Investigative reporter Michael Drosnin stood alone on the Lisanne Peninsula in Jordan, the strip of desert was a barren moonscape that jutted out into the Dead Sea. To most, it was useless land. But Drosnin believed it held a secret that could save the world.

Just a few years before Drosnin learn about the Bible code, a mathematical cipher hidden in the Torah. The code predicted future events like economic collapses, presidential elections and political assassinations.

It also described a nuclear apocalypse that would bring about the biblical end of days.

But details about this impending atomic war were vague. Drosnin realized that he needed more information to stop it. There had to be a key to further unlock the Bible codes message. But where would he find it? Drosnin searched the Bible code and he found a clue that seemed to be about the key. It was a hidden message stating that the Lord of the Code had placed something at the mouth of the obelisk or stone pillar.

Drosnin wasn't sure what this pillar would be like, but using the Bible code, he believed it was hidden on the Lisanne Peninsula.

He petitioned the Jordanian government for an excavation permit and they granted it.

Drosnin flew in a team of archaeologists, geologists and geophysicists to hunt for the ancient relic. The announcement of this expedition raised eyebrows all over the world. Drosnin wasn't looking for an ordinary artifact, and he believed that the Lord of the Clode wasn't human. The Bible code and the pillar were both created by aliens.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify original from past every Monday and Wednesday, we dig into the complicated stories behind the world's most controversial events and search for the truth. I'm Carter Roy. And I'm Molly Brandenberg. And neither of us are conspiracy theorists, but we are open minded, skeptical and curious. Don't get us wrong. Sometimes the official version is the truth, but sometimes it's not.

You can find episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from Perkiest for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is our second episode on the Bible code. In the 1990s, Michael Drosnin introduced the world to a mathematical cipher hidden in the Torah. Supposedly, it predicted events that occurred thousands of years after the text was written.

In part one, we discussed the history of the Torah and early attempts to find the code within it. In the 20th century, mathematicians like Dr. Eliahu Rib's used computers to crack the alleged Bible code. Later, Drosnin used it to predict the assassination of the Prime Minister of Israel.

This episode, we'll explore three conspiracy theories surrounding the code's origin and purpose. Its creators may have been alien or a civilization of time traveling humans. Or maybe it was all a lie. Michael Drosnin and Dr. Rip's may have devoted their lives to something that never existed at all. We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. The force behind the Bible code remains a mystery, as does its purpose. It's unclear whether the cipher is an unavoidable prophecy or a list of probable futures that can be avoided.

In 2002, Drosnin said the Bible code predicted a nuclear war that would come soon. This prophecy came after he uncovered the linked phrases World War Atomic Attack, bin Laden, New York and Jerusalem. Many of these warnings intersected with the year 2006. Supposedly, it would bring about the biblical end of days.

Drosnin reached out to high ranking security officials in both the American and Israeli government, but his contacts ignored the warnings. And as we know, 2006 did not see a global apocalypse.

Drosnin believe this error was due to a missing piece of the cipher and that nuclear war was still a threat. In order to prevent it, he needed full access to the Bible code. He needed the code key and obelisk or stone pillar that had been hidden in the Jordanian desert by the creators of the Bible code extra terrestrials. Which leads us to conspiracy theory number one, future events were encoded in the Torah by advanced beings from another planet, Drosnin claims the first contact between humans and aliens is recorded in the Torah, hiding in plain sight.

In the twelve hundreds BCE, Moses freed the Israelites and led them out of Egypt. They were camped at the base of Mount Sinai. One morning, the camp woke to a pile of thunder and a flash of lightning, 600000 men and women stared up at the mountain in fear as it smoked like a furnace. Then a horn sounded and a voice called out. It said, Moses come up to the top of the mountain.

Moses obeyed.

And when he reached the peak, the voice of God dictated the Ten Commandments in the full text of the Torah.

According to the Torah, the Ten Commandments were etched on two stone tablets in the Book of Exodus, it says. And the tablets were the work of God and the writing was the writing of God.

However, Drosnin believes that Moses his encounter was not with an omniscient deity. He says that Moses and the Israelites observed an alien craft landing on the top of Mount Sinai, and the voice that called out to him was actually a being from another world.

Drosnin based this theory of information he discovered in the Bible code, allegedly. He found a message encoded in that text that read it was made by computer and no one on earth had a computer in 100 BCE.

