LYS Podcast Episode 2

## Summary

This week’s podcast recounts conversations between Amanda
and Colin and between Amanda and Mitch regarding specific people, most
important among them Millicent Harper, Ettore Majorana and Waylon Taylor.  Amanda and Mitch also go on a hunt chasing down
a set of GPS coordinates given to them anonymously.

First, Mitch presents information to Amanda about Millicent
Harper, one of the people present at the first Leap Year Society meeting in
1888.  Briefly, Millicent was very interested
in topics such as alchemy, cuneiform, immortality and possibly even witchcraft,
and used her husband Carson’s society – he was a member of a society called the
Grand Orange Lodge – for her own research and investigation. This increasingly
worried her husband – that is, until she killed him (even though he was trying to kill her first).  She was later acquitted of the crime.

Next, Colin relays what he’s found about two physicists,
Weylen Taylor and Ettore Majorana.
Majorana was a well-respected physicist who had started to expand his
research into more obscure subjects, possibly involving human experimentation
dedicated to learning how to measure a soul.
He disappeared under mysterious circumstances.  Professor Weylen Taylor was something of a
disciple of Majorana’s with the two men researching similar topics. Taylor also
disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
There are rumors however that, before his disappearance, Taylor had
begun experimenting with specific devices given to him by none other than
Millicent Harper herself.

Amanda then discusses a separate meeting with Mitch, where
Mitch receives a set of GPS coordinates in response to a line of questioning on
a deep web forum regarding The Leap Year Society.  Amanda and Mitch go to the location indicated
by the coordinates and find a poster with the LYS insignia and a series of
numbers printed along the bottom.

Lastly, Colin tells Amanda about a picture of Majorana that
he received anonymously.  This picture is
similar to one published by the RIS, an Italian investigation agency, showing
Majorana in Argentina in 1955.  The
difference is that, in Colin’s picture, Majorana is sitting on a bench with a
suitcase – a suitcase with the same LYS symbol from the poster stamped clearly
on the front.

## Transcript of LYS Podcast: Episode 2

-intro music-

AMANDA MORRISON: Last episode, we looked into the world of
secret societies, their historical significance, contemporary influence, and
what the term ‘secret society’ actually means to us as a culture in 2018.  By the end of that last episode, we’d focused
our attention on two things:  the
possibility that a contemporary version of one of these secret societies had
somehow been responsible for forcing an earlier version of this podcast off the
air – so to speak – and a secret meeting between members of well-known secret
societies that allegedly took place in Lincoln, England on February 29,
1888.  You’re listening to the Leap Year
Society.  I’m Amanda Morrison.  Stay with us.

-music-

AM: So, before we can ask the larger question about that
meeting in February of 1888 and whether or not the group that met that day
would eventually become known as the Leap Year Society, we need to ask a series
of smaller questions.  For example, what
evidence do we have that this meeting in February of 1888 actually took place?

MICHELLE SORRENSON: Millicent. Harper.

AM: I’ll bite.  Who’s Millicent
Harper?

MS: She’s the first name listed in the Athenaeum Press
article.

AM: I thought we’d lost that link.

MS: The deep web site is gone but…I took a screen capture.

AM: Smart!

MS: Thanks.

AM: What about Millicent Harper?

MS: She was the wife of Carson Harper.

AM: And Carson Harper was?

MS: A-allegedly, Carson Harper was a member of a Northern
Irish secret society known as the Grand Orange Lodge.  It’s a Protestant group concerned with a
united Britain and opposed to Irish or Scottish independence.

AM: An Orangeman.

MS: Exactly.  But
something happened to this particular Orangeman near the end of the 19th
century. Something that resulted in him shifting his focus from politics and
religion to something else.

AM: To what?

MS: Cuneiform.

AM: Ok, please explain.

MS: Of course. It was one cuneiform tablet in particular,
something allegedly discovered on Easter Island.

AM: Sumerian.

