The Butterfly People of Joplin, Missouri – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

Dozens of unrelated children said shining, winged figures stood over them as an EF5 tornado destroyed Joplin. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli weigh cryptids, trauma, folklore, and guardian angels behind the butterfly people.

https://youtu.be/k_6kqDpNXIQ

Help us continue to offer Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?

Links for this episode:

Chapters:

  • 0:00:00 – MYS427
  • 0:00:12 – Intro
  • 0:00:47 – Cold open: The butterfly people of Joplin
  • 0:01:39 – Joplin, Missouri — close to home for Jimmy
  • 0:03:04 – The Enhanced Fujita scale
  • 0:04:25 – The day of the storm
  • 0:08:06 – The funnel touches down
  • 0:09:06 – On the ground: six minutes across the city
  • 0:12:35 – St. John’s Regional Medical Center
  • 0:14:14 – The next morning and the death toll
  • 0:16:16 – A wave of survival stories
  • 0:17:09 – The children’s accounts
  • 0:18:57 – Todd Frankel’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporting
  • 0:21:52 – Firsthand accounts: the documentary and the trauma center
  • 0:25:37 – Emily Huddleston
  • 0:27:38 – The city responds: mural, memorial, and the soul as butterfly
  • 0:29:43 – The stories keep circulating
  • 0:30:35 – Where the account stands today: the documentary and the books
  • 0:32:43 – Thank you to Patrons
  • 0:33:15 – Sponsor: The Grady Group
  • 0:33:36 – Sponsor Mysterious World
  • 0:34:38 – The five theories
  • 0:35:44 – Reason Perspective — Theory 1: A cryptid species
  • 0:36:40 – Theory 2: The natural explanation
  • 0:40:09 – Theory 3: Folklore
  • 0:44:09 – Child witnesses and suggestibility
  • 0:45:32 – Historical parallels and the third man factor
  • 0:46:06 – Theory 4: Near-death experience
  • 0:48:05 – Where reason lands
  • 0:49:29 – Faith Perspective — Theory 5: Guardian angels
  • 0:51:13 – Wings, light, and color: what angels look like
  • 0:52:59 – The Catholic tradition and child witnesses
  • 0:53:42 – The 2024 Vatican norms
  • 0:55:02 – Were the butterfly people guardian angels?
  • 0:56:36 – Bottom Line
  • 0:58:24 – Further Resources
  • 0:59:13 – Mysterious Feedback: #416 Jesus’ Most Misunderstood Prophecy
  • 1:04:24 – Your mysterious feedback
  • 1:05:00 – Thank you to Oasis Studio 7
  • 1:05:04 – Jimmy’s YouTube channel
  • 1:05:56 – Thank you to Melanie for voiceover work
  • 1:05:59 – Next Time: Fifth Friday Weird Questions
  • 1:07:08 – Follow the show
  • 1:07:21 – Get your Mysterious merch
  • 1:07:30 – Show notes
  • 1:07:37 – Become a Patron
  • 1:07:45 – Sponsor: Rosary Army and School of Mary
  • 1:08:11 – Outro

This Episode is Brought to You By:

Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com

The Grady Group, a Catholic company bringing financial clarity to their clients across the United States. Using safe money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients. Learn more by visiting GradyGroupInc.com.

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

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The Weekly Leo – 22 July 2026

Pope Leo XIV visits the Shrine of the Holy Trinity in Vallepietra

This version of The Weekly Leo covers material released in the last week, from 16 July 2026 to 19 July 2026.

Angelus

Letters

Speeches

Social Media

Singularity (ENT) – The Secrets of Star Trek

Radiation from a black hole turns the crew into a shipful of obsessives in Enterprise S2E9, “Singularity.” Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler ask whether you can really build a whole plot on a pun.

https://youtu.be/xs8WyG6dPs0

Direct Link to the Episode.

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Mark Twain Super-Psychic: His Shocking Telepathy & Death Dream – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

He spent his career debunking fake mesmerists and mediums — then dreamed his brother’s funeral weeks before it happened. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli trace Mark Twain’s strange turn toward telepathy and ask what the Catholic has to say about it.

https://youtu.be/FCpm1H55MNw

Help us continue to offer Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?

