level consequences kick in.
In China tens of

millions have been denied travel by air and train because of this.
All

the locations and activities denied to refusers by the ‘vaccine’

passports will be included in one big mass ban on doing almost

anything for those that don’t bow their head to government.
It’s

beyond fascist and a new term is required to describe its extremes – I

guess fascist technocracy will have to do.
The way the Chinese

system of technological – technocratic – control is sweeping the West

can be seen in the Los Angeles school system and is planned to be

expanded worldwide.
Every child is required to have a ‘Covid’-

tracking app scanned daily before they can enter the classroom.
The

so-called Daily Pass tracking system is produced by Gates’ Microso

which I’m sure will shock you rigid.
The pass will be scanned using

a barcode (one step from an inside-the-body barcode) and the

information will include health checks, ‘Covid’ tests and

vaccinations.
Entry codes are for one specific building only and

access will only be allowed if a student or teacher has a negative test

with a test not testing for the ‘virus’, has no symptoms of anything

alleged to be related to ‘Covid’ (symptoms from a range of other

illness), and has a temperature under 100 degrees.
No barcode, no

entry, is planned to be the case for everywhere and not only schools.
Kids are being psychologically prepared to accept this as ‘normal’

their whole life which is why what they can impose in schools is so

important to the Cult and its gofers.
Long-time American freedom

campaigner John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute was not

exaggerating when he said: ‘Databit by databit, we are building our

own electronic concentration camps.’ Canada under its Cult gofer

prime minister Justin Trudeau has taken a major step towards the

real thing with people interned against their will if they test positive

with a test not testing for the ‘virus’ when they arrive at a Canadian

airport.
They are jailed in internment hotels o en without food or

water for long periods and with many doors failing to lock there

have been sexual assaults.
The interned are being charged

sometimes $2,000 for the privilege of being abused in this way.
Trudeau is fully on board with the Cult and says the ‘Covid

pandemic’ has provided an opportunity for a global ‘reset’ to

permanently change Western civilisation.
His number two, Deputy

Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, is a trustee of the World Economic

Forum and a Rhodes Scholar.
The Trudeau family have long been

servants of the Cult.
See The Biggest Secret and Cathy O’Brien’s book

Trance-Formation of America for the horrific background to Trudeau’s

father Pierre Trudeau another Canadian prime minister.
Hide your

fascism behind the façade of a heart-on-the-sleeve liberal.
It’s a well-

honed Cult technique.
What can the ‘vaccine’ really do?
We have a ‘virus’ never shown to exist and ‘variants’ of the ‘virus’

that have also never been shown to exist except, like the ‘original’, as

computer-generated fictions.
Even if you believe there’s a ‘virus’ the

‘case’ to ‘death’ rate is in the region of 0.23 to 0.15 percent and those

‘deaths’ are concentrated among the very old around the same

average age that people die anyway.
In response to this lack of threat

(in truth none) psychopaths and idiots, knowingly and unknowingly

answering to Gates and the Cult, are seeking to ‘vaccinate’ every

man, woman and child on Planet Earth.
Clearly the ‘vaccine’ is not

about ‘Covid’ – none of this ever has been.
So what is it all about

really?
Why the desperation to infuse genetically-manipulating

synthetic material into everyone through mRNA fraudulent

‘vaccines’ with the intent of doing this over and over with the

excuses of ‘variants’ and other ‘virus’ inventions?
Dr Sherri

Tenpenny, an osteopathic medical doctor in the United States, has

made herself an expert on vaccines and their effects as a vehement

campaigner against their use.
Tenpenny was board certified in

emergency medicine, the director of a level two trauma centre for 12

years, and moved to Cleveland in 1996 to start an integrative

medicine practice which has treated patients from all 50 states and

some 17 other countries.
Weaning people off pharmaceutical drugs is

a speciality.
She became interested in the consequences of vaccines a er

a ending a meeting at the National Vaccine Information Center in

Washington DC in 2000 where she ‘sat through four days of listening

to medical doctors and scientists and lawyers and parents of vaccine

injured kids’ and asked: ‘What’s going on?’ She had never been

vaccinated and never got ill while her father was given a list of

vaccines to be in the military and was ‘sick his entire life’.
The

experience added to her questions and she began to examine vaccine

documents from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
A er

reading the first one, the 1998 version of The General Recommendations

of Vaccination, she thought: ‘This is it?’ The document was poorly

wri en and bad science and Tenpenny began 20 years of research

into vaccines that continues to this day.
She began her research into

‘Covid vaccines’ in March, 2020, and she describes them as ‘deadly’.
For many, as we have seen, they already have been.
Tenpenny said

that in the first 30 days of the ‘vaccine’ rollout in the United States

there had been more than 40,000 adverse events reported to the

vaccine adverse event database.
A document had been delivered to

her the day before that was 172 pages long.
‘We have over 40,000

adverse events; we have over 3,100 cases of [potentially deadly]

anaphylactic shock; we have over 5,000 neurological reactions.’

Effects ranged from headaches to numbness, dizziness and vertigo,

to losing feeling in hands or feet and paraesthesia which is when

limbs ‘fall asleep’ and people have the sensation of insects crawling

underneath their skin.
All this happened in the first 30 days and

remember that only about ten percent (or far less) of adverse reactions

and vaccine-related deaths are estimated to be officially reported.
Tenpenny said:

So can you think of one single product in any industry, any industry, for as long as products

have been made on the planet that within 30 days we have 40,000 people complaining of

side effects that not only is still on the market but … we’ve got paid actors telling us how great

they are for getting their vaccine.
We’re offering people $500 if they will just get their vaccine and we’ve got nurses and doctors going; ‘I got the vaccine, I got the vaccine’.
Tenpenny said they were not going to be ‘happy dancing folks’

when they began to suffer Bell’s palsy (facial paralysis),

neuropathies, cardiac arrhythmias and autoimmune reactions that

kill through a blood disorder.
‘They’re not going to be so happy,

happy then, but we’re never going to see pictures of those people’

she said.
Tenpenny described the ‘vaccine’ as ‘a well-designed killing

tool’.
No off-switch

Bad as the initial consequences had been Tenpenny said it would be

maybe 14 months before we began to see the ‘full ravage’ of what is

going to happen to the ‘Covid vaccinated’ with full-out

consequences taking anything between two years and 20 years to

show.
You can understand why when you consider that variations of

the ‘Covid vaccine’ use mRNA (messenger RNA) to in theory

activate the immune system to produce protective antibodies

without using the actual ‘virus’.
How can they when it’s a computer

program and they’ve never isolated what they claim is the ‘real

thing’?
Instead they use synthetic mRNA.
They are inoculating

synthetic material into the body which through a technique known

as the Trojan horse is absorbed into cells to change the nature of

DNA.
Human DNA is changed by an infusion of messenger RNA

and with each new ‘vaccine’ of this type it is changed even more.
Say

so and you are banned by Cult Internet platforms.
The contempt the

contemptuous Mark Zuckerberg has for the truth and human health

can be seen in an internal Facebook video leaked to the Project

Veritas investigative team in which he said of the ‘Covid vaccines’:

‘… I share some caution on this because we just don’t know the long

term side-effects of basically modifying people’s DNA and RNA.’ At

the same time this disgusting man’s Facebook was censoring and

banning anyone saying exactly the same.
He must go before a

Nuremberg trial for crimes against humanity when he knows that he

is censoring legitimate concerns and denying the right of informed

consent on behalf of the Cult that owns him.
People have been killed

and damaged by the very ‘vaccination’ technique he cast doubt on

himself when they may not have had the ‘vaccine’ with access to

information that he denied them.
The plan is to have at least annual

‘Covid vaccinations’, add others to deal with invented ‘variants’, and

change all other vaccines into the mRNA system.
Pfizer executives

told shareholders at a virtual Barclays Global Healthcare Conference

in March, 2021, that the public may need a third dose of ‘Covid

vaccine’, plus regular yearly boosters and the company planned to

hike prices to milk the profits in a ‘significant opportunity for our

vaccine’.
These are the professional liars, cheats and opportunists

who are telling you their ‘vaccine’ is safe.
Given this volume of

mRNA planned to be infused into the human body and its ability to

then replicate we will have a transformation of human genetics from

biological to synthetic biological – exactly the long-time Cult plan for

reasons we’ll see – and many will die.
Sherri Tenpenny said of this

replication:

It’s like having an on-button but no off-button and that whole mechanism … they actually

give it a name and they call it the Trojan horse mechanism, because it allows that [synthetic]

virus and that piece of that [synthetic] virus to get inside of your cells, start to replicate and even get inserted into other parts of your DNA as a Trojan-horse.
Ask the overwhelming majority of people who have the ‘vaccine’

what they know about the contents and what they do and they

would reply: ‘The government says it will stop me ge ing the virus.’

Governments give that false impression on purpose to increase take-

up.
You can read Sherri Tenpenny’s detailed analysis of the health

consequences in her blog at Vaxxter.com , but in summary these are some of them.
She highlights the statement by Bill Gates about how

human beings can become their own ‘vaccine manufacturing

machine’.
The man is insane.
[‘Vaccine’-generated] ‘antibodies’ carry

synthetic messenger RNA into the cells and the damage starts,

Tenpenny contends, and she says that lungs can be adversely

affected through varying degrees of pus and bleeding which

obviously affects breathing and would be dubbed ‘Covid-19’.
Even

more sinister was the impact of ‘antibodies’ on macrophages, a white

blood cell of the immune system.
They consist of Type 1 and Type 2

which have very different functions.
She said Type 1 are ‘hyper-

vigilant’ white blood cells which ‘gobble up’ bacteria etc.
However,

in doing so, this could cause inflammation and in extreme

circumstances be fatal.
She says these affects are mitigated by Type 2

macrophages which kick in to calm down the system and stop it

going rogue.
They clear up dead tissue debris and reduce

inflammation that the Type 1 ‘fire crews’ have caused.
Type 1 kills

the infection and Type 2 heals the damage, she says.
This is her

punchline with regard to ‘Covid vaccinations’: She says that mRNA

‘antibodies’ block Type 2 macrophages by a aching to them and

deactivating them.
This meant that when the Type 1 response was

triggered by infection there was nothing to stop that ge ing out of

hand by calming everything down.
There’s an on-switch, but no off-

switch, she says.
What follows can be ‘over and out, see you when I

see you’.
Genetic suicide

Tenpenny also highlights the potential for autoimmune disease – the

body a acking itself – which has been associated with vaccines since

they first appeared.
Infusing a synthetic foreign substance into cells

could cause the immune system to react in a panic believing that the

body is being overwhelmed by an invader (it is) and the

consequences can again be fatal.
There is an autoimmune response

known as a ‘cytokine storm’ which I have likened to a homeowner

panicked by an intruder and picking up a gun to shoot randomly in

all directions before turning the fire on himself.
The immune system

unleashes a storm of inflammatory response called cytokines to a

threat and the body commits hara-kiri.
The lesson is that you mess

with the body’s immune response at your peril and these ‘vaccines’

seriously – fundamentally – mess with immune response.
Tenpenny

refers to a consequence called anaphylactic shock which is a severe

and highly dangerous allergic reaction when the immune system

floods the body with chemicals.
She gives the example of having a

bee sting which primes the immune system and makes it sensitive to

those chemicals.
When people are stung again maybe years later the

immune response can be so powerful that it leads to anaphylactic

shock.
Tenpenny relates this ‘shock’ with regard to the ‘Covid

vaccine’ to something called polyethylene glycol or PEG.
Enormous

numbers of people have become sensitive to this over decades of use

in a whole range of products and processes including food, drink,

skin creams and ‘medicine’.
Studies have claimed that some 72

percent of people have antibodies triggered by PEG compared with

two percent in the 1960s and allergic hypersensitive reactions to this

become a gathering cause for concern.
Tenpenny points out that the

‘mRNA vaccine’ is coated in a ‘bubble’ of polyethylene glycol which

has the potential to cause anaphylactic shock through immune

sensitivity.
Many reports have appeared of people reacting this way

a er having the ‘Covid vaccine’.
What do we think is going to

happen as humanity has more and more of these ‘vaccines’?
Tenpenny said: ‘All these pictures we have seen with people with

these rashes … these weepy rashes, big reactions on their arms and

things like that – it’s an acute allergic reaction most likely to the

polyethylene glycol that you’ve been previously primed and

sensitised to.’

Those who have not studied the conspiracy and its perpetrators at

length might think that making the population sensitive to PEG and

then pu ing it in these ‘vaccines’ is just a coincidence.
It is not.
It is

instead testament to how carefully and coldly-planned current

events have been and the scale of the conspiracy we are dealing

with.
Tenpenny further explains that the ‘vaccine’ mRNA procedure

can breach the blood-brain barrier which protects the brain from

toxins and other crap that will cause malfunction.
In this case they

could make two proteins corrupt brain function to cause

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) , a progressive nervous system

disease leading to loss of muscle control, and frontal lobe

degeneration – Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Immunologist J.
Bart

Classon published a paper connecting mRNA ‘vaccines’ to prion

disease which can lead to Alzheimer’s and other forms of

neurogenerative disease while others have pointed out the potential

to affect the placenta in ways that make women infertile.
This will

become highly significant in the next chapter when I will discuss

other aspects of this non-vaccine that relate to its nanotechnology

and transmission from the injected to the uninjected.
Qualified in idiocy

Tenpenny describes how research has confirmed that these ‘vaccine’-

generated antibodies can interact with a range of other tissues in the

body and a ack many other organs including the lungs.
‘This means

that if you have a hundred people standing in front of you that all

got this shot they could have a hundred different symptoms.’

Anyone really think that Cult gofers like the Queen, Tony Blair,

Christopher Whi y, Anthony Fauci, and all the other psychopaths

have really had this ‘vaccine’ in the pictures we’ve seen?
Not a

bloody chance.
Why don’t doctors all tell us about all these dangers

and consequences of the ‘Covid vaccine’?
Why instead do they

encourage and pressure patients to have the shot?
Don’t let’s think

for a moment that doctors and medical staff can’t be stupid, lazy, and

psychopathic and that’s without the financial incentives to give the

jab.
Tenpenny again:

Some people are going to die from the vaccine directly but a large number of people are

going to start to get horribly sick and get all kinds of autoimmune diseases 42 days to maybe a

year out.
What are they going to do, these stupid doctors who say; ‘Good for you for getting

that vaccine.’ What are they going to say; ‘Oh, it must be a mutant, we need to give an extra

dose of that vaccine.’

Because now the vaccine, instead of one dose or two doses we need three or four because the

stupid physicians aren’t taking the time to learn anything about it.
If I can learn this sitting in my living room reading a 19 page paper and several others so can they.
There’s nothing

special about me, I just take the time to do it.
Remember how Sara Kayat, the NHS and TV doctor, said that the

‘Covid vaccine’ would ‘100 percent prevent hospitalisation and

death’.
Doctors can be idiots like every other profession and they

should not be worshipped as infallible.
They are not and far from it.
Behind many medical and scientific ‘experts’ lies an uninformed prat

trying to hide themselves from you although in the ‘Covid’ era many

have failed to do so as with UK narrative-repeating ‘TV doctor’

Hilary Jones.
Pushing back against the minority of proper doctors

and scientists speaking out against the ‘vaccine’ has been the entire

edifice of the Cult global state in the form of governments, medical

systems, corporations, mainstream media, Silicon Valley, and an

army of compliant doctors, medical staff and scientists willing to say

anything for money and to enhance their careers by promoting the

party line.
If you do that you are an ‘expert’ and if you won’t you are

an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘Covidiot’.
The pressure to be ‘vaccinated’ is

incessant.
We have even had reports claiming that the ‘vaccine’ can

help cure cancer and Alzheimer’s and make the lame walk.
I am

waiting for the announcement that it can bring you coffee in the

morning and cook your tea.
Just as the symptoms of ‘Covid’ seem to

increase by the week so have the miracles of the ‘vaccine’.
American

supermarket giant Kroger Co.
offered nearly 500,000 employees in

35 states a $100 bonus for having the ‘vaccine’ while donut chain

Krispy Kreme promised ‘vaccinated’ customers a free glazed donut

every day for the rest of 2021.
Have your DNA changed and you will

get a doughnut although we might not have to give you them for

long.
Such offers and incentives confirm the desperation.
Perhaps the worse vaccine-stunt of them all was UK ‘Health’

Secretary Ma -the-prat Hancock on live TV a er watching a clip of

someone being ‘vaccinated’ when the roll-out began.
Hancock faked

tears so badly it was embarrassing.
Brain-of-Britain Piers Morgan,

the lockdown-supporting, ‘vaccine’ supporting, ‘vaccine’ passport-

supporting, TV host played along with Hancock – ‘You’re quite

emotional about that’ he said in response to acting so atrocious it

would have been called out at a school nativity which will

presumably today include Mary and Jesus in masks, wise men

keeping their camels six feet apart, and shepherds under tent arrest.
System-serving Morgan tweeted this: ‘Love the idea of covid vaccine

passports for everywhere: flights, restaurants, clubs, football, gyms,

shops etc.
It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their

bullsh*t bluff called & bar themselves from going anywhere that

responsible citizens go.’ If only I could aspire to his genius.
To think

that Morgan, who specialises in shouting over anyone he disagrees

with, was lauded as a free speech hero when he lost his job a er

storming off the set of his live show like a child throwing his dolly

out of the pram.
If he is a free speech hero we are in real trouble.
I

have no idea what ‘bullsh*t’ means, by the way, the * throws me

completely.
The Cult is desperate to infuse its synthetic DNA-changing

concoction into everyone and has been using every lie, trick and

intimidation to do so.
The question of ‘ Why?’ we shall now address.
CHAPTER TEN

Human 2.0

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general

educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to

speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted –

Alan Turing (1912-1954), the ‘Father of artificial intelligence‘

Ihave been exposing for decades the plan to transform the human

body from a biological to a synthetic-biological state.
The new

human that I will call Human 2.0 is planned to be connected to

artificial intelligence and a global AI ‘Smart Grid’ that would operate

as one global system in which AI would control everything from

your fridge to your heating system to your car to your mind.
Humans would no longer be ‘human’, but post-human and sub-

human, with their thinking and emotional processes replaced by AI.
What I said sounded crazy and beyond science fiction and I could

understand that.
To any balanced, rational, mind it is crazy.
Today,

however, that world is becoming reality and it puts the ‘Covid

vaccine’ into its true context.
Ray Kurzweil is the ultra-Zionist

‘computer scientist, inventor and futurist’ and co-founder of the

Singularity University.
Singularity refers to the merging of humans

with machines or ‘transhumanism’.
Kurzweil has said humanity

would be connected to the cyber ‘cloud’ in the period of the ever-

recurring year of 2030:

Our thinking … will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking … humans will be

able to extend their limitations and ‘think in the cloud’ … We’re going to put gateways to the

cloud in our brains...
We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves...
In my view, that’s the nature of being human – we transcend our limitations.
As the technology becomes

vastly superior to what we are then the small proportion that is still human gets smaller and

smaller and smaller until it’s just utterly negligible.
They are trying to sell this end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it as the

next stage of ‘evolution’ when we become super-human and ‘like the

gods’.
They are lying to you.
Shocked, eh?
The population, and again

especially the young, have been manipulated into addiction to

technologies designed to enslave them for life.
First they induced an

addiction to smartphones (holdables); next they moved to

technology on the body (wearables); and then began the invasion of

the body (implantables).
I warned way back about the plan for

microchipped people and we are now entering that era.
We should

not be diverted into thinking that this refers only to chips we can see.
Most important are the nanochips known as smart dust, neural dust

and nanobots which are far too small to be seen by the human eye.
Nanotechnology is everywhere, increasingly in food products, and

released into the atmosphere by the geoengineering of the skies

funded by Bill Gates to ‘shut out the Sun’ and ‘save the planet from

global warming’.
Gates has been funding a project to spray millions

of tonnes of chalk (calcium carbonate) into the stratosphere over

Sweden to ‘dim the Sun’ and cool the Earth.
Scientists warned the

move could be disastrous for weather systems in ways no one can

predict and opposition led to the Swedish space agency announcing

that the ‘experiment’ would not be happening as planned in the

summer of 2021; but it shows where the Cult is going with dimming

the impact of the Sun and there’s an associated plan to change the

planet’s atmosphere.
Who gives psychopath Gates the right to

dictate to the entire human race and dismantle planetary systems?
The world will not be safe while this man is at large.
The global warming hoax has made the Sun, like the gas of life,

something to fear when both are essential to good health and human

survival (more inversion).
The body transforms sunlight into vital

vitamin D through a process involving … cholesterol.
This is the

cholesterol we are also told to fear.
We are urged to take Big Pharma

statin drugs to reduce cholesterol and it’s all systematic.
Reducing

cholesterol means reducing vitamin D uptake with all the multiple

health problems that will cause.
At least if you take statins long term

it saves the government from having to pay you a pension.
The

delivery system to block sunlight is widely referred to as chemtrails

although these have a much deeper agenda, too.
They appear at first

to be contrails or condensation trails streaming from aircra into

cold air at high altitudes.
Contrails disperse very quickly while

chemtrails do not and spread out across the sky before eventually

their content falls to earth.
Many times I have watched aircra cross-

cross a clear blue sky releasing chemtrails until it looks like a cloudy

day.
Chemtrails contain many things harmful to humans and the

natural world including toxic heavy metals, aluminium (see

Alzheimer’s) and nanotechnology.
Ray Kurzweil reveals the reason

without actually saying so: ‘Nanobots will infuse all the ma er

around us with information.
Rocks, trees, everything will become

these intelligent creatures.’ How do you deliver that?
From the sky.
Self-replicating nanobots would connect everything to the Smart

Grid.
The phenomenon of Morgellons disease began in the chemtrail

era and the correlation has led to it being dubbed the ‘chemtrail

disease’.
Self-replicating fibres appear in the body that can be pulled

out through the skin.
Morgellons fibres continue to grow outside the

body and have a form of artificial intelligence.
I cover this at greater

length in Phantom Self.
‘Vaccine’ operating system

‘Covid vaccines’ with their self-replicating synthetic material are also

designed to make the connection between humanity and Kurzweil’s

‘cloud’.
American doctor and dedicated campaigner for truth, Carrie

Madej, an Internal Medicine Specialist in Georgia with more than 20

years medical experience, has highlighted the nanotechnology aspect

of the fake ‘vaccines’.
She explains how one of the components in at

least the Moderna and Pfizer synthetic potions are ‘lipid

nanoparticles’ which are ‘like li le tiny computer bits’ – a ‘sci-fi

substance’ known as nanobots and hydrogel which can be ‘triggered

at any moment to deliver its payload’ and act as ‘biosensors’.
The

synthetic substance had ‘the ability to accumulate data from your

body like your breathing, your respiration, thoughts and emotions,

all kind of things’ and each syringe could carry a million nanobots:

This substance because it’s like little bits of computers in your body, crazy, but it’s true, it can do that, [and] obviously has the ability to act through Wi-Fi.
It can receive and transmit

energy, messages, frequencies or impulses.
That issue has never been addressed by these

companies.
What does that do to the human?
Just imagine getting this substance in you and it can react to things all around you, the 5G,

your smart device, your phones, what is happening with that?
What if something is triggering

it, too, like an impulse, a frequency?
We have something completely foreign in the human

body.
Madej said her research revealed that electromagnetic (EMF)

frequencies emi ed by phones and other devices had increased

dramatically in the same period of the ‘vaccine’ rollout and she was

seeing more people with radiation problems as 5G and other

electromagnetic technology was expanded and introduced to schools

and hospitals.
She said she was ‘floored with the EMF coming off’

the devices she checked.
All this makes total sense and syncs with

my own work of decades when you think that Moderna refers in

documents to its mRNA ‘vaccine’ as an ‘operating system’:

Recognizing the broad potential of mRNA science, we set out to create an mRNA technology

platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer.
It is designed so

that it can plug and play interchangeably with different programs.
In our case, the ‘program’

or ‘app’ is our mRNA drug – the unique mRNA sequence that codes for a protein …

… Our MRNA Medicines – ‘The ‘Software Of Life’: When we have a concept for a new

mRNA medicine and begin research, fundamental components are already in place.
Generally, the only thing that changes from one potential mRNA medicine to another is the

coding region – the actual genetic code that instructs ribosomes to make protein.
Utilizing

these instruction sets gives our investigational mRNA medicines a software-like quality.
We

also have the ability to combine different mRNA sequences encoding for different proteins in

a single mRNA investigational medicine.
Who needs a real ‘virus’ when you can create a computer version to

justify infusing your operating system into the entire human race on

the road to making living, breathing people into cyborgs?
What is

missed with the ‘vaccines’ is the digital connection between synthetic

material and the body that I highlighted earlier with the study that

hacked a computer with human DNA.
On one level the body is

digital, based on mathematical codes, and I’ll have more about that

in the next chapter.
Those who ridiculously claim that mRNA

‘vaccines’ are not designed to change human genetics should explain

the words of Dr Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, in a 2017

TED talk.
He said that over the last 30 years ‘we’ve been living this

phenomenal digital scientific revolution, and I’m here today to tell

you, that we are actually hacking the software of life, and that it’s

changing the way we think about prevention and treatment of

disease’:

In every cell there’s this thing called messenger RNA, or mRNA for short, that transmits the

critical information from the DNA in our genes to the protein, which is really the stuff we’re

all made out of.
This is the critical information that determines what the cell will do.
So we

think about it as an operating system.
So if you could change that, if you could introduce a

line of code, or change a line of code, it turns out, that has profound implications for

everything, from the flu to cancer.
Zaks should more accurately have said that this has profound

implications for the human genetic code and the nature of DNA.
Communications within the body go both ways and not only one.
But, hey, no, the ‘Covid vaccine’ will not affect your genetics.
Cult

fact-checkers say so even though the man who helped to develop the

mRNA technique says that it does.
Zaks said in 2017:

If you think about what it is we’re trying to do.
We’ve taken information and our

understanding of that information and how that information is transmitted in a cell, and we’ve

taken our understanding of medicine and how to make drugs, and we’re fusing the two.
We

think of it as information therapy.
I have been writing for decades that the body is an information

field communicating with itself and the wider world.
This is why

radiation which is information can change the information field of

body and mind through phenomena like 5G and change their nature

and function.
‘Information therapy’ means to change the body’s

information field and change the way it operates.
DNA is a receiver-

transmi er of information and can be mutated by information like

mRNA synthetic messaging.
Technology to do this has been ready

and waiting in the underground bases and other secret projects to be

rolled out when the ‘Covid’ hoax was played.
‘Trials’ of such short

and irrelevant duration were only for public consumption.
When

they say the ‘vaccine’ is ‘experimental’ that is not true.
It may appear

to be ‘experimental’ to those who don’t know what’s going on, but

the trials have already been done to ensure the Cult gets the result it

desires.
Zaks said that it took decades to sequence the human

genome, completed in 2003, but now they could do it in a week.
By

‘they’ he means scientists operating in the public domain.
In the

secret projects they were sequencing the genome in a week long

before even 2003.
Deluge of mRNA

Highly significantly the Moderna document says the guiding

premise is that if using mRNA as a medicine works for one disease

then it should work for many diseases.
They were leveraging the

flexibility afforded by their platform and the fundamental role

mRNA plays in protein synthesis to pursue mRNA medicines for a

broad spectrum of diseases.
Moderna is confirming what I was

saying through 2020 that multiple ‘vaccines’ were planned for

‘Covid’ (and later invented ‘variants’) and that previous vaccines

would be converted to the mRNA system to infuse the body with

massive amounts of genetically-manipulating synthetic material to

secure a transformation to a synthetic-biological state.
The ‘vaccines’

are designed to kill stunning numbers as part of the long-exposed

Cult depopulation agenda and transform the rest.
Given this is the

goal you can appreciate why there is such hysterical demand for

every human to be ‘vaccinated’ for an alleged ‘disease’ that has an

estimated ‘infection’ to ‘death’ ratio of 0.23 -0.15 percent.
As I write

children are being given the ‘vaccine’ in trials (their parents are a

disgrace) and ever-younger people are being offered the vaccine for

a ‘virus’ that even if you believe it exists has virtually zero chance of

harming them.
Horrific effects of the ‘trials’ on a 12-year-old girl

were revealed by a family member to be serious brain and gastric

problems that included a bowel obstruction and the inability to

swallow liquids or solids.
She was unable to eat or drink without

throwing up, had extreme pain in her back, neck and abdomen, and

was paralysed from the waist down which stopped her urinating

unaided.
When the girl was first taken to hospital doctors said it was

all in her mind.
She was signed up for the ‘trial’ by her parents for

whom no words suffice.
None of this ‘Covid vaccine’ insanity makes

any sense unless you see what the ‘vaccine’ really is – a body-

changer.
Synthetic biology or ‘SynBio’ is a fast-emerging and

expanding scientific discipline which includes everything from

genetic and molecular engineering to electrical and computer

engineering.
Synthetic biology is defined in these ways:

• A multidisciplinary area of research that seeks to create new

biological parts, devices, and systems, or to redesign systems that

are already found in nature.
• The use of a mixture of physical engineering and genetic

engineering to create new (and therefore synthetic) life forms.
• An emerging field of research that aims to combine the

knowledge and methods of biology, engineering and related

disciplines in the design of chemically-synthesized DNA to create

organisms with novel or enhanced characteristics and traits

(synthetic organisms including humans).
We now have synthetic blood, skin, organs and limbs being

developed along with synthetic body parts produced by 3D printers.
These are all elements of the synthetic human programme and this

comment by Kurzweil’s co-founder of the Singularity University,

Peter Diamandis, can be seen in a whole new light with the ‘Covid’

hoax and the sanctions against those that refuse the ‘vaccine’:

