Episode Six: Killer Bees

 Episode Summary: The killer bees are coming. Can they be stopped?

Bike Summary: 2.6 miles, 134 calories

An excellent episode capitalizing on the popular panic about Africanized honey bees being super-aggressive and deadly -- as well as LIVE BEE INSEMINATION.

Despite clearly being built on the panic, the episode was factual and even tried to downplay the bees, to the point where it sounded like bee propaganda. Nimoy says "Killer bees deserve our respect" in a way that sounds almost ingratiating, eg, "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

This follows a number of shots of a man in a beekeeper suit deliberately aggravating a hive, which result in him and the camera man being chased for some time and even traditional tools like smoke don't calm them down. 

We also get our first look at bee biology, as Nimoy voices over the life of the hive, with fertile queens, specialized drones and how eggs are stored in special cells and emerge as fully formed adults, which I did not know. 

He then described how the bees were created. European honey bees were dandy and benign, having been brought to the New World deliberately for their honey and wax production. But African honey bees fascinated apiologists, because although bigger and more aggressive and territorial, they were also much more productive. "A harsh, nomadic race," Nimoy called them.

Anyways, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, researchers wanted to see if they could breed a better bee, combining the productivity of the African bee with the tranquility of the European. In other words, as all great b movies start, "They tampered in God's domain."

The show then goes back to being a straight documentary as Nimoy discusses further breeding to try to dilute the bees' aggression. As a result, we see a scientist squeeze a bee to extract semen and then artificially insemenate a queen. There are also scenes of a scientist performing what I believe is a vivisection on a bee because that was the only way to tell the different bees apart. 

Then we go back to the beekeeper, Dr Norman Gary, who talks about and then demonstrates the different ways to make the bees angry. According to In Search Of, killing just one can bring out a swarm bent on removing the threat, but they also show how motorized farm equipment angers them, or how they'll build a hive in a rotted log or hollow stump, which a farmer then chains saws through in preparation of removing it, setting them off. In his beekeeper's vail, Gary also showed how the bees fiercely attack things colored black, in Gary's case a patch of leather attached to his suit, which quickly had dozens of stings in it. Goths will also therefore be at high risk. 

Finally Nimoy discusses how the bees are on their way, expected to arrive in the US in 1990 and how some plans to stop them include building a net across the Panama Canal -- "We'll build a hive and make the bees pay for it."

Podcast summary:

Jeb and Blake described this as "Kind of almost not an episode of In Search Of" because of its factual nature. Jeb talked about how the whole idea of the "Killer bees are coming" is partially a real thing and a partially a cultural anxiety. They mention of a bunch of "killer insect" films, including "The Swarm" from 1974 and two MST3K films, The Beginning of the End and The Deadly Mantis (they also did 1967's The Deadly Bees). Jeb said that, since he does archeological work in Central America, he has met people who have been stung by Africanized bees and if you're not allergic to bees, you can develop an allergy if you're stung enough times. (Some people even think beestings or bee venom can be therapeutic.)

He also talked about how people in Central America have been keeping bees -- and there are native American stingless bees -- for about 2,000 years, using traditional methods where the bees are kept in logs. This method is dying out because the American bee doesn't produce as much honey as either the European or Africanized bees (interestingly, I was looking up stuff on Wikipedia related to this episode and according to it, the African bee that was used in the hybridization attempts was the East African Lowland Honey Bee. This bee itself is under threat in southern Africa, by the Cape Honey Bee. Basically, the Cape Honey Bee has female workers capable of reproducing parthenogenetically and when they come across colonies of the East African Lowland Bees, they resemble queens so much they don't get recognized as invaders, so they get to eat the colonies' food without contributing to it and eventually the host colony queen starves to death and the colony dies).

They discussed what podcasting would be like if they had to dance to communicate the way bees do and Norman Gary's film career -- he's now who Hollywood turns to when they need bees.

Jeb also says "Do not want" to radioactive wasps from the Hanford, Washington nuclear site. Blake, who is from the South, says that because of climate change hornets and yellow jacket nests aren't dying during the winter, but are forming huge multi-year nests. Yellow jackets are bad news, but hopefully the kudzu will take care of things. 

Whole moral of this episode might be that humans mess up accidentally bringing new plants and animals across continents, but deliberately doing that is somehow even worse. 

