Lost media has become a bit of an obsession on the internet, and it’s easy to see why when you consider some of these bizarre and insane stories that were captured on film. But alas, there are some that have been lost to time, and here’s some of them.
TRANSCRIPT:
Justin Lyons had no idea what he was in for that day.
It was the 4th of September, 2006, and he was up early to get a head start at his job – he was a cameraman on a nature documentary at the time.
They were exploring the Batt Reef in Queensland, Australia, and they were hoping to capture some of the unique ecosystems that exist there.
So he got to his studio and assembled his gear, he had a lot of specialized wet gear and underwater cameras for days like this – he was kinda known for his underwater photography.
By the time the sun was up, he and the documentary host were cruising around in an inflatable dingy, wearing snorkel gear, looking for something interesting to capture. They didn’t have a lot of luck at first.
They caught a few things here and there, but nothing that he hadn’t already shot in dozens of other places.
When suddenly they spotted an enormous short tail sting ray gliding through the water with a wingspan of about 2’-2.5’. Immediately Justin and the host jumped in the water to get some footage.
After getting some good shots of it swimming below the camera, toward the camera, interacting with the host, the host wanted to get a shot of himself swimming over the top of the ray… and that’s when everything went wrong.
The ray, which is normally a very docile creature, got startled. And it whipped its tail at the host a few times and swam away.
Justin followed it with his camera but when he turned back to the host, he noticed the water was all murky. It took him a second to figure out it was blood.
The ray had not just managed to stick this guy with his barbed tail, but in a million to one shot it actually punctured his clothing, entered his chest, happened to go between two ribs and lodged itself into his heart.
Justin got him back up onto the dingy and struggled to save him, but there was absolutely nothing he could do. The host remained conscious just long enough to say, “I’m dying.”
And that’s how on that day, in that dingy, Justin Lyon became the sole witness to the last words of Steve Irwin.
I know, you saw it coming a mile away.
Except he wasn’t the only witness, his camera was also a witness. Steve had a policy on his show to keep the camera rolling, even if he was in danger. Actually, especially if he was in danger, that was his whole thing.
In fact he used to joke in interviews that he would be really sad if his death wasn’t caught on camera.
So I guess he kinda got his wish? His death was caught on tape, footage of it exists.
And the internet is obsessed with finding it.
Some of that’s just morbid curiosity, some of it might be wanting a sense of closure, as he was a beloved figure in the lives of many people when they were kids.
Also there’s just the randomness of how he died. I mean this guy was known as The Crocodile Hunter, he made a living taunting wild man-eating crocodiles for fun. And he was killed by one of the most harmless animals in the ocean.
Like, I’ll be honest, when I heard that he died, I was sad. It was sad. (beat) But I wasn’t surprised.
Oh, that guy that wrestles wild crocodiles on TV died?
Whoa, that was on my bingo card!
But a stingray? You know how many divers have been killed by stingrays? Twenty. That’s not this year. Or the last five years or ten years, that is since they started keeping records of stingray attacks in 1945. Over 80 years. Twenty people. And somehow, Steve Irwin was one of them.
That is bonkers and hard to believe, and knowing that there’s proof, that there’s footage of it out there… I mean I get it.
According to his widow, Terri Irwin, she had the footage destroyed. But that hasn’t stopped the internet from looking for it.
But maybe the biggest reason is just because it’s there. It exists. And people love to solve a mystery.
This is true of the death of Steve Irwin and many other examples of lost media. So today we’re going to talk about some of the more compelling lost media stories, and examine why we’re so obsessed with them.
So all of the stories we’ll be talking about here have their own bit of internet lore around them, so there’s no shortage of articles and videos around them, I’ll link to some great videos down below. But I’ve assembled some of my favorites and I’ll be covering them in my own… devil-may-care style.
The devil cares a great deal.
I’ve got them ordered kind-of mildest to craziest, and I’ve got them organized into four categories:
- Lost Entertainment
- Historical
- Accidental Deaths caught on camera
- And Truly Awful.
Which has a subcategory I’ve titled WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK
Seriously the last one gets super dark.
But maybe the best way to dip our toes into lost media is to cover a piece of lost media that was actually found. Because that’s what everybody’s trying to make happen… and it happens a lot.
But I’ll focus on one that was just solved in the last year and I love this one, it’s just so funny.
It’s a song called Everyone Knows That, or just EKT, for short.
It first appeared in 2001 on a website called WatZatSong—
Oh, early internet. Never change.
It was posted by a user named Carl92, who shared 17 seconds of a song, which he claims he had accidentally recorded and can’t figure out who sang it.
And it does sound… familiar…?
It has this very universal 80s sound to it, right, like I know this vibe, who is this?
And the voice… I mean, it’s right there. You know? It’s that guy.
Pick any issue of Tiger Beat from 1986, it could be any of those guys.
