奶油小生艾瑞克

Date: 14/09/2019

Note

a gift from the ancient world with healing ability

red mercury

the shinning liquid picture on Facebook

liquid red mercury

ancient antiquity

archaeologist

mystery gift

princess from Arab to Egypt

Her mother is in a coma for a long time

He tries to use all the way to save her mother

there’s no liquid mercury, in fact

magical ancient substances

giant monument from Egypt pyramids

be fooled in the Internet

cause a lot of damage to pyramids

produced by vampire bites

graphic blood in a video which has no reflection at all

red mercury could also be used to seek out gold

buy red mercury to become rich

synabar is mercury salfy in archaeological research

is something for pigments

synabar is very toxic and if you buy is could receive a nasty result

investigating red mercury

also because it could be used to create nuclear weapons

Soviet Union

red mercury is a code word that represents a kind of substances used in making nuclear bomb

NCND from government

is also a kind of way invented by the US in order to attract terrorist

deadly material used in the Hollywood movie

computer game also use it as a bomb material

99.999999% pure in social media

Facebook will forbidden those frauds, also in Twitter and Youtube

Don’t try to buy it, it’s a trap

Transcript

So much so that you can find it for sale on social media websites today? Today, I’m here with Sarah miles who’s been investigating red Mercury, a mysterious substance that you can find being traded on social media, even though it doesn’t actually exist. Some believe it comes from the ancient Egyptians and has magical healing properties. But Sarah they’re also claims that red mercury can be used for far more worrying purposes.

Yes, Mike. Another reason why some people want to get their hands in red Mercury is because of the belief that it can be used to create nuclear weapons.

Wow, this stuff really does have 101 different uses. So how did that particular belief come about?

Well, that’s Ask an Expert.

My name is Mark. I’m a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That’s an NGO and a think tank in Washington, DC, but I live in Germany. So my kids remembers when red mercury first started gaining a reputation as a nuclear substance. It was around the time of the end of the Cold War between Russia and the West. I was a journalist during the 1980s. Those of us who in the late 1980s, were beginning to track Soviet nuclear materials. So a union after the Chernobyl accident began to open up, we began to hear that there was a substance called Red Mercury, which was offered for sale by shadowy perpetrators who claimed to have this material that was claimed to have signal importance for the production of nuclear weapons.

So where was this red mercury supposedly coming from?

Well, at the time the Soviet Union was coming to an end, the old institutions of the Communist order were falling apart. And that was a concern because that regime was a nuclear superpower. Soviet Union was a place that over a number of decades, and very secretly accumulated nuclear inventories across a massive territory of eight or nine time zones where nuclear materials were stored. And it wasn’t clear to us at the time, that all those materials in the Soviet Union began to disintegrate would remain under lock and key. So when we began to hear in the 1980s that a substance called Red mercury was on the market, people paid attention to it

sounds like a nightmare scenario you could potentially disappearing from government facilities being sold on the black market, and possibly being snapped up by rogue states or terrorists. Fortunately for everyone, though, things were not as feared.

It wasn’t very long after these offers of red mercury appeared before Western governments began countering free openly in media advisories that these efforts to sell this product were hoaxes. I remember very well at the time, a flyer that had been circulated by the United States government, which was titled caveat emptor buyer beware, alerting people that the red mercury was a hoax.

So red mercury isn’t a magic medicine and isn’t a nuclear substance.

Some people believe that it’s real or not, it is including Sam Cohen, who invented the neutron bomb. He was a proponent of red Mac, right. He claimed red mercury would make it easier to make nuclear bombs and to make them as small as a baseball. But the general scientific consensus is that the existence of such a substance is a hoax. It just doesn’t exist. However, Mark has told me something interesting. He said he was present at a number of meetings between Western and Russian scientists that took place in the late 1980s and early 90s. The aim was to put an end to the nuclear arms race and to try and prevent nuclear material is falling into the wrong hands.

During one such event. I recall very distinctly that Soviet weapon scientists told me personally that red mercury was a code word that was used in the Soviet nuclear weapons complex for a material called lithium six derived. This is an isotope that serves as a nuclear weapons precursor material for fusion nuclear weapons. They didn’t offer any further explanation for that
will not naturally add to find out if this could be true. I asked other people with knowledge of nuclear weapons whether that was possible or cogent explanation for the red mercury phenomenon. And the people that I talked to suggested it may well have been, but officially speaking, both from Western governments and from the Soviet government response to my queries were basically NCND no confirmation, no denial. And to my knowledge, it was never established, the time is absolutely certain what red mercury actually was, or is slippery stuff this red mercury.

Indeed it is. And given all this uncertainty, it’s not a surprise that some people think that the stories about red Mercury, we’re all made up for another purpose. There are rumors that they were invented by the US government as a way to entrap terrorists by bringing them out in the open. Sneaky, yes. And in 2015, The New York Times reported that several members of the so called Islamic State group have been arrested in Turkey trying to buy red mercury. Here in the UK, three men were arrested in 2004 for trying to buy red mockery,

trying to buy something that doesn’t exist,

right. And maybe that’s why they were acquitted. It turns out, they were set up by a newspaper. But even if I Mercury is a myth that hasn’t prevented it from repeatedly popping up in popular culture, the idea that there is this deadly material out there and it could find its way into the hands of terrorists is this stuff of Hollywood movies. And in 2005, it was the promise of a thriller that was actually called Red mercury. Three fanatics take a little hostages threaten the world with a nuclear bomb, and it’s called.

