Underneath the narrow streets, churches, and palaces of the Italian city of Siena lies a sprawling network of underground aqueducts that supplied water to the Tuscan city for centuries, enabling it to flourish despite a chronic lack of nearby rivers and streams. Extending for roughly 25 kilometers, the so-called Bottini constitute an ingenious hydraulic system that sustained the city from the Middle Ages until the early 20th century.
Fountain Fontebranda, its waters fed by Bottini. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Ancient history is usually told through grand things: ruined cities, royal tombs, battlefield weapons, and monuments built to make rulers look eternal. History loves the flashy stuff. Swords. Crowns. Burning cities. Mysterious tombs. Kings with dramatic beards. Paperwork? Not so much. But that is a mistake. Some of the most revealing things ever found from […]
There are ancient monuments that impress with their size and others that impress with their precision. The Sacred Well of Santa Cristina, in the municipality of Paulilatino, province of Oristano in Sardinia, belongs to the second group. Its basalt stones are carved and assembled with such geometric precision that, according to the site management center […]
For nearly seven decades, one of the most feared men in Rome lived an otherwise ordinary life. He sold umbrellas, attended church, and walked the narrow streets of the Borgo district near the Vatican. Yet whenever he crossed the Tiber River, Romans knew that someone was about to die.
His name was Giovanni Battista Bugatti, though history remembers him by a different name: Mastro Titta.
Across much of the world, powerful royal dynasties are things of the past. But you’d be shocked at how long some of them held power—or repeatedly regained it through cadet branches, restorations, and lines of descent. From the formidably influential Habsburg family to the French Capetians to Japan’s Imperial House, these are ten of the […]
More than a century before Albert Einstein revolutionized physics with his theory of general relativity, and nearly two centuries before astronomers accepted the existence of black holes, an English clergyman and scientist named John Michell proposed a startling idea. In 1783, Michell suggested that some stars might possess such immense gravity that even light could not escape from them. These invisible objects, which he called "dark stars," bear a remarkable resemblance to what we now know as black holes.
The world is a crazy place, and it always has been. Looking back through history, there are seemingly endless stories about real-life situations, events, moments, and acts that now seem very hard to believe. But they were real, they were documented, and in many cases, they are every bit as unsettling today as they were […]
It appears that quite a few people have been killed or brought to justice for having failed to deliver on their promise of turning ordinary metals into gold, in other words, alchemy. One was the English chemist James Price, who took his own life after his deception was exposed. Another was Georg Honauer, whose downfall ended not in disgrace alone but in a spectacular public execution.
Georg Honauer was born in Olomouc, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), in 1572. In 1596, he entered the service of Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg, in Stuttgart after persuading the duke that he was both a skilled goldsmith and a successful alchemist.
An etching depicting the execution of the alchemist, Georg Honauer. Credit: Science History Institute
In the first century BC, nearly two thousand years before the invention of the microscope, the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro made a remarkable observation about the cause of disease. Writing in his agricultural treatise De Re Rustica around 37 BC, Varro advised landowners to avoid building homes near swamps. His reason was unusual for the time:
There are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.
The statement sounds astonishingly similar to the principles of germ theory. Varro described invisible living organisms too small to be seen, entering the human body and causing illness. Although he lacked any means of observing microorganisms and had no scientific evidence to support his claim, his words represent one of the closest approaches to germ theory found in the ancient world.
In Wilbert L. Cooper’s new memoir, The Black Shield, he tells two intertwining stories: the history of the city’s Black Shield Police Association, one of the country’s oldest Black policing organizations, and the multigenerational narrative of his own family, embedded in the police force. Both of his parents and sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother’s side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In this book about race, policing, and power, Cooper examines the complex duality of the Black cop, what it was like for his parents to navigate an institution that was hostile to their own community, and, ultimately, what this all has meant for him.
This excerptcombines the prologue and a chapter focused on his mother’s beginnings in Cleveland’s police department. Two individuals mentioned spearheaded legal efforts in the 1970s to diversify the department: Fred Johnson, the association’s president who led a lawsuit over the department’s discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and Jean Clayton, a policewoman and the organization’s secretary whose parallel lawsuit disbanded the segregated Women’s Bureau and integrated women into the department. Below, Cooper recounts how his mother, Gayle, walked through the door that they opened. But it was not without a struggle.
—Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The gun was always there. I used to see it in flashes as Dad would get ready to leave the house. After he doused himself in spicy cologne and sliced a plastic comb through the waves of his jet-black Jheri curl, I would catch that 9-millimeter sliding between the small of his back and the belted waistband of his blue jeans.
Mom had her own. She kept it in her purse. One of those big leather bags, the kind they show behind the counter at Dillard’s, with shiny metal clasps and countless compartments. Her gun would be in there with red lipstick, a double-sided compact mirror, and her bulky pager. I knew the gun was there because I sensed its heft whenever I’d have to move the bag off the kitchen table to do my homework. It felt like a bowling ball in a pillowcase.
Dad used to store his 9-millimeter above the fine china, on top of the large, baby-pink Victorian-style cabinet in our dining room. One time while he was sleeping, I climbed on top of the pink-velvet-upholstered chairs to get a good look at it through the scrollwork. When I came face-to-face with the gun, I was too intimidated to actually pick it up and play with it.
It took a few moments for me to work up the gumption to run my little fingers across the raised bumps of its grip. Then I touched the ridges of the slide and the smooth, cold, hard barrel from where bullets burst. And just that alone felt crazy to me. Even in the dusty, mundane space of the cabinet, the stock-still object pulsated with wild energy. It was like petting a tiger.
Even now, it’s overwhelming for me to imagine that all that calamitous potential to take life, to inflict pain, to inspire fear, to demand subservience, to have your way with the world, to finally be the actor instead of the one who is acted upon—was right there and it was theirs.
I was 7 or 8 when I saw Dad shoot that gun. It must have been the summer, because I still remember the heavy outside air kissing my arms and legs, the suburban sunlight beaming on me. I see that light reverberating off the concrete, making vivid every blade of green grass in the yard and every goose-egg stone in the gravel strips. But I cannot hear the gunshot. I cannot tune in to the boom. All I sense is the fear, because it is so foreign. I’m still there. Standing in the driveway. Stuck and dumbfounded. Until Dad’s shouts break through, begging me to run inside before those crackers come back, commanding me to have Mom call the cops.
Have you heard of Pastor Leon McCray? The man of faith who saw two White people dumping a refrigerator on his property. When McCray tried to stop them, the duo threatened him. One of the Whites ran off to grab three more racists. McCray says that’s when they all ganged up on him. That’s when they told him that his “Black life didn’t matter.” The beating didn’t stop until McCray pulled out his gun. When the police showed up at the scene, they handcuffed McCray and put him in the back of the cruiser. His assailants laughed and waved at him as he was taken off.
But at least McCray survived. You know that many of us aren’t so lucky: The police shot and killed the father Philando Castile during a traffic stop after he told them he had a firearm. The police shot and killed the father John Crawford while he was carrying a pellet rifle inside the Walmart that retailed the damn pellet rifle. Police shot Emantic F. Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall while they were responding to a call about gunshots at the mall. Witnesses say they killed Bradford as he was trying to direct shoppers to safety.
These killings now give shape and sharpness to that immense and totalizing fear I felt in the driveway as a child. That American malice is always there anytime we try to commandeer a power that wasn’t intended for us. Black people are killed or incarcerated every day for much less than what Dad did. Simply owning a gun can put a bullseye on your back. Pulling one on a White man can turn you into a hashtag.
So why did Dad want to call 911? I know that he’d tell you it was because his gun was different from Pastor Leon’s. Dad didn’t buy it at Walmart or Bass Pro alongside camouflage galoshes and fly-fishing rods. He didn’t pick it up at a gun shop with a shooting range full of targets depicting men in turbans and hip-hop gear. He didn’t procure it across state lines at a gun show with bundles of cash and no identification or background check. And he didn’t get it off the street, with scratched-out serial numbers and bodies on it.
Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business. They hold up those guns and their power to use them as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks. When I was a child, I never questioned that contradiction. But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents.
By the time the Black Shield had forced the hand of the Cleveland Police Department in 1977, Gayle had given birth to another child—a little boy named Geoffrey. Now with three kids, she was even more entrenched in a wrathful marriage and farther away from the working world. And losing her uncle Lloyd, which felt a lot like losing a father, only made her feel that much more alone. When he died, the dream of becoming a cop and the freedom the job promised died with him.
It was at the moment that she’d almost completely resigned herself that it all came raging back. She opened up an issue of the Plain Dealer to find that people who’d taken the test with her and were lower than her on the eligibility list were being appointed to the police academy. And quickly, her despondency turned to confusion. And then her confusion turned to anger. She said to herself, “I know my number is higher than this and they’ve gone eighty past me and I’m not getting called?!” As she started to look into the issue, she found out that the city had expunged her from the eligibility list. “They were trying to lose Black folks’ stuff,” she told me. The city claimed it was because her addresses had changed and she hadn’t notified the civil service. To get back on the list, she had to go to court. “They claimed I had moved, but I owned my own home!” she said. “I told them, ‘I bought this house, I haven’t gone anywhere.’” As soon as she prevailed in her hearing, a White officer walked up to her in court. He simply said, “I’m from the academy.” He took her information. And then he said, “You will start the police academy on Monday.”
Later that same night, Fred Johnson called Gayle’s phone. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to the man. Lloyd was never big on the Shield Club, and Curtis was much closer with her younger brother, his namesake, who would join the police department five years later. Gayle didn’t have a complete idea of what the Shield Club had been up to at that point, or of how much it had shaped the situation she was walking into. Because of all the lawsuits, more than 40 percent of her classmates would be people of color and women. But the department they were entering was only 9 percent Black or Hispanic, and 2 percent women. For his part, Johnson stressed the struggle happening in the city to resist the change that Black women like Gayle represented. The academy was framed as a contentious environment controlled by people who were intent on destroying Gayle’s professional prospects and her spirit.
Despite the reforms that resulted from the Shield Club and the Women’s Law Fund cases, Gayle was still put through a series of tests, during which she could still be expunged. She had to meet with a psychiatrist, who asked her questions about her affiliations. Although this test had been revised thanks to the efforts of Fred Johnson and the Shield Club, it remained biased. As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself. Her strategy was to answer every question like a White man of modest intellect.
In the 1970s, Gayle had spent a few years in the Nation of Islam. Although she never really let go of Jesus, she converted aesthetically and culturally to satisfy the whims of her second husband. She traded her hot pants for conservative flowing dresses. And instead of sweet potato pie, she started baking bean pies. When she did make a Polish Boy, she did it with beef sausage. She even traveled to Chicago once for Saviours’ Day to see the honorable Elijah Muhammad with her own eyes. But she put all that behind her when she found out that her proud Muslim husband was sleeping with a fellow “sister.” By the time she took the psych test to become a police officer, she’d gone back to straightening her hair and listening to gospel music. But some of the political knowledge she gained from the Nation, especially its perspective on America, stuck with her. She understood things differently than most—like the “riots” that happened in Hough and Glenville. She saw them as a natural reaction to the way her people had been done in this city and done in America. To her, the people who stormed the streets weren’t criminal. The crimes being committed were by the landlords renting rat-infested apartments and the Board of Education shoving kids into overcrowded schools and businesses charging a premium for rancid meat. She had a lot of ideas about these sorts of things, but none of them could feed her kids or free her from her marriage. And so she kept them to herself during her psych test.
The new hires were also required to do a complete physical examination. This was especially humiliating for Gayle. The whole ordeal was a perverse take on the idea that if women want to be in the academy, if women want to do what the men do, then they have to go through the exact same processes. For the physical exam, this meant standing around nearly nude to be ogled by their peers. “They made us stand up there in paper gowns and these guys were trying to catch glimpses at us. And they make you do stuff in the gowns so the gowns get all torn up. My breasts and everything were just hanging out,” Gayle recalled. She was so thoroughly humiliated that a fellow female in the academy came to her with some Scotch tape to try to cover her up. “They did that kind of thing because they wanted us to quit. The guys didn’t want us, their wives didn’t want us, it was terrible. They treated us like new meat, picking out which one they were going to take.”
Fred Johnson made himself available to all the Blacks in the academy because he was prepared for the city to try to find excuses to fail them. Gayle didn’t think she’d have a problem. She was voted the vice president of the academy class and consistently scored high on all of the interstitial tests. Those high scores were attained by studying alongside her new girlfriend. But when they both got good grades on a test with similar answers, they were accused of cheating and threatened with expulsion from the academy. Fred Johnson had to step in and help them prove that they’d arrived at the same answers because they’d been preparing together.
After passing the academy, but before they could be sworn in as officers, they were also required to take a qualification test administered by the State of Ohio that evaluated their skills. Cadets could fly through the academy with high marks and still get disqualified to be a police officer. Although policewomen in Cleveland had been in the academy before the 1970s, they weren’t required to take the qualification test because officers in the women’s bureau didn’t carry guns. Anticipating that they would do whatever they could to disqualify her, Gayle prepared for the test with the desperate intensity of a woman fighting for her life. “To prepare for the running test, I used to run up and down the steps whenever I’d put the kids down for nap,” she told me. To make her qualifying time, she outran some Vietnam veterans, who threw up before they crossed the finish line. The state also required people to do a series of chin-ups and push-ups and dips that demanded upper body strength that seemed to favor the male physique, but Gayle fought her way through those. When she finally had to take her shooting test, the last phase, it was 19 degrees below zero. In 1977, Cleveland was in the midst of one of its coldest winters ever. But one of the essential rules of the academy was that it never canceled or postponed qualification tests for any reason, in an effort to help simulate what it’s like to be a police officer and have to work when everyone else gets the day off. And so Gayle stood at the outdoor range with the soft skin of her red-nailed fingers sticking to the ice-cold metal of her gun, her body involuntarily shivering, hoping the icy air didn’t tank her shot.
The first night Patrolwoman Gayle Smith reported to the Fifth District of the Cleveland Division of Police in the winter of 1977, her supervisor showed her two things: the coffee machine and the broom. It was expected that she would be the shift’s glorified janitor. But she bucked back. “I did not go through all that training to do no housekeeping. I came here to be a police officer,” she remembers saying to him, surprised by her own candor. Ridiculous as it seems now, perhaps this kind of insult by her male colleagues should have been expected. After all of the efforts by the Women’s Law Fund and Jean Clayton to break down the formal barriers in the CDP, women still constituted only 2.3 percent of the police force when Gayle started. The assholes she was working with had almost no experience working alongside women as equals and little incentive to see them as such. Gayle was basically a guinea pig. Ironically, it was because of Jean Clayton, Gayle’s initial inspiration to become a lady cop, that the women’s bureau was dissolved and lady cops ceased to exist. Although Gayle had been intent on following Clayton’s path, she found herself involved in something entirely new.
While most of the male cops were unhappy with the gender integration of the department, a lot of the women officers were displeased, too. They were especially pissed at Jean Clayton and her damn lawsuit. These were women who had no interest in being partnered with men and participating in a form of policing that oriented itself around violence and punishment. There were certainly fair criticisms of the women’s bureau, from its troubling focus on purity to the fact that its diversion efforts and empathy weren’t as equally distributed to Black suspects as they were to Whites. But I wonder if the department would be less lethal and repressive today if the men on the Cleveland Police Department had become more like the women and their women’s bureau. Instead, the women became more like the men. After the women’s bureau closed, some of its important work, such as sex crimes, was shamefully ignored or mishandled. Gayle would see this firsthand. But first she needed to get out of coffee duty.
