Mushrooms Made Me See Pixies

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
You're listening to Strange by Nature, your guide to the strange, weird, unbelievable and improbable wonders of the natural world.

**Kirk Mona** (0:23)
Hello, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm Kirk Mona, and joining me are Rachel Gimza and Victoria Thompson. We're all naturalists who together have scoured the world for weird and wonderful wonders, just to please your mammalian brain's desire for novelty. Isn't that nice? Let's do this.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the show. Yay. It is...
We're going to have a much happier episode...

**Rachel Gimza** (0:53)
I'm so excited for my topic.

**Kirk Mona** (0:56)
A little bit of a downer, but I will tell you, it is summertime. We are having a blast. We've had a very thunderstorm-filled summer here so far this year. And so I think maybe thunderstorms have been on my mind. And the physics behind a thunderstorm are quite interesting, but there's also a strange, rare phenomenon that can occur along with a storm that almost seems like science fiction, mass delusion, or tall tales.
But the evidence seems to point to it being true. And that is the very strange occurrence of heat bursts. Have either of you heard about those? No.

**Victoria Thompson** (1:36)
What's that?

**Rachel Gimza** (1:38)
I tend to not do things with severe weather, so not to spike any anxiety I have regarding severe weather. So the fact that we've had so many thunderstorms, and I live on the second floor of my house, not great.

**Kirk Mona** (1:54)
Yeah.
No, I've been loving it. Well, seriously.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:57)
You live in the basement.

**Kirk Mona** (2:01)
I live in the whole house. My bedroom is in a... I have a basement bedroom, which is fabulous. But anyways, before we get into the mechanics of how this particular thing occurs, let's visit the site and hear the story of what may have been the most extreme heat burst ever recorded in the United States. We need to head to Copperill, Texas.
We have to. It is there that locals still talk about what they called Satan's Storm. Oh.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:35)
Yeah, this sounds terrible.

**Kirk Mona** (2:37)
And this occurred in 1960 Yeah. Now, it is important to note, this storm took place in 1960, which is before I was born, but isn't like ancient prehistory or something. There were people alive today who were around in 19th century. Yeah, exactly. My parents who are still alive were in high school at the time. We're just nine years away from landing on the moon. This wasn't horse and buggy days. And yet, in a lot of ways, we still didn't have a lot of modern meteorology. And the large network of automated sensors that give us information today, that didn't really exist. There were a few official thermometers per state, maybe like at the Capitol, maybe at an airport. And they were just the old-fashioned thermometers. It was nothing digital. And the local temperature in small towns was probably just something you read off of an advertising sign with a thermometer attached to it, down at the local grocery store. Maybe a few people had a thermometer on their barn or something, but there weren't official temperatures in a lot of places.
Well, shortly after midnight on June 15th, 1960, something truly extraordinary happened in Copperill, Texas. Most everyone was in bed. Most people didn't have air conditioning back then, so they were sleeping with the windows open, most likely. It had been a pretty pleasant day, actually, with temperatures in the 70s, which was downright cool for Texas in June. Yeah, pretty good for June in Texas. That sounds nice. Or maybe this was like 70s, probably the temperature that it was as night fell, once it had cooled off some. But still, really nice, nice, beautiful evening. That's okay. But people, yeah, so people had their windows open, and we're looking forward to a good night's sleep.
Well, suddenly, very suddenly, things changed. People were simultaneously awoken by two different things. And first up, we're gonna talk about the extreme wind. The wind was said to go from essentially nothing to suddenly blowing at 75 miles per hour, and possibly higher.
And this wind seemed to come out of nowhere.
All of a sudden, just boom, 75 mile an hour winds. And a reporter who visited the town the next day shot footage, which you can still watch. There are trees knocked down, roofs ripped off buildings, windows blown out of stores.
And again, the windows were blown out from the inside, which seems to indicate a very rapid and extreme pressure change that occurred in this small town.

**Rachel Gimza** (5:15)
Especially if the windows were open to?