CERN: The God Machine, the Weasels & the Courtyard Ritual Pt. 2:

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In 2008, six months before the Large Hadron Collider switched on, two men filed a federal lawsuit in Honolulu to stop it, arguing the machine might create a black hole and swallow the Earth. A year earlier, two credentialed theoretical physicists had published a real, peer-reviewed paper suggesting something even stranger: that the collider kept suffering bad luck because the future itself was reaching back to sabotage it. And in August 2016, a video filmed inside the lab at night appeared to show hooded figures staging a human sacrifice at the foot of a statue of a Hindu deity called the Destroyer. This is CERN, Part 2 of 2, the God Machine, and this time the accusations aren't about your memory. They're about everything else.

Kathryn and Gabriel are upfront, again, that this is a romp: they tell you what's documented, what's claimed, and which claims Gabriel is leaning into "like a man leaning into a buffet." Part 1 was the Mandela Effect. Part 2 takes the largest machine ever built to court, and calls its first witness from the future.

We walk the doomsday lawsuit filed by Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho against the U.S. Department of Energy, the NSF, Fermilab, and CERN, and its three ways the collider might end the world: a runaway microscopic black hole, "strangelets" that convert everything they touch, and magnetic monopoles. We give CERN's actual answer, cosmic rays far more energetic than anything the collider produces have been striking Earth for billions of years, and the Earth is still here, and we cover the memorable moment Wagner told The Daily Show the odds of the world ending were "50/50: either it happens or it doesn't." The suit was thrown out; the Ninth Circuit rejected the appeal; the planet remained a planet.

Then Gabriel's favorite: the genuinely published work of physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, whose model proposed that the universe "disfavors" mass production of the Higgs boson so strongly that the future nudges the past to prevent it, an idea they said explained why an earlier American supercollider in Texas was killed by a 1993 budget vote. Nine days after startup, the collider suffered a catastrophic helium explosion that damaged dozens of magnets. Then, during a later cooldown, a bird reportedly dropped a piece of baguette onto an electrical substation. Then a weasel chewed through a transformer in 2016 and knocked the machine offline just as a tantalizing new-particle "bump" in the data was building, a bump that vanished by August. A second weasel died the same way months later; it is now stuffed and on display in a Rotterdam museum. Bad luck, or the future installing better weasels? The theory, the hosts note cheerfully, cannot lose, which makes it a horoscope.

And we cover the "occult file": the 666-shaped logo, the Shiva Nataraja statue India gifted the lab in 2004, the town whose name conspiracy sites tie to a Roman "gateway to the underworld," a real 2015 art film shot inside the facility, the goat-headed Gotthard Tunnel opening ceremony, storm clouds called portals, and the 2016 courtyard "sacrifice" video, which CERN investigated and stated was a staged prank by visitors whose sense of humor went too far.

The machine is dark until 2030. Four years with no beam, four years in which every theory here gets tested against a world that keeps being weird anyway.

This concludes our two-part CERN series.

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SOURCES:

Court records from Sancho v. U.S. Department of Energy et al. (2008), filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii, including the September 2008 dismissal and the Ninth Circuit's 2010 rejection of the appeal; CERN's published Large Hadron Collider safety assessments addressing hypothetical black holes, strangelets, and magnetic monopoles, and the cosmic-ray argument; the 2008 European Court of Human Rights petition associated with Otto Rössler and its rejection; the peer-reviewed papers of Holger Bech Nielsen (Niels Bohr Institute) and Masao Ninomiya (Yukawa Institute) proposing "influence from the future," and the October 2009 New York Times coverage of the theory; documentation of the September 19, 2008 magnet quench and helium-release incident and the fourteen-month repair; reporting on the November 2009 electrical fault attributed to a bird and piece of bread, and the 2016 transformer failures involving martens/weasels, including the specimen held by the Natural History Museum Rotterdam and its director Kees Moeliker; the history of the cancelled U.S. Superconducting Super Collider (1993); the 2004 gift of the Shiva Nataraja statue by the government of India; the 2015 film "Symmetry" by Ruben van Leer, made with CERN's cooperation; the June 2016 Gotthard Base Tunnel opening ceremony; and the August 2016 filmed incident at the Shiva statue, together with CERN's official statement that the video depicted a staged scene by people on campus and its confirmation of an internal investigation. Parallel-universe, "backward causation," and occult interpretations are presented as internet theories, not established fact.

DISCLAIMER:

Content warning: This episode discusses end-of-the-world scenarios, occult and conspiracy theories, and a widely circulated video that appears to depict a violent ritual. It also describes the electrocution deaths of two animals. Please take care while listening.

The Mugshot Mysteries podcast is independently produced and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any individual, institution, company, or agency referenced in this episode, including CERN, or any museum, filmmaker, court, or public figure named.

This episode is presented for entertainment and deliberately, openly leans into internet conspiracy culture for comedic effect. The hosts' expressed "belief" in the doomsday, time-sabotage, and occult theories, including remarks suggesting the 2016 courtyard video showed a real killing or that CERN covered something up, is a running comedic bit and a piece of theater, not a factual assertion. To be clear about the documented record: the collider did not and cannot destroy the world; the "influence from the future" hypothesis is a fringe idea that the discovery of the Higgs boson did not bear out; and the 2016 video was investigated by CERN and identified as a staged scene by people with legitimate campus access, with no death, no victim, no missing person, and no criminal case. Nothing in this episode should be understood as a factual claim that CERN, its staff, or its visitors committed, staged, or concealed any real act of violence, or that any real person was harmed. The correlations drawn between the machine's schedule and world events are, by the hosts' own admission, an unfalsifiable pattern offered as a joke, not a causal claim. The scientific explanations described reflect CERN's public safety analysis and mainstream physics. References to real people, companies, and institutions are made in the context of public information and reporting and are not intended to defame, mislead, or cause harm. Any third-party names and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners and are referenced under fair use for purposes of commentary, criticism, and reporting.

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