It took some convincing, but eventually Gayle got her first assignment outside the district. After roll call, she would be taken to White City Beach, a former park on Lake Erie that in the 1940s was home to attractions like Bonavita the lion trainer, along with fishing and a yacht club. After natural disasters hurt the park and desegregation saw the City of Cleveland give up on supporting community spaces shared by both Blacks and Whites, White City Beach went the way of Euclid Beach. By the 1970s, it became a dumping ground for garbage and a place where the city parked vehicles that were towed to clear the streets for snowplows or as the result of car wrecks. That year, it was overflowing with gnarled automobiles. It had been the coldest Cleveland winter of the century, complete with “superbomb” blizzards and scores of days that were more than 20 degrees below zero. There were more than one thousand cars down there at White City Beach, but not another soul in sight.
“They dropped me off at White City Beach every night and stuck me in a shell of a car that was up on bricks and cinder blocks, with a wire heater inside of it. There was no bathroom. They’d leave me there all night and they’d come back and get me in the morning. I was just down there by myself in pitch blackness and cold. Even if I had wanted to get out, I couldn’t go nowhere. If someone had tried to steal the cars down there, there is nothing I could have done about it. It was demoralizing.”
Mom told me this in the kitchen, where I’d often heard her talk about the bad early days on the job. I’m not sure whether this was the first time I was really listening, or if she was telling it differently. Usually, her stories were never this detailed and specific. It was just “racism” and “men being nasty.” Perhaps because I was taking a real interest, she started accessing parts of the story she had often left untouched in her recounting.
There is a feeling of humiliation that stings long after an event has passed. It doesn’t just hurt because of what was done, it hurts because you feel as though you had some agency in the matter. That you let it happen. When she started telling me what it was like, I could feel her own surprise at the disregard she had endured. In the zone car with White partners, she was beneath speaking to. These were men who would greet a dog if they saw it on the street, but wouldn’t say one word to her. In this sense, despite the lawsuit and the consent decree, not much had changed on the job since the late 1950s, when White officers would “throw a shoe” to avoid being paired up with Curtis and Fred Johnson.
“When they finally had two guys take me out, they put me in the back seat where a prisoner would sit. And they didn’t let me touch the radio. They were supposed to show me some things. But instead, they got out of the car and went to eat. They just left me locked in the back of that car without saying anything. I’m just beating on the door and everything.”
It wasn’t until an old, White, Catholic officer who looked like Santa Claus decided to take Gayle under his wing that she finally got to learn a bit about real policing. The rotund veteran with snow-white hair explained to Gayle the first time she got in the car with him exactly why he was willing to teach her. It wasn’t that he was pleased about working with Blacks or with women. He simply realized the futility of resistance: “If we get rid of her, they will just send another one of them down here.”
“It was crazy to have me on the job that length of time and nobody taught me nothing except what I learned in the academy,” she remembered of her time wasted on frivolous assignments. “When he took me out, the first thing he ever told me was this: He said, ‘Okay, kid, what time is it?’ I looked for my watch. He said, ‘That is the first rule. Don’t you ever take your eye off anybody. If they ask what time it is, say you don’t know or your watch is broke. But you don’t look down.’”
It was with Santa Claus that she got to see how the men handled sex crimes now that the women’s bureau was closed. The first rape call that they ever responded to together involved a White woman. The lady had walked three doors over from where she lived to bum a cigarette from her neighbor. Before she could get back home, three men had grabbed her off the street, dragged her into a car, and took turns raping her. While Gayle was wrenched by the story, calling back to her own experiences of sexual abuse, the veteran was incredulous. “He talked to that girl so bad, I felt sorry for her,” she remembered. “He asked her, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Why were you out at that time of night?’ ‘What did you expect was going to happen?’ It was horrible . . . I will never forget it. That girl ended up not even filing.”
It was also alongside Santa Claus that she finally proved she could be real police, like the men. The call was a robbery at a drugstore that drew several cars to the scene. The suspect was a young Black man who managed to run out the back door. To show her tenacity, Gayle took off after him ahead of the rest of the cops, moving just as she had when she was training for the department’s entrance exam, going up and down those steps. Santa, who was heavy and plodding with bad knees, couldn’t keep up as Gayle tailed this man through an alleyway. And then from behind her, a shot rang out.
When a police shooting happens, officers come together to get their story straight. Although this was an era when it was still legal for officers in Cleveland to shoot fleeing felons, all the patrolmen made sure they agreed on what took place. After they were finished, they looked over at Gayle to see if she saw it the same way they did. Forget the police academy. The offensive rape call was a pop quiz, and this shooting was the final exam of real police shit. And Gayle passed with flying colors. “After that, I started having people to work with,” she told me. “It didn’t feel good, but I had a demon behind me.”
This excerpt is protected under copyright laws and reproduction of the text in any form for distribution is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer this work via any medium must be secured with the copyright owner.
Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.
For centuries, travellers to the southern tip of South America returned with astonishing stories. They spoke of a land swept by fierce winds and endless plains, inhabited by people of extraordinary size. Some claimed these inhabitants were giants, towering far above ordinary men. Their tales captured the imagination of Europe and helped create one of the most enduring geographical myths in history: the Giants of Patagonia.
A sailor giving a Patagonian woman some biscuit for her baby. Credit: William C. Sturtevant
Continuing the project we started in the beginning of “026.
Here is our selection of our 7 most astonishing, original or viewed videos released in this the week.
This reminder ccome back after many months of pause due to that the main important videos were published in the post WARS in Video with dauky updates on the ongoing international conflicts in Ukraine and in Middle East.
But there are many videos that are extremely significant for their social or geopolitical content that sometimes take a back seat to the serious events that occur every day in wars, which is why we decided to start this periodic column.
Inside the Rumble description of each video there is a link to the detailed investigation it refers to or to a related topic.
Enjoy watching with Gospa News. And if you like our work, support us with a small donation.
In the early hours of April 27, 1865, a steamboat packed with nearly two thousand exhausted Union soldiers drifted northward on the Mississippi River. The American Civil War had ended and these soldiers who had survived battlefields, diseases, and some of the Confederacy’s most notorious prison camps were finally going home.
Shortly after 2 a.m., the vessel's boilers exploded with tremendous force throwing men into the river and trapping hundreds beneath collapsing decks. Flames engulfed the wooden steamboat. By the time the disaster was over, more than a thousand people had perished, making the Sultana tragedy the deadliest maritime disaster in American history. Yet unlike the sinking of the Titanic, it remains largely unknown today.
Sultana at Helena, Arkansas, on April 26, 1865, the day before her destruction. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Most wartime diaries are written on paper. Some are scribbled in notebooks or loose sheets and hidden beneath floorboards, or tucked inside clothing. The most famous wartime diary is undoubtedly that of Anne Frank, but there are many others whose accounts are equally compelling. One of the most unusual records of the Second World War, however, was kept by Day Joyce, a biologist interned at Stanley Camp in Hong Kong. Her diary was not written on paper at all. Instead, she stitched it into a bed sheet.
Once again, US President Donald Trump shows he wants to be a double-crosser on riding a wild horse that could unseat him at any moment…
During the White House press conference on the reduction of the US vaccination plan from 17 to 11 vaccines (still one more than Italy after the Lorenzin Decree came into force) and on the renewed safety program on the alarm about correlation between pediatric vaccines and autism (censored by the CDC) he was questioned by a journalist about the issue of the day…
President Trump drops this response to Dr. Fauci being exposed for privately admitting that the COVID vaccine may be linked to miscarriages.
