Ep. 86 | Out of This World/A Good Scrub Down

MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries

Wondery | Ballen Studios

True Crime

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

“Out of This World”: In 2003, a treasure hunter in Chile makes a shocking discovery: a tiny, 6-inch skeleton of what appears to be a human. But parts of its anatomy just don’t make sense. It’s too well-formed to be a fetal skeleton, and its skull is strangely elongated – making some people wonder, is this a medical mystery… or an extraterrestrial one?

“A Good Scrub Down”:

After thoroughly cleaning his apartment, a young man is ready to enjoy his weekend. A few hours later, his eye starts to itch unbearably. Is it an allergy? An irritant? A bacteria? Or something even more sinister?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members. You can listen to new episodes of Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries early and ad-free.
0:05.3	Download the Amazon music app today.
0:11.2	This show is all about the strange and surprising things that can happen to the human body,
0:20.3	so you always expect the unexpected. But in today can happen to the human body, so you always expect
0:21.3	the unexpected. But in today's episode, the subjects of our two stories are truly bizarre.
0:28.2	In our first story, a treasure hunter in the Chilean desert finds an ancient artifact that is
0:33.4	so strange and so otherworldly, it takes an entire medical team just to determine what it is
0:39.0	and where it came from. And in our second story, a man's eye becomes infected with what
0:44.9	almost seems like alien tendrils.
0:51.4	When Luigi Mangione was arrested for allegedly shooting the CEO of United Healthcare,
0:57.2	he didn't just spark outrage. He ignited a cultural firestorm. Is the system working? Or is it
1:04.5	time for a reckoning? I'm Jesse Weber. Listen to Law and Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus.
1:11.9	Hi, I'm Misha Brown, and I'm the host of Wondry's podcast, The Big Flop.
1:16.6	Each episode, comedians join me to chronicle one of the biggest pop culture fails of all time
1:22.0	and try to answer the age-old question, who thought this was a good idea?
1:27.0	Follow the big flop wherever you get your
1:28.4	podcasts. From Ballin Studios and Wondry, I'm Mr. Ballin, and this is Mr. Ballin's
1:37.4	medical mysteries, where every week we will explore a new baffling mystery originating from the one
1:43.2	place we all can't escape, our own bodies.
1:47.3	So if you like today's story, please sneak into the Follow Button's house and flip all their batteries around inside of their TV remotes.
2:11.0	Thank you. And now here's our first story called Out of This World.
2:23.1	On a blazing hot summer day in 2003, a man named Carlos Ocampo took a long drink from his water bottle.
	...

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