Speaker 1: High Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you
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Speaker 1: it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot
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Speaker 1: For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2: There's some type of strange road light hill.
Speaker 3: I saw, y'all a tang in it too.
Speaker 4: Weird, It maybe a little bit funny.
Speaker 5: Yes, it's be not aspat thrill is coming its way.
Speaker 6: Also, it's definitely coming its way. It goes back out
Speaker 6: into the farmer's field directly overhead a very high speed.
Speaker 6: At least fifteen people in the weapons storage areas saw
Speaker 6: the objects.
Speaker 4: In the sky.
Speaker 5: Here's something very very strange.
Speaker 2: It's not aspen.
Speaker 4: I said, let's try and approach it.
Speaker 3: We move up to the edge of the forest, and
Speaker 3: when we.
Speaker 6: Tried to get close, it went back out into the field.
Speaker 6: They knew we were trying to get close.
Speaker 3: It's kind of tourist house.
Speaker 6: Sparks are coming off and so bright.
Speaker 2: It was like looking at the sun coming down to
Speaker 2: the ground.
Speaker 6: This is beyond anything that we're familiar with.
Speaker 1: Welcome to high Strange. The year was nineteen eighty Suffolk, England.
Speaker 1: Tensions between Russia and the US were high.
Speaker 7: There is imminent danger of some kind of Soviet military action.
Speaker 1: There were two bases in eastern England ran by the
Speaker 1: US Air Force.
Speaker 7: This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace.
Speaker 1: They house the most advanced weapons in the world, there
Speaker 1: ready for deployment at any second. Right around Christmas time
Speaker 1: that year, the forest behind this US military base will
Speaker 1: become the location of Britain's very own roswell event known
Speaker 1: as the Rendlesham Forest incident. Charles Holt, a military commander
Speaker 1: on the base, headed into the forest to investigate rumors
Speaker 1: of lights in the sky when he experienced an encounter
Speaker 1: of his own. This was the third night in a
Speaker 1: row that separate military officers claimed to have experienced something
Speaker 1: unexplainable in the forest. I reached out to one of
Speaker 1: the witnesses from the first night. His experience is arguably
Speaker 1: even more bizarre than Halts. Forty years later, gathering these
Speaker 1: different accounts, I'm hoping to try and piece together what
Speaker 1: really happened here.
Speaker 2: This guy, yeah, it's perfect for you.
Speaker 3: This is Jim Piniston.
Speaker 2: So how many guys believe in UFOs.
Speaker 1: At this point, I'm convinced that UFOs are not a
Speaker 1: matter of believing, but rather the question is what are they?
Speaker 1: There are outlier cases like this one that still puzzle
Speaker 1: our government today. The real question we're asking ourselves is
Speaker 1: do you believe these are extraterrestrial or are they some
Speaker 1: other natural phenomenon we don't fully understand yet. Or are
Speaker 1: these guys simply mistaking what they saw, embellishing their stories,
Speaker 1: or just flat out making them all up.
Speaker 3: That's the real question here.
Speaker 8: You've told this story a thousand times, I'd say over times.
Speaker 2: We're fascinated about.
Speaker 8: Story, and they don't have a story. Though I don't
Speaker 8: have a story. The story sounds like something that you
Speaker 8: read when you're in grade school.
Speaker 9: What is it?
Speaker 8: This is an investigation by the United States Air Force.
Speaker 8: I'm December twenty sixth, nineteen eight. This is gonna be
Speaker 8: a rough night sleeping tonight. Well, I could talk. I'm
Speaker 8: talking about these are triggers. So everything you hear is
Speaker 8: a trigger. Nothing, there's no way around it. What I
Speaker 8: was seeing was stuff I had never encountered in my
Speaker 8: life or since then.
Speaker 2: In the trauma of dealing with it.
Speaker 8: I've always been able to tell you everything it wasn't,
Speaker 8: but there is a problem because of what wasn't.
Speaker 2: I don't know what it was.
Speaker 1: Jim's story begins on December twenty sixth, nineteen eighty, shortly
Speaker 1: after midnight.
Speaker 8: I was a fifth generation military at that time. I
Speaker 8: was in charge of base security for Woodbreach. Our job
Speaker 8: was to protect aircraft weapons plus the personnel on the base.
Speaker 8: The night started pretty much as usual. I had done
Speaker 8: my guard mount, which is a briefing that you give
Speaker 8: your fifteen guys that are going to be working with you,
Speaker 8: putting my stuff down and grabbing a cup of coffee.
Speaker 8: Sarry mccaully says, did you hear that call on the radio?
Speaker 8: I said, no, I missed it. Central Security Control, our
Speaker 8: control center is trying to get a hold of it.
Speaker 8: We had a direct line. Talked to sargant coffee. He
Speaker 8: was a senior controller. I said, well, what's going on?
Speaker 8: He says, well, they'll brief you when you get out there.
Speaker 8: He wouldn't tell me nfhone, which was odd. I'm being
Speaker 8: dispatched for a situation.
Speaker 2: What it is? I don't know he wouldn't tell me.
Speaker 2: I arrived at the east gate.
Speaker 8: I contact the senior law enforcement patrolman staff Sargen, Bud Stephens.
