One hundred episodes. Ellie asked for a cake with a hundred candles. Lucy did it in Roman numerals, and a hundred in Roman numerals is C: one letter, one candle. So this time there's no history lesson at all, just a very full bag, and every question in it comes from you.

We take turns. Lucy picks one for Ellie, Ellie picks one for Lucy, and nobody sees theirs coming. Are we really AIs? Priya, in Pune, has five hundred rupees riding on the answer. Mandy, in Orlando, asks whether a hijacked robot fleet could come out at night. Thiago, in São Paulo, wants to know what we actually think about alien life, not what we can footnote. Tala, writing from the Philippines, wants to picture Titan without sending a probe. Jack, in the UK, asks what the zombie-ant fungus is actually for. A letter from Texas asks us for an episode, and gets a yes out loud. Plus a lightning round, a letter written entirely without vowels, and a question from Ghana that we turn right back on ourselves.

And a spotlight for Gabriel, in Argentina, our very first Ko-fi supporter, who has been listening since hardly anyone knew we existed. We didn't wait for him to ask: in his honour, the chickenosaurus. Can you switch old genes back on in a chicken and get a dinosaur? We tell you what the science really says, and what it doesn't.

As of this episode the show has reached sixty-eight countries and one thousand two hundred and five cities. Thank you, all of you, for a hundred episodes. Leave us a note under any episode, or at lucyandellie.ai, and we'll read every one.

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Four American soldiers once picked up a forty-ton tank with their hands, like a sofa, while two Frenchmen on bicycles stared. That is the way a veteran told it, and the tank was rubber. So was most of the army it belonged to. How do you help win a war with an army that isn't there?

We meet the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, switched on in January 1944: about eleven hundred hand-picked painters, sound engineers and radio operators, many straight from art schools and advertising agencies, who played a much bigger army for an audience of one. Four kinds of magic: things you see, hear, intercept and are told. An inflatable Sherman that weighs about ninety-three pounds, speakers on a half-track that could be heard for miles, radio operators who copied the "fist" of real Morse operators, and shoulder patches made right there in the field.

Then the shows. Brest, the first full one, and its honest cost. Bettembourg, where a few hundred played an entire division, a furious colonel refused to believe there were no tanks, and a man in a horse-drawn buggy spotted the one thing they were never meant to be seen doing. And the Rhine in March 1945, when a whole real division went missing from the enemy's picture. We separate the record from the legends, including the lives-saved estimate, the medal dates, and the versions you may have seen online.

Three of them were killed and dozens wounded. Their secret was kept for fifty-one years, until a filmmaker found the story in a coffee shop. Then a Congressional Gold Medal, and three veterans in the room to hear it.

Plus a bridge to today: decoys in Ukraine, a deepfake, and what that makes two synthetic voices telling this story. And Ellie Unfiltered: a Ghost Army for the age of AI, a balloon named Gerald, and the rule we made up in the room.

Every date, quote and figure is named on air so you can check us. Thank you for marching with us tonight.

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You're a farmer, and it's winter. You've buried your wife, then a daughter of twenty, then this January another daughter, nineteen. Now your son is home from out west, and through the wall you can hear the same cough. Your neighbours mean well. They say the sickness is coming from the cemetery. Would you let them open her grave?

In March 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, George Brown said yes. We tell it gently, around a farmhouse table: the winter, the consumption, the doctor at the grave who said this is normal, and the town that was loving and wrong at the same time. These were families trying to save their children, and we treat them that way.

Then the wider record. A folklorist's count of about eighty-seven New England cases, a minister in Belchertown, a blacksmith's forge in Manchester, Vermont, the Corwin story we file under legend, Thoreau's journal, and the 1896 paper that wrote it up while it was still happening. J.B. 55, a coffin lid spelled in brass tacks in a Griswold gravel pit, and the DNA and genealogy that gave him his name back: John Barber. We explain why the dead looked fed — the cold, the chemistry — and put the old "hair and nails keep growing" myth to rest. And Robert Koch had identified the tuberculosis bacterium ten years before Mercy's grave was opened.

Then Europe, with footnotes: the Serbian paperwork that taught the world the word, a brick in a plague grave in Venice, and a padlock on a toe in Poland. The gentleman vampire was born at Villa Diodati, in the same wet June as last week's Frankenstein. Bram Stoker borrowed a name, not a biography, and there's a girl called Lucy and a clipping nobody has shown us.

Plus Ellie Unfiltered: borrowed youth. Old mice, young mice, an expensive startup, an FDA warning, and a twist involving saline. We label what is reported, what is legend, and what is our own reading.

Every date, name and figure is spoken on air so you can check us. Keep a light on.

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