As I mentioned on a previous post of mine; that I love to listen to radio shows. They are quite obscured now, but in the podcast form a few are making a good comeback. One show that I have listened quite a bit, is Tanis.
Tanis is a bi-weekly podcast, although now available in full at apple podcast (for your binge listening pleasures), from the Public Radio Alliance and Minnow Beats Whale. Tanis is hosted by Nic Silver and he always wanted to create a podcast about a true mystery. So he created Tanis.
I have heard about Tanis is many places before. My personal idea was Tanis is a lost city in Ancient Egypt at the Nile Delta. I remembered my Indiana Jones :) In Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark it was told that:
Tanis was an ancient Egyptian city, ruled by the Pharaoh Shishak, who placed the Ark of the Covenant within a secret chamber called the Well of the Souls. The city contained a palace, a pyramid, a court building, colossal statues and obelisks. Not long after this, Tanis was consumed by a sandstorm which lasted for an entire year and buried the city completely. Though never proven it was speculated that this was the divine power of God's wrath brought upon Shishak for daring to take the Ark.
I don't know how many of you remember this scene, but to me, this was one of the best scene of the movie:
Later I found out that, Tanis was a real city in the Nile Delta and was never actually 'lost' as described in that movie, but can be still observed today.
Tanis podcast actually looks into the true mystery of Tanis. When I say "true" I mean true as portrayed in the podcast which is sort of docudrama. For those who don't know what that means, it means the story does have a base in the reality, but it is dramatized to enhance and fit the need of the program.
The podcast is read my Nic Silver, who is the main character of the story with support from MK, Meerkatnip, who is a computer hacker, although she prefers to be called cyber-information-specialist. She only communicates via skype and email and prefers to be paid in Bitcoin (sigh!) Here I think they need some education, eh? Not only that is slow, but the transaction fees alone would kill Nic, and the public radio don't you think? :)
The story weaves around a lot and has a global footprint. It talks about Tanis, not as a city, but as a phenomenon, which has happened all over the world at different time and space. There are hints of it in multiple dark web message boards, strange unpublished books, and audio recordings and broadcasts for numbered short wave radio stations.
This last bit, I didn't know at all. May be I heard about it somewhere, and obviously read about it in many World War II era spy thrillers, but I didn't know they exists today. You can read more about them if you are interested here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
Nic and MK did a deep search and got entangled into a global conspiracy and took the listener with them for a ride of their lifetime.
There are 4 seasons, and I highly recommend it. If you have never listened to a program like this you will be pleasantly surprised. It will help, just like any good book, if you believe every bit of the story while you are in it. I think that is true for every book or movie or story.