Drosnin believes that the only beings who could have created the Bible code 3000 years ago were extraterrestrials. When these aliens arrived on Earth, they brought a computer more powerful than we can imagine, one that was responsible for not only writing the Torah, but also hiding a code within it. These messages were to remain hidden until humanity invented similar technology.

His theory relies on two major assumptions. First, that advanced alien life exists. Second, these aliens had a computer that could predict the future of our planet.

These claims may seem fantastical at first, but perhaps they aren't far fetched.

The existence of alien life on other planets is a statistical certainty. There are said to be at least 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, although we only know of one star in this galaxy with planets suitable for life ours.

The Earth has one key quality that makes it ideal for life as we know it its distance from the sun.

It's in what scientists call the Goldilocks or habitable zone.

This is the perfect distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface. If Earth was closer to our sun, it would be too hot and the oceans would evaporate. If we were farther away, they would freeze. Liquid water is a key element of complex life.

So far, the earth is the only planet which has plentiful amounts on its surface.

However, scientists estimate that at least point zero one five percent of stars have Earth like planets orbiting them in the habitable zone. This means that there could be six billion solar systems in our galactic neighborhood with planets like Earth places. Life could have also originated, but we have yet to discover. And that's just the Milky Way galaxy. The observable universe has around one billion trillion stars, meaning there are most likely trillions of Earth like planets out there.

They could be home to intelligent species, one of whom may have visited Earth.

But that brings us to the second assumption, not only do aliens have to exist, but if they're responsible for the Bible code, then they also have to know intimate details about our planet's future.

The Bible code predicts the stock market crash of 1929, Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s and the moon landing in 1969. If aliens did write the Bible code, that suggests they knew all of these events ahead of time back in 100 BCE Drosnin doesn't find that absurd.

As we learned, he believes these alien visitors had a computer to predict those future events, which isn't impossible.

Humanity has already started to develop similar technology, predicting the future is conceivable.

If you believe the universe is deterministic, every event is the result of an event that happened before. We call this the principle of cause and effect.

If you have enough data about a situation, you can accurately predict what will happen next. Meteorologists do this every day. They measure variables like temperature, humidity and wind direction. They input those details into a computer that predicts the weather for the week.

Drosnin believe that the aliens who visited Earth thousands of years ago had similar technology.

But instead of predicting the weather, their computer predicted events that wouldn't happen for millennia.

As anyone who watches the Weather Channel knows, those predictions aren't always correct. But they do get more precise each year as our computers receive more and more data, they can simulate possible futures more accurately.

Although there's always a margin of error, creating an algorithm that could predict the future with 100 percent accuracy is incredibly difficult. You would have to know where every atom in the universe was and then model how every single one of those molecules interacts with each other for the rest of time.

But again, it's not inconceivable, since humanity invented the computer in the 1940s, computer power has increased a trillion fold.

Imagine how advanced alien technology could be if it was thousands of years ahead of our own aliens.

And supercomputers aside, this theory hinges mainly on Drosnin interpretation of the Torah. Many religious scholars disagree with the idea that Moses encountered an extraterrestrial on Mount Sinai. After all, there's no mention of a ship or alien like creatures.

But there is another tale in the Bible that hints at ancient alien visitors.

Ezekiel was the prophet from the 6th century BCE. The stories of his life are recorded in the Old Testament. Ezekiel's experience began when he was alone by a canal near Babylon.

Looking up to the sky, he saw a deadly storm approaching fire and lightning flashed within the clouds.

Then a metal object emerged and descended towards him.

The vessel looked like a chariot of fire when it landed, a door opened, exposing for beings that look like people but weren't according to a skill.

These creatures had the likeness of a man and everyone had for wings. Their feet were straight and the soul of their feet was like the soul of a calf's foot. They sparkled like the color of the burnished brass.

Each of these beings had four faces, that of a man, lion, bull and eagle over their heads. They were a strange ornament of pure crystal. To us. It may have resembled a glass helmet.

Ezekiel bowed to the creatures. Then another man like being approached him and spoke. This figure identified himself as the Lord God.

He told Ezekiel he came to deliver a warning. Then he gave Ezekiel a scroll filled with lamentations, mourning and woe. They describe tragedies that would befall God's people if they refused his commandments.

Then God ordered him to eat the scroll. Ezekiel placed it in his mouth and knowledge filled his body. Afterwards, God, in his four strange companions, ascended back into the clouds.

Ezekiel never described the tragedies they warned him of, but the story could be interpreted as evidence of aliens visiting Earth to deliver future warnings.