MS: Yes. This particular tablet was written by the ruler of
the ancient Mesopotamian city-state of Kish, a woman named Kubaba.

AM: Interesting.

MS: She was SUPER interesting, a tavern-keeper who took the
throne sometime around 2500 BCE. The only female monarch listed on the List of
Kings, a clay tablet also written in cuneiform compiling the ancient rulers of
Sumer and the length of their respective reigns.

AM: And, what does this have to do with our secret society?

MS: Carson Harper had started working with the Orangemen on
a top-secret project, something that his wife Millicent had initiated.

AM: What top secret project?

MS: Magic.  They
believed that, via this cuneiform tablet from Easter Island, that they’d uncovered
proof of immortality.  They began digging
deeper trying to find proof.

AM: And did they find any proof?

MS: Well, a number of clues followed their translation of the
tablet that Millicent had led them to, and they began to believe that
something…supernatural…might have been happening in Mesopotamia.  They found lists and descriptions of a number
of people suspected of being…gods.

AM: Gods?

MS: Immortals.

AM: And what does this have to do with Carson Harper?

MS: Well, it all comes back to his wife, Millicent.  Eyewitnesses and physical evidence indicated
that she’d murdered her husband.

AM: Wow.

MS: Yeah. Witnesses to this evidence, which took place in a
public house in Essex, say that he claimed his wife was a witch and that he
tried to stab her before she somehow managed to turn the knife on him.

AM: So…what happened to her?

MS: She was acquitted.
And, as you already know, she would eventually end up at that meeting in
Lincoln, England in 1888.  But, this is
where things get quite interesting.

(sound of Michelle sliding a letter across the table)

AM: What is this?

MS: A letter.

AM: From Carson Harper to Professor Bellamy Neville, an
expert in Sumerian and Assyrian mythology?

MS: Judging by their correspondence, they were lifelong good
friends.

AM: How many of these do you have?

MS: Four. But this one is the most telling.

AM: Wow.

MS: Yeah.

(voiceover)

AM: Mitch was right.
That letter was extremely interesting. I’m going to read a section of it
for you now. It’s dated January 11, 1888.

AM: “Bellamy, I’m at my wits’ end.  What I warned you about during our last
meeting has come to pass.  Millicent has
become more and more focused on ancient alchemy and has indeed been marshaling
the resources of our order to her own, dare I say, twisted ends.   I do not use that term twisted lightly.  I believe she’s become convinced that there
are others – magical beings of some kind who live among us.  She’s uncovered evidence of these gods.  Links and connections.  My God Bellamy, she is convinced that Kubaba,
the ruler of the ancient Sumerian city-state of Kish, married a fisherman in
Liverpool in 1852.  She’s been taking
secret meetings, and I know she’s planning something.  I’m not sure what it is, but it’s happening
in Lincoln in February of this year.  I
suspect she’s practicing witchcraft along with the alchemy.  I’m going to confront her.  I’ll keep you informed.  Good luck, and long life.  Your friend, Carson Harper.”

AM: So, what does this letter tell us?  Well, it’s certainly an interesting
historical perspective on a marriage, but it also does something else.  It provides supporting evidence that a
meeting took place in February 1888 in Lincoln, England.

-music-

AM: Speaking of meetings that took place a long time ago,
I’m going to take a bit of a trip down memory lane of my own.  Back to college.  A friend of mine from school was obsessed
with conspiracies and secret societies.
His name is Colin Orry.  Colin has
worked for a number of different companies on a contract basis: film and
entertainment companies, as well as insurance adjustors as an
investigator.  If you need deep
background information on an actor or someone who may have faked an injury in
the past, Colin is your guy.  He’s the
fact checker’s fact checker.  He used to
work as a cleaner, manipulating the internet to clean somebody’s identity.  If you wanted something washed off Google
search results, you called Colin.  He
quit after about a year.  He told me that
he just couldn’t handle how horrific people could be to each other.  These days, Colin works from home in
Montreal.  Along with his day job as a
digital investigator, Colin also runs a YouTube channel called “You Can’t
Handle the Truth: Investigations and Explorations of the Bizarre”.  He does top ten lists like “The Top Ten
Haunted Taverns in Scotland”, “The Top Five Weirdest Sounds in the World”, and
“The Top Nine Poltergeists in North America”.
I reached out to Colin because of one of the videos he released last
year, “The Top Five Secret Societies You’ve Never Heard Of”.  His list didn’t include the Leap Year
Society, so I called him up to ask him why.

