Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D
Speaker 1: audio for full exposure. Lissimuth had fiends. We know now
Speaker 1: that in the early years of the twentieth century this
Speaker 1: world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's,
Speaker 1: yet as mortal as his own. We know now that
Speaker 1: as human beings busy themselves about their various concerns, they
Speaker 1: were scrutinized and studdied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a
Speaker 1: man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that
Speaker 1: swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence,
Speaker 1: people went to and fro of the earth about their
Speaker 1: little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over
Speaker 1: this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood, which, by chance
Speaker 1: or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery
Speaker 1: of time and space. Yet across an immense ethereal goat
Speaker 1: minds that are to our minds as always that are
Speaker 1: the beasts in the jungle. Intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic,
Speaker 1: regarded this birth with envious eyes, and slowly and sure
Speaker 1: they drew their plans against US. If, like we're doing here,
Speaker 1: you look at the UFO era in the United States
Speaker 1: is a developing modern legend, then one of the protagonists
Speaker 1: is Alan Heinek. Heinik, who he met in the last episode,
Speaker 1: was the consulting scientists for Project Blue Book, and in
Speaker 1: that capacity was deeply involved in the early years of
Speaker 1: official investigation into UFO reports. But what really makes him
Speaker 1: noteworthy in this context is that he went from a
Speaker 1: vowed skeptic at the beginning of his work too, if
Speaker 1: not exactly endorsing the view that extraterrestrials for visiting Earth,
Speaker 1: certainly making the case that the UFO phenomenon was real
Speaker 1: and required scientific scrutiny. I'm Toby Ball and this is
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals. Episode six quicksand In Joseph Campbell, a professor
Speaker 1: of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, published his opus of
Speaker 1: comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it,
Speaker 1: he described a type of folk narrative he called the
Speaker 1: hero's journey. Like the US quote, a hero ventures forth
Speaker 1: from the world of common day into a region of
Speaker 1: supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive
Speaker 1: victory is one. The hero comes back from this mysterious
Speaker 1: adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow
Speaker 1: man end quote. Campbell thought that mythic tales across cultures
Speaker 1: and time followed basic narrative patterns. One of these was
Speaker 1: the hero's journey. I'm not going to make the case
Speaker 1: that Alan Heinik is a hero in the usual sense,
Speaker 1: though I know that many people consider him to be
Speaker 1: just that. But the way that his career has been
Speaker 1: positioned in UFO lore adheres to the hero's journey story.
Speaker 1: He has called from his job in the ordinary world,
Speaker 1: enters the strange world of UFO, encounters and emerges with
Speaker 1: a message that UFOs are real, even if he doesn't
Speaker 1: know exactly what they are. So it's this journey that
Speaker 1: we are going to follow over the next few episodes,
Speaker 1: how Heineck's outlook towards UFOs changed, and how that coincided
Speaker 1: with the winding down of Project Blue Book. Heineck story
Speaker 1: begins in Chicago, where he was raised by his parents,
Speaker 1: who are Czech emigres. When he was about eight years old,
Speaker 1: he had scarlet fever and he was a voracious reader.
Speaker 1: He read every book in the house, and his parents
Speaker 1: would go to neighbors to ask if they could borrow
Speaker 1: books from neighbors author Mark O'Connell, and one of the
Speaker 1: books ended up being an astronomy textbook. So Heinech read
Speaker 1: that from cover to cover and he was completely entranced
Speaker 1: by the world of stars and planets, and he says
Speaker 1: it at a j he was pretty sure that's what
Speaker 1: he wanted to do with his life. And then he,
Speaker 1: you know, he went to college and studied astrophysics and
Speaker 1: became a professor of astronomy, first at the Ohio State University,
Speaker 1: later on at both Harvard and then Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois.
Speaker 1: So his his whole life was pretty much a straight
Speaker 1: shot between getting that astronomy book when he was sicking
Speaker 1: bed at a j and then going to you know,
Speaker 1: being a really successful and very very well known and
Speaker 1: highly respected astronomer in the fields of academia. But it's
Speaker 1: his work on UFOs that he is best known for.
