Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D Audio.
Speaker 1: For full exposure, listen with headphones. This is the last
Speaker 1: episode of season two. We will be releasing a number
Speaker 1: of bonus episodes with full interviews with some of the
Speaker 1: people featured on this podcast, as well as others who
Speaker 1: bring an interesting perspective on the issues we've looked at
Speaker 1: this season. I also sat down with Alex Williams to
Speaker 1: be interviewed about both seasons of Strange Arrivals for his
Speaker 1: podcast Ephemeral. Alex is an executive producer of Strange Arrivals
Speaker 1: and his creative input has been invaluable. This episode of Ephemeral,
Speaker 1: titled simply UFOs, looks at some of the same things
Speaker 1: the first two seasons of Strange Arrivals did, but in
Speaker 1: a completely different way. You can hear it now by
Speaker 1: searching for Ephemeral on the I Heart radio app or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to podcasts, and listen at the end
Speaker 1: of this episode for a sneak preview. Closer to home
Speaker 1: in Marietta, Washington, you will experience slip terror of Bigfoot.
Speaker 1: It all began on the night of June six. Rita
Speaker 1: Graham was sitting on our couch watching TV. Suddenly a giant,
Speaker 1: hairy hand crashed through the window and groped about. The
Speaker 1: monster was next seen by Tom Stern and three days
Speaker 1: later in a boy scout camp. In all, the small
Speaker 1: town experienced twelve encounters within thirty days. Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman,
Speaker 1: the Luckness Monster just three of the monsters you will
Speaker 1: see in The Mysterious Monsters, A shocking look into man's
Speaker 1: encounters with the unknown. The Mysterious Monsters. H I'm Toby
Speaker 1: Ball and this is Strange Arrivals, Episode thirteen my Lar Batman.
Speaker 1: On July, the Invernous Courier, a newspaper in Scotland, reported
Speaker 1: an incident involving Mr and Mrs Spicer, tourists from London.
Speaker 1: As they drove along the banks of Loch Ness. It
Speaker 1: was horrible, an abomination. About fifty yards ahead we saw
Speaker 1: an undulating sort of neck, and quickly followed by a large,
Speaker 1: ponderous body. I estimated the link to be thirty ft.
Speaker 1: Its color was dark elephant gray. It crossed the road
Speaker 1: in a series of jerks, but because of the slope,
Speaker 1: we could not see its limbs. Although I accelerated quickly
Speaker 1: towards it, it had disappeared into the loch. By the
Speaker 1: time I reached the spot, there was no sign of
Speaker 1: it in the water. I am a temperate man, but
Speaker 1: I am willing to take any oath that we saw
Speaker 1: this loch Ness beast. I'm certain that this creature was
Speaker 1: of a prehistoric species, likely spurred by a new road
Speaker 1: that allowed for better views of its waters. This was
Speaker 1: just one of a number of sightings of something in
Speaker 1: loch Ness. In December n the British newspaper The Daily
Speaker 1: Mail commissioned a filmmaker and big game hunter named Marmaduke
Speaker 1: Weatherall to find the Lochness Monster. On December, he discovered
Speaker 1: footprints on the shore that he said, we're from a quote,
Speaker 1: very powerful, soft footed animal about twenty ft long. This
Speaker 1: turned out not to be true. They were in fact
Speaker 1: made using a dried hippopotamus foot that served as a
Speaker 1: base for an ash tray or umbrella stand. Weather All
Speaker 1: was humiliated four months later. In April, a physician from
Speaker 1: England named Robert Kenneth Wilson claimed to take a photograph
Speaker 1: of what appeared to be the neck and head of
Speaker 1: some prehistoric looking creature emerging from the water. This became
Speaker 1: known as the Surgeon's photo, and it is the iconic
Speaker 1: photo of the Lockness Monster. And this wasn't the only
Speaker 1: case where a piece of visual evidence caught the public's imagination.
Speaker 1: Mysterious creature is roaming this wilderness, the creature that has
Speaker 1: confounded scientists, baffled investigators, and captured the imagination of millions
Speaker 1: of people. We've all heard of the reported sightings of
Speaker 1: this creature, a creature most of us know as big Foot.