It feels like a song you should remember… but you don’t. And I think that just kinda made it a splinter in the mind of everybody on the internet because the search was on.
Internet sleuths combed through the music libraries of multiple artists from the time, when there was nothing in their catalogs, they scoured for unreleased songs.
There was speculation that it might have been from a stock music library, so people hunted down the catalogs from stock music companies, looking for a match.
Many searched copyright and trademark records for songs with the names Everybody Knows That and Ulterior Motives, because that was the second part of the chorus.
For a while there it was a leading theory that it was from a TV show in Spain, so people were hunting down obscure Spanish TV shows from the 80s.
People were even debating a few sounds that were recorded in the background of the song and trying to see if that gives a clue…
Meanwhile, the original poster, Carl92, completely vanished.
He answered some questions and was part of the conversation in the beginning but once it attracted a lot of attention, he kinda disappeared.
Anyway, it’s kinda just been a big internet mystery this whole time but it really started picking up steam in the last few years.
Maybe it’s the 80s music nostalgia moment or maybe it just hit critical mass but suddenly everyone was talking about Everyone Knows That.
It was on TikTok. It was on posters with QR codes. There were television interviews with subredditors. EKT became the holy grail for lost media hunters.
The search had gone on so long that many started to question if it even existed, like it was a big hoax, like Carl92 had somehow crafted the most believable fake song ever and was pranking the internet with it, especially since he disappeared.
But then, in April of 2024, EKT was found, and no it was not an April Fool’s joke… But it was really funny.
See the thing is, one of the theories, out of the many, many theories… was that it was from an adult film. Most people did not take this theory seriously.
But one guy did.
A redditor named One-Truth-5867 took it upon themselves to get a list of all the porn produced between 1985 and 1987, roughly the years most people expected it was made, based on style, and synth instruments at the time.
And this guy left no stone or boob unturned and set out to watch every. Last. One of them.
He said he was watching as much as 65 adult films every week, which is an impressive thing to do with just one hand.
Eventually dozens of others joined in the hunt, they got organized around it and split up the movies so that nothing got missed.
And they say nobody wants to work anymore.
But eventually, finally, a user named south_pole_ball won the golden goon sesh when he heard the song in a 1986 adult film called Angels of Passion.
It played on top of a sex scene, and there just happened to be a short period between moans that lasted exactly 17 seconds.
Which finally solved the mystery of what that background noise was.
Flesh. It was flesh.
So it seems what happened was that original poster, Carl92, was watching some old VHS tapes from that box in the back of the closet, heard that song and thought, hey that’s a banger, I wonder if I can find that song. So he clipped out a non-sexual bit, posted it online, and lied about where he’d heard it. Then it got super popular, attracted a bunch of people, and he got embarrassed and deleted his account.
So he knew where the clip came from, he could have said it was from Angels of Passion 20 years ago and the mystery would have been solved. But no, Carl had to distance himself from it. To save his business I guess.
Just think of those poor people who had to watch an objectively unhealthy amount of 80s porn because of you.
If you’re going to be a pervert at least be a good pervert.
Once they figured out the movie, it wasn’t long before the actual song was found, which was actually titled Ulterior Motives, so they got the title half right. And ironically, Everyone Knows That isn’t even right, the lyrics actually say “everyone knows it”
Which rhymes with “ulterior motives” better so that makes sense.
But all this time people called it EKT for short and that’s not even right. It’s EKI.
It was written by brothers Christopher and Phillip Booth in the mid 1980s.
They were working as PAs in the film industry and sorta did music on the side. For extra money sometimes they’d record some songs and sell them to porn studios.
So this was just a song they spat out for some extra cash back in 1985, they probably forgot all about it the day after the check cleared.
But somehow they just kinda captured lightning in a bottle with this song. Lightning that wouldn’t go off for 40 years.
They had no idea that hundreds of people were out there clamoring for their work. And now they’ve re-recorded it and are working on an 80s album, you can find it on Spotify.
If EKT – or EKI – teaches us anything, it’s that you never know. Even after 20 years, these things can suddenly appear.
But see how satisfying that is, to solve a mystery? It’s no wonder people obsess over lost media, they long for that satisfying conclusion….
None of these other stories have a satisfying conclusion.
Lost Entertainment
Batman, Dracula, and Dr. Who
There’s actually a lot of lost movies and TV shows for a couple of reasons, one, there’s just a LOT that’s been made over the last century so there’s a lot of stuff to lose.
And two, old film and video reels, these things take up space, and are expensive to store and maintain. And they do degrade over time.
One movie that the internet has latched onto is a 1967 horror/comedy called Batman Fights Dracula.
So the Philippines, like many other countries, has their own little film industry and back in the 60s they kinda made a name for themselves for doing parodies of American films because of a loophole in copyright law.