As enticing as an alien intervention theory may be, the evidence is scant. Ezekiel story is impossible to verify, and so is every alien encounter in the 2000 odd years since.

But there might be evidence in the Lisanne Peninsula, an obelisk buried by the aliens who created it.

Not only would approve the existence of their visit to Earth, it would also unlock the entirety of the Bible code.

Unfortunately, before Drosnin team was able to start excavating, their permit was revoked by the Jordanian government without explanation. So the obelisk, if there is one, was never found to this day. The only evidence we do have is Ezekiel's anecdote, which is definitely open to interpretation. Right.

On a scale of one to ten ten being the most believable, I have to give this theory a two. It's unlikely that extraterrestrials had anything to do with the history of the Bible.

I give this theory a one out of ten Drosnin theory just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. But there may be a different explanation.

There's another civilization that may have encoded our destiny into the Bible, except they wouldn't need to predict the future because they'd have already lived it.

Coming up, we'll explore the idea that time traveling humans created the Bible code, high power casters.

It's Carter like you. I have an eclectic mix of can't miss podcasts that I listen to each week. And one of my favorites is Supernatural with Ashley Flowers. Every Wednesday on Supernatural, host Ashley Flowers explains some of the biggest mysteries in the world. Taking you on a journey through baffling events and sharing all the possible explanations.

No matter how strange or surreal they get, whether it's sudden disappearances, alien abductions or even mystifying murders, she presents the facts we know for sure, and the theories that might be closer to the truth than we think. If you haven't had a chance to catch this Spotify original from podcast yet, you're in for a wild ride. Follow Supernatural with Ashley Flowers free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, Power Castor's, it's Carter, like you, I have an eclectic mix of can't miss podcasts that I listen to each week and one of my favorites is Supernatural with Ashley Flowers. Every Wednesday on Supernatural, host Ashley Flowers explains some of the biggest mysteries in the world. Taking you on a journey through baffling events and sharing all the possible explanations.

No matter how strange or surreal they get, whether it's sudden disappearances, alien abductions or even mystifying murders, she presents the facts we know for sure, and the theories that might be closer to the truth than we think. If you haven't had a chance to catch this Spotify original from podcast yet, you're in for a wild ride. Follow Supernatural with Ashley Flowers free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now back to the story.

Investigative reporter Michael Drosnin believed that aliens were responsible for hiding a mathematical code in the Torah, the cipher predicted future events, including the end of the world. However, the evidence for his theory is based on loose interpretations of biblical events.

But there is another possibility, one that doesn't require spaceships or alien life. Conspiracy theory number two is that the Bible code was created by humans from the future.

When Drosnin found references to a computer in the Bible code, he believed it must have belonged to aliens.

But it's possible that this computer was made by humans who traveled back in time.

In this theory, the predictions of future events aren't predictions at all.

Instead, their records of a lived past the code may be a warning from future humans hoping to change the events of their own past, which is our own present and future.

Surprisingly, time travel may be more attainable than we think.

Dr. William Hiscock, a leading physics researcher, believes it's possible to go back in time. He claims that there is nothing in the known laws of physics that would prevent such a trip from occurring. Only problem is we haven't developed the technology yet, but we do know that time can be manipulated.

In fact, it's possible to skip forward in time.

Already, Einstein's theory of relativity states that the faster an object travels, the slower time passes for that object. This effect is known as time dilation, as Dr Hiscock explains. If you traveled from Earth to the center of the galaxy and back at the speed of light, it would take you about 40 years. But to the people of Earth, you would have been gone for 60000 years. Engineers who manage global positioning systems have to deal with this problem every day because the GPS satellites are far from Earth.

They actually travel through time faster than we do on the ground.

They end up gaining about 38 microseconds a day. But in order to accurately calculate latitude and longitude, they can't be more than around 30 nanoseconds ahead.

This is a problem because without accurate timekeeping, the GPS network can't triangulate positions on Earth. Engineers have to design software, which subtracts this extra time that the satellites gain each day. The existence of time dilation proves that time isn't immutable. It can be changed. Perhaps one day controlled scientists still aren't sure how time can be manipulated backwards.

But famed inventor Nikola Tesla believed it could be done by altering magnetic fields. By one account, he actually did it. As the story goes, in 1895, one of Tesla's friends found him in a coffee shop. The inventor seemed shaken and disturbed. Tesla told him that he built a machine which altered the space time barrier.

It had electrocuted him, but he survived, though the machine had nearly killed him.

Tesla reportedly claimed it had opened a window into space and time. He saw the past, present and future all at once. Unfortunately, all records of this machine have been lost.

