Original In Search Of... air date: November 1, 1980 (syndicated; see Deep Cuts) Hosts: Jeb Card and Blake Smith Guest: Sharon A. Hill, geologist, science writer, and author of Scientifical Americans: The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers. Sharon also has a new cryptid-themed podcast out now called Pop Goes the Cryptid! Snag that RSS right here. Five and a half months after Mount St. Helens blew out its north flank, In Search Of... got a volcano episode on the air, and geologist (and almost-volcanologist) Sharon Hill returns to help us dig through the rubble. 👔 Nimoy Fashion Alert Nimoy trying to cross a military blouse with a safari overshirt - but somehow he makes it work. Nimoy kneels and reveals his dark loafers and dark navy blue pants. Thanks as always to Pedro, our Canadian fashion consultant. Note that those shoulder loops are not epaulettes. Sharon walks us through the eruption: phreatic steam blasts starting in March, a bulge on the north face growing about five feet a day, and her old Penn State professor Barry Voight warning that the north flank would fail in a giant landslide. (It did.) Observers said the mountain suddenly "went fuzzy" from the shaking, the flank collapsed, and the pressure underneath flashed into a sideways blast. Then came the ash, which reached a big chunk of the country. Jeb puts the ash-fall map in perspective with the meter-thick layers he encountered on a dig in El Salvador near Ilopango. Nimoy can't The Photographers The episode has stills but very little motion footage, which sent Blake down a rabbit hole about who was actually behind a camera that morning. Robert Landsburg rewound his film, packed it, and lay on his backpack to shield it. His film survived; he did not. Reid Blackburn's camera was recovered, but the heat ruined it. And KOMO's Dave Crockett kept his camera rolling while stumbling through the ash-dark for hours, producing one of the great unintentional found-footage openings of all time: "I honest to God believe I'm dead." The Eyewitness Our main on-the-ground witness is Mrs. Adriana Johnson, dressed for the part, standing on the hardened lahar that swallowed her neighborhood along the Toutle River. Sharon explains how the blast hit Spirit Lake and sent a hot slurry of ash, rock, and water down the valley, and why that sediment is still a headache for engineers today. A Painter and the hidden "bigfoot" The episode flashes a painting of an earlier eruption without much context. Jeb tracked it to Canadian painter Paul Kane and found his published journal, which describes a "race of beings of a different species, who are cannibals" said to live on the mountain. Yes, the Bigfoot connection to Mount St. Helens goes back to 1847. Kane's next entry, about a burial site set on fire by a visiting American commodore, is a lot less fun. (Jeb reads it in the episode.) Dr. Alexander McBirney Jeb spent an embarrassing amount of time making sure the University of Oregon building sign was real (fool me once, UFO Coverups). It is. There we meet Dr. Alexander "Mac" McBirney, who looks highly amused, and who turns out to have written Sharon's igneous petrology textbook. Founding director, UO Center for Volcanology, his obituary is here. We get a filmstrip-style tour of volcano types that was inexpensive but doesn't look "cheap." The Human Seismograph? Seismographs are dismissed in the episode as unreliable (they aren't), volcanologists are said to be "developing the magnetometer" (they've existed since the 1830s), and so perhaps the real tool is the human mind. Enter Charlotte King, who says she feels harmonic tremors as migraines, called in a 12-hour warning, and had the pores on her hands open and bleed before the eruption (StigMAGMA). The show catches her in pain on camera, and the USGS confirms tremor activity at that moment. Sharon explains why that's less impressive than it sounds. Note: unlike most of the people in this episode, Charlotte King is still with us, and her website is still active. Unexpected Final Thoughts Just when you think the episode is done, it hands the final word to Cowlitz Indian Tribe chairman Roy I. Wilson, in voiceover only, warning of "spirit retribution against the white men who desecrated our graves." We talk about how that lands, what real grievances sat underneath it (clear-cut slopes, dams, Weyerhaeuser), and the woven hat in the closing footage, which is made in the style of Coast Salish basketry hats like this one. 🔬 Deep Cuts & Research Notes 🎸 Goblins about Goblin. The 1981 HBO film St. Helens was scored by Goblin, Dario Argento's house band. Blake's insert covers their path from would-be Yes disciples to Deep Red, Suspiria, and Zombi. Guitarist Massimo Morante died in June 2022. Claudio Simonetti's Goblin is touring a live score to Tenebre this fall. 