Links for this episode:

Chapters:

  • 0:00 – Intro
  • 1:32 – Twain’s Early Life, the Civil War, and His Journalism Career
  • 6:01 – Fame, Marriage, and the Move Into Fiction
  • 9:30 – The Moral Climax of *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*
  • 16:27 – Later Novels, Bankruptcy, and Family Tragedy
  • 17:55 – Twain’s Formative Skeptical Experiences (Mesmerism, Phrenology, Spiritualism)
  • 22:37 – Coining "Mental Telegraphy"
  • 25:35 – The Harper’s Essays and Joining the SPR and ASPR
  • 28:09 – The 1858 Precognitive Dream of Brother Henry’s Death
  • 33:54 – Recurring Dreams and "My Platonic Sweetheart"
  • 37:29 – Ghost Reports at the Hartford House
  • 38:08 – The William Wright "Nevada Silver Bonanza" Letter Case
  • 42:33 – Thank you to Patrons
  • 43:05 – Sponsor: The Grady Group
  • 44:27 – More Mental Telegraphy Cases: Frank Millet, Henry Morton Stanley, and the Lotos Club
  • 48:37 – The Simultaneous Invention Argument
  • 54:51 – An Apparition of a Living Friend in Montreal
  • 57:34 – Livy’s Turn to Spiritualism and Twain’s Felt Presence After Jean’s Death
  • 59:33 – The George Bernard Shaw Mental Telegraphy Case
  • 1:00:28 – The Halley’s Comet Coincidence
  • 1:02:34 – Reason Perspective
  • 1:04:51 – Faith Perspective
  • 1:06:37 – Bottom Line
  • 1:07:36 – Further Resources
  • 1:08:21 – Mysterious Feedback: #415 The Mattress Store Conspiracy
  • 1:14:37 – Your mysterious feedback
  • 1:15:15 – Thank you to Oasis Studio 7
  • 1:15:22 – Jimmy’s YouTube channel
  • 1:16:03 – Next Time: The Butterfly People of Joplin
  • 1:16:17 – ★ – Get your Mysterious merch
  • 1:16:33 – ★ – Show notes
  • 1:16:41 – ★ – Become a Patron
  • 1:16:49 – ★ – Sponsor: Rosary Army and School of Mary
  • 1:17:15 – ★ – Outro

This Episode is Brought to You By:

Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com

The Grady Group, a Catholic company bringing financial clarity to their clients across the United States. Using safe money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients. Learn more by visiting GradyGroupInc.com.

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

Direct Link to the Episode.

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The Weekly Leo – 15 July 2026

A moment during the lunch (@Vatican Media)

This version of The Weekly Leo covers material released in the last week, from 20 June 2026 to 12 July 2026.

Angelus

Homilies

Speeches

Social Media

Persistence of Vision (VOY) – The Secrets of Star Trek

A powerful alien entity invades Voyager’s minds and gives each crew member exactly what they secretly want: **Janeway** gets a visit from the fiancé she left behind on Earth. **B’Elanna Torres** gets Chakotay. **Tuvok** gets Vulcan. And Kes gets a nightmare version of Neelix to fight her way through in engineering. When it’s over, the alien vanishes without explanation, the Bothan ships disappear, and no one can account for what just happened. Voyager moves on.

[**Dom Bettinelli**](https://sqpn.com/team_member/domenico-bettinelli-jr/) and [**Jimmy Akin**](https://sqpn.com/team_member/jimmy-akin/) unpack “Persistence of Vision,” Season 2, Episode 8 of *Star Trek: Voyager* (originally aired October 30, 1995), written by executive producer **Jeri Taylor**.

The episode is built like a Twilight Zone psychological slow-burn — hallucinations bleeding from Janeway’s holonovel into the real ship, the crew picking up fragments of other people’s fantasies, the tension ratcheting up as one by one the bridge falls. Jimmy grants the build works. But he argues the episode is ultimately all style and no substance: it leads viewers to expect a Star Trek resolution and then yanks the rug out without ever having established that no resolution was the point. Unlike a well-constructed mystery-box ending, the show gives no early signal that we shouldn’t expect answers.

The alien’s implied power level only makes the silence more baffling. Reading the minds of an entire crew and tailoring individualized fantasies simultaneously — Jimmy compares it to an omega-level telepath from Marvel — and then simply vanishing? Dom wonders if this is Q-level territory. The questions pile up: Was he working with the Bothans? Was he even in engineering? How did any of this work?