  

  

Episode Five: Bigfoot

 Episode Summary: In Search Of goes looking for Bigfoot, the best-known cryptid of them all. 

Bike summary: 2.8 miles, 142.4 calories

This episode opens with a bang. Almost literally, as it's a reenaction of the Ape Canyon Incident, where some miners working near Mount St Helens were beseiged by ape-like creatures who threw rocks at their cabin and screamed. 

We get a lot of shots of the Pacific Northwest and some talk about Native American beliefs of sasquatch as gentle, friendly creatures. 

There's an interview of a person in his car who says that he saw a Bigfoot trying to get into the car or something like that and it was scared off, but left a strong odor in the car for days (in the podcast they say it was a sulfur smell, but I don't remember that detail from the show). The different stories and reenactments all make the episode feel like Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (confusingly the third film in the Boggy Creek series), as riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000. There's a scene where auteur Charles B. Pierce confronts the creature with a pistol and a pair of short-shorts and yells something like "I don't see you, but I sure do smell you".

There's also stuff about a very-aristocratic sounding Bigfoot tracker who hunted big game in Nepal investigating Bigfoot sightings throughout the Pacific Northwest, an anthropologist who said that Bigfoot was absolutely gigantopithecus and the Patterson-Gimlin film. They don't do much with the film, other than show the sequence everyone knows, but I find it fascinating -- Patterson was dying of cancer and for some reason settled on cryptozoology as an opportunity to make some quick cash so he could die in some comfort and provide some security for his family, so he decided to make a Bigfoot film and immediately was able to take some footage of one. That has set the alarm bells ringing that it was hoax, as was the fact that they talked to a guy called Ray Wallace who would later be revealed as a hoaxer (I believe he made a bunch of fake tracks). Patterson and Gimlin both maintained it was real until their dying days -- and Gimlin refused to talk about it for something like 40 years. What I find most interesting is that the man who claimed to have worn the suit and the man who claimed to have made it have given completely opposite descriptions of what the suit looked like, was made out of and how it was worn. 

The episode's focus on the Pacific Northwest is interesting, since there have been reports of Bigfoot from across the country. In fact, it's one of the few cryptids I know of where there are enough sightings that it could actually be a real animal, whether unknown or not. In particular, the town I grew up in, Rutland, VT, was at one end of a Bigfoot hot spot that stretch along US Route Four to Whitehall, NY. There are still sightings reported today and Finding Bigfoot filmed an episode there.

When I was in high school I was the biggest and tallest among my friends and two of them actually wanted to rent an ape costume, put me in it and have me dart across the highway when a car was coming around sunset. I refused on the grounds that too many people in rural Vermont are armed. 

Another interesting thing is that sightings of Bigfoot-type phenomena aren't unknown from other cultures in history. The yeti is the best known of these, but Medieval Europe knew several kinds of wild men, green men and wood woses. The archetype was also present in Greek and Roman mythology. In Jewish folklore Cain is sometimes depicted as being accidentally killed by his grandson, who mistook him for a beast. Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh might be the earliest.

One of the books they had the International Cryptozoology Museum was called Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men, which locates St Nick in this mytheme and needs to be the title of a film. 

Podcast summary:

The Ape Canyon events are possibly weirder than anyone thought (I had never heard of them before seeing this episode). In the newspaper accounts researchers have dug up, the miners explicitly deny engaging in spiritualist or theosophical activity over the winter. I'm not sure what was meant to be implied -- that they had accidentally summoned the creatures they said attacked them? 

The anthropologist talking about gigantopithecus was Gordon Krantz, who would eventually grow a Gandalf-esque beard. One interesting thing is that only the fossilized jaws of gigantopithecus have been discovered, which are similar to those of orangutangs, only much bigger. 

Jeb also caught a Boggy Creek vibe from this episode. Great minds, etc. 

They do great with the guy who was interviewed in his car. They say it looks like In Search Of set up a road block to ask people if they had Bigfoot stories. They also get a lot of milage from the Paqcific Northwest setting. "Come for the Bigfoot, stay for the pot."

I was surprised how nice they were about this episode. They obviously know a lot of Bigfoot lore and attribute most of the episode's issues to research limitations of the 1970s -- they didn't have Google or digital archives. 

