The first time I came across animal-to-human testicle transplants, I was reading a book of cocktail recipes.

I’m not a rich man, and by most metrics I’m chronically unsuccessful, but I do take some solace in the fact that I’ve lived the kind of life where I can write sentences like that. I learned about inter-species testicle transplants from a cocktail book.

It was in my bartending days and I was flicking through a recipe guide when I noticed a drink called a “Monkey Gland.” Obviously, I was intrigued. The drink itself is an oldie, from the 1920s, but in digging further I found that it was named for a medical fad of the time. People were well aware that human beings lose energy and become less vigorous with age, and this seems to have been at least partially a coded way of saying that men’s sex drives drop off over time. It then, apparently, seemed logical to some people that if we could install extra testicles in men - ideally from some of the hornier animals like monkeys or pigs - it would revitalise them.

There’s a lot to unpack, there. The fact that this idea wasn’t immediately laughed out of the room makes you realise just how recent a development modern medicine is. A hundred years ago you could seriously suggest installing monkey bollocks into a human man and people wouldn’t just consider it, they’d actually sign up. For all the advances we’ve made in the years since, it’s also worth noting that women’s medicine has always been an afterthought - pregnancy and childbirth deplete a woman’s body, but nobody worried about women losing energy or strength as they aged, let alone suggested that we improve their lot by installing extra ovaries or a donkey uterus or whatever.

Only men’s age-related decline was considered an issue, and the king of fixing men’s health with the balls of other animals was John R. Brinkley.

John Romulus Brinkley (he would later change his middle name to Richard in probably the only example of something in his life becoming less weird) was a quack doctor who completed about two thirds of a medical degree before he ran out of money, then decided that that was good enough and bought his final qualifications from a diploma mill. His only real belief about medicine was that goat balls would solve most problems. Starting out as the then-standard “giving a man extra goat nuts will revive his energy” quack, he slowly began to believe (or at least tell people) that surgically installing goat testicles would cure basically any illness or infirmity. Low sex drive? Goat balls. Asthma? Goat balls. Metastatic myesthelioma? Brinkley wouldn’t have known what that was, but he DID know that you didn’t get to talk down to him if you only had the one measly pair of testicles you started out with.

If you’re afflicted with a brain like mine, you’ll probably want to know what actually happens when someone installs goat balls into a human body, and I’ll save you sullying your search history: the short answer is that the body will recognise the goaticles as foreign tissue and break them down over time. They obviously don’t give you superpowers as John Brinkley insisted, but they also don’t actively seem to cause any harm as long as the surgery is carried out in a sterile environment.

John Brinkley did not carry out his surgeries in a sterile environment.

Having made a fortune with his goat surgeries, and peddling other quack medicines on the side through his pioneering use of radio advertising, the American Medical Assosciation came gunning for Brinkley after investigations revealed at least forty two deaths of previously healthy patients, probably due to unsanitary conditions in Brinkley’s operating room. He was ultimately stripped of his license to practice medicine in 1930. Shortly afterwards, he was also stripped of his radio broadcasting license, cutting off his popular (and self-aggrandising) second income stream when the state decided that his “radio station” was mostly just advertising for unproven medical products.

Undeterred, Brinkley ran for Governor, on the logic that if he won he could change the laws to say whatever he wanted and re-instate himself as a doctor and broadcaster. He was actually too late to declare his candidacy in the upcoming election, and so ran as an independent write-in candidate. The Kansas legislation, understandably unhappy that the goat balls guy was doing well in the polls due to a shrewd, populist campaign, ammended the rules so that only the specific name J. R. Brinkley would count as a write-in vote. With an estimated forty-thousand votes for “John Brinkley” or “Dr. Brinkley” or similar thereby discounted, Brinkley lost the election that he would otherwise have won.

It’s hard to know what to make of that, morally - on the one hand, a populist charlatan was kept out of office, which is for the best, not least because Brinkley spent his later years as a committed Nazi sympathiser. On the other hand, in a fair and democratic count, Brinkley won, and it’s only vote tampering that kept him out.

Either way, if you thought this story about a fake doctor who implanted goat testicles into people was an amusingly weird story from history, you should probably know that we haven’t got to the crazy part, yet.

With his political ambitions stymied, Brinkley decamped to Mexico, where medical laws were more lax and the government had an axe to grind over radio broadcasting.

Setting up shop just inside the Mexican border, Brinkley also set up a radio station that could transmit into America and continue to advertise his various pills and powders and goat implants. The Mexican government had been incensed that the Americans had divided up the radio broacast frequencies all across North America without consulting Mexico, and so were content to adopt an “anything goes” attitude when it came to Brinkley’s radio tower. With no oversight, Brinkley built himself a million watt transmitter.