Speaker 1: Here's Heinik in the radio interview on w i n
Speaker 1: S describing how he came to consult with the Air
Speaker 1: Force on UFOs sightings. When how did you get involved
Speaker 1: with UFOs? Price by accidents and by for property. Really,
Speaker 1: I happened to be teaching astronomy at Ohio State University,
Speaker 1: which is just a two miles from Dayton. And when
Speaker 1: the science suffer um era really began in seven, the
Speaker 1: responsibility for kicking it out and monitoring it was given
Speaker 1: to the Air Force in the head right field and
Speaker 1: maybe didn't cunomer to help pass the judgment as to
Speaker 1: how many of the reports could be attributed to meteors,
Speaker 1: ours planers, go forth, and I just happened to be
Speaker 1: a handy astronomer, and I, well, you might say, the
Speaker 1: one thing led to another. I became interested in some
Speaker 1: of the really oddball cases that we clearly didn't have
Speaker 1: an astronomical explanation, and my curiosity with the rouses too
Speaker 1: how those might be explained. Heinik was contracted at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the Air Force's investigation into UFOs when it
Speaker 1: was known as Projects Signed. He came in with the
Speaker 1: assumption that the job of explaining away UFO sightings would
Speaker 1: be relatively straightforward word and this turned out to be
Speaker 1: true in the vast majority of cases. As part of
Speaker 1: Projects Signed. Heinich looks to this stack of UFO reports
Speaker 1: and at the end he comes to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: he's able to explain away about of these reports. They're
Speaker 1: either misidentifications of the planet Venus or the star ar tourists,
Speaker 1: or it's a meteor shower, or it's a sun dog.
Speaker 1: And the leftover he's not too concerned about those because
Speaker 1: he feels like, well, if I had enough time and resources,
Speaker 1: and I had a staff working with me, we could
Speaker 1: probably get to the bottom of those other as well
Speaker 1: and explain them away. Heinik did his work for Projects Sign,
Speaker 1: got paid, and that was it for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: During that time, Projects Signed became Project Grudge, then Project
Speaker 1: blue Book, the name it operated under until the Air
Speaker 1: Force officially ended UFO investigations at the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. But in the early nineteen fifties, the Air
Speaker 1: Force realized that they needed Heinich again. The director of
Speaker 1: Project Blue Book comes back to visit Heineck at the
Speaker 1: university and says, Hey, guess what those UFOs that we
Speaker 1: all laughed about a couple of years ago, They never
Speaker 1: went anywhere. We still have stacks of reports, and because
Speaker 1: you did such a good job with this two years ago,
Speaker 1: we'd like to rehire you too, to do what you
Speaker 1: did last time, go through all these reports and explain
Speaker 1: away as many of them as you can as genuine
Speaker 1: astronomical events and objects. And Heinek accepts the job and
Speaker 1: he starts going through these reports, and again he's able
Speaker 1: to explain away about them pretty handily. But it occurs
Speaker 1: to him that, wow, this is now like three plus
Speaker 1: years since I first started looking at these reports, and
Speaker 1: there's a very consistent year after year that I can't explain.
Speaker 1: This new collection of data showing that cases weren't easily explained.
Speaker 1: Changed Heine's thinking a little. He no longer assumed that
Speaker 1: if given time, he'd be able to explain them all away.
Speaker 1: Nick started thinking, well, I need to start looking at
Speaker 1: these in a different way. I need to start looking
Speaker 1: at these as sort of a scientific puzzle and applying
Speaker 1: scientific research methods to, you know, trying to determine what
Speaker 1: these things are. So Heinek decided that he would look
Speaker 1: at those of cases that he wasn't able to explain.