“The Biden administration was a disaster in every way. That would be just one way, but they’ve been a disaster in every single one. It’s unimaginable what they did. “
It’s a shame that this comes after his repeated statements about the success of Operation Warp Speed, with which he himself funded, during the first Trump administration, the production of Moderna’s Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, developed by Cambridge-based Big Pharma in close collaboration with the military agency DARPA and Fauci himself…
The Moderna vaccine itself was deemed by the WHO to be the most dangerous for pregnant women and therefore not recommended (read below).
Therefore, Trump is fully complicit in the Biden-Fauci disaster, which is why the former White House medical advisor will most likely never go to jail… Indeed, after the November 2026 midterm elections, the issue will likely evaporate from the horizon of Republican senators who are denouncing the scandals.
Fauci and CDC knew about the risk of miscarriage linked to mRNA Covid vaccines
Newly released government text messages (source 1) reveal that Dr. Anthony Fauci privately raised concerns in January 2021 that the immune response following the second COVID-19 “vaccine” dose could trigger miscarriage during the first trimester of pregnancy.
In a text exchange involving then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy, Fauci noted that fever and the heightened immune response following dose two “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
The messages are part of a soon-to-be released cache containing more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails recovered from Fauci’s government-issued phone and released by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul (source 2)
At the heart of the story is a January 2021 text message exchange between Fauci, Vivek Murthy (then Surgeon General), and Rochelle Walensky (then CDC director). In those messages, Fauci wrote that “there is no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccination is preferable early rather than late in pregnancy.” (source 3)
Pregnant Women’s Concerns About the Genetic Vaccine and Fauci’s Private Confirmation
He also highlighted a warning that would later prove prophetic.
“However, some people (including female healthcare workers) have concerns about administering a ‘genetic’ vaccine in the very early stages of pregnancy,” he wrote.
Nearly two hours passed before Fauci returned to the topic with an aspect he hadn’t mentioned the first time. “I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of,” he wrote.
“Since many people have significant cytokine storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this heoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester .”
This exchange was never reflected in Fauci’s public statements. On February 3, 2021, in a JAMA livestream event, he stated that the FDA had found “no warning signs” regarding pregnant women.
The White House Advisor’s Lies About Risks to Pregnant Women – VIDEO
Months later, as White House medical advisor, he claimed that the CDC data showed “no indication” of additional risks, arguing that pregnant women should be vaccinated.
“It’s pretty clear that pregnant women should be vaccinated,”he stated. Here he is, in the video reposted on X by Senator Ron Johnson, confidently recommending the vaccination of pregnant women with a smile.
«Fauci on August 30, 2021: “it’s really one of those things that’s kind of not a close call. It really is pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated.”But 7 months earlier he was concerned that the second dose of the COVID shot “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester» Senator Johnson comments (source 4).
The messages also show how the three officials weighed the vaccine’s risk-benefit balance against that of the virus, while worrying about public statements that could undermine pregnant women’s confidence in COVID vaccination.
On January 26, 2021, Murthy told Fauci and Walensky that he was “surprised to see the WHO issue a strong statement saying they do not recommend Moderna [sic] for pregnant women,”calling it “a strong statement to make and potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women.”
A 2024 study confirmed 37 adverse events in pregnancy
«The revelation takes on added significance in light of a recent peer-reviewed pregnancy safety studyby Dr. James Thorp and colleagues» writes American epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher in an article published on his Substack Focal Points. (source 5).
Using CDC/FDA VAERS data through April 26, 2024, they examined 37 pregnancy and newborn adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination and found that every one of the 37 exceeded the CDC/FDA safety signal statistical threshold.
These included miscarriage, fetal malformations, chromosomal abnormalities, placental disorders, fetal growth restriction, premature delivery, stillbirth, neonatal asphyxia, and newborn death.
Alarmingly, the study reported a COVID-19 vaccine miscarriage proportional reporting ratio (PRR) of 114 compared with influenza vaccination and 38.4 compared with all other vaccines.
Epidemiologist Hulscher: “Vaccines administered despite the risk of miscarriage: It’s diabolical.”
«In simple terms, official CDC/FDA data showed miscarriage was reported far more disproportionately after COVID-19 vaccination than after other vaccines—creating an unusually large safety signal» Hulsher commented
«While senior federal health officials were privately discussing miscarriage risk in January 2021, they went on to aggressively push COVID-19 mRNA injections during pregnancy. Years later, a peer-reviewed analysis found all 37 pregnancy and newborn adverse events examined breached safety-signal thresholds. That is diabolical» the epidemiologist concluded.
It should be remembered that in clinical trials of a new drug, pregnant women, just like the elderly and those more vulnerable due to pre-existing conditions, are generally excluded for safety reasons related to the protection of the fetus and the mother.
The Alarm about the Risk of Miscarriages in Vaccinated Women, raised by Gospa News in 2021
On January 25, 2021, he texted then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky the following.
Nevertheless, in April 2021, Walensky had a published conversation with Dr. Eric J. Rubin (editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine) in which she vehemently advocated COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women, even though it hadn’t been tested on pregnant women(source 6).
This was a flagrant violation of the “Golden Rule of pregnancy”—namely, that novel and/or potentially harmful substances are never used when new human life is being formed and nurtured within the womb.
At this time, Drs. Peter McCullough and James Thorp were totally shocked by her recommendation, as both doctors had long taken it for granted that we’d already learned this lesson the hard way from the diethylstilbestrol (DES) and thalidomide disasters.
After Walensky’s approval, millions of pregnant women who wouldn’t have dared drink a solitary glass of wine lined up to get an experimental genetic shot that had been developed “at warp speed.”
Given that Walensky is herself a mother of three children, it strikes me as especially bizarre that she would make this recommendation just two months after hearing Dr. Fauci’s concern about miscarriage risk.
Nearly two centuries ago, a strange hill rose above the flat landscape of London's East End. It stood high enough to appear on maps, serve as a landmark for travellers, and offer sweeping views across the city. Unlike most hills, Whitechapel Mount, as this hill was called, was almost certainly man-made. Yet, nobody is entirely sure how it came to be.
Was it a giant rubbish heap? A burial mound from one of London's deadly plague outbreaks? A remnant of Civil War fortifications? Or was it created from debris left behind by the Great Fire of London?
The answers remain uncertain, making Whitechapel Mount one of the most curious lost landmarks in the history of London.
Illustration of the Whitechapel Mount as it appeared on Illustrated London News, 28 April 1862. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
by Scott Ritter – originally published on his Substack
Scott ritter is a former US Navy Intelligence official, now writer, historian, geopolitical analyst, arms control specialist, military expert.
All links to previous Gospa News article or video have been added in the aftermath
When I was travelling to Israel on a regular basis back in the mid- to late-1990’s as part of my duties with the United Nations, I was always struck by how closely many Israelis identified with the United States. On national holidays, many Israeli motorists would fly two little plastic flags from the windows of their cars—one the blue and white Star of David, and the other the Stars and Stripes. “We see ourselves as little America”, my Israeli host would explain when I pointed this out.
I know—I was caught up in the middle of this power dynamic, and ended up being accused by the US government of spying on behalf of Israel. The charges were eventually dropped as unfounded and politically motivated, but the sentiment behind the accusations was real—a significant part of the US defense, intelligence and security establishment of the United States viewed Israel as a threat.
Collaboration and cooperation ongoing between the US and Israel
Because Israel was a threat. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t collaboration and cooperation ongoing between the US and Israel—while I was in Israel, the hotels were full of CIA officers, US military officers, and State Department diplomats who were on official business.
But there was a Chinese Wall separating the US and Israel, and interactions were governed by strict protocols that kept this wall up at all times. After I left the United Nations, I worked for a while as an on-air analyst for NBC News.
I also signed with a New York City speakers bureau, Greater Talent Network (GTN). And it was these two experiences which exposed me to the level to which pro-Israeli interests had infiltrated every aspect of American media and information management.