Batman parodies were especially popular and one of the first ones was Batman Fights Dracula.
The plot, if you can call it that, involved the mad scientist Zorba, who tries to defeat Batman and his sidekick Ruben by resurrecting Dracula.
I mean Dracula turns into a bat. He’s kind-of like a bat man.
And this movie was popular, it screened in theaters all over the country.
We still have posters and advertisements for the movie, there’s behind the scenes and promotional photos… But the film itself seems to be gone. No clips of it survive.
It’s thought that it’s completely lost, likely due to poor archival practices.
Now right around this same time, the early 1960s, we started recording video on magnetic tape. And magnetic tape back then was super expensive. Luckily, unlike film, it was reusable.
So instead of saving and archiving tape back then, they’d often just record over it, which is exactly what happened to nearly 100 episodes of Doctor Who.
Yes, the beloved BBC show Doctor Who, which got started in 1963, is missing 97 episodes from the first 6 seasons.
And yeah, it happened for all the reasons I just said, the BBC used to wipe their tapes until 1978, when VHS came along and they realized they could sell old episodes on there.
And yeah, it happened for all the reasons I just said, the BBC used to wipe their tapes until 1978, when VHS came along and they realized they could sell old episodes on there.
A number of episodes have been recovered by reaching out to overseas broadcasters like telerecordings from Hong Kong. Some are thought to be in the hands of private collectors, so there’s a chance some of them could still turn up. The Whovians are hopeful anyway.
The single most sought after episode is The Tenth Planet, which ends with the First Doctor’s regeneration into the Second. Only this clips remains.
Thus beginning a long-standing tradition of quiet, subtle regenerations.
Shrek and Toy Story
The next couple of stories aren’t so much media that’s been lost or destroyed but… withheld. For control reasons.
The first one is the Chris Farley Shrek cut.
It’s hard to imagine now but yeah, Chris Farley was the original voice of Shrek, and he had actually recorded 85% of the film, before he sadly died in 1997.
Hate to say it but that was another one that wasn’t a big shock to me.
But yeah, the studio considered hiring an impersonator to finish the film, but ultimately Mike Myers came in to do this film in honor of his dead friend.
So the Chris Farley cut does exist, but nobody’s ever seen it so it’s considered lost. There are a few scenes that have been made available, so here is a taste of the Shrek that could have been:
Which, amazingly, there’s kind-of a lost Mike Myers cut because he originally re-recorded the entire film without the Scottish accent. Shrek just sounded like… him.
But then he decided he wanted to do it in a Scottish accent because that’s kind-of his thing.
So he re-re-recorded it.
Shrek obviously went on to become a cultural phenomenon and that voice became synonymous with the character but there could have been a very different version released.
The Farley Cut of Shrek is thought to exist out there somewhere but for the rest of us, for now, we have to get by with a handful of scenes that have been released, like this:
Another popular animated film from around that time was Toy Story and it’s no secret that that script went through a lot of changes, there’s nothing unusual about that, but specifically a lot has been made about how earlier versions were a lot darker, especially with Woody’s character.
If, somehow you’ve never seen it, Woody is the main character, voiced by Tom Hanks, and he’s Andy’s favorite toy, so he’s kind-of like the alpha dog in the toy pack. And the whole movie is about him dealing with Buzz Lightyear showing up and becoming Andy’s favorite toy and all the rejection and jealousy that comes with that.
And in the final version of the film, Woody is definitely a bit full of himself being the top dog, and his character arc is all about getting past that but in earlier versions, he was just a straight-up ass.
And all of this voice over was recorded and sketched out in an animatic, they had gotten that far into the process. So somewhere out there is an alternate version of Toy Story that’s a lot darker. And they call it the Black Friday cut.
This is apparently a real alternate version of Toy Story, and it’s been known to come out at Pixar parties, like just a handful of people have ever seen it, but yeah. It’s real. Just locked away in a safe somewhere.
There is one clip from this version that has been released and yeah if this is any indication, Woody was… not a great guy.
Just threw that guy right out the window.
But I’m a little sad that the mainstream public was deprived of the line, “Who said your job was to think, spring wiener??”
The Day The Clown Cried
So, stories like that, films that get almost completely finished and then the director was like, wait, this isn’t working, and they start over, that’s not unusual, that happens a lot.
What is unusual, is when the director gets to that point, takes one look at the film and says, “Naw, nobody’s ever going to see this.”
And then just destroys it.
That is exactly what happened to the infamous Jerry Lewis film, The Day The Clown Cried.
So Jerry Lewis was known as a slapstick comedian, about the most broad comedy you can imagine. Lots of mugging for the camera, over the top characters. He was the Jim Carrey of the 1960s.
And just like Jim Carrey eventually turned to more dramatic roles, Jerry Lewis also wanted to be taken seriously so in 1972, he decided to try on some drama shoes. And he decided to put on the biggest drama shoes that he could get.