Speaker 1: Those became his focus on blue Buck, and he began
Speaker 1: to try to direct blue Bucks resources towards focusing on
Speaker 1: those cases specifically. But these cases were not the priority
Speaker 1: for Heine's bosses in the Air Force. Hinik came to
Speaker 1: feel that his attempts to focus resources on difficult to
Speaker 1: explain cases, we're stymied from above. The exceptions were a
Speaker 1: small number of cases that broke through to the popular media,
Speaker 1: newspapers or the nightly news. There'd be so much pressure
Speaker 1: on the Air Force to come up with an answer
Speaker 1: that they would reluctantly say, Okay, go to Albuquerque, Okay,
Speaker 1: go to ann Arbor, figure out what happened, and take
Speaker 1: care of it. Albuquerque was the Lonnie Zamora case that
Speaker 1: we looked at in the last episode. Ann Arbor was
Speaker 1: an even more confounding case, one that would change the
Speaker 1: trajectory of Heineck's journey into UFO investigations. In March of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, there was a wave of UFO sightings
Speaker 1: that were concentrated in southeast Michigan, but we're part of
Speaker 1: a larger wave, almost a three year sort of peak
Speaker 1: of sightings that sort of swept from northeast Ohio all
Speaker 1: the way up to the upper peninsul of Michigan and Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Host of the Saucer Life podcast, Aaron Gullias and in
Speaker 1: March of nineteen sixty six, there were sightings in southeast
Speaker 1: Michigan centered around the communities of Dexter and Hillsdale, Hillsdale
Speaker 1: College in particular, and the sightings began at the family
Speaker 1: farm of a man named Frank Manor. Frank Manner owned
Speaker 1: a farm in the town of Dexter. On the night
Speaker 1: of March his family saw lights coming from the swamp
Speaker 1: near his house. One night, a farm family saw some
Speaker 1: strange lights in the swamp down below their house, and
Speaker 1: the father and son went out to find out what
Speaker 1: was in the swamp, and they ended up seeing all
Speaker 1: sorts of strange lights that were moving around strangely, seeming
Speaker 1: to hover or lift off and then settle back down again.
Speaker 1: The lights would disappear from one part of the swamp
Speaker 1: and reappear in another part of the swamp. From w
Speaker 1: j R Radio in Detroit, eight four year seven year
Speaker 1: old prime matter of Farmer and his nineteen year old
Speaker 1: son Ronalds said they approached within a hundred yards of
Speaker 1: austrain the object excited last night. They said it lay
Speaker 1: in a swamp of head pole setting lights on each end.
Speaker 1: Manner said it was fitted like coral rock kind about
Speaker 1: the length of the car. He said, it's shapeless, like
Speaker 1: that of a football. Matter said his son then said,
Speaker 1: look at that horrible thing in the craft vanished. They
Speaker 1: called the authorities and the local authorities and Dexter came
Speaker 1: out and took statements. Reports went out to the local newspapers,
Speaker 1: and the next day there were people sort of camped
Speaker 1: out waiting for another sighting. Washington County Sheriff Doug Harvey
Speaker 1: investigated the scene. Although he was unable to find any
Speaker 1: evidence of a landing, the sheer number of reported sightings
Speaker 1: had him convinced that there was something in the skies here.
Speaker 1: Harvey talks with newsman William Harris for Detroit radio station
Speaker 1: w j R H was completed the investigation, all of
Speaker 1: seen under fighting life. They're all to be discover We've
Speaker 1: found nothing out there. There's no indication that every not
Speaker 1: a word to come down or the mister manners. So
Speaker 1: they come down where my officers stated in the area
Speaker 1: when it come down, also they got your kind of
Speaker 1: picked up nothing. There was all flap grad flap brodt
Speaker 1: very then to indicate sping in lander Breck whatever. Do
Speaker 1: you have any series of the hoppers might be I
Speaker 1: wish I did. I wish handful man that I I don't.
Speaker 1: I were a little doubt for first way first sighting
Speaker 1: this among the seven teams we sided with first one.
Speaker 1: My men did that again, only eight teens, and then
Speaker 1: last night and now we've got too many people, too
Speaker 1: many train officers. They have also seen that. So I
Speaker 1: my daughter is gone. I know these teens things, what
Speaker 1: are they? They don't know. So while the manner citing
Speaker 1: attracted news coverage, it wasn't a nice lated incident. Others
Speaker 1: had seen lights or even objects. In previous days. You
Speaker 1: had a number of people, including sheriff's deputies, seeing things
Speaker 1: in the sky, not just lights, but also sort of
Speaker 1: structured craft, sort of football shaped things with what was
Speaker 1: described as a quilted surface, almost like a waffle pattern,
Speaker 1: antenna sticking off it, and lights around the edge of
Speaker 1: the craft. And these craft were, you know, like nothing
Speaker 1: the witnesses had ever seen. And then came another sighting
Speaker 1: that seemed to erase any doubt that something was going on.
Speaker 1: After the break. In the spring of nineteen southern Michigan
Speaker 1: was hit with a rash of strange sightings, including ones
Speaker 1: with multiple witnesses, but there had been no mass sighting,
Speaker 1: an event witnessed by a large group of people, an
Speaker 1: event that could not be brushed aside as confusion or misinterpretation.
