Watergate Mysteries / Real Sea Monsters

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Hosted byRichard Syrett

After seemingly exhaustive investigative reporting by the Washington Post and dozens of books and movies on the Watergate scandal, there are many questions left unanswered. Lawyer and author John John O'Connor joined host Richard Syrett (Twitter) to delve into the lingering questions, central truths, and inconvenient facts of the scandal in order to finally solve the mysteries of Watergate. "It's crucial that we understand what happened and we really don't," O'Connor said, noting our ignorance about Watergate is solidifying, and his recent book is a last-ditch attempt to set the record straight.

According to O'Connor, we don't completely understand what happened at the Watergate burglary because it was covered up. The official story involves five people breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., in order to wiretap the phone of DNC employee Larry O'Brien. "It's completely false — there's absolutely no evidence," O'Connor reported. He raised questions about the Washington Post's cover-up as well as why the two supervisors of the break-in could be tied directly to President Nixon. He also suggested those involved in the operation may have been led astray by nefarious political forces.

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During the latter half of the program, Max Hawthorne, known as the "Prince of Paleo-fiction," discussed the latest in his Kronos Rising series, Purgatory, which features Homo Sauridae, a man-eating sea creature created as a result of vile experimentation. Hawthorne briefly outlined the central conceit of his series, which involves the survival of a pliosaur from the time of the dinosaurs being let loose on the modern world. An apex predator, the pliosaur could grow as long as 50 or 60 feet (the size of a sperm whale), he explained, noting they may have even reached 75 feet in length. He estimated during their time on earth between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, there were hundreds of thousands of pliosaurs populating the world's oceans.

It is likely there could be a holdover from prehistoric times in the oceans, Hawthorne suggested. Reports of sea monsters in lakes are likely isolated, large sturgeon or catfish, he added. Hawthorne also talked about the megalodon, comparing its size to modern whale sharks at around the mid to upper 50s in length. The teeth of megalodon were different than other sharks. "These teeth were bone chisels... they weren't just designed to break through bone, they were actually designed like wedges," Hawthorne explained. A large megalodon could use a special set of their teeth like log splitters to crack through a dead whale's rib cage, he revealed.

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