On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Sea Monkeys, the amazing instant pets for the whole family.

In just 24 hours, you can actually hatch your own sea scamp circus.

They're alive! They're off on the amazing live sea monkey ski trials.

Hey, these are brine shrimp. I used to feed them to my fish.

I got ripped off! ... While making this episode, I asked my mom if I had ever had sea monkeys as a kid, because I felt somewhere deep inside the cloudy water of my briny brain, a microscopic memory

of that little circus of sea scamps, as they were called in the early advertising copy.

She said, yes, they had inhabited our home, bore a short time in the early 1990s,

though she recalled little else, estimating my age to be around five and following up vaguely with

it was a weird time. When I asked her to elaborate, she shrugged. It was a weird time, I'm sure,

for reasons more profound than the sea monkeys in the corner of my bedroom, but I feel like

those specks swimming in circles with their thousand centipede-like flippers, each

slowly growing one bulging eye in the center of their translucent heads probably added to the

feeling.

The only other thing my mom had to say was this.

I think you lost interest pretty quick.

And why wouldn't I have?

These allegedly incredible pets were presented by the advertisements as nothing less than a joyful miniature family of aquatic humanoids,

but arrived as nothing more than a bunch of brine shrimp,

usually used as live fish food in the glowing blue aquarium aisles of pet stores. Sea monkeys were

patented and sold for the first time in the early 1960s, reaching their

...