Speaker 8: He said, what's going on, Bud? He just sort of
Speaker 8: points over maybe preiriy yards over to render some forest
Speaker 8: adjacent to the gate. I could see lighting above the
Speaker 8: forest and in the forest. I turned around to him
Speaker 8: and said, well, what is it? He says, oh, inside
Speaker 8: the forest you could see orange light. You see a
Speaker 8: red light. You could see flickering like that. It would
Speaker 8: appear to be a fire, like something's burning. But the
Speaker 8: strange part of that, over the top of the canopy
Speaker 8: of the forest, there was a bubble of light over
Speaker 8: the top of it. But I see out there didn't
Speaker 8: make sense to me at all. Whatever is there had
Speaker 8: to be really lit up. So my question to a
Speaker 8: Bud was, need to hear a crash, And he goes, oh, no,
Speaker 8: it'll landed. There's no way helicopter or plane could ever
Speaker 8: land in that forest.
Speaker 1: The trees and Redntlesoome Forest at the time were used
Speaker 1: as a crop hundreds of trees planted about five feet
Speaker 1: apart from each other, which would make it nearly impossible
Speaker 1: for conventional aircraft to land there. He went back to
Speaker 1: the east gate and called in to report what he
Speaker 1: was seeing in the forest.
Speaker 8: Reached central security control. It's now security problem.
Speaker 2: Five guys pick up. We got five guys online.
Speaker 8: I says, well, I think this is a possible aircraft
Speaker 8: crash in the forest. They lost contact. Was a unidentified
Speaker 8: bogie on radar. They know where it came from. It
Speaker 8: came from our ease. And all this stuff is happening megafast.
Speaker 8: We were giving permission to go off base. We had
Speaker 8: a crash kit. I pulled out the camera. Security control
Speaker 8: was starting to break up and I couldn't really understand
Speaker 8: what they were saying.
Speaker 1: On base, they used repeating systems for their radios, which
Speaker 1: allowed their walkies to cover a much longer distance.
Speaker 3: Basically, there's never a dead spot.
Speaker 1: But for the first time in his career on that base,
Speaker 1: Jim was having trouble reaching the command post on his radio.
Speaker 8: Even though I wasn't hearing nothing in the radio, I'm talking.
Speaker 8: I'll get to the edge of the tree line was
Speaker 8: coming out of the forest was a white light. It
Speaker 8: was so intense that you couldn't really see anything inside
Speaker 8: the center of that light. Started taking pictures. I could
Speaker 8: feel static electricity on my face and skin. At first
Speaker 8: I thought it was maybe adrenaline, but it continued. My
Speaker 8: movements felt labored, like walking waist deep and a pool
Speaker 8: of water. I'm starting to wonder now, is this a rust?
Speaker 8: Is this something out here to distract us? I started
Speaker 8: to get worried. As I got to the edge of
Speaker 8: the forest. I implemented a helping hand situation on the radio.
Speaker 8: It's real and I'm unarmed. I used all the film up,
Speaker 8: the camera started going out. This final burn, this bright
Speaker 8: white light just exploded. I hit the ground. I was
Speaker 8: getting very scared, very concerned for my.
Speaker 2: Own well being.
Speaker 8: I know that what I'm seeing is nothing I trained for.
Speaker 8: I personally thought, this is an unsurvivable situation. Everything out
Speaker 8: there is something I haven't seen. Before I get up
Speaker 8: off the ground, the white light started to dissipate, and
Speaker 8: when it did, I could see nothing but this black aircraft,
Speaker 8: this black triangular craft inside this white light.
Speaker 3: Did you ever see anything like that before?
Speaker 2: Craft like that didn't exist.
Speaker 1: He pulled out his pen and notebook and started documenting
Speaker 1: as many details as he could about what he was seeing.
Speaker 1: Itself was warm to the touch, he described it feeling
Speaker 1: very smooth like black glass.
Speaker 8: Well, I looked the underneath it. I could see white
Speaker 8: beams of light. There's three of them coming out from
Speaker 8: underneath the craft. I wonder if that's stable. I wanted
Speaker 8: to secure, so I tried to move it, and I
Speaker 8: pushed on it, tried to give it a shove to
Speaker 8: see if it would move. This didn't move at all.
Speaker 8: It was solid, fixed to the ground. Somehow, with this technology,
Speaker 8: how can this be? I started to look for things
Speaker 8: that aircraft needs to fly, exhausts and intakes and things
Speaker 8: like that. There was void of all those things. There
Speaker 8: was no openings, there was no crew compartment. I had nothing. Basically,
Speaker 8: it was a flying brick. This thing couldn't fly. You
Speaker 8: need all those things for craft to fly.
Speaker 2: I go out to record all that stuff down in
Speaker 2: my book.
Speaker 8: The craft itself was warm to touch, smooth, glass like metal.
Speaker 8: Still doing my security checks on the radio, but I'm
Speaker 8: getting nothing back. During my interaction with the craft, the
Speaker 8: air fell electric. I don't know how to explain that. Boy,
Speaker 8: the hair was lifting in the back of the neck
Speaker 8: and arms and face come back around and I could
Speaker 8: see writing.
