141: Invisible Worlds
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Let's start with what's legal. Let's start with what we're allowed to hear. This would be actually your off-the-shelf radio here and sort of powered up. I'm going to do your short now, 83-year-old, bail, difficulty breathing, O2 stats are falling. These are transmissions from a police scanner, a little radio the size of a walkie-talkie that picks up 9-1-1 dispatches, fire, highway patrol, the police, there are lots of people who listen in. There's been many instances where for an hour they've tracked individuals on foot running through neighborhoods and you're listening to the police officer running and talking to his mic at the same time and they're panting, they're out of breath and a lot of times you'll hear an officer tackle an individual and at the same time he's trying to talk on his mic and you can hear the struggle, you can hear the screaming, the yelling, the swearing. And you are there, literally, you are there. Another party trying to get the patient to vomit now or trying to instruct him not to do that. He said that he is acting sleepy and let him copy. It's legal to listen in to emergency transmissions like this, but there is an entire invisible world, thousands of voices, passing through your body right now, on radio waves, signals from cellular phones and cordless phones, military transmissions and baby monitors, voices that you are not supposed to listen to. I have a hard time accepting that. I think that if it's traveling through my body right now, why shouldn't I be allowed to listen to it? I don't care how sensitive the material is, if you're transmitting it through my body, I'm going to monitor it. Today on our radio program, people who are trying to make this invisible world visible, like this man, like many others, and stories of other invisible worlds. From W.B.E.C. Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life, I'm out of a glass. Our program today, seeing the invisible world, stories of what is all around us, all the time, beyond sight. At one of our program, faster than a speeding bullet, people who figure out ways to hide 80-foot radio antennas in their backyards, who monitor the radio voices that are passing through all of our bodies right now, at the speed of light, and what they know that you and I don't know. We've all been in conversations where some things, some truth, just hovers in the air. Unsaid, everybody aware of it. In this act, we examine just how powerful that force can be, with case examples from David Sedaris, Scott Carrier, Sarah Val, Brady Udall, and Lance Man of the Chang. Act 3, able to leap tall buildings. This is the story of a man who sneaks through back hallways, searches, abandoned subway stations, crawls through miles of train pipe, and in general goes all the places that you are not supposed to go. And what he finds there. Act 4, look up in the sky. My friend, what sort of incredibly sophisticated species are we? We are a species, that, to confirm the existence of one of the basic building blocks of our universe, a subatomic particle hurtling here from the sun all the time, we had to use some of the same materials that you would use to remove a stain from a tie. Stay with us. Act 1, faster than a speeding bullet. Well, it took a while for our producer, Alex Bloomberg, to enter the community of people
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