Clown-sized drama shoes.
In The Day The Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis plays a German circus clown during the Holocaust who gets arrested and thrown into a prison camp.
The camp also holds Jewish families that are separated by a fence. Being a clown, he decides to entertain the Jewish kids by performing shows from across the fence
One day the Nazi guards see him entertaining the kids, and it gives them an idea. So they approach our titular clown and say hey, we could use your help. You see, we’ve been having a lot of trouble getting these kids to go in the gas chambers. You think you could just kinda Pied Piper them in there for us?
In exchange, they offer to review his case, meaning he might get out of prison. So, do it and he might get out of prison, don’t do it, and he’ll be stuck there until they decide to stop feeding him. Oh and the kids will be killed anyway.
Maybe entertaining them in their final moments is the kind thing to do?
Anyway, he does it, but he’s so overcome with guilt about it that when they arrive at the gas chambers, he steps in and joins them and they all die together.
The End.
This film… Has gone down in Hollywood Lore as one of the worst things that has ever been put to film. It was so heavily criticized for its lack of tact that Jerry Lewis just straight up didn’t finish the film.
He considered it an artistic disaster, saying, “You will never see it. No one will ever see it, because I am embarrassed at the poor work.”
One of the few people who has seen it and written about it is the actor Harry Shearer, from Spinal Tap and Simpsons fame.
After a private screening, he wrote, “But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. ‘Oh My God!’ – that’s all you can say.”
That’s right, this guy….
Jerry Lewis handed over the footage to the Library of Congress with the stipulation that it would not be released until 2024. Which uh… checks watch… Nah. I still don’t want to see it.
Heartbeat in the Brain
Okay so this last one in the “Lost Entertainment” category might be stretching the definition of “entertainment” but it is considered an “art film” so I’ll count it.
The movie is called Heartbeat in the Brain, it was shot in 1970, and in it, artist and filmmaker Amanda Fielding drills a hole through her skull and exposes her brain tissue.
Yeah, so we’re getting into the “grotesque” part of the episode so if you’re the type of person that needs a content warning, consider this your content warning. It gets gnarly from this point forward.
So Amanda Fielding was fascinated with trepanation, which is the practice of drilling a hole through the skull, for various reasons.
Ancient cave people did it, probably to cure headaches or let a demon out but they’ve found skulls where some skull was cut out and it had healed, so people survived this.
It’s been used to help relieve pressure if there’s swelling of the brain, amongst other things, so there is a medical use for it.
But then of course there are wackos that think it’ll give them a spiritual experience due to the increased blood flow.
Mayhaps try a mushroom, ma’am.
Anyway, she wanted to capture this on film, and couldn’t find a professional heathcare worker to assist her with it so she just turned the camera on and did it herself.
It screened once at a gallery in 1978, people fainted, it was a whole thing, and it was never seen again.
Outside a few private screenings, this has not seen the light of day. While considered a legitimate work of art, it’s just too gruesome for most audeinces.
A few clips have been shown in various documentaries but Fielding has no desire to release the work in its entirety. So you’re probably not ever going to see it.
Entertainment lost media is fun but some lost media has historical significance. These are the ones that big ol’ conspiracies come out of.
Because we live in a “pics or it didn’t happen” world
So let’s talk about the death of Osama Bin Laden
Osama Bin Laden
In the years after 9/11, Osama Bin Laden became a household name. He might have been the most famous person in the world, just a shorthand we all started using for pure evil.
We started two wars and scoured the Earth and wrote country songs about boots in asses and focused our righteous vengeance to find and punish this one man. (beat) And then it happened.
In May of 2011, almost ten years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan during a targeted attack by US special forces. The units were using body cameras and the death was recorded.
The second he died, they were in a race against time because muslim tradition dictates that the deceased should be buried within 24 hours, but the problem was, no countries wanted him to be buried there.
Like, he was born in Saudi Arabia but Saudi Arabia didn’t want him. So, they performed a sea burial aboard the USS Carl Vinson.
Another reason for the sea burial was to avoid his tomb from becoming a shrine. There was still a lot of Al Qaeda and ISIS out there, they didn’t want his death to become a rallying cry.
Which is also why they chose to not release the video of his death, or his burial. They didn’t want a repeat of what happened to Saddam Hussein in 2003.
There were still a lot of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan that could be targets for retaliation if Bin Laden’s death became a circus.
So, they didn’t release any photos to avoid fanning the flames. And that was probably the right choice to make.
Of course this has caused some people to think that it never happened but the attack definitely did happen and was documented, and there were eyewitness accounts of his death on both sides.
And yes, there are high-level experts and world leaders that have been allowed to see the photos, and have reported back that it’s real.