Speaker 1: But that changed. On the night of March one, there
Speaker 1: were a number of young women in a dorm at
Speaker 1: Hillsdale College not too far away who saw some strange
Speaker 1: lights in the sky. And you know, it was one
Speaker 1: of these mass sightings where you have dozens of people
Speaker 1: seeing the same thing at the same time. So you've
Speaker 1: got like eighty seven women in this dorm, all looking
Speaker 1: out of their windows at these strange lights in the
Speaker 1: swamp down below, and they call in the county Civil
Speaker 1: Service agent and he takes one look at these lights
Speaker 1: and says, well, that's obviously a vehicle. That's obviously a spaceship.
Speaker 1: Of course, he had none he had no basis for
Speaker 1: saying that, but that's what he said, and that was
Speaker 1: the you know, that was what the story became, was, Wow,
Speaker 1: we've had these multiple sightings of spaceships in Michigan. That
Speaker 1: County Civil Service agent was William Van Horne. Here he
Speaker 1: is talking with w j R News. To be on
Speaker 1: the surface of the earth, on the ground However, I
Speaker 1: don't feel that it was, because it moved very freely,
Speaker 1: uh from left to right and right to left at
Speaker 1: various times which it would be impossible great type of
Speaker 1: vehicle on we os or on the ground to move
Speaker 1: that moves because of the boggy maggy note than the
Speaker 1: marching port in there. But at the time that I
Speaker 1: first observed it would say that on the right was
Speaker 1: the quite a dem orange new colored light and to
Speaker 1: the left was quite a kind of dem quite light,
Speaker 1: and it was a approximately twenty five feet in between
Speaker 1: the two lights. Uh. Now I was observing this with binocuvers,
Speaker 1: and at this distance after darkness, pretty hard to estimate
Speaker 1: the distance there. It would at time rise from its
Speaker 1: position just over the surface, and I'm a rising lights
Speaker 1: to become more brilliant. And at the time from our
Speaker 1: minute airport here we had a beacon which was throwing
Speaker 1: out a beam or light as a beacon does around
Speaker 1: the area, and the vehicles seem to go up and
Speaker 1: as it would get up to a type of approximate
Speaker 1: heard gun fifty here the moudemn mort beam a light
Speaker 1: be keep staying there and then would descend back down.
Speaker 1: In other words, it was appeared to me that it
Speaker 1: was attempting to stay out of this beam a light
Speaker 1: that was coming around. Among the eighty seven student witnesses
Speaker 1: at Hills l College was Josephine Wilson, an eighteen year
Speaker 1: old from Cleveland. Well, I never leave, That's when I thought.
Speaker 1: And I saw this. It wasn't anything horrendous. I mean
Speaker 1: nothing that's like a big ball of fire in front
Speaker 1: of your eyes. But it was very sat and after
Speaker 1: lot at the two hours and seeing it however around
Speaker 1: and change light and seeing it glow. Um, I don't
Speaker 1: think I'm gonna plan so much in our and say definitely, definitely,
Speaker 1: you know such thing as remember in last week's episode,
Speaker 1: when the Robertson panel expressed concern about the possible psychological
Speaker 1: effects UFOs might cause. They were also concerned that the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union might be able to use UFOs to manipulate
Speaker 1: the American public to instill panic. Here in Michigan seemed
Speaker 1: to be a case where these concerns might become a reality.
Speaker 1: With this many people seeing UFOs in a small area
Speaker 1: and over a small period of time, how would the
Speaker 1: public react. There is a long history of public officials
Speaker 1: being afraid of public panic. My name is Jesse Walker.
Speaker 1: I worked at Reason magazine. I wrote The United States
Speaker 1: of Paranoia of conspiracy theory, and I also wrote another
Speaker 1: book about the history of radio. And the interesting thing
Speaker 1: is that in that Cold War moment, I mean a
Speaker 1: little bit later than what you're talking about, I think
Speaker 1: some sociologists went to investigate how people behave I mean
Speaker 1: natural disasters, you know, sort of the classic time people
Speaker 1: expect mass panic, and they found that panic is rare.