Speaker 2: On the side of the craft. That's a good thing.
Speaker 8: I'm thinking, I'm hoping this says Nassai or something. As
Speaker 8: I got closer, it was a writing light we had.
Speaker 8: It was like gliffs. Victoria Bliss was put the emotion
Speaker 8: back into a panic.
Speaker 2: What it looked like the writing.
Speaker 8: There's five symbols. They were different shapes. The one that
Speaker 8: stood out the most it was the one that was
Speaker 8: above those five. There was another one which was larger
Speaker 8: and had a circular a circle around it, and it
Speaker 8: was a triangle with this huge circle around it, the
Speaker 8: size of a big dinner plate.
Speaker 2: The circle.
Speaker 8: I put my hand on the circular triangle that was
Speaker 8: above the other Gliss. All of a sudden, I have
Speaker 8: a blinding, pure white light. I cannot see nothing else.
Speaker 8: That eliminated all my visions. I start to see things
Speaker 8: that don't make no sense at all. That more, things
Speaker 8: that don't make those sense, like one and zeros and
Speaker 8: things like that.
Speaker 2: It terrified me.
Speaker 8: I gained my wits back, lift my hand back off,
Speaker 8: and it stops.
Speaker 3: Was it in your head or physically there?
Speaker 8: I was trying to determine whether or now it was
Speaker 8: physically there or in my head? Okay, When I took
Speaker 8: my hand off, that symbol I had my night vision,
Speaker 8: which is impossible. I had perfect night vision once I
Speaker 8: took my hand off the craft. After that happened with
Speaker 8: the light, I was never going to touch that craft again.
Speaker 8: All of a sudden, I started to see what I
Speaker 8: perceive as activity. All of a sudden, the color light
Speaker 8: that had dissipated inside the fabric of the cast started
Speaker 8: to come back and started moving around in the craft.
Speaker 8: So I backed away for about ten feet. I got
Speaker 8: on the ground, tried to dig a hole. I was
Speaker 8: thinking that I had active something. When I touched it,
Speaker 8: I thought I was going to explode. The craft started
Speaker 8: powering up and moved back through the trees. It had
Speaker 8: no air displacement at all. There's absolutely no sound. All
Speaker 8: aircraft make noise. That's a fact. All of the flaps
Speaker 8: that all need either a propeller or intakes or exhaust,
Speaker 8: or they can't fly. A few seconds later, it just
Speaker 8: took off. It was gone in a blank of that eye.
Speaker 8: After the craft departure, all of a sudden, I could
Speaker 8: start hearing things. Immediately after it went out of site.
Speaker 8: I could start hearing wind. I had full real contact.
Speaker 1: Jim Penison was the head of security at the time,
Speaker 1: not just some on duty guard, the head of security
Speaker 1: on a US military base that held nuclear bombs ready
Speaker 1: to drop on Russia at any given moment. He spent
Speaker 1: his career in the Air Force and specialized in recognizing aircraft.
Speaker 1: Multiple witnesses saw the same things over the course of
Speaker 1: three days on the base. After the incident, Jim typed
Speaker 1: a report recounting his experience, submitting it to the higher ups.
Speaker 1: He took notes in his notepad and drew several sketches
Speaker 1: of what the craft looked like. I got to see
Speaker 1: these for myself and I'll post them on the High
Speaker 1: Strange Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 3: Just go to at High Strange.
Speaker 1: I'm no expert on anything aircraft related, but even to
Speaker 1: the layperson, Jim's sketches of the aircraft looked nothing like
Speaker 1: the US Air Force has then or now.
Speaker 6: After I had my encounter in the forest, I went
Speaker 6: back and talked to all the participants that were involved.
Speaker 4: The first night.
Speaker 1: Here's Charles Holtz again, the man who recorded the third
Speaker 1: night of the incident on his tape.
Speaker 6: Recorder, Peniston Burrows Cabana sack. They told me a cleaned
Speaker 6: up version of what happened.
Speaker 4: They were told what to tell me.
Speaker 6: In fact, Cabanasak brought me a typed statement. He didn't
Speaker 6: type it. He couldn't type words that he would not
Speaker 6: have used.
Speaker 1: Holtz seems to think, or is at least hinting at
Speaker 1: the idea, that the reports submitted by his buddy were
Speaker 1: merely a cover story.
Speaker 4: Basically said, we saw the Lighthews.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 5: The British tabloid press had a field day with reports
Speaker 5: of the incident, with stories of flying saucers, mysterious lights,
Speaker 5: and even aliens. The Times of London, however, dismissed the
Speaker 5: incident and poked fun at the other newspapers. It quoted
Speaker 5: this man, Vince their Kettle, a forester who works near
Speaker 5: the alleged landing site. Their Kettle told CNN that the
Speaker 5: UFO was merely a beam of light from the nearby
Speaker 5: Orford Lighthouse.
Speaker 9: But if you didn't know as a lighthouse, if you short,
Speaker 9: it was something small, maybe two three meters across, pulsing
Speaker 9: white in the forest. Yes, it looks as if it's
Speaker 9: within the trees, and it does appear to light up
Speaker 9: the trees as well.