But I think I get why people are obsessed with finding the Osama Bin Laden footage, like so much of our national rage was directed at this one man, and we never really got closure on that. Just knowing that it’s out there kinda sparks a curiosity.
The Nixon/Haldeman Tapes
Going a little bit further back, there’s the Nixon/Haldeman tapes.
So you know how people are recording their work meetings or lessons at school and then just putting it into chatgpt and getting the bullet points out of it? Like Zoom and Google have their little AI tools that transcribe and generate summaries, like that’s the hot technology now?
Well in the 60s, that was just audio tape, just the ability to record your meeting on tape and then have someone transcribe it later on, that was huge, and Nixon was all about it.
He basically just wired his office for sound and recorded at all times, because you never knew when an important conversation might take place, you know?
But it was these very recordings that got him implicated in the Watergate scandal.
Nixon handed over his recordings to the Watergate investigators. They found several incriminating statements but what most got their attention is what wasn’t there.
Three days after the Watergrate break in, President Nixon met with his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman to discuss the incident. But right in the middle of their conversation, there’s a large chunk of audio missing. Like 18 and a half minutes worth.
What… happened?
According to the official story, it was accidentally recorded over by his secretary, Rosemary Woods. Or that’s the story. Most people think they recorded over something incriminating.
Also we know Bob Haldeman was an avid note taker, and when they went through his notes of that meeting, it also seemed to be missing a page or two. Interesting that.
there also just so happen to be it appears as though his hand written notes have come up short as well. There were only 2 pages from this meeting, while those who knew him said he would normally take 5-6. A close examination of the paper suggested pages were ripped away by the tear of some stapler holes. An amateur historian asked if they could see marks from the pen impressed on to the bottom page and a forensics team confirmed that was the case. But they could only make out a large signature and found no other discernible markings.
The National Archives and Records Administration owns the tape and they’ve tried many, many times to recover what was originally on there but nothing’s worked. Unless some future technology figures out a way to peel back that segment, it’s likely going to remain a subject for debate for a long, long time.
The Basement Tapes
And then there are the video diaries made by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, in the months leading up to the Columbine shooting.
They were found during the investigation and they wound up getting the name The Basement Tapes, not to be confused with Bob Dylan’s 16th album.
Eric and Dylan shot a series of home videos leading up to the high school massacre in 1999. And uh… They didn’t really help to soften their image.
These tapes were a deluge of violence, rage, aggression, and racial slurs. They discussed their strategies, their acquisition of weapons, specific names of those who wronged them.
Like a lot of paranoid delusional people, they thought their act of violence would be the wake-up call the world needed, that they were going to be seen as heroes some day and “kick start a revolution,” in Harris’ words.
They even debated which directors should tell their story– Spielberg or Tarantino?
The morning of the shooting Harris left a microcassette tape on the kitchen table labeled “Nixon” on which he said “It’s less than 9 hours now. People will die because of me. It will be a day that will be remembered forever.”
Regarding the tapes, FBI Agent Mark Holstlaw said “You have two individuals who wanted to immortalize themselves. They wanted to be martyrs and document everything they were doing.”
“They wanted to be famous. And they are,” he continued. “They’re infamous.”
The Basement Tapes have never been released. Some clips were made available for news media but the actual tapes are still sealed away with Jefferson County, along with all the evidence from the investigation.
Of course, a lot of people question why they’ve never been released, some speculate maybe… they had a point?
That maybe in all their rantings against society and the system that they maybe stumbled on some good points and that same society and system now don’t want those points to get out?
I’m sure it has more to do with preventing copycats and not giving them the fame they so desperately wanted.
I would say though those tapes might be interesting to study in terms of looking at how people fall down these rabbit holes and spiral into madness, especially in a group dynamic. Maybe they have been, I don’t know.
Accidental Deaths While Camera Was Rolling
So, I don’t really know what the rules are here on YouTube when it comes to the word “death” I feel like you only get so many “deaths” before you get demonetized so I’m just going to lean in and see how many different other words I can use going forward in the video. It’ll be a fun creative exercise.
If you don’t like it, I encourage you to leave an all-caps comment about how much you hate YouTube’s demonetization practices, and I’m sure YouTube will get right on that.
But this section deals with accidental unalivings caught on camera. There, I got “unalive” out of the way right off the bat, you’re welcome.
Steve Irwin would fit into this segment, but we covered him earlier. Another extremely famous ending via animal attack is Timothy Treadwell.
These two guys were kinda similar, what Steve Irwin was for crocodiles, Timothy wanted to be for bears.
Over thirteen summers, he camped amongst bears in the Alaskan wilderness, documenting his interactions and advocating for bear preservation.
And in the offseason, he would give presentations and shows to grade-school kids and talk about his adventures with the bears and get them excited about animal protection.
