Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. In the nineteen thirties, J. B Ryan and
Speaker 1: his wife Louisa explored a new frontier in the field
Speaker 1: of psychology. They started a program at Duke University examining
Speaker 1: whether subjects possessed something called extrasensory perception, also known as
Speaker 1: e SP. This new field of study, which is often
Speaker 1: referred to as parapsychology, was ridiculed by professors and academics.
Speaker 1: Experiments were conducted using a special deck of cards with
Speaker 1: one of five different shapes printed on each. Subjects would
Speaker 1: try to guess what shape was on the other side
Speaker 1: of the card without being able to see it, and
Speaker 1: the results were well mixed. Still, that didn't stop Rhyan
Speaker 1: and others from testing the limits of the human mind.
Speaker 1: Looking back, though, it might be fair to say that
Speaker 1: they probably should have looked a little lower. Joy met
Speaker 1: her husband less while the two were still in high school.
Speaker 1: They had gone to a party together and ended up
Speaker 1: dancing all night. Although it wasn't his skills on the
Speaker 1: dance floor, she remembered years later, it was his manly,
Speaker 1: muskie smell. They remained together through college and got married
Speaker 1: shortly after, both of them entering the medical field. Post graduation,
Speaker 1: Less became a doctor, Joy a nurse. Over the next
Speaker 1: ten years, they raised three sons together and almost never fought.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, they had a perfect marriage. But one
Speaker 1: day Less came home from work at the hospital and
Speaker 1: Joy noticed something different about him. His smell was gone.
Speaker 1: That manly odor she'd fallen in love with had disappeared,
Speaker 1: and its place was a foul, musty stench no amount
Speaker 1: of soap would remove. After that, they fought more often,
Speaker 1: especially when Joy mentioned his smell. Over the following weeks
Speaker 1: and months, their relationship got worse, but so did her
Speaker 1: husband's demeanor. He was a lot more quick to become
Speaker 1: angry with her. He yelled more and had lost all
Speaker 1: the patients he used to have. Joy could tell something
Speaker 1: was going on with him, but she couldn't put her
Speaker 1: finger exactly on what it was. Her nose on the
Speaker 1: other hand, knew exactly what was going on. It just
Speaker 1: hadn't told her yet, so she told Less to go
Speaker 1: in for some tests. Joy believed that he had a tumor,
Speaker 1: one that was causing a shift in his personality, but
Speaker 1: the doctors told her that there was no tumor. Instead,
Speaker 1: they gave a very different diagnosis Less, it turned out,
Speaker 1: at Parkinson's disease. He Enjoy would manage the symptoms for
Speaker 1: the next two decades, even as they worsened. Less eventually
Speaker 1: had to leave his job at the hospital when his
Speaker 1: mobility made it impossible to keep up. He wasn't sleeping
Speaker 1: well either, and his hands shook, and then in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, Joy accompanied him to a support group for
Speaker 1: Parkinson's patients. They showed up late that night, so by
Speaker 1: the time they arrived almost all of the seats were taken.
Speaker 1: As soon as she stepped through the door, though, Joy
Speaker 1: was hit in the face with an all too familiar stench.