Peter Byrne, the aristocratic-sounding tracker, worked for a man called Tom Slick looking for Yetis in Nepal. Slick was a millionaire who ran a clandestine airline on behalf of the US government in Southeast Asia -- they said it was a predescor of Air America. Many of Slick's Yeti expedeitions were also covers for spying on China. 

Jeb and Blake also have an interesting convrersation about how Bigfoot replaces "savages" in some stories and how cryptozoology interprets beings like the Sasquatch into unknown animals to fit in with the investigators' bias. I think they were getting at the "wild man" or wood wose idea and they said that the idea of Bigfoot as supernatural was starting to come back. 

Does an unknown giant hominid live and roam in the great forests of North America? Is it an alien, a fearie, or a very lost, very hairy French Canadian? All I know is I submarine lightbulb. 

Episode Four: The Bermuda Triangle

 Episode summary: Nimoy throws shade at Nova and a Coast Guard cutter encounters fog . . . in the Bermuda Triangle. 

Bike summary: 3.3 miles. This is the last episode I forgot to record calory data for. 

When people think of In Search Of, it's probably episodes like this that come to mind, versus that first one about psychic plants. 

I don't think I've heard anything about it recently -- the universal adoption of GPS for navigating for ships and boats, as well as the fact that Bermuda, the Bahamas and Miami were hubs of a huge tourist trade may have finally killed it in popular culture -- but when I was a kid in the 90s there were still shows about it appearing with some regularity (I seem to recall having my parents videotape one two hour long one that connected the Bermuda Triangle to Atlantis that must have been shown at 9:00 pm. Update: it might be this one, hosted by Richard Crenna, with this the Atlantis one ). I think TV crews like justifying trips to the Bahamas as work trips. Nowadays the only things that disappear mysteriously in that part of the world are the tax liabilities of certain high net worth individuals and businesses. 

Anyways, we open with Nimoy throwing shade on a rival documentary crew that concluded there was no mystery to the Bermuda Triangle by engaging in what can only be described as moving the goal posts. It's very subtle, but he says something like "Not to investigate is undermine the essence of science itself", even though the rivals (which turned out to be Nova) concluded that there's nothing paranormal going on, not that there's nothing to investigate. Of course missing planes and ships need to be investigated, for the sake of the families and insurers if nothing else, but there's a huge difference between saying to a greiving widow "Your husband's ship disappeared. It probably sank with all hands, but we can't find any remains because the ocean is big, deep and dark." and "Your husband's ship disappeared and we don't care." 

I do wonder if multiple TV crews have ever turned up to make dueling documentaries somewhere and they end up trying to sabotage each other and rewrite the scripts to include disses and take thats. 

It's a way of making skeptcs sound callous, dogmatic and incurious and it's still done today. UFO believers have won a huge victory by getting the US military to release a bunch of videos taken by planes, get these videos into mainstream publications like The New York Times and get ex-CIA director John Brennan to say things like "Some of the phenomena we're going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be the result of something we don't yet understand . . ." But press them on the explanations advanced by skeptics and they say they just want to investigate.

To demonstrate that there's still a mystery to solve, we are presented with a few stories we're told can't be explained: a plane crash, a Coast Guard cutter encountering a white wall that left people on board feel cold and clammy and someone with a mid-Atlantic accent calling in to a radio station. 

The Coast Guard cutter seems to have come across some fog and they don't offer many details about the crash. The voice on the radio was genuinely creepy, though. It said that every living thing has an aura, as does the planet itself, and the Bermuda Triangle is like some kind of communications device for the planet's aura to contact the "Millionth Council" that governs it. Ships and planes get transported to "the timeless void" if they're in the triangle when the thing is on. A) This sounds like something from a film (or TV show, eg The Fantastic Journey, B) Why are "precursor" or advanced civilizations always so damn negligent? In fiction they'll mark their abandoned superweapons or the repository of an evil warlord's consciousness with temples or shmuck-baity warnings, but these Millionth Council jokers can't even bother to put up a single pyramid of skulls. I guess in space no one can hear you file a civil suit. They're doing a great job of governing the planet, too. 

Podcast summary:

I like Smith's Razor: "Never attribute to the paranormal what can be attributed to your misunderstanding of statistics."

Of course, as any baseball fan knows, even massive sample sizes don't mean that the nigh-impossible doesn't happen, only that it will evantually happen to a Mets team in a close playoff race -- just ask Jeff Francoeur.