He was, let’s say, controversial amongst wildlife experts and local officials, they all thought he was insane – because bears – but he insisted he was never in any danger, that he had a relationship with these bears, that they had an understanding, that they’re intelligent, social animals, he was ready to give his life to show the world something important about bears.
And on October 5, 2003, he did exactly that.
But while Steve Irwin wrestled crocodiles and was done in by something relatively harmless, Timothy Treadwell wrestled with bears, and… he was done in by a bear. The bear guy was eaten by a bear.
My bingo card is on fire!
That morning, he and his girlfriend Amie Huegenard were setting up a shot with a grizzly bear nearby. She started the camera rolling but hadn’t even taken the lens cap off yet when the bear unexpectedly attacked.
It expired both of them and consumed their bodies. All while the camera recorded the audio.
This footage has never been released to the public. It’s currently in the custody of Treadwell’s ex, (Jewel Palovak) who claims she’s never listened to it.
One person who has, very famously heard it is the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who made a documentary using Treadwell’s footage called Grizzly Man.
It’s an amazing movie by the way, it’s really interesting and disturbing… I mean it’s Werner Herzog.
But in this movie, he chooses to not to share the recording, but he does listen to it and react to it on camera.
This was in the “YouTube reaction channel” phase of his career
He later urged her to destroy the tape, because knowing the tape is there will always haunt her.
He goes on to later say, “And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”
It’s not really known if Jewel Palovak destroyed the tape as Herzog suggested, but it’s believed by most people to still be out there, somewhere.
Although any urge to hear this one is purely morbid curiosity, I don’t think there’s a lot to learn from here. Although this is a rare example of lost media where you can see someone confirming that it exists.
Sea World Tragedy
On February 24th, 2010, a 40-year old orca trainer at SeaWorld Orlando name Dawn Brancheau was finishing up the “Dine With Shamu” show with an orca whale named Tilikum. It was the part after the show where she stands next to Tilikum and they pose for pictures.
They’ve done this day in and day out for years but for some reason this time, while Dawn stood there rubbing Tilikum’s head… something snapped.
Tilikum, out of nowhere, latched onto her shoulder and hair and dragged her to the bottom of the tank. He smashed her against the wall and floor with his 12,000 pound body, and then held her there. For forty five minutes.
SeaWorld staff attempted to distract Tilikum with nets and food but it was too late. When they recovered her body, they found her spinal cord was severed and she had fractures to her jawbone and ribs. Her scalp was torn from her head, arm torn off and both knees dislocated.
Yeah.
This not only happened in front of a live crowd of people, the show was being recorded. The tapes went to OSHA for investigation, then were returned to SeaWorld.
This event ended the orca shows at SeaWorld, which is what they were mostly known for. And by the way, there’s a great documentary about this specific orca called Blackfish that will change the way you look at parks like SeaWorld.
Which sucks because SeaWorld was like my FAVORITE place when I was a kid, I loved the dolphins and the orcas and the idea of being a SeaWorld trainer that could work with them… Like I legitimately wanted to be a marine biologist at one point in my life. You’d think I would have learned how to swim…
By the way, Dawn was not the first person to be relieved of life by this orca, she’s not even the second… She’s the third.
Tilikum had a straight-up body count.
I’m sure orcas are a lot like people, you got some aggressive ones and some calm ones, but they are clearly not living their best lives in these water parks, and Tilikum should have been put out to sea a long time ago.
Anyway, the footage of Dawn’s last moments does exist, it’s locked away at SeaWorld headquarters probably. And because of that it’s become a famous piece of lost footage.
Owen Hart
They say if you’re a Gen-Xer, you remember the Space Shuttle disaster, if you’re a Boomer, you remember JFK. Well if you were a wrestling fan in the 90s, you remember Owen Hart.
On May 29th, 1999, Owen Hart was performing a stunt at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City when something went horribly wrong.
He was there to fight an intercontinental champion match with The Godfather, and he was going to enter as a character he played called The Blue Blazer, descending via a harness from the rafters above.
This is a gag he’s done several times, his character’s kind-of buffoonish, so they have him descend dramatically until it gets just above the ropes, and then he pretends to get tangled by the cords before he disconnects and falls buffoonishly onto the mat.
This required the use of a quick-release mechanism that he could trigger with a cord or special movement.
Well in Kansas City, they were using a different quick-release mechanism that he wasn’t as familiar with, and he accidentally disconnected it just after he began descending. That was 80 feet above the ring. And he landed on the edge of the platform.
A coroner would later determine that he hit the platform so hard it severed his aorta and he bled out internally. It only took a couple of minutes.
This happened in front of a crowd of fifteen thousand people, but there were many thousands more watching from home on Pay-Per View. And incredibly, at that moment in the broadcast, they were showing a promo video. So to the people sitting at home, they were just watching some wrestling promo thing and when they cut back, there were medics and emergency people swarming the ring.