-phone rings-

COLIN ORRY: He-llo.

AM: Hey, Colin.  It’s
Amanda.  Morrison.

CO: Hey…it’s been more than a minute.

-voiceover-

AM: I gave Colin a day or two to look into the Leap Year
Society and then called him back.

-back to phone call-

CO: How are things?

AM: Things are good.
I’m just working on this podcast at the moment, seeing where it takes
me.

CO: It seems to be taking you into pretty interesting
territory.

AM: I agree.

CO: So, I looked into this Leap Year Society.

AM: And?

CO: And there’s not really much out there.

AM: I know.  It’s
strange.

CO: I took a look for the deep web site you mentioned.

AM: And there was nothing there?

CO: That’s right.  I
have a friend who’s working on a Wayback Machine for the dark net, but he’s
having some funding issues.

AM: I’ll bet.

CO: But, I was able to find one potentially interesting
connection to the Leap Year Society.

AM: What do you have for me?

CO: Waylon Taylor.

AM: I’m sorry, but I don’t l know who that is.

CO: Waylon Taylor was a research scientist who was living
and working in the Bay Area at Berkeley University.

AM: And how is that related to the Leap Year Society?

CO: Well, I’ll get there.
But first, a bit of background on Professor Taylor.

AM: Ok.

CO: K.  Professor
Waylon Taylor’s research was mainly concerned with sleep and states of
consciousness, but he was also deeply involved in theoretical physics.

AM: Sounds like a complicated guy.

CO: Ha…it gets a LOT more complicated.  Have you heard of a man named Ettore
Majorana?

AM:  I…have not.

CO: Majorana was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked
on neutrino masses. He also disappeared under very suspicious
circumstances.  Did I mention that
Professor Waylon Taylor is missing?

AM: What happened to Taylor?

CO: Uh ok, let me finish with Majorana first.  Enrico Fermi, writing about Majorana in Rome
in 1938, said that there are several categories of scientists in the world:
those of second or third rank who do their best but never get very far, then
there’s the first rank – those who make important discoveries fundamental to
scientific progress.  But then there are
the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton.
Majorana was one of these.

AM: Wow.

CO: Yeah. But Majorana wasn’t interested in fame and
fortune.  He’d only published nine papers
in his lifetime and, by all accounts, he had shied away from public life.

AM: So…why are we talking about him?

CO: He was apparently close to a breakthrough, something he
had uncovered while researching a theory of his that never really caught
on.  Something related to gravitational
waves and neutrino masses.

AM: Those old chestnuts.

CO: Right. Well, Majorana thought he could prove that math
exerted a small shielding effect on gravitational waves.

AM: Ok well, I only have a limited understanding of physics
but, I don’t believe that’s something that’s been proven.

CO: You’re correct.
It’s unlikely.  However, like I
mentioned, Majorana had been expanding his…reach.  Performing other…experiments.  Some directly related, others more…tenuously
connected.

AM: What do you mean?

CO: Well, it turns out he was trying to find a way to
measure the soul.

AM: Ok…that sounds certainly less likely than his
gravitational wave stuff.

CO: Certainly does.
However, there is evidence to suggest he’d begun conducting a series of
test on human subjects.

AM: Really?

CO: Yeah.

AM: What kind of tests?

CO: Ah, I’m not sure but, allegedly at the time of his
disappearance in 1938, he’d been doing some kind of research with a number
of…devices.