But there are stories of time manipulation from long before Tesla. If you look closely, there are two examples in the Old Testament itself.

The Book of Joshua describes the Israelites conquest of Canaan in the 13th century BCE during the battle. Joshua asked God to stop the movement of the sun and moon until he avenged his enemies. His prayer was answered.

According to the Bible, the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and stayed there for a full day. Tine froze.

It seemed that God was truly on the Israelite side. This demonstration of power gave him the courage and strength to destroy the Canaanites.

The second instance of time manipulation in the Old Testament comes from the Book of Kings. In this story, the king of Judah, named Hezekiah, was sick and dying. He asked the prophet Isaiah for help, Isaiah then spoke to God, who promised the king would be healed.

But King Hezekiah doubted Isaiah. He asked for proof. So Isaiah pointed a shadow the Sun had cast on a nearby stairway. He said, this is the Lord's sign to you that he will do what he promised. Shall the shadow go forward ten steps or shall it go back ten steps?

Hezekiah asked that the shadow move backwards ten steps, and it did the shadow reverse direction right before hatzakis eyes.

Arguably, the only way this could have happened is if time had also moved backwards.

The King immediately professed his belief in Isaiah and God. Days later, the King was healed.

These two anecdotes portray biblical figures who seem to manipulate time. And if this is true, it's possible.

People like Isaiah and Joshua could have been humans from the future. Perhaps they use their technology to travel back and interact with humans thousands of years ago.

To be fair, human beings weren't responsible for manipulating time in the Bible. God was.

That's true.

But let's consider for a second, if God wasn't actually a deity, he may have been a human being with future technologies, ones that gave him the power to control time to the Israelites of hundred BCE. A person like that could have appeared to be a God.

A researcher named Ronald Pegg claims to have found proof of this theory.

According to him, God, Angels and any mention of divine intervention in the Bible is actually due to time traveling humans pay claims to have found depictions of technology like CD-ROMs, monitors and disk drives in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in Hebrew texts.

He also suggests that Babylonian and Hebrew scriptures refer to ancient visions, revelations that were actually displayed to prophets on computer screens.

According to Pegg. In the Book of Genesis, an angel showed Moses a vision of void and darkness. Moses then heard the uproar of a surging mass of water, and the world appeared. But Peg found this exact sequence somewhere else.

In the early 1990s, Peg bought a CD rom titled Ancient Civilizations of the Mediterranean. It had been published by a software company called M Interactive in 1995. The disc offered a brief overview of Egyptian, Babylonian and other cultures from early human history.

So Pasig placed the CD and the distrait of his computer and waited for it to load as the CD War to Life.

His computer played the sound of rushing water. Then a map of Mesopotamia appeared pay claims. The sequence was exactly like the one Moses described back in 1200 BCE.

Peg knew this could just be a coincidence, so he kept digging. He found Egyptian hieroglyphs that described a disk with a reflective bottom side like a CD would have. He found a passage in the Book of Exodus that described an object known as a tabernacle. It used several computer terms, such as board socket pins and cords. Furthermore, the Book of Revelation in the New Testament speaks of a sealed group of 144 thousand people.

The significance of this number has always puzzled biblical scholars on Pegg's Ancient Civilization CD, the size of the program was listed as just under one hundred and forty four thousand bytes. He saw this as evidence that someone took a copy of this CD back in time. They may have played it for Moses and other biblical prophets.

That's a bit of a stretch.

It seems old Peg did was find similarities between a CD he owned and avision Moses received from God. Not to mention there's no record of biblical angels claiming to be humans from the future. They all clearly stayed. They serve and omniscient deity God.

But the time traveling theory could explain why God and His angels are so motivated to help humanity when they are people themselves. It could be that these time travelers were so. Vivas of a nuclear war, they hit a code in the Bible to prevent the past from repeating itself.

I don't buy the motivation to stop nuclear Armageddon. If we listen to the warnings, there would be no nuclear war. And if there was no nuclear war, no one would come back in time to warn us about it. It seems like something out of a fantasy film not based in any real logic.

And again, this theory relies heavily on coincidences and biblical interpretations. I have to give it a three out of 10 and I'll agree on the rating.

But we still haven't addressed the major problems with the Bible code issues about the predictions and even flaws in Dr. Rip's first study back in 1994.

If we look closer, we may find that there is no Bible code at all.

Coming up next, we explore whether the Bible code is a figment of human imagination. Now back to the story.

