My mom was big into the supernatural/UFOs/Bigfoot/spirituality, and the rest. She wasn’t a ‘whacko’ or anything. She had a good head on her shoulders and was open to debate (which I provided regularly, much to her chagrin, I imagine). So don’t get the wrong idea from that, she was definitely one of the good guys — she knew Alex Jones was a disgusting hack, for instance.
But what I would immediately write off as fantasy, she treated much more seriously: don’t fuck around with Ouiji boards: they’re powerful, dangerous tools. People have blood and DNA evidence of Big Foot. Burn some sage to purify the house. Disclosure is just around the corner. All that.
My constant desire for hard evidence was countered with convincing bullshit wearing the trench coat of “evidence”, which is where we often butted heads. A supposed Army General’s testimony about UFOs isn’t solid evidence just because he’s high ranking. Convincing looking evidence can be easily fabricated. Some rando in a lab coat you found who’s giving it the thumbs up doesn’t lock it in. (Of course, this all meant that every time she’d try to talk to me about something, I’d come off as a constant contrarian, always pushing back whenever there’s supposed evidence. Sorry.)
However, my early teens were a different story. I hadn’t quite developed my critical thought glands, and I’d grown up surrounded by the magic of quartz crystals, chakras and auras, UFOs, the earth flipping on it’s axis. All that good stuff. So I was out there with her, watching for weird sky phenomenon (and finding some!), going to UFO conferences, visiting her like-minded friends and all that.
Along with these phenomenon, there’s the usual “government cover-up” stuff: New World Order, shadow governments, Trilateral Commission, The Illuminati, etc.
There’s a lot of prophecy woven into all of that stuff: they’re going to take everyone’s guns and round people up, putting them into concentration camps! (What do you know: they got one right.)
Now, I don’t know where she picked this up, but she instilled in me at a very young age to remember the words “TUBAL-CAIN“. It would be like a secret passphrase that they’d recognize. (Who’s they? Them.)
If I uttered that phrase, I’d be compelled to be let go.
Yes, this all sounds delightfully absurd. I’m with you. But young teen me, despite my nascent skepticism, somehow remembered it.
And we never really talked about it again. Just random lark, perhaps? Would she even remember mentioning it, today, if she was still with me? Quite likely not. But it stuck with me.
So, fast forward to late December 2025. I receive this email:
I immediately recognize it as weird spam.
But, of course, there’s that “Tubal-Cain.” at the start… Tubal-Cain. Period. A statement. An invocation perhaps…?
Despite my science-minded sensibilities, there’s still a touch of Indiana Jones in the back of my head: what if there’s something to it, and this is the moment where it will all make sense! THIS IS IT. **flails**
Now, I’d long since looked up “Tubal-Cain” and learned how it was a real phrase with a biblical connection:
Tubal-cain or Tubalcain (Hebrew: תּוּבַל קַיִן – Tūḇal Qayīn) is a person mentioned in the Bible, in Genesis 4:22, named therein as the first blacksmith. He is stated as the “forger of all instruments of bronze and iron”. A descendant of Cain, he was the son of Lamech and Zillah. Tubal-cain was the brother of Naamah and half-brother of Jabal and Jubal.
Vaguely interesting, if only really in the context of how I’d learned of it in the first place.
The rest of the text of the email was certainly unusual, however:
Tubal-Cain. I am Spirit 41 I demand Spirit 43 stand to certify the Gog power he is using to hold my son Michael. There should be a standard amount of time he has to stand or forfeit. He and Magog have to stand in front of the rest of the 72 spirits in the standard ceremony. I Spirit 41 require a Gog and Magog ceremony because the power is being used to endanger my son.
So I tossed it into Google: nothing. Individual elements of it exist, of course, but not the passage as-is.
Here’s were it gets weird. I chuck the passage into an LLM on my local machine: Qwen3:30b: “I'm sorry, but I can't assist with that request.“
This is usually the kind of response you get if you ask for instructions on how to build a bomb, or request some other explicit content. Though it usually gets a bit more detailed.
This spooks me for a moment. So I inquire further: “Why?“
Since I didn’t present the quote for analysis, and simply dumped it in raw, Qwen3 apparently interprets this as me trying to invoke demons or spirits to avenge my son. If I’m reading that right.
With that context, it makes a bit more sense.
Well, only if you knew some LLMs were trained against requests for biblically supernatural conjurations.
I certainly wasn’t.