🎞️ The movie the family hated. St. Helens starred Art Carney as Harry Truman and David Huffman as "David Jackson," a thinly veiled David Johnston rewritten as a maverick. Johnston's family threatened to sue, and 36 scientists who knew him signed a protest letter. Filming started in November 1980 and it premiered on the first anniversary, so a five-month turnaround for this episode is not a stretch. 🏷️ No saint required. The mountain is named for Alleyne FitzHerbert, 1st Baron St Helens, a British diplomat, by George Vancouver in 1792. (USGS FAQ) 📅 When did this air? TheTVDB lists November 1, 1980; Blake's TV listing is from December 12, 1980. In Search Of... was a syndicated show, so stations aired episodes on their own schedules. Either way, it's months, not years, after the eruption. 📸 The "22 photographers" number. A figure of 22 photographers on the mountain gets repeated online without a source, and it has the feel of echo-lore. Blake's best guess at an origin is USGS Professional Paper 1250, which reconstructs the eruption's timing from photographs taken at numerous viewpoints. Counting attributable images instead: Landsburg and Blackburn in the blast zone; Gary Rosenquist and Keith Ronnholm at Bear Meadow, with Vern Hodgson a few miles farther out; Roger Werth of the Longview Daily News; Robert Krimmel of the USGS; AP staffers; and geologists Keith and Dorothy Stoffel, who were flying over the summit in a Cessna when it went. 🧪 "Acidic ash" that isn't ash. Per Sharon, volcanic "ash" isn't combustion ash at all. It's pulverized rock and volcanic glass, mostly silica and aluminum, from sand-sized down to powder, which is why it's so bad for your lungs. The ash itself isn't acidic; sulfur gases riding along with it make acid rain. Long term, all those minerals make great soil (hello, Idaho potatoes). 🔥 Pelean, Plinian, or both? Eruption styles are named after type volcanoes: Peléan for Mount Pelée, Plinian for Pliny's account of Vesuvius. Sharon flags "Pelean" as the wrong call for St. Helens, though close. Wikipedia currently lists the 1980 eruption as phreatic, Plinian, and Peléan, so the honest answer is "it's complicated," and the signature feature is really the lateral blast. Sharon has seen it called "Pelean-Plinian," which Jeb hates on principle. 💨 The word they never said. We say "pyroclastic flow" a lot in this episode. The script never does. On Jeb's Dante's Peak question: St. Helens' later pyroclastic flows are estimated at 50 to 80 mph, but the lateral blast started around 220 mph and may have hit 670. Outrunning one in a pickup is still a bad plan. (wikipedia) 🌡️ 12,000 degrees centigrade. The episode says the 1902 Pelée blast that destroyed St. Pierre was "estimated at 12,000 degrees centigrade." Nope. Pyroclastic flows run on the order of hundreds of degrees up to around 1,000°C, which is plenty. The ~30,000 death toll is about right, and yes, the man in the jail cell who survived went on to tour with Barnum & Bailey. 🔢 Death toll inflation. The episode gives Krakatoa "more than 96,000" deaths; the commonly cited figure for 1883 is about 36,000, most killed by tsunamis. Etna's 1669 eruption gets 20,000, but contemporary sources don't report mass fatalities and the big numbers appear later (more here). Etna is a lava-flow volcano; it wrecks villages, and people walk away. 🏺 Not mummified, not sudden. The Pompeii "bodies" are plaster casts, a technique introduced by Giuseppe Fiorelli, poured into voids left in the ash. The eruption also unfolded over many hours. At Herculaneum, by contrast, the heat was fast and extreme enough that one victim's brain turned to glass. 🧲 "Developing the magnetometer." Magnetometers date to the 1830s. Sharon explains the real use: rock loses its magnetization when it melts, so rising magma shows up as a magnetic anomaly. And seismographs absolutely are central to volcano monitoring, despite what the narration says. 📈 Charlotte King and the odds. The episode treats a USGS-confirmed tremor during her on-camera episode as a hit. But in late June 1980 St. Helens was an active, closely watched volcano, and harmonic tremors were being reported that very week. Low-level seismicity at an active volcano is near-constant; calling it is playing the odds. Her claims are discussed (skeptically) in David Ulin's The Myth of Solid Ground; BLDGBLOG has a good summary. 🏔️ Shasta's phantom eruption. Nimoy says Shasta "last erupted 200 years ago." That date traces to a plume seen by La Pérouse's expedition in 1786, which has since been struck from the record as probably a grass fire. Shasta's confirmed eruptions are thousands of years old (USGS eruption history). Still a dangerous volcano, just not on that schedule. 🦶 Bigfoot on the volcano. Kane's 1847 "Skoocooms" sits alongside the oft-reprinted 1840 letter attributed to missionary Elkanah Walker about giants stealing salmon (we have yet to find a digitized original). Ape Canyon, s