Speaker 1: We've read about it and our newspapers, and heard about
Speaker 1: it on radio and television. And some of you, like me,
Speaker 1: might have been skeptical about these reports, wondering how it
Speaker 1: could be possible for a sizeable population of eight foot
Speaker 1: five monsters to live among us on the edge of
Speaker 1: our industrialized society. I was skeptical. I was also tantalized
Speaker 1: by what I heard, so I decided to find out
Speaker 1: for myself whether Bigfoot was fact or fiction. In October
Speaker 1: of nineteen seven, thirty three years after the Surgeon's photo,
Speaker 1: Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were riding horses along Bluff
Speaker 1: Creek in Humboldt County, California. Patterson was in the midst
Speaker 1: of attempting to film a movie based partly on actual
Speaker 1: stories of a group of cowboys tracking a sasquatch. Patterson
Speaker 1: may have already done some filming over Memorial Day weekend,
Speaker 1: which would become important. Later in the early afternoon, Patterson
Speaker 1: and Giblin claimed they saw a figure standing or crouching
Speaker 1: by a stream. Patterson dismounted, grabbed his camera from a
Speaker 1: saddle bag, and chased the creature, who had begun to
Speaker 1: retreat from the two men and their horses. The beginning
Speaker 1: of the film, which lasts just less than a minute,
Speaker 1: is confused and jiggli as Patterson runs with the camera
Speaker 1: in hand, but there's a several second shot of this
Speaker 1: ape like creature striding away from Patterson, turning to look
Speaker 1: back at him, and then continuing on. For most people,
Speaker 1: this is the image that comes to mind when someone
Speaker 1: mentions Bigfoot or Sasquatch. I bring these two examples up
Speaker 1: because the advent of photography and film created a new
Speaker 1: kind of folklore, one that is particularly important to UFOs
Speaker 1: because it is one thing to hear about someone seeing
Speaker 1: a huge, seemingly prehistoric creature in a lake, or even
Speaker 1: foot ape that walks like a man deep in the
Speaker 1: woods of the Pacific Northwest. But having a visual artifact
Speaker 1: makes the story vastly more compelling Utah State University folklore
Speaker 1: professor Lynn McNeil. Then we start adding in not just
Speaker 1: the narratives, not just the stories, but this additional media
Speaker 1: that comes to us from this particular time in our culture,
Speaker 1: where there's more everyday people out there with cameras. There's
Speaker 1: more visual media than just textual. We're able to capture
Speaker 1: things and share them with each other in unprecedented ways,
Speaker 1: and that changes how we talk about this stuff. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's any question that the surgeons photo and
Speaker 1: the Patterson film are critical pieces of the Locknest Monster
Speaker 1: and bigfoot folklore's They are the first or among the
Speaker 1: first things you think of when you think about these
Speaker 1: two legendary creatures. But here's the thing, they're both almost
Speaker 1: definitely hoaxes. The Surgeon's photo is nearly always shown cropped
Speaker 1: to accentuate the image of the creature. The uncropped photo
Speaker 1: includes the far shore and a wider expanse of lake,
Speaker 1: and suddenly, with this context, the creature doesn't look so large.
Speaker 1: In fact, two men Marmaduke. Weather all Son and Stepson,
Speaker 1: both at different times, confessed that they had helped in
Speaker 1: creating a hoax to get revenge on the Daily Mail
Speaker 1: for its treatment of Marmaduke after the Hippo foot incident.