Anybody who is going to be resisting the progress forward [to transhumanism] is going to be

resisting evolution and, fundamentally, they will die out.
It’s not a matter of whether it’s good or bad.
It’s going to happen.
‘Resisting evolution’?
What absolute bollocks.
The arrogance of these

people is without limit.
His ‘it’s going to happen’ mantra is another

way of saying ‘resistance is futile’ to break the spirit of those pushing

back and we must not fall for it.
Ge ing this genetically-

transforming ‘vaccine’ into everyone is crucial to the Cult plan for

total control and the desperation to achieve that is clear for anyone

to see.
Vaccine passports are a major factor in this and they, too, are a

form of resistance is futile.
It’s NOT.
The paper funded by the

Rockefeller Foundation for the 2013 ‘health conference’ in China

said:

We will interact more with artificial intelligence.
The use of robotics, bio-engineering to

augment human functioning is already well underway and will advance.
Re-engineering of

humans into potentially separate and unequal forms through genetic engineering or mixed

human-robots raises debates on ethics and equality.
A new demography is projected to emerge after 2030 [that year again] of technologies

(robotics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology) producing robots, engineered organisms,

‘nanobots’ and artificial intelligence (AI) that can self-replicate.
Debates will grow on the

implications of an impending reality of human designed life.
What is happening today is so long planned.
The world army

enforcing the will of the world government is intended to be a robot

army, not a human one.
Today’s military and its technologically

‘enhanced’ troops, pilotless planes and driverless vehicles are just

stepping stones to that end.
Human soldiers are used as Cult fodder

and its time they woke up to that and worked for the freedom of the

population instead of their own destruction and their family’s

destruction – the same with the police.
Join us and let’s sort this out.
The phenomenon of enforce my own destruction is widespread in

the ‘Covid’ era with Woker ‘luvvies’ in the acting and entertainment

industries supporting ‘Covid’ rules which have destroyed their

profession and the same with those among the public who put signs

on the doors of their businesses ‘closed due to Covid – stay safe’

when many will never reopen.
It’s a form of masochism and most

certainly insanity.
Transgender = transhumanism

When something explodes out of nowhere and is suddenly

everywhere it is always the Cult agenda and so it is with the tidal

wave of claims and demands that have infiltrated every aspect of

society under the heading of ‘transgenderism’.
The term ‘trans’ is so

‘in’ and this is the dictionary definition:

A prefix meaning ‘across’, ’through’, occurring … in loanwords from Latin, used in particular

for denoting movement or conveyance from place to place (transfer; transmit; transplant) or

complete change (transform; transmute), or to form adjectives meaning ’crossing’, ‘on the

other side of’, or ‘going beyond’ the place named (transmontane; transnational; trans-

Siberian).
Transgender means to go beyond gender and transhuman means

to go beyond human.
Both are aspects of the Cult plan to transform

the human body to a synthetic state with no gender.
Human 2.0 is not

designed to procreate and would be produced technologically with

no need for parents.
The new human would mean the end of parents

and so men, and increasingly women, are being targeted for the

deletion of their rights and status.
Parental rights are disappearing at

an ever-quickening speed for the same reason.
The new human

would have no need for men or women when there is no procreation

and no gender.
Perhaps the transgender movement that appears to

be in a permanent state of frenzy might now contemplate on how it

is being used.
This was never about transgender rights which are

only the interim excuse for confusing gender, particularly in the

young, on the road to fusing gender.
Transgender activism is not an

end; it is a means to an end.
We see again the technique of creative

destruction in which you destroy the status quo to ‘build back be er’

in the form that you want.
The gender status quo had to be

destroyed by persuading the Cult-created Woke mentality to believe

that you can have 100 genders or more.
A programme for 9 to 12

year olds produced by the Cult-owned BBC promoted the 100

genders narrative.
The very idea may be the most monumental

nonsense, but it is not what is true that counts, only what you can

make people believe is true.
Once the gender of 2 + 2 = 4 has been

dismantled through indoctrination, intimidation and 2 + 2 = 5 then

the new no-gender normal can take its place with Human 2.0.
Aldous Huxley revealed the plan in his prophetic Brave New World in

1932:

Natural reproduction has been done away with and children are created, decanted’, and

raised in ‘hatcheries and conditioning centres’.
From birth, people are genetically designed to

fit into one of five castes, which are further split into ‘Plus’ and ‘Minus’ members and designed to fulfil predetermined positions within the social and economic strata of the World State.
How could Huxley know this in 1932?
For the same reason George

Orwell knew about the Big Brother state in 1948, Cult insiders I have

quoted knew about it in 1969, and I have known about it since the

early 1990s.
If you are connected to the Cult or you work your balls

off to uncover the plan you can predict the future.
The process is

simple.
If there is a plan for the world and nothing intervenes to stop

it then it will happen.
Thus if you communicate the plan ahead of

time you are perceived to have predicted the future, but you haven’t.
You have revealed the plan which without intervention will become

the human future.
The whole reason I have done what I have is to

alert enough people to inspire an intervention and maybe at last that

time has come with the Cult and its intentions now so obvious to

anyone with a brain in working order.
The future is here

Technological wombs that Huxley described to replace parent

procreation are already being developed and they are only the

projects we know about in the public arena.
Israeli scientists told The

Times of Israel in March, 2021, that they have grown 250-cell embryos

into mouse foetuses with fully formed organs using artificial wombs

in a development they say could pave the way for gestating humans

outside the womb.
Professor Jacob Hanna of the Weizmann Institute

of Science said:

We took mouse embryos from the mother at day five of development, when they are just of

250 cells, and had them in the incubator from day five until day 11, by which point they had

grown all their organs.
By day 11 they make their own blood and have a beating heart, a fully developed brain.
Anybody would look at them and say, ‘this is clearly a mouse foetus with all the

characteristics of a mouse.’ It’s gone from being a ball of cells to being an advanced foetus.
A special liquid is used to nourish embryo cells in a laboratory

dish and they float on the liquid to duplicate the first stage of

embryonic development.
The incubator creates all the right

conditions for its development, Hanna said.
The liquid gives the

embryo ‘all the nutrients, hormones and sugars they need’ along

with a custom-made electronic incubator which controls gas

concentration, pressure and temperature.
The cu ing-edge in the

underground bases and other secret locations will be light years

ahead of that, however, and this was reported by the London

Guardian in 2017:

We are approaching a biotechnological breakthrough.
Ectogenesis, the invention of a

complete external womb, could completely change the nature of human reproduction.
In

April this year, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced their

development of an artificial womb.
The article was headed ‘Artificial wombs could soon be a reality.
What will this mean for women?’ What would it mean for children is

an even bigger question.
No mother to bond with only a machine in

preparation for a life of soulless interaction and control in a world

governed by machines (see the Matrix movies).
Now observe the

calculated manipulations of the ‘Covid’ hoax as human interaction

and warmth has been curtailed by distancing, isolation and fear with

people communicating via machines on a scale never seen before.
These are all dots in the same picture as are all the personal

assistants, gadgets and children’s toys through which kids and

adults communicate with AI as if it is human.
The AI ‘voice’ on Sat-

Nav should be included.
All these things are psychological

preparation for the Cult endgame.
Before you can make a physical

connection with AI you have to make a psychological connection

and that is what people are being conditioned to do with this ever

gathering human-AI interaction.
Movies and TV programmes

depicting the transhuman, robot dystopia relate to a phenomenon

known as ‘pre-emptive programming’ in which the world that is

planned is portrayed everywhere in movies, TV and advertising.
This is conditioning the conscious and subconscious mind to become

familiar with the planned reality to dilute resistance when it

happens for real.
What would have been a shock such is the change

is made less so.
We have young children put on the road to

transgender transition surgery with puberty blocking drugs at an

age when they could never be able to make those life-changing

decisions.
Rachel Levine, a professor of paediatrics and psychiatry who

believes in treating children this way, became America’s highest-

ranked openly-transgender official when she was confirmed as US

Assistant Secretary at the Department of Health and Human

Services a er being nominated by Joe Biden (the Cult).
Activists and

governments press for laws to deny parents a say in their children’s

transition process so the kids can be isolated and manipulated into

agreeing to irreversible medical procedures.
A Canadian father

Robert Hoogland was denied bail by the Vancouver Supreme Court

in 2021 and remained in jail for breaching a court order that he stay

silent over his young teenage daughter, a minor, who was being

offered life-changing hormone therapy without parental consent.
At

the age of 12 the girl’s ‘school counsellor’ said she may be

transgender, referred her to a doctor and told the school to treat her

like a boy.
This is another example of state-serving schools imposing

ever more control over children’s lives while parents have ever less.
Contemptible and extreme child abuse is happening all over the

world as the Cult gender-fusion operation goes into warp-speed.
Why the war on men – and now women?
The question about what artificial wombs mean for women should

rightly be asked.
The answer can be seen in the deletion of women’s

rights involving sport, changing rooms, toilets and status in favour

of people in male bodies claiming to identify as women.
I can

identify as a mountain climber, but it doesn’t mean I can climb a

mountain any more than a biological man can be a biological

woman.
To believe so is a triumph of belief over factual reality which

is the very perceptual basis of everything Woke.
Women’s sport is

being destroyed by allowing those with male bodies who say they

identify as female to ‘compete’ with girls and women.
Male body

‘women’ dominate ‘women’s’ competition with their greater muscle

mass, bone density, strength and speed.
With that disadvantage

sport for women loses all meaning.
To put this in perspective nearly

300 American high school boys can run faster than the quickest

woman sprinter in the world.
Women are seeing their previously

protected spaces invaded by male bodies simply because they claim

to identify as women.
That’s all they need to do to access all women’s

spaces and activities under the Biden ‘Equality Act’ that destroys

equality for women with the usual Orwellian Woke inversion.
Male

sex offenders have already commi ed rapes in women’s prisons a er

claiming to identify as women to get them transferred.
Does this not

ma er to the Woke ‘equality’ hypocrites?
Not in the least.
What

ma ers to Cult manipulators and funders behind transgender

activists is to advance gender fusion on the way to the no-gender

‘human’.
When you are seeking to impose transparent nonsense like

this, or the ‘Covid’ hoax, the only way the nonsense can prevail is

through censorship and intimidation of dissenters, deletion of

factual information, and programming of the unquestioning,

bewildered and naive.
You don’t have to scan the world for long to

see that all these things are happening.
Many women’s rights organisations have realised that rights and

status which took such a long time to secure are being eroded and

that it is systematic.
Kara Dansky of the global Women’s Human

Rights Campaign said that Biden’s transgender executive order

immediately he took office, subsequent orders, and Equality Act

legislation that followed ‘seek to erase women and girls in the law as

a category’.
Exactly.
I said during the long ago-started war on men

(in which many women play a crucial part) that this was going to

turn into a war on them.
The Cult is phasing out both male and

female genders.
To get away with that they are brought into conflict

so they are busy fighting each other while the Cult completes the job

with no unity of response.
Unity, people, unity.
We need unity

everywhere.
Transgender is the only show in town as the big step

towards the no-gender human.
It’s not about rights for transgender

people and never has been.
Woke political correctness is deleting

words relating to genders to the same end.
Wokers believe this is to

be ‘inclusive’ when the opposite is true.
They are deleting words

describing gender because gender itself is being deleted by Human

2.0.
Terms like ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are being

deleted in the universities and other institutions to be replaced by

the no-gender, not trans-gender, ‘individuals’ and ‘guardians’.
Women’s rights campaigner Maria Keffler of Partners for Ethical

Care said: ‘Children are being taught from kindergarten upward that

some boys have a vagina, some girls have a penis, and that kids can

be any gender they want to be.’ Do we really believe that suddenly

countries all over the world at the same time had the idea of having

drag queens go into schools or read transgender stories to very

young children in the local library?
It’s coldly-calculated confusion

of gender on the way to the fusion of gender.
Suzanne Vierling, a

psychologist from Southern California, made another important

point:

Yesterday’s slave woman who endured gynecological medical experiments is today’s girl-

child being butchered in a booming gender-transitioning sector.
Ovaries removed, pushing her

into menopause and osteoporosis, uncharted territory, and parents’ rights and authority

decimated.
The erosion of parental rights is a common theme in line with the

Cult plans to erase the very concept of parents and ‘ovaries removed,

pushing her into menopause’ means what?
Those born female lose

the ability to have children – another way to discontinue humanity

as we know it.
Eliminating Human 1.0 (before our very eyes)

To pave the way for Human 2.0 you must phase out Human 1.0.
This

is happening through plummeting sperm counts and making

women infertile through an onslaught of chemicals, radiation

(including smartphones in pockets of men) and mRNA ‘vaccines’.
Common agriculture pesticides are also having a devastating impact

on human fertility.
I have been tracking collapsing sperm counts in

the books for a long time and in 2021 came a book by fertility

scientist and reproductive epidemiologist Shanna Swan, Count

Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering

Male and Female Reproductive Development and Imperiling the Future of

the Human Race.
She reports how the global fertility rate dropped by

half between 1960 and 2016 with America’s birth rate 16 percent

below where it needs to be to sustain the population.
Women are

experiencing declining egg quality, more miscarriages, and more

couples suffer from infertility.
Other findings were an increase in

erectile dysfunction, infant boys developing more genital

abnormalities, male problems with conception, and plunging levels

of the male hormone testosterone which would explain why so

many men have lost their backbone and masculinity.
This has been

very evident during the ‘Covid’ hoax when women have been

prominent among the Pushbackers and big strapping blokes have

bowed their heads, covered their faces with a nappy and quietly

submi ed.
Mind control expert Cathy O’Brien also points to how

global education introduced the concept of ‘we’re all winners’ in

sport and classrooms: ‘Competition was defused, and it in turn

defused a sense of fighting back.’ This is another version of the

‘equity’ doctrine in which you drive down rather than raise up.
What a contrast in Cult-controlled China with its global ambitions

where the government published plans in January, 2021, to ‘cultivate

masculinity’ in boys from kindergarten through to high school in the

face of a ‘masculinity crisis’.
A government adviser said boys would

be soon become ‘delicate, timid and effeminate’ unless action was

taken.
Don’t expect any similar policy in the targeted West.
A 2006

study showed that a 65-year-old man in 2002 had testosterone levels

15 percent lower than a 65-year-old man in 1987 while a 2020 study

found a similar story with young adults and adolescents.
Men are

ge ing prescriptions for testosterone replacement therapy which

causes an even greater drop in sperm count with up to 99 percent

seeing sperm counts drop to zero during the treatment.
More sperm

is defective and malfunctioning with some having two heads or not

pursuing an egg.
A class of synthetic chemicals known as phthalates are being

blamed for the decline.
These are found everywhere in plastics,

shampoos, cosmetics, furniture, flame retardants, personal care

products, pesticides, canned foods and even receipts.
Why till

receipts?
Everyone touches them.
Let no one delude themselves that

all this is not systematic to advance the long-time agenda for human

body transformation.
Phthalates mimic hormones and disrupt the

hormone balance causing testosterone to fall and genital birth

defects in male infants.
Animals and fish have been affected in the

same way due to phthalates and other toxins in rivers.
When fish

turn gay or change sex through chemicals in rivers and streams it is

a pointer to why there has been such an increase in gay people and

the sexually confused.
It doesn’t ma er to me what sexuality people

choose to be, but if it’s being affected by chemical pollution and

consumption then we need to know.
Does anyone really think that

this is not connected to the transgender agenda, the war on men and

the condemnation of male ‘toxic masculinity’?
You watch this being

followed by ‘toxic femininity’.
It’s already happening.
When

breastfeeding becomes ‘chest-feeding’, pregnant women become

pregnant people along with all the other Woke claptrap you know

that the world is going insane and there’s a Cult scam in progress.
Transgender activists are promoting the Cult agenda while Cult

billionaires support and fund the insanity as they laugh themselves

to sleep at the sheer stupidity for which humans must be infamous

in galaxies far, far away.
‘Covid vaccines’ and female infertility

We can now see why the ‘vaccine’ has been connected to potential

infertility in women.
Dr Michael Yeadon, former Vice President and

Chief Scientific Advisor at Pfizer, and Dr Wolfgang Wodarg in

Germany, filed a petition with the European Medicines Agency in

December, 2020, urging them to stop trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech

shot and all other mRNA trials until further studies had been done.
They were particularly concerned about possible effects on fertility

with ‘vaccine’-produced antibodies a acking the protein Syncytin-1

which is responsible for developing the placenta.
The result would

be infertility ‘of indefinite duration’ in women who have the

‘vaccine’ with the placenta failing to form.
Section 10.4.2 of the

Pfizer/BioNTech trial protocol says that pregnant women or those

who might become so should not have mRNA shots.
Section 10.4

warns men taking mRNA shots to ‘be abstinent from heterosexual

intercourse’ and not to donate sperm.
The UK government said that

it did not know if the mRNA procedure had an effect on fertility.
Did

not know?
These people have to go to jail.
UK government advice did

not recommend at the start that pregnant women had the shot and

said they should avoid pregnancy for at least two months a er

‘vaccination’.
The ‘advice’ was later updated to pregnant women

should only have the ‘vaccine’ if the benefits outweighed the risks to

mother and foetus.
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Then

‘spontaneous abortions’ began to appear and rapidly increase on the

adverse reaction reporting schemes which include only a fraction of

adverse reactions.
Thousands and ever-growing numbers of

‘vaccinated’ women are describing changes to their menstrual cycle

with heavier blood flow, irregular periods and menstruating again

a er going through the menopause – all links to reproduction

effects.
Women are passing blood clots and the lining of their uterus

while men report erectile dysfunction and blood effects.
Most

significantly of all un vaccinated women began to report similar

menstrual changes a er interaction with ‘vaccinated’ people and men

and children were also affected with bleeding noses, blood clots and

other conditions.
‘Shedding’ is when vaccinated people can emit the

content of a vaccine to affect the unvaccinated, but this is different.
‘Vaccinated’ people were not shedding a ‘live virus’ allegedly in

‘vaccines’ as before because the fake ‘Covid vaccines’ involve

synthetic material and other toxicity.
Doctors exposing what is

happening prefer the term ‘transmission’ to shedding.
Somehow

those that have had the shots are transmi ing effects to those that

haven’t.
Dr Carrie Madej said the nano-content of the ‘vaccines’ can

‘act like an antenna’ to others around them which fits perfectly with

my own conclusions.
This ‘vaccine’ transmission phenomenon was

becoming known as the book went into production and I deal with

this further in the Postscript.
Vaccine effects on sterility are well known.
The World Health

Organization was accused in 2014 of sterilising millions of women in

Kenya with the evidence confirmed by the content of the vaccines

involved.
The same WHO behind the ‘Covid’ hoax admi ed its

involvement for more than ten years with the vaccine programme.
Other countries made similar claims.
Charges were lodged by

Tanzania, Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Philippines.
The Gardasil

vaccine claimed to protect against a genital ‘virus’ known as HPV

has also been linked to infertility.
Big Pharma and the WHO (same

thing) are criminal and satanic entities.
Then there’s the Bill Gates

Foundation which is connected through funding and shared

interests with 20 pharmaceutical giants and laboratories.
He stands

accused of directing the policy of United Nations Children’s Fund

(UNICEF), vaccine alliance GAVI, and other groupings, to advance

the vaccine agenda and silence opposition at great cost to women

and children.
At the same time Gates wants to reduce the global

population.
Coincidence?
Great Reset = Smart Grid = new human

The Cult agenda I have been exposing for 30 years is now being

openly promoted by Cult assets like Gates and Klaus Schwab of the

World Economic Forum under code-terms like the ‘Great Reset’,

‘Build Back Be er’ and ‘a rare but narrow window of opportunity to

reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’.
What provided this ‘rare but

narrow window of opportunity’?
The ‘Covid’ hoax did.
Who created

that?
They did.
My books from not that long ago warned about the

planned ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) and its implications for human

freedom.
This was the plan to connect all technology to the Internet

and artificial intelligence and today we are way down that road with

an estimated 36 billion devices connected to the World Wide Web

and that figure is projected to be 76 billion by 2025.
I further warned

that the Cult planned to go beyond that to the Internet of Everything

when the human brain was connected via AI to the Internet and

Kurzweil’s ‘cloud’.
Now we have Cult operatives like Schwab calling

for precisely that under the term ‘Internet of Bodies’, a fusion of the

physical, digital and biological into one centrally-controlled Smart

Grid system which the Cult refers to as the ‘Fourth Industrial

Revolution’.
They talk about the ‘biological’, but they really mean

the synthetic-biological which is required to fully integrate the

human body and brain into the Smart Grid and artificial intelligence

planned to replace the human mind.
We have everything being

synthetically manipulated including the natural world through

GMO and smart dust, the food we eat and the human body itself

with synthetic ‘vaccines’.
I said in The Answer that we would see the

Cult push for synthetic meat to replace animals and in February,

2021, the so predictable psychopath Bill Gates called for the

introduction of synthetic meat to save us all from ‘climate change’.
The climate hoax just keeps on giving like the ‘Covid’ hoax.
The war

on meat by vegan activists is a carbon (oops, sorry) copy of the

manipulation of transgender activists.
They have no idea (except

their inner core) that they are being used to promote and impose the

agenda of the Cult or that they are only the vehicle and not the reason.
This is not to say those who choose not to eat meat shouldn’t be

respected and supported in that right, but there are ulterior motives

for those in power.
A Forbes article in December, 2019, highlighted

the plan so beloved of Schwab and the Cult under the heading:

‘What Is The Internet of Bodies?
And How Is It Changing Our

World?’ The article said the human body is the latest data platform

(remember ‘our vaccine is an operating system’).
Forbes described

the plan very accurately and the words could have come straight out

of my books from long before:

The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is an extension of the IoT and basically connects the human body

to a network through devices that are ingested, implanted, or connected to the body in some

way.
Once connected, data can be exchanged, and the body and device can be remotely

monitored and controlled.
They were really describing a human hive mind with human

perception centrally-dictated via an AI connection as well as

allowing people to be ‘remotely monitored and controlled’.
Everything from a fridge to a human mind could be directed from a

central point by these insane psychopaths and ‘Covid vaccines’ are

crucial to this.
Forbes explained the process I mentioned earlier of

holdable and wearable technology followed by implantable.
The

article said there were three generations of the Internet of Bodies that

include:

• Body external: These are wearable devices such as Apple Watches

or Fitbits that can monitor our health.
• Body internal: These include pacemakers, cochlear implants, and

digital pills that go inside our bodies to monitor or control various

aspects of health.
• Body embedded: The third generation of the Internet of Bodies is

embedded technology where technology and the human body are

melded together and have a real-time connection to a remote

machine.
Forbes noted the development of the Brain Computer Interface (BCI)

which merges the brain with an external device for monitoring and

controlling in real-time.
‘The ultimate goal is to help restore function

to individuals with disabilities by using brain signals rather than

conventional neuromuscular pathways.’ Oh, do fuck off.
The goal of

brain interface technology is controlling human thought and

emotion from the central point in a hive mind serving its masters

wishes.
Many people are now agreeing to be chipped to open doors

without a key.
You can recognise them because they’ll be wearing a

mask, social distancing and lining up for the ‘vaccine’.
The Cult

plans a Great Reset money system a er they have completed the

demolition of the global economy in which ‘money’ will be

exchanged through communication with body operating systems.
Rand Corporation, a Cult-owned think tank, said of the Internet of

Bodies or IoB:

Internet of Bodies technologies fall under the broader IoT umbrella.
But as the name suggests,

IoB devices introduce an even more intimate interplay between humans and gadgets.
IoB

devices monitor the human body, collect health metrics and other personal information, and

transmit those data over the Internet.
Many devices, such as fitness trackers, are already in use

… IoB devices … and those in development can track, record, and store users’ whereabouts,

bodily functions, and what they see, hear, and even think.
Schwab’s World Economic Forum, a long-winded way of saying

‘fascism’ or ‘the Cult’, has gone full-on with the Internet of Bodies in

the ‘Covid’ era.
‘We’re entering the era of the Internet of Bodies’, it

declared, ‘collecting our physical data via a range of devices that can

be implanted, swallowed or worn’.
The result would be a huge

amount of health-related data that could improve human wellbeing

around the world, and prove crucial in fighting the ‘Covid-19

pandemic’.
Does anyone think these clowns care about ‘human

wellbeing’ a er the death and devastation their pandemic hoax has

purposely caused?
Schwab and co say we should move forward with

the Internet of Bodies because ‘Keeping track of symptoms could

help us stop the spread of infection, and quickly detect new cases’.
How wonderful, but keeping track’ is all they are really bothered

about.
Researchers were investigating if data gathered from

smartwatches and similar devices could be used as viral infection

alerts by tracking the user’s heart rate and breathing.
Schwab said in

his 2018 book Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution:

The lines between technologies and beings are becoming blurred and not just by the ability to

create lifelike robots or synthetics.
Instead it is about the ability of new technologies to literally become part of us.
Technologies already influence how we understand ourselves, how we

think about each other, and how we determine our realities.
As the technologies … give us

deeper access to parts of ourselves, we may begin to integrate digital technologies into our

bodies.
You can see what the game is.
Twenty-four hour control and people

– if you could still call them that – would never know when

something would go ping and take them out of circulation.
It’s the

most obvious rush to a global fascist dictatorship and the complete

submission of humanity and yet still so many are locked away in

their Cult-induced perceptual coma and can’t see it.
Smart Grid control centres

The human body is being transformed by the ‘vaccines’ and in other

ways into a synthetic cyborg that can be a ached to the global Smart

Grid which would be controlled from a central point and other sub-

locations of Grid manipulation.
Where are these planned to be?
Well,

China for a start which is one of the Cult’s biggest centres of

operation.
The technological control system and technocratic rule

was incubated here to be unleashed across the world a er the

‘Covid’ hoax came out of China in 2020.
Another Smart Grid location

that will surprise people new to this is Israel.
I have exposed in The

Trigger how Sabbatian technocrats, intelligence and military

operatives were behind the horrors of 9/11 and not `19 Arab hijackers’

who somehow manifested the ability to pilot big passenger airliners

when instructors at puddle-jumping flying schools described some

of them as a joke.
The 9/11 a acks were made possible through

control of civilian and military air computer systems and those of the

White House, Pentagon and connected agencies.
See The Trigger – it

will blow your mind.
The controlling and coordinating force were

the Sabbatian networks in Israel and the United States which by then

had infiltrated the entire US government, military and intelligence

system.
The real name of the American Deep State is ‘Sabbatian

State’.
Israel is a tiny country of only nine million people, but it is

one of the global centres of cyber operations and fast catching Silicon

Valley in importance to the Cult.
Israel is known as the ‘start-up

nation’ for all the cyber companies spawned there with the

Sabbatian specialisation of ‘cyber security’ that I mentioned earlier

which gives those companies access to computer systems of their

clients in real time through ‘backdoors’ wri en into the coding when

security so ware is downloaded.
The Sabbatian centre of cyber

operations outside Silicon Valley is the Israeli military Cyber

Intelligence Unit, the biggest infrastructure project in Israel’s history,

headquartered in the desert-city of Beersheba and involving some

20,000 ‘cyber soldiers’.
Here are located a literal army of Internet

trolls scanning social media, forums and comment lists for anyone

challenging the Cult agenda.
The UK military has something similar

with its 77th Brigade and associated operations.
The Beersheba

complex includes research and development centres for other Cult

operations such as Intel, Microso , IBM, Google, Apple, Hewle -

Packard, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola.
Techcrunch.com

ran an article about the Beersheba global Internet technology centre

headlined ‘Israel’s desert city of Beersheba is turning into a cybertech

oasis’:

The military’s massive relocation of its prestigious technology units, the presence of

multinational and local companies, a close proximity to Ben Gurion University and generous

government subsidies are turning Beersheba into a major global cybertech hub.
Beersheba has

all of the ingredients of a vibrant security technology ecosystem, including Ben Gurion

University with its graduate program in cybersecurity and Cyber Security Research Center, and

the presence of companies such as EMC, Deutsche Telekom, PayPal, Oracle, IBM, and

Lockheed Martin.
It’s also the future home of the INCB (Israeli National Cyber Bureau); offers

a special income tax incentive for cyber security companies, and was the site for the

relocation of the army’s intelligence corps units.
Sabbatians have taken over the cyber world through the following

process: They scan the schools for likely cyber talent and develop

them at Ben Gurion University and their period of conscription in

the Israeli Defense Forces when they are stationed at the Beersheba

complex.
When the cyber talented officially leave the army they are

funded to start cyber companies with technology developed by

themselves or given to them by the state.
Much of this is stolen

through backdoors of computer systems around the world with

America top of the list.
Others are sent off to Silicon Valley to start

companies or join the major ones and so we have many major

positions filled by apparently ‘Jewish’ but really Sabbatian

operatives.
Google, YouTube and Facebook are all run by ‘Jewish’

CEOs while Twi er is all but run by ultra-Zionist hedge-fund shark

Paul Singer.
At the centre of the Sabbatian global cyber web is the

Israeli army’s Unit 8200 which specialises in hacking into computer

systems of other countries, inserting viruses, gathering information,

instigating malfunction, and even taking control of them from a

distance.
A long list of Sabbatians involved with 9/11, Silicon Valley

and Israeli cyber security companies are operatives of Unit 8200.
This is not about Israel.
It’s about the Cult.
Israel is planned to be a

Smart Grid hub as with China and what is happening at Beersheba is

not for the benefit of Jewish people who are treated disgustingly by

the Sabbatian elite that control the country.
A glance at the

Nuremberg Codes will tell you that.
The story is much bigger than ‘Covid’, important as that is to

where we are being taken.
Now, though, it’s time to really strap in.
There’s more … much more …