Speaker 1: When your senses are heightened, adrenaline pumping, and you're out
Speaker 1: in the woods at night looking for something weird. Common
Speaker 1: sense says there's a good chance you might find it.
Speaker 10: I don't think we're ever going to get very far
Speaker 10: with the Renation Forest incident.
Speaker 1: This is Mick West again, an investigative UFO skeptic.
Speaker 10: I don't know if this is ever going to be
Speaker 10: a determination of exactly what happened to that. I think
Speaker 10: there are laws of all explanations a certain aspects of it.
Speaker 10: There was a lighthouse, that's crazy.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the lighthouse. I'm very familiar with.
Speaker 6: The lighthouse, and the lighthouse is at orford Ness. Orford
Speaker 6: Ness is a little small fishing village on the coast
Speaker 6: out on the island. Two little pubs out there have
Speaker 6: very good food and reasonable prices. I have pictures of
Speaker 6: me standing here. The lighthouse is over there, and the
Speaker 6: object was out here. How could the lighthouse reflect off
Speaker 6: the windows of the farmhouse when the lighthouse is two
Speaker 6: or three miles out that way.
Speaker 1: The lighthouse theory quickly became the easiest and most rational explanation.
Speaker 1: But why would all these highly trained men interpret a
Speaker 1: lighthouse as some strange foreign object.
Speaker 3: Three days in a row. I mean, what's the point.
Speaker 1: The lighthouse was always there anyway, a little strange to
Speaker 1: suddenly take note of it and make a huge deal
Speaker 1: out of it all.
Speaker 5: The game warden was also familiar with the cars and
Speaker 5: dismissed the lighthouse theory outright.
Speaker 7: At the moment, We're standing on the orphored key, and
Speaker 7: quite clearly you can see the lighthouse over there flashing.
Speaker 7: The light from the UFO was totally nothing like the
Speaker 7: light from the lighters.
Speaker 3: We know that people make mistakes.
Speaker 10: We know that people, even with the best of intentions
Speaker 10: and with the best of observational abilities, can sometimes perceive
Speaker 10: things to be other than the way they actually are.
Speaker 10: There are classic cases like the Cottingly Fairies, where these
Speaker 10: two girls took photographs of fairies and they managed to
Speaker 10: convince a whole bunch of people that these were genuine
Speaker 10: photos of fairies, including Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a
Speaker 10: big investigator of such things at the time. They stuck
Speaker 10: to their story for decades. People once they buy into
Speaker 10: a certain explanation, it's kind of difficult for them to
Speaker 10: admit that they made stuff up.
Speaker 3: Once they told the same.
Speaker 10: Story over and over again, it almost becomes like a memory.
Speaker 10: They're not really lying as such, they're simply just telling
Speaker 10: the same story, which happens to be false.
Speaker 1: How could so many credible people from the military come
Speaker 1: up with the exact same lie, the same exact misinterpretation
Speaker 1: of something so completely normal. What are the odds they
Speaker 1: were all just mistaken or hallucinating. If their job is
Speaker 1: to guard and protect a military base, and they're dreaming
Speaker 1: of fantastical stories of foreign lights in the sky that
Speaker 1: didn't actually exist, then that would be pretty concerning on
Speaker 1: its own, wouldn't it.
Speaker 6: I met the lighthouse keeper, Keith Simmons, met him and
Speaker 6: talk with him. Light house has three lenses, red and green,
Speaker 6: shine out to sea and white to land. He said,
Speaker 6: if you saw a red light, you couldn't have seen
Speaker 6: the lighthouse. You had to be out the sea to
Speaker 6: see the red lights. So people say that red light
Speaker 6: you saw was the lighthouse. There's no way it's not
Speaker 6: the lighthouse. The lighthouse is in a different location, twenty
Speaker 6: five or thirty degrees away. There's agencies that have a
Speaker 6: whole lot more information in what they're reviewing. The following
Speaker 6: week from the incident, an unmarked plane came normally went planes,
Speaker 6: even the U two's and SR seventy one, which occasionally
Speaker 6: dropped them when they had a problem. We provided security
Speaker 6: for this plane, provided their own security and had their
Speaker 6: own people in uniform which were not Air Force uniforms.
Speaker 3: Unmarked planes are not unheard of.
Speaker 1: There's a company known as Janet Airlines that shuttles employees
Speaker 1: from the Las Vegas Airport to Area fifty one. You'd
Speaker 1: at least think that if unmarked planes full of unknown
Speaker 1: uniformed employees were landing on the based to collect information
Speaker 1: day whoever they are seem to find this incident just.
Speaker 3: A little bit interesting.
Speaker 1: Seems like a lot of extra unnecessary work for a lighthouse.
Speaker 6: It was obvious nobody else was going to investigate. Nobody
Speaker 6: else was going to do anything, even though they did
Speaker 6: do things in the background, behind the scenes, so to speak.
Speaker 6: So I didn't know anybody else was in the background
Speaker 6: playing games. I didn't know any of this. I wasn't
Speaker 6: told to be quiet. It was sort of inferred that
Speaker 6: I should be quiet, and I already knew that. But
Speaker 6: I still got to three and four star endorsements on
Speaker 6: my report cards and still got promoted because they knew
Speaker 6: it was credible.