Speaker 1: According to them, it was a small model maybe two
Speaker 1: ft high, placed on a toy submarine and then photographed
Speaker 1: the enlisted Wilson, the English doctor, through a mutual friend
Speaker 1: to give the photograph authenticity it wouldn't have had if
Speaker 1: it had come from someone in the weather all family. Similarly,
Speaker 1: there are questions about the Patterson film. Without getting too
Speaker 1: deep into the weeds, there's an issue about the dating
Speaker 1: of the film, because there were very few labs that
Speaker 1: could develop the kind of film he was using. Critics
Speaker 1: question whether Patterson could have recorded the footage on the
Speaker 1: date he says he did and have it developed by
Speaker 1: the time it was made public. They point to the
Speaker 1: filming of the movie that took place over Memorial Day
Speaker 1: weekend and note that Patterson would likely have had a
Speaker 1: bigfoot costume for those scenes, the implication being he filmed
Speaker 1: a hoax video at the time. Further, and more damning
Speaker 1: biologists who have looked at the film note that the
Speaker 1: Bigfoot doesn't have a realistic physiology and is most likely
Speaker 1: a man in a costume. But regardless of the authenticity
Speaker 1: of what was filmed, these two visual artifacts are critical
Speaker 1: parts of their respective folklores. Photos and videos, of course,
Speaker 1: are also very important parts of the UFO folklore, especially
Speaker 1: recently with a number of unclassified UFO videos released by
Speaker 1: the Pentagon. The ranks of UFO videos and photographs have
Speaker 1: also been plagued by hoaxes well. There is no single
Speaker 1: image that has the iconic power of the Surgeon's photo
Speaker 1: or the Patterson film. Two early photographs that set the
Speaker 1: expectation for the stereotypical flying saucer were taken in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty just outside the town of Sheridan, Oregon, by a
Speaker 1: farmer named Paul Trent. These photos have come to be
Speaker 1: associated with a larger town not far from Sheridan called McMinnville.
Speaker 1: It's one thing to trust your neighbor when he's like
Speaker 1: I saw some weird lights over my farm and then
Speaker 1: I lost three hours of my day. I don't know
Speaker 1: what happened, but I woke up in a ditch and
Speaker 1: I had all these bruises. You know, you tell me
Speaker 1: what that means. It's another thing when your neighbor tells
Speaker 1: you that same story and then shows you a photo
Speaker 1: that he took, and you're like, oh, yeah, I can't
Speaker 1: explain what those lights are. They don't look like an airplane,
Speaker 1: they don't look like anything I'm familiar with. That word
Speaker 1: of mouth culture is now being bolstered by additional things.
Speaker 1: The sighting occurred at seven thirty in the evening on
Speaker 1: maybe eleventh. Here's Evelyn Trent, who first saw the object,
Speaker 1: describing what happened. I had to look up and I've
Speaker 1: seen this thing and I ran into the house. You'll
Speaker 1: know about it. We went one look after a camera
Speaker 1: and I with the other way after a camel the
Speaker 1: green above the let's we found it. The best thing,
Speaker 1: I have to say, It would be just about the
Speaker 1: size of the shoes without any strings ing not I said.
Speaker 1: It was all flat on the bottom and it was
Speaker 1: still recolored. I was about to lunking it, but there
Speaker 1: was no smoke, no noise either. What we just suppose
Speaker 1: the let the flight wires away and I just you know,
Speaker 1: the distance and stuff. I just don't know if it
Speaker 1: could have hovered for a while and all just like that,
Speaker 1: and he's just a picture, and right, just the picture.
Speaker 1: He ran the film the re rose in order to
Speaker 1: take another one, and as his turn, and just to
Speaker 1: folve very The two photos are taken from similar, though
Speaker 1: not identical vantage points. In the lower left of the
Speaker 1: frame is a house or shed with an oil tank
Speaker 1: set on the side that faces the camera. An expanse
Speaker 1: of sparsely wooded flat land ends at what appeared to
Speaker 1: be low hills in the distance. Not far away. On
Speaker 1: the right side of the frame is a telephone pole,
Speaker 1: and wires can be seen going from the pole in
Speaker 1: each direction. In the foreground, electrical wires hang across the
Speaker 1: top of the frame. An objects seems to hover in
Speaker 1: the air in the center of the shot. In the
Speaker 1: first photo, the object is tilted down to the right
Speaker 1: and away from the camera, and enlargement shows what seems
Speaker 1: to be a flat circular or bottom and perhaps a
Speaker 1: kind of rounded dome on top. In the second photo,
Speaker 1: the object is still tilted somewhat to the right, but
Speaker 1: is no longer tilted away, and you can see that
Speaker 1: the top section is raised and flattened like a mesa,
Speaker 1: and there's a point that sticks up from the middle.