The conversation detours into holonovels — Jimmy still can’t figure out how they’re supposed to work. Unlimited freedom? A set plot? Some middle ground? Dom argues the writers were theater kids who never reckoned with the fact that what they’re describing is an RPG, not a novel. The episode also marks the final appearance of Janeway’s Victorian holonovel, which writer Jeri Taylor had planned to continue and resolve; fan indifference ended it.

A more sobering thread runs through the episode: Jimmy’s research into why **Jennifer Lien** left the show. The official explanation — the writers ran out of stories for Kes — wasn’t the real one. Lien was dealing with schizophrenia, mirroring the situation of *Babylon 5*’s **Michael O’Hare**, who left that show after his paranoid symptoms were aggravated by a storyline about government agents torturing his character. Jimmy notes the parallel grimly: an episode built around a telepath suffering body-horror and psychological assault may have been the last thing Jennifer Lien needed to film.

Guest star **Carolyn Seymour** (Mrs. Templeton, knife in hand) gets her due: a British actress of Estonian and Irish heritage who has played cold, menacing roles across multiple Star Trek series.

https://youtu.be/E-xR2tM9ics

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EXPOSED: The Government’s Patented Way to Put Voices in Your Head – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World


The U.S. government holds real patents for putting voices in people’s heads — and thousands say it’s happening to them. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli separate the real physics from psychiatry, internet lore, and outright fraud.

https://youtu.be/TLm2wOTEUkU

Help us continue to offer Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?

Links for this episode:

Chapters:

  • 0:00 – MYS425
  • 0:43 – Hook: what if the voice in your head is real?
  • 1:39 – The real origin of the tinfoil hat (Julian Huxley’s "The Tissue Culture King")
  • 3:25 – Meet the targeted individuals (TIs)
  • 4:31 – Case study: Timothy Trespas (*New York Times*, 2016)
  • 6:02 – Case study: Harlan Girard and "the voices" (*Washington Post Magazine*, 2007)
  • 10:54 – More TI accounts: a Phoenix mother and Dr. John Hall
  • 12:54 – What is V2K, and where does the name come from?
  • 14:22 – Related terms: microwave auditory effect, synthetic telepathy, silent sound, LRAD
  • 15:59 – The Frey effect: Allan Frey’s 1962 discovery
  • 18:13 – From clicks to speech: the 1973 Walter Reed demonstration
  • 19:41 – The Moscow Signal and Project Pandora
  • 23:08 – MKUltra and the precedent for non-consensual research
  • 25:16 – Three key patents: Brunkan, O’Loughlin/Loree, and Lowery
  • 30:02 – The Army’s own "voice to skull" thesaurus entry
  • 32:00 – Other programs: BioEffects, Medusa, Active Denial System, and LRAD
  • 34:20 – "Voice of God" operations and the Waco proposal
  • 36:14 – Can the microwave auditory effect be weaponized? (Foster et al., 2021)
  • 38:16 – Thank you to Patrons
  • 38:47 – Sponsor: The Grady Group
  • 40:08 – Reason Perspective: five theories of what’s really happening
  • 41:17 – …what the physics actually permits
  • 43:22 – …what the documentary record does and doesn’t establish
  • 44:44 – …could silent sound technology explain it?
  • 45:56 – …could LRAD explain it?
  • 47:22 – …conventional medical and psychiatric explanations
  • 49:51 – …gang stalking and the Sheridan and James study
  • 52:08 – …when belief turns to violence: Aaron Alexis and Myron May
  • 54:14 – …how widespread is this really?
  • 57:23 – …why so many people believe it’s happening to them
  • 59:53 – Faith Perspective: is it ever moral to use V2K?
  • 1:03:14 – …how to respond when someone says they’re hearing voices
  • 1:04:44 – ★ – Bottom Line
  • 1:06:27 – ★ – Further Resources
  • 1:07:21 – ★ – Mysterious Feedback: #414 Ancient Christian Ghosts
  • 1:14:43 – ★ – Your mysterious feedback
  • 1:15:18 – ★ – Thank you to Oasis Studio 7
  • 1:15:32 – ★ – Jimmy’s YouTube channel
  • 1:16:19 – ★ – Next Time: Mark Twain, Super Psychic
  • 1:16:41 – ★ – Share the show, write a review
  • 1:16:55 – ★ – Get your Mysterious merch
  • 1:17:01 – ★ – Show notes
  • 1:17:04 – ★ – Become a Patron
  • 1:17:13 – ★ – Sponsor: Rosary Army and School of Mary
  • 1:17:38 – ★ – Outro

This Episode is Brought to You By:

Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com

The Grady Group, a Catholic company bringing financial clarity to their clients across the United States. Using safe money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients. Learn more by visiting GradyGroupInc.com.