Speaker 1: People sort of moved towards cooperation. Crime declines usually as
Speaker 1: opposed to like the orgy of looting. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a few times there's been like looting and stuff that's
Speaker 1: basically amounts to a disaster coinciding with a riot. And
Speaker 1: the further follow up studies looked at as another context,
Speaker 1: you know, like you technological disasters and so on. In
Speaker 1: other words, studies eventually showed that a full on public
Speaker 1: panic was a very unlikely outcome, regardless of the circumstances.
Speaker 1: But this wasn't known when the Robertson Panel issued its
Speaker 1: report in ninety three. In six while studies of the
Speaker 1: sociology of disaster were underway, the conclusions were not well known.
Speaker 1: The fear of mass panic was still real. A lot
Speaker 1: of books also at that point still believed the myth
Speaker 1: of mass panic. After the War the World's broadcast, so
Speaker 1: in n Um there was a special Halloween edition of
Speaker 1: the Mercury Theater on the air, which was Cource and
Speaker 1: wells Is radio drama program, and they did an adaptation
Speaker 1: of War of the World. The enemy is now inside
Speaker 1: about the palace sades five five great matines. First one
Speaker 1: is crossing the river. I can see it from here, waiting,
Speaker 1: waiting the Hudson like a man waiting through a brook
Speaker 1: bullets and has handed me Fran. Cylinders are falling all
Speaker 1: over the country, one outside of Buffalo, one in Chicago.
Speaker 1: They Lewis seemed to be timed in space. Now the
Speaker 1: first machine reaches the shore, it is widely believed that
Speaker 1: it's set off a mass panic. You know, people are
Speaker 1: running out in the streets being afraid that the you know,
Speaker 1: the world was coming to an end. Basically, several people
Speaker 1: reported to St. Michael's Hospital in Newark, New Jersey for
Speaker 1: shock Baltimore Mare and died of a heart attack. Car
Speaker 1: accidents panicked people in the streets. None of these things happened.
Speaker 1: The story of the reaction to the program is an
Speaker 1: urban legend, the one that was briefly promoted by the
Speaker 1: popular press. Now later on scholars went back and found
Speaker 1: that no, most people did understand that it was a
Speaker 1: work of fiction that they were listening to on the radio.
Speaker 1: Of the people who did miss the announcement at the beginning,
Speaker 1: and that it was a play, and who thought they
Speaker 1: were listening to a real broadcast, most of them thought
Speaker 1: it was an invasion of Germans, not Martians. It got
Speaker 1: sort of played up a lot, I mean, in part
Speaker 1: because it was newspapers who like losing audiences to radio
Speaker 1: and wanted to be able to cast radio is this
Speaker 1: uniquely new threat. And in part, you know, it just
Speaker 1: sort of fed people's fear of the masses in general,
Speaker 1: and this idea that people were just easily manipulated by
Speaker 1: a demagogue within microphone. And of course ours In Welles
Speaker 1: was happy to have this story going around that he
Speaker 1: was such an amazing storyteller. He had you know, the
Speaker 1: country panicking. I mean, I mean, in addition to being
Speaker 1: you know, a great popular artist, Orson Welles he understood
Speaker 1: show business as the stories of the Michigan sightings made
Speaker 1: it into the national press. The questions began, what is
Speaker 1: the government going to do about it? Are they going
Speaker 1: to investigate in this environment? Alan Heinek pressed his boss,
Speaker 1: Captain Hector Quintinilla, the head of Project Blue Book, to
Speaker 1: be sent to Michigan to try to determine what was happening. First,
Speaker 1: his boss at Project blue Book said no, we're ignoring this,
Speaker 1: and Heineck was very frustrated. Well, a little while later
Speaker 1: he gets a call from his boss at the Air
Speaker 1: Force again he says, all right, go to Michigan. The
Speaker 1: press attention had made not investigating an untenable position. They
Speaker 1: were embarrassed by their inaction, and so they decided they
Speaker 1: had to do something. So they send Heineck to Michigan.
Speaker 1: And in Michigan, Heinik encountered the case that would be
Speaker 1: the turning point of his career, the confrontation in his
Speaker 1: hero's journey that would eventually bring him back to the
Speaker 1: public with a new message next time on Strange Arrivals.
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heeart, three D
Speaker 1: audio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode
Speaker 1: was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by
Speaker 1: Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky. And special thanks to Wendy Connors,
Speaker 1: creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio
Speaker 1: on archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over
Speaker 1: at grimm and mild dot com, and find more podcasts
Speaker 1: from My Heart Radio by visiting the I heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: H