A million watts is an insane amount of power. At this point, what Brinkley was in charge of was less a radio station and more of a doomsday weapon. Birds that flew in front of the tower would reportedly explode in mid air. Anything metallic for miles in every direction would vibrate with the sound of Brinkley’s XKR - “The Sunshine Station Between The Nations!”

Local telephone conversations would have Brinkley’s broadcasts as constant background noise, and farmers reported that you could hear XKR in barbed wire fences, or if you just held up a shovel. At night, it would make people’s mattress springs vibrate. Anyone who was unfortunate enough to have metal fillings in their teeth would hear the station inside their own heads. Drivers who went near the radio station reported that the signal was strong enough to turn their lights on.

On a clear night, you could reportedly pick up the station in Canada - the closest part of Canada to Brinkley’s transmitter being Winnipeg, sixteen hundred miles away. It would take you just under twenty four hours of unbroken driving to cover the same distance in a vehicle. Twenty eight if you want to avoid tolls going through Kansas, a state which ironically seems determined to prevent a wayward son from carrying on, unless they pay for it.

John Brinkley thus became the pioneer of what became known as “border blaster” radio stations - as the name implies, these were cheap Mexican radio stations that aimed over-powered signals into America. Interestingly, Brinkley (who, like all con artists, knew how to give people what they wanted) would play the popular music of the time and as a result launched the careers of several prominent country artists. As Brinkley’s XKR was easily the most powerful radio station in the world, and audible across huge swathes of North America, there’s a strong argument to be made that the American south west is assosciated with country music because of Brinkley. Artists like Gene Autry and the Carter Family became successful off the back of Brinkley’s ludicrous mega-transmitter.

The rest of the time, the station was dedicated to the same scams Brinkley had always run. Aside from ads for his own ineffectual medicines and his Mexican goat clinic, he sold air time at a premium (about thirty grand an hour, in modern money) to other enterprising scammers, including a company that advertised “genuine simulated diamonds” and a business that sold autographed pictures of Jesus.

Like many grifters, Brinkley was a mixture of cunning and lazy, and he built himself a mansion just inside the U.S., initially commuting a few minutes back and forth across the border to the station, before he hit on the idea of installing a phone line and broadcasting from his house. This led the increasingly frustrated American authorities to pass the “Brinkley Act”, which banned American telephones from transmitting on Mexican radio. Brinkley then took to pre-recording his shows, another area in which he was a pioneer.

By 1934, the Mexican government caved to American pressure and shut Brinkley’s station down. He continued in his medical practices, but as is so often the case, was brought down by his own greed. Other quacks began moving in on his territory, offering the same non-treatments for less money.

After a newspaper report accused him of being a quack and a charlatan, Brinkley attempted to sue for libel, but the jury found that he was, in fact, a quack and a charlatan and an avalanche of lawsuits descended. He was sued for wrongful deaths, for mail fraud over the pills and powders he’d been sending out for years, and the Internal Revenue Service began to take a keen interest in his tax affairs. Brinkley declared bankruptcy in 1941 and died broke a year later.

At this point, we should probably look at what all this has to do with aliens…

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Eight years after John Brinkley died in Texas, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked a question in New Mexico: “Where is everybody?”

The conversation had been between Fermi and some other Manhattan Project alumni, discussing the probability of alien life. By Fermi’s logic, the Milky Way galaxy has billions of stars that are similar to our own sun, and some of those similar stars are much older. Assuming (as would later be proven correct) that these stars have earth-like planets at habitable distances, then it would seem likely that these planets would also produce life. Given the time frames involved, that life would have existed for far longer than humans, who were already planning to reach their own moon.

The universe should be absolutely teeming with life. Plenty of time has already passed to allow aliens from older stars to strike out into the cosmos, or at least to make their own planets noticeable to human beings. There should be other intelligent civilisations everywhere we look, and yet there’s nothing. So, Fermi surmised, where is everybody?

It became known as the Fermi Paradox, and there still isn’t an answer. Several of the proposed solutions are concerning (“Great Filter” theory says that all civilisations might reach a point of technological advancement where they destroy themselves, and that this outcome is inevitable) but probably the creepiest idea to emerge is called the Dark Forest theory.

This theory says that there are plenty of other intelligent species in the galaxy, but they are staying quiet like animals in a forest, because they know that something is hunting them.

Human beings are completely oblivious to the danger, because whatever is out there hasn’t found us yet. So, we declare out existence proudly, sending space probes and robots and beaming signals into the void with careless abandon. We’re lit up like a beacon - somewhat deliberately - and if anything out there in the cosmos is hostile, we’re laughably easy to find.

