Bigfoot expert Bob Gymlan encountered some high strangeness the other day.
That may not sound too noteworthy for a guy who makes cryptid videos and posts them on YouTube.
Except this brush with the unexplained had nothing to do with unknown animals.
In brief, Gymlan’s old PC died while he was working on a video, so he bought a brand new one to finish the project.
He insists that the only software on it at the time of the incident – besides Windows 11, the standard programs, and some preloaded games – was the video editor he downloaded.
To continue work on the video, Gymlan says the only other thing he did was plug in a thumb drive containing 3 files – a prior finished video and 2 mp4s – and load them into the video editor.
Then he went to bed.
When he resumed work the next morning, this happened:
Gonna be honest. I don’t know what to make of this one.
The documented paranormal phenomena it comes closest to are EVPs.
One problem, though: Gymlan’s not dead.
I hope.
Maybe you could draw parallels with Milslop skinwalker creepypastas. But those are lame fabrications by extremely online suburban kids stuck in Perpetual Year Zero who live in terror of deer.
Gymlan seems too beset by Boomer tech to buy into such flights of fancy.
So am I, for that matter. Which is why I can’t rule out a technical explanation. Like him, I just don’t know enough to say this couldn’t be a fluke of A/V tech.
The fact that the anomalous .wav file contained new narration in Gymlan’s voice that he claims never to have spoken, and noises he didn’t make, would seem to strain the tech glitch theory.
For context, the video he was making concerned a series of bear attacks that claimed the lives of several Japanese villagers about a century ago.
Imperial police who abandoned their guard posts said they fled the village due to fears that it wasn’t just a bear, but a demon.
For decades after the fact, survivors refused interviews and wouldn’t even discuss the beast’s rampage.
Not that you can blame them.
As for Bob Gymlan, he probably just experienced the weird effects of a bizarre software glitch.
His story can still serve as warning against excessive curiosity about things man wasn’t meant to know.
Or vindication of Dead Internet theory.
Either way it’s getting weirder out there.
Take care.
And if you’re in the mood for a fictional story about demons battling with space pirates, read my award-winning horror/adventure series:
There is also another theory relating to dead internet. It’s the face that nothing you do connected to the internet is REALLY secure. Anything can slip in through that open door, watch you, or even tamper with your things. Check out the plentiful footage of people messing around with indoor security cameras installed in residential homes. Only issue is that it’s very hard for your average Joe to just do that out of nowhere, even if he’s a decent hacker, and especially if he has no window in.
This then stands to reason that other forces could manage much the same thing, attracted to certain algorithms or mantras sent out into the wasteland and react accordingly to it.
I think the mistake is thinking computers are the internet are some sort of cyberspace disconnected from our reality when they are really just another facet of it. There is no reason to think things that happen here also wouldn’t happen there just because it’s a larger calculator with a screen attached.
The kinds of issues you bring up have been making the rounds in dissident circles lately. These are folks who have good reason to be wary of prying eyes – whether they belong to the Powers That Be or the powers of the darkness of this world.
One bold but hard-to-dismiss claim that’s been made is that Lucifer’s original purpose as the Lightbringer was to enlighten men about the natural world. Since he fell, he’s twisted that intended purpose. So almost all technology has been corrupted.
Brian, that claim reminds me of the myth of Prometheus. I mean the Greek original, of course, not the it’s-not-a-prequel prequel to the Aliens franchise.
Would you attribute the corruption of technology to human fallibility or malign spiritual influence? Or that an “et, et” sort of question?
The great “et, et.”
Another possibility I’ve seen raised is that the decay of technical, moral, and spiritual knowledge are all interrelated, facets of turning away from the God Who Is Truth:
“Despite the breath-taking technological progress that has been made in the past 150 years, there is a sense that the people of the world have been letting go of the hard=won progress that the Church has made in pushing back idolatry by and [sic] advancing knowledge of things, this world and God; instead choosing to fall back into ancient superstitions, idolatrous practices and attempts at magic.”–Fr. Cliff Ermatinger, The Trouble with Magic: Our failed search for more and Christ’s fulfillment of our desires (Padre Pio Press, 2021), 157.