Speaker 1: When it comes to trolls Holts. I'll be honest, it's
Speaker 1: hard not to believe him.
Speaker 6: I get disappointed with all the disinformation that's out there,
Speaker 6: but I can't know anything about it except just tell
Speaker 6: the truth.
Speaker 1: He doesn't claim to know what he saw that night,
Speaker 1: but that it was certainly something they were beyond unfamiliar with.
Speaker 6: I have not ever said I saw a little green man.
Speaker 6: I never saw any entity that I could identify. I
Speaker 6: know what I saw, but I don't know what it was.
Speaker 6: I'd sure like to know. So Obviously, whatever we're seeing
Speaker 6: in the sky has the ability to do phenomenal things
Speaker 6: change shape, change size, change calor going phenomenal speed, do
Speaker 6: things that we just can't even imagine.
Speaker 1: He wrote down in his own memo that he and
Speaker 1: several other military personnel saw multiple objects in the sky,
Speaker 1: a quote redlight sun object that pulsed and shed into
Speaker 1: particles before splitting into five separate white lights and then
Speaker 1: disappearing in the sky. It's hard to imagine someone of
Speaker 1: sound mind running around with a cassette recorder chasing a
Speaker 1: stationary lighthouse all night. The tape itself feels genuine. It
Speaker 1: sounds like they really don't know what's going on.
Speaker 2: I wish I knew more, but I don't.
Speaker 4: I am firmly convinced that we're not alone.
Speaker 6: I can tell that, but I don't know what we're
Speaker 6: faced with.
Speaker 1: Charles Holt went on to investigate the supposed landing site
Speaker 1: of the unknown aircraft, and he found indentations in the
Speaker 1: frozen ground, So something, whatever it was, had to have
Speaker 1: physically been there, or someone went out of their way
Speaker 1: to make it look like there was. That feels like
Speaker 1: we're entering conspiracy land a little bit. Holt and his
Speaker 1: crew members also took Geiger counter readings. They found the
Speaker 1: radiation on the indentations in the ground were significantly higher
Speaker 1: than the background, and while they were examining the site,
Speaker 1: they were interrupted by their own firsthand ufhoe encounter, and
Speaker 1: each time they made an attempt to get closer to it,
Speaker 1: the object moved further away from them.
Speaker 3: Never once device in a lighthouse move. So what else
Speaker 3: could these things be? Exactly?
Speaker 1: Were they truly under intelligent control? Are they extraterrestrials, aliens, spirits,
Speaker 1: ai from the future. I could go on and on,
Speaker 1: or is it none of those things at all? Something
Speaker 1: simpler and much more rational, but easily misinterpreted as something strange.
Speaker 3: However you feel about it.
Speaker 1: A case like the Reynolsome forest incident is a hard
Speaker 1: one to just blindly dismiss as nothing at all.
Speaker 4: Let's take a step back.
Speaker 11: Forget the X files, forget popular culture and all the
Speaker 11: alien visitation and stories.
Speaker 3: Here's political journalist Brian Bender.
Speaker 4: Take this at face value.
Speaker 11: Sightings reported by credible people over sensitive facilities, and we
Speaker 11: don't know what they are, just an air safety hazard.
Speaker 11: The military should probably try to find out what those
Speaker 11: things are, if for nothing else, to protect its own personnel.
Speaker 4: Our job is to protect our troops.
Speaker 11: If our troops are seeing things that they think are
Speaker 11: potentially dangerous or is upsetting to them, it's our job
Speaker 11: to do whatever we can do to figure out what
Speaker 11: that is. Let's get scientists together and deal with what
Speaker 11: can potentially.
Speaker 4: Be a safety hazard.
Speaker 11: If we really want to maximize our resources, let's get
Speaker 11: the government to be more transparent, share more of what
Speaker 11: it might have and its ability to gather more data.
Speaker 11: You know, maybe not publicize all of that, but what
Speaker 11: if you shared that data with some scientists. If what
Speaker 11: we get out of this is a society where we
Speaker 11: pride ourselves on the search for knowledge. This is a
Speaker 11: topic that fits squarely into that. A whole new generation
Speaker 11: of people can put their minds to this see if
Speaker 11: they can find more answers than their fathers or grandfathers
Speaker 11: or great grandfathers could.
Speaker 4: That would be a real victory.
Speaker 11: We're at a time in human history where technology is advancing.
Speaker 11: Assuming we can harness the technologies and they don't kill
Speaker 11: us first, I think it'd be a victory if there
Speaker 11: was a real career path, approach UAPs as a discipline
Speaker 11: and be successful. That's the way to get down the
Speaker 11: road of knowledge.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty an article was published in True magazine
Speaker 1: titled The Flying Saucers Are Real. It was written by
Speaker 1: former pilot and retired Marine Major Donald Keho. Donald Kehoe
Speaker 1: is likely the very first citizen researcher of UFOs. Unlike
Speaker 1: most of his peers at the time, he didn't rely
Speaker 1: on the government to provide him all the answers, but
Speaker 1: instead embarked on his very own investigation. At first, Keyho
Speaker 1: was admittedly very skeptical that any of these reported sightings
Speaker 1: were something extraordinary, but after speaking to countless witnesses.