Speaker 1: As you heard Evelyn Trent say, she thought it was
Speaker 1: roughly the size of a parachute. The photos were a
Speaker 1: sensation and taken to be genuine. The Condon Committee undertook
Speaker 1: a scientific study of the photos and found no evidence
Speaker 1: of a hoax. In the conclusion to the section on
Speaker 1: these photos, the researcher, an astronomer named William Hartman, wrote,
Speaker 1: this is one of the few UFO reports in which
Speaker 1: all factors investigated geometric, psychological, and physical, appeared to be
Speaker 1: consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object silvery
Speaker 1: metallic disc shaped tens of meters in diameter, and evidently
Speaker 1: artificial fluid in sight of two witnesses. It cannot be
Speaker 1: said that the evidence positively rules out of fabrication, although
Speaker 1: there are some physical factors, such as the accuracy of
Speaker 1: certain photometric measures of the original negatives, which argue against
Speaker 1: the fabrication. This validation by the United States government let
Speaker 1: the photos a greater degree of legitimacy. Now it's the government.
Speaker 1: Now it's an institutional element of our culture who we
Speaker 1: know isn't joking around, and they're taking it seriously, and
Speaker 1: they're producing documents and they're gathering photos, and you start
Speaker 1: to go, okay, wait, hey, wait a minute, like the
Speaker 1: authority that institutions lend to the already powerful word of
Speaker 1: mouth consensus of folklore is really something that you can't underestimate.
Speaker 1: In his section on the mc minville photos in the
Speaker 1: Condon Report, Hartman had noted that it was possible that
Speaker 1: this was a hope. Another possibility can be considered, however,
Speaker 1: the object appears beneath a pair of wires, as is
Speaker 1: seen in Plates twenty four. We may question, therefore, whether
Speaker 1: it could have been a model suspended from one of
Speaker 1: the wires. This possibility is strengthened by the observation that
Speaker 1: the object appears beneath roughly the same point in the
Speaker 1: two photos, in spite of their having been taken from
Speaker 1: two positions, and in fact this may have been what happened.
Speaker 1: Skeptical investigator Robert Shaefer has shown that the lightning conditions
Speaker 1: and the photos indicate that the shots were taken around
Speaker 1: eight twenty in the morning, not seven thirty in the evening,
Speaker 1: as the trends claimed. French researchers published a technical paper
Speaker 1: showing that the physics of the positions of the object
Speaker 1: in the two photos indicate that it is a small
Speaker 1: model hanging from the electrical lines in a light breeze
Speaker 1: a short distance from the camera. A researcher named Joel
Speaker 1: Carpenter suggested that the object was a mirror from an
Speaker 1: old truck. The post war era saw an increase in
Speaker 1: the ability for people to produce or consume visual culture.
Speaker 1: Cameras became increasingly easy for non professionals to use, and
Speaker 1: the influence and presence of television, of course grew exponentially.
Speaker 1: So we start to see people think in terms of
Speaker 1: images more than words, and that of course has only
Speaker 1: grown thanks to the Internet and our ability to now
Speaker 1: combine images and words in all sorts of new ways.
Speaker 1: But we see folklore reflect that. We suddenly start getting
Speaker 1: genres of folklore that scholars referred to as xerox lore
Speaker 1: and facts lore, and we get things like visual legends,
Speaker 1: so instead of telling a story, we just get an
Speaker 1: image of something. And you can see how something like UFOs,
Speaker 1: something that's relying on visual input or photography or you know,
Speaker 1: mapping and things like that. The ability to share that information,
Speaker 1: the ability to pass around that evidence, just gets that
Speaker 1: much stronger. In an organization called To the Stars Academy
Speaker 1: released three videos taken by Navy pilots in two thousand
Speaker 1: and four and two thousand fifteen showing blurry images of
Speaker 1: things in the sky that the audio released along with
Speaker 1: the videos indicated could not be identified. The videos were
Speaker 1: posted on the websites of The New York Times and
Speaker 1: The Washington Post, accompanying stories about a secret Pentagon project
Speaker 1: allegedly investigating UFOs rebranded as u a p s Unexplained
Speaker 1: Aerial Phenomena. This story, to some degree is still unfolding,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to argue about the merits of
Speaker 1: the videos, but what strikes me is how indistinct they are.