CHAPTER ELEVEN

Who controls the Cult?
Awake, arise or be forever fall’n

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Ihave exposed this far the level of the Cult conspiracy that operates

in the world of the seen and within the global secret society and

satanic network which operates in the shadows one step back from

the seen.
The story, however, goes much deeper than that.
The ‘Covid’ hoax is major part of the Cult agenda, but only part,

and to grasp the biggest picture we have to expand our a ention

beyond the realm of human sight and into the infinity of possibility

that we cannot see.
It is from here, ultimately, that humanity is being

manipulated into a state of total control by the force which dictates

the actions of the Cult.
How much of reality can we see?
Next to

damn all is the answer.
We may appear to see all there is to see in the

‘space’ our eyes survey and observe, but li le could be further from

the truth.
The human ‘world’ is only a tiny band of frequency that

the body’s visual and perceptual systems can decode into perception

of a ‘world’.
According to mainstream science the electromagnetic

spectrum is 0.005 percent of what exists in the Universe (Fig 10).
The

maximum estimate I have seen is 0.5 percent and either way it’s

miniscule.
I say it is far, far, smaller even than 0.005 percent when

you compare reality we see with the totality of reality that we don’t.
Now get this if you are new to such information: Visible light, the

only band of frequency that we can see, is a fraction of the 0.005





percent (Fig 11 overleaf).
Take this further and realise that our

universe is one of infinite universes and that universes are only a

fragment of overall reality – infinite reality.
Then compare that with

the almost infinitesimal frequency band of visible light or human

sight.
You see that humans are as near blind as it is possible to be

without actually being so.
Artist and filmmaker, Sergio Toporek,

said:

Figure 10: Humans can perceive such a tiny band of visual reality it’s laughable.
Figure 11: We can see a smear of the 0.005 percent electromagnetic spectrum, but we still

know it all.
Yep, makes sense.
Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than

1% of the acoustic spectrum.
90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA

and are not ‘you’.
The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999 % empty space and

none of them are the ones you were born with...
Human beings have 46 chromosomes, two

less than a potato.
The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist.
So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it.
This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colours you see represent

less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Suddenly the ‘world’ of humans looks a very different place.
Take

into account, too, that Planet Earth when compared with the

projected size of this single universe is the equivalent of a billionth of

a pinhead.
Imagine the ratio that would be when compared to

infinite reality.
To think that Christianity once insisted that Earth and

humanity were the centre of everything.
This background is vital if

we are going to appreciate the nature of ‘human’ and how we can be

manipulated by an unseen force.
To human visual reality virtually

everything is unseen and yet the prevailing perception within the

institutions and so much of the public is that if we can’t see it, touch

it, hear it, taste it and smell it then it cannot exist.
Such perception is

indoctrinated and encouraged by the Cult and its agents because it

isolates believers in the strictly limited, village-idiot, realm of the five

senses where perceptions can be firewalled and information

controlled.
Most of those perpetuating the ‘this-world-is-all-there-is’

insanity are themselves indoctrinated into believing the same

delusion.
While major players and influencers know that official

reality is laughable most of those in science, academia and medicine

really believe the nonsense they peddle and teach succeeding

generations.
Those who challenge the orthodoxy are dismissed as

nu ers and freaks to protect the manufactured illusion from

exposure.
Observe the dynamic of the ‘Covid’ hoax and you will see

how that takes the same form.
The inner-circle psychopaths knows

it’s a gigantic scam, but almost the entirety of those imposing their

fascist rules believe that ‘Covid’ is all that they’re told it is.
Stolen identity

Ask people who they are and they will give you their name, place of

birth, location, job, family background and life story.
Yet that is not

who they are – it is what they are experiencing.
The difference is

absolutely crucial.
The true ‘I’, the eternal, infinite ‘I’, is consciousness,

a state of being aware.
Forget ‘form’.
That is a vehicle for a brief

experience.
Consciousness does not come from the brain, but through

the brain and even that is more symbolic than literal.
We are

awareness, pure awareness, and this is what withdraws from the

body at what we call ‘death’ to continue our eternal beingness,

isness, in other realms of reality within the limitlessness of infinity or

the Biblical ‘many mansions in my father’s house’.
Labels of a

human life, man, woman, transgender, black, white, brown,

nationality, circumstances and income are not who we are.
They are

what we are – awareness – is experiencing in a brief connection with a

band of frequency we call ‘human’.
The labels are not the self; they

are, to use the title of one of my books, a Phantom Self.
I am not

David Icke born in Leicester, England, on April 29th, 1952.
I am the

consciousness having that experience.
The Cult and its non-human

masters seek to convince us through the institutions of ‘education’,

science, medicine, media and government that what we are

experiencing is who we are.
It’s so easy to control and direct

perception locked away in the bewildered illusions of the five senses

with no expanded radar.
Try, by contrast, doing the same with a

humanity aware of its true self and its true power to consciously

create its reality and experience.
How is it possible to do this?
We do

it all day every day.
If you perceive yourself as ‘li le me’ with no

power to impact upon your life and the world then your life

experience will reflect that.
You will hand the power you don’t think

you have to authority in all its forms which will use it to control your

experience.
This, in turn, will appear to confirm your perception of

‘li le me’ in a self-fulfilling feedback loop.
But that is what ‘li le me’

really is – a perception.
We are all ‘big-me’, infinite me, and the Cult

has to make us forget that if its will is to prevail.
We are therefore

manipulated and pressured into self-identifying with human labels

and not the consciousness/awareness experiencing those human

labels.
The phenomenon of identity politics is a Cult-instigated

manipulation technique to sub-divide previous labels into even

smaller ones.
A United States university employs this list of le ers to

describe student identity: LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM or lesbian, gay,

bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, flexual,

asexual, gender-fuck, polyamorous, bondage/discipline,

dominance/submission and sadism/masochism.
I’m sure other lists

are even longer by now as people feel the need to self-identity the ‘I’

with the minutiae of race and sexual preference.
Wokers

programmed by the Cult for generations believe this is about

‘inclusivity’ when it’s really the Cult locking them away into smaller

and smaller versions of Phantom Self while firewalling them from

the influence of their true self, the infinite, eternal ‘I’.
You may notice

that my philosophy which contends that we are all unique points of

a ention/awareness within the same infinite whole or Oneness is the

ultimate non-racism.
The very sense of Oneness makes the

judgement of people by their body-type, colour or sexuality u erly

ridiculous and confirms that racism has no understanding of reality

(including anti-white racism).
Yet despite my perception of life Cult

agents and fast-asleep Wokers label me racist to discredit my

information while they are themselves phenomenally racist and

sexist.
All they see is race and sexuality and they judge people as

good or bad, demons or untouchables, by their race and sexuality.
All they see is Phantom Self and perceive themselves in terms of

Phantom Self.
They are pawns and puppets of the Cult agenda to

focus a ention and self-identity in the five senses and play those

identities against each other to divide and rule.
Columbia University

has introduced segregated graduations in another version of social

distancing designed to drive people apart and teach them that

different racial and cultural groups have nothing in common with

each other.
The last thing the Cult wants is unity.
Again the pump-

primers of this will be Cult operatives in the knowledge of what they

are doing, but the rest are just the Phantom Self blind leading the

Phantom Self blind.
We do have something in common – we are all

the same consciousness having different temporary experiences.
What is this ‘human’?
Yes, what is ‘human’?
That is what we are supposed to be, right?
I

mean ‘human’?
True, but ‘human’ is the experience not the ‘I’.
Break

it down to basics and ‘human’ is the way that information is

processed.
If we are to experience and interact with this band of

frequency we call the ‘world’ we must have a vehicle that operates

within that band of frequency.
Our consciousness in its prime form

cannot do that; it is way beyond the frequency of the human realm.
My consciousness or awareness could not tap these keys and pick up

the cup in front of me in the same way that radio station A cannot

interact with radio station B when they are on different frequencies.
The human body is the means through which we have that

interaction.
I have long described the body as a biological computer

which processes information in a way that allows consciousness to

experience this reality.
The body is a receiver, transmi er and

processor of information in a particular way that we call human.
We

visually perceive only the world of the five senses in a wakened state

– that is the limit of the body’s visual decoding system.
In truth it’s

not even visual in the way we experience ‘visual reality’ as I will

come to in a moment.
We are ‘human’ because the body processes

the information sources of human into a reality and behaviour

system that we perceive as human.
Why does an elephant act like an

elephant and not like a human or a duck?
The elephant’s biological

computer is a different information field and processes information

according to that program into a visual and behaviour type we call

an elephant.
The same applies to everything in our reality.
These

body information fields are perpetuated through procreation (like

making a copy of a so ware program).
The Cult wants to break that

cycle and intervene technologically to transform the human

information field into one that will change what we call humanity.
If

it can change the human information field it will change the way

that field processes information and change humanity both

‘physically’ and psychologically.
Hence the messenger (information)

RNA ‘vaccines’ and so much more that is targeting human genetics

by changing the body’s information – messaging – construct through

food, drink, radiation, toxicity and other means.
Reality that we experience is nothing like reality as it really is in

the same way that the reality people experience in virtual reality

games is not the reality they are really living in.
The game is only a

decoded source of information that appears to be a reality.
Our

world is also an information construct – a simulation (more later).
In

its base form our reality is a wavefield of information much the same

in theme as Wi-Fi.
The five senses decode wavefield information into

electrical information which they communicate to the brain to

decode into holographic (illusory ‘physical’) information.
Different

parts of the brain specialise in decoding different senses and the

information is fused into a reality that appears to be outside of us

but is really inside the brain and the genetic structure in general (Fig

12 overleaf).
DNA is a receiver-transmi er of information and a vital

part of this decoding process and the body’s connection to other

realities.
Change DNA and you change the way we decode and

connect with reality – see ‘Covid vaccines’.
Think of computers

decoding Wi-Fi.
You have information encoded in a radiation field

and the computer decodes that information into a very different

form on the screen.
You can’t see the Wi-Fi until its information is

made manifest on the screen and the information on the screen is

inside the computer and not outside.
I have just described how we

decode the ‘human world’.
All five senses decode the waveform ‘Wi-

Fi’ field into electrical signals and the brain (computer) constructs

reality inside the brain and not outside – ‘You don’t just look at a

rainbow, you create it’.
Sound is a simple example.
We don’t hear

sound until the brain decodes it.
Waveform sound waves are picked

up by the hearing sense and communicated to the brain in an

electrical form to be decoded into the sounds that we hear.
Everything we hear is inside the brain along with everything we see,

feel, smell and taste.
Words and language are waveform fields

generated by our vocal chords which pass through this process until

they are decoded by the brain into words that we hear.
Different

languages are different frequency fields or sound waves generated

by vocal chords.
Late British philosopher Alan Wa s said:



Figure 12: The brain receives information from the five senses and constructs from that our perceived reality.
[Without the brain] the world is devoid of light, heat, weight, solidity, motion, space, time or

any other imaginable feature.
All these phenomena are interactions, or transactions, of

vibrations with a certain arrangement of neurons.
That’s exactly what they are and scientist Robert Lanza describes in

his book, Biocentrism, how we decode electromagnetic waves and

energy into visual and ‘physical’ experience.
He uses the example of

a flame emi ing photons, electromagnetic energy, each pulsing

electrically and magnetically:

… these … invisible electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if (and only if) the

waves happen to measure between 400 and 700 nano meters in length from crest to crest,

then their energy is just right to deliver a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the

retina.
Each in turn send an electrical pulse to a neighbour neuron, and on up the line this goes, at

250 mph, until it reaches the … occipital lobe of the brain, in the back of the head.
There, a

cascading complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjectively perceive

this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a place we have been conditioned to call

the ‘external world’.
You hear what you decode

If a tree falls or a building collapses they make no noise unless

someone is there to decode the energetic waves generated by the

disturbance into what we call sound.
Does a falling tree make a

noise?
Only if you hear it – decode it.
Everything in our reality is a

frequency field of information operating within the overall ‘Wi-Fi’

field that I call The Field.
A vibrational disturbance is generated in

The Field by the fields of the falling tree or building.
These

disturbance waves are what we decode into the sound of them

falling.
If no one is there to do that then neither will make any noise.
Reality is created by the observer – decoder – and the perceptions of

the observer affect the decoding process.
For this reason different

people – different perceptions – will perceive the same reality or

situation in a different way.
What one may perceive as a nightmare

another will see as an opportunity.
The question of why the Cult is

so focused on controlling human perception now answers itself.
All

experienced reality is the act of decoding and we don’t experience

Wi-Fi until it is decoded on the computer screen.
The sight and

sound of an Internet video is encoded in the Wi-Fi all around us, but

we don’t see or hear it until the computer decodes that information.
Taste, smell and touch are all phenomena of the brain as a result of

the same process.
We don’t taste, smell or feel anything except in the

brain and there are pain relief techniques that seek to block the

signal from the site of discomfort to the brain because if the brain

doesn’t decode that signal we don’t feel pain.
Pain is in the brain and

only appears to be at the point of impact thanks to the feedback loop

between them.
We don’t see anything until electrical information

from the sight senses is decoded in an area at the back of the brain.
If

that area is damaged we can go blind when our eyes are perfectly

okay.
So why do we go blind if we damage an eye?
We damage the

information processing between the waveform visual information

and the visual decoding area of the brain.
If information doesn’t

reach the brain in a form it can decode then we can’t see the visual

reality that it represents.
What’s more the brain is decoding only a

fraction of the information it receives and the rest is absorbed by the

sub-conscious mind.
This explanation is from the science magazine,

Wonderpedia:

Every second, 11 million sensations crackle along these [brain] pathways...
The brain is

confronted with an alarming array of images, sounds and smells which it rigorously filters

down until it is left with a manageable list of around 40.
Thus 40 sensations per second make

up what we perceive as reality.
The ‘world’ is not what people are told to believe that is it and the

inner circles of the Cult know that.
Illusory ‘physical’ reality

We can only see a smear of 0.005 percent of the Universe which is

only one of a vast array of universes – ‘mansions’ – within infinite

reality.
Even then the brain decodes only 40 pieces of information

(‘sensations’) from a potential 11 million that we receive every

second.
Two points strike you from this immediately: The sheer

breathtaking stupidity of believing we know anything so rigidly that

there’s nothing more to know; and the potential for these processes

to be manipulated by a malevolent force to control the reality of the

population.
One thing I can say for sure with no risk of contradiction

is that when you can perceive an almost indescribable fraction of

infinite reality there is always more to know as in tidal waves of it.
Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was so right when he said that

wisdom is to know how li le we know.
How obviously true that is

when you think that we are experiencing a physical world of solidity

that is neither physical nor solid and a world of apartness when

everything is connected.
Cult-controlled ‘science’ dismisses the so-

called ‘paranormal’ and all phenomena related to that when the

‘para’-normal is perfectly normal and explains the alleged ‘great

mysteries’ which dumbfound scientific minds.
There is a reason for

this.
A ‘scientific mind’ in terms of the mainstream is a material

mind, a five-sense mind imprisoned in see it, touch it, hear it, smell it

and taste it.
Phenomena and happenings that can’t be explained that

way leave the ‘scientific mind’ bewildered and the rule is that if they



can’t account for why something is happening then it can’t, by

definition, be happening.
I beg to differ.
Telepathy is thought waves

passing through The Field (think wave disturbance again) to be

decoded by someone able to connect with that wavelength

(information).
For example: You can pick up the thought waves of a

friend at any distance and at the very least that will bring them to

mind.
A few minutes later the friend calls you.
‘My god’, you say,

‘that’s incredible – I was just thinking of you.’ Ah, but they were

thinking of you before they made the call and that’s what you

decoded.
Native peoples not entrapped in five-sense reality do this

so well it became known as the ‘bush telegraph’.
Those known as

psychics and mediums (genuine ones) are doing the same only

across dimensions of reality.
‘Mind over ma er’ comes from the fact

that ma er and mind are the same.
The state of one influences the

state of the other.
Indeed one and the other are illusions.
They are

aspects of the same field.
Paranormal phenomena are all explainable

so why are they still considered ‘mysteries’ or not happening?
Once

you go down this road of understanding you begin to expand

awareness beyond the five senses and that’s the nightmare for the

Cult.
Figure 13: Holograms are not solid, but the best ones appear to be.
Figure 14: How holograms are created by capturing a waveform version of the subject image.
Holographic ‘solidity’

Our reality is not solid, it is holographic.
We are now well aware of

holograms which are widely used today.
Two-dimensional

information is decoded into a three-dimensional reality that is not

solid although can very much appear to be (Fig 13).
Holograms are

created with a laser divided into two parts.
One goes directly onto a

holographic photographic print (‘reference beam’) and the other

takes a waveform image of the subject (‘working beam’) before being

directed onto the print where it ‘collides’ with the other half of the

laser (Fig 14).
This creates a waveform interference pa ern which

contains the wavefield information of whatever is being

photographed (Fig 15 overleaf).
The process can be likened to

dropping pebbles in a pond.
Waves generated by each one spread

out across the water to collide with the others and create a wave

representation of where the stones fell and at what speed, weight

and distance.
A waveform interference pa ern of a hologram is akin

to the waveform information in The Field which the five senses

decode into electrical signals to be decoded by the brain into a

holographic illusory ‘physical’ reality.
In the same way when a laser

(think human a ention) is directed at the waveform interference

pa ern a three-dimensional version of the subject is projected into

apparently ‘solid’ reality (Fig 16).
An amazing trait of holograms

reveals more ‘paranormal mysteries’.
Information of the whole





hologram is encoded in waveform in every part of the interference

pa ern by the way they are created.
This means that every part of a

hologram is a smaller version of the whole.
Cut the interference

wave-pa ern into four and you won’t get four parts of the image.
You get quarter-sized versions of the whole image.
The body is a

hologram and the same applies.
Here we have the basis of

acupuncture, reflexology and other forms of healing which identify

representations of the whole body in all of the parts, hands, feet,

ears, everywhere.
Skilled palm readers can do what they do because

the information of whole body is encoded in the hand.
The concept

of as above, so below, comes from this.
Figure 15: A waveform interference pattern that holds the information that transforms into a hologram.
Figure 16: Holographic people including ‘Elvis’ holographically inserted to sing a duet with Celine Dion.
The question will be asked of why, if solidity is illusory, we can’t

just walk through walls and each other.
The resistance is not solid

against solid; it is electromagnetic field against electromagnetic field

and we decode this into the experience of solid against solid.
We

should also not underestimate the power of belief to dictate reality.
What you believe is impossible will be.
Your belief impacts on your

decoding processes and they won’t decode what you think is

impossible.
What we believe we perceive and what we perceive we

experience.
‘Can’t dos’ and ‘impossibles’ are like a firewall in a

computer system that won’t put on the screen what the firewall

blocks.
How vital that is to understanding how human experience

has been hijacked.
I explain in The Answer, Everything You Need To

Know But Have Never Been Told and other books a long list of

‘mysteries’ and ‘paranormal’ phenomena that are not mysterious

and perfectly normal once you realise what reality is and how it

works.
‘Ghosts’ can be seen to pass through ‘solid’ walls because the

walls are not solid and the ghost is a discarnate entity operating on a

frequency so different to that of the wall that it’s like two radio

stations sharing the same space while never interfering with each

other.
I have seen ghosts do this myself.
The apartness of people and

objects is also an illusion.
Everything is connected by the Field like

all sea life is connected by the sea.
It’s just that within the limits of

our visual reality we only ‘see’ holographic information and not the

field of information that connects everything and from which the

holographic world is made manifest.
If you can only see holographic

‘objects’ and not the field that connects them they will appear to you

as unconnected to each other in the same way that we see the

computer while not seeing the Wi-Fi.
What you don’t know can hurt you

Okay, we return to those ‘two worlds’ of human society and the Cult

with its global network of interconnecting secret societies and

satanic groups which manipulate through governments,

corporations, media, religions, etc.
The fundamental difference

between them is knowledge.
The idea has been to keep humanity

ignorant of the plan for its total enslavement underpinned by a

crucial ignorance of reality – who we are and where we are – and

how we interact with it.
‘Human’ should be the interaction between

our expanded eternal consciousness and the five-sense body

experience.
We are meant to be in this world in terms of the five

senses but not of this world in relation to our greater consciousness

and perspective.
In that state we experience the small picture of the

five senses within the wider context of the big picture of awareness

beyond the five senses.
Put another way the five senses see the dots

and expanded awareness connects them into pictures and pa erns

that give context to the apparently random and unconnected.
Without the context of expanded awareness the five senses see only

apartness and randomness with apparently no meaning.
The Cult

and its other-dimensional controllers seek to intervene in the

frequency realm where five-sense reality is supposed to connect with

expanded reality and to keep the two apart (more on this in the final

chapter).
When that happens five-sense mental and emotional

processes are no longer influenced by expanded awareness, or the

True ‘I’, and instead are driven by the isolated perceptions of the

body’s decoding systems.
They are in the world and of it.
Here we

have the human plight and why humanity with its potential for

infinite awareness can be so easily manipulatable and descend into

such extremes of stupidity.
Once the Cult isolates five-sense mind from expanded awareness

it can then program the mind with perceptions and beliefs by

controlling information that the mind receives through the

‘education’ system of the formative years and the media perceptual

bombardment and censorship of an entire lifetime.
Limit perception

and a sense of the possible through limiting knowledge by limiting

and skewing information while censoring and discrediting that

which could set people free.
As the title of another of my books says

… And The Truth Shall Set You Free.
For this reason the last thing the

Cult wants in circulation is the truth about anything – especially the

reality of the eternal ‘I’ – and that’s why it is desperate to control

information.
The Cult knows that information becomes perception

which becomes behaviour which, collectively, becomes human

society.
Cult-controlled and funded mainstream ‘science’ denies the

existence of an eternal ‘I’ and seeks to dismiss and trash all evidence

to the contrary.
Cult-controlled mainstream religion has a version of

‘God’ that is li le more than a system of control and dictatorship

that employs threats of damnation in an a erlife to control

perceptions and behaviour in the here and now through fear and

guilt.
Neither is true and it’s the ‘neither’ that the Cult wishes to

suppress.
This ‘neither’ is that everything is an expression, a point of

a ention, within an infinite state of consciousness which is the real

meaning of the term ‘God’.
Perceptual obsession with the ‘physical body’ and five-senses

means that ‘God’ becomes personified as a bearded bloke si ing

among the clouds or a raging bully who loves us if we do what ‘he’

wants and condemns us to the fires of hell if we don’t.
These are no

more than a ‘spiritual’ fairy tales to control and dictate events and

behaviour through fear of this ‘God’ which has bizarrely made ‘God-

fearing’ in religious circles a state to be desired.
I would suggest that

fearing anything is not to be encouraged and celebrated, but rather

deleted.
You can see why ‘God fearing’ is so beneficial to the Cult

and its religions when they decide what ‘God’ wants and what ‘God’

demands (the Cult demands) that everyone do.
As the great

American comedian Bill Hicks said satirising a Christian zealot: ‘I

think what God meant to say.’ How much of this infinite awareness

(‘God’) that we access is decided by how far we choose to expand

our perceptions, self-identity and sense of the possible.
The scale of

self-identity reflects itself in the scale of awareness that we can

connect with and are influenced by – how much knowing and

insight we have instead of programmed perception.
You cannot

expand your awareness into the infinity of possibility when you

believe that you are li le me Peter the postman or Mary in marketing

and nothing more.
I’ll deal with this in the concluding chapter

because it’s crucial to how we turnaround current events.
Where the Cult came from

When I realised in the early 1990s there was a Cult network behind

global events I asked the obvious question: When did it start?
I took

it back to ancient Rome and Egypt and on to Babylon and Sumer in

Mesopotamia, the ‘Land Between Two Rivers’, in what we now call

Iraq.
The two rivers are the Tigris and Euphrates and this region is of

immense historical and other importance to the Cult, as is the land

called Israel only 550 miles away by air.
There is much more going

with deep esoteric meaning across this whole region.
It’s not only

about ‘wars for oil’.
Priceless artefacts from Mesopotamia were

stolen or destroyed a er the American and British invasion of Iraq in

2003 justified by the lies of Boy Bush and Tony Blair (their Cult

masters) about non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
Mesopotamia was the location of Sumer (about 5,400BC to 1,750BC),

and Babylon (about 2,350BC to 539BC).
Sabbatians may have become

immensely influential in the Cult in modern times but they are part

of a network that goes back into the mists of history.
Sumer is said by

historians to be the ‘cradle of civilisation’.
I disagree.
I say it was the

re-start of what we call human civilisation a er cataclysmic events

symbolised in part as the ‘Great Flood’ destroyed the world that

existed before.
These fantastic upheavals that I have been describing

in detail in the books since the early1990s appear in accounts and

legends of ancient cultures across the world and they are supported

by geological and biological evidence.
Stone tablets found in Iraq

detailing the Sumer period say the cataclysms were caused by non-

human ‘gods’ they call the Anunnaki.
These are described in terms

of extraterrestrial visitations in which knowledge supplied by the

Anunnaki is said to have been the source of at least one of the

world’s oldest writing systems and developments in astronomy,

mathematics and architecture that were way ahead of their time.
I

have covered this subject at length in The Biggest Secret and Children

of the Matrix and the same basic ‘Anunnaki’ story can be found in

Zulu accounts in South Africa where the late and very great Zulu

high shaman Credo Mutwa told me that the Sumerian Anunnaki

were known by Zulus as the Chitauri or ‘children of the serpent’.
See

my six-hour video interview with Credo on this subject entitled The

Reptilian Agenda recorded at his then home near Johannesburg in

1999 which you can watch on the Ickonic media platform.
The Cult emerged out of Sumer, Babylon and Egypt (and

elsewhere) and established the Roman Empire before expanding

with the Romans into northern Europe from where many empires

were savagely imposed in the form of Cult-controlled societies all

over the world.
Mass death and destruction was their calling card.
The Cult established its centre of operations in Europe and European

Empires were Cult empires which allowed it to expand into a global

force.
Spanish and Portuguese colonialists headed for Central and

South America while the British and French targeted North America.
Africa was colonised by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands,

Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Germany.
Some like Britain and France

moved in on the Middle East.
The British Empire was by far the

biggest for a simple reason.
By now Britain was the headquarters of

the Cult from which it expanded to form Canada, the United States,

Australia and New Zealand.
The Sun never set on the British Empire

such was the scale of its occupation.
London remains a global centre

for the Cult along with Rome and the Vatican although others have

emerged in Israel and China.
It is no accident that the ‘virus’ is

alleged to have come out of China while Italy was chosen as the

means to terrify the Western population into compliance with

‘Covid’ fascism.
Nor that Israel has led the world in ‘Covid’ fascism

and mass ‘vaccination’.
You would think that I would mention the United States here, but

while it has been an important means of imposing the Cult’s will it is

less significant than would appear and is currently in the process of

having what power it does have deleted.
The Cult in Europe has

mostly loaded the guns for the US to fire.
America has been

controlled from Europe from the start through Cult operatives in

Britain and Europe.
The American Revolution was an illusion to

make it appear that America was governing itself while very

different forces were pulling the strings in the form of Cult families

such as the Rothschilds through the Rockefellers and other

subordinates.
The Rockefellers are extremely close to Bill Gates and

established both scalpel and drug ‘medicine’ and the World Health

Organization.
They play a major role in the development and

circulation of vaccines through the Rockefeller Foundation on which

Bill Gates said his Foundation is based.
Why wouldn’t this be the

case when the Rockefellers and Gates are on the same team?
Cult

infiltration of human society goes way back into what we call history

and has been constantly expanding and centralising power with the

goal of establishing a global structure to dictate everything.
Look

how this has been advanced in great leaps with the ‘Covid’ hoax.
The non-human dimension

I researched and observed the comings and goings of Cult operatives

through the centuries and even thousands of years as they were

born, worked to promote the agenda within the secret society and

satanic networks, and then died for others to replace them.
Clearly

there had to be a coordinating force that spanned this entire period

while operatives who would not have seen the end goal in their

lifetimes came and went advancing the plan over millennia.
I went

in search of that coordinating force with the usual support from the

extraordinary synchronicity of my life which has been an almost

daily experience since 1990.
I saw common themes in religious texts

and ancient cultures about a non-human force manipulating human

society from the hidden.
Christianity calls this force Satan, the Devil

and demons; Islam refers to the Jinn or Djinn; Zulus have their

Chitauri (spelt in other ways in different parts of Africa); and the

Gnostic people in Egypt in the period around and before 400AD

referred to this phenomena as the ‘Archons’, a word meaning rulers

in Greek.
Central American cultures speak of the ‘Predators’ among

other names and the same theme is everywhere.
I will use ‘Archons’

as a collective name for all of them.
When you see how their nature

and behaviour is described all these different sources are clearly

talking about the same force.
Gnostics described the Archons in

terms of ‘luminous fire’ while Islam relates the Jinn to ‘smokeless

fire’.
Some refer to beings in form that could occasionally be seen,

but the most common of common theme is that they operate from

unseen realms which means almost all existence to the visual

processes of humans.
I had concluded that this was indeed the

foundation of human control and that the Cult was operating within

the human frequency band on behalf of this hidden force when I

came across the writings of Gnostics which supported my

conclusions in the most extraordinary way.
A sealed earthen jar was found in 1945 near the town of Nag

Hammadi about 75-80 miles north of Luxor on the banks of the River

Nile in Egypt.
Inside was a treasure trove of manuscripts and texts

le by the Gnostic people some 1,600 years earlier.
They included 13

leather-bound papyrus codices (manuscripts) and more than 50 texts

wri en in Coptic Egyptian estimated to have been hidden in the jar

in the period of 400AD although the source of the information goes

back much further.
Gnostics oversaw the Great or Royal Library of

Alexandria, the fantastic depository of ancient texts detailing

advanced knowledge and accounts of human history.
The Library

was dismantled and destroyed in stages over a long period with the

death-blow delivered by the Cult-established Roman Church in the

period around 415AD.
The Church of Rome was the Church of

Babylon relocated as I said earlier.
Gnostics were not a race.
They

were a way of perceiving reality.
Whenever they established

themselves and their information circulated the terrorists of the

Church of Rome would target them for destruction.
This happened

with the Great Library and with the Gnostic Cathars who were

burned to death by the psychopaths a er a long period of

oppression at the siege of the Castle of Monségur in southern France

in 1244.
The Church has always been terrified of Gnostic information

which demolishes the official Christian narrative although there is

much in the Bible that supports the Gnostic view if you read it in

another way.
To anyone studying the texts of what became known as

the Nag Hammadi Library it is clear that great swathes of Christian

and Biblical belief has its origin with Gnostics sources going back to

Sumer.
Gnostic themes have been twisted to manipulate the

perceived reality of Bible believers.
Biblical texts have been in the

open for centuries where they could be changed while Gnostic

documents found at Nag Hammadi were sealed away and

untouched for 1,600 years.
What you see is what they wrote.
Use your pneuma not your nous