In the show notes they mention that writer Gian Quasar speculates that the "Millionth Council" caller is either Peter Tompkins (who wrote about psychic plants, ancient astronauts and the Bermuda Triangle) or Carlos Allende (he invented the Philadelphia Experiment).

I think Jeb says the whole phone thing is very Mothman-y, which gives me an excuse to post this picture, from the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, ME.

Blake also talks about some of the ships that "mysteriously" disappeared in the Triangle and it turns out that they were old, slow cargo ships operated without much regard for safety in a part of the world known for hurricanes. One of the ships was on fire so much the alarms were turned off! Wikipedia goes him one better and points out that a ship cited as disappearing in the Triangle actually exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles away. 

In the end, the real mystery is if I'm ever going to get this Barry Manilow song out of my head.

 

Episode Three: Ancient Aviators

Bike summary: 2.1 miles, also forgot to note calories. 

Episode summary: could ancient people fly?

This was an odd one. As they said in the podcast, it was like they were trying to do an ancient astronauts episode without talking about ancient astronauts. It was still odd considering one of the specials that preceeded the series (and which was hosted by Rod Serling) was all about that stuff. I guess they had the footage?

The episode has a lot of footage of the Nazca Lines, which they say can only be seen from the air. They don't spend a lot of time delving into the history or archeology of the lines, in favor of hopping around to different locations in Central America and even India. They make a lot of weird assumptions and the Indian observatory they visit is the seen of one of them: Nimoy says that it shows an "understanding of space and time" neccesarry for flight, as though the Wright Brothers were cosmologists. Another weird assumption is when they show an experiment in Death Valley speculating that Native Americans could have had hot air balloons, which they would use to direct the drawing of pictographs like the Nazca Lines.

(It's easy! You kill a deer, you tan the hide, you make an annodized aluminum frame and you learn how to extrude and weld, all in about five minutes.)

Of course, needing to be able to see a whole site from above in order to draw something on the surface like that is like saying that maps were impossible to make before the airplane. Since I'm on the topic, I've seen loads of these sorts of shows that do state the premise: that the Nazca Lines were part of a runway for ancient spaceships. However, if you look at Nazca on Google Maps, it turns out they're really hard to see from space, so I think we can discount the space ship idea. Also, nobody ever seems to talk about the chalk figures of England in these discussions -- some of them, like the White Horse of Uffington, are certainly old enough.

There's a funny moment where Nimoy suggests that Inca roads could have been runways, while they show a shot of a road curving over and around a hill, because you don't want a runway to be smooth and straight. 

They also show some Maya ruins and suggest that the Maya, whom they imply ceased to exist, used aircraft to get from city to city. Or maybe their roads have been swallowed by the jungle. Also, the Maya last rebelled against European rule in the 1920s.

Also, in a show that mostly talks about ancient things, without really dating anything, Leonardo Da Vinci shows up (fresh from Quest of the Delta Knights, I guess) with his helicopter. For this I must invoke SF Debris and award this episode of In Search Of an "Ancient Chinese secret, huh".

We also get some images of Cape Canaveral, which Nimoy describes as "forlorn and abandoned" and another Mesoamerican site, comparing the two. If you squint they kind of look similar, but only just. They are also apparently filming both from highly specific angles. 

Podcast summary:

It turns out Jeb Card specializes in Mayan archeology and so we get a very informative discussion of their history, the fact that of course they built roads and, in fact, road metaphors are very common in Mayan speech. 

We also got to learn more about the people of the Nazca Desert. Basically, it's in the rain shadow of the Andes, like the Atacama in Chile, and it gets next to no rain at all. But there are snow-fed rivers that come down from the mountains and in the river valleys people settled and formed civilizations. They buried their dead with grave goods in the desert and it's so dry the burials are often very well preserved and we know that textiles were very important, including cotton (which I thought cotton was an old world plant). I wonder if cotton's high water demand played a roll in its value. 

They also brought up the Ica stones, which I had never heard of. These are fakes, made by a farmer in a different valley, that purported to be ancient depictions of humans coexisting with dinosaurs. They also showed dinosaurs with udders, which maybe should have been a clue they were fakes. 

So, Professor, you made this entirely out of bamboo?  

   

Episode Two: Strange Visitors

 Bike summary: 2.5 miles, didn't record calories

Episode summary: Is a stone structure in New Hampshire proof that ancient Phonecians visited North America thousands of years before Columbus? No, but that won't ever stop us!