Speaker 1: The objects in these black and white videos are either
Speaker 1: blobs the result of heat detecting cameras, or dots moving
Speaker 1: against the background. There's no way you could see the
Speaker 1: films and then describe the objects in them. Contrast that
Speaker 1: to a still photo that was put out to the
Speaker 1: Internet by a newly formed online magazine called The Debrief
Speaker 1: that shows a photo taken from the rear seat of
Speaker 1: an F A eighteen super hornet of a metallic object
Speaker 1: in the sky. Supposedly, the Defense Department was stumped. The
Speaker 1: object is in the distance, but it's clear to see
Speaker 1: you can describe what it looks like. In fact, you
Speaker 1: can describe it well enough that it took practically no
Speaker 1: time for the Internet masses to not only identify it
Speaker 1: as a milar balloon, but as a batman my lar balloon.
Speaker 1: But while this photo was quickly explained, the previous three
Speaker 1: videos exists in that realm we've talked about throughout this
Speaker 1: season where no single explanation has been accepted by the culture.
Speaker 1: So it lives in that folklore realm. But there is
Speaker 1: attached to the videos a sense that the Department of
Speaker 1: Defense has legitimate questions about them, and this is important
Speaker 1: when people evaluate them. When we start to see any
Speaker 1: sort of institutional acknowledgement of that, like the declassified reports
Speaker 1: that have come out from the U. S. Military of
Speaker 1: we caught these things on camera, what are they? We
Speaker 1: don't know, that sort of admission from that level of authority,
Speaker 1: and just bam, suddenly a whole slice of people who
Speaker 1: previously were maybe on the skeptical side, are now just
Speaker 1: like WHOA. That was what was missing for me. That
Speaker 1: was the resonant piece that's going to get me to
Speaker 1: take this seriously again. And so it's an ever shifting landscape,
Speaker 1: but one in which we can stand back and see
Speaker 1: really big themes, but we can also zoom in and
Speaker 1: see really really specific, small scale symbolic moments that are
Speaker 1: generating that larger theme. So these videos have been absorbed,
Speaker 1: at least at this moment, into the larger UFO folklore.
Speaker 1: But what accounts for our continuing fascination with UFOs when
Speaker 1: the culture loses interest in so many other paranormal phenomena
Speaker 1: after the break? Why have UFOs maintained their place in
Speaker 1: our culture while other paranormal interests seemed to come and go.
Speaker 1: One answer, of course, is that there might be more
Speaker 1: to the UFO phenomenon the just stories. Maybe we are
Speaker 1: being visited again, Lynn McNeil. We know that belief doesn't
Speaker 1: stick around for no reason, and we know that one straightforward,
Speaker 1: if hard to accept answer is perhaps people keep talking
Speaker 1: about UFOs because people keep seeing them, because they're they're
Speaker 1: they're real, people are having encounters. That is a possibility
Speaker 1: that it does us no service to discount. When we wonder, wow,
Speaker 1: why do people keep talking about this? It's like, Wow,
Speaker 1: why do people keep talking about Bigfoot may because they
Speaker 1: keep seeing him. You know. That's one answer that we
Speaker 1: don't need to erase. But what explains it if UFOs
Speaker 1: aren't real? After all, we don't have the kind of
Speaker 1: evidence that you'd expect from a phenomenon that has been
Speaker 1: going on for at least three quarters of a century.
Speaker 1: Let's say that we cannot confirm the existence of UFOs.
Speaker 1: We don't have one that most of us know of, right,
Speaker 1: We don't have one to look at to take apart
Speaker 1: to dismantle, to analyze with what tools are available to us?
Speaker 1: Why do we keep telling this story? Clearly there's some
Speaker 1: beneficial outcome of leaving in this possibility, not meaning always positive,
Speaker 1: but meaning it serves us in our psychological and social needs.