Gnosticism and Gnostic come from ‘gnosis’ which means

knowledge, or rather secret knowledge, in the sense of spiritual

awareness – knowledge about reality and life itself.
The desperation

of the Cult’s Church of Rome to destroy the Gnostics can be

understood when the knowledge they were circulating was the last

thing the Cult wanted the population to know.
Sixteen hundred

years later the same Cult is working hard to undermine and silence

me for the same reason.
The dynamic between knowledge and

ignorance is a constant.
‘Time’ appears to move on, but essential

themes remain the same.
We are told to ‘use your nous’, a Gnostic

word for head/brain/intelligence.
They said, however, that spiritual

awakening or ‘salvation’ could only be secured by expanding

awareness beyond what they called nous and into pneuma or Infinite

Self.
Obviously as I read these texts the parallels with what I have

been saying since 1990 were fascinating to me.
There is a universal

truth that spans human history and in that case why wouldn’t we be

talking the same language 16 centuries apart?
When you free

yourself from the perception program of the five senses and explore

expanded realms of consciousness you are going to connect with the

same information no ma er what the perceived ‘era’ within a

manufactured timeline of a single and tiny range of manipulated

frequency.
Humans working with ‘smart’ technology or knocking

rocks together in caves is only a timeline appearing to operate within

the human frequency band.
Expanded awareness and the

knowledge it holds have always been there whether the era be Stone

Age or computer age.
We can only access that knowledge by

opening ourselves to its frequency which the five-sense prison cell is

designed to stop us doing.
Gates, Fauci, Whi y, Vallance,

Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Wojcicki, Bezos, and all the others behind

the ‘Covid’ hoax clearly have a long wait before their range of

frequency can make that connection given that an open heart is

crucial to that as we shall see.
Instead of accessing knowledge

directly through expanded awareness it is given to Cult operatives

by the secret society networks of the Cult where it has been passed

on over thousands of years outside the public arena.
Expanded

realms of consciousness is where great artists, composers and

writers find their inspiration and where truth awaits anyone open

enough to connect with it.
We need to go there fast.
Archon hijack

A fi h of the Nag Hammadi texts describe the existence and

manipulation of the Archons led by a ‘Chief Archon’ they call

‘Yaldabaoth’, or the ‘Demiurge’, and this is the Christian ‘Devil’,

‘Satan’, ‘Lucifer’, and his demons.
Archons in Biblical symbolism are

the ‘fallen ones’ which are also referred to as fallen angels a er the

angels expelled from heaven according to the Abrahamic religions of

Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
These angels are claimed to tempt

humans to ‘sin’ ongoing and you will see how accurate that

symbolism is during the rest of the book.
The theme of ‘original sin’

is related to the ‘Fall’ when Adam and Eve were ‘tempted by the

serpent’ and fell from a state of innocence and ‘obedience’

(connection) with God into a state of disobedience (disconnection).
The Fall is said to have brought sin into the world and corrupted

everything including human nature.
Yaldabaoth, the ‘Lord Archon’,

is described by Gnostics as a ‘counterfeit spirit’, ‘The Blind One’,

‘The Blind God’, and ‘The Foolish One’.
The Jewish name for

Yaldabaoth in Talmudic writings is Samael which translates as

‘Poison of God’, or ‘Blindness of God’.
You see the parallels.
Yaldabaoth in Islamic belief is the Muslim Jinn devil known as

Shaytan – Shaytan is Satan as the same themes are found all over the

world in every religion and culture.
The ‘Lord God’ of the Old

Testament is the ‘Lord Archon’ of Gnostic manuscripts and that’s

why he’s such a bloodthirsty bastard.
Satan is known by Christians

as ‘the Demon of Demons’ and Gnostics called Yaldabaoth the

‘Archon of Archons’.
Both are known as ‘The Deceiver’.
We are

talking about the same ‘bloke’ for sure and these common themes

using different names, storylines and symbolism tell a common tale

of the human plight.
Archons are referred to in Nag Hammadi documents as mind

parasites, inverters, guards, gatekeepers, detainers, judges, pitiless

ones and deceivers.
The ‘Covid’ hoax alone is a glaring example of

all these things.
The Biblical ‘God’ is so different in the Old and New

Testaments because they are not describing the same phenomenon.
The vindictive, angry, hate-filled, ‘God’ of the Old Testament, known

as Yahweh, is Yaldabaoth who is depicted in Cult-dictated popular

culture as the ‘Dark Lord’, ‘Lord of Time’, Lord (Darth) Vader and

Dormammu, the evil ruler of the ‘Dark Dimension’ trying to take

over the ‘Earth Dimension’ in the Marvel comic movie, Dr Strange.
Yaldabaoth is both the Old Testament ‘god’ and the Biblical ‘Satan’.
Gnostics referred to Yaldabaoth as the ‘Great Architect of the

Universe’and the Cult-controlled Freemason network calls their god

‘the ‘Great Architect of the Universe’ (also Grand Architect).
The

‘Great Architect’ Yaldabaoth is symbolised by the Cult as the all-

seeing eye at the top of the pyramid on the Great Seal of the United

States and the dollar bill.
Archon is encoded in arch-itect as it is in

arch-angels and arch-bishops.
All religions have the theme of a force

for good and force for evil in some sort of spiritual war and there is a

reason for that – the theme is true.
The Cult and its non-human

masters are quite happy for this to circulate.
They present

themselves as the force for good fighting evil when they are really

the force of evil (absence of love).
The whole foundation of Cult

modus operandi is inversion.
They promote themselves as a force for

good and anyone challenging them in pursuit of peace, love,

fairness, truth and justice is condemned as a satanic force for evil.
This has been the game plan throughout history whether the Church

of Rome inquisitions of non-believers or ‘conspiracy theorists’ and

‘anti-vaxxers’ of today.
The technique is the same whatever the

timeline era.
Yaldabaoth is revolting (true)

Yaldabaoth and the Archons are said to have revolted against God

with Yaldabaoth claiming to be God – the All That Is.
The Old

Testament ‘God’ (Yaldabaoth) demanded to be worshipped as such: ‘

I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me’

(Isaiah 45:5).
I have quoted in other books a man who said he was

the unofficial son of the late Baron Philippe de Rothschild of the

Mouton-Rothschild wine producing estates in France who died in

1988 and he told me about the Rothschild ‘revolt from God’.
The

man said he was given the name Phillip Eugene de Rothschild and

we shared long correspondence many years ago while he was living

under another identity.
He said that he was conceived through

‘occult incest’ which (within the Cult) was ‘normal and to be

admired’.
‘Phillip’ told me about his experience a ending satanic

rituals with rich and famous people whom he names and you can

see them and the wider background to Cult Satanism in my other

books starting with The Biggest Secret.
Cult rituals are interactions

with Archontic ‘gods’.
‘Phillip’ described Baron Philippe de

Rothschild as ‘a master Satanist and hater of God’ and he used the

same term ‘revolt from God’ associated with

Yaldabaoth/Satan/Lucifer/the Devil in describing the Sabbatian

Rothschild dynasty.
‘I played a key role in my family’s revolt from

God’, he said.
That role was to infiltrate in classic Sabbatian style the

Christian Church, but eventually he escaped the mind-prison to live

another life.
The Cult has been targeting religion in a plan to make

worship of the Archons the global one-world religion.
Infiltration of

Satanism into modern ‘culture’, especially among the young,

through music videos, stage shows and other means, is all part of

this.
Nag Hammadi texts describe Yaldabaoth and the Archons in their

prime form as energy – consciousness – and say they can take form if

they choose in the same way that consciousness takes form as a

human.
Yaldabaoth is called ‘formless’ and represents a deeply

inverted, distorted and chaotic state of consciousness which seeks to

a ached to humans and turn them into a likeness of itself in an

a empt at assimilation.
For that to happen it has to manipulate

humans into low frequency mental and emotional states that match

its own.
Archons can certainly appear in human form and this is the

origin of the psychopathic personality.
The energetic distortion

Gnostics called Yaldabaoth is psychopathy.
When psychopathic

Archons take human form that human will be a psychopath as an

expression of Yaldabaoth consciousness.
Cult psychopaths are

Archons in human form.
The principle is the same as that portrayed

in the 2009 Avatar movie when the American military travelled to a

fictional Earth-like moon called Pandora in the Alpha Centauri star

system to infiltrate a society of blue people, or Na’vi, by hiding

within bodies that looked like the Na’vi.
Archons posing as humans

have a particular hybrid information field, part human, part Archon,

(the ancient ‘demigods’) which processes information in a way that

manifests behaviour to match their psychopathic evil, lack of

empathy and compassion, and stops them being influenced by the

empathy, compassion and love that a fully-human information field

is capable of expressing.
Cult bloodlines interbreed, be they royalty

or dark suits, for this reason and you have their obsession with

incest.
Interbreeding with full-blown humans would dilute the

Archontic energy field that guarantees psychopathy in its

representatives in the human realm.
Gnostic writings say the main non-human forms that Archons

take are serpentine (what I have called for decades ‘reptilian’ amid

unbounded ridicule from the Archontically-programmed) and what

Gnostics describe as ‘an unborn baby or foetus with grey skin and

dark, unmoving eyes’.
This is an excellent representation of the ET

‘Greys’ of UFO folklore which large numbers of people claim to have

seen and been abducted by – Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa among

them.
I agree with those that believe in extraterrestrial or

interdimensional visitations today and for thousands of years past.
No wonder with their advanced knowledge and technological

capability they were perceived and worshipped as gods for

technological and other ‘miracles’ they appeared to perform.
Imagine someone arriving in a culture disconnected from the

modern world with a smartphone and computer.
They would be

seen as a ‘god’ capable of ‘miracles’.
The Renegade Mind, however,

wants to know the source of everything and not only the way that

source manifests as human or non-human.
In the same way that a

Renegade Mind seeks the original source material for the ‘Covid

virus’ to see if what is claimed is true.
The original source of

Archons in form is consciousness – the distorted state of

consciousness known to Gnostics as Yaldabaoth.
‘Revolt from God’ is energetic disconnection

Where I am going next will make a lot of sense of religious texts and

ancient legends relating to ‘Satan’, Lucifer’ and the ‘gods’.
Gnostic

descriptions sync perfectly with the themes of my own research over

the years in how they describe a consciousness distortion seeking to

impose itself on human consciousness.
I’ve referred to the core of

infinite awareness in previous books as Infinite Awareness in

Awareness of Itself.
By that I mean a level of awareness that knows

that it is all awareness and is aware of all awareness.
From here

comes the frequency of love in its true sense and balance which is

what love is on one level – the balance of all forces into a single

whole called Oneness and Isness.
The more we disconnect from this

state of love that many call ‘God’ the constituent parts of that

Oneness start to unravel and express themselves as a part and not a

whole.
They become individualised as intellect, mind, selfishness,

hatred, envy, desire for power over others, and such like.
This is not

a problem in the greater scheme in that ‘God’, the All That Is, can

experience all these possibilities through different expressions of

itself including humans.
What we as expressions of the whole

experience the All That Is experiences.
We are the All That Is

experiencing itself.
As we withdraw from that state of Oneness we

disconnect from its influence and things can get very unpleasant and

very stupid.
Archontic consciousness is at the extreme end of that.
It

has so disconnected from the influence of Oneness that it has become

an inversion of unity and love, an inversion of everything, an

inversion of life itself.
Evil is appropriately live wri en backwards.
Archontic consciousness is obsessed with death, an inversion of life,

and so its manifestations in Satanism are obsessed with death.
They

use inverted symbols in their rituals such as the inverted pentagram

and cross.
Sabbatians as Archontic consciousness incarnate invert

Judaism and every other religion and culture they infiltrate.
They

seek disunity and chaos and they fear unity and harmony as they

fear love like garlic to a vampire.
As a result the Cult, Archons

incarnate, act with such evil, psychopathy and lack of empathy and

compassion disconnected as they are from the source of love.
How

could Bill Gates and the rest of the Archontic psychopaths do what

they have to human society in the ‘Covid’ era with all the death,

suffering and destruction involved and have no emotional

consequence for the impact on others?
Now you know.
Why have

Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Wojcicki and company callously censored

information warning about the dangers of the ‘vaccine’ while

thousands have been dying and having severe, sometimes life-

changing reactions?
Now you know.
Why have Tedros, Fauci,

Whi y, Vallance and their like around the world been using case and

death figures they’re aware are fraudulent to justify lockdowns and

all the deaths and destroyed lives that have come from that?
Now

you know.
Why did Christian Drosten produce and promote a

‘testing’ protocol that he knew couldn’t test for infectious disease

which led to a global human catastrophe.
Now you know.
The

Archontic mind doesn’t give a shit (Fig 17).
I personally think that

Gates and major Cult insiders are a form of AI cyborg that the

Archons want humans to become.
Figure 17: Artist Neil Hague’s version of the ‘Covid’ hierarchy.
Human batteries

A state of such inversion does have its consequences, however.
The

level of disconnection from the Source of All means that you

withdraw from that source of energetic sustenance and creativity.
This means that you have to find your own supply of energetic

power and it has – us.
When the Morpheus character in the first

Matrix movie held up a ba ery he spoke a profound truth when he

said: ‘The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep

us under control in order to change the human being into one of

these.’ The statement was true in all respects.
We do live in a

technologically-generated virtual reality simulation (more very

shortly) and we have been manipulated to be an energy source for

Archontic consciousness.
The Disney-Pixar animated movie

Monsters, Inc.
in 2001 symbolised the dynamic when monsters in

their world had no energy source and they would enter the human

world to terrify children in their beds, catch the child’s scream, terror

(low-vibrational frequencies), and take that energy back to power

the monster world.
The lead character you might remember was a

single giant eye and the symbolism of the Cult’s all-seeing eye was

obvious.
Every thought and emotion is broadcast as a frequency

unique to that thought and emotion.
Feelings of love and joy,

empathy and compassion, are high, quick, frequencies while fear,

depression, anxiety, suffering and hate are low, slow, dense

frequencies.
Which kind do you think Archontic consciousness can

connect with and absorb?
In such a low and dense frequency state

there’s no way it can connect with the energy of love and joy.
Archons can only feed off energy compatible with their own

frequency and they and their Cult agents want to delete the human

world of love and joy and manipulate the transmission of low

vibrational frequencies through low-vibrational human mental and

emotional states.
We are their energy source.
Wars are energetic

banquets to the Archons – a world war even more so – and think

how much low-frequency mental and emotional energy has been

generated from the consequences for humanity of the ‘Covid’ hoax

orchestrated by Archons incarnate like Gates.
The ancient practice of human sacrifice ‘to the gods’, continued in

secret today by the Cult, is based on the same principle.
‘The gods’

are Archontic consciousness in different forms and the sacrifice is

induced into a state of intense terror to generate the energy the

Archontic frequency can absorb.
Incarnate Archons in the ritual

drink the blood which contains an adrenaline they crave which

floods into the bloodstream when people are terrorised.
Most of the

sacrifices, ancient and modern, are children and the theme of

‘sacrificing young virgins to the gods’ is just code for children.
They

have a particular pre-puberty energy that Archons want more than

anything and the energy of the young in general is their target.
The

California Department of Education wants students to chant the

names of Aztec gods (Archontic gods) once worshipped in human

sacrifice rituals in a curriculum designed to encourage them to

‘challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial

beliefs’, join ‘social movements that struggle for social justice’, and

‘build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism

society’.
It’s the usual Woke crap that inverts racism and calls it anti-

racism.
In this case solidarity with ‘indigenous tribes’ is being used

as an excuse to chant the names of ‘gods’ to which people were

sacrificed (and still are in secret).
What an example of Woke’s

inability to see beyond black and white, us and them, They condemn

the colonisation of these tribal cultures by Europeans (quite right),

but those cultures sacrificing people including children to their

‘gods’, and mass murdering untold numbers as the Aztecs did, is

just fine.
One chant is to the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca who had a man

sacrificed to him in the 5th month of the Aztec calendar.
His heart

was cut out and he was eaten.
Oh, that’s okay then.
Come on

children … a er three … Other sacrificial ‘gods’ for the young to

chant their allegiance include Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and Xipe

Totec.
The curriculum says that ‘chants, affirmations, and energizers

can be used to bring the class together, build unity around ethnic

studies principles and values, and to reinvigorate the class following

a lesson that may be emotionally taxing or even when student

engagement may appear to be low’.
Well, that’s the cover story,

anyway.
Chanting and mantras are the repetition of a particular

frequency generated from the vocal cords and chanting the names of

these Archontic ‘gods’ tunes you into their frequency.
That is the last

thing you want when it allows for energetic synchronisation,

a achment and perceptual influence.
Initiates chant the names of

their ‘Gods’ in their rituals for this very reason.
Vampires of the Woke

Paedophilia is another way that Archons absorb the energy of

children.
Paedophiles possessed by Archontic consciousness are

used as the conduit during sexual abuse for discarnate Archons to

vampire the energy of the young they desire so much.
Stupendous

numbers of children disappear every year never to be seen again

although you would never know from the media.
Imagine how

much low-vibrational energy has been generated by children during

the ‘Covid’ hoax when so many have become depressed and

psychologically destroyed to the point of killing themselves.
Shocking numbers of children are now taken by the state from

loving parents to be handed to others.
I can tell you from long

experience of researching this since 1996 that many end up with

paedophiles and assets of the Cult through corrupt and Cult-owned

social services which in the reframing era has hired many

psychopaths and emotionless automatons to do the job.
Children are

even stolen to order using spurious reasons to take them by the

corrupt and secret (because they’re corrupt) ‘family courts’.
I have

wri en in detail in other books, starting with The Biggest Secret in

1997, about the ubiquitous connections between the political,

corporate, government, intelligence and military elites (Cult

operatives) and Satanism and paedophilia.
If you go deep enough

both networks have an interlocking leadership.
The Woke mentality

has been developed by the Cult for many reasons: To promote

almost every aspect of its agenda; to hijack the traditional political

le and turn it fascist; to divide and rule; and to target agenda

pushbackers.
But there are other reasons which relate to what I am

describing here.
How many happy and joyful Wokers do you ever

see especially at the extreme end?
They are a mental and

psychological mess consumed by emotional stress and constantly

emotionally cocked for the next explosion of indignation at someone

referring to a female as a female.
They are walking, talking, ba eries

as Morpheus might say emi ing frequencies which both enslave

them in low-vibrational bubbles of perceptual limitation and feed

the Archons.
Add to this the hatred claimed to be love; fascism

claimed to ‘anti-fascism’, racism claimed to be ‘anti-racism’;

exclusion claimed to inclusion; and the abuse-filled Internet trolling.
You have a purpose-built Archontic energy system with not a wind

turbine in sight and all founded on Archontic inversion.
We have

whole generations now manipulated to serve the Archons with their

actions and energy.
They will be doing so their entire adult lives

unless they snap out of their Archon-induced trance.
Is it really a

surprise that Cult billionaires and corporations put so much money

their way?
Where is the energy of joy and laughter, including

laughing at yourself which is confirmation of your own emotional

security?
Mark Twain said: ‘The human race has one really effective

weapon, and that is laughter.‘ We must use it all the time.
Woke has

destroyed comedy because it has no humour, no joy, sense of irony,

or self-deprecation.
Its energy is dense and intense.
Mmmmm, lunch

says the Archontic frequency.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was the

Austrian philosopher and famous esoteric thinker who established

Waldorf education or Steiner schools to treat children like unique

expressions of consciousness and not minds to be programmed with

the perceptions determined by authority.
I’d been writing about this

energy vampiring for decades when I was sent in 2016 a quote by

Steiner.
He was spot on:

There are beings in the spiritual realms for whom anxiety and fear emanating from human

beings offer welcome food.
When humans have no anxiety and fear, then these creatures

starve.
If fear and anxiety radiates from people and they break out in panic, then these

creatures find welcome nutrition and they become more and more powerful.
These beings are

hostile towards humanity.
Everything that feeds on negative feelings, on anxiety, fear and

superstition, despair or doubt, are in reality hostile forces in super-sensible worlds, launching cruel attacks on human beings, while they are being fed...
These are exactly the feelings that

belong to contemporary culture and materialism; because it estranges people from the

spiritual world, it is especially suited to evoke hopelessness and fear of the unknown in

people, thereby calling up the above mentioned hostile forces against them.
Pause for a moment from this perspective and reflect on what has

happened in the world since the start of 2020.
Not only will pennies

drop, but billion dollar bills.
We see the same theme from Don Juan

Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman in Mexico and the information source

for Peruvian-born writer, Carlos Castaneda, who wrote a series of

books from the 1960s to 1990s.
Don Juan described the force

manipulating human society and his name for the Archons was the

predator:

We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our

lives.
Human beings are its prisoners.
The predator is our lord and master.
It has rendered us

docile, helpless.
If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest.
If we want to act

independently, it demands that we don’t do so...
indeed we are held prisoner!
They took us over because we are food to them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we

are their sustenance.
Just as we rear chickens in coops, the predators rear us in human coops,

humaneros.
Therefore, their food is always available to them.
Different cultures, different eras, same recurring theme.
The ‘ennoia’ dilemma

Nag Hammadi Gnostic manuscripts say that Archon consciousness

has no ‘ennoia’.
This is directly translated as ‘intentionality’, but I’ll

use the term ‘creative imagination’.
The All That Is in awareness of

itself is the source of all creativity – all possibility – and the more

disconnected you are from that source the more you are

subsequently denied ‘creative imagination’.
Given that Archon

consciousness is almost entirely disconnected it severely lacks

creativity and has to rely on far more mechanical processes of

thought and exploit the creative potential of those that do have

‘ennoia’.
You can see cases of this throughout human society.
Archon

consciousness almost entirely dominates the global banking system

and if we study how that system works you will appreciate what I

mean.
Banks manifest ‘money’ out of nothing by issuing lines of

‘credit’ which is ‘money’ that has never, does not, and will never

exist except in theory.
It’s a confidence trick.
If you think ‘credit’

figures-on-a-screen ‘money’ is worth anything you accept it as

payment.
If you don’t then the whole system collapses through lack

of confidence in the value of that ‘money’.
Archontic bankers with

no ‘ennoia’ are ‘lending’ ‘money’ that doesn’t exist to humans that do

have creativity – those that have the inspired ideas and create

businesses and products.
Archon banking feeds off human creativity

which it controls through ‘money’ creation and debt.
Humans have

the creativity and Archons exploit that for their own benefit and

control while having none themselves.
Archon Internet platforms

like Facebook claim joint copyright of everything that creative users

post and while Archontic minds like Zuckerberg may officially head

that company it will be human creatives on the staff that provide the

creative inspiration.
When you have limitless ‘money’ you can then

buy other companies established by creative humans.
Witness the

acquisition record of Facebook, Google and their like.
Survey the

Archon-controlled music industry and you see non-creative dark

suit executives making their fortune from the human creativity of

their artists.
The cases are endless.
Research the history of people

like Gates and Zuckerberg and how their empires were built on

exploiting the creativity of others.
Archon minds cannot create out of

nothing, but they are skilled (because they have to be) in what

Gnostic texts call ‘countermimicry’.
They can imitate, but not

innovate.
Sabbatians trawl the creativity of others through

backdoors they install in computer systems through their

cybersecurity systems.
Archon-controlled China is globally infamous

for stealing intellectual property and I remember how Hong Kong,

now part of China, became notorious for making counterfeit copies

of the creativity of others – ‘countermimicry’.
With the now

pervasive and all-seeing surveillance systems able to infiltrate any

computer you can appreciate the potential for Archons to vampire

the creativity of humans.
Author John Lamb Lash wrote in his book

about the Nag Hammadi texts, Not In His Image:

Although they cannot originate anything, because they lack the divine factor of ennoia

(intentionality), Archons can imitate with a vengeance.
Their expertise is simulation (HAL,

virtual reality).
The Demiurge [Yaldabaoth] fashions a heaven world copied from the fractal

patterns [of the original]...
His construction is celestial kitsch, like the fake Italianate villa of a Mafia don complete with militant angels to guard every portal.
This brings us to something that I have been speaking about since

the turn of the millennium.
Our reality is a simulation; a virtual

reality that we think is real.
No, I’m not kidding.
Human reality?
Well, virtually

I had pondered for years about whether our reality is ‘real’ or some

kind of construct.
I remembered being immensely affected on a visit

as a small child in the late 1950s to the then newly-opened

Planetarium on the Marylebone Road in London which is now

closed and part of the adjacent Madame Tussauds wax museum.
It

was in the middle of the day, but when the lights went out there was

the night sky projected in the Planetarium’s domed ceiling and it

appeared to be so real.
The experience never le me and I didn’t

know why until around the turn of the millennium when I became

certain that our ‘night sky’ and entire reality is a projection, a virtual

reality, akin to the illusory world portrayed in the Matrix movies.
I

looked at the sky one day in this period and it appeared to me like

the domed roof of the Planetarium.
The release of the first Matrix

movie in 1999 also provided a synchronistic and perfect visual

representation of where my mind had been going for a long time.
I

hadn’t come across the Gnostic Nag Hammadi texts then.
When I

did years later the correlation was once again astounding.
As I read

Gnostic accounts from 1,600 years and more earlier it was clear that

they were describing the same simulation phenomenon.
They tell

how the Yaldabaoth ‘Demiurge’ and Archons created a ‘bad copy’ of

original reality to rule over all that were captured by its illusions and

the body was a prison to trap consciousness in the ‘bad copy’ fake

reality.
Read how Gnostics describe the ‘bad copy’ and update that

to current times and they are referring to what we would call today a

virtual reality simulation.
Author John Lamb Lash said ‘the Demiurge fashions a heaven

world copied from the fractal pa erns’ of the original through

expertise in ‘HAL’ or virtual reality simulation.
Fractal pa erns are

part of the energetic information construct of our reality, a sort of

blueprint.
If these pa erns were copied in computer terms it would

indeed give you a copy of a ‘natural’ reality in a non-natural

frequency and digital form.
The principle is the same as making a

copy of a website.
The original website still exists, but now you can

change the copy version to make it whatever you like and it can

become very different to the original website.
Archons have done

this with our reality, a synthetic copy of prime reality that still exists

beyond the frequency walls of the simulation.
Trapped within the

illusions of this synthetic Matrix, however, were and are human

consciousness and other expressions of prime reality and this is why

the Archons via the Cult are seeking to make the human body

synthetic and give us synthetic AI minds to complete the job of

turning the entire reality synthetic including what we perceive to be

the natural world.
To quote Kurzweil: ‘Nanobots will infuse all the

ma er around us with information.
Rocks, trees, everything will

become these intelligent creatures.’ Yes, synthetic ‘creatures’ just as

‘Covid’ and other genetically-manipulating ‘vaccines’ are designed

to make the human body synthetic.
From this perspective it is

obvious why Archons and their Cult are so desperate to infuse

synthetic material into every human with their ‘Covid’ scam.
Let there be (electromagnetic) light

Yaldabaoth, the force that created the simulation, or Matrix, makes

sense of the Gnostic reference to ‘The Great Architect’ and its use by

Cult Freemasonry as the name of its deity.
The designer of the Matrix

in the movies is called ‘The Architect’ and that trilogy is jam-packed

with symbolism relating to these subjects.
I have contended for years

that the angry Old Testament God (Yaldabaoth) is the ‘God’ being

symbolically ‘quoted’ in the opening of Genesis as ‘creating the

world’.
This is not the creation of prime reality – it’s the creation of

the simulation.
The Genesis ‘God’ says: ‘Let there be Light: and there

was light.’ But what is this ‘Light’?
I have said for decades that the

speed of light (186,000 miles per second) is not the fastest speed

possible as claimed by mainstream science and is in fact the

frequency walls or outer limits of the Matrix.
You can’t have a fastest

or slowest anything within all possibility when everything is

possible.
The human body is encoded to operate within the speed of

light or within the simulation and thus we see only the tiny frequency

band of visible light.
Near-death experiencers who perceive reality

outside the body during temporary ‘death’ describe a very different

form of light and this is supported by the Nag Hammadi texts.
Prime reality beyond the simulation (‘Upper Aeons’ to the Gnostics)

is described as a realm of incredible beauty, bliss, love and harmony

– a realm of ‘watery light’ that is so powerful ‘there are no shadows’.
Our false reality of Archon control, which Gnostics call the ‘Lower

Aeons’, is depicted as a realm with a different kind of ‘light’ and

described in terms of chaos, ‘Hell’, ‘the Abyss’ and ‘Outer Darkness’,

where trapped souls are tormented and manipulated by demons

(relate that to the ‘Covid’ hoax alone).
The watery light theme can be

found in near-death accounts and it is not the same as simulation

‘light’ which is electromagnetic or radiation light within the speed of

light – the ‘Lower Aeons’.
Simulation ‘light’ is the ‘luminous fire’

associated by Gnostics with the Archons.
The Bible refers to

Yaldabaoth as ‘that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which

deceiveth the whole world’ (Revelation 12:9).
I think that making a

simulated copy of prime reality (‘countermimicry’) and changing it

dramatically while all the time manipulating humanity to believe it

to be real could probably meet the criteria of deceiving the whole

world.
Then we come to the Cult god Lucifer – the Light Bringer.
Lucifer is symbolic of Yaldabaoth, the bringer of radiation light that

forms the bad copy simulation within the speed of light.
‘He’ is

symbolised by the lighted torch held by the Statue of Liberty and in

the name ‘Illuminati’.
Sabbatian-Frankism declares that Lucifer is the

true god and Lucifer is the real god of Freemasonry honoured as

their ‘Great or Grand Architect of the Universe’ (simulation).
I would emphasise, too, the way Archontic technologically-

generated luminous fire of radiation has deluged our environment

since I was a kid in the 1950s and changed the nature of The Field

with which we constantly interact.
Through that interaction

technological radiation is changing us.
The Smart Grid is designed to

operate with immense levels of communication power with 5G

expanding across the world and 6G, 7G, in the process of

development.
Radiation is the simulation and the Archontic

manipulation system.
Why wouldn’t the Archon Cult wish to

unleash radiation upon us to an ever-greater extreme to form

Kurzweil’s ‘cloud’?
The plan for a synthetic human is related to the

need to cope with levels of radiation beyond even anything we’ve

seen so far.
Biological humans would not survive the scale of

radiation they have in their script.
The Smart Grid is a technological

sub-reality within the technological simulation to further disconnect

five-sense perception from expanded consciousness.
It’s a

technological prison of the mind.
Infusing the ‘spirit of darkness’