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

Direct Link to the Episode.

Subscribe on iTunes. | Other Ways to Subscribe.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Weekly Leo – 8 July 2026

Pope Leo blessing a child (ANSA)

This version of The Weekly Leo covers material released in the last week, from 25 June 2026 to 8 July 2026.

Angelus

Homilies

Letters

Messages

Prayers

Speeches

Social Media

Joseph Williamson’s Tunnels – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

A Liverpool merchant spent 30 years tunneling beneath his own neighborhood and never said why. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli weigh seven theories about Joseph Williamson and his mysterious underground labyrinth.

https://youtu.be/GuEb4R5XLRg

Help us continue to offer Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. Won’t you make a pledge at SQPN.com/give today?

Links for this episode:

Chapters:

  • 0:00 – MYS424
  • 0:12 – Intro
  • 0:44 – The mystery: thirty years of tunneling, no explanation
  • 1:37 – Who was Joseph Williamson?
  • 3:46 – The Liverpool Mercury obituary (1840)
  • 5:26 – Edge Hill and the geology: New Red Sandstone
  • 8:06 – The eccentric houses above ground
  • 9:51 – What Charles Hand found underground
  • 12:03 – Boys exploring the tunnels: Hand’s childhood expeditions
  • 14:43 – Hand’s adult revisit (1926): the descent
  • 17:19 – James Stonehouse’s 1845 tour
  • 19:34 – The two underground four-room houses
  • 20:02 – Williamson’s character and eccentric dress
  • 21:53 – The window tax story
  • 23:04 – The beans and bacon test dinner
  • 24:56 – His religious life: St. Thomas’s Church
  • 27:23 – The Rambler’s 1837 appreciation
  • 29:10 – Death, burial, and the suppressed Stonehouse manuscript
  • 31:30 – Modern excavations: Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels
  • 33:16 – Thank you to Patrons
  • 33:50 – Sponsor: Peter’s Barque presented by The Grady Group
  • 35:36 – Theories overview: seven proposed explanations
  • 37:49 – Analysis: Freemasonry theory
  • 38:32 – Analysis: Smuggling theory
  • 39:06 – Analysis: Apocalyptic refuge theory
  • 42:12 – Analysis: Storage / wine cellars theory
  • 43:19 – Analysis: Personal eccentricity theory
  • 44:48 – Analysis: Quarrying theory
  • 48:24 – Analysis: Charity theory
  • 53:07 – Reason Perspective
  • 54:01 – Faith Perspective
  • 55:03 – Bottom Line
  • 56:02 – Further Resources
  • 56:47 – Mysterious Feedback: #413 The Shocking Secret Manuscript of the Anna Eklund Exorcism
  • 1:00:11 – Your mysterious feedback
  • 1:00:48 – Thank you to Oasis Studio 7
  • 1:00:55 – Jimmy’s YouTube channel
  • 1:01:51 – Next Time: Voice-to-skull technology
  • 1:02:34 – Share and follow the show
  • 1:02:47 – Get your Mysterious merch
  • 1:02:56 – Show notes
  • 1:03:03 – Become a Patron
  • 1:03:11 – Sponsor: Rosary Army and School of Mary
  • 1:03:37 – Outro

This Episode is Brought to You By:

Rosary Army. Featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts, Rosary resources, videos, and the School of Mary online community, prayer, and learning platform. Learn how to make them, pray them, and give them away while growing in your faith at RosaryArmy.com and SchoolOfMary.com

The Grady Group, a Catholic company bringing financial clarity to their clients across the United States. Using safe money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients. Learn more by visiting GradyGroupInc.com.

Want to Sponsor A Show?
Support StarQuest’s mission to explore the intersection of faith and pop culture by becoming a named sponsor of the show of your choice on the StarQuest network. Click to get started or find out more.

Direct Link to the Episode.

Subscribe on iTunes. | Other Ways to Subscribe.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Weekly Leo – 1 July 2026

Pope Leo XIV receives delegation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (@Vatican Media)

This version of The Weekly Leo covers material released in the last week, from 25 June 2026 to 29 June 2026.

Angelus

Homilies

Letters

Social Media