Speaker 3: In numerous high ranking military officials.
Speaker 1: He became convinced that some of these UFO sightings were
Speaker 1: of unearthly origin.
Speaker 3: Keiho would go on.
Speaker 1: To sell millions of books about the UFO mystery, and
Speaker 1: his diligent approach to the subject helped create a much
Speaker 1: more pragmatic conversation that still exists to this day. The
Speaker 1: road to knowledge is a long one, filled with roadblocks
Speaker 1: and potholes. But if we stopped looking to the military
Speaker 1: to provide us all the answers and instead turned to
Speaker 1: independent scientists from around the world who can collect all
Speaker 1: their own data, we might have a much better shot
Speaker 1: at the truth.
Speaker 12: When we say the size of the universe, that's the
Speaker 12: size of the region that we can see. The universe
Speaker 12: is expanding, so if we go back in time, it
Speaker 12: was denser. Back in time. Eventually you get infinite density.
Speaker 12: That is the Big Bang when the density was infinite.
Speaker 12: So that's the beginning of time thirteen point eight billion years.
Speaker 1: This is Abby Lobe, professor of science at Harvard University.
Speaker 12: Within that volume that we can see, which is basically
Speaker 12: the distance that light could have traveled in thirteen point
Speaker 12: eight billion years, there are about a trillion galaxies.
Speaker 2: Like the Milky Way.
Speaker 12: Within the Milky Way galaxy, there are tens of billions
Speaker 12: of stars. You have more habitable planets like the Earth
Speaker 12: than there are grains of sand on all beaches on Earth?
Speaker 12: Are twenty one just a huge number?
Speaker 3: Well, that's a brain buster for you.
Speaker 4: The chance of.
Speaker 12: Us being specially and unique is extremely smart. We know
Speaker 12: that most of the stars formed ten billion years before
Speaker 12: the present time, and the Sun only four point six
Speaker 12: billion years ago. Most stars like the Sun formed billions
Speaker 12: of years before the Sun.
Speaker 1: Most planets that are habitable would be orbiting stars that
Speaker 1: are billions of years older than ours. Of these tens
Speaker 1: of billions of stars, many of them have what we
Speaker 1: call Goldilock zones, a fancy term for the areas that
Speaker 1: contain habitable planets like Earth. As of today, we've found
Speaker 1: fifty nine of the estimated eleven billion planets that could
Speaker 1: be inside these Goldilock zones.
Speaker 12: If the technological clock started ticking around the same time
Speaker 12: as here, then the civilizations predated us. I think that
Speaker 12: it's very likely there could be probes visiting us. They
Speaker 12: had plenty of time to send probes that would fill
Speaker 12: up the Milky Way Galaxy. Most likely there was a
Speaker 12: scientist smarter than Albert Einstein on another planet who existed
Speaker 12: a billion years ago. They could have launched probes that
Speaker 12: arrived to us by now. And that's what we are
Speaker 12: trying to find out. Let's find the smartest kid in
Speaker 12: our interstellar class of intelligent civilizations. We can learn from
Speaker 12: that kid. What Sherlock Holmes would say is never eliminate
Speaker 12: any suspect, any possibility. Put all of them on the table,
Speaker 12: and if you eliminate them one by one, whatever it
Speaker 12: means must be the truth. At the same time, you
Speaker 12: have those scientists that don't want to touch it ridicule,
Speaker 12: which is also wrong. The correct thing to do is
Speaker 12: to collect enough evidence such that we will be convinced.
Speaker 12: The pan Star's Telescope in Hawaii was constructed to find
Speaker 12: near Earth objects.
Speaker 1: Since two thousand and eight, the pant Star's Telescope in
Speaker 1: Hawaii has been using astronomical cameras and telescopes to track
Speaker 1: moving objects in the sky. Near Earth objects, the kind
Speaker 1: that Hollywood loves to make movies with. Bruce willis about
Speaker 1: big asteroids that could potentially wipe out the planet.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm glad that someone is doing this.
Speaker 1: I mean, remember what happened to all those dinosaurs.
Speaker 12: The hard purpose of it was to find ninety percent
Speaker 12: of all the objects bigger than one hundred and forty
Speaker 12: meters the size of a football field.
Speaker 1: On October nineteenth, twenty seventeen, the telescope spotted an objects
Speaker 1: roughly twenty one million miles away.
Speaker 12: Here was an object that passed close to Earth, within
Speaker 12: a sixth of the Earth's sund separation and was about
Speaker 12: the size of a football field.
Speaker 1: The data they were receiving started splitting the science community.
Speaker 1: Its characteristics were different. It didn't seem to look or
Speaker 1: behave like a typical space rock. It's believed to be
Speaker 1: somewhere between three hundred and three thousand feet long, and
Speaker 1: avi Low became increasingly convinced that the object was of
Speaker 1: interstellar origin. It was given the name a Mua Mua,
Speaker 1: and it's likely the first object we've ever seen from
Speaker 1: outside our own Solar system. Because of its unusually high
Speaker 1: speed and trajectory, scientists became convinced that it came from
Speaker 1: somewhere else, somewhere.