A recurring theme in religion and native cultures is the

manipulation of human genetics by a non-human force and most

famously recorded as the biblical ‘sons of god’ (the god s plural in the

original) who interbred with the daughters of men.
The Nag

Hammadi Apocryphon of John tells the same story this way:

He [Yaldabaoth] sent his angels [Archons/demons] to the daughters of men, that they might

take some of them for themselves and raise offspring for their enjoyment.
And at first they did

not succeed.
When they had no success, they gathered together again and they made a plan

together...
And the angels changed themselves in their likeness into the likeness of their

mates, filling them with the spirit of darkness, which they had mixed for them, and with evil...
And they took women and begot children out of the darkness according to the likeness of

their spirit.
Possession when a discarnate entity takes over a human body is an

age-old theme and continues today.
It’s very real and I’ve seen it.
Satanic and secret society rituals can create an energetic environment

in which entities can a ach to initiates and I’ve heard many stories

of how people have changed their personality a er being initiated

even into lower levels of the Freemasons.
I have been inside three

Freemasonic temples, one at a public open day and two by just

walking in when there was no one around to stop me.
They were in

Ryde, the town where I live, Birmingham, England, when I was with

a group, and Boston, Massachuse s.
They all felt the same

energetically – dark, dense, low-vibrational and sinister.
Demonic

a achment can happen while the initiate has no idea what is going

on.
To them it’s just a ritual to get in the Masons and do a bit of good

business.
In the far more extreme rituals of Satanism human

possession is even more powerful and they are designed to make

possession possible.
The hierarchy of the Cult is dictated by the

power and perceived status of the possessing Archon.
In this way

the Archon hierarchy becomes the Cult hierarchy.
Once the entity

has a ached it can influence perception and behaviour and if it

a aches to the extreme then so much of its energy (information)

infuses into the body information field that the hologram starts to

reflect the nature of the possessing entity.
This is the Exorcist movie

type of possession when facial features change and it’s known as

shapeshi ing.
Islam’s Jinn are said to be invisible tricksters who

change shape, ‘whisper’, confuse and take human form.
These are all

traits of the Archons and other versions of the same phenomenon.
Extreme possession could certainty infuse the ‘spirit of darkness’

into a partner during sex as the Nag Hammadi texts appear to

describe.
Such an infusion can change genetics which is also

energetic information.
Human genetics is information and the ‘spirit

of darkness’ is information.
Mix one with the other and change must

happen.
Islam has the concept of a ‘Jinn baby’ through possession of

the mother and by Jinn taking human form.
There are many ways

that human genetics can be changed and remember that Archons

have been aware all along of advanced techniques to do this.
What is

being done in human society today – and far more – was known

about by Archons at the time of the ‘fallen ones’ and their other

versions described in religions and cultures.
Archons and their human-world Cult are obsessed with genetics

as we see today and they know this dictates how information is

processed into perceived reality during a human life.
They needed to

produce a human form that would decode the simulation and this is

symbolically known as ‘Adam and Eve’ who le the ‘garden’ (prime

reality) and ‘fell’ into Matrix reality.
The simulation is not a

‘physical’ construct (there is no ‘physical’); it is a source of

information.
Think Wi-Fi again.
The simulation is an energetic field

encoded with information and body-brain systems are designed to

decode that information encoded in wave or frequency form which





is transmi ed to the brain as electrical signals.
These are decoded by

the brain to construct our sense of reality – an illusory ‘physical’

world that only exists in the brain or the mind.
Virtual reality games

mimic this process using the same sensory decoding system.
Information is fed to the senses to decode a virtual reality that can

appear so real, but isn’t (Figs 18 and 19).
Some scientists believe –

and I agree with them – that what we perceive as ‘physical’ reality

only exists when we are looking or observing.
The act of perception

or focus triggers the decoding systems which turn waveform

information into holographic reality.
When we are not observing

something our reality reverts from a holographic state to a waveform

state.
This relates to the same principle as a falling tree not making a

noise unless someone is there to hear it or decode it.
The concept

makes sense from the simulation perspective.
A computer is not

decoding all the information in a Wi-Fi field all the time and only

decodes or brings into reality on the screen that part of Wi-Fi that it’s

decoding – focusing upon – at that moment.
Figure 18: Virtual reality technology ‘hacks’ into the body’s five-sense decoding system.
Figure 19: The result can be experienced as very ‘real’.
Interestingly, Professor Donald Hoffman at the Department of

Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, says that

our experienced reality is like a computer interface that shows us

only the level with which we interact while hiding all that exists

beyond it: ‘Evolution shaped us with a user interface that hides the

truth.
Nothing that we see is the truth – the very language of space

and time and objects is the wrong language to describe reality.’ He is

correct in what he says on so many levels.
Space and time are not a

universal reality.
They are a phenomenon of decoded simulation

reality as part of the process of enslaving our sense of reality.
Near-

death experiencers report again and again how space and time did

not exist as we perceive them once they were free of the body – body

decoding systems.
You can appreciate from this why Archons and

their Cult are so desperate to entrap human a ention in the five

senses where we are in the Matrix and of the Matrix.
Opening your

mind to expanded states of awareness takes you beyond the

information confines of the simulation and you become aware of

knowledge and insights denied to you before.
This is what we call

‘awakening’ – awakening from the Matrix – and in the final chapter I

will relate this to current events.
Where are the ‘aliens’?
A simulation would explain the so-called ‘Fermi Paradox’ named

a er Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) who created the first

nuclear reactor.
He considered the question of why there is such a

lack of extraterrestrial activity when there are so many stars and

planets in an apparently vast universe; but what if the night sky that

we see, or think we do, is a simulated projection as I say?
If you

control the simulation and your aim is to hold humanity fast in

essential ignorance would you want other forms of life including

advanced life coming and going sharing information with

humanity?
Or would you want them to believe they were isolated

and apparently alone?
Themes of human isolation and apartness are

common whether they be the perception of a lifeless universe or the

fascist isolation laws of the ‘Covid’ era.
Paradoxically the very

existence of a simulation means that we are not alone when some

force had to construct it.
My view is that experiences that people

have reported all over the world for centuries with Reptilians and

Grey entities are Archon phenomena as Nag Hammadi texts

describe; and that benevolent ‘alien’ interactions are non-human

groups that come in and out of the simulation by overcoming

Archon a empts to keep them out.
It should be highlighted, too, that

Reptilians and Greys are obsessed with genetics and technology as

related by cultural accounts and those who say they have been

abducted by them.
Technology is their way of overcoming some of

the limitations in their creative potential and our technology-driven

and controlled human society of today is arch etypical Archon-

Reptilian-Grey modus operandi.
Technocracy is really Archon tocracy.
The Universe does not have to be as big as it appears with a

simulation.
There is no space or distance only information decoded

into holographic reality.
What we call ‘space’ is only the absence of

holographic ‘objects’ and that ‘space’ is The Field of energetic

information which connects everything into a single whole.
The

same applies with the artificially-generated information field of the

simulation.
The Universe is not big or small as a physical reality.
It is

decoded information, that’s all, and its perceived size is decided by

the way the simulation is encoded to make it appear.
The entire

night sky as we perceive it only exists in our brain and so where are

those ‘millions of light years’?
The ‘stars’ on the ceiling of the

Planetarium looked a vast distance away.
There’s another point to mention about ‘aliens’.
I have been

highlighting since the 1990s the plan to stage a fake ‘alien invasion’

to justify the centralisation of global power and a world military.
Nazi scientist Werner von Braun, who was taken to America by

Operation Paperclip a er World War Two to help found NASA, told

his American assistant Dr Carol Rosin about the Cult agenda when

he knew he was dying in 1977.
Rosin said that he told her about a

sequence that would lead to total human control by a one-world

government.
This included threats from terrorism, rogue nations,

meteors and asteroids before finally an ‘alien invasion’.
All of these

things, von Braun said, would be bogus and what I would refer to as

a No-Problem-Reaction-Solution.
Keep this in mind when ‘the aliens

are coming’ is the new mantra.
The aliens are not coming – they are

already here and they have infiltrated human society while looking

human.
French-Canadian investigative journalist Serge Monast said

in 1994 that he had uncovered a NASA/military operation called

Project Blue Beam which fits with what Werner von Braun predicted.
Monast died of a ‘heart a ack’ in 1996 the day a er he was arrested

and spent a night in prison.
He was 51.
He said Blue Beam was a

plan to stage an alien invasion that would include religious figures

beamed holographically into the sky as part of a global manipulation

to usher in a ‘new age’ of worshipping what I would say is the Cult

‘god’ Yaldabaoth in a one-world religion.
Fake holographic asteroids

are also said to be part of the plan which again syncs with von

Braun.
How could you stage an illusory threat from asteroids unless

they were holographic inserts?
This is pre y straightforward given

the advanced technology outside the public arena and the fact that

our ‘physical’ reality is holographic anyway.
Information fields

would be projected and we would decode them into the illusion of a

‘physical’ asteroid.
If they can sell a global ‘pandemic’ with a ‘virus’

that doesn’t exist what will humans not believe if government and

media tell them?
All this is particularly relevant as I write with the Pentagon

planning to release in June, 2021, information about ‘UFO sightings’.
I have been following the UFO story since the early 1990s and the

common theme throughout has been government and military

denials and cover up.
More recently, however, the Pentagon has

suddenly become more talkative and apparently open with Air

Force pilot radar images released of unexplained cra moving and

changing direction at speeds well beyond anything believed possible

with human technology.
Then, in March, 2021, former Director of

National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said a Pentagon report months

later in June would reveal a great deal of information about UFO

sightings unknown to the public.
He said the report would have

‘massive implications’.
The order to do this was included bizarrely

in a $2.3 trillion ‘coronavirus’ relief and government funding bill

passed by the Trump administration at the end of 2020.
I would add

some serious notes of caution here.
I have been pointing out since

the 1990s that the US military and intelligence networks have long

had cra – ‘flying saucers’ or anti-gravity cra – which any observer

would take to be extraterrestrial in origin.
Keeping this knowledge

from the public allows cra flown by humans to be perceived as alien

visitations.
I am not saying that ‘aliens’ do not exist.
I would be the

last one to say that, but we have to be streetwise here.
President

Ronald Reagan told the UN General Assembly in 1987: ‘I

occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would

vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.’

That’s the idea.
Unite against a common ‘enemy’ with a common

purpose behind your ‘saviour force’ (the Cult) as this age-old

technique of mass manipulation goes global.
Science moves this way …

I could find only one other person who was discussing the

simulation hypothesis publicly when I concluded it was real.
This

was Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher at the University of

Oxford, who has explored for many years the possibility that human

reality is a computer simulation although his version and mine are

not the same.
Today the simulation and holographic reality

hypothesis have increasingly entered the scientific mainstream.
Well,

the more open-minded mainstream, that is.
Here are a few of the

ever-gathering examples.
American nuclear physicist Silas Beane led

a team of physicists at the University of Bonn in Germany pursuing

the question of whether we live in a simulation.
They concluded that

we probably do and it was likely based on a la ice of cubes.
They

found that cosmic rays align with that specific pa ern.
The team

highlighted the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin (GZK) limit which refers

to cosmic ray particle interaction with cosmic background radiation

that creates an apparent boundary for cosmic ray particles.
They say

in a paper entitled ‘Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical

Simulation’ that this ‘pa ern of constraint’ is exactly what you

would find with a computer simulation.
They also made the point

that a simulation would create its own ‘laws of physics’ that would

limit possibility.
I’ve been making the same point for decades that

the perceived laws of physics relate only to this reality, or what I

would later call the simulation.
When designers write codes to create

computer and virtual reality games they are the equivalent of the

laws of physics for that game.
Players interact within the limitations

laid out by the coding.
In the same way those who wrote the codes

for the simulation decided the laws of physics that would apply.
These can be overridden by expanded states of consciousness, but

not by those enslaved in only five-sense awareness where simulation

codes rule.
Overriding the codes is what people call ‘miracles’.
They

are not.
They are bypassing the encoded limits of the simulation.
A

population caught in simulation perception would have no idea that

this was their plight.
As the Bonn paper said: ‘Like a prisoner in a

pitch-black cell we would not be able to see the “walls” of our

prison,’ That’s true if people remain mesmerised by the five senses.
Open to expanded awareness and those walls become very clear.
The

main one is the speed of light.
American theoretical physicist James Gates is another who has

explored the simulation question and found considerable evidence

to support the idea.
Gates was Professor of Physics at the University

of Maryland, Director of The Center for String and Particle Theory,

and on Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and

Technology.
He and his team found computer codes of digital data

embedded in the fabric of our reality.
They relate to on-off electrical

charges of 1 and 0 in the binary system used by computers.
‘We have

no idea what they are doing there’, Gates said.
They found within

the energetic fabric mathematical sequences known as error-

correcting codes or block codes that ‘reboot’ data to its original state

or ‘default se ings’ when something knocks it out of sync.
Gates was

asked if he had found a set of equations embedded in our reality

indistinguishable from those that drive search engines and browsers

and he said: ‘That is correct.’ Rich Terrile, director of the Centre for

Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet

Propulsion Laboratory, has said publicly that he believes the

Universe is a digital hologram that must have been created by a form

of intelligence.
I agree with that in every way.
Waveform information

is delivered electrically by the senses to the brain which constructs a

digital holographic reality that we call the ‘world’.
This digital level

of reality can be read by the esoteric art of numerology.
Digital

holograms are at the cu ing edge of holographics today.
We have

digital technology everywhere designed to access and manipulate

our digital level of perceived reality.
Synthetic mRNA in ‘Covid

vaccines’ has a digital component to manipulate the body’s digital

‘operating system’.
Reality is numbers

How many know that our reality can be broken down to numbers

and codes that are the same as computer games?
Max Tegmark, a

physicist at the Massachuse s Institute of Technology (MIT), is the

author of Our Mathematical Universe in which he lays out how reality

can be entirely described by numbers and maths in the way that a

video game is encoded with the ‘physics’ of computer games.
Our

world and computer virtual reality are essentially the same.
Tegmark imagines the perceptions of characters in an advanced

computer game when the graphics are so good they don’t know they

are in a game.
They think they can bump into real objects

(electromagnetic resistance in our reality), fall in love and feel

emotions like excitement.
When they began to study the apparently

‘physical world’ of the video game they would realise that

everything was made of pixels (which have been found in our

energetic reality as must be the case when on one level our world is

digital).
What computer game characters thought was physical

‘stuff’, Tegmark said, could actually be broken down into numbers:

And we’re exactly in this situation in our world.
We look around and it doesn’t seem that

mathematical at all, but everything we see is made out of elementary particles like quarks and

electrons.
And what properties does an electron have?
Does it have a smell or a colour or a

texture?
No!...
We physicists have come up with geeky names for [Electron] properties, like

electric charge, or spin, or lepton number, but the electron doesn’t care what we call it, the properties are just numbers.
This is the illusory reality Gnostics were describing.
This is the

simulation.
The A, C, G, and T codes of DNA have a binary value –

A and C = 0 while G and T = 1.
This has to be when the simulation is

digital and the body must be digital to interact with it.
Recurring

mathematical sequences are encoded throughout reality and the

body.
They include the Fibonacci sequence in which the two

previous numbers are added to get the next one, as in...
1, 1, 2, 3, 5,

8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.
The sequence is encoded in the human face and

body, proportions of animals, DNA, seed heads, pine cones, trees,

shells, spiral galaxies, hurricanes and the number of petals in a

flower.
The list goes on and on.
There are fractal pa erns – a ‘never-

ending pa ern that is infinitely complex and self-similar across all

scales in the as above, so below, principle of holograms.
These and

other famous recurring geometrical and mathematical sequences

such as Phi, Pi, Golden Mean, Golden Ratio and Golden Section are

computer codes of the simulation.
I had to laugh and give my head a

shake the day I finished this book and it went into the production

stage.
I was sent an article in Scientific American published in April,

2021, with the headline ‘Confirmed!
We Live in a Simulation’.
Two

decades a er I first said our reality is a simulation and the speed of

light is it’s outer limit the article suggested that we do live in a

simulation and that the speed of light is its outer limit.
I le school at

15 and never passed a major exam in my life while the writer was up

to his eyes in qualifications.
As I will explain in the final chapter

knowing is far be er than thinking and they come from very different

sources.
The article rightly connected the speed of light to the

processing speed of the ‘Matrix’ and said what has been in my books

all this time … ‘If we are in a simulation, as it appears, then space is

an abstract property wri en in code.
It is not real’.
No it’s not and if

we live in a simulation something created it and it wasn’t us.
‘That

David Icke says we are manipulated by aliens’ – he’s crackers.’

Wow …

The reality that humanity thinks is so real is an illusion.
Politicians,

governments, scientists, doctors, academics, law enforcement,

media, school and university curriculums, on and on, are all

founded on a world that does not exist except as a simulated prison

cell.
Is it such a stretch to accept that ‘Covid’ doesn’t exist when our

entire ‘physical’ reality doesn’t exist?
Revealed here is the

knowledge kept under raps in the Cult networks of

compartmentalised secrecy to control humanity’s sense of reality by

inducing the population to believe in a reality that’s not real.
If it

wasn’t so tragic in its experiential consequences the whole thing

would be hysterically funny.
None of this is new to Renegade Minds.
Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (about 428 to about 347BC) was a

major influence on Gnostic belief and he described the human plight

thousands of years ago with his Allegory of the Cave.
He told the

symbolic story of prisoners living in a cave who had never been

outside.
They were chained and could only see one wall of the cave

while behind them was a fire that they could not see.
Figures walked

past the fire casting shadows on the prisoners’ wall and those

moving shadows became their sense of reality.
Some prisoners began

to study the shadows and were considered experts on them (today’s

academics and scientists), but what they studied was only an illusion

(today’s academics and scientists).
A prisoner escaped from the cave

and saw reality as it really is.
When he returned to report this

revelation they didn’t believe him, called him mad and threatened to

kill him if he tried to set them free.
Plato’s tale is not only a brilliant

analogy of the human plight and our illusory reality.
It describes,

too, the dynamics of the ‘Covid’ hoax.
I have only skimmed the

surface of these subjects here.
The aim of this book is to crisply

connect all essential dots to put what is happening today into its true

context.
All subject areas and their connections in this chapter are

covered in great evidential detail in Everything You Need To Know,

But Have Never Been Told and The Answer.
They say that bewildered people ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’.
Humanity, however, can’t see the forest for the twigs.
The five senses

see only twigs while Renegade Minds can see the forest and it’s the

forest where the answers lie with the connections that reveals.
Breaking free of perceptual programming so the forest can be seen is

the way we turn all this around.
Not breaking free is how humanity

got into this mess.
The situation may seem hopeless, but I promise

you it’s not.
We are a perceptual heartbeat from paradise if only we

knew.
CHAPTER TWELVE

Escaping Wetiko

Life is simply a vacation from the infinite

Dean Cavanagh

Renegade Minds weave the web of life and events and see

common themes in the apparently random.
They are always

there if you look for them and their pursuit is aided by incredible

synchronicity that comes when your mind is open rather than

mesmerised by what it thinks it can see.
Infinite awareness is infinite possibility and the more of infinite

possibility that we access the more becomes infinitely possible.
That

may be stating the apparently obvious, but it is a devastatingly-

powerful fact that can set us free.
We are a point of a ention within

an infinity of consciousness.
The question is how much of that

infinity do we choose to access?
How much knowledge, insight,

awareness, wisdom, do we want to connect with and explore?
If

your focus is only in the five senses you will be influenced by a

fraction of infinite awareness.
I mean a range so tiny that it gives

new meaning to infinitesimal.
Limitation of self-identity and a sense

of the possible limit accordingly your range of consciousness.
We are

what we think we are.
Life is what we think it is.
The dream is the

dreamer and the dreamer is the dream.
Buddhist philosophy puts it

this way: ‘As a thing is viewed, so it appears.’ Most humans live in

the realm of touch, taste, see, hear, and smell and that’s the limit of

their sense of the possible and sense of self.
Many will follow a

religion and speak of a God in his heaven, but their lives are still

dominated by the five senses in their perceptions and actions.
The

five senses become the arbiter of everything.
When that happens all

except a smear of infinity is sealed away from influence by the rigid,

unyielding, reality bubbles that are the five-sense human or

Phantom Self.
Archon Cult methodology is to isolate consciousness

within five-sense reality – the simulation – and then program that

consciousness with a sense of self and the world through a deluge of

life-long information designed to instil the desired perception that

allows global control.
Efforts to do this have increased dramatically

with identity politics as identity bubbles are squeezed into the

minutiae of five-sense detail which disconnect people even more

profoundly from the infinite ‘I’.
Five-sense focus and self-identity are like a firewall that limits

access to the infinite realms.
You only perceive one radio or

television station and no other.
We’ll take that literally for a moment.
Imagine a vast array of stations giving different information and

angles on reality, but you only ever listen to one.
Here we have the

human plight in which the population is overwhelmingly confined

to CultFM.
This relates only to the frequency range of CultFM and

limits perception and insight to that band – limits possibility to that

band.
It means you are connecting with an almost imperceptibly

minuscule range of possibility and creative potential within the

infinite Field.
It’s a world where everything seems apart from

everything else and where synchronicity is rare.
Synchronicity is

defined in the dictionary as ‘the happening by chance of two or more

related or similar events at the same time‘.
Use of ‘by chance’ betrays

a complete misunderstanding of reality.
Synchronicity is not ‘by

chance’.
As people open their minds, or ‘awaken’ to use the term,

they notice more and more coincidences in their lives, bits of ‘luck’,

apparently miraculous happenings that put them in the right place

at the right time with the right people.
Days become peppered with

‘fancy meeting you here’ and ‘what are the chances of that?’ My

entire life has been lived like this and ever more so since my own

colossal awakening in 1990 and 91 which transformed my sense of

reality.
Synchronicity is not ‘by chance’; it is by accessing expanded

realms of possibility which allow expanded potential for

manifestation.
People broadcasting the same vibe from the same

openness of mind tend to be drawn ‘by chance’ to each other

through what I call frequency magnetism and it’s not only people.
In

the last more than 30 years incredible synchronicity has also led me

through the Cult maze to information in so many forms and to

crucial personal experiences.
These ‘coincidences’ have allowed me

to put the puzzle pieces together across an enormous array of

subjects and situations.
Those who have breached the bubble of five-

sense reality will know exactly what I mean and this escape from the

perceptual prison cell is open to everyone whenever they make that

choice.
This may appear super-human when compared with the

limitations of ‘human’, but it’s really our natural state.
‘Human’ as

currently experienced is consciousness in an unnatural state of

induced separation from the infinity of the whole.
I’ll come to how

this transformation into unity can be made when I have described in

more detail the force that holds humanity in servitude by denying

this access to infinite self.
The Wetiko factor

I have been talking and writing for decades about the way five-sense

mind is systematically barricaded from expanded awareness.
I have

used the analogy of a computer (five-sense mind) and someone at

the keyboard (expanded awareness).
Interaction between the

computer and the operator is symbolic of the interaction between

five-sense mind and expanded awareness.
The computer directly

experiences the Internet and the operator experiences the Internet

via the computer which is how it’s supposed to be – the two working

as one.
Archons seek to control that point where the operator

connects with the computer to stop that interaction (Fig 20).
Now the

operator is banging the keyboard and clicking the mouse, but the

computer is not responding and this happens when the computer is

taken over – possessed – by an appropriately-named computer ‘virus’.
The operator has lost all influence over the computer which goes its

own way making decisions under the control of the ‘virus’.
I have



just described the dynamic through which the force known to

Gnostics as Yaldabaoth and Archons disconnects five-sense mind

from expanded awareness to imprison humanity in perceptual

servitude.
Figure 20: The mind ‘virus’ I have been writing about for decades seeks to isolate five-sense mind (the computer) from the true ‘I’.
(Image by Neil Hague).
About a year ago I came across a Native American concept of

Wetiko which describes precisely the same phenomenon.
Wetiko is

the spelling used by the Cree and there are other versions including

wintiko and windigo used by other tribal groups.
They spell the

name with lower case, but I see Wetiko as a proper noun as with

Archons and prefer a capital.
I first saw an article about Wetiko by

writer and researcher Paul Levy which so synced with what I had

been writing about the computer/operator disconnection and later

the Archons.
I then read his book, the fascinating Dispelling Wetiko,

Breaking the Spell of Evil.
The parallels between what I had concluded

long before and the Native American concept of Wetiko were so

clear and obvious that it was almost funny.
For Wetiko see the

Gnostic Archons for sure and the Jinn, the Predators, and every

other name for a force of evil, inversion and chaos.
Wetiko is the

Native American name for the force that divides the computer from

the operator (Fig 21).
Indigenous author Jack D.
Forbes, a founder of

the Native American movement in the 1960s, wrote another book

about Wetiko entitled Columbus And Other Cannibals – The Wetiko

Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism which I also read.
Forbes says that Wetiko refers to an evil person or spirit ‘who

terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible acts, including

cannibalism’.
Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa told me that African

accounts tell how cannibalism was brought into the world by the

Chitauri ‘gods’ – another manifestation of Wetiko.
The distinction

between ‘evil person or spirit’ relates to Archons/Wetiko possessing

a human or acting as pure consciousness.
Wetiko is said to be a

sickness of the soul or spirit and a state of being that takes but gives

nothing back – the Cult and its operatives perfectly described.
Black

Hawk, a Native American war leader defending their lands from

confiscation, said European invaders had ‘poisoned hearts’ – Wetiko

hearts – and that this would spread to native societies.
Mention of

the heart is very significant as we shall shortly see.
Forbes writes:

‘Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in

great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.’ Yes,

and much longer.
Forbes is correct when he says: ‘The wetikos

destroyed Egypt and Babylon and Athens and Rome and

Tenochtitlan [capital of the Aztec empire] and perhaps now they will

destroy the entire earth.’ Evil, he said, is the number one export of a

Wetiko culture – see its globalisation with ‘Covid’.
Constant war,

mass murder, suffering of all kinds, child abuse, Satanism, torture

and human sacrifice are all expressions of Wetiko and the Wetiko

possessed.
The world is Wetiko made manifest, but it doesn’t have to

be.
There is a way out of this even now.
Figure 21: The mind ‘virus’ is known to Native Americans as ‘Wetiko’.
(Image by Neil Hague).
Cult of Wetiko

Wetiko is the Yaldabaoth frequency distortion that seeks to a ach to

human consciousness and absorb it into its own.
Once this

connection is made Wetiko can drive the perceptions of the target

which they believe to be coming from their own mind.
All the

horrors of history and today from mass killers to Satanists,

paedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein and other psychopaths, are the

embodiment of Wetiko and express its state of being in all its

grotesqueness.
The Cult is Wetiko incarnate, Yaldabaoth incarnate,

and it seeks to facilitate Wetiko assimilation of humanity in totality

into its distortion by manipulating the population into low

frequency states that match its own.
Paul Levy writes:

‘Holographically enforced within the psyche of every human being

the wetiko virus pervades and underlies the entire field of

consciousness, and can therefore potentially manifest through any

one of us at any moment if we are not mindful.’ The ‘Covid’ hoax

has achieved this with many people, but others have not fallen into

Wetiko’s frequency lair.
Players in the ‘Covid’ human catastrophe

including Gates, Schwab, Tedros, Fauci, Whi y, Vallance, Johnson,

Hancock, Ferguson, Drosten, and all the rest, including the

psychopath psychologists, are expressions of Wetiko.
This is why

they have no compassion or empathy and no emotional consequence

for what they do that would make them stop doing it.
Observe all

the people who support the psychopaths in authority against the

Pushbackers despite the damaging impact the psychopaths have on

their own lives and their family’s lives.
You are again looking at

Wetiko possession which prevents them seeing through the lies to

the obvious scam going on.
Why can’t they see it?
Wetiko won’t let

them see it.
The perceptual divide that has now become a chasm is

between the Wetikoed and the non-Wetikoed.
Paul Levy describes Wetiko in the same way that I have long

described the Archontic force.
They are the same distorted

consciousness operating across dimensions of reality: ‘… the subtle

body of wetiko is not located in the third dimension of space and

time, literally existing in another dimension … it is able to affect

ordinary lives by mysteriously interpenetrating into our three-

dimensional world.’ Wetiko does this through its incarnate

representatives in the Cult and by weaving itself into The Field

which on our level of reality is the electromagnetic information field

of the simulation or Matrix.
More than that, the simulation is Wetiko

/ Yaldabaoth.
Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia

University, has speculated that ‘alien life’ could be so advanced that

it has transcribed itself into the quantum realm to become what we

call physics.
He said intelligence indistinguishable from the fabric of

the Universe would solve many of its greatest mysteries:

Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external.
Perhaps it’s already all around.
It is embedded

in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behaviour of particles and fields to the

phenomena of complexity and emergence...
In other words, life might not just be in the

equations.
It might BE the equations [My emphasis].
Scharf said it is possible that ‘we don’t recognise advanced life

because it forms an integral and unsuspicious part of what we’ve

considered to be the natural world’.
I agree.
Wetiko/Yaldabaoth is the

simulation.
We are literally in the body of the beast.
But that doesn’t

mean it has to control us.
We all have the power to overcome Wetiko

influence and the Cult knows that.
I doubt it sleeps too well because

it knows that.
Which Field?
This, I suggest, is how it all works.
There are two Fields.
One is the

fierce electromagnetic light of the Matrix within the speed of light;

the other is the ‘watery light’ of The Field beyond the walls of the

Matrix that connects with the Great Infinity.
Five-sense mind and the

decoding systems of the body a ach us to the Field of Matrix light.
They have to or we could not experience this reality.
Five-sense mind

sees only the Matrix Field of information while our expanded

consciousness is part of the Infinity Field.
When we open our minds,

and most importantly our hearts, to the Infinity Field we have a

mission control which gives us an expanded perspective, a road

map, to understand the nature of the five-sense world.
If we are

isolated only in five-sense mind there is no mission control.
We’re on

our own trying to understand a world that’s constantly feeding us

information to ensure we do not understand.
People in this state can

feel ‘lost’ and bewildered with no direction or radar.
You can see

ever more clearly those who are influenced by the Fields of Big

Infinity or li le five-sense mind simply by their views and behaviour

with regard to the ‘Covid’ hoax.
We have had this division

throughout known human history with the mass of the people on

one side and individuals who could see and intuit beyond the walls

of the simulation – Plato’s prisoner who broke out of the cave and

saw reality for what it is.
Such people have always been targeted by

Wetiko/Archon-possessed authority, burned at the stake or

demonised as mad, bad and dangerous.
The Cult today and its

global network of ‘anti-hate’, ‘anti-fascist’ Woke groups are all

expressions of Wetiko a acking those exposing the conspiracy,

‘Covid’ lies and the ‘vaccine’ agenda.
Woke as a whole is Wetiko which explains its black and white

mentality and how at one it is with the Wetiko-possessed Cult.
Paul

Levy said: ‘To be in this paradigm is to still be under the thrall of a

two-valued logic – where things are either true or false – of a

wetikoized mind.’ Wetiko consciousness is in a permanent rage,

therefore so is Woke, and then there is Woke inversion and

contradiction.
‘Anti-fascists’ act like fascists because fascists and ‘anti-

fascists’ are both Wetiko at work.
Political parties act the same while

claiming to be different for the same reason.
Secret society and

satanic rituals are a aching initiates to Wetiko and the cold, ruthless,

psychopathic mentality that secures the positions of power all over

the world is Wetiko.
Reframing ‘training programmes’ have the

same cumulative effect of a aching Wetiko and we have their

graduates described as automatons and robots with a cold,

psychopathic, uncaring demeanour.
They are all traits of Wetiko

possession and look how many times they have been described in

this book and elsewhere with regard to personnel behind ‘Covid’

including the police and medical profession.
Climbing the greasy

pole in any profession in a Wetiko society requires traits of Wetiko to

get there and that is particularly true of politics which is not about

fair competition and pre-eminence of ideas.
It is founded on how

many backs you can stab and arses you can lick.
This culminated in

the global ‘Covid’ coordination between the Wetiko possessed who

pulled it off in all the different countries without a trace of empathy

and compassion for their impact on humans.
Our sight sense can see

only holographic form and not the Field which connects holographic

form.
Therefore we perceive ‘physical’ objects with ‘space’ in

between.
In fact that ‘space’ is energy/consciousness operating on

multiple frequencies.
One of them is Wetiko and that connects the

Cult psychopaths, those who submit to the psychopaths, and those

who serve the psychopaths in the media operations of the world.
Wetiko is Gates.
Wetiko is the mask-wearing submissive.
Wetiko is

the fake journalist and ‘fact-checker’.
The Wetiko Field is

coordinating the whole thing.
Psychopaths, gofers, media

operatives, ‘anti-hate’ hate groups, ‘fact-checkers’ and submissive

people work as one unit even without human coordination because they

are a ached to the same Field which is organising it all (Fig 22).
Paul Levy is here describing how Wetiko-possessed people are drawn

together and refuse to let any information breach their rigid



perceptions.
He was writing long before ‘Covid’, but I think you will

recognise followers of the ‘Covid’ religion oh just a little bit:

People who are channelling the vibratory frequency of wetiko align with each other through

psychic resonance to reinforce their unspoken shared agreement so as to uphold their

deranged view of reality.
Once an unconscious content takes possession of certain

individuals, it irresistibly draws them together by mutual attraction and knits them into groups

tied together by their shared madness that can easily swell into an avalanche of insanity.
A psychic epidemic is a closed system, which is to say that it is insular and not open to any

new information or informing influences from the outside world which contradict its fixed,

limited, and limiting perspective.
There we have the Woke mind and the ‘Covid’ mind.
Compatible

resonance draws the awakening together, too, which is clearly

happening today.
Figure 22: The Wetiko Field from which the Cult pyramid and its personnel are made

manifest.
(Image by Neil Hague).
Spiritual servitude

Wetiko doesn’t care about humans.
It’s not human; it just possesses

humans for its own ends and the effect (depending on the scale of

possession) can be anything from extreme psychopathy to

unquestioning obedience.
Wetiko’s worst nightmare is for human

consciousness to expand beyond the simulation.
Everything is

focussed on stopping that happening through control of

information, thus perception, thus frequency.
The ‘education

system’, media, science, medicine, academia, are all geared to

maintaining humanity in five-sense servitude as is the constant

stimulation of low-vibrational mental and emotional states (see

‘Covid’).
Wetiko seeks to dominate those subconscious spaces

between five-sense perception and expanded consciousness where

the computer meets the operator.
From these subconscious hiding

places Wetiko speaks to us to trigger urges and desires that we take

to be our own and manipulate us into anything from low-vibrational

to psychopathic states.
Remember how Islam describes the Jinn as

invisible tricksters that ‘whisper’ and confuse.
Wetiko is the origin of

the ‘trickster god’ theme that you find in cultures all over the world.
Jinn, like the Archons, are Wetiko which is terrified of humans

awakening and reconnecting with our true self for then its energy

source has gone.
With that the feedback loop breaks between Wetiko

and human perception that provides the energetic momentum on

which its very existence depends as a force of evil.
Humans are both

its target and its source of survival, but only if we are operating in

low-vibrational states of fear, hate, depression and the background

anxiety that most people suffer.
We are Wetiko’s target because we

are its key to survival.
It needs us, not the other way round.
Paul

Levy writes:

A vampire has no intrinsic, independent, substantial existence in its own right; it only exists in relation to us.
The pathogenic, vampiric mind-parasite called wetiko is nothing in itself – not

being able to exist from its own side – yet it has a ‘virtual reality’ such that it can potentially destroy our species …

…The fact that a vampire is not reflected by a mirror can also mean that what we need to see

is that there’s nothing, no-thing to see, other than ourselves.
The fact that wetiko is the

expression of something inside of us means that the cure for wetiko is with us as well.
The

critical issue is finding this cure within us and then putting it into effect.
Evil begets evil because if evil does not constantly expand and

find new sources of energetic sustenance its evil, its distortion, dies

with the assimilation into balance and harmony.
Love is the garlic to

Wetiko’s vampire.
Evil, the absence of love, cannot exist in the

presence of love.
I think I see a way out of here.
I have emphasised

so many times over the decades that the Archons/Wetiko and their

Cult are not all powerful.
They are not.
I don’t care how it looks even

now they are not.
I have not called them li le boys in short trousers

for effect.
I have said it because it is true.
Wetiko’s insatiable desire

for power over others is not a sign of its omnipotence, but its

insecurity.
Paul Levy writes: ‘Due to the primal fear which

ultimately drives it and which it is driven to cultivate, wetiko’s body

politic has an intrinsic and insistent need for centralising power and

control so as to create imagined safety for itself.’ Yeeeeeees!
Exactly!
Why does Wetiko want humans in an ongoing state of fear?
Wetiko

itself is fear and it is petrified of love.
As evil is an absence of love, so

love is an absence of fear.
Love conquers all and especially Wetiko

which is fear.
Wetiko brought fear into the world when it wasn’t here

before.
Fear was the ‘fall’, the fall into low-frequency ignorance and

illusion – fear is False Emotion Appearing Real.
The simulation is

driven and energised by fear because Wetiko/Yaldabaoth (fear) are

the simulation.
Fear is the absence of love and Wetiko is the absence

of love.
Wetiko today

We can now view current events from this level of perspective.
The

‘Covid’ hoax has generated momentous amounts of ongoing fear,

anxiety, depression and despair which have empowered Wetiko.
No

wonder people like Gates have been the instigators when they are

Wetiko incarnate and exhibit every trait of Wetiko in the extreme.
See how cold and unemotional these people are like Gates and his

cronies, how dead of eye they are.
That’s Wetiko.
Sabbatians are

Wetiko and everything they control including the World Health

Organization, Big Pharma and the ‘vaccine’ makers, national ‘health’

hierarchies, corporate media, Silicon Valley, the banking system, and

the United Nations with its planned transformation into world

government.
All are controlled and possessed by the Wetiko

distortion into distorting human society in its image.
We are with

this knowledge at the gateway to understanding the world.
Divisions of race, culture, creed and sexuality are diversions to hide

the real division between those possessed and influenced by Wetiko

and those that are not.
The ‘Covid’ hoax has brought both clearly

into view.
Human behaviour is not about race.
Tyrants and

dictatorships come in all colours and creeds.
What unites the US

president bombing the innocent and an African tribe commi ing

genocide against another as in Rwanda?
What unites them?
Wetiko.
All wars are Wetiko, all genocide is Wetiko, all hunger over centuries

in a world of plenty is Wetiko.
Children going to bed hungry,

including in the West, is Wetiko.
Cult-generated Woke racial

divisions that focus on the body are designed to obscure the reality

that divisions in behaviour are manifestations of mind, not body.
Obsession with body identity and group judgement is a means to

divert a ention from the real source of behaviour – mind and

perception.
Conflict sown by the Woke both within themselves and

with their target groups are Wetiko providing lunch for itself

through still more agents of the division, chaos, and fear on which it

feeds.
The Cult is seeking to assimilate the entirety of humanity and

all children and young people into the Wetiko frequency by

manipulating them into states of fear and despair.
Witness all the

suicide and psychological unravelling since the spring of 2020.
Wetiko psychopaths want to impose a state of unquestioning

obedience to authority which is no more than a conduit for Wetiko to

enforce its will and assimilate humanity into itself.
It needs us to

believe that resistance is futile when it fears resistance and even

more so the game-changing non-cooperation with its impositions.
It

can use violent resistance for its benefit.
Violent impositions and

violent resistance are both Wetiko.
The Power of Love with its Power

of No will sweep Wetiko from our world.
Wetiko and its Cult know

that.
They just don’t want us to know.
AI Wetiko

This brings me to AI or artificial intelligence and something else

Wetikos don’t want us to know.
What is AI really?
I know about

computer code algorithms and AI that learns from data input.
These,

however, are more diversions, the expeditionary force, for the real AI

that they want to connect to the human brain as promoted by Silicon

Valley Wetikos like Kurzweil.
What is this AI?
It is the frequency of

Wetiko, the frequency of the Archons.
The connection of AI to the

human brain is the connection of the Wetiko frequency to create a

Wetiko hive mind and complete the job of assimilation.
The hive

mind is planned to be controlled from Israel and China which are

both 100 percent owned by Wetiko Sabbatians.
The assimilation

process has been going on minute by minute in the ‘smart’ era which

fused with the ‘Covid’ era.
We are told that social media is

scrambling the minds of the young and changing their personality.
This is true, but what is social media?
Look more deeply at how it

works, how it creates divisions and conflict, the hostility and cruelty,

the targeting of people until they are destroyed.
That’s Wetiko.
Social

media is manipulated to tune people to the Wetiko frequency with

all the emotional exploitation tricks employed by platforms like

Facebook and its Wetiko front man, Zuckerberg.
Facebook’s

Instagram announced a new platform for children to overcome a

legal bar on them using the main site.
This is more Wetiko

exploitation and manipulation of kids.
Amnesty International

likened the plan to foxes offering to guard the henhouse and said it

was incompatible with human rights.
Since when did Wetiko or

Zuckerberg (I repeat myself) care about that?
Would Brin and Page

at Google, Wojcicki at YouTube, Bezos at Amazon and whoever the

hell runs Twi er act as they do if they were not channelling Wetiko?
Would those who are developing technologies for no other reason

than human control?
How about those designing and selling

technologies to kill people and Big Pharma drug and ‘vaccine’

producers who know they will end or devastate lives?
Quite a

thought for these people to consider is that if you are Wetiko in a

human life you are Wetiko on the ‘other side’ unless your frequency

changes and that can only change by a change of perception which

becomes a change of behaviour.
Where Gates is going does not bear

thinking about although perhaps that’s exactly where he wants to go.
Either way, that’s where he’s going.
His frequency will make it so.
The frequency lair

I have been saying for a long time that a big part of the addiction to

smartphones and devices is that a frequency is coming off them that

entraps the mind.
People spend ages on their phones and sometimes

even a minute or so a er they put them down they pick them up

again and it all repeats.
‘Covid’ lockdowns will have increased this

addiction a million times for obvious reasons.
Addictions to alcohol

overindulgence and drugs are another way that Wetiko entraps

consciousness to a ach to its own.
Both are symptoms of low-

vibrational psychological distress which alcoholism and drug

addiction further compound.
Do we think it’s really a coincidence

that access to them is made so easy while potions that can take

people into realms beyond the simulation are banned and illegal?
I

have explored smartphone addiction in other books, the scale is

mind-blowing, and that level of addiction does not come without

help.
Tech companies that make these phones are Wetiko and they

will have no qualms about destroying the minds of children.
We are

seeing again with these companies the Wetiko perceptual

combination of psychopathic enforcers and weak and meek

unquestioning compliance by the rank and file.
The global Smart Grid is the Wetiko Grid and it is crucial to

complete the Cult endgame.
The simulation is radiation and we are

being deluged with technological radiation on a devastating scale.
Wetiko frauds like Elon Musk serve Cult interests while occasionally

criticising them to maintain his street-cred.
5G and other forms of

Wi-Fi are being directed at the earth from space on a volume and

scale that goes on increasing by the day.
Elon Musk’s (officially)

SpaceX Starlink project is in the process of pu ing tens of thousands

of satellites in low orbit to cover every inch of the planet with 5G

and other Wi-Fi to create Kurzweil’s global ‘cloud’ to which the

human mind is planned to be a ached very soon.
SpaceX has

approval to operate 12,000 satellites with more than 1,300 launched

at the time of writing and applications filed for 30,000 more.
Other

operators in the Wi-Fi, 5G, low-orbit satellite market include

OneWeb (UK), Telesat (Canada), and AST & Science (US).
Musk tells

us that AI could be the end of humanity and then launches a

company called Neuralink to connect the human brain to computers.
Musk’s (in theory) Tesla company is building electric cars and the

driverless vehicles of the smart control grid.
As frauds and

bullshi ers go Elon Musk in my opinion is Major League.
5G and technological radiation in general are destructive to

human health, genetics and psychology and increasing the strength

of artificial radiation underpins the five-sense perceptual bubbles

which are themselves expressions of radiation or electromagnetism.
Freedom activist John Whitehead was so right with his ‘databit by

databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps’.
The Smart Grid and 5G is a means to control the human mind and

infuse perceptual information into The Field to influence anyone in

sync with its frequency.
You can change perception and behaviour

en masse if you can manipulate the population into those levels of

frequency and this is happening all around us today.
The arrogance

of Musk and his fellow Cult operatives knows no bounds in the way

that we see with Gates.
Musk’s satellites are so many in number

already they are changing the night sky when viewed from Earth.
The astronomy community has complained about this and they have

seen nothing yet.
Some consequences of Musk’s Wetiko hubris

include: Radiation; visible pollution of the night sky; interference

with astronomy and meteorology; ground and water pollution from

intensive use of increasingly many spaceports; accumulating space

debris; continual deorbiting and burning up of aging satellites,

polluting the atmosphere with toxic dust and smoke; and ever-

increasing likelihood of collisions.
A collective public open le er of

complaint to Musk said:

We are writing to you … because SpaceX is in process of surrounding the Earth with a

network of thousands of satellites whose very purpose is to irradiate every square inch of the

Earth.
SpaceX, like everyone else, is treating the radiation as if it were not there.
As if the mitochondria in our cells do not depend on electrons moving undisturbed from the food we

digest to the oxygen we breathe.
As if our nervous systems and our hearts are not subject to radio frequency interference like

any piece of electronic equipment.
As if the cancer, diabetes, and heart disease that now

afflict a majority of the Earth’s population are not metabolic diseases that result from

interference with our cellular machinery.
As if insects everywhere, and the birds and animals

that eat them, are not starving to death as a result.
People like Musk and Gates believe in their limitless Wetiko

arrogance that they can do whatever they like to the world because

they own it.
Consequences for humanity are irrelevant.
It’s

absolutely time that we stopped taking this shit from these self-

styled masters of the Earth when you consider where this is going.
Why is the Cult so anti-human?
I hear this question o en: Why would they do this when it will affect

them, too?
Ah, but will it?
Who is this them?
Forget their bodies.
They are just vehicles for Wetiko consciousness.
When you break it

all down to the foundations we are looking at a state of severely

distorted consciousness targeting another state of consciousness for

assimilation.
The rest is detail.
The simulation is the fly-trap in

which unique sensations of the five senses create a cycle of addiction

called reincarnation.
Renegade Minds see that everything which

happens in our reality is a smaller version of the whole picture in

line with the holographic principle.
Addiction to the radiation of

smart technology is a smaller version of addiction to the whole

simulation.
Connecting the body/brain to AI is taking that addiction

on a giant step further to total ongoing control by assimilating

human incarnate consciousness into Wetiko.
I have watched during

the ‘Covid’ hoax how many are becoming ever more profoundly

a ached to Wetiko’s perceptual calling cards of aggressive response

to any other point of view (‘There is no other god but me’),

psychopathic lack of compassion and empathy, and servile

submission to the narrative and will of authority.
Wetiko is the

psychopaths and subservience to psychopaths.
The Cult of Wetiko is

so anti-human because it is not human.
It embarked on a mission to

destroy human by targeting everything that it means to be human

and to survive as human.
‘Covid’ is not the end, just a means to an

end.
The Cult with its Wetiko consciousness is seeking to change

Earth systems, including the atmosphere, to suit them, not humans.
The gathering bombardment of 5G alone from ground and space is

dramatically changing The Field with which the five senses interact.
There is so much more to come if we sit on our hands and hope it

will all go away.
It is not meant to go away.
It is meant to get ever

more extreme and we need to face that while we still can – just.
Carbon dioxide is the gas of life.
Without that human is over.
Kaput, gone, history.
No natural world, no human.
The Cult has

created a cock and bull story about carbon dioxide and climate

change to justify its reduction to the point where Gates and the

ignoramus Biden ‘climate chief’ John Kerry want to suck it out of the

atmosphere.
Kerry wants to do this because his master Gates does.
Wetikos have made the gas of life a demon with the usual support

from the Wokers of Extinction Rebellion and similar organisations

and the bewildered puppet-child that is Greta Thunberg who was

put on the world stage by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic

Forum.
The name Extinction Rebellion is both ironic and as always

Wetiko inversion.
The gas that we need to survive must be reduced

to save us from extinction.
The most basic need of human is oxygen

and we now have billions walking around in face nappies depriving

body and brain of this essential requirement of human existence.
More than that 5G at 60 gigahertz interacts with the oxygen

molecule to reduce the amount of oxygen the body can absorb into

the bloodstream.
The obvious knock-on consequences of that for

respiratory and cognitive problems and life itself need no further

explanation.
Psychopaths like Musk are assembling a global system

of satellites to deluge the human atmosphere with this insanity.
The

man should be in jail.
Here we have two most basic of human needs,

oxygen and carbon dioxide, being dismantled.
Two others, water and food, are ge ing similar treatment with the

United Nations Agendas 21 and 2030 – the Great Reset – planning to

centrally control all water and food supplies.
People will not even

own rain water that falls on their land.
Food is affected at the most

basic level by reducing carbon dioxide.
We have genetic modification

or GMO infiltrating the food chain on a mass scale, pesticides and

herbicides polluting the air and destroying the soil.
Freshwater fish

that provide livelihoods for 60 million people and feed hundreds of

millions worldwide are being ‘pushed to the brink’ according the

conservationists while climate change is the only focus.
Now we

have Gates and Schwab wanting to dispense with current food

sources all together and replace them with a synthetic version which

the Wetiko Cult would control in terms of production and who eats

and who doesn’t.
We have been on the Totalitarian Tiptoe to this for

more than 60 years as food has become ever more processed and full

of chemical shite to the point today when it’s not natural food at all.
As Dr Tom Cowan says: ‘If it has a label don’t eat it.’ Bill Gates is

now the biggest owner of farmland in the United States and he does

nothing without an ulterior motive involving the Cult.
Klaus Schwab

wrote: ‘To feed the world in the next 50 years we will need to

produce as much food as was produced in the last 10,000 years …

food security will only be achieved, however, if regulations on

genetically modified foods are adapted to reflect the reality that gene

editing offers a precise, efficient and safe method of improving

crops.’ Liar.
People and the world are being targeted with

aluminium through vaccines, chemtrails, food, drink cans, and

endless other sources when aluminium has been linked to many

health issues including dementia which is increasing year a er year.
Insects, bees and wildlife essential to the food chain are being

deleted by pesticides, herbicides and radiation which 5G is

dramatically increasing with 6G and 7G to come.
The pollinating bee

population is being devastated while wildlife including birds,

dolphins and whales are having their natural radar blocked by the

effects of ever-increasing radiation.
In the summer windscreens used

to be spla ered with insects so numerous were they.
It doesn’t

happen now.
Where have they gone?
Synthetic everything

The Cult is introducing genetically-modified versions of trees, plants

and insects including a Gates-funded project to unleash hundreds of

millions of genetically-modified, lab-altered and patented male

mosquitoes to mate with wild mosquitoes and induce genetic flaws

that cause them to die out.
Clinically-insane Gates-funded Japanese

researchers have developed mosquitos that spread vaccine and are

dubbed ‘flying vaccinators’.
Gates is funding the modification of

weather pa erns in part to sell the myth that this is caused by carbon

dioxide and he’s funding geoengineering of the skies to change the

atmosphere.
Some of this came to light with the Gates-backed plan

to release tonnes of chalk into the atmosphere to ‘deflect the Sun and

cool the planet’.
Funny how they do this while the heating effect of

the Sun is not factored into climate projections focussed on carbon

dioxide.
The reason is that they want to reduce carbon dioxide (so

don’t mention the Sun), but at the same time they do want to reduce

the impact of the Sun which is so essential to human life and health.
I have mentioned the sun-cholesterol-vitamin D connection as they

demonise the Sun with warnings about skin cancer (caused by the

chemicals in sun cream they tell you to splash on).
They come from

the other end of the process with statin drugs to reduce cholesterol

that turns sunlight into vitamin D.
A lack of vitamin D leads to a

long list of health effects and how vitamin D levels must have fallen

with people confined to their homes over ‘Covid’.
Gates is funding

other forms of geoengineering and most importantly chemtrails

which are dropping heavy metals, aluminium and self-replicating

nanotechnology onto the Earth which is killing the natural world.
See Everything You Need To Know, But Have Never Been Told for the

detailed background to this.
Every human system is being targeted for deletion by a force that’s

not human.
The Wetiko Cult has embarked on the process of

transforming the human body from biological to synthetic biological

as I have explained.
Biological is being replaced by the artificial and

synthetic – Archontic ‘countermimicry’ – right across human society.
The plan eventually is to dispense with the human body altogether

and absorb human consciousness – which it wouldn’t really be by

then – into cyberspace (the simulation which is Wetiko/Yaldabaoth).
Preparations for that are already happening if people would care to

look.
The alternative media rightly warns about globalism and ‘the

globalists’, but this is far bigger than that and represents the end of

the human race as we know it.
The ‘bad copy’ of prime reality that

Gnostics describe was a bad copy of harmony, wonder and beauty to

start with before Wetiko/Yaldabaoth set out to change the simulated

‘copy’ into something very different.
The process was slow to start

with.
Entrapped humans in the simulation timeline were not

technologically aware and they had to be brought up to intellectual

speed while being suppressed spiritually to the point where they

could build their own prison while having no idea they were doing

so.
We have now reached that stage where technological intellect has

the potential to destroy us and that’s why events are moving so fast.
Central American shaman Don Juan Matus said:

Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the

intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of belief, or the stupidity of

his contradictory behaviour.
Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of

beliefs, our ideas of good and evil; our social mores.
They are the ones who set up our dreams

of success or failure.
They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice.
It is the

predator who makes us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.
In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a

stupendous manoeuvre – stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist;

a horrendous manoeuvre from the point of those who suffer it.
They gave us their mind.
The

predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any

minute now.
For ‘predators’ see Wetiko, Archons, Yaldabaoth, Jinn, and all the

other versions of the same phenomenon in cultures and religions all

over the world.
The theme is always the same because it’s true and

it’s real.
We have reached the point where we have to deal with it.
The question is – how?
Don’t fight – walk away

I thought I’d use a controversial subheading to get things moving in

terms of our response to global fascism.
What do you mean ‘don’t

fight’?
What do you mean ‘walk away’?
We’ve got to fight.
We can’t

walk away.
Well, it depends what we mean by fight and walk away.
If fighting means physical combat we are playing Wetiko’s game and

falling for its trap.
It wants us to get angry, aggressive, and direct

hate and hostility at the enemy we think we must fight.
Every war,

every ba le, every conflict, has been fought with Wetiko leading

both sides.
It’s what it does.
Wetiko wants a fight, anywhere, any

place.
Just hit me, son, so I can hit you back.
Wetiko hits Wetiko and

Wetiko hits Wetiko in return.
I am very forthright as you can see in

exposing Wetikos of the Cult, but I don’t hate them.
I refuse to hate

them.
It’s what they want.
What you hate you become.
What you

fight you become.
Wokers, ‘anti-haters’ and ‘anti-fascists’ prove this

every time they reach for their keyboards or don their balaclavas.
By

walk away I mean to disengage from Wetiko which includes ceasing

to cooperate with its tyranny.
Paul Levy says of Wetiko:

The way to ‘defeat’ evil is not to try to destroy it (for then, in playing evil’s game, we have

already lost), but rather, to find the invulnerable place within ourselves where evil is unable to vanquish us – this is to truly ‘win’ our battle with evil.
Wetiko is everywhere in human society and it’s been on steroids

since the ‘Covid’ hoax.
Every shouting match over wearing masks

has Wetiko wearing a mask and Wetiko not wearing one.
It’s an

electrical circuit of push and resist, push and resist, with Wetiko

pushing and resisting.
Each polarity is Wetiko empowering itself.
Dictionary definitions of ‘resist’ include ‘opposing, refusing to accept

or comply with’ and the word to focus on is ‘opposing’.
What form

does this take – se ing police cars alight or ‘refusing to accept or

comply with’?
The former is Wetiko opposing Wetiko while the

other points the way forward.
This is the difference between those

aggressively demanding that government fascism must be obeyed

who stand in stark contrast to the great majority of Pushbackers.
We

saw this clearly with a march by thousands of Pushbackers against

lockdown in London followed days later by a Woker-hijacked

protest in Bristol in which police cars were set on fire.
Masks were

virtually absent in London and widespread in Bristol.
Wetiko wants

lockdown on every level of society and infuses its aggression to

police it through its unknowing stooges.
Lockdown protesters are

the ones with the smiling faces and the hugs, The two blatantly

obvious states of being – ge ing more obvious by the day – are the

result of Wokers and their like becoming ever more influenced by

the simulation Field of Wetiko and Pushbackers ever more

influenced by The Field of a far higher vibration beyond the

simulation.
Wetiko can’t invade the heart which is where most

lockdown opponents are coming from.
It’s the heart that allows them

to see through the lies to the truth in ways I will be highlighting.
Renegade Minds know that calmness is the place from which

wisdom comes.
You won’t find wisdom in a hissing fit and wisdom

is what we need in abundance right now.
Calmness is not weakness

– you don’t have to scream at the top of your voice to be strong.
Calmness is indeed a sign of strength.
‘No’ means I’m not doing it.
NOOOO!!!
doesn’t mean you’re not doing it even more.
Volume

does not advance ‘No – I’m not doing it’.
You are just not doing it.
Wetiko possessed and influenced don’t know how to deal with that.
Wetiko wants a fight and we should not give it one.
What it needs

more than anything is our cooperation and we should not give that

either.
Mass rallies and marches are great in that they are a visual

representation of feeling, but if it ends there they are irrelevant.
You

demand that Wetikos act differently?
Well, they’re not going to are

they?
They are Wetikos.
We don’t need to waste our time demanding

that something doesn’t happen when that will make no difference.
We need to delete the means that allows it to happen.
This, invariably,

is our cooperation.
You can demand a child stop firing a peashooter

at the dog or you can refuse to buy the peashooter.
If you provide

the means you are cooperating with the dog being smacked on the

nose with a pea.
How can the authorities enforce mask-wearing if

millions in a country refuse?
What if the 74 million Pushbackers that

voted for Trump in 2020 refused to wear masks, close their

businesses or stay in their homes.
It would be unenforceable.
The

few control the many through the compliance of the many and that’s

always been the dynamic be it ‘Covid’ regulations or the Roman

Empire.
I know people can find it intimidating to say no to authority

or stand out in a crowd for being the only one with a face on display;

but it has to be done or it’s over.
I hope I’ve made clear in this book

that where this is going will be far more intimidating than standing

up now and saying ‘No’ – I will not cooperate with my own

enslavement and that of my children.
There might be consequences

for some initially, although not so if enough do the same.
The

question that must be addressed is what is going to happen if we

don’t?
It is time to be strong and unyieldingly so.
No means no.
Not

here and there, but everywhere and always.
I have refused to wear a

mask and obey all the other nonsense.
I will not comply with

tyranny.
I repeat: Fascism is not imposed by fascists – there are never

enough of them.
Fascism is imposed by the population acquiescing

to fascism.
I will not do it.
I will die first, or my body will.
Living

meekly under fascism is a form of death anyway, the death of the

spirit that Martin Luther King described.
Making things happen

We must not despair.
This is not over till it’s over and it’s far from

that.
The ‘fat lady’ must refuse to sing.
The longer the ‘Covid’ hoax

has dragged on and impacted on more lives we have seen an

awakening of phenomenal numbers of people worldwide to the

realisation that what they have believed all their lives is not how the

world really is.
Research published by the system-serving University

of Bristol and King’s College London in February, 2021, concluded:

