The Mythbusters' Worst Experiment Yet: The Pig-in-a-Container Disaster
The team behind the popular science show Mythbusters had seen it all, but nothing could have prepared them for the catastrophe that unfolded during one of their experiments. In this harrowing tale, we'll relive the events that led to one of the most memorable failures in Mythbuster history.
It all started with a seemingly innocuous plan: to investigate the safety and effectiveness of emergency brakes on a truck container. The team members, Jamie, Adam, Neil Smither, and Adam Savage, had carefully loaded pigs into the container, which was then sealed and pushed into the truck. However, as they attempted to pull out the container, disaster struck. The emergency brakes were still engaged, causing the car to become stuck in the container.
With the situation spiraling out of control, Jamie volunteered to climb inside the car to release the emergency brake. Wearing full hazmat suits, the team was prepared for the worst. However, they soon realized that they had underestimated the power of decomposition. The pigs, which had been sealed in the container for three months, had undergone a grotesque transformation. They were no longer recognizable as living creatures, but rather "pig-shaped mounds" of hairy boney pudding.
As Jamie struggled to breathe due to the lack of oxygen inside the car, the team sprang into action. They quickly deployed fans to clear out the ammonia-filled air and managed to coax Jamie out of the vehicle. The scene that greeted them was nothing short of horrific: a putrid cloud of gas hung over the container, making it difficult for anyone to approach.
Meanwhile, Neil Smither, the crime scene cleaner, watched from a safe distance, attempting to stifle his laughter at the absurdity of it all. "This is up there with the worst things I've ever seen," he exclaimed, shaking his head in amazement.
As the team worked to safely remove the pigs from the container, they couldn't help but feel a sense of unease. They knew that they had faced some strange and unusual experiments on Mythbusters before, but this was something special. And yet, it was precisely this kind of unpredictability that made their show so beloved by fans around the world.
In the aftermath of the experiment, the team couldn't help but share the story with each other. Adam Savage recalled a moment when Jamie had hesitated to lick the snout of the pig, citing a lack of confidence in his ability to do so. The others chuckled at this exchange, knowing that it was just one of those moments where you'd rather not recall.
The incident served as a poignant reminder that even with the best preparation and equipment, some experiments are beyond human comprehension. And for the Mythbusters team, it will forever be etched in their memories as a testament to the unpredictable nature of science.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat myth grossed you out the mostthe pigs in the car the pigs in the car yeah i've got time to tell the story uh it's not going to take up the next 15 minutes or anything but the grossest story we ever did was a myth about a guy who had uh he had died in his car and his car was like some kind of classic car and he died and wasn't discovered for three months and so he decomposed into the car and the myth is that that car could not be resoldand because the smell obvi um so we this was our first dead animal myth i just said that sentence this is our first dead animal myth and um we were really clear we didn't justwe needed two animals to decompose the animals that are closest to humans in the way that they decompose and in their overall makeup of muscle and fat are pigs we didn't want to just buy a couple of pigs from the butcher and then waste 250 pounds of meat so we found this place in la that will find you dead animals and they do this for movies where it's frequently cheaper to get a dead animal than to make a dead animal um but what they do is they have relationships with all these farms in the greater los angeles area and they get calls when an animal dies and so you kind of tell them hey in a couple of weeks i'm going to need a couple of pigs and somebody calls him and said we just had two pigs die and they call us and say we got two pigs for you we found out at like 5 p.m on a on a i don't know probably a tuesday something like that we find out at 5 00 p.m so we take we grab one of our pas and we're like dude you you're driving to la and you're gonna pick up a package and this poor pait might have actually been scott sorensen who later became our a cameraman um i think it might have been scott okay at any rate that pa got in their car drove to la they left san francisco about 5 30 pm which means they arrived in l.a at about midnight they met up with this farmer in the middle of farm country outside of la to help that farmer transfer two human-sized dead pigs into the back of his pickup truck and then drive immediately back to san francisco so we could film with them the next morning he said that that transfer was one of the most upsetting things he's ever done just the transferring dead bodies in the middle of the night on the edge of a farm he's like this is horrifying driving all the way back to san francisco so we take these two dead pigs i don't think we put them in clothing but we put them in the uh in the front driver's seat and passenger seat of i think a corvette we wanted a car that we could afford but also was considered a classic we spent like five grand on this corvette and we put the two pegs in it and then we um we sealed up the doors with packing tape because we didn't want the smell to upset our neighbors obviously and then um we further hid the car inside a 20-foot truck container that we rented we rented it and then we left it there for three months there's so much around this um the expert we hired for that episode is named neil smither neil smither is known as the crime scene cleaner he got a lot of attention back in the early aughts for um for his business uh he literally cleans up suicides killings meth labs and he has a huge business doing this and the way he discovered that this was the business he wanted to be in was while watching pulp fiction the scene where john travolta shoots the kid uh uh he shoots the kid in the back seat and then they gotta clean it out and neil was watching that scene and he was like this is what i have to do for a living it's a very strange origin story and yet he built a really amazing company doing that so neil was our expert we pulled that corvette out of the out of the truck container well actually no we didn't pull the corvette out of the truck container because we had a problem the problem is we put the pigs in the in the car and then we pushed it into the container and then we pulled the emergency brakeso those pegs decomposed with the emergency brakes still on and then we couldn't get the car out of the container until somebody climbed into the car and released the emergency brake and so jamie did this and we're wearing like i don't even know what they were but you know we're wearing full hazmat suits and jamie like opens the door and slides in and immediately starts to choke because there's no oxygen left in the car it's all ammonia from the decomposition so we get a couple of fans and we can blow it out a little and then jamie has to sit he did not sit on the pig because on was not an option it is more like a mug yeah that's the best way to describe it because these the pigs after three months sealed in this car were no longer um pigs they were pig-shaped mounds of hairy boney pudding that is yeah you asked that is exactly what they were it'sso we get the car out we open the door and the smell everyone's got the peppermint under their nose everyone's wearing masks everyone's wretching it is just horrendous and neil smither the crime scene cleaner is staying about 50 feet away and laughing his ass off he's like oh man that is wrong he's like this is up there with the worst thing i've ever seen and he has seen some things and there's this key moment in this story when um we're about to start scooping the pigs out of the car and get rid of them and this is pig head sitting there and neil goes out of adam and he gets my attention and i look over and again i'm wearing full sealed in with duct tape in this hazmat suit he's like dude i will pay you 5 000 cash today if you lick this now to that pigi thought about it and i said no you're watching this and you think dude i would have said yes i'm here to tell you no you wouldn't you just wouldn't you literally just wouldn't you would because oh by the way he's he said i don't want none of this none of that he's like i want you lick the snout of that pig you would hate your tongue for the rest of your life like you would not have been sorry 5 000 bucks not enough to go through that yeah that was the most disgusting story we shot on mythbusters welcomeadam savage here in my cave with a thank you to everyone who has joined the tested channel memberships thus far it truly allows us to keep up this high level pace of video production and frankly it energizes us a lot to talk to you guys in that vein i have also loved diving back in to doing the live stream specifically tested member questions have been phenomenal and other tested family members are going to be doing their own live streams soon keep an eye on this space to find out when and where and we have also heard your feedback and we've decided to add a new membership tier at 4.99 a month that is comparable to the tested premium membership package we used to have members at that level will get all the supporter level perks and in addition to that they'll get access to our premium video archive behind the scenes updates and members only vids of course tested 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