Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Mojave Megaphone

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

What is the Mojave Megaphone? Well, nobody really knows. Listen in today to learn about this desert mystery. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Mojave Josh and there's Mojave Chuck and Mojave Jerry's

out there somewhere and so is Mojave Dave and this is short stuff about something I had never heard of before Chuck the Mojave Desert Megaphone. Yes, Mojave, how are you Mojave? I'm good. I'm Mojave. Mojave, you? Mojave. Sure. So dumb. Have you ever been to the Mojave Desert? Sure. I guess you have to have been if you've ever driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, right? Yeah, boy, that's a, that's not the most fun ride in the world, I gotta say. Baron, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty barren. Cow skulls everywhere. Yeah, exact tumbleweeds and dead mafia bodies and me and my old friend John Pendell driving to Vegas to get him a Krispy Kreme Las Vegas t-shirt and then driving home. No, that's right. That just does

not seem right to call him John. I know him as Johnny and I always would. Johnny P. Johnny Pendell. Sounds like a bad kid at school. He was, you know, he was a decent kid. He's probably laughing because he gets in touch with me every time we mention him so he'll laugh at that. Yeah. He's a good guy. I know he is. That's why I can out him as a bad kid. Bad kid, though. So did you guys ever go see the Mojave Megaphone or had you heard of it before? I had not heard of it until I found this article on how stuff works, actually. Nice work. Well, nice work. How stuff works for really turning us on to something really interesting. Had you heard about it? No, I hadn't. I already said. Oh, okay. I've never heard of this

before. Sorry, Mojave. It's Mojave. Okay. So in the Mojave Desert, as a matter of fact, in the Mojave Desert National Preserve, there is what looks a lot like a giant weathered steel megaphone bolted pretty much permanently to a couple of boulders on the top of a hill. It weighs a lot and no one can make heads or tails of not only how it got there, but what it is and how long it's been there. It's a bona fide mystery. Yeah. This is nuts to me that nobody has come out and knows the origin of this thing. I know. Surely by now, somebody would have been like, oh, I know the guy who put it there and here's what it is. By the way, this is Banksy's real identity kind of person. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So the Mojave Desert is, or this thing is located actually in the Mojave Desert National Preserve in sort of a, it says a remote corner, but they're all fairly remote. And it's just, you know, it could be art. It could be a horn of some sort, like maybe a siren. And, you know, we'll get to some of these in a little more detail, but it's just crazy to me that no one knows how this got there, especially because it has, you know, sort of shaped like a megaphone. But it's the kind of thing where it seems like one would be able to say, oh, well, no, that used to be a thing because there were other things that are shaped just like this. Right. Exactly. There's nothing like that. And like you're saying, nobody's come forward to be like,

this is what it is, or everyone has to preference what they're saying with I think or I see it as, you know, like it's all just interpretation, which is great. And if you just describe it a little further, it looks like two slightly different sized rocket boosters placed top to top or mouth to mouth. I like to think that the fire comes out of the butt, you know? All right, sure. So this is mouth to mouth bolted together like that. There's a couple of like triangular fins. I think there's a pair of them at least toward the end on each side as they flare out. And then inside there's crosshairs basically made of rebar, it looked like to me. And the whole thing has no markings. There's no numbers. There's no letters. There's nothing on it. Not even what seems like it was

maybe used for before. And then if you look at like the rebar and the welding job, it doesn't seem like it was part of any kind of mass production. Like it almost gives you the idea of like a one-off kind of thing, you know? Yeah, which means it could be art. It's big. It's about eight feet long. And if you see where it is, it, you know, it took some effort, maybe two people, but probably at least three or four people to get this thing up there, get it bolted onto the side of this cliff. And it has led to a lot of speculation over the years as to, you know, there's some pretty decent ideas, I think, as to what this thing could be. And maybe we should take a break and come back. Yes, we should Mojave. Yes, Mojave. And we'll be right back to really

Mojave this Mojave. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars,

if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Mojave Chuck. All right. So some people think it might be a siren of some kind from the