I was approached repeatedly by NBC producers who would hand me their business cards—not the NBC ones, but rather their AIPAC cards (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, a literal front for the Israeli government.)
AIPAC called the shots for influential Senators and Congressional Representatives, and Senate and House staffers
GTN networked me directly with AIPAC, as well as its affiliate entities that had taken root in American academia and the think tank industry.
Through these networks, I was brought into a secretive world of backroom connectivity with the US Congress, where AIPAC called the shots for influential Senators and Congressional Representatives, and Senate and House staffers openly collaborated with employees of various US government agencies to set policy.
I was offered a great deal of money by Paul Wolfowitz, who at the time of the pitch was the Dean of the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), if I would join the team.
All I had to do was get onboard with the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I declined Wolfowitz’s offer, and walked away from the AIPAC cabal.
Unfortunately America’s elected representatives have not shown such moral clarity or loyalty to the Republic they ostensibly serve.
We live in an age where the Israeli Prime Minister openly brags about having bought the US Congress.
Pro-Israeli operatives spent $30 million to evict Thomas Massie from the US Congress
Where AIPAC brags about spending $100 million to accomplish just that. Where pro-Israeli operatives spent $30 million to evict Thomas Massie from the US Congress because he dared challenge the surrender of American sovereignty to Israel.
Where the US Secretary of State has openly declared that criticism of Israel is grounds for being denied a visa into the United States. Where Israeli politicians openly advocate for the suppression of free speech in America.
And where the Chinese Wall that separated US and Israeli interests is being torn down by a compliant Congress, all the while the mainstream media, which long ago surrendered its independence and integrity to Israeli interests, remains silent.
The surrender document that signals the capitulation of the Constitutional Republic formerly known as the United States of America to a new entity which could more accurately be called the United States of Israel is the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), in particular Section 219 of the House version, and Section 1217 of the Senate’s version.
Secretary of Defense to designate an Executive Agent (EA) to expand and accelerate deeper integration of Israel into US institutions.
Section 219/1217 directs the Secretary of Defense to designate an Executive Agent (EA) to expand and accelerate deeper integration of Israel into US institutions. The EA authority would take precedence over the authority of the other DoD Component heads per DOD Instruction 5101.01, meaning that the EA would be able to overrule determinations by other DOD agencies such as the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) on Israeli access to US technology.
This new EA would end direct Congressional oversight with supervision by the Secretary of Defense. There would be no Congressional confirmation or ability for removal of an executive agent by Congress.
In short, it is the surrendering of the constitutional duties of Congress to a politically appointment agent of the Executive branch of government.This is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.
Section 2191217 integrates American and Israeli research and development programs in a way which makes the United States dependent on Israel’s provision of specific technologies, thereby granting Israel a significant amount of leverage over future American policy and infrastructure, entangling defense supply chains of Israel and the United States across government, private and academic sectors, blurring the lines of territorial integrity and political sovereignty.
Section 219/1217 targets defense related procurement and acquisition processes so that it will be impossible for future Administrations to separate Israeli technologies or agreements from major defense procurement programs, holding DOD Program Executive Offices and Program Managers hostage to the inclusion of Israeli-origin technologies in US systems. These procedures make moot current “Buy-America” provisions, and give Israeli companies access to intellectual property for weapons systems they are directly competing against.
Section 2191217 grants the EA the authority to re-allocate the funding and focus of the Defense Department by prioritizing the integration of Israel into the US’ national defense structures. It is literally subordinating the totality of the most sensitive aspects of US defense to Israel, outside the purview of Congressional oversight.
At a time when the majority of the American people are waking up to the horrific crimes committed by Israel against the people of Palestine, and the role played by Israel in getting America involved in permanent wars in the Middle East, Section 219/1217 will permanently tie the United States to Israel, making the US Department of Defense and, by extension, all of the American people, complicit in these crimes.
The Greater Israeli Project in the Middle East is floundering.
The Greater Israeli Project, which seeks the territorial expansion of the Israeli State in the Middle East at the expense of Israel’s neighbors, is floundering. Israel itself is going through an existential crisis because of its permanent state of war.
I have previously written that the relationship between Israel and the United States is like that of a parasite to its host. Section 219/1217 would codify this status as law.And in doing so, destroy the Constitutional Republic.
Congress has specific duties and responsibilities demanded of it by the Constitution.Surrendering these responsibilities to a foreign nation is not one of these duties.
If Section 219/1217 becomes law, Israel will have permanently attached itself to the American enterprise.
Right now, we have a Congress which has considered criminalizing and criticism of Israel.This, or course, is an affront to the very notion of free speech.By making Israeli security and US security indistinguishable, as would happen if Section 219/1217 becomes law, the inevitability of the criminalization of speech critical of Israel is assured.
The 2027 NDAA is America’s last stand.Remove Section 2191217, and we have a chance at survival.Turn Section 219/1217 into law, and we have lost the Republic.
I swore to defend the United States of America, a Constitutional Republic.
I will never serve the United States of Israel. And neither should anyone who calls themselves an American.
by Scott Ritter – originally published on his Substack
William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) is an American former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer, former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector, author, and commentator.
Violence has accompanied humanity throughout recorded history, leaving behind countless mysteries that still puzzle archaeologists today. Advances in forensic science, DNA analysis, and modern imaging techniques have solved some ancient crimes. Still, many remain stubbornly unsolved despite decades of research. From carefully arranged mass graves to murdered kings and frozen victims whose killers were never […]
Nearly a century before the Vietnam War, the United States undertook one of its first military interventions in East Asia. It was not a full-scale campaign, and it lasted only a single day. Its opponent was not a modern army but the indigenous Paiwan people of southern Taiwan. Yet the expedition exposed a problem that would become familiar in later conflicts: the limits of military power against an elusive enemy fighting on its own terrain. Known as the Formosa Expedition of 1867, this little-remembered operation ended in an embarrassing defeat for the United States Navy.
United States Marines and sailors attacking the Paiwan natives of southern Taiwan. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
In 1935, two chemists at Tokyo’s Imperial University synthesized a new molecule and unwittingly launched one of the strangest narratives of the psychedelic age. Toshio Hoshino and Kenya Shimodaira were working on a family of compounds known as the tryptamines, which occur widely in nature and have a range of intriguing biological properties. The neurotransmitter serotonin, which among other things regulates mood, cognition, and social behavior, is a tryptamine. So are many psychoactive drugs, although this would only be discovered later on. The Japanese scientists had recently completed the world’s first laboratory synthesis of a molecule called bufotenine, which is produced by toads and certain species of mushrooms. Now, via a sequence of reactions, they engineered a close chemical relative. Diagrams of the two tryptamines looked nearly identical, each represented by two angular rings and a tail, resembling microscopic organisms; the only difference lay in the shape of the head. Such tiny changes in chemical structure “can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad’s switch points,” as the writer and organic chemist Primo Levi once wrote. The new molecule’s name, following scientific convention, would be 5-MeO-DMT.
Hoshino and Shimodaira published their findings in the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan, leaving no explanation as to why they had conducted these experiments. The early 20th century was a time of wide-ranging exploration in organic chemistry, with researchers synthesizing new compounds to assess their pharmacological potential or better understand the reactions by which one substance could be transformed into another. Many of these compounds had no evident utility, such as 5-MeO-DMT, which for decades was thought only to be a product of the laboratory.
