Joe Rogan Experience #2543 - MrBallen

The Dyatlov Pass search party found nine sets of footprints leading away from the tent.

The tracks were real and they are one of the strangest parts of the case. Searchers followed a single file trail of prints downslope for close to a mile, made by people in socks, bare feet or one boot, with none leading back. What the record does not support is a clean count of nine. Accounts from the search put it at eight or nine sets.

A standard SEAL training class consists of approximately 100 enlisted candidates and 8 to 10 officer candidates.

The shape is right, the split is not. An average BUD/S class starts with about 148 candidates, roughly 15% of them officers, so more like 22 officers and 126 enlisted. Across a year the Navy takes about 70 to 80 officers against 700 to 800 enlisted.

Biceps tendinitis surgery involves removing a portion of the biceps tendon.

Close, but the tendon is moved rather than taken out. In a tenodesis the surgeon detaches the long head of the biceps tendon from inside the shoulder, trims the end, and anchors what is left to the upper arm bone. In a tenotomy it is simply cut loose and allowed to drop, which is where the Popeye bulge comes from. Neither one removes the tendon.

The McLeod brothers disappeared in the Nahani Valley and were later found dead and headless in 1905.

The story is right, the date is off by a few years. Willie and Frank McLeod went up the Nahanni in 1906 and were never seen alive again. A search party found their skeletons near a camp about 90 miles up the river on 24 July 1908, and the accounts from that search do describe them as headless. That is where the valley got its nickname.

Martin Jorgensson was found dead and headless in the Nahani Valley in 1913 after his cabin burned down.

There is a real record of this, though the year is wrong. The prospector was Martin Jorgenson, and he was found in 1917, not 1913, near the Flat River, his cabin burned to the ground and a headless skeleton beside a still cocked rifle. He had written to friends weeks earlier saying he had struck it rich. None of the gold turned up.

Riley O'Brien was a prospector in the Nahani Valley who was found frozen to death sitting by a cold fire pit.

The frozen prospector story is real, but the name is off. Multiple accounts of the Nahanni 'Headless Valley' legend describe a trapper named John O'Brien who was found frozen solid sitting near his campfire with a matchstick still in hand, not someone named Riley O'Brien.

May Laferty went missing during a hunting trip in the Nahani Valley in 1926.

A woman with a similar name really did vanish from a hunting party in the Nahanni region in 1926, but most retellings of the story give her name as Annie or Anne Laferte, not May Laferty. The year and the basic circumstances hold up; the first name is the part that doesn't match.

Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets located within the habitable 'Goldilocks zone'.

Thousands is the total, not the habitable slice. Astronomers have confirmed roughly 6,000 exoplanets, and only about 97 of those sit inside the conservative habitable zone of their star. Being in that zone also does not make a planet habitable, it just means liquid water is possible there.

Betty and Barney Hill reported a UFO abduction experience in New Hampshire during the 1950s.

The story is real, the decade is not. Betty and Barney Hill said they were taken on the night of 19 September 1961, driving home through the White Mountains in New Hampshire. That is the 1960s, and it became the case that set the template for every abduction account that followed.

Hell Week in Navy SEAL training requires trainees to remain awake for five and a half days.

Hell Week does run five and a half days, and sleep is close to nonexistent, but it is not zero. The Navy's own description puts candidates at roughly four total hours of sleep across the whole week, taken in short broken stretches, while training more than 20 hours a day.

The speaker signed a $62 million deal with Amazon for his podcast.

The deal is real, the number is not public. MrBallen signed an exclusive content deal with Amazon in 2022 that moved his podcast to Amazon Music for three years, and he later moved to SiriusXM. Neither side has disclosed what the Amazon deal was worth, so $62 million is not a figure anyone can check.

Second phase SEAL training includes a pool competency test which is 20 minutes long.

Pool competency is real and it is one of the most feared parts of Second Phase, where instructors sabotage a diver's gear underwater to see whether he keeps his head and works the problem. What it is not is a single 20 minute block. It is a series of separate underwater tests, and the published descriptions of the phase do not define it by a fixed running time.

John Patterson was a prospector who went missing in the Nahani Valley around 1939 or 1940.

John Patterson was a real prospector who disappeared in the Nahanni Valley, but the documented year is 1946, not 1939 or 1940. His partner, geologist Frank Henderson, reported him missing after the two failed to meet up near Virginia Falls.