Speaker 1: Every single person smelled just like her husband. Some people
Speaker 1: had it less, while others were barely tolerable. But Joy
Speaker 1: finally realized why her husband's odor had changed. When he
Speaker 1: was in his early thirties. She had detected his Parkinson's
Speaker 1: ten years before the symptoms were bad enough to warrant
Speaker 1: to diagnosis. She hesitated to tell him, though, after all,
Speaker 1: the idea that someone could smell a disease sounded far fetched. Still,
Speaker 1: she had to know, and his reaction surprised her. It
Speaker 1: all made sense now why she kept complaining about his
Speaker 1: sudden woodsy scent that wouldn't wash off. So they flew
Speaker 1: over Ease to speak with Dr Tila Kunath, a Parkinson's
Speaker 1: researcher and neurobiologist at the University of Edinburgh. During the
Speaker 1: Q and a portion of one of his lectures, Joy
Speaker 1: stood up and asked whether Parkinson's had a smell. Dr
Speaker 1: Kunath was thrown He never thought about it that way,
Speaker 1: but he didn't think so. Months later, he heard about
Speaker 1: a study where dogs were able to detect cancer purely
Speaker 1: by a patients scent. It was a eureka moment that
Speaker 1: caused him to invite Joy back to the university to
Speaker 1: participate in an experiment of his own. He assembled a
Speaker 1: group of subjects, some with Parkinson's and some without, and
Speaker 1: gave each of them a T shirt to wear that
Speaker 1: night as they slept. The next day, they gave those
Speaker 1: shirts back. Dr Kannath then presented the T shirts in
Speaker 1: a random order to Joy, asking her to take a
Speaker 1: whiff and score each one by how much of the
Speaker 1: Parkinson's she could smell. She sniffed each one and noted
Speaker 1: where on the spectrum each subject fell, like whether they
Speaker 1: actually had the disease and at what stage, and the
Speaker 1: results were incredible and almost all cases she was able
Speaker 1: to accurately detect Parkinson's on the T shirts from the
Speaker 1: group of the diagnosed patients. From that point on, Joy's
Speaker 1: knows would unlock new avenues for Parkinson's research, and she
Speaker 1: was even listed as a co author on Dr Kuldneth's study.
Speaker 1: There was one hiccup though. During the shirt study, Joy
Speaker 1: had made a mistake. She had claimed that a shirt
Speaker 1: she smelled had belonged to one of Dr Kenneth's Parkinson's patients,
Speaker 1: when in fact it had come from one of the
Speaker 1: healthy control groups subjects Well, sort of you see. Months later,
Speaker 1: that same subject pain Dr Kuldnath a visit and told
Speaker 1: him that they could no longer participate in the healthy
Speaker 1: control group and the reason why would blow everyone else away.
Speaker 1: That test subject had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease,
Speaker 1: and Joy Milne had found it before anyone else with
Speaker 1: just her nose. When more than one person is planning
Speaker 1: to commit a crime, it's a good idea for everyone
Speaker 1: to get their stories straight ahead of time. One break
Speaker 1: in the narrative and the cops will have no problem
Speaker 1: getting one culprit to roll on the others. Charles and
Speaker 1: Calvin weren't criminals, but they did have a surprising story
Speaker 1: to tell the authorities. On the night of October eleventh
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy three, Charles was the foreman at a
Speaker 1: shipyard in Mississippi, and nineteen year old Calvin had just
Speaker 1: arrived in town and was looking for work. His father
Speaker 1: and Charles had been buddies years earlier, so Charles was
Speaker 1: only too happy to lend a helping hand. Charles gave
Speaker 1: the young man a job and even rented him a
Speaker 1: room in his apartment. To celebrate. After Calvin's first day
Speaker 1: at the shipyard, Charles invited him to go fishing after work.
Speaker 1: They spent a few hours casting their lines, watching the sunset,
Speaker 1: and waiting for the fish to bite, and that's when
Speaker 1: something strange happened. Charles reeled in his empty line and
Speaker 1: bent down to grab more bait for his hook when
Speaker 1: he heard a strange zipping sound overhead. A blue light
Speaker 1: flashed and a thirty foot long craft emerged out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: landing nearby, and then the dome on top opened. As
Speaker 1: it did, a bright light nearly blinded the men, and
Speaker 1: then three creatures appeared from inside, seeming to float several
Speaker 1: inches off the ground. Charles and Calvin froze, later recounting
Speaker 1: to police that they had been paralyzed by an injection
Speaker 1: from one of the creatures. Sharp pincers reached out and
Speaker 1: grabbed both of the men, pulling them toward the ship.
