Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: The ancient Roman satirist juvenile famously said that the secret
Speaker 1: to being loved as a ruler is not good governance,
Speaker 1: but providing the public bread and circuses, food and entertainment.
Speaker 1: But it must be said that people sometimes are particular
Speaker 1: about what sort of circuses they're presented. Escapism and politics,
Speaker 1: although seemingly very far apart, often collide in the most
Speaker 1: turbulent of ways. That said, William mccreedy wasn't thinking of
Speaker 1: this when the curtain rose on May seventh of eighteen
Speaker 1: forty nine. He was one of the most acclaimed British
Speaker 1: actors of his era, and he was focused on his craft.
Speaker 1: He stepped out onto a stage in Manhattan, ready to
Speaker 1: perform the lead in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, and was greeted
Speaker 1: by a wall of jeers and booze McReady froze. He
Speaker 1: hadn't even delivered a line yet, and already the audience
Speaker 1: was turning against him. Moments later, the crowd began to
Speaker 1: throw rotten vegetables at him, as well as eggs and coins.
Speaker 1: It was so noisy that McCready and his fellow actors
Speaker 1: struggled to make themselves heard over the rabble. And this
Speaker 1: wasn't the first time that locals had disrupted McCready's performances.
Speaker 1: Earlier that week, someone had thrown a dead sheep onto
Speaker 1: the stage. There was an actor's worst nightmare, and everyone
Speaker 1: knew that there was only one person to blame. You see,
Speaker 1: that very same night, at a nearby Broadway theater, another
Speaker 1: performance of Macbeth was under way, and the lead there
Speaker 1: was an American named Edwin Forrest. The rowdy auditudiens that
Speaker 1: had disrupted me were all fans of his. It seems
Speaker 1: that these Shakespearean actors were in the midst of a
Speaker 1: public feud. Forest was everything that MacCready was not. Boisterous, unrefined, populist,
Speaker 1: in a word, American. MacCready said as much to interviewers,
Speaker 1: and Forest responded by attacking McCready's tour of America. If
Speaker 1: he couldn't be there to disrupt a show himself, he
Speaker 1: would encourage his fans to do it for him. And honestly,
Speaker 1: nineteenth century New York City was primed for this sort
Speaker 1: of theatrical turf war. The ruggedly handsome Forest was the
Speaker 1: perfect proxy for the working class, and the restrained MacCready
Speaker 1: was seen as refined, elegant, and a British import that
Speaker 1: appealed to the city's elites. After the May seventh humiliation,
Speaker 1: though MacCready announced that he would return to England, wealthy
Speaker 1: New Yorkers persuaded him to stay a little longer though.
Speaker 1: On May tenth, he would perform Macbeth again, and this
Speaker 1: time they would be watching for rabble rousers. Police officers
Speaker 1: were posted inside the theater and outside. The state militia
Speaker 1: was told to stand by, and they actually had good
Speaker 1: reason to be concerned. Incendiary posters started to appear on
Speaker 1: street corners, encouraging people to show up at the astor
Speaker 1: Place theater to protest MacCready, referring to the venue as
Speaker 1: a British aristocratic opera house. A crowd began to gather
Speaker 1: there as the play began. The crowd outside grew enormous.
Speaker 1: While inside the witches proclaimed by the pricking of my thumbs,
Speaker 1: something wicked this way comes. Heckeling began as soon as
Speaker 1: MacCready took the stage. The hecklers were grabbed by police
Speaker 1: and taken out of the auditorium the state militia. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: we're losing control of the situation. Outside. The crowd you see,
Speaker 1: had swelled to around ten thousand people, a mix of
Speaker 1: protesters and curious bystanders. Someone doused the gas lamps in
Speaker 1: the square, making impossible for militia men to see the
Speaker 1: size of the protest, and soon after it turned from
Speaker 1: a protest into a riot as men threw objects at
Speaker 1: the militia, including paving stones, up from the street. Inside
Speaker 1: the theater, MacCready finished his performance in spite of the
Speaker 1: chaos outside and the sounds of breaking glass. As soon
Speaker 1: as the curtain fell, he disguised himself and slipped out
Speaker 1: the back entrance. Meanwhile, in an effort to control the mob,
Speaker 1: the military raised their muskets and fired into the air,
Speaker 1: and when that did not stop the hail of stones,
Speaker 1: they opened fire again, this time into the crowd. The
Speaker 1: mob dispersed in terror and all, twenty two people were
Speaker 1: killed and over one hundred were injured. MacCready fled back
Speaker 1: home to England and Forrest closed his engagement with the
Speaker 1: Broadway Theater soon after. But as Shakespeare himself wrote, what's
Speaker 1: done cannot be undone. It was not the first riot
Speaker 1: in New York history, nor was it the most violent,
Speaker 1: But in more ways than one, it was the most theatrical,
Speaker 1: growing pains as the American theater scene violently asserted its
Speaker 1: identity in defiance of the British. But for those involved,
Speaker 1: so foul and fair a day they had not seen.
Speaker 1: It was the evening of March thirteenth of nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: and amateur pilot Kurt was on his descent into the
Speaker 1: Phoenix Airport when his son Oliver pointed to the sky.