1940s or 50s. Like, you know, they tested nuclear bombs not too far from here. It's near some army and air force activity. Maybe it was an early warning signal. Other people say, I don't know about that. Like this thing is really out in the middle of nowhere. You would have something like that closer to where people are probably. So that idea is okay, but has also largely been shot down by a bunch of other people. So that to me still makes sense because while it's not, it never was very heavily populated place, I think there's a ghost town called Crucero nearby. I mean, it's between the existing towns of Baker and Ludlow, and they're not exactly like Beijing and Shanghai or anything like that, you know? But there's a rail line, an old abandoned

rail line that runs right through there. And apparently they used to run chemical agents to the military bases out that way. So while you wouldn't have had a lot of people to warn, you would have had a potential situation to warn about even if it was just a few people of like a major chemical spill or a gas leak or something like that. So to me, the idea that it was some sort of warning system, it does make sense. But at the same time, it doesn't make sense that they would use some handmade one rather than one that was, you know, available. Because there were huge arid sirens that were around in World War II that look kind of similar, but were obviously arid sirens and they look like they would work a lot better than

whatever this thing was. Yeah, I saw on YouTube, there was this woman who did a siren test, like got a crank siren and put it in the small end, then had her friends down on the ground and see if they could hear it. And they could, but it didn't amplify things that much. And interestingly, in the YouTube comments, and so believe me, I'm not saying that this is like the worst research possible, to say a YouTube commenter said this, but there was a YouTube comment that said, hey, listen, I think it might be something from an old salt mine, like hot brine might have been pumped at high pressure through this thing, because it's just made of such thick iron and steel, like it doesn't, he said you could make something like a megaphone out of something a lot lighter.

Yeah, true. And that sort of made sense a little bit. That's the only reason I mentioned it. Other people said that they said something like a rocket booster, maybe, or maybe what's called a venturi, a pipeline venturi, which is an enclosure that is hourglass shape that controls the flow of fluids through a pipe, which is legitimate too. I mean, that would be there like, and wouldn't they have some record of a pipeline through there? That's the thing, like there's no apparent, either some, no one's looked in the right place yet, or it just wasn't documented, which means it was either secret or it is a more recent art installation. But if you look at it, I think one of the people who run tours out there said that they think that it's been there for 30 more

years. This thing looks like it's been around for a lot longer than the 1990s. So it looks very old, and it's possible its use was just so mundane that it didn't need any kind of documentation, or it's possible it's secret. And I kind of don't want to know, but at the same time, I think I would find it pretty fascinating to know its use too. I think that that also makes mysterious objects really interesting, you know, knowing their history. Yeah, another thing that feels plausible to me is that it was not something that sent out a sound, but something that maybe was used to detect something, like if they were doing nuclear testing at the Nevada testing site, that maybe it was something that like measured or detected long

range shock waves or something like that. And then it could make sense that the government, you know, it was, it might have been sort of a one-off and not have manufacturing numbers, and the government wouldn't readily come out and say anything like that existed. Plus also, Edwards Air Force Base is kind of nearby, which is where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Yeah, sure. And he very famously said, folks, Mojave, over. And that was it. Should we tell people how to get there? I think so, sure. I mean, it's all over the place. We even have the exact coordinates. Yeah, the exact coordinates are, get at your pencil, everyone, and Mojave this down on your Mojave. 35.0056 degrees north, 116.1963 degrees west.

And that's the user-decoder pin for the little orphan anti-secret message. If you want to go there, you cannot just walk there or drive there in your Toyota Tercel. No shade on the Tercel. Great car. Sure. But you need a four-wheel drive because you're going to have to drive through the Mojave River. You're going to be on dirt roads. You're going to be driving through sand, through canyons, and it's not the easiest thing to get to. No, not at all. But if you want to get there, you can. People have before, and you can take a photo with it. Sure. Or do a, bring a crank siren and do a test of your own.

Or you can look for gold. There's a legend that it actually points to a gold hoard underground, but I'm not sure I buy that one. No, I think they mentioned the crosshairs for that reason. But I don't know. It's just really interesting. It doesn't look like any megaphones that were used at any period in anyone's history. So I don't know. I think sometimes people just, didn't they find something like a monolith in Utah recently? Yeah, that definitely was an art installation. This isn't necessarily so. Well, if you do go, let us know. We want to hear about it. Get in touch with us. And in the meantime, everybody, short stuff is Mojave.

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