Speaker 1: When it was all over, the men were deposited back
Speaker 1: at the pier where they had been abducted. Calvin reached
Speaker 1: towards the sky and screamed after the creatures. Eventually, the
Speaker 1: two of them made their way to the local police station,
Speaker 1: and they told their story. The officers initially believed that
Speaker 1: both men had been drinking a bit too much that night,
Speaker 1: but Calvin was out of control. Assuming that something had
Speaker 1: indeed happened near the docks, one officer brought the men
Speaker 1: into an interrogation room. He asked them questions about what
Speaker 1: had happened. They told their story again, beginning with the
Speaker 1: fishing nextpedition, then describing the odd sounds and the flashing lights.
Speaker 1: Charles told him about the alien creatures with their sharp claws,
Speaker 1: which caused the puncture in his arm, but Calvin begged
Speaker 1: his boss not to say anything. Those people will come
Speaker 1: back and get us. He said, they don't want us
Speaker 1: to talk about it, but Charles ignored him and kept going.
Speaker 1: He talked about the sparse interior of the ship and
Speaker 1: the giant eye that scanned their bodies from overhead, how
Speaker 1: the beans had flipped them over and around so they
Speaker 1: could examine them from all angles. Yet the men hadn't
Speaker 1: been worried. At the time. They were being communicated to
Speaker 1: telepathically by one of the aliens, who told them that
Speaker 1: everything would be all right. Calvin said he assumed the
Speaker 1: voice was coming from the fourth creature in the room.
Speaker 1: He said it looked more like a human than the rest,
Speaker 1: that had large, kind eyes. When they had finished telling
Speaker 1: their tale to the police, the officer left the room,
Speaker 1: but hid a tape recorder to record their conversation. After
Speaker 1: he was gone. He expected Charles and Calvin to laugh
Speaker 1: and joke about how they were pulling one over on
Speaker 1: the cops, or making sure that they had gotten all
Speaker 1: the details of their story right for the next round
Speaker 1: of questions. Instead, the two men talked about everything they
Speaker 1: had encountered, and it was clear there was genuine fear
Speaker 1: in their voices. Other officers attempted to find holes in
Speaker 1: their stories. Charles and Calvin were even subjected to polygraph tests,
Speaker 1: but they both passed. In fact, nothing the authorities through
Speaker 1: at them could crack through to the truth that they
Speaker 1: assumed was underneath a lie. By all measures, these two
Speaker 1: men believed that they had actually experienced an alien abduction.
Speaker 1: Newspapers all over the country reported their story. Charles even
Speaker 1: went on television, sitting down with Dick Cavitt and Johnny Carson. Well.
Speaker 1: Calvin did the opposite and went into hiding. He immediately
Speaker 1: went home after his night at the police station and
Speaker 1: bathed his body in bleach, hoping to remove any trace
Speaker 1: of whatever the aliens had done to him. Calvin never
Speaker 1: talked about what he'd seen. He eventually moved on and
Speaker 1: got married, taking jobs here and there, always avoiding the
Speaker 1: spotlight at all costs, but forty five years later, Calvin
Speaker 1: finally published a book with his side of the story,
Speaker 1: a story just as convincing today as it was back
Speaker 1: in nine and he wasn't alone. Since then, another witness
Speaker 1: has come forward who claimed to have seen the same
Speaker 1: blue lights in flying Object months after Charles Hickson and
Speaker 1: Calvin Parker. She too hadn't told anyone for over forty years.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was a true close encounter, or an elaborate hoax,
Speaker 1: or even a lie that got wildly out of control.
Speaker 1: Call it whatever you want, but I'll stick to the
Speaker 1: word that describes it best, curious. I hope you've enjoyed
Speaker 1: today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
Speaker 1: free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
Speaker 1: by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
Speaker 1: by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
Speaker 1: learn all about it over at the World of Lore
Speaker 1: dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,