Speaker 3: Far far away, but where exactly.
Speaker 1: The more data they collected, the more science pointed to
Speaker 1: the possibility that this wasn't a rock at all, and
Speaker 1: maybe it was actually a piece of machinery.
Speaker 12: They flagged it and then they measured its speed and
Speaker 12: they realized, oh, it's moving too fast to be bound
Speaker 12: to the Sun. It's actually interested up. The more we
Speaker 12: found about it, the more unusually it looked. And I said, well,
Speaker 12: maybe it's artificial. They said, no, this must be natural,
Speaker 12: and then try to explain that anomali is and always
Speaker 12: concluded that it's something that we've never seen before.
Speaker 1: According to NASA, they concluded the object has vents on
Speaker 1: its surface that emit jets of gases, giving it a
Speaker 1: non gravitational boost in its speed. Because of how insanely
Speaker 1: forward is from Earth, all we can see with our
Speaker 1: own eyes is a little speck of light, so the
Speaker 1: shape itself was.
Speaker 3: Determined by its light curves.
Speaker 1: On a graph, a muahmua is said to be ten
Speaker 1: times longer than it is wide, like a pancake. Astronomers
Speaker 1: have never seen an object with such extreme proportions at
Speaker 1: this rate of speed inside our solar system.
Speaker 12: My colleagues suggested that maybe Omua Mua, this first object
Speaker 12: from twenty seventeen maybe it's a hydrogen iceberg, a nitrogen iceberg,
Speaker 12: or a dust bunny. I noticed that the object is
Speaker 12: so unusual that it couldn't be a rock or a comet.
Speaker 12: It was moving too fast to be bound to the sun,
Speaker 12: and astronomers at first thought that it's a rock that
Speaker 12: originated from another star. As we collected more data, it
Speaker 12: looked very strange because the amount of sunlight reflected from
Speaker 12: it changed by a factor of tennis. It was stumbling
Speaker 12: every eight hours. That's very unusual. It means that it
Speaker 12: had a very extreme shape.
Speaker 1: It's either the weirdest space rock scientists have come across, possible,
Speaker 1: likely even or it's something different, possibly even artificial in origin.
Speaker 12: And other people said, oh, well, maybe it's a rock
Speaker 12: of a type that we've never seen before. And I said, well,
Speaker 12: if that's the case, it could be also artificial origin.
Speaker 12: It was not a comet. It just shows that the
Speaker 12: game is not fair. A fair game should be to say,
Speaker 12: this object does not appear to be a comet. We
Speaker 12: didn't see any evidence for that. It could be something unusual.
Speaker 12: It could be a rock of a type we've never
Speaker 12: seen before, which some people claim that's fine, but don't
Speaker 12: call it a comet. It's at the core of the
Speaker 12: way that experts respond to unusual things. They basically want
Speaker 12: them to conform with what they knew before. There was
Speaker 12: plenty of time for probes to arrive to us. Some
Speaker 12: of them may be equipped with artificial intelligence. Some may
Speaker 12: look like a space trash if they're not functional anymore.
Speaker 12: What my colleagues in the scientific community are doing is wrong.
Speaker 12: They are eliminating the artificial origin possibility just because it
Speaker 12: would have huge implications if it's right.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty an Italian physicist name Enrico Fermi, the
Speaker 1: creator of the nuclear reactor, was on a lunch break
Speaker 1: with his coworkers. He was discussing in the recent UFO
Speaker 1: sightings in New Mexico, and he randomly blurted out, where
Speaker 1: is everybody? This question inspired him to do the math.
Speaker 1: If aliens do exist, well, then why haven't we all
Speaker 1: seen them yet?
Speaker 3: I mean, what are they waiting for?
Speaker 1: Fermi's calculations concluded that if they were real, then we
Speaker 1: would have been visited a very long time ago and
Speaker 1: many times over since then, and out of the billions
Speaker 1: of planets potentially growing civilizations, there should have been some
Speaker 1: evidence of them by now, But where are they? Why
Speaker 1: haven't they made contact if the probability is so damn high.
Speaker 1: This concept became known as the Fermi paradox. Today, in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, we need some way to prove that
Speaker 1: there is other intelligent life in the universe, or that
Speaker 1: there just isn't.
Speaker 3: You could look at this two different ways.