Speaker 1: On August six, the first nuclear weapon to be used
Speaker 1: in war was detonated above Hiroshima, causing destruction at a
Speaker 1: scale unimaginable before that moment. In an instant, an estimated
Speaker 1: eighty people were killed and tens of thousands more would
Speaker 1: die in the days to come. Everything within a two
Speaker 1: kilometer radius of the detonation site burned. The destruction was
Speaker 1: on a scale that had previously been thought only possible
Speaker 1: by gods. Now though through technology, man had acquired that power.
Speaker 1: What did that mean? How could fallible humans be trusted
Speaker 1: with that kind of destructive potential? After people, and particularly Americans,
Speaker 1: were confronted with the fierce, nearly supernatural power afforded to
Speaker 1: them by technology, less than two years after the bombing
Speaker 1: of Hiroshima, Kenneth Arnold saw objects flying around Mountaineer and
Speaker 1: debris was found on Mac Brazil's ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico,
Speaker 1: and this became the form that this strain of folklore
Speaker 1: would take. The reality is is that folklore is a
Speaker 1: really contemporary form of cultural expression. Yes, it comes from
Speaker 1: the past, but the whole point of it being folklore
Speaker 1: is that it keeps itself relevant by adapting and changing dynamically,
Speaker 1: so that when it was relevant in the past, it
Speaker 1: can adjust to become relevant now. So, yeah, folklore dies out,
Speaker 1: folklore disappears. For a long time, people thought of folklore
Speaker 1: as the survivals of a past age. And what we
Speaker 1: now know is that it's not so much that it's
Speaker 1: dying out. It's that it's changing its face in order
Speaker 1: to keep up the early days of the modern UFO era.
Speaker 1: Explicitly acknowledged the centrality of the new destructive forces in
Speaker 1: human hands. The so called contact e s were people
Speaker 1: who in the nineteen fifties claim to have interactions with
Speaker 1: very humanlike beings from outer space that brought messages of
Speaker 1: peace and concern over the development of nuclear weapons. Here's
Speaker 1: Aaron Gallias, hosts of the Saucer Life podcast, talking about
Speaker 1: the most famous of the contacts, a man named George
Speaker 1: adam Ski. In nineteen fifty two, George Adamsky has a
Speaker 1: meeting in the desert with a being from a flying saucer.
Speaker 1: He's from the planet Venus, and he communicates through gestures
Speaker 1: that the Venusians are concerned because of atomic explosions they've
Speaker 1: detected coming from the Earth. These other civilizations have already
Speaker 1: passed beyond this stage of development that Earth is in,
Speaker 1: and this might spell doom for the balance of the
Speaker 1: Solar System. The same message was delivered by Claw to
Speaker 1: an alien visitor in the classic science fiction film From
Speaker 1: the Day the Earth Stood Still. If you threaten to
Speaker 1: extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced
Speaker 1: to a burned out cinder. In fact, many of the
Speaker 1: encounters we've looked at this season have taken place near
Speaker 1: nuclear facilities. Roswell is near White Sands Missile Test Range,
Speaker 1: site of the first atomic bomb test, and R F.
Speaker 1: Bentwaters in Curtland Air Force Base, both house nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: The link is unmistakable. But why. Part of folklore development
Speaker 1: is the adaptation of traditional stories to a framework that
Speaker 1: makes sense in the context of the times. If we
Speaker 1: want to look at the legend of the UFO visitor,
Speaker 1: where we have odd, often vaguely humanoid, sometimes a little
Speaker 1: extra tall, slender creatures descending from the sky or perhaps
Speaker 1: emerging from another dimension to interact with humans, often to
Speaker 1: kidnap them, often to interfere with their bodies in some way.
Speaker 1: We've just described centuries of fairy lore, you know, other
Speaker 1: creatures slender, humanoid, mysterious, powerful, emerging from the mists, taking
Speaker 1: us away. Being kidnapped by the fairies and taken by
Speaker 1: the fairies is a longstanding tradition. So if we want
Speaker 1: to call that UFO lore, we could very very easily.
