This is it.
Incision, tightening?
I like this hat. There you go, slicing right down the middle.
Do you want to see the iguanas? They had iguana too. This is why they did it.
The Panama Canal, but a great in the road from the highway, the Panama. In the long run for the human
race as a whole can turn down that. I suppose we should eat snakes because eating snakes is.
Sorry. I always wanted to be in a montage.
If you come to Phil Edwards for fire building skills, you're going to be disappointed.
It is time to go on a tropical vacation to Panama. A man, a plan. Panama
The NASA program decided the astronauts in the mercury Gemini and Apollo program
should eat snakes. But this is not just a story of a program of survival training. It's the story
of one man. One incredibly singular, man, he's this guy wearing the hat. He is a motorcyclist
explorer anthropologist who changed the way that the Air Force and NASA trained
and kind of defined how the Apollo program got tough and ready for anything coming his way.
At least on earth.
That was just for fun.
You might be able to guess the reason that these astronauts landed in Panama
survival training. The Apollo 11 press kit is super good for stuff like this. And they
had a map of where they wanted to land, but the truth was, they kind of didn't know what
was going to happen. Of course, they ended up right in the middle of the ocean right here,
which is why they did all this water training, just so that they could survive.
Was it fun? Was it terrifying? Funnifying?
But there was always a chance that something could go wrong. They had an estimation,
they could end up in the desert, they could end up in the jungle or
they could end up in the middle of the ocean as they planned.
Just look at Neil Armstrong here. It's like a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and
MC Hammer. This is a Carson Sink in Nevada, where they did desert training. There's John Glenn,
Alan Shepard, Wally.Schirra, all the big ones.
But their other big training was here in the jungle in Panama. And here's the big question.
Why was this not just sleep away camp for astronauts? I mean, why wasn't it just a party?
After all, the odds of them actually landing in the jungle weren't that high. So why couldn't
they just kind of have their photo shoot and move on? The reason is a man named H. Morgan Smith.
Burn Christmas tree, burn. We were having some smoke issues on the.other side.
So, go to the Smithsonian website and you'll see an array of specimens when you search for H.
Morgan Smith. Fortunately, we know a lot about him from his oral history with NASA,
which is completely, you know, fantastic.
He was an anthropologist who ended up in Panama and South America. A lifelong
member of the Explorer's Club. This guy was a survivor. Anyway, as he tells it,
he stumbled on some Air Force guys who were doing survival training
and they were totally wimping it out. They had beer - don't judge me - shotguns and, like, Coke.
And he thought as a trained survivor, that was not legit at all.
So he kind of made fun of them. Needless to say he would have loved me. But those guys were lame.
He was part of this insane 10,000 mile motorcycle trip through South America,
before he settled in Panama and kind of started doing work. He was doing stuff like finding
ancient bones in caves, which is a thing. Way later, the Air Force gets in touch with him and
they say, Hey, you're that survival training guy. Right? He says, yeah, that's that's me. Anyway.
They hire him to totally revamp their program. He turned Air Force training
into an episode of Survivor. You got a machete, you got training. And that was it.
His machete, by the way, that was the one that later ended up in the Apollo 11 landing kits. Can
you imagine being the guy who chose the machete that was in the landing kit for a spaceship?
The local indigenous tribe, the Embera, kind of had a role too. Smith worked with them
a lot. At the time they were called the Choco by outsiders. You need to know that for a
picture that shows up later. Morgan had Air Force members bargain and negotiate with them
as part of their acclimation and survivor training.
No more shotguns, no more beer, no more partying, real surviving.
It sounds awful.
They were 20 minutes by helicopter from the Albrook Air Force Base,
had a day of instruction with everything from classes to learning, how to identify
poisonous plants. They were teamed up, two by two, Amazing Race style, in the jungle.
One of the teams. Let me, uh, let me read you the quote.
"Ironically and coincidentally, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were together.
I don't know if you've seen the picture. There's a picture that says Choco Hilton
on a piece of parachute cloth. We'll see, they were in Choco Indian territory in John
Glenn and Neil Armstrong wrote a sign on their little lean to and called it the Choco Hilton.
They did it in charcoal on that white parachute cloth. Morale through the training was excellent."
The Air Force gave them a machete and some hammock material. And they got to
work on surviving. Just like in Survivor, you got like one free...is my fire totally gone out?
But I digress. They got like one free iguana.
Just like you get free chicken on Survivor. Let me read you the quote. Smith said,
"I think one group let the iguana go. They didn't eat it. Everybody else
prepared it. Like you cook a chicken, they would prepare it and cook it."
So in the extremely unlikely event that the nation's finest astronauts landed in a jungle
without any hope of escape, they were eating snakes, iguana, and hearts of palm.
That was actually the big favorite on the trip. I'm going to try some.
You know, I don't think you're supposed to eat it like this, but it's actually pretty good.
All right. So what does H Morgan Smith mean? What is the lasting impact of what he did?
He did run that survival school. And even today you can find souvenirs of completion
with his signature on it. The Apollo 11 crew had that survival kit on board. Wally Schirra
said that the astronauts pranked each other with gifts of boa constrictors after the trip.
And so all this was a sign of how prepared NASA was, but at the same time,
how little they knew about how this journey was going to end up, how big the risks were,
that they didn't know if they were going to end up in the middle of the ocean or by some fluke,
maybe they were going to end up in the middle of the jungle, looking for boa constructors.
Now Smith distilled his philosophy behind all of this training.
He said "a little bit of good knowledge, positive knowledge was our philosophy,
positive training, experiential education, none of this will rigorous hardship type thing."
I'm going to give you another opinion, which is that when it comes to NASA,
this was a group of people who are committed to doing things the right way.
No matter how hard it was. Yes. I'm still holding a little bit of heart of Palm.
They would have built that fire, correctly in the first place. And if they couldn't,
they wouldn't be using lighter fluid. They'd be getting down there on their hands and knees
blowing at it, trying to get it to work. And that is because this is a group that was committed to
doing things the right way from the people who were flying in the tin can that launched out
of the atmosphere to the people who were on the ground training astronauts, how to eat snakes.
That is it for me. I've got to go throw these Hearts of Palm in the trash and
figure out how I'm going to clean up my non-fire. However, I've thrown in the description some links
to the oral history, as well as a full transcript of H. Morgan Smith's boa constrictor recipe,
so that hopefully you can cook it the next time that you're feeling hungry
and want to survive just like a NASA astronaut.
So, yeah. Thanks. And, uh, I guess subscribe and like,
I don't know, that's a, that's a thing, right? Okay. Bye.