The actual footage of the fall never aired. But it likely was recorded, this footage very likely exists.
For the record, his widow Martha accuses the WWF for negligence in hiring unqualified riggers who used the incorrect equipment.
Something that’s interesting about this lost media though is a lot of people swear that they’ve seen it, and remember it vividly. Like there are heated debates on Reddit with some people swearing on a stack of bibles that they saw it happen. Like this is a core memory from their childhood.
Like this story is often used as and example of the Mandela Effect.
So yeah, some people are very serious about finding this footage just to prove to themselves that they aren’t crazy.
For now though, it’s owned by the WWE, who don’t have any plans to release it.
The Mandela effect is the psychological phenomenon where large groups of people misremember an event or fact. Coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome when she realized that she, along with hundreds of others, believed that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, when he actually died in 2013. Other popular cases of the Mandela Effect include people believing the Fruit of the Loom logo has a cornucopia in it when it never has, or that Mr. Monopoly wears a monocle.
So that brings us to the final and most disturbing category of lost media, which I’ve titled Truly Awful.
By the way, there’s a LOT of things that could fit into this category, I mean that’s one of the main reasons footage gets hidden away, because it captured something gruesome and horrifying.
I’ll limit myself to two, because this video’s already running long, but they’re a couple of doozies.
Christine Chubbuck
Let’s start with the year 1974, and a news reporter named Christine Chubbuck.
Christine was a reporter at WXLT-TV in Sarasota Florida, and host of the news discussion program Suncoast Digest. When she became the news herself, by doing something nobody had ever done before.
She self-exterminated live on air.
On July 15th, she surprised her co-hosts and guests by starting the episode off with headlines about violent crimes around the country. She then cued up a tape from a local reporter on a recent shooting.
The tape jammed. So she continued with what seemed like an improvisation. Before pulling out a .38 caliber revolver and putting it behind her ear and pulled the trigger.
This was broadcast live to all of Sarasota. The station immediately cut to black and threw up a public service announcement, then played a movie. Hundreds of viewers called the police and flooded the station’s phone lines trying to find out if it was real or some kind of prank.
Unfortunately it was all too real. She even had written out a script for whoever might have followed her on camera.
She was known to have battled depression for a while. She was well-liked by her coworkers though she had a pretty dark sense of humor. She had actually made jokes about offing herself on camera.
She actually threw a big party just a few days before it happened and many commented that she seemed to be in the best spirits they’ve seen for a long time. In hindsight, it was a goodbye party.
It’s actually not unusual for someone who has decided to end their life to have a sudden improvement in mood, because they feel like they have a solution to all their problems.
Station Owner Robert Nelson kept the tapes and eventually went to his widower Mollie Nelson, who said she plans never to release them. She transferred possession to a law firm for secure keeping.
There is, however, audio of the incident.
Christine’s story is sad, and was dramatized by a movie in 2016, but some believe she may have inspired Paddy Chayefsky as he was writing the film Network.
Network is a satire of news sensationalism, it’s one of the best movies ever made on the news industry, go watch it if you haven’t but considering her final message about blood and guts journalism… I can see it.
Armin Meiwes
Our last story, and due to the organizational structure of this video, the most gruesome by far, is the one I had to create its category for, which I call What the Actual F**k!?
So content warnings, trigger warnings, all the warnings on this one… This is the story of Armin Meiwes, who also went by the nicknames The Master Butcher and The Cannibal of Rotenberg.
So you can see where this is going.
Armin was generally considered to be a quiet, unassuming guy, polite, friendly. But unbeknownst to those around him, he’d been carrying around a fantasy for years that on March 9, 2001, he finally got to realize…
He always kinda wanted to eat a guy.
The thing is, he didn’t want to murder anybody, he’s not a monster, he just wanted to prepare and eat someone. So he had to find a willing participant to go along with his plan. And believe it or not, he found one.
His victim, if that’s even the right word for it, was a guy named Bernd Brandes, who was contemplating ending things. The two of them met online and found they had compatible interests – one of them wanted to eat someone, the other wanted to be eaten. Circle of life style.
I think they call that a “meat cute”
So you know how a lot of childrens’ fairy tales, the old Brothers Grimm tales, are actually really violent and messed up? And then you start wondering if that kind of stuff actually warps kids’ minds?
Apparently this is an example of that because apparently Meiwes has had this urge to eat human meat since he heard the tale of Hansel and Gretel when he was a kid, and he really enjoyed the part where Hansel was prepared to be eaten.
Since then Meiwes had a quiet desire to eat someone but certain life events, like the death of his mother, increased that appetite. He has said he always wanted a brother, “someone to be a part of me,” and cannibalism became the way to fulfill that obsession.
And because everything is on the internet, he was able to find some cannibal enthusiast forums where he began posting messages in chat rooms seeking “men for slaughter.” He had a couple takers, but they got cold feet (which taste TERRIBLE) and he did not pursue it.