Speaker 1: This modification of existing stories to fit the context of
Speaker 1: a culture or a time is a common phenomenon in folklore.
Speaker 1: So the term actually that folk has use for this,
Speaker 1: which I love, is eco typification. It's borrowed from botany, basically,
Speaker 1: the study of plants and the way that they immerge
Speaker 1: urge differently, even though it's the same species in two
Speaker 1: different climate and geological and geographical environments, because it's being
Speaker 1: responsive to its context, and so folklore is seen as
Speaker 1: operating in that same way. You can have the same story,
Speaker 1: the same legend, the same fairy tales, show up in
Speaker 1: two different places, and it's going to be morphologically distinct.
Speaker 1: Morphology is the study of words and how they relate
Speaker 1: to other words in the same language. Syntax studies the
Speaker 1: structure of sentences. Morphology studies the structure of words. Because
Speaker 1: of the context of those two different places, it's going
Speaker 1: to be meeting the needs of a different time, maybe
Speaker 1: a different culture in different region, a different language family,
Speaker 1: all those sorts of things. So it's not that folklore
Speaker 1: is old, it's that folklore is continuously adapting. That's what
Speaker 1: makes it relevant. People have always used stories to make
Speaker 1: sense of the forces that seem to control the course
Speaker 1: of their lives. You can think of the seasonal flooding
Speaker 1: of the nile, or the cycle of birth, life and death,
Speaker 1: or national origin narratives. I think that UFO folklore has
Speaker 1: developed as a response to our ability through technology to
Speaker 1: assert control over the natural environment our lives the most
Speaker 1: pressing problems facing us, and at the same time create
Speaker 1: immense seemingly insurmountable problems, such as our loss of privacy
Speaker 1: and anonymity in the computer age, and of course, climate change.
Speaker 1: Given the unprecedented power of technology, it doesn't seem too
Speaker 1: surprising that a folklore developed around the existence of technology
Speaker 1: that is superior to our own in some unknowable way.
Speaker 1: I think it's important to point out that legends, as
Speaker 1: a genre of folk narrative, are a legend about possibility.
Speaker 1: For a long time, legends were defined by folklorists as
Speaker 1: stories told as true, whereas fairy tales are stories told
Speaker 1: as fiction and myths our stories told sort of as
Speaker 1: sacred revelation. Right, legends are the ones that were told
Speaker 1: as literally true. We've nuanced this since then to talk
Speaker 1: about the idea that what legends do is they allow
Speaker 1: us to symbolically discuss possibility, and the possibilities of reality
Speaker 1: are a thing that human beings love to discuss. We
Speaker 1: really want to chew over the potential boundaries of reality.
Speaker 1: Could this be, Could this not be? Could this happen?
Speaker 1: Is this real? And UFOs are something that clearly there's
Speaker 1: both ambiguity and importance in this. It matters to us
Speaker 1: to not be alone in the universe, and we aren't
Speaker 1: sure if it's going to be a good thing or
Speaker 1: a bad thing when we get that answer. So again,
Speaker 1: you have two possibilities. One is that there really are
Speaker 1: craft in our skies whose origins we don't know. But
Speaker 1: if there aren't, we have a story or a collection
Speaker 1: of stories that speaks to something about our age. Are
Speaker 1: we alone? And if we aren't and we are being visited,
Speaker 1: these beings must have technology far beyond ours. We have
Speaker 1: a sense that technology advances along certain lines, and therefore
Speaker 1: these beings can give us some insight about where we
Speaker 1: are headed. And our ambivalence about the exponentially expanding power
Speaker 1: of technology is reflected in these stories where we have
Speaker 1: no idea of the intentions of these visitors except for
Speaker 1: fiction or in the disinformation spread by people like Richard Doughty,
Speaker 1: their motives are opaque. Take for instance, the mysterious binary
Speaker 1: download that Jim Peniston says he received from the ship
Speaker 1: bringing the clearing in Rendel shimp Forest. He says his
Speaker 1: ship came from six thousand years in the future to
Speaker 1: give him this information, but he hasn't figured the code
Speaker 1: out yet. It's not known, And this, I think is
Speaker 1: important when we think of what the relationship between humans
Speaker 1: and technology might be like six thousand years in the
Speaker 1: future or at any time or place where technology is
Speaker 1: greatly advanced. Is it a good picture or a bad picture,
Speaker 1: utopia or dystopia. There isn't a consensus answer to this question,
Speaker 1: and the UFO narrative doesn't offer one. It reflects our uncertainty.