AM: Hm. What kind of devices?

CO: Not sure.  But
there were reportedly gifted to him by a friend.

AM: That’s pretty interesting for sure, but how does any of
this connect to the Leap Year Society.

CO: Well, because those devices were gifted to Ettore
Majorana by a woman named Millicent Harper.

-voiceover-

AM: A brief additional bit of information on the mysterious
disappearance of Ettore Majorana.  Majorana
disappeared during a trip by boat from Palermo to Naples on March 25,
1938.  There were numerous investigations
into his disappearance, however, his fate remains a mystery…his body never
found.  Adding to the strangeness
surrounding Majorana’s vanishing is the fact that he’d withdrawn all his money
from the bank prior to his trip and, on the very day of his disappearance, he
sent the following note to the Director of the Physics Institute in Naples.

AM: “Dear Carrelli, I made a decision that has become
unavoidable.  There isn’t a bit of
selfishness in it, but I realize what trouble my sudden disappearance will
cause you and the students.  For this as
well, I beg your forgiveness, but especially for betraying the trust, the
sincere friendship and the sympathy you gave me over the past months.  I ask you to remember me to all those I
learned to know and appreciate in your Institute, especially Sciuti: I will
keep a fond memory of them all at least until 11 pm tonight, possibly later too.  E. Majorana.”

AM: So, there appeared to be a connection between Ettore
Majorana, a scientist who went missing under very mysterious circumstances, and
Millicent Harper.  But what does all of
this have to do with our other disappearing scientist Waylon Taylor?  I asked Colin to explain.

CO: Right. So, Waylon Taylor was a disciple of sorts to
Ettore Majorana.  He believed that
Majorana’s greatest contribution was yet to come.  And it was a “foul conspiracy” – his words –
that had taken or murdered Ettore Majorana right before he was about to reveal
the results of his more, um, out there experiments.

AM: What experiments?
The search for the soul?

CO: It’s unclear, but that’s the most likely explanation.

AM: And where are you getting all this Waylon Taylor-Ettore
Majorana information?

CO: I can’t say.

AM: What???

CO: (chuckles) Kidding.
I’ll send you all the links and scanned documents.

AM: Thanks.

CO: No worries. (adjusts phone)

AM: So, the two scientists are connected how exactly?

CO: Well, a lot of that has to do with the similarities
between what the two men were looking into at the time of their disappearances
and circumstances surrounding those disappearances.

AM: Ok.

CO: Oh, and there’s something else.  Ettore Majorana wasn’t dead.

AM: No?

CO: No, they found him alive in 1959 and researching
something very strange.

AM: They found him?

CO: Yeah, they did.

-voiceover-

AM: We’ll get back to my conversation with Colin about
Ettore Majorana and Waylon Taylor very soon, I promise.  But first, my friend and producer Mitch
called me into the studio.  She told me
that she has some news.

-cut to conversation between Amanda and Mitch-

AM: What is it?

MS: I’m not sure, but…I think it’s pretty interesting.

AM: Where did you get this stuff?

MS: About three months ago, I posted a query on a deep web
forum dedicated to secret societies.

AM: Ok.

MS: A few days ago, I received a response in the form of a
question.

AM: What question?

MS: Three letters…L, Y, S and a question mark.

AM: So, you responded right away with?

MS: With a resounding yes, any information would be greatly
appreciated.

AM: And?

MS: And I received this response about 15 minutes ago.

-voiceover-

AM: At this point, Mitch showed me a message she’d received
on her phone.  It was a series of
numbers.  We’d both seen enough longitude
and latitude measurement to recognize location coordinates when we saw
them.  We plugged the numbers into Google
Earth and discovered a location that was about 20 minutes from our studio.

-cut to Amanda and Mitch at the location-

AM: It should be just up around the next corner.

MS: (laughs) This is CRAZY.

AM: It’s kind of cool actually.  Especially if there’s something waiting for
us at these coordinates.