To his credit, he never wanted to make anyone do anything against their will. He said, “you’d be surprised at how many Hansels are whizzing around the internet.”
He’d met a number of other cannibal enthusiasts online before Brandes, such as Jörg Buse who went by the chat name Meatboy. Meiwes and Meatboy (the crime fighting duo that nobody wanted) met a few times and played a little with the idea of consuming flesh. They slathered Meatboy in olive oil and circled his best parts to consume but never went through with it. Meatboy offered drugging some acquaintances to be eaten but Meiwse declined. Their connection fizzled.
That’s where he met Bernd Brandes, who was more interested in being castrated than eaten but in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.
They had long chats, making detailed plans for how things would go, sharing their interest in cannibalism.
BB: And your blood, it tasted good to you?
AM: It was quite tasty. Once I was drilling some holes and the drill slipped right into my hand, that was a real treat. Blood is the juice of life. It contains everything a person needs for nutrition.
BB: Then I hope you won’t wilt, that you can really see it through without a problem.
And then there was the bit where Bernd became concerned about how he’ll hide the body parts that don’t get eaten:
AM: After you’re dead, I’ll take you out and expertly carve you up. Except for a pair of knees and some fleshy trash (skin, cartilage, tendons) there won’t be much of you left.
BB: There will be a good bit, like the knees. I hope you have a good hiding place for them.
AM: I’ll dry out the knees and grind them up soon after.
BB: Okay, they’re good fertilizer, I heard that once. I see you’ve thought about it. Good! Sounds like I’m the first.
Anyway, after months of planning, they gathered at Meiwes’ house and at midnight, made their way to the basement, where they set up the video camera, along with six knives, a hatchet, and a meat grinder.
And then recorded what happened over the next four hours.
Okay, so my writer, Rachel, gave me a VERY graphic depiction of what happened on that tape, but I’m sure there’s no way I can say any of this on YouTube, so I’m going to put the details in the Nebula video, you can watch it there.
But if you’ve ever seen someone process a deer or a hog… it was basically that.
Meiwes froze Brandes in meal sized portions and ate more than 45 lbs in the following months. And since I know you’re wondering, he said, “The flesh tastes like pork, a little bit more bitter, stronger. It tastes quite good.”
He also claimed Brandes spoke good English and that, since eating him, his own English has improved.
The murder was discovered by an Austrian student in 2002 who stumbled upon another of Meiwes’s posts and messaged him directly asking if he’d ever killed anyone. When Meiwes said ‘yes’ the Austrian went to the authorities.
And today I learned Austrians are snitches.
The trial was actually tricky for the lawyers because it turns out cannibalism was not against he law in Germany.
And Brandes very clearly volunteered, there was absolutely no debate around that. So in the end, believe it or not, Meiwes was only sentenced to 8.5 years.
But courts keep adding years to his sentence since it seems Meiwes still harbors a desire to eat humans per a prison psychologist.
As of 2020, he has been allowed to go out of the prison for supervised excursions under disguise.
He is now a vegetarian.
To wrap things up, I thought I’d just talk about the phenomenon of Lost Media itself. Like, what is it about lost media that just makes people just lose their minds?
I kinda feel like it’s a byproduct of living in a time with the internet and ubiquitous camera phones. Like we live in a world where EVERYTHING is recorded, everything can be known, everything can be found. And it just feels wrong when it can’t be.
But that is a VERY new phenomenon. In the past it was just assumed that most things were lost.
You wanna hear a crazy thought? The entire Egyptian civilization was kind-of a lost media until 1822. Because nobody knew how to read heiroglyphics. All those etchings on the wall that told the story of their vast history was unreadable. It was lost media.
Kinda. It’s a stretch but I’m going with it.
The point is, I think the entire idea of “lost media” is a product of our current moment. Because only in a time as hyper-documented as this one would the idea of not having footage would be bizarre.
Or maybe people just like the thrill of the chase.
As cameras integrate more seamlessly into our daily lives, it’s not unfeasible that in the future there will be a technology that records everything all the time.
Everything that happens gets recorded on some kind of global ledger that can be referred to during any conflicts or misunderstandings.
It kinda makes me think of that show DEVS, where he was working on some kind of quantum device that allowed him to see through time. Yeah maybe something like that.
Although if there is one thing I’ve learned watching younger generations grow up around social media, it’s that I’m glad I didn’t have a way of sharing every thought I had with the world because I had some terrible thoughts. So yeah I don’t know if I’d want all my movement recorded.
Also, with the rise of streaming platforms and the loss of physical media like DVDs, there’s going to be a lot more lost media in the future.
I mean a streaming platform can just remove a movie or a show and it’s just gone. Granted it’s probably archived away somewhere but you and I can’t get to it.
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