In the late 1980s, Doctor Eliyahu Reps discovered a cipher in the Torah. Skeptics were unable to find a flaw in the computer program which revealed the code. And many believe there was only one explanation. The code was intentionally placed by an intelligent power. If it seems too good to be true, it might be. Which leads us to our third and final, a conspiracy theory. What if the Bible code doesn't exist at all from the beginning?

Skeptics had concerns about the code. For some, the idea that the future is encoded in a 3000 year old book was too ridiculous to entertain.

But even those who accepted the premise had questions. The prophecies focused primarily on America or European affairs.

Apparently, none of the results referenced historical events in Asia, South America or Africa. It seems odd that none of those regions would be mentioned in the code.

Aside from geographical problems, many of the predictions didn't come true at all. For instance, the code predicted the assassination of Prime Minister Netanyahu and a nuclear holocaust in 2006. Neither event came to pass, despite appearing in the code numerous times. And yet critics couldn't find an issue with Dr. Rip's Great Rabbis experiment.

If you recall from the last episode, Dr Rip's wrote a computer program that uncovered the names, dates of birth and death of 66 rabbis in the Torah. The information was encoded together in a word puzzle format. Dr. Rip's believed it was a deliberate message when he submitted his work to the journal Statistical Science.

Independent experts failed to find a flaw in the program.

The math checked out in the early 1990s, Michael Drosnin learned about the code and used it to predict Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. This launched the Bible code into the public eye. But a few years later, in 1999, Statistical Science published another article.

The title was Solving the Bible Code Puzzle. It was submitted by Australian mathematician Brendan McKay and his three Israeli colleagues Draw Barnat in Maya Bahlul and Gil Kaleigh. They pointed out that the flaw wasn't with the program, it was with the people who implemented it.

Dr. McKay found that the search terms Dr. IPPs used were incredibly vague.

He searched for the day and month of each rabbi's birth and death, but not the year.

So if a rabbi was born April 21st, six seven, see, Dr. Rip's program only looked for the date April 21st, even if it found a date with the wrong year. It was considered a success, but the biggest flaw was how his program Search for the rabbi's names.

The criteria included full and partial names, initials and titles.

For instance, if you searched for John F. Kennedy, Dr. Rip's program looked for any of the following terms.

John F. Kennedy, JFK, Jack Kennedy, Mr. Jay Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, Jackie Kennedy's husband and president from Massachusetts.

In addition, Hebrew has no written vowels, only consonants. This means that Dr. Rip's assumed the vowels himself. No matter how much of a stretch the results were, he considered them a success.

It seems that the only reason Dr. Repassed used such generic terms was to maximize the chances of finding a match. He cast a wide net, so to speak.

After this discovery, Dr. McKay's team sent Dr. Rip's methods to a religious scholar named Dr. Menachem Cohon at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. Dr. Cohen insisted that the terms had, quote, no scientific basis and are entirely the result of inconsistent and arbitrary choice.

But there was another error and Dr. Rip's methods, one that most Bible code skeptics had missed, the fact that the Torah had remained unchanged since it was first written 3000 years ago. Michael Drosnin claimed the ancient and modern Torah were identical, but that wasn't exactly the case. Dr. McKay analyzed the Dead Sea Scrolls and found that there were slight differences. They were rare, sometimes only one mistake or change every 100 characters, a detail that could easily be missed if you weren't looking for it.

But Dr. Rip's computer program used equidistant letters, sequences or skip codes. This meant that it would skip an exact number of characters each time. For instance, one code would only count every third letter. If there was just one mistake, it could throw off the entire sequence. So if the modern Torah had changed since the Dead Sea Scrolls were written around 100 BCE, then there was no telling what might have changed in the 1000 years before that. With this many errors, a code placed in the original text would probably be turned into garbled nonsense.

Finally, Dr. McKay debunked the major pillar of the Bible code, the claim that it only existed in the Torah.

Dr. Rip's claimed he had tried to find the same list of rabbis and other books, such as War and Peace, but failed to him disprove the Torah was special.

However, when Dr. McKay and his colleagues tried to find skip codes and war and peace, they got a different result.

They made their own list of rabbis like Dr. Rip's. They used a broad range of terms. Sometimes they included multiple spellings. To their surprise, they found their list of rabbis in war, in peace, but not in the Torah. The exact opposite of Rip's conclusion, Michael Drosnin was not swayed by Dr. McKay's findings.

He resolutely believed in the prophetic power of the Bible code. When a reporter asked about opposing research, Drosnin said, When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them.