This changed in 1959, when the molecule was isolated from a shrub native to Brazil. Not long afterward, 5-MeO-DMT was detected in Anadenanthera peregrina, a leguminous tree from the Caribbean and South America. For thousands of years, Indigenous communities had been harvesting its slender bean pods to prepare snuffs called cohoba or yopo, which were typically inhaled using hollow bones or bamboo shoots—the earliest known use of psychedelics in the New World. “With this powder they lose consciousness and become like drunken men,” Christopher Columbus observed in the 15th century. The Spaniards regarded such practices as demonic and sought to eradicate them as they colonized the region. After witnessing a yopo ceremony in the Andes, where the snuff was dispensed from a snail shell with a spoon carved from the bone of a puma, one missionary reported, “They summoned the devil.”
The rich biodiversity of the Amazon also yielded other hallucinogenic snuffs containing 5-MeO-DMT. These were prepared from trees in the nutmeg family and were known, in some local communities, as “semen of the sun.” In the early 1950s, a distinguished Harvard scholar named Richard Evans Schultes had documented the snuffs being used for “witchcraft, divination and the diagnosis of illness” by the medicine men of more than half a dozen tribes, describing the effects as “virulently potent.” Schultes expressed incredulity that such a widely used substance had gone unstudied for so long. “It makes one wonder how many more narcotic plants, up to now obscured by better-known ones, still wait to be discovered,” he wrote. These snuffs were only later found to contain 5-MeO-DMT.
A tall, bespectacled man who wore a pith helmet in the jungle, Schultes was considered the father of modern ethnobotany, a field that studies the traditional uses of plants. He was also one of the world’s foremost experts on psychedelic rituals in an era before they had captured mainstream attention. In the 1930s, he had uncovered the ceremonial use of psilocybin mushrooms in southern Mexico and identified the source of an ancient Aztec sacrament as the seeds of a native morning glory vine, which contained a chemical cousin of LSD. He went on to live in the Amazon for a decade, documenting thousands of medicinal plant traditions while researching alternative rubber sources for the US military. The only provisions he carried were instant coffee and tins of Boston baked beans.
Even then, Schultes recognized that incursions from the wider world threatened the survival of Indigenous knowledge. “Time is running out,” he once warned. “The Indians’ botanical knowledge is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves.” Yet capturing this knowledge, as an outsider, was a formidable endeavor. In addition to navigating remote and inhospitable regions, ethnobotanists had to draw on scattered records from disparate disciplines—botany, anthropology, archaeology, plant chemistry, pharmacology, history, geography and sundry other tangential fields of the sciences and arts,” as Schultes put it. There was always the risk that in selecting and piecing together this information one might draw false conclusions.
A misleading narrative about psychedelic toads took hold, involving not only the wrong molecule but the wrong species entirely.
In the 1960s, while Schultes was continuing his ethnobotanical research, 5-MeO-DMT was detected in numerous other plants around the world, including a type of grass that could cause grazing sheep to convulse uncontrollably, a phenomenon known as “staggers.” Then, in 1964, the molecule showed up in an animal for the first time, detected in the skins of Sonoran Desert toads, a species that had formerly been of interest only to the occasional herpetologist. This breakthrough was thanks to an Italian chemist named Vittorio Erspamer. Earlier in his career, Erspamer had discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin—a pivotal moment in the field of neuroscience, laying the groundwork for understanding chemical signaling in the brain. His lifelong interest was pharmacognosy, or the study of drugs from natural sources; by the end of his career, he would identify and name more than 60 new compounds, including from octopuses, shellfish, and sea anemones, and twice be nominated for the Nobel Prize. “Land and sea are populated by a miraculous variety of creatures, representing the outcome of the tremendous biosynthetic work carried out by Nature over hundreds of millions of years,” he once wrote.
No animals captured his attention like amphibians, which he described as “an inexhaustible mine of active compounds.” In his laboratory, which was decorated with pictures of frogs and toads, Erspamer and his assistants minced the skins of different species with scissors and exposed them to a variety of tests: gas and paper chromatography, X-ray fluorescence analysis. Colleagues from around the world sent him samples by airmail, and in the early 1960s he received 21 Sonoran Desert toad specimens that had been skinned and dried in Arizona. (At the time, the species was classified as Bufa alvarius, a name that remains in widespread use despite being formally changed in 2006.) The findings were striking. All toads produce bufotenine, but this was the only species among some of the most chemically diverse animals in the world that contained 5-MeO-DMT.
Erspamer’s study was published in a technical journal in 1965, just as the psychedelic revolution was getting started. At around this time, a small cohort of psychonauts began using synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, alerted by its discovery in South American snuffs, but it would be decades before anyone in this milieu realized that the same molecule could be obtained from a North American toad. Knowledge of psychedelic toads was fractured across niche academic disciplines, and even Erspamer appears not to have been aware that 5-MeO-DMT had hallucinogenic properties. But over the next two decades, something remarkable happened: A misleading narrative about psychedelic toads took hold, involving not only the wrong molecule but the wrong species entirely. Although 5-MeO-DMT can produce experiences of overwhelming intensity, often interpreted as encounters with ultimate truth, the history of toad smoking is riddled with false leads and misinformation.
In 1956, a psychiatrist named Howard Fabing co-authored a study in Science, the prestigious academic journal, about the effects of a purported hallucinogen. Like many others in his field, he had become fascinated by drugs that appeared to evoke states of psychosis, inspired by the discovery, the previous decade, of LSD. People had reported overpowering hallucinations after consuming tiny doses of acid, as the substance would become known in psychedelic culture. “My field of vision fluctuated and swam like an image in a distorted mirror,” its creator, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann, recalled of his first trip (during which he somehow wobbled home from work on his bicycle). Accounts like these, Fabing wrote, had “precipitated the whole field of biochemistry into a new look at the brain.” Psychoanalysis had long been the dominant paradigm for treating mental illness, but now another possibility was arising. If certain compounds could seemingly induce the symptoms of insanity, then perhaps insanity was a result of faulty brain chemistry—and could thus be treated with psychiatric drugs.
Fabing’s interest lay in using psychedelics not as therapeutic agents but as tools for understanding how a healthy mind could malfunction. This was seen as especially urgent in the 1950s, when around half the hospital beds in the developed world were occupied by patients with schizophrenia and other mental disorders. “The stakes are high,” Fabing wrote. Scientists had begun revisiting anthropological accounts of hallucinogenic rituals—iboga ceremonies in Central Africa, peyote cults in the American Southwest. The term “psychedelics” was not yet in use; instead, such substances were known as psychotomimetics, reflecting an underlying belief that they induced not illumination but madness. Intriguingly, many of them shared a chemical structure with serotonin.
This line of inquiry had led Fabing to bufotenine, the tryptamine relative of 5-MeO-DMT that Hoshino and Shimodaira had originally synthesized. Besides occurring in most toad species, bufotenine was known to occur in fly agaric mushrooms, the iconic red toadstools of fairy tales, and thought to be the origin of the Norse berserker legend, involving warriors who reputedly consumed the mushrooms and entered such frenzied states that they were invincible in battle—the root of the phrase “going berserk.” Separate accounts from Siberia described nomadic herders using fly agaric in shamanic ceremonies, taking pains to prolong its psychoactive effects. “The urine of persons intoxicated with fly agaric is not wasted,” an anthropologist noted in 1901. “The drunkard himself drinks it to prolong his hallucinations, or he offers it to others as a treat.”
Fabing hypothesized that schizophrenia might arise from the abnormal production of bufotenine in the brain, possibly instead of serotonin. To explore the compound’s effects in more controlled settings, he and a colleague injected subjects with escalating doses and monitored their reactions. One man experienced a bodily numbness that he described as “a pleasant Martini feeling.” Another became light-headed and reported visual hallucinations. “I see white straight lines with a black background. I can’t trace a pattern,” he exclaimed. “Nowthere are red, green, and yellow dots, very bright, like they were made out of fluorescent cloth, moving like blood cells through capillaries, weaving in and out of the white lines.” Based on the results of this experiment, the scientists concluded that bufotenine had hallucinogenic properties similar to LSD.