The film was directed by Roy Battersby and had quite a decent cast, but it does look fairly hysterical. And it doesn’t end. This is Frankie.

Welcome to my nightmare.

He’s working with the red mercury cm sick.

That’s a clip from shadow ops red Mercury, a computer game released by zombie studios. It’s a shoot ’em up game and which a US Special Forces soldier has to stop a Russian mercenary detonating a bomb made Have you guessed it?

What? Red mercury? Oh,of course. Yeah.

So the notion of red mercury being this incredible substance really does seem to have made its mark around the world, regardless of the facts.

Yeah, it sure has. Depending on your story of choice in it’s a magical healing substance to be found in the pyramids, or vampire juice that can help you find golds, or a shortcut to making a nuclear bomb.

Take your pick, I guess. But one thing does strike me you have all these fantastical stories, all these amazing claims being made for what red Mercury is and what it can do. And then you’ve got these adverts offering it for sale on social media. They’re grainy pictures of some red.on a plate with a phone number. The two don’t seem to have much relation to each other.

It’s a bit of a disappointment, isn’t it? Yes, the adverts look very dodgy and a bit flat. They don’t say things like buy this and it will cure all your illnesses or buy this and make your own nuclear device at home. In fact, the ones we saying don’t seem to make any claims for this stuff. Other than it’s 99.999999% pure, very pure, very, very pure.

It’s like the no paper will have heard the stories and are letting the mystique do the selling for them.

So is this just a story calm?

Well, that’s certainly with the people we’ve been talking to think this is my caves from the Carnegie and diamond for International Peace again, he thinks if the legends about red Mercury, which you certainly wouldn’t find a be knocked on social media grid mercury at any value for the production of nuclear weapons. It would be the darkness. Was it where I would expect it to show up in the internet and not in the open Internet?

Well, that is reassuring, at least. And it makes sense that you probably wouldn’t find nuclear material turning up on Facebook marketplace,
but let’s hope not. And this is Professor Lisa, when again, who told us about the Saudi dignitary who wanted to buy a red marker at keras mother.

I don’t think it exists. And the danger is that people are going to be swindled that they might be robbed a mugged, or that they’ll just waste their time.

Well, we approached a few of the platforms where red Mercury is being offered for sale. Facebook told us it did not allow fraudulent activity. We are taking action to stop fraud wherever it appears the company told us in a statement, they are people to use the reporting tools on Facebook itself. And they said that they had removed the pages with adverts for red mercury that we made them aware of

Twitter told us that it’s spam policy clearly states you may not use it services to disrupt user experiences. It said it had suspended the accounts with red mercury ads that we highlighted to them.

And YouTube told us that their community guidelines prohibit any content encouraging dangerous or unlawful activities. This includes content promoting the sale of illegal substances. But they said red Mercury is not a known illegal or regulated good and therefore not in violation of our policies. But they continued. However, not all videos are fit for advertising. And we take action to prevent ads on videos in violation of our advertising guidelines.

And if there’s one thing to take away from this story, it’s this. If you see red mercury for sale, don’t try to buy it. It’s a trap.

That’s it this week for the BBC trending podcast. I’m Mike when link thanks to Sarah miles and also to our production coordinator, Sarah Jackson and our editor Jeremy skeet. Our producer this week was Ed main. You can use any of our social media outlets, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, to get in touch with us and let me know what you thought. But please don’t try to offer us any red mercury I am buying.

Or if you want to message us with your thoughts on this or any of our other programs. Well just email me direct my email, Michael dwindling wendling@bbc.co.uk.

Before we go, just time for one more question. What do reggae music roller coasters and puppet movies have in common? Well, they all start with a creative spark. That’s the common thread that brings them together in our podcast in the studio. Each week, the show takes you into the minds of the world’s most creative people, artists, writers, sports stars, musicians, DJ designers, they all invite you behind the scenes. It’s the podcast that explores the creative process from start to finish, from inspiration to reality. It’s called in the studio, another podcast from the BBC World Service. Just search for wherever you get your podcasts from, and I’ll be back with trending next week. See you then.

END

Vocabulary

• nasty
• adverts
• ingest
• archaeological excavations
• cinnabar
• mockery
• coax
• reckons
• tackle
• bangle
• be repelled by
• scuttling
• a clove of garlic
• blob
• haunting
• ward off
• movie buff
• fad
• urban legends
• absurd
• nest of bats
• crawling
• genies
• in proportion
• be blended
• elixirs
• alchemists
• bunk
• mummy
• in a coma
• dignified
• robes
• cluster around
• anthropology
• intrigued
• delving into
• bizarre
• apocalypse
• mystical