This is one of my favorite episodes, since I'm a New Englander and this site is only about 30 miles north of me. 

We get a lot of shots of the Palace of Knossos and some other ancient ruins while Leonard Nimoy talks astronomical alignments and then we see the focus of the episode: Mystery Hill, America's Stonehenge, in North Salem, NH. To my untrained eyes, Mystery Hill doesn't look much like any ancient site. It looks like a root cellar or the foundation of a barn.

There's a section on an analysis of charcoal from the site, which was apparently carbon dated to 2000 BC or something like that. It came from between the stones and I'm not sure how that would work to date the site. If it came from something that could plausibly be identified as a cooking or other human-made fire, that could, in the right context, give you a range of dates for human use of the site. But it seems to me that charcoal from between stones that are exposed to the elements a) doesn't tell you if the charcoal is man-made or the result of a forest fire or b) if the charcoal is even part of the site -- if the people living next door to Stonehenge have a cookout today, or burn a police officer in a wicker man, and the smoke blows on to Stonehenge, the logic of this episode suggests we could date Stonehenge to contemporary times because of this contemporary material. 

We also get to hear from Dr Barry Fell, a marine biologist who convvinced himself he could read ancient Phonecian and Ogham and suddenly found Phonecian and Ogham inscriptions everywhere in random rocks in New England that no one else could see. 

One thing that's not really talked about is why the Phoenicians would have come to New England in the first place. European fishermen may have reached the Canadian maritimes (and their huge supply of cod) before Columbus, although I don't think there's any hard evidence for it and I'm not sure there was enough demand would have made such a voyage profitable. Most other trade goods from North America would have been found in the archeology of the ancient Mediterranean and recognized -- the historical Columbian exchange totally changed the European diet and culture -- paprika, tomatoes and potatoes are just three North American plants that assumed paramount roles in old world cuisine. Tobacco reached some very remote places in the Old World very quickly and things like furs of North American animals would have been found in Europe and the Near East and artifacts from there would have been definitively found here. There's no tin or copper in New England and certainly no evidence of the mining or smelting operations Bronze Age civilizations practiced. The Sinai Desert, for example, is littered with holes where copper-bearing ores were dug, as well as slag heaps where the ores were processed for the pure metal. 

There are no burials at Mystery Hill, no midden heaps, no drinking water and strangely for a site supposedly settled by people who sailed across the ocean, it's inland. It's over six miles from the Merrimack River and at least 20 from the sea. Ancient people were not suburbanites living in subdivisions with pre-existing utility hookups, they didn't build cities in places with no resources, with no access to transportation. 

Podcast summary.

This episode of the podcast featured Ken Feder, an archeologist in Connecticut, who had a lot of interesting facts about Mystery Hill. He said that it's still unclear who built it, although the site was substantially changed by a man called William Goodwin, who bought it in the 30s and decided it was the work of Irish monks in the Middle Ages. It wasn't until the 70s that it was promoted as Bronze Age. 

They spend a lot of time talking about HP Lovecraft this episode and I don't know why, other than the coincidence that Mystery Hill started being promoted as a tourist attraction the same year Lovecraft died. They mention that he wrote some pastiches of Arthur Machen transposing Machen's Celtic-inspired fantasy to New England, but Lovecraft was neither a major literary figure in his lifetime nor was he the first person to imagine a more ancient, non-Native American past for the region. 

It was super popular in the 19th century to find evidence of Vikings everywhere. The sagas of Leif Eriksson had been popularized and, probably as a reaction to Irish and Italian Catholic immigration (the Catholic fraternal society the Knight of Columbus was founded in New Haven, CT in 1882), New England WASP elite embraced the blond-haired, blue-eyed Leif from what would become Protestant Scandinavia as discoverer over the swarthy, dark-haired Italian working for those Spaniards with their Inquisition and popery and hostility to free thought.  

Longfellow wrote a poem called "The Skeleton in Armor" reimaging an indigenous grave that was discovered of a man with a copper breastplate in the New Bedford area as that of a European in late medieval plate armor; a windmill in Newport, RI that was probably built in the 1650s was decided to be Viking and a millionaire chemistry professor claimed to have discovered Leif Eriksson's city on the Charles River, conveniently close to his home in Wellesley. 