Speaker 1: Next week, on a bonus episode of Strange Arrivals, I
Speaker 1: talked with Colin Dickey, the author of The Unexplained Mythical
Speaker 1: Monsters Alien Encounters. In our obsession with the Unexplained, the
Speaker 1: three topics that ended up being sort of the driving
Speaker 1: force of this book, not just cryptis and aliens, but
Speaker 1: also the lost continents of Atlantis and Lamaria. I wanted
Speaker 1: to try and figure out a way to account for them,
Speaker 1: a kind of hypothesis that would encompass these three areas
Speaker 1: and why they seemed to be so interrelated to one another.
Speaker 1: And as promised, here's a clip from my ephemeral episode
Speaker 1: available wherever podcasts are found. Betty and Barney Hill crossover
Speaker 1: from Canada into northern New Hampshire and they stopped to
Speaker 1: have a snack at the diner in this place called Colebrook.
Speaker 1: They eat. As they're leaving, they see it's around ten
Speaker 1: o'clock at night. They started driving south. They get into
Speaker 1: the White Mountains and they see that there's this light
Speaker 1: that seems to be following them. They stopped at a
Speaker 1: turn off and they get out and they look at it.
Speaker 1: Barney thinks that maybe it's a plane, but they can't
Speaker 1: hear any noise. They get back in the car, but
Speaker 1: with his sense that something up and the sky is
Speaker 1: following them. They drive through this area called Franconian Notch.
Speaker 1: I've driven through it many times. It's this really beautiful road,
Speaker 1: but on either side or these very steep mountains, so
Speaker 1: it feels fairly claustrophobic. They stopped right by the old
Speaker 1: man in the mountain and they see an actual craft
Speaker 1: and that's the point which you know it gets real.
Speaker 1: They get back in the car start heading further south.
Speaker 1: They kind of get out of Franconian Notch into more
Speaker 1: open area over their car, they hear this craft. They
Speaker 1: pull over and the craft goes off into this field.
Speaker 1: Barney gets out and he's got binoculars. He looked like
Speaker 1: the kind of man who would have binoculars handy in
Speaker 1: his car. He's looking up and he sees beings inside
Speaker 1: the craft looking back at them. I don't think you
Speaker 1: had to get it earlier that they were pretty human looking,
Speaker 1: and you have to consider that looking at anyone in
Speaker 1: a window ten stories up with the binocular the only
Speaker 1: thing you can discern is that they look human, and
Speaker 1: nothing good task about it. They jumped back into the car,
Speaker 1: take off down the highway. They feel these kind of
Speaker 1: buzzes in the car, very subtle vibrating, and it was
Speaker 1: b B B B B b B, and they realized
Speaker 1: they're like thirty miles down the road with no memory
Speaker 1: of driving it. They go into Conquered trying to find
Speaker 1: a cop to tell about what happened, get a cup
Speaker 1: of coffee, don't find either. Drive the rest of the
Speaker 1: way back, arriving at about five in the morning, but
Speaker 1: they were expecting to show up around three based on
Speaker 1: when they've gone through Colebrook. So there's a couple of
Speaker 1: missing hours, listen and subscribe to Ephemeral Now wherever you
Speaker 1: find your favorite shows, and learn more at Ephemeral Thought. Show.
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart 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 Manki, and special thanks to Wendy
Speaker 1: Connor's creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related
Speaker 1: audio on archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals
Speaker 1: over at Grimm and Mile dot com, and find more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my Heart Radio by visiting the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. For more information on folklore, visit the American
Speaker 1: Folklore Society on the web at American Folklore Society dot org.
Speaker 1: A SHO on the East