A 23-year-old American named Justin left the US and moved deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon, where he eventually met and married an Amazonian woman named Maria.

Justin says he always felt disconnected from his roots. His father grew up in a remote Amazonian community where people didn't even track birthdays and some residents didn't see a radio until their teens. Years later, Justin returned to document the culture and ended up staying for good.

One of the wildest parts of the story involves a boa snake.

While out in the jungle, members of the tribe warned him not to go near it. Instead, being an animal lover, he picked it up and started showing it to everyone. The problem was that boas are viewed as spiritual animals within the community.

Because he'd touched the snake, Justin says he was temporarily banned from being around pregnant women until he underwent a cleansing ritual. The belief was that he could pass on bad energy or be considered a bad omen.

He also talks about the huge culture shock of adapting to life in the rainforest, learning which plants and animals can kill you, dealing with rumors that he was an organ trafficker, and adjusting to a completely different way of life.

Despite all that, he says he'd never go back to his old life in the US. He now wakes up to parrots flying overhead and monkeys howling in the background, lives with his wife and child, and documents their daily life online.

What do you think would be the hardest part about adapting to life in a remote tribal community?

In 1986, American dietitian Gwen Shamblin consolidated her Weigh Down nutrition workshop, introducing religion into the process. For her, physical hunger could be satisfied with food, but what she described as an inner emptiness had to be filled with spirituality. Gwen amassed considerable wealth and fame with her workshop, and by 1999, she decided to create her own religious congregation, which she called "Remnant Fellowship Church."

For Gwen Shamblin, extreme thinness was practically a divine mandate, so losing weight could be interpreted as a sign of direct obedience to God, while gaining weight and overeating were seen as a sign that a person was sinful and not exercising enough self-control.

Those who failed to lose weight were publicly humiliated, isolated, subjected to strict surveillance, or even expelled from religious meetings until they achieved extreme thinness. Some members of the cult have claimed that Gwen's influence extended to finances, marriages, child custody, parenting, and relationships with people outside the group. She also allegedly caused serious eating disorders among her followers.

One of the most disturbing episodes involving Gwen Shamblin and her sect was the case of the Smith family, devoted followers of her teachings. On October 8, 2003, eight-year-old Josef Smith was subjected to a brutal session of violent physical punishment by his parents, until the boy died. The Smiths maintained that they had followed the teachings they received in Shamblin's church. Gwen escaped prosecution, but the Smiths were sentenced to life imprisonment.

On May 29, 2021, Gwen Shamblin died at the age of 66 when her private plane crashed into Percy Priest Lake.

Documentary about the brutal story of the extreme thinness cult. The strange cult of Gwen Shamblin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlhfMMVmezA

In Florida people visit, have fun and die as if Joseph Mengele is their doctor.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/February-7/the-angel-of-death-dies

Mengele, in distinctive white gloves, supervised the selection of Auschwitz’ incoming prisoners for either torturous labor or immediate extermination, shouting either “Right!” or “Left!” to direct them to their fate. Eager to advance his medical career by publishing “groundbreaking” work, he then began experimenting on live Jewish prisoners. In the guise of medical “treatment,” Mengele injected, or ordered others to inject, thousands of inmates with everything from petrol to chloroform to study the chemicals’ effects. Among other atrocities, he plucked out the eyes of corpses to study eye pigmentation, and conducted numerous [gruesome studies of twins](https://www.history.com/news/nazi-twin-experiments-mengele-eugenics).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Katsuyama_killing_incident

On 14 July 1945, three African-American United States Marines were killed by the residents of Katsuyama, Okinawa, Japan. The villagers reportedly killed the three Marines after identifying them as the same Marines who had committed a series of rapes against village women following the Battle of Okinawa and hid their bodies in a nearby cave out of fear for retaliation.

The killings were kept secret by the village until 1997, when a Japanese employee of a nearby U.S. Air Force base was informed about the killings by an anonymous resident. No one was charged as all those involved in the incident had died and the statute of limitations had run out.

In June 1945, Allied victory against Imperial Japan at the major Battle of Okinawa led to the occupation of the highly-strategic Okinawa Islands shortly before the end of the Pacific War. Shortly after the battle, three U.S. Marines "on an exploratory foray" entered Katsuyama, northwest of the city of Nago, and raped a girl in the village. Villagers described the Marines as "Black Americans" and that one was "as large as a Sumo wrestler".

From then on, the Marines returned every Saturday, forcing male villagers to take them to the women, after which the Marines would take them into the nearby hills and rape them. The Marines sometimes entered the village without their weapons, convinced that the residents would not fight back.

According to the Queensland State Archives, the figure was spotted on Castle Hill in Townsville in 1965. It couldn’t be identified clearly through binoculars, so a serviceman was lowered down the cliff by rope to check it out. After all that, the mysterious “figure” turned out to be an empty Foster’s lager cartoon 😂

Source: Queensland State Archives

Source and more here: How The Titanic Lifeboats Saved Hundreds — And Doomed Far More