‘One in every 11 people in Britain say they trust David Icke’s take on

the coronavirus pandemic.’ It will be more by now and we have

gathering numbers to build on.
We must urgently progress from

seeing the scam to ceasing to cooperate with it.
Prominent German

lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, also licenced to practice law in America, is

doing a magnificent job taking the legal route to bring the

psychopaths to justice through a second Nuremberg tribunal for

crimes against humanity.
Fuellmich has an impressive record of

beating the elite in court and he formed the German Corona

Investigative Commi ee to pursue civil charges against the main

perpetrators with a view to triggering criminal charges.
Most

importantly he has grasped the foundation of the hoax – the PCR

test not testing for the ‘virus’ – and Christian Drosten is therefore on

his charge sheet along with Gates frontman Tedros at the World

Health Organization.
Major players must be not be allowed to inflict

their horrors on the human race without being brought to book.
A

life sentence must follow for Bill Gates and the rest of them.
A group

of researchers has also indicted the government of Norway for

crimes against humanity with copies sent to the police and the

International Criminal Court.
The lawsuit cites participation in an

internationally-planned false pandemic and violation of

international law and human rights, the European Commission’s

definition of human rights by coercive rules, Nuremberg and Hague

rules on fundamental human rights, and the Norwegian

constitution.
We must take the initiative from hereon and not just

complain, protest and react.
There are practical ways to support vital mass non-cooperation.
Organising in numbers is one.
Lockdown marches in London in the

spring in 2021 were mass non-cooperation that the authorities could

not stop.
There were too many people.
Hundreds of thousands

walked the London streets in the centre of the road for mile a er

mile while the Face-Nappies could only look on.
They were

determined, but calm, and just did it with no histrionics and lots of

smiles.
The police were impotent.
Others are organising group

shopping without masks for mutual support and imagine if that was

happening all over.
Policing it would be impossible.
If the store

refuses to serve people in these circumstances they would be faced

with a long line of trolleys full of goods standing on their own and

everything would have to be returned to the shelves.
How would

they cope with that if it kept happening?
I am talking here about

moving on from complaining to being pro-active; from watching

things happen to making things happen.
I include in this our

relationship with the police.
The behaviour of many Face-Nappies

has been disgraceful and anyone who thinks they would never find

concentration camp guards in the ‘enlightened’ modern era have

had that myth busted big-time.
The period and se ing may change –

Wetikos never do.
I watched film footage from a London march in

which a police thug viciously kicked a protestor on the floor who

had done nothing.
His fellow Face-Nappies stood in a ring

protecting him.
What he did was a criminal assault and with a

crowd far outnumbering the police this can no longer be allowed to

happen unchallenged.
I get it when people chant ‘shame on you’ in

these circumstances, but that is no longer enough.
They have no

shame those who do this.
Crowds needs to start making a citizen’s

arrest of the police who commit criminal offences and brutally a ack

innocent people and defenceless women.
A citizen’s arrest can be

made under section 24A of the UK Police and Criminal Evidence

(PACE) Act of 1984 and you will find something similar in other

countries.
I prefer to call it a Common Law arrest rather than

citizen’s for reasons I will come to shortly.
Anyone can arrest a

person commi ing an indictable offence or if they have reasonable

grounds to suspect they are commi ing an indictable offence.
On

both counts the a ack by the police thug would have fallen into this

category.
A citizen’s arrest can be made to stop someone:



• Causing physical injury to himself or any other person

• Suffering physical injury

• Causing loss of or damage to property

• Making off before a constable can assume responsibility for him



A citizen’s arrest may also be made to prevent a breach of the

peace under Common Law and if they believe a breach of the peace

will happen or anything related to harm likely to be done or already

done in their presence.
This is the way to go I think – the Common

Law version.
If police know that the crowd and members of the

public will no longer be standing and watching while they commit

their thuggery and crimes they will think twice about acting like

Brownshirts and Blackshirts.
Common Law – common sense

Mention of Common Law is very important.
Most people think the

law is the law as in one law.
This is not the case.
There are two

bodies of law, Common Law and Statute Law, and they are not the

same.
Common Law is founded on the simple premise of do no

harm.
It does not recognise victimless crimes in which no harm is

done while Statute Law does.
There is a Statute Law against almost

everything.
So what is Statute Law?
Amazingly it’s the law of the sea

that was brought ashore by the Cult to override the law of the land

which is Common Law.
They had no right to do this and as always

they did it anyway.
They had to.
They could not impose their will on

the people through Common Law which only applies to do no harm.
How could you stitch up the fine detail of people’s lives with that?
Instead they took the law of the sea, or Admiralty Law, and applied

it to the population.
Statute Law refers to all the laws spewing out of

governments and their agencies including all the fascist laws and

regulations relating to ‘Covid’.
The key point to make is that Statute

Law is contract law.
It only applies between contracting corporations.
Most police officers don’t even know this.
They have to be kept in

the dark, too.
Long ago when merchants and their sailing ships

began to trade with different countries a contractual law was

developed called Admiralty Law and other names.
Again it only

applied to contracts agreed between corporate entities.
If there is no

agreed contract the law of the sea had no jurisdiction and that still

applies to its new alias of Statute Law.
The problem for the Cult when

the law of the sea was brought ashore was an obvious one.
People

were not corporations and neither were government entities.
To

overcome the la er they made governments and all associated

organisations corporations.
All the institutions are private

corporations and I mean governments and their agencies, local

councils, police, courts, military, US states, the whole lot.
Go to the

Dun and Bradstreet corporate listings website for confirmation that

they are all corporations.
You are arrested by a private corporation

called the police by someone who is really a private security guard

and they take you to court which is another private corporation.
Neither have jurisdiction over you unless you consent and contract

with them.
This is why you hear the mantra about law enforcement

policing by consent of the people.
In truth the people ‘consent’ only

in theory through monumental trickery.
Okay, the Cult overcame the corporate law problem by making

governments and institutions corporate entities; but what about

people?
They are not corporations are they?
Ah...
well in a sense,

and only a sense, they are.
Not people exactly – the illusion of

people.
The Cult creates a corporation in the name of everyone at the

time that their birth certificate is issued.
Note birth/ berth certificate

and when you go to court under the law of the sea on land you stand

in a dock.
These are throwbacks to the origin.
My Common Law

name is David Vaughan Icke.
The name of the corporation created

by the government when I was born is called Mr David Vaughan

Icke usually wri en in capitals as MR DAVID VAUGHAN ICKE.
That is not me, the living, breathing man.
It is a fictitious corporate

entity.
The trick is to make you think that David Vaughan Icke and

MR DAVID VAUGHAN ICKE are the same thing.
They are not.
When

police charge you and take you to court they are prosecuting the

corporate entity and not the living, breathing, man or woman.
They

have to trick you into identifying as the corporate entity and

contracting with them.
Otherwise they have no jurisdiction.
They do

this through a language known as legalese.
Lawful and legal are not

the same either.
Lawful relates to Common Law and legal relates to

Statute Law.
Legalese is the language of Statue Law which uses

terms that mean one thing to the public and another in legalese.
Notice that when a police officer tells someone why they are being

charged he or she will say at the end: ‘Do you understand?’ To the

public that means ‘Do you comprehend?’ In legalese it means ‘Do

you stand under me?’ Do you stand under my authority?
If you say

yes to the question you are unknowingly agreeing to give them

jurisdiction over you in a contract between two corporate entities.
This is a confidence trick in every way.
Contracts have to be agreed

between informed parties and if you don’t know that David

Vaughan Icke is agreeing to be the corporation MR DAVID

VAUGHAN ICKE you cannot knowingly agree to contract.
They are

deceiving you and another way they do this is to ask for proof of

identity.
You usually show them a driving licence or other document

on which your corporate name is wri en.
In doing so you are

accepting that you are that corporate entity when you are not.
Referring to yourself as a ‘person’ or ‘citizen’ is also identifying with

your corporate fiction which is why I made the Common Law point

about the citizen’s arrest.
If you are approached by a police officer

you identify yourself immediately as a living, breathing, man or

woman and say ‘I do not consent, I do not contract with you and I do

not understand’ or stand under their authority.
I have a Common

Law birth certificate as a living man and these are available at no

charge from commonlawcourt.com.
Businesses registered under the

Statute Law system means that its laws apply.
There are, however,

ways to run a business under Common Law.
Remember all ‘Covid’

laws and regulations are Statute Law – the law of contracts and you

do not have to contract.
This doesn’t mean that you can kill someone

and get away with it.
Common Law says do no harm and that

applies to physical harm, financial harm etc.
Police are employees of

private corporations and there needs to be a new system of non-

corporate Common Law constables operating outside the Statute

Law system.
If you go to davidicke.com and put Common Law into the search engine you will find videos that explain Common Law in

much greater detail.
It is definitely a road we should walk.
With all my heart

I have heard people say that we are in a spiritual war.
I don’t like the

term ‘war’ with its Wetiko dynamic, but I know what they mean.
Sweep aside all the bodily forms and we are in a situation in which

two states of consciousness are seeking very different realities.
Wetiko wants upheaval, chaos, fear, suffering, conflict and control.
The other wants love, peace, harmony, fairness and freedom.
That’s

where we are.
We should not fall for the idea that Wetiko is all-

powerful and there’s nothing we can do.
Wetiko is not all-powerful.
It’s a joke, pathetic.
It doesn’t have to be, but it has made that choice

for now.
A handful of times over the years when I have felt the

presence of its frequency I have allowed it to a ach briefly so I could

consciously observe its nature.
The experience is not pleasant, the

energy is heavy and dark, but the ease with which you can kick it

back out the door shows that its real power is in persuading us that

it has power.
It’s all a con.
Wetiko is a con.
It’s a trickster and not a

power that can control us if we unleash our own.
The con is founded

on manipulating humanity to give its power to Wetiko which

recycles it back to present the illusion that it has power when its

power is ours that we gave away.
This happens on an energetic level

and plays out in the world of the seen as humanity giving its power

to Wetiko authority which uses that power to control the population

when the power is only the power the population has handed over.
How could it be any other way for billions to be controlled by a

relative few?
I have had experiences with people possessed by

Wetiko and again you can kick its arse if you do it with an open

heart.
Oh yes – the heart which can transform the world of perceived

‘ma er’.
We are receiver-transmi ers and processors of information, but

what information and where from?
Information is processed into

perception in three main areas – the brain, the heart and the belly.
These relate to thinking, knowing, and emotion.
Wetiko wants us to

be head and belly people which means we think within the confines

of the Matrix simulation and low-vibrational emotional reaction

scrambles balance and perception.
A few minutes on social media

and you see how emotion is the dominant force.
Woke is all emotion

and is therefore thought-free and fact-free.
Our heart is something

different.
It knows while the head thinks and has to try to work it out

because it doesn’t know.
The human energy field has seven prime

vortexes which connect us with wider reality (Fig 23).
Chakra means



‘wheels of light’ in the Sanskrit language of ancient India.
The main

ones are: The crown chakra on top of the head; brow (or ‘third eye’)

chakra in the centre of the forehead; throat chakra; heart chakra in

the centre of the chest; solar plexus chakra below the sternum; sacral

chakra beneath the navel; and base chakra at the bo om of the spine.
Each one has a particular function or functions.
We feel anxiety and

nervousness in the belly where the sacral chakra is located and this

processes emotion that can affect the colon to give people ‘the shits’

or make them ‘shit scared’ when they are nervous.
Chakras all play

an important role, but the Mr and Mrs Big is the heart chakra which

sits at the centre of the seven, above the chakras that connect us to

the ‘physical’ and below those that connect with higher realms (or at

least should).
Here in the heart chakra we feel love, empathy and

compassion – ‘My heart goes out to you’.
Those with closed hearts

become literally ‘heart-less’ in their a itudes and behaviour (see Bill

Gates).
Native Americans portrayed Wetiko with what Paul Levy

calls a ‘frigid, icy heart, devoid of mercy’ (see Bill Gates).
Figure 23: The chakra system which interpenetrates the human energy field.
The heart chakra is the governor – or should be.
Wetiko trembles at the thought of heart energy which it cannot

infiltrate.
The frequency is too high.
What it seeks to do instead is

close the heart chakra vortex to block its perceptual and energetic

influence.
Psychopaths have ‘hearts of stone’ and emotionally-

damaged people have ‘heartache’ and ‘broken hearts’.
The

astonishing amount of heart disease is related to heart chakra

disruption with its fundamental connection to the ‘physical’ heart.
Dr Tom Cowan has wri en an outstanding book challenging the

belief that the heart is a pump and making the connection between

the ‘physical’ and spiritual heart.
Rudolph Steiner who was way

ahead of his time said the same about the fallacy that the heart is a

pump.
What?
The heart is not a pump?
That’s crazy, right?
Everybody knows that.
Read Cowan’s Human Heart, Cosmic Heart

and you will realise that the very idea of the heart as a pump is

ridiculous when you see the evidence.
How does blood in the feet so

far from the heart get pumped horizontally up the body by the

heart??
Cowan explains in the book the real reason why blood

moves as it does.
Our ‘physical’ heart is used to symbolise love when

the source is really the heart vortex or spiritual heart which is our

most powerful energetic connection to ‘out there’ expanded

consciousness.
That’s why we feel knowing – intuitive knowing – in

the centre of the chest.
Knowing doesn’t come from a process of

thoughts leading to a conclusion.
It is there in an instant all in one

go.
Our heart knows because of its connection to levels of awareness

that do know.
This is the meaning and source of intuition – intuitive

knowing.
For the last more than 30 years of uncovering the global game and

the nature of reality my heart has been my constant antenna for

truth and accuracy.
An American intelligence insider once said that I

had quoted a disinformer in one of my books and yet I had only

quoted the part that was true.
He asked: ‘How do you do that?’ By

using my heart antenna was the answer and anyone can do it.
Heart-

centred is how we are meant to be.
With a closed heart chakra we

withdraw into a closed mind and the bubble of five-sense reality.
If

you take a moment to focus your a ention on the centre of your

chest, picture a spinning wheel of light and see it opening and

expanding.
You will feel it happening, too, and perceptions of the

heart like joy and love as the heart impacts on the mind as they

interact.
The more the chakra opens the more you will feel

expressions of heart consciousness and as the process continues, and

becomes part of you, insights and knowings will follow.
An open



heart is connected to that level of awareness that knows all is One.
You will see from its perspective that the fault-lines that divide us

are only illusions to control us.
An open heart does not process the

illusions of race, creed and sexuality except as brief experiences for a

consciousness that is all.
Our heart does not see division, only unity

(Figs 24 and 25).
There’s something else, too.
Our hearts love to

laugh.
Mark Twain’s quote that says ‘The human race has one really

effective weapon, and that is laughter’ is really a reference to the

heart which loves to laugh with the joy of knowing the true nature of

infinite reality and that all the madness of human society is an

illusion of the mind.
Twain also said: ‘Against the assault of laughter

nothing can stand.’ This is so true of Wetiko and the Cult.
Their

insecurity demands that they be taken seriously and their power and

authority acknowledged and feared.
We should do nothing of the

sort.
We should not get aggressive or fearful which their insecurity

so desires.
We should laugh in their face.
Even in their no-face as

police come over in their face-nappies and expect to be taken

seriously.
They don’t take themselves seriously looking like that so

why should we?
Laugh in the face of intimidation.
Laugh in the face

of tyranny.
You will see by its reaction that you have pressed all of its

bu ons.
Wetiko does not know what to do in the face of laughter or

when its targets refuse to concede their joy to fear.
We have seen

many examples during the ‘Covid’ hoax when people have

expressed their energetic power and the string puppets of Wetiko

retreat with their tail limp between their knees.
Laugh – the world is

bloody mad a er all and if it’s a choice between laughter and tears I

know which way I’m going.
Figure 24: Head consciousness without the heart sees division and everything apart from

everything else.
Figure 25: Heart consciousness sees everything as One.
‘Vaccines’ and the soul

The foundation of Wetiko/Archon control of humans is the

separation of incarnate five-sense mind from the infinite ‘I’ and

closing the heart chakra where the True ‘I’ lives during a human life.
The goal has been to achieve complete separation in both cases.
I was

interested therefore to read an account by a French energetic healer

of what she said she experienced with a patient who had been given

the ‘Covid’ vaccine.
Genuine energy healers can sense information

and consciousness fields at different levels of being which are

referred to as ‘subtle bodies’.
She described treating the patient who

later returned a er having, without the healer’s knowledge, two

doses of the ‘Covid vaccine’.
The healer said:

I noticed immediately the change, very heavy energy emanating from [the] subtle bodies.
The

scariest thing was when I was working on the heart chakra, I connected with her soul: it was

detached from the physical body, it had no contact and it was, as if it was floating in a state of total confusion: a damage to the consciousness that loses contact with the physical body, i.e.
with our biological machine, there is no longer any communication between them.
I continued the treatment by sending light to the heart chakra, the soul of the person, but it

seemed that the soul could no longer receive any light, frequency or energy.
It was a very

powerful experience for me.
Then I understood that this substance is indeed used to detach

consciousness so that this consciousness can no longer interact through this body that it

possesses in life, where there is no longer any contact, no frequency, no light, no more

energetic balance or mind.
This would create a human that is rudderless and at the extreme

almost zombie-like operating with a fractional state of consciousness

at the mercy of Wetiko.
I was especially intrigued by what the healer

said in the light of the prediction by the highly-informed Rudolf

Steiner more than a hundred years ago.
He said:

In the future, we will eliminate the soul with medicine.
Under the pretext of a ‘healthy point

of view’, there will be a vaccine by which the human body will be treated as soon as possible

directly at birth, so that the human being cannot develop the thought of the existence of soul

and Spirit.
To materialistic doctors will be entrusted the task of removing the soul of humanity.
As today, people are vaccinated against this disease or that disease, so in the future, children

will be vaccinated with a substance that can be produced precisely in such a way that people,

thanks to this vaccination, will be immune to being subjected to the ‘madness’ of spiritual life.
He would be extremely smart, but he would not develop a conscience, and that is the true

goal of some materialistic circles.
Steiner said the vaccine would detach the physical body from the

etheric body (subtle bodies) and ‘once the etheric body is detached

the relationship between the universe and the etheric body would

become extremely unstable, and man would become an automaton’.
He said ‘the physical body of man must be polished on this Earth by

spiritual will – so the vaccine becomes a kind of arymanique

(Wetiko) force’ and ‘man can no longer get rid of a given

materialistic feeling’.
Humans would then, he said, become

‘materialistic of constitution and can no longer rise to the spiritual’.
I

have been writing for years about DNA being a receiver-transmi er

of information that connects us to other levels of reality and these

‘vaccines’ changing DNA can be likened to changing an antenna and

what it can transmit and receive.
Such a disconnection would clearly

lead to changes in personality and perception.
Steiner further

predicted the arrival of AI.
Big Pharma ‘Covid vaccine’ makers,

expressions of Wetiko, are testing their DNA-manipulating evil on

children as I write with a view to giving the ‘vaccine’ to babies.
If it’s

a soul-body disconnector – and I say that it is or can be – every child

would be disconnected from ‘soul’ at birth and the ‘vaccine’ would

create a closed system in which spiritual guidance from the greater

self would play no part.
This has been the ambition of Wetiko all

along.
A Pentagon video from 2005 was leaked of a presentation

explaining the development of vaccines to change behaviour by their

effect on the brain.
Those that believe this is not happening with the

‘Covid’ genetically-modifying procedure masquerading as a

‘vaccine’ should make an urgent appointment with Naivety

Anonymous.
Klaus Schwab wrote in 2018:

Neurotechnologies enable us to better influence consciousness and thought and to understand

many activities of the brain.
They include decoding what we are thinking in fine levels of

detail through new chemicals and interventions that can influence our brains to correct for

errors or enhance functionality.
The plan is clear and only the heart can stop it.
With every heart that

opens, every mind that awakens, Wetiko is weakened.
Heart and

love are far more powerful than head and hate and so nothing like a

majority is needed to turn this around.
Beyond the Phantom

Our heart is the prime target of Wetiko and so it must be the answer

to Wetiko.
We are our heart which is part of one heart, the infinite

heart.
Our heart is where the true self lives in a human life behind

firewalls of five-sense illusion when an imposter takes its place –

Phantom Self; but our heart waits patiently to be set free any time we

choose to see beyond the Phantom, beyond Wetiko.
A Wetikoed

Phantom Self can wreak mass death and destruction while the love

of forever is locked away in its heart.
The time is here to unleash its

power and let it sweep away the fear and despair that is Wetiko.
Heart consciousness does not seek manipulated, censored,

advantage for its belief or religion, its activism and desires.
As an

expression of the One it treats all as One with the same rights to

freedom and opinion.
Our heart demands fairness for itself no more

than for others.
From this unity of heart we can come together in

mutual support and transform this Wetikoed world into what reality

is meant to be – a place of love, joy, happiness, fairness, justice and

freedom.
Wetiko has another agenda and that’s why the world is as

it is, but enough of this nonsense.
Wetiko can’t stay where hearts are

open and it works so hard to keep them closed.
Fear is its currency

and its food source and love in its true sense has no fear.
Why would

love have fear when it knows it is All That Is, Has Been, And Ever Can

Be on an eternal exploration of all possibility?
Love in this true sense

is not the physical a raction that passes for love.
This can be an

expression of it, yes, but Infinite Love, a love without condition, goes

far deeper to the core of all being.
It is the core of all being.
Infinite

realty was born from love beyond the illusions of the simulation.
Love infinitely expressed is the knowing that all is One and the

swi ly-passing experience of separation is a temporary

hallucination.
You cannot disconnect from Oneness; you can only

perceive that you have and withdraw from its influence.
This is the

most important of all perception trickery by the mind parasite that is

Wetiko and the foundation of all its potential for manipulation.
If we open our hearts, open the sluice gates of the mind, and

redefine self-identity amazing things start to happen.
Consciousness

expands or contracts in accordance with self-identity.
When true self

is recognised as infinite awareness and label self – Phantom Self – is

seen as only a series of brief experiences life is transformed.
Consciousness expands to the extent that self-identity expands and

everything changes.
You see unity, not division, the picture, not the

pixels.
From this we can play the long game.
No more is an

experience something in and of itself, but a fleeting moment in the

eternity of forever.
Suddenly people in uniform and dark suits are no

longer intimidating.
Doing what your heart knows to be right is no

longer intimidating and consequences for those actions take on the

same nature of a brief experience that passes in the blink of an

infinite eye.
Intimidation is all in the mind.
Beyond the mind there is

no intimidation.
An open heart does not consider consequences for what it knows

to be right.
To do so would be to consider not doing what it knows to

be right and for a heart in its power that is never an option.
The

Renegade Mind is really the Renegade Heart.
Consideration of

consequences will always provide a getaway car for the mind and

the heart doesn’t want one.
What is right in the light of what we face

today is to stop cooperating with Wetiko in all its forms and to do it

without fear or compromise.
You cannot compromise with tyranny

when tyranny always demands more until it has everything.
Life is

your perception and you are your destiny.
Change your perception

and you change your life.
Change collective perception and we

change the world.
Come on people … One human family, One heart, One goal …

FREEEEEEDOM!
We must se le for nothing less.
Postscript

The big scare story as the book goes to press is the ‘Indian’

variant and the world is being deluged with propaganda about

the ‘Covid catastrophe’ in India which mirrors in its lies and

misrepresentations what happened in Italy before the first lockdown

in 2020.
The New York Post published a picture of someone who had

‘collapsed in the street from Covid’ in India in April, 2021, which

was actually taken during a gas leak in May, 2020.
Same old, same

old.
Media articles in mid-February were asking why India had been

so untouched by ‘Covid’ and then as their vaccine rollout gathered

pace the alleged ‘cases’ began to rapidly increase.
Indian ‘Covid

vaccine’ maker Bharat Biotech was funded into existence by the Bill

and Melinda Gates Foundation (the pair announced their divorce in

May, 2021, which is a pity because they so deserve each other).
The

Indian ‘Covid crisis’ was ramped up by the media to terrify the

world and prepare people for submission to still more restrictions.
The scam that worked the first time was being repeated only with far

more people seeing through the deceit.
Davidicke.com and

Ickonic.com have sought to tell the true story of what is happening by talking to people living through the Indian nightmare which has

nothing to do with ‘Covid’.
We posted a le er from ‘Alisha’ in Pune

who told a very different story to government and media mendacity.
She said scenes of dying people and overwhelmed hospitals were

designed to hide what was really happening – genocide and

starvation.
Alisha said that millions had already died of starvation

during the ongoing lockdowns while government and media were

lying and making it look like the ‘virus’:

Restaurants, shops, gyms, theatres, basically everything is shut.
The cities are ghost towns.
Even so-called ‘essential’ businesses are only open till 11am in the morning.
You basically

have just an hour to buy food and then your time is up.
Inter-state travel and even inter-district travel is banned.
The cops wait at all major crossroads to question why you are traveling outdoors or to fine you if you are not wearing a mask.
The medical community here is also complicit in genocide, lying about hospitals being full

and turning away people with genuine illnesses, who need immediate care.
They have even

created a shortage of oxygen cylinders.
This is the classic Cult modus operandi played out in every country.
Alisha said that people who would not have a PCR test not testing

for the ‘virus’ were being denied hospital treatment.
She said the

people hit hardest were migrant workers and those in rural areas.
Most businesses employed migrant workers and with everything

closed there were no jobs, no income and no food.
As a result

millions were dying of starvation or malnutrition.
All this was

happening under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a 100-percent

asset of the Cult, and it emphasises yet again the scale of pure anti-

human evil we are dealing with.
Australia banned its people from

returning home from India with penalties for trying to do so of up to

five years in jail and a fine of £37,000.
The manufactured ‘Covid’

crisis in India was being prepared to justify further fascism in the

West.
Obvious connections could be seen between the Indian

‘vaccine’ programme and increased ‘cases’ and this became a

common theme.
The Seychelles, the most per capita ‘Covid

vaccinated’ population in the world, went back into lockdown a er a

‘surge of cases’.
Long ago the truly evil Monsanto agricultural biotechnology

corporation with its big connections to Bill Gates devastated Indian

farming with genetically-modified crops.
Human rights activist

Gurcharan Singh highlighted the efforts by the Indian government

to complete the job by destroying the food supply to hundreds of

millions with ‘Covid’ lockdowns.
He said that 415 million people at

the bo om of the disgusting caste system (still going whatever they

say) were below the poverty line and struggled to feed themselves

every year.
Now the government was imposing lockdown at just the

time to destroy the harvest.
This deliberate policy was leading to

mass starvation.
People may reel back at the suggestion that a

government would do that, but Wetiko-controlled ‘leaders’ are

capable of any level of evil.
In fact what is described in India is in the

process of being instigated worldwide.
The food chain and food

supply are being targeted at every level to cause world hunger and

thus control.
Bill Gates is not the biggest owner of farmland in

America for no reason and destroying access to food aids both the

depopulation agenda and the plan for synthetic ‘food’ already being

funded into existence by Gates.
Add to this the coming hyper-

inflation from the suicidal creation of fake ‘money’ in response to

‘Covid’ and the breakdown of container shipping systems and you

have a cocktail that can only lead one way and is meant to.
The Cult

plan is to crash the entire system to ‘build back be er’ with the Great

Reset.
‘Vaccine’ transmission

Reports from all over the world continue to emerge of women

suffering menstrual and fertility problems a er having the fake

‘vaccine’ and of the non-’vaccinated’ having similar problems when

interacting with the ‘vaccinated’.
There are far too many for

‘coincidence’ to be credible.
We’ve had menopausal women ge ing

periods, others having periods stop or not stopping for weeks,

passing clots, sometimes the lining of the uterus, breast

irregularities, and miscarriages (which increased by 400 percent in

parts of the United States).
Non-‘vaccinated’ men and children have

suffered blood clots and nose bleeding a er interaction with the

‘vaccinated’.
Babies have died from the effects of breast milk from a

‘vaccinated’ mother.
Awake doctors – the small minority –

speculated on the cause of non-’vaccinated’ suffering the same

effects as the ‘vaccinated’.
Was it nanotechnology in the synthetic

substance transmi ing frequencies or was it a straight chemical

bioweapon that was being transmi ed between people?
I am not

saying that some kind of chemical transmission is not one possible

answer, but the foundation of all that the Cult does is frequency and

this is fertile ground for understanding how transmission can

happen.
American doctor Carrie Madej, an internal medicine

physician and osteopath, has been practicing for the last 20 years,

teaching medical students, and she says a ending different meetings

where the agenda for humanity was discussed.
Madej, who operates

out of Georgia, did not dismiss other possible forms of transmission,

but she focused on frequency in search of an explanation for

transmission.
She said the Moderna and Pfizer ‘vaccines’ contained

nano-lipid particles as a key component.
This was a brand new

technology never before used on humanity.
‘They’re using a

nanotechnology which is pre y much li le tiny computer bits …

nanobots or hydrogel.’ Inside the ‘vaccines’ was ‘this sci-fi kind of

substance’ which suppressed immune checkpoints to get into the

cell.
I referred to this earlier as the ‘Trojan horse’ technique that

tricks the cell into opening a gateway for the self-replicating

synthetic material and while the immune system is artificially

suppressed the body has no defences.
Madej said the substance

served many purposes including an on-demand ability to ‘deliver

the payload’ and using the nano ‘computer bits’ as biosensors in the

body.
‘It actually has the ability to accumulate data from your body,

like your breathing, your respiration, thoughts, emotions, all kinds

of things.’