Well, in 1997, Dr. McKay took drosnin up on this challenge. He and his colleagues searched for details about Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in Moby Dick.

While Drosnin and Dr. Ripp seem to have found only one reference to Yitzhak Rabin's death in the Torah. Dr. McKay found multiple references to the assassination in Herman Melville's famous novel.

They found other predictions in Moby Dick as well. McKay searched for references to Princess Diana's death in 1997. He found the name Lady Diana intersecting with the names of her boyfriend, Dodi, and her driver, Henri Paul. Her name was next to the phrase mortal in these jaws of death.

Next, they search for JFK's brother, Robert Kennedy. His initials, RPK, appeared beside the phrase Reifel holds the fatal powder and the name of his assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. Dr. McKay even used Rip's technique to find references to the September 11th terrorist attacks embedded in some lyrics by rapper Vanilla Ice. The legitimacy of the Bible code relied on the fact that it only existed in the Torah, but if the future could be encoded in every novel or singer's discography, then suddenly it doesn't seem like a Bible specific code at all.

But that doesn't mean Drosnin or Doctor Rips intentionally lied about their results. They may have just gotten caught up in logical fallacies.

The first error they made is referred to as the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. This means they ignored the differences in their data while overemphasizing the similarities.

Imagine that a farmer in Texas shot randomly at the side of his barn, even if he's not a good marksman. Some of the bullet holes would be grouped together. If he drew a bull's eye around that cluster, he might claim he was a sharpshooter.

But the reality is he wasn't aiming for that bull's eye to begin with. He found a pattern on the barn later and created the narrative that his target was there all along. Ultimately, it was just a coincidence.

Likewise, Drosnin and Dr. Rip's drew conclusions from the clues they found in the Bible code. But that doesn't mean there was a deliberate message. They latched on to what they believed was a pattern and ignored the facts that didn't fit their narrative.

For example, take the codes description of Albert Einstein. His name was described using the phrases they prophesied. A brainy person. He overturned present reality and a new and excellent understanding.

At first glance, those clues seem unique and accurate. Yet if you want to decode a message about Albert Einstein, there are hundreds of more accurate clues to associate with his name. Like Physicist equals EMC squared, theory of relativity and so forth.

Human beings are excellent at finding patterns in nature. Just because we find one doesn't mean it was placed there intentionally. We're constantly assigning value and explanations that might not be true.

For instance, in World War Two, the German Air Force or the WHATFOR dropped thousands of bombs on Britain, this devastating campaign was known as the Blitz and it took over 40000 lives. But in London, citizens noticed the bombers consistently spared certain neighborhoods.

People suggested that those buildings were spared because they were filled with German spies. It was a logical suspicion the Luftwaffe wouldn't want to risk killing their own people. Therefore, German command must have given orders to avoid targeting these areas. But after the war, researchers found that no such orders were given. Mathematical analysis later showed that these neighborhoods were spared by random chance. The people of London noticed a pattern and assign their own value to make sense of it, just like Drosnin did with the text of the Torah.

The premise of this theory is that if humans look for a pattern, they'll find one. And unlike the other theories we've covered in this episode, this one doesn't require a huge, logical leap. All we have to do is acknowledge the flaws in human psychology. For that reason, we give this theory a nine out of 10.

The Bible code appears to be just another example of humanity's need for order and certainty. In a chaotic world, it's comforting to believe that there is an underlying plan to it all. It gives us a feeling of power and control to think that someone may know what the future holds. The idea we're surrounded by meaningless chaos is a hard pill to swallow.

Drosnin devoted his career to discovering the purpose of the Bible code. He taught himself Hebrew, spent countless hours poring over ancient documents and wrote three books on the subject. And yet the code's creator remained a mystery. In June of 20-20, Drosnin passed away without finding the answers to his burning questions.

But it appears the code only existed in his own mind, which means the creator Michael Drosnin, spent 30 years looking for was actually himself.

Thanks for tuning into conspiracy theories. We'll be back Monday with a new episode, you can find all episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from Paşa cast for free on Spotify.

Until then, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.

Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify original forecast. It is executive produced by Max Cutler, Sound Design by Anthony Vasek with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Travis Clark. This episode of Conspiracy Theories was written by Evan McGehee with writing assistance by Lori Gottlieb and Ellie Whicker, fact checking by Onya barely and research by Brad Klein and Brian Peatross. Conspiracy theory stars Molly Brandenberg and Carter Roy.