Speaker 1: To me, the easy, more ignorant approach is the whole Well,
Speaker 1: why haven't they reached out to us yet? To me,
Speaker 1: that screams were so special, I'm offended, why haven't you
Speaker 1: introduced yourselves yet? If aliens were in fact real, and
Speaker 1: it could travel to Earth from places so far away
Speaker 1: that we literally can't see them with our most advanced telescopes,
Speaker 1: then that would clearly mean they are incredibly more advanced
Speaker 1: than us. In this case, we're like the cavemen in
Speaker 1: the universe in terms of interstellar travel. Earth is like
Speaker 1: a little ant hill in the forest. How often do
Speaker 1: you sit down next to an ant hill in the
Speaker 1: middle of the woods and introduce yourself to them? Unless
Speaker 1: you're high on shrooms, and unless you're an asshole, you're
Speaker 1: not going to step on the ant hill and destroy
Speaker 1: it either it's best just to leave them be. They're
Speaker 1: doing their own thing out there, with their own colony,
Speaker 1: their own system. Now, if the ants started talking to us, well,
Speaker 1: that might change things of it, and I would definitely
Speaker 1: need the number for your shrooms guy. So if extraterrestrials
Speaker 1: haven't gone out of their way to contact us, maybe
Speaker 1: we should try contacting them. Both the Voyager one and
Speaker 1: two space probes created by NASA carried a type of
Speaker 1: time capsule on board for this very same reason. In
Speaker 1: the event that some other civilization out there found the
Speaker 1: space probe inside, it would be our own little message
Speaker 1: in a bottle contains a gold plated copper twelve inch
Speaker 1: record with instructions on how to play it written in
Speaker 1: binary code. We probably should have waited for the iPod
Speaker 1: to come out, but hindsight's always twenty twenty. The concept
Speaker 1: of making contact with extraterrestrials is something that's inspired the
Speaker 1: greatest science fiction movies of our time, and while it's
Speaker 1: held its place in popular culture, it's also been the
Speaker 1: focus of many great scientists of our time, and not
Speaker 1: just the science community, but civilians too. One man named
Speaker 1: John Sheppard spent his whole life building a machine to
Speaker 1: make contact with.
Speaker 3: Ets, and he believes it actually happened.
Speaker 13: The heart of Project strat is the broadcast operation. There
Speaker 13: are sixty thousand voltes running through his basement, powering a
Speaker 13: signal that's been straight out into space. The possibility that
Speaker 13: something out there might hear and perhaps respond, keeps John going.
Speaker 1: John lives in a quaint little town in northern Michigan. Now,
Speaker 1: for over thirty years, he has literally been trying to
Speaker 1: contact aliens, send.
Speaker 14: And now a signal, trying out a lure, trying to
Speaker 14: get some more information by luring the men close enough
Speaker 14: to get accurate electronic measurements, some hard data, something on instruments.
Speaker 1: He built a radio transmitter so enormous that it took
Speaker 1: up two floors of his house, with generators the size
Speaker 1: of cars, an unbelievably powerful homemade machine you'd only expect
Speaker 1: to find at NASA. After decades of beaming signals into space,
Speaker 1: collecting data, and tweaking his instruments, one night he experienced
Speaker 1: something that remains hard to rationally explain to this day.
Speaker 1: After years of sending his own signals into space, he
Speaker 1: was suddenly getting something back.
Speaker 14: Contacted our local Sheriff's firement. They sent out a deputy.
Speaker 14: I showed him on the cell scope screen what was coming.
Speaker 1: On a frequency on the machine that was far more
Speaker 1: than just some strange anomaly. Something was out there intentionally
Speaker 1: causing it.
Speaker 14: There shouldn't be that other frequency in there. That's not
Speaker 14: part of it. Something caused that amount of energy. I
Speaker 14: think something was attractive for.
Speaker 2: The spaceship nor space conditions. The White legend in a
Speaker 2: habitat and states like a rich smokers, I ain't need.
Speaker 3: A weed player, didn't take a lean it. She been
Speaker 3: on there Gen.
Speaker 2: This is a bean back. I've been going Gene because
Speaker 2: her cool. Right now she was over. She was pending
Speaker 2: up to Japan.
Speaker 15: The bands of very T shirt sleeve button our top
Speaker 15: ten of bird riding. Then you whether you gotta being
Speaker 15: down and saying the pear peller. We spend a diecop
Speaker 15: and God sweaters drive.
Speaker 3: John n and nine helped. It was booming out of guys.
Speaker 7: We are not the devil.
Speaker 1: High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for
Speaker 1: free every Thursday. But if you'd like to binge the
Speaker 1: whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus
Speaker 1: on Apple podcasts. To get all the episodes right now,
Speaker 1: follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange,
Speaker 1: and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Speaker 1: Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email
Speaker 1: us at tips at highstrange dot com. High Strange is
Speaker 1: a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with Cadence thirteen, created, hosted,
Speaker 1: and edited by myself Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are myself
Speaker 1: and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner and myself.
Speaker 1: Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, Sound design, mixing
Speaker 1: and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney,
Speaker 1: Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, Meredith Stedman, and Sidney Evans.
Speaker 3: Our cover art is by polygon On.
Speaker 1: This episode features the song space Cadet by metro Booman
Speaker 1: featuring Gunna, written by Wesley Tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler,
Speaker 1: Wayne Alan Ritter and Jack Queis Webster performed by metro
Speaker 1: Booman featuring Gunna courtesy of Republic Records under license from
Speaker 1: Universal Music Enterprises for metro Booman in three hundred Entertainment
Speaker 1: for Gunna Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole
Speaker 1: team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck Media
Speaker 1: and Marketing, as well as Chris Corcoran and the team
Speaker 1: at Cadence thirteen. Check out the show's website at Highstrange
Speaker 1: dot com and if you're enjoying the show, please help
Speaker 1: us out by rating and reviewing the podcast and share
Speaker 1: it with your friends.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.