Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War?

短篇故事:吸血鬼传说是否助赢了冷战?

Stuff You Should Know

2026-01-14

12 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

During the Cold War, the CIA used the legend of a vampire named Aswang to scare locals into not helping the communists.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • This is an I Heart podcast.

  • Guaranteed human.

  • Hey, and welcome to the short stuff.

  • I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave.

  • So this is short stuff.

  • Giddy up.

  • That's right.

  • And this week we are talking about more nefarious business by the American CIA during the Cold War in this case.

  • But first we should probably tell you just a short bit about the Philippines, right?

  • Yeah.

  • There's 7,000 islands in the Philippines, more than.

  • I did not know that, but that's a lot of islands.

  • There's 175 different languages.

  • Tagalog is one of the larger language families or groups or just languages.

  • And because there's 7,000 islands, there's a bunch of different languages.

  • There's a lot of cultural, different cultural beliefs, but some of the ones are spread.

  • pretty far and wide across the Philippines, which would suggest they're very, very old folk beliefs.

  • And one of them that we're going to talk about today is the Aswan.

  • That's right.

  • We don't have an exact correlation here in the United States,