-voiceover-

AM: I should interject here.
Although Mitch had no idea how whoever had contacted her had found her telephone
number, we didn’t feel like we were in danger.
When we set out to investigate those coordinates, it was the middle of
the day.  There were a lot of people
around.  At no point did either of us
feel unsafe.

-cut back to Amanda and Mitch at the location-

MS: Ok, uh, it should be right around this intersection.

AM: Um…Mitch?  I think
this might be what we’re looking for.

MS: Oh my God!

-voiceover-

AM: We were looking at a small poster that had been glued
onto a pole, just above the button you’d press to cross the street.  The poster featured an old style photograph
of a symbol: a circle with the letters LYS with a couple of extra lines on the
Y, almost like calipers.  Beneath the
symbol were another series of numbers.

AM: While digging into what had happened to Ettore Majorana way
back in 1938, Colin had received an anonymous message. Something directly
related to Majorana.  Something very
interesting.

-cut back to call with Colin-

CO: Back in 2015, the Rome attorney’s office released an
official statement indicating that Majorana had been alive between 1955 and
1959 and had been living in Valencia, Venezuela.  They declared that Majorana’s disappearance
had been most likely a personal choice.
The case was officially closed.

AM: How did they come to that conclusion?

CO: That’s a good question.
Well, the RIS – which is the Italian scientific investigation department
– analyzed a photograph of a man taken in Argentina in 1955.  They found ten points of similarity with
Majorana.

AM: Ok, so he was definitely alive.

CO: It appears so.
But there’s more.

AM: There is?

CO: Yeah.  Someone
sent me another photo of Majorana, taken at around the same time.  One that was never published.  And I think you’re gonna find it quite
interesting.

-voiceover-

AM: So, Colin sent me that picture, a photo he’d gotten from
somebody who claimed it came from the archives of the RIS, the Italian
scientific investigation department.  It
was a picture of a man sitting on a bench in what appeared to be a train
station.  In front of him, clearly
visible, it’s a suitcase.  And stamped
there on the front of that suitcase was the symbol.  The exact same symbol that had been printed
on the small poster we discovered on that pole.

-outro begins-

AM: You’ve been
listening to the Leap Year Society. I’m Amanda Morrison.  Thank you for
listening. We’ll be back next week with another episode. Remember, you can join
the investigation and find all of the links, images, and videos mentioned in
our podcast on our website, lyspodcast.com.  The Leap Year Society podcast
is produced by Michelle Sorrenson and me, Amanda Morrison.  Researched by
Colin Orry.  Special thanks to Terry Miles at Minnow Beats Whale
Productions. If you like the Leap Year Society, show us by visiting the
lyspodcast.com and please make sure to rate and review the show. Certain scenes
have been reenacted to protect the identities of those involved.  Thank
you for listening to the Leap Year Society.

-music-

AM: Tanis is a
docudrama podcast about an ancient and mysterious myth, perhaps the last
genuine mystery of the information age.  Tanis is what happens when the
lines of science and fiction start to blur. So, download the podcast the
Guardian calls ‘compelling and wildly addictive’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Stitcher or wherever you listen. Tanis is like a cross between Serial, Lost and
an Andrei Tarkovsky film.  Tanis…it’s television for your ears.

## Notes

Kubaba was indeed
a ruler of the city-state of Kish in Mesopotamia.  She is the only queen on the Sumerian List of
Kings and one of very few women to have ever ruled in their own right in
Iraqi history.

Not only is
Ettore Majorana an actual mathematician, but his mysterious disappearance, the
letter sent to Carrelli, the RIS’s closing of the case in 2015 and the
photograph having a ten point match are also authentic.

The Grand Orange
Lodge is an arm of the Orange Order, a society founded in 1795 and still active
today.

The numbers at the bottom of the poster, while only briefly mentioned here, are a code in base 8. The decryption of this code is discussed in Episode 4.