Eben Norton Horsford was a professor at Wellesley College who invented a popular baking powder, becoming very wealthy. He used his money to promote his theory that the Vikings colonized New England, building a city called Norumbega. Horsford even claimed to find evidence of the Norse language in Native American languages. With his own money he errected a tower in Weston, Mass, where he believed they settled. His daughter later installed a tablet on a site in Cambridge (today sadly overrun by highway) where she believed Eriksson had a country house, she also donated a statue of Leif Eriksson to the City of Boston and it's on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall to this day. This was also the era of the Book of Mormon, the Prince Madoc legends and endless ideas about Native Americans as the lost tribes of Israel. 

They also talk about Native erasure in this episode, which is certainly a thing, but some of the specific imagery I don't remember seeing (maybe they got confused and it was from a different episode, maybe I just wasn't paying attention?)

Ken Feder brought up Dudleytown, a ghost town in Connecticut, that I've never heard of, but people also assume it's much older than it really is. The woods have grown back in many places and you can totally find old stone walls, old foundations and root cellars in the middle of what feels like virgin forest. However, I believe that 90 percent of Vermont was clear cut by 1920, for lumber and paper. They floated huge log rafts down the Connecticut River to the mills at Holyoke and Chicopee. Things weren't allowed to grow back, however, until the Hurricane of 1927, which caused mudslides and major floods and people realized that the trees helped protect river banks and subsequent storms haven't been as destructive, although Irene came close. 

Episode One: Other Voices

 Episode summary: Can plants talk? In Search Of investigates. 

Bike summary: 2.1 miles, 108 calories. 

TV reaction:

As first episodes go, this is an odd choice. I know people in the 70s and 80s had strange pseudoscientific fads like pyramid power, crystals and the intelligence of dolphins and whales, but what was going on that made a show about the supposed psychic and empathic powers of houseplants compelling TV? (Although having seen the ads that accompanied the Star Wars Holiday Special, maybe this was dangerously exciting by 70s standards?) I would have led with the Bigfoot episode, which opens with a tense, dramatic reenactment of a cabin supposedly being beseiged by Bigfoots.

Not much about the episode sticks out to me, other than Nimoy's frankly creepy insinuations. "Children are more accepting of new ideas than adults", "Have plants been speaking to Man for millions of years?" "Your honor, the plants told me to kidnap the children". (I made that last one up.)

It feels a bit unfocused. There's a bit at the beginning where some guy is trying to teach kids to "feel the plant's life force" or something, a woman doing an experiment with playing music to plants, some Kirlian photography showing plant "auras" and a guy with a polygraph machine trying to see if plants can feel others' pain, first by scratching himself with a scalpel and then by scratching a producer with it. Nothing really ties it together. It really needed something like an explicit thesis of vitalism or maybe the Gaia  hypothesis to bring it together. Also, I find it interesting that they didn't talk about Peter and Eileen Caddy's garden in Findhorn, Scotland, which they claim flourished because of their spiritual practices. 

Podcast:

No Nimoy Fashion Report yet. 

The kids in the beginning are doing "plant Reiki" according to Jeb (I think, it might be Blake). The guy teaching them to empathize with mulch is Billy Meier, who made the photo the "I want to believe" poster is based on. It's apparently from The X-Files, but I know it from poster sales at college in the late Aughts and Vice TV ads in the Boston subway. (Meier also claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus and Mohammed, among others, and is in contact with extraterrestrials, like someone who really likes the All Myths are True trope. Per Wikipedia, he's also an anti-Semite.)

Jeb and Blake really focus in on polygraph guy, who they find really squicky for the way he does the "experiment" with plants feeling the pain of others. They keep describing him as "stabbing" with the scalpel, which makes me think of Young Frankenstein, but it's more of a scraping motion. Also, polygraph guy was an interogator for the CIA, which makes me wonder if they let him go because he wanted to recruit plants as spies (maybe Timothy Zhan saw this?).

They mention that the Mythbusters recreated the "play plants music" experiment (NB: I want to look up this experiment because the episode presents it like this woman got a doctorate for a science fair project, while kids these days build fusion reactors for their science fairs), but while the experiment on In Search Of found that classical music was great for plants and acid rock the worst for them, I think the experiment on Mythbusters found that plants preferred heavy metal to other types.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we know what plants would say if they could talk.