For whatever it’s worth, the Dark Forest theory is more effectively creepy than it is likely. Any civilisation that could travel interstellar distances in order to steal our resources or invade our planet wouldn’t need to do it in the first place. To travel quickly between stars would require finding a way around the speed of light, which still appears to be the hard limit of how fast things can happen. To travel faster than light would require brain-meltingly advanced levels of technology - as far as we can tell, it’s impossible. The old sci-fi trope of aliens coming to earth to, say, steal our water (or be instantly killed by it in much dumber stories) doesn’t make any sense, because if a species is smart enough to transcend the speed of light, they’re already plenty smart enough to make their own water.

Interstellar, faster-than-light species would have to be advanced enough that they don’t need anything material, because they would have mastered physics to the point where they can make whatever they want out of whatever they want. They would have achieved universal alchemy long before they arrived on our doorstep, so we’re probably not in danger from any intergalactic marauders.

Nonetheless, the earth is still transmitting relentlessly into space, and an interesting footnote is that there are two contenders for our first interstellar signal. The first is John Brinkley’s giant radio tower, which was firing out radio waves with enough power to transmit into space. The second candidate for accidental interplanetary messaging is the 1936 Olympic Games.

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Fascism is always contradictory. A key component of any fascist ideology is that the enemy must be simultaneously weak and strong, like how beta males and ineffectual liberals are weak and pathetic and also somehow preventing strong, competent men from running the world like they’re supposed to, because such Aryan ubermenches are naturally superior and dominant but also can’t overcome the useless sissy communists who drink soy lattes and are afraid of Real Men, whilst also keeping those Real Men from succeeding using… fucking… voodoo?! Who knows, don’t look for logic.

Another contradiction that crops up a lot in fascist ideology is that things were better at some vague historical point, and we should all try to regress society until we reach that point again, but also anything futuristic is good.

Mussolini and his Italian fascists were early adopters of planes and fast cars, because fascism was the hot new ideology and was going to change the world using cutting edge tech. And also return to the past. Modern American fascists are desperate to return to some imaginary period of the 1950s, but they’re heavily invested in crypto currency and A.I. because it’s futuristic. Their ideal world seems to be Happy Days if the Fonz drove a Cybertruck, an image too depressing to contemplate.

It’s worth noting again that John R. Brinkley, radio pioneer and lunatic, spent his last few years supporting the American Nazi party, which might still be the worst thing you can say about a man who was stuffing people with goat balls and firing radio signals into their fillings.

German fascism, meanwhile, wanted to return Germany to some sort of mythical past full of agrarian knights and literal wizards, but they were also very keen on bomber planes, designer drugs and the new medium of mass broadcasting. As a result, their big P.R. effort in hosting the 1936 Olympics was broadcast far and wide and became the first Olympics to be televised. John Brinkley was off the air by 1936, but it’s speculated that the Nazi Olympics were the second terrestrial signal to make it out into space.*

This means that, although unlikely, it’s still possible that the first evidence that other civilisations will have of the human race will consist of quack medicine, country and western music, and Nazism. If aliens immediately ran to their ships when they picked up the first available broadcasts from Earth and began the journey here, there’s every chance that they’d turn up in cowboy hats and Nazi armbands. Possibly bringing goat testicles as an offering.

I used to think that this was an amusing image - visitors from the stars attempting to win us over with a confusing mixture of line dancing and zieg-heils, but these days that’s basically what American culture is. It wouldn’t be seen as funny if aliens landed on the white house lawn giving Hitler salutes and dressed like Gene Autry - it would be seen as a shrewd distillation of what the western world is about. Throw in the quack medicine and obsession with dead animal parts, too, because RFK Jr. would presumably be present.

What I find weird about this scenario is that it’s not really science fiction anymore - it’s closer to chaos magic; the idea that beliefs shape reality and therefore whatever we put out into the world will somehow come back around to us. We beamed country music and Nazis into space and now we’re stuck in an ongoing dumpster fire of neo-Nazis running the “free” world and country music more popular than it’s been for decades - Taylor Swift got her start in country, Sabrina Carpenter is a huge star with an avowedly country aesthetic, Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” reached number one all over the western world, etc etc.

I’m not saying that Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Noah Kahan or any other country musicians are in any way connected to the ongoing revival of the Far Right - just that the cultural themes of our current moment seem to be the exact first things that we broadcast into the universe a hundred years ago.

Either this is one of the weirder coincidences of history, or the people running our simulation have a mean sense of humour.

I guess if nothing else, John Brinkley is dead. It would be terrible if the most-listened-to radio broadcasts in the world were still a mixture of quack medical advice and Nazi apologia.

Ah, fuck...

*Hilariously, the American Jesse Owens, who was black, became the standout star of Hitler’s games, which were intended to showcase Germany’s genetic superiority. The Americans took the most medals, with Owens winning four Gold and setting a record in each event. Germany came second overall and Finland did surprisingly well in third.