She said the technology obviously has the ability to operate

through Wi-Fi and transmit and receive energy, messages,

frequencies or impulses.
‘Just imagine you’re ge ing this new

substance in you and it can react to things all around you, the 5G,

your smart device, your phones.’ We had something completely

foreign in the human body that had never been launched large scale

at a time when we were seeing 5G going into schools and hospitals

(plus the Musk satellites) and she believed the ‘vaccine’ transmission

had something to do with this: ‘… if these people have this inside of

them … it can act like an antenna and actually transmit it outwardly

as well.’ The synthetic substance produced its own voltage and so it

could have that kind of effect.
This fits with my own contention that

the nano receiver-transmi ers are designed to connect people to the

Smart Grid and break the receiver-transmi er connection to

expanded consciousness.
That would explain the French energy

healer’s experience of the disconnection of body from ‘soul’ with

those who have had the ‘vaccine’.
The nanobots, self-replicating

inside the body, would also transmit the synthetic frequency which

could be picked up through close interaction by those who have not

been ‘vaccinated’.
Madej speculated that perhaps it was 5G and

increased levels of other radiation that was causing the symptoms

directly although interestingly she said that non-‘vaccinated’

patients had shown improvement when they were away from the

‘vaccinated’ person they had interacted with.
It must be remembered

that you can control frequency and energy with your mind and you

can consciously create energetic barriers or bubbles with the mind to

stop damaging frequencies from penetrating your field.
American

paediatrician Dr Larry Palevsky said the ‘vaccine’ was not a ‘vaccine’

and was never designed to protect from a ‘viral’ infection.
He called

it ‘a massive, brilliant propaganda of genocide’ because they didn’t

have to inject everyone to get the result they wanted.
He said the

content of the jabs was able to infuse any material into the brain,

heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, sperm and female productive system.
‘This is genocide; this is a weapon of mass destruction.’ At the same

time American colleges were banning students from a ending if

they didn’t have this life-changing and potentially life-ending

‘vaccine’.
Class action lawsuits must follow when the consequences

of this college fascism come to light.
As the book was going to press

came reports about fertility effects on sperm in ‘vaccinated’ men

which would absolutely fit with what I have been saying and

hospitals continued to fill with ‘vaccine’ reactions.
Another question

is what about transmission via blood transfusions?
The NHS has

extended blood donation restrictions from seven days a er a ‘Covid

vaccination’ to 28 days a er even a sore arm reaction.
I said in the spring of 2020 that the then touted ‘Covid vaccine’

would be ongoing each year like the flu jab.
A year later Pfizer CEO,

the appalling Albert Bourla, said people would ‘likely’ need a

‘booster dose’ of the ‘vaccine’ within 12 months of ge ing ‘fully

vaccinated’ and then a yearly shot.
‘Variants will play a key role’, he

said confirming the point.
Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky also

took time out from his ‘vaccine’ disaster to say that people may need

to be vaccinated against ‘Covid-19’ each year.
UK Health Secretary,

the psychopath Ma Hancock, said additional ‘boosters’ would be

available in the autumn of 2021.
This is the trap of the ‘vaccine

passport’.
The public will have to accept every last ‘vaccine’ they

introduce, including for the fake ‘variants’, or it would cease to be

valid.
The only other way in some cases would be continuous testing

with a test not testing for the ‘virus’ and what is on the swabs

constantly pushed up your noise towards the brain every time?
‘Vaccines’ changing behaviour

I mentioned in the body of the book how I believed we would see

gathering behaviour changes in the ‘vaccinated’ and I am already

hearing such comments from the non-‘vaccinated’ describing

behaviour changes in friends, loved ones and work colleagues.
This

will only increase as the self-replicating synthetic material and

nanoparticles expand in body and brain.
An article in the Guardian in

2016 detailed research at the University of Virginia in Charlo esville

which developed a new method for controlling brain circuits

associated with complex animal behaviour.
The method, dubbed

‘magnetogenetics’, involves genetically-engineering a protein called

ferritin, which stores and releases iron, to create a magnetised

substance – ‘Magneto’ – that can activate specific groups of nerve

cells from a distance.
This is claimed to be an advance on other

methods of brain activity manipulation known as optogenetics and

chemogenetics (the Cult has been developing methods of brain

control for a long time).
The ferritin technique is said to be non-

invasive and able to activate neurons ‘rapidly and reversibly’.
In

other words, human thought and perception.
The article said that

earlier studies revealed how nerve cell proteins ‘activated by heat

and mechanical pressure can be genetically engineered so that they

become sensitive to radio waves and magnetic fields, by a aching

them to an iron-storing protein called ferritin, or to inorganic

paramagnetic particles’.
Sensitive to radio waves and magnetic

fields?
You mean like 5G, 6G and 7G?
This is the human-AI Smart

Grid hive mind we are talking about.
The Guardian article said:

… the researchers injected Magneto into the striatum of freely behaving mice, a deep brain

structure containing dopamine-producing neurons that are involved in reward and motivation,

and then placed the animals into an apparatus split into magnetised and non-magnetised

sections.
Mice expressing Magneto spent far more time in the magnetised areas than mice that did not,

because activation of the protein caused the striatal neurons expressing it to release

dopamine, so that the mice found being in those areas rewarding.
This shows that Magneto

can remotely control the firing of neurons deep within the brain, and also control complex

behaviours.
Make no mistake this basic methodology will be part of the ‘Covid

vaccine’ cocktail and using magnetics to change brain function

through electromagnetic field frequency activation.
The Pentagon is

developing a ‘Covid vaccine’ using ferritin.
Magnetics would explain

changes in behaviour and why videos are appearing across the

Internet as I write showing how magnets stick to the skin at the

point of the ‘vaccine’ shot.
Once people take these ‘vaccines’

anything becomes possible in terms of brain function and illness

which will be blamed on ‘Covid-19’ and ‘variants’.
Magnetic field

manipulation would further explain why the non-‘vaccinated’ are

reporting the same symptoms as the ‘vaccinated’ they interact with

and why those symptoms are reported to decrease when not in their

company.
Interestingly ‘Magneto’, a ‘mutant’, is a character in the

Marvel Comic X-Men stories with the ability to manipulate magnetic

fields and he believes that mutants should fight back against their

human oppressors by any means necessary.
The character was born

Erik Lehnsherr to a Jewish family in Germany.
Cult-controlled courts

The European Court of Human Rights opened the door for

mandatory ‘Covid-19 vaccines’ across the continent when it ruled in

a Czech Republic dispute over childhood immunisation that legally

enforced vaccination could be ‘necessary in a democratic society’.
The 17 judges decided that compulsory vaccinations did not breach

human rights law.
On the face of it the judgement was so inverted

you gasp for air.
If not having a vaccine infused into your body is not

a human right then what is?
Ah, but they said human rights law

which has been specifically wri en to delete all human rights at the

behest of the state (the Cult).
Article 8 of the European Convention

on Human Rights relates to the right to a private life.
The crucial

word here is ‘except’:

There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right EXCEPT

such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests

of national security, public safety or the economic wellbeing of the country, for the prevention

of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others [My emphasis].
No interference except in accordance with the law means there are no

‘human rights’ except what EU governments decide you can have at

their behest.
‘As is necessary in a democratic society’ explains that

reference in the judgement and ‘in the interests of national security,

public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the

prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or

morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others’

gives the EU a coach and horses to ride through ‘human rights’ and

sca er them in all directions.
The judiciary is not a check and

balance on government extremism; it is a vehicle to enforce it.
This

judgement was almost laughably predictable when the last thing the

Cult wanted was a decision that went against mandatory

vaccination.
Judges rule over and over again to benefit the system of

which they are a part.
Vaccination disputes that come before them

are invariably delivered in favour of doctors and authorities

representing the view of the state which owns the judiciary.
Oh, yes,

and we have even had calls to stop pu ing ‘Covid-19’ on death

certificates within 28 days of a ‘positive test’ because it is claimed the

practice makes the ‘vaccine’ appear not to work.
They are laughing

at you.
The scale of madness, inhumanity and things to come was

highlighted when those not ‘vaccinated’ for ‘Covid’ were refused

evacuation from the Caribbean island of St Vincent during massive

volcanic eruptions.
Cruise ships taking residents to the safety of

another island allowed only the ‘vaccinated’ to board and the rest

were le to their fate.
Even in life and death situations like this we

see ‘Covid’ stripping people of their most basic human instincts and

the insanity is even more extreme when you think that fake

‘vaccine’-makers are not even claiming their body-manipulating

concoctions stop ‘infection’ and ‘transmission’ of a ‘virus’ that

doesn’t exist.
St Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said: ‘The

chief medical officer will be identifying the persons already

vaccinated so that we can get them on the ship.’ Note again the

power of the chief medical officer who, like Whi y in the UK, will be

answering to the World Health Organization.
This is the Cult

network structure that has overridden politicians who ‘follow the

science’ which means doing what WHO-controlled ‘medical officers’

and ‘science advisers’ tell them.
Gonsalves even said that residents

who were ‘vaccinated’ a er the order so they could board the ships

would still be refused entry due to possible side effects such as

‘wooziness in the head’.
The good news is that if they were woozy

enough in the head they could qualify to be prime minister of St

Vincent.
Microchipping freedom

The European judgement will be used at some point to justify moves

to enforce the ‘Covid’ DNA-manipulating procedure.
Sandra Ro,

CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, told a World

Economic Forum event that she hoped ‘vaccine passports’ would

help to ‘drive forced consent and standardisation’ of global digital

identity schemes: ‘I’m hoping with the desire and global demand for

some sort of vaccine passport – so that people can get travelling and

working again – [it] will drive forced consent, standardisation, and

frankly, cooperation across the world.’ The lady is either not very

bright, or thoroughly mendacious, to use the term ‘forced consent’.
You do not ‘consent’ if you are forced – you submit.
She was

describing what the plan has been all along and that’s to enforce a

digital identity on every human without which they could not

function.
‘Vaccine passports’ are opening the door and are far from

the end goal.
A digital identity would allow you to be tracked in

everything you do in cyberspace and this is the same technique used

by Cult-owned China to enforce its social credit system of total

control.
The ultimate ‘passport’ is planned to be a microchip as my

books have warned for nearly 30 years.
Those nice people at the

Pentagon working for the Cult-controlled Defense Advanced

Research Projects Agency (DARPA) claimed in April, 2021, they

have developed a microchip inserted under the skin to detect

‘asymptomatic Covid-19 infection’ before it becomes an outbreak

and a ‘revolutionary filter’ that can remove the ‘virus’ from the

blood when a ached to a dialysis machine.
The only problems with

this are that the ‘virus’ does not exist and people transmi ing the

‘virus’ with no symptoms is brain-numbing bullshit.
This is, of

course, not a ruse to get people to be microchipped for very different

reasons.
DARPA also said it was producing a one-stop ‘vaccine’ for

the ‘virus’ and all ‘variants’.
One of the most sinister organisations

on Planet Earth is doing this?
Be er have it then.
These people are

insane because Wetiko that possesses them is insane.
Researchers from the Salk Institute in California announced they

have created an embryo that is part human and part monkey.
My

books going back to the 1990s have exposed experiments in top

secret underground facilities in the United States where humans are

being crossed with animal and non-human ‘extraterrestrial’ species.
They are now easing that long-developed capability into the public

arena and there is much more to come given we are dealing with

psychiatric basket cases.
Talking of which – Elon Musk’s scientists at

Neuralink trained a monkey to play Pong and other puzzles on a

computer screen using a joystick and when the monkey made the

correct move a metal tube squirted banana smoothie into his mouth

which is the basic technique for training humans into unquestioning

compliance.
Two Neuralink chips were in the monkey’s skull and

more than 2,000 wires ‘fanned out’ into its brain.
Eventually the

monkey played a video game purely with its brain waves.
Psychopathic narcissist Musk said the ‘breakthrough’ was a step

towards pu ing Neuralink chips into human skulls and merging

minds with artificial intelligence.
Exactly.
This man is so dark and

Cult to his DNA.
World Economic Fascism (WEF)

The World Economic Forum is telling you the plan by the statements

made at its many and various events.
Cult-owned fascist YouTube

CEO Susan Wojcicki spoke at the 2021 WEF Global Technology

Governance Summit (see the name) in which 40 governments and

150 companies met to ensure ‘the responsible design and

deployment of emerging technologies’.
Orwellian translation:

‘Ensuring the design and deployment of long-planned technologies

will advance the Cult agenda for control and censorship.’ Freedom-

destroyer and Nuremberg-bound Wojcicki expressed support for

tech platforms like hers to censor content that is ‘technically legal but

could be harmful’.
Who decides what is ‘harmful’?
She does and

they do.
‘Harmful’ will be whatever the Cult doesn’t want people to

see and we have legislation proposed by the UK government that

would censor content on the basis of ‘harm’ no ma er if the

information is fair, legal and provably true.
Make that especially if it

is fair, legal and provably true.
Wojcicki called for a global coalition

to be formed to enforce content moderation standards through

automated censorship.
This is a woman and mega-censor so self-

deluded that she shamelessly accepted a ‘free expression’ award –

Wojcicki – in an event sponsored by her own YouTube.
They have no

shame and no self-awareness.
You know that ‘Covid’ is a scam and Wojcicki a Cult operative

when YouTube is censoring medical and scientific opinion purely on

the grounds of whether it supports or opposes the Cult ‘Covid’

narrative.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis compiled an expert panel

with four professors of medicine from Harvard, Oxford, and

Stanford Universities who spoke against forcing children and

vaccinated people to wear masks.
They also said there was no proof

that lockdowns reduced spread or death rates of ‘Covid-19’.
Cult-

gofer Wojcicki and her YouTube deleted the panel video ‘because it

included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global

health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the

spread of Covid-19’.
This ‘consensus’ refers to what the Cult tells the

World Health Organization to say and the WHO tells ‘local health

authorities’ to do.
Wojcicki knows this, of course.
The panellists

pointed out that censorship of scientific debate was responsible for

deaths from many causes, but Wojcicki couldn’t care less.
She would

not dare go against what she is told and as a disgrace to humanity

she wouldn’t want to anyway.
The UK government is seeking to pass

a fascist ‘Online Safety Bill’ to specifically target with massive fines

and other means non-censored video and social media platforms to

make them censor ‘lawful but harmful’ content like the Cult-owned

Facebook, Twi er, Google and YouTube.
What is ‘lawful but

harmful’ would be decided by the fascist Blair-created Ofcom.
Another WEF obsession is a cyber-a ack on the financial system

and this is clearly what the Cult has planned to take down the bank

accounts of everyone – except theirs.
Those that think they have

enough money for the Cult agenda not to ma er to them have got a

big lesson coming if they continue to ignore what is staring them in

the face.
The World Economic Forum, funded by Gates and fronted

by Klaus Schwab, announced it would be running a ‘simulation’

with the Russian government and global banks of just such an a ack

called Cyber Polygon 2021.
What they simulate – as with the ‘Covid’

Event 201 – they plan to instigate.
The WEF is involved in a project

with the Cult-owned Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

called the WEF-Carnegie Cyber Policy Initiative which seeks to

merge Wall Street banks, ‘regulators’ (I love it) and intelligence

agencies to ‘prevent’ (arrange and allow) a cyber-a ack that would

bring down the global financial system as long planned by those that

control the WEF and the Carnegie operation.
The Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace sent an instruction to First World

War US President Woodrow Wilson not to let the war end before

society had been irreversibly transformed.
The Wuhan lab diversion

As I close, the Cult-controlled authorities and lapdog media are

systematically pushing ‘the virus was released from the Wuhan lab’

narrative.
There are two versions – it happened by accident and it

happened on purpose.
Both are nonsense.
The perceived existence of

the never-shown-to-exist ‘virus’ is vital to sell the impression that

there is actually an infective agent to deal with and to allow the

endless potential for terrifying the population with ‘variants’ of a

‘virus’ that does not exist.
The authorities at the time of writing are

going with the ‘by accident’ while the alternative media is

promoting the ‘on purpose’.
Cable news host Tucker Carlson who

has questioned aspects of lockdown and ‘vaccine’ compulsion has

bought the Wuhan lab story.
‘Everyone now agrees’ he said.
Well, I

don’t and many others don’t and the question is why does the system

and its media suddenly ‘agree’?
When the media moves as one unit

with a narrative it is always a lie – witness the hour by hour

mendacity of the ‘Covid’ era.
Why would this Cult-owned

combination which has unleashed lies like machine gun fire

suddenly ‘agree’ to tell the truth??
Much of the alternative media is buying the lie because it fits the

conspiracy narrative, but it’s the wrong conspiracy.
The real

conspiracy is that there is no virus and that is what the Cult is

desperate to hide.
The idea that the ‘virus’ was released by accident

is ludicrous when the whole ‘Covid’ hoax was clearly long-planned

and waiting to be played out as it was so fast in accordance with the

Rockefeller document and Event 201.
So they prepared everything in

detail over decades and then sat around strumming their fingers

waiting for an ‘accidental’ release from a bio-lab?
What??
It’s crazy.
Then there’s the ‘on purpose’ claim.
You want to circulate a ‘deadly

virus’ and hide the fact that you’ve done so and you release it down

the street from the highest-level bio-lab in China?
I repeat – What??
You would release it far from that lab to stop any association being

made.
But, no, we’ll do it in a place where the connection was certain

to be made.
Why would you need to scam ‘cases’ and ‘deaths’ and

pay hospitals to diagnose ‘Covid-19’ if you had a real ‘virus’?
What

are sections of the alternative media doing believing this crap?
Where were all the mass deaths in Wuhan from a ‘deadly pathogen’

when the recovery to normal life a er the initial propaganda was

dramatic in speed?
Why isn’t the ‘deadly pathogen’ now circulating

all over China with bodies in the street?
Once again we have the

technique of tell them what they want to hear and they will likely

believe it.
The alternative media has its ‘conspiracy’ and with

Carlson it fits with his ‘China is the danger’ narrative over years.
China is a danger as a global Cult operations centre, but not for this

reason.
The Wuhan lab story also has the potential to instigate

conflict with China when at some stage the plan is to trigger a

Problem-Reaction-Solution confrontation with the West.
Question

everything – everything – and especially when the media agrees on a

common party line.
Third wave … fourth wave … fifth wave …

As the book went into production the world was being set up for

more lockdowns and a ‘third wave’ supported by invented ‘variants’

that were increasing all the time and will continue to do so in public

statements and computer programs, but not in reality.
India became

the new Italy in the ‘Covid’ propaganda campaign and we were told

to be frightened of the new ‘Indian strain’.
Somehow I couldn’t find

it within myself to do so.
A document produced for the UK

government entitled ‘Summary of further modelling of easing of

restrictions – Roadmap Step 2’ declared that a third wave was

inevitable (of course when it’s in the script) and it would be the fault

of children and those who refuse the health-destroying fake ‘Covid

vaccine’.
One of the computer models involved came from the Cult-

owned Imperial College and the other from Warwick University

which I wouldn’t trust to tell me the date in a calendar factory.
The

document states that both models presumed extremely high uptake

of the ‘Covid vaccines’ and didn’t allow for ‘variants’.
The document

states: ‘The resurgence is a result of some people (mostly children)

being ineligible for vaccination; others choosing not to receive the

vaccine; and others being vaccinated but not perfectly protected.’

The mendacity takes the breath away.
Okay, blame those with a

brain who won’t take the DNA-modifying shots and put more

pressure on children to have it as ‘trials’ were underway involving

children as young as six months with parents who give insanity a

bad name.
Massive pressure is being put on the young to have the

fake ‘vaccine’ and child age consent limits have been systematically

lowered around the world to stop parents intervening.
Most

extraordinary about the document was its claim that the ‘third wave’

would be driven by ‘the resurgence in both hospitalisations and

deaths … dominated by those that have received two doses of the vaccine,

comprising around 60-70% of the wave respectively’.
The predicted

peak of the ‘third wave’ suggested 300 deaths per day with 250 of

them fully ‘vaccinated’ people.
How many more lies do acquiescers

need to be told before they see the obvious?
Those who took the jab

to ‘protect themselves’ are projected to be those who mostly get sick

and die?
So what’s in the ‘vaccine’?
The document went on:

It is possible that a summer of low prevalence could be followed by substantial increases in

incidence over the following autumn and winter.
Low prevalence in late summer should not

be taken as an indication that SARS-CoV-2 has retreated or that the population has high

enough levels of immunity to prevent another wave.
They are telling you the script and while many British people

believed ‘Covid’ restrictions would end in the summer of 2021 the

government was preparing for them to be ongoing.
Authorities were

awarding contracts for ‘Covid marshals’ to police the restrictions

with contracts starting in July, 2021, and going through to January

31st, 2022, and the government was advertising for ‘Media Buying

Services’ to secure media propaganda slots worth a potential £320

million for ‘Covid-19 campaigns’ with a contract not ending until

March, 2022.
The recipient – via a list of other front companies – was

reported to be American media marketing giant Omnicom Group

Inc.
While money is no object for ‘Covid’ the UK waiting list for all

other treatment – including life-threatening conditions – passed 4.5

million.
Meantime the Cult is seeking to control all official ‘inquiries’

to block revelations about what has really been happening and why.
It must not be allowed to – we need Nuremberg jury trials in every

country.
The cover-up doesn’t get more obvious than appointing

ultra-Zionist professor Philip Zelikow to oversee two dozen US

virologists, public health officials, clinicians, former government

officials and four American ‘charitable foundations’ to ‘learn the

lessons’ of the ‘Covid’ debacle.
The personnel will be those that

created and perpetuated the ‘Covid’ lies while Zelikow is the former

executive director of the 9/11 Commission who ensured that the

truth about those a acks never came out and produced a report that

must be among the most mendacious and manipulative documents

ever wri en – see The Trigger for the detailed exposure of the almost

unimaginable 9/11 story in which Sabbatians can be found at every

level.
Passive no more

People are increasingly challenging the authorities with amazing

numbers of people taking to the streets in London well beyond the

ability of the Face-Nappies to stop them.
Instead the Nappies choose

situations away from the mass crowds to target, intimidate, and seek

to promote the impression of ‘violent protestors’.
One such incident

happened in London’s Hyde Park.
Hundreds of thousands walking

through the streets in protest against ‘Covid’ fascism were ignored

by the Cult-owned BBC and most of the rest of the mainstream

media, but they delighted in reporting how police were injured in

‘clashes with protestors’.
The truth was that a group of people

gathered in Hyde Park at the end of one march when most had gone

home and they were peacefully having a good time with music and

chat.
Face-Nappies who couldn’t deal with the full-march crowd

then waded in with their batons and got more than they bargained

for.
Instead of just standing for this criminal brutality the crowd

used their numerical superiority to push the Face-Nappies out of the

park.
Eventually the Nappies turned and ran.
Unfortunately two or

three idiots in the crowd threw drink cans striking two officers

which gave the media and the government the image they wanted to

discredit the 99.9999 percent who were peaceful.
The idiots walked

straight into the trap and we must always be aware of potential

agent provocateurs used by the authorities to discredit their targets.
This response from the crowd – the can people apart – must be a

turning point when the public no longer stand by while the innocent

are arrested and brutally a acked by the Face-Nappies.
That doesn’t

mean to be violent, that’s the last thing we need.
We’ll leave the

violence to the Face-Nappies and government.
But it does mean that

when the Face-Nappies use violence against peaceful people the

numerical superiority is employed to stop them and make citizen’s

arrests or Common Law arrests for a breach of the peace.
The time

for being passive in the face of fascism is over.
We are the many, they are the few, and we need to make that count

before there is no freedom le and our children and grandchildren

face an ongoing fascist nightmare.
COME ON PEOPLE – IT’S TIME.
One final thought …

The power of love

A force from above

Cleaning my soul

Flame on burn desire

Love with tongues of fire

Purge the soul

Make love your goal

I’ll protect you from the hooded claw

Keep the vampires from your door

When the chips are down I’ll be around

With my undying, death-defying

Love for you

Envy will hurt itself

Let yourself be beautiful

Sparkling love, flowers

And pearls and pre y girls

Love is like an energy

Rushin’ rushin’ inside of me

This time we go sublime

Lovers entwine, divine, divine,

Love is danger, love is pleasure

Love is pure – the only treasure

I’m so in love with you

Purge the soul

Make love your goal

The power of love

A force from above

Cleaning my soul

The power of love

A force from above

A sky-scraping dove

Flame on burn desire

Love with tongues of fire

Purge the soul

Make love your goal

Frankie Goes To Hollywood





Appendix

Cowan-Kaufman-Morell Statement on Virus Isolation

(SOVI)

Isolation: The action of isolating; the fact or condition of being

isolated or standing alone; separation from other things or persons;

solitariness

Oxford English Dictionary

The controversy over whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus has ever

been isolated or purified continues.
However, using the above

definition, common sense, the laws of logic and the dictates of

science, any unbiased person must come to the conclusion that the

SARS-CoV-2 virus has never been isolated or purified.
As a result, no

confirmation of the virus’ existence can be found.
The logical,

common sense, and scientific consequences of this fact are:



• the structure and composition of something not shown to exist

can’t be known, including the presence, structure, and function of

any hypothetical spike or other proteins;

• the genetic sequence of something that has never been found can’t

be known;

• “variants” of something that hasn’t been shown to exist can’t be

known;

• it’s impossible to demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease

called Covid-19.
In as concise terms as possible, here’s the proper way to isolate,

characterize and demonstrate a new virus.
First, one takes samples

(blood, sputum, secretions) from many people (e.g.
500) with

symptoms which are unique and specific enough to characterize an

illness.
Without mixing these samples with ANY tissue or products

that also contain genetic material, the virologist macerates, filters

and ultracentrifuges i.e.
purifies the specimen.
This common virology

technique, done for decades to isolate bacteriophages1 and so-called

giant viruses in every virology lab, then allows the virologist to

demonstrate with electron microscopy thousands of identically sized

and shaped particles.
These particles are the isolated and purified

virus.
These identical particles are then checked for uniformity by

physical and/or microscopic techniques.
Once the purity is

determined, the particles may be further characterized.
This would

include examining the structure, morphology, and chemical

composition of the particles.
Next, their genetic makeup is

characterized by extracting the genetic material directly from the

purified particles and using genetic-sequencing techniques, such as

Sanger sequencing, that have also been around for decades.
Then

one does an analysis to confirm that these uniform particles are

exogenous (outside) in origin as a virus is conceptualized to be, and

not the normal breakdown products of dead and dying tissues.2 (As

of May 2020, we know that virologists have no way to determine

whether the particles they’re seeing are viruses or just normal break-

down products of dead and dying tissues.)3



1

Isolation, characterization and analysis of bacteriophages from the haloalkaline lake Elmenteita, KenyaJuliah Khayeli Akhwale et al, PLOS One, Published: April 25, 2019.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371 /journal.pone.0215734 – accessed 2/15/21

2 “Extracellular Vesicles Derived From Apoptotic Cells: An Essential Link Between Death and

Regeneration,” Maojiao Li1 et al, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 2020 October 2.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389 /fcell.2020.573511/full – accessed 2/15/21

3 “The Role of Extraellular Vesicles as Allies of HIV, HCV and SARS Viruses,” Flavia Giannessi, et al, Viruses, 2020 May



If we have come this far then we have fully isolated, characterized,

and genetically sequenced an exogenous virus particle.
However, we

still have to show it is causally related to a disease.
This is carried

out by exposing a group of healthy subjects (animals are usually

used) to this isolated, purified virus in the manner in which the

disease is thought to be transmi ed.
If the animals get sick with the

same disease, as confirmed by clinical and autopsy findings, one has

now shown that the virus actually causes a disease.
This

demonstrates infectivity and transmission of an infectious agent.
None of these steps has even been a empted with the SARS-CoV-2

virus, nor have all these steps been successfully performed for any

so-called pathogenic virus.
Our research indicates that a single study

showing these steps does not exist in the medical literature.
Instead, since 1954, virologists have taken unpurified samples

from a relatively few people, o en less than ten, with a similar

disease.
They then minimally process this sample and inoculate this

unpurified sample onto tissue culture containing usually four to six

other types of material – all of which contain identical genetic

material as to what is called a “virus.” The tissue culture is starved

and poisoned and naturally disintegrates into many types of

particles, some of which contain genetic material.
Against all

common sense, logic, use of the English language and scientific

integrity, this process is called “virus isolation.” This brew

containing fragments of genetic material from many sources is then

subjected to genetic analysis, which then creates in a computer-

simulation process the alleged sequence of the alleged virus, a so

called in silico genome.
At no time is an actual virus confirmed by

electron microscopy.
At no time is a genome extracted and

sequenced from an actual virus.
This is scientific fraud.
The observation that the unpurified specimen — inoculated onto

tissue culture along with toxic antibiotics, bovine fetal tissue,

amniotic fluid and other tissues — destroys the kidney tissue onto

which it is inoculated is given as evidence of the virus’ existence and

pathogenicity.
This is scientific fraud.
From now on, when anyone gives you a paper that suggests the

SARS-CoV-2 virus has been isolated, please check the methods

sections.
If the researchers used Vero cells or any other culture

method, you know that their process was not isolation.
You will hear

the following excuses for why actual isolation isn’t done:

1.
There were not enough virus particles found in samples from patients to analyze.
2.
Viruses are intracellular parasites; they can’t be found outside the cell in this manner.
If No.
1 is correct, and we can’t find the virus in the sputum of sick

people, then on what evidence do we think the virus is dangerous or

even lethal?
If No.
2 is correct, then how is the virus spread from

person to person?
We are told it emerges from the cell to infect

others.
Then why isn’t it possible to find it?
Finally, questioning these virology techniques and conclusions is

not some distraction or divisive issue.
Shining the light on this truth

is essential to stop this terrible fraud that humanity is confronting.
For, as we now know, if the virus has never been isolated, sequenced

or shown to cause illness, if the virus is imaginary, then why are we

wearing masks, social distancing and pu ing the whole world into

prison?
Finally, if pathogenic viruses don’t exist, then what is going into

those injectable devices erroneously called “vaccines,” and what is

their purpose?
This scientific question is the most urgent and

relevant one of our time.
We are correct.
The SARS-CoV2 virus does not exist.
Sally Fallon Morell, MA

Dr.
Thomas Cowan, MD

Dr.
Andrew Kaufman, MD

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