This finding, published in a reputed journal, would later cross disciplinary lines and be picked up in the rush to solve a major anthropological mystery. Across Mesoamerica, archaeologists had unearthed a preponderance of toad artifacts, including detailed depictions of the parotid glands (located at the top of the neck) in which toads produce their defense toxins. Each of the great civilizations—the Olmecs, the Mayans, the Aztecs—had left behind extensive toad artworks: sculptures, altars, friezes, ceramics. There were middens of toad bones in what appeared to be ritual contexts, sometimes comprising thousands of skeletons. What significance had these ancient societies ascribed to toads?
Women in ancient Rome used toad secretions to murder their husbands; 16th-century Italian chemists laced salts with toad toxins for poisoning the food of enemies.
In the 1970s, amid surging popular interest in psychedelics, a compelling academic theory arose: that toads had been used as ritual intoxicants, much like psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca. It was well established that Indigenous cultures across the region had performed healing or shamanic rituals with psychedelics. Of the psychoactive plants identified worldwide, close to 90 percent were native to the Americas, with more than a dozen psychedelic traditions documented in Mexico alone. Fabing’s research had suggested that bufotenine, which occurs inmany species of toads, was hallucinogenic. The pieces of the puzzle all seemed to connect.
There was also an obvious candidate species: Bufa marinus, more commonly known as the cane toad, a lumbering, fleshy creature that can grow up to ten inches in length and weigh as much as six pounds, a little less than a typical newborn baby. Cane toads were native to Central America, dwelling in marshlands and swamps. They corresponded to many of the archaeological depictions of toads, with bulging parotid glands, and their bones were frequently excavated during archaeological digs. It wasn’t long before researchers were confidently asserting that there had been a psychedelic cane toad tradition in Mesoamerica. “The Olmecs had a predisposition for consuming toads,” one scholar wrote in a book about the region’s archaeology. “Consumption of these toads produces hallucinations.”
* The dark art of toad poisoning seemingly made a return in May 2022, when a Russian oligarch whose firm had called for an end to the invasion of Ukraine died after visiting a shaman who served him a “hangover cure” prepared using toads. Three other senior executives at the company have since died in mysterious circumstances, presumptively at the behest of the Russian government, including a former chairman who fell out of a hospital window.
Yet the theory had a glaring weakness. In addition to bufotenine, the cane toad produces an array of other chemicals, several of them acutely toxic. Its glands secrete two classes of compounds, bufogenin and bufotoxin, that can be lethal to humans even in tiny doses. Similar molecules are found in the skins of many toad species around the world and have long been used for preparing poisons. Women in ancient Rome used toad secretions to murder their husbands; 16th-century Italian chemists laced salts with toad toxins for poisoning the food of enemies. At English country fairs in the 17th and 18th centuries, charlatan doctors hawked medicines by feeding live toads to hired assistants, who fainted or became delirious in front of onlookers, only to revive upon swallowing whichever concoction was being advertised. The assistants survived by lining their mouths and stomachs with oil or by consuming large meals in advance. They became known as “toadies,” a word that has drifted from being associated with charlatanism to its modern definition: a sycophant or obsequious helper.*
The driving question for proponents of the psychedelic cane toad hypothesis thus became how precolonial Mesoamerican cultures might have isolated bufotenine from these deadlier defense toxins. In the early 1970s, an American graduate student named Timothy Knab went searching the Mexican countryside for a healer, or curandero, who could provide an answer. Knab eventually came across an elderly man in the mountains of Veracruz who claimed to remember a potion that had not been used in decades. The man ground the glands of 10 cane toads into a paste, added lime water and ash, then boiled the mixture overnight. This was stirred into corn beer, filtered, mixed with cornmeal, and left for several days to ferment before being heated to drive off the remaining moisture. The result was a hardened doughlike substance. The curandero refused to consume it and only reluctantly consented to dose Knab, who recorded the experience in dissociative terms. “Profuse sweating is noted along with a sudden increase in heartbeat,” he wrote. “The heartbeat becomes continuously harder and stronger. A pronounced chill sets in with twitching of the facial and eye muscles. A pounding headache and delirium shortly follow the onset of twitching.” For several hours, he lay in front of a fire, sweating and unable to move.
In a seeming blow to the theory, Knab reported no hallucinations from this experiment. But his account, which he presented at an anthropology conference in Mexico City, stirred the imagination of another young scholar. Alison Kennedy was the heiress of a wealthy Palo Alto family who would later adopt the alter ego Queen Mu and launch an influential cyberculture magazine called Mondo 2000, a futuristic mash-up of technology, psychedelics, and arts writing. Before all of this, Kennedy was an anthropology graduate student with an interest in Mesoamerican iconography; this had led her, almost inevitably, to the question of toads. She turned her eye to the artifacts of the Olmecs, who died out around twenty-five hundred years ago and are considered the first major civilization in Mesoamerica. Jaguars featured prominently among their artworks, which many researchers had interpreted as a sign of mythological significance. But Kennedy concluded that this had been a case of mistaken identity. Many of the artworks weren’t jaguars, she argued. They were toads.
In support, she presented dozens of illustrations, focusing on what she described as “the attributes of toadiness”: downturned mouths, inward-facing forelimbs, glandular swellings. She became drawn, like so many others in her field, to the idea that toads had been used in psychedelic ceremonies.
To account for the toxicity of the toads, Kennedy proposed a solution that reads like science fiction from the magazine she later founded. In addition to toads, the Olmecs had left behind depictions of many other animals, including ducks, which have highly efficient livers. Perhaps ducks had been used as bio-processors, feeding on toads and metabolizing their poisonous compounds so that humans could safely consume them. Kennedy drew attention to Olmec figurines of people wearing what appeared to be duck-billed masks. These masks would have provided protection from “venom spatters” as putative toad shamans “stood at their toad altars lancing the parotid glands,” she posited. This relied on the assumption that ducks could eat toads without being poisoned themselves. To investigate further, Kennedy visited a zoo in Texas, where she and the head aviculturist flung some cane toads into a duck pond. The ducks had been reared in captivity and were “toad-naive,” as Kennedy wrote, yet they pursued the toads with avidity, juggling their soft bodies before gulping them down. Kennedy described this behavior as “singular and apparently wholly instinctive.” Duck bills have neither nerve endings for sensing toad toxins nor blood vessels for absorbing them; the juggling movements were conceivably an adaptation for rinsing poisons into the water. Two of the duck species in the pond happened to be native to Mexico, home of both the Olmec culture and Bufa marinus. Here, at least, was proof that ducks had an appetite for the toads.
Now Kennedy took her suppositions even further, reexamining the literature on a famous Olmec site where thousands of toad skeletons had been excavated. The ruins featured an elaborate system of water channels hewn from some three hundred tons of rock, running between a sculpture of a jaguar (or possibly a toad) and an enormous stone receptacle in the shape of a duck. The main channel drained into a series of smaller pools too shallow for human bathing; confounded researchers had guessed that they were for unspecified “ritual use.” With a flourish, Kennedy now presented her final claim: That this complex hydraulic system had been designed as an integrated bufo-culture station, including both spawning grounds for toads and a captive population of bio-processing ducks. These bold ideas won her a prize at an anthropology conference in 1979, but there was one problem: No one had taken the obvious next step and tested whether the duck livers were in fact hallucinogenic. For all the scholarly attention it had garnered, the mystery of the psychedelic toad remained unresolved.
In the early 1980s, after reading about Fabing’s bufotenine study, a British artist named Adrian Morgan began a series of personal experiments with toads. These included “licking poison glands, rubbing animals against my forehead, and in one instance collecting venom with blotting paper . . . and then eating the paper,” he reported. Disappointingly, Morgan experienced no hallucinations from these tests, which seemed only to aggravate his research subjects. “One specimen of green toad showed its disgust by leaping from an open window into the celery patch below me,” he wrote. “It was never seen again.”