Speaker 1: Following Oliver's gaze, Kurt saw something unlike anything he had
Speaker 1: seen in the air, a cluster of six lights soaring
Speaker 1: towards the airport in a perfect v formation. Something about
Speaker 1: the lights unsettled him. They were hypnotizing, but the longer
Speaker 1: he stared, the more confused he became. He couldn't put
Speaker 1: his finger on it, but they just weren't quite behaving.
Speaker 1: Like any aircraft that he knew, so Kurt decided to
Speaker 1: call the lights in on the radio. When he reported
Speaker 1: the lights to aircraft at Control, he was met with
Speaker 1: a confused pause. Then an authoritative voice told him that
Speaker 1: they didn't see any lights in the area that he
Speaker 1: had indicated. In fact, they didn't see anything at all.
Speaker 1: Nothing had appeared on the radar whatsoever. As far as
Speaker 1: they were concerned. Kurt and Oliver were seeing an unidentified
Speaker 1: flying object. They may have been some of the first
Speaker 1: witnesses of the Phoenix Lights in nineteen ninety seven, but
Speaker 1: they were far from the last. That evening, thousands of
Speaker 1: other people in Arizona spotted the strange lights flying overhead.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of photos and videos of the lights were taken,
Speaker 1: making the incident one of the most recorded UFO sightings
Speaker 1: in American history. On the ground, residents of Phoenix seemed
Speaker 1: to spot two distinct types of aircraft earlier that night.
Speaker 1: Starting around eight PM, multiple witnesses spotted a group of
Speaker 1: five or six reddish orange lights that formed a V formation.
Speaker 1: This was the group of lights that Kurt had reported.
Speaker 1: This V was first sighted near Henderson, Nevada, nearly three
Speaker 1: hundred miles north of Phoenix and reportedly traveled slowly through
Speaker 1: the Phoenix Mountains toward the city. Later in the nights,
Speaker 1: around ten pm, another group of lights flew over Phoenix.
Speaker 1: These ones were in a straight line, and rather than
Speaker 1: flying forward, they seemed to hover near the city. Some
Speaker 1: people even thought that they saw some of these second
Speaker 1: lights fall out of the sky, just like the earlier lights.
Speaker 1: These ones disappeared almost as quickly as they had first arrived,
Speaker 1: and for weeks, the Phoenix lights had the city in
Speaker 1: a chokehold. The media frenzy blamed everything from aliens to
Speaker 1: Russian spies. To calm things down, the Arizona governor hosted
Speaker 1: a bizarre press conference where he claimed that he had
Speaker 1: found the person responsible for the lights, and then brought
Speaker 1: on an aid who was dressed in an alien costume.
Speaker 1: The joke helped to reassure the public that they weren't
Speaker 1: under any imminent threats of alien invasion, but the truth
Speaker 1: about the lights was no laughing matter. While the night
Speaker 1: of March thirteenth featured two separate UFO incidents, both groups
Speaker 1: of mysterious lights were caused by the same thing, Operation Snowbird.
Speaker 1: You see in nineteen ninety seven, the Air National Guard
Speaker 1: were conducting exercises out of an air base in Tucson, Arizona.
Speaker 1: One of these, codenamed Operation Snowbird, was meant to test
Speaker 1: the capabilities of the A ten Thunderbolt attack planes under
Speaker 1: winter conditions. While commercial planes typically employ blinking lights to
Speaker 1: help with visibility, military planes don't have to follow the
Speaker 1: same flight rules, so when a group of six Thunderbolts
Speaker 1: launched in a V formation, they kept their lights steady
Speaker 1: as they crossed Phoenix and headed south to Tucson. The
Speaker 1: second sighting also involved Thunderbolt planes, but it wasn't the
Speaker 1: lights on the aircraft that struck people as odd. Around
Speaker 1: ten PM, a group of Thunderbolts launched from a military
Speaker 1: airfield south of Phoenix. These planes were practicing dropping slow
Speaker 1: burning flares. The light from the flares, when seen from
Speaker 1: far away, seemed to fall slowly toward the ground, just
Speaker 1: as people reported seeing in the second UFO sighting. The
Speaker 1: Phoenix lights gained a lot of attention when they first appeared,
Speaker 1: but were quickly explained by the Army National Guard. Except
Speaker 1: some witnesses missed the memo. In fact, Kurt the amateur
Speaker 1: pilot who first called the lights in to air traffic control,
Speaker 1: didn't discover the truth until two years later. He was
Speaker 1: in his house in California when he noticed his wife
Speaker 1: watching a news program on UFO sightings, and Kurt instantly
Speaker 1: recognized the incident the newscasters described as the one that
Speaker 1: he and his son Oliver had witnessed in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1: When he told his wife, Goldie, she hardly believed him.
Speaker 1: It all sounded too coincidental, not just that he had
Speaker 1: witnessed the event, but that he Kurt had been the
Speaker 1: first to report it to the authorities. After all, who
Speaker 1: would believe a big Hollywood star like Kurt Russell would
Speaker 1: spot a UFO. It honestly sounded out of this world.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
Speaker 1: and you can learn all about it over at the
Speaker 1: Worldolore dot com and until next time, stay curious,