One spring, Morgan visited a forest outside London and came upon two dead female toads in a pond. He took them home, where he pounded their skins and poison glands in a mortar. Then he snuffed the residue and took notes in an increasingly jagged hand:
3:41 p.m. First quantity ingested into right nostril. Within one minute, nostril strongly anesthetized.
3:49 Sneezing violently, profuse sweating of forehead.
4:03 Fleeting pain at temples.
4:05 Salivating strongly.
4:15 Thick saliva at back of throat causing tendency to gag.
4:32 Feeling very tired.
Midway through, colors briefly appeared richer and moving objects left trails in his vision, like speed blurs. Morgan described these sensations as “only slightly psychedelic” and concluded, “The experience was not pleasant.”
Yet the notion of hallucinogenic toads persisted, cropping up in stranger contexts still. While Morgan was pursuing his investigations, stories of psychedelic cane toad use began surfacing in Australia, of all places, where the animals had been introduced in the 1930s to control pests on plantations. The toads had gone rogue, consuming native frogs, birds, insects, small marsupials, even Ping-Pong balls and cigarette butts flicked toward them at pubs—almost everything except the swarms of sugarcane beetles they had been imported to feed on. Australia’s plague of beetles had been compounded by a plague of toads.
This was possible in large part because toads are opportunistic and superbly adaptable creatures. They are residents of the gutter, the verge, the ditch. They can hunker down when times are bad and burst to life when conditions favor them. They are capable of producing millions of eggs. In their present form, toads have existed for at least 30 million years, enduring all kinds of planetary upheaval, from ice ages to the rise of humans. Released onto a new continent, the cane toads marauded unstoppably.
For all the scholarly attention it had garnered, the mystery of the psychedelic toad remained unresolved.
In the 1980s, 50 years into the invasion, an Australian filmmaker named Mark Lewis began working on a satirical documentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which Werner Herzog later declared to be his favorite film of all time. Hundreds of millions of the animals had taken up residence across Australia’s east coast, expanding their occupied range at a rate of more than 15 miles annually. Researchers dubbed the toads “an amphibian weed.” Streets were slicked with flattened toad carcasses, which emitted a fishy aroma. Bands of vigilantes went after the animals with cricket bats or swerved deliberately to run them over, but the toads continued their relentless spread.
During his research for the film, Lewis picked up on a rumor that people were getting high on the toads. He ended up speaking by phone with a man who claimed to have been in prison, where the inmates “would race to grab a toad if it found its way inside the compound,” Lewis told me. His source was unwilling to appear on camera, so Lewis hired an actor to deliver the lines. “You use a little quantity at first, then larger,” the man mumbles in the film, which identifies him as a “cane toad drug abuser” from the town of Mullumbimby. He makes a reference to Carlos Castaneda’s writings, saying how users of peyote would “see the world through the consciousness of the cactus. “With a weak laugh, the man adds, “The toad’s the same.”
The documentary also features a detective from Queensland who attests that people in “hippie communes” have been tripping on cane toads since at least the 1970s. “When heroin and other drugs weren’t freely available, the next best alternative was to go out and get a cane toad, “the detective explains. These toads would be boiled down in billycans to produce a sludgy brew, which the hippies purportedly drank. “From what I’ve been told, they had fantastic color hallucinations, “the detective says. “It warped their sense of time.”
Australians have a certain reputation for toughness, but even the hardiest among them would likely have been poisoned by the bufotoxins in this recipe. Yet Lewis also heard about a more plausible mode of ingestion. A local narcotics squad was said to possess a jar of confiscated dried cane toad skins that could be “shredded and put into a hookah or a pipe and smoked,” apparently causing intense hallucinatory effects. At one point during his research (“to see what all the fuss was about”) Lewis rolled a small quantity with tobacco into a joint. “I smoked it, and the only result was that I got a bad headache,” he told me. “I would not recommend that kids try this at home.”
Dubiously sourced accounts followed of Australians who died after drinking toad tea and a man supposedly being imprisoned in South America on toad-licking charges.
But in 1988, the year Lewis’s film came out, a moral panic began that swept the concept of psychedelic toads into popular culture. “I feel partly responsible,” Lewis told me decades later, sounding mystified. This strange sequence began with media reports in the United States of Australian hippies “forsaking traditional drugs for cane toads, which they boil for a slimy, potentially lethal cocktail.” Later that year, a doctor at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, a San Francisco drug treatment facility established during the Summer of Love, jokingly mentioned the “rare 1960s practice of toad licking” during a lecture. Afterward, the clinic was inundated with calls from reporters around the world, wanting to know about “crazed hippies licking toads in the mountains,” as the clinic’s director later recalled. Staff assured the journalists that there was no evidence of toads being licked in the United States, but the idea, like some invasive animal, took on a life of its own. At a conference on crack cocaine the following year, the Berkeley police chief announced that toad licking was a “problem that comes up from time to time.” An official from the Drug Enforcement Administration was quoted saying that cane toad secretions were “in the same (legal) category as heroin or LSD.” Bufotenine had indeed been listed as a Schedule I substance in 1967—even though, at the time, there had been virtually no reports of anybody using it. Citing the DEA, news articles now declared toad licking “the latest way to hallucinate.” (One headline: ”A Desperation High: Crack? Coke? Croak!”) The DEA official later clarified that he had said nothing about toad licking, but the phrase continued spawning fresh rounds of coverage until, as Scientific American later put it, “reality imitated fiction.”
In 1989, two teenagers were hospitalized in New Mexico after licking toads, which they had read about in the papers. The following year, two men were admitted to an emergency ward in Canada, bewildered and vomiting, after reportedly scraping the back of a pet cane toad and eating its secretions on crackers; the tabloids later claimed that one of the men had committed suicide after being discharged. Dubiously sourced accounts followed of Australians who died after drinking toad tea and a man supposedly being imprisoned in South America on toad-licking charges. Hungry for copy, journalists pressed experts for comment. “It gives them a kick like alcohol,” an Australian herpetologist professed, of the toad users. In a foretelling of toad mythmaking to come, it had become difficult to tell fact, conjecture, and fabrication apart. “This is a case of media feeding on media,” a reporter who covered the story would later reflect. Psychedelic toads, as a 1993 journal article titled “Misuse and Legend in the ‘Toad Licking’ Phenomenon” described it, had become an “informational epidemic.”
Meanwhile, the television drama L.A. Law ran an episode involving a retiree accused of toad licking, and Beavis and Butt-Head licked toads on MTV. (“Tastes like chicken,” Beavis remarked.) Psychedelic toads also captured the attention of lawmakers: A state representative in Georgia cautioned his colleagues about “the extreme dangers of toad licking,” while a representative in South Carolina proposed sentencing offenders to community service at zoos. The men appear to have been speaking in jest, but Canadian police were serious when, in 1991, they urged officials to ban imports of cane toads and outlaw them as pets, citing “the deaths of several Australian drug users.” Before long, Australia also passed laws against psychoactive toad use, listing bufotenine as a controlled substance. Toad licking had become so ingrained in popular consciousness that three decades later, while I was working on this book, people continuously brought it up as a point of reference. Yet the hype about cane toads obscured a crucial detail. As the anthropologist Wade Davis, who became drawn into solving the mystery, would later write, “An animal venom that contained no hallucinogenic agent but that did contain lethal poisons was not likely to inspire a new drug craze.” A satirical film had broadcast rumors that snowballed into full-blown hysteria about cane toads, but there was still no evidence that they were psychoactive at all.
Kimon de Greef is a journalist from South Africa and the author ofThe Ego Trip, an investigative nonfiction book about psychedelic toads. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic, and other publications. He has coauthored a book about abalone poaching and holds a conservation biology master’s from the University of Cape Town.
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