Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D
Speaker 1: Audience for full exposure, listen with headphones. Lynn McNeil is
Speaker 1: an associate professor of folklore in the English Department at
Speaker 1: Utah State University. She serves as the chair of the
Speaker 1: Folklore Program. She is also a regular cast member on
Speaker 1: the Travel Channel's Paranormal Caught on Camera. We had a
Speaker 1: wide ranging conversation about contemporary folklore, the paranormal, and much more.
Speaker 1: I'm Lynn McNeil. I am a folkloreist at Utah State University.
Speaker 1: I run the folklore program there. I teach folklore there.
Speaker 1: I work in the folklore archives that we have there,
Speaker 1: which are really incredible. We are a great hub of
Speaker 1: folklore studies. We have for a offer a master's program
Speaker 1: and folklore and undergraduate minor. It's a good place to
Speaker 1: be a folkloreist. I also am very lucky and that
Speaker 1: I get to be a folklorist um in the media
Speaker 1: fairly often, so I get to be a folklorist on
Speaker 1: podcasts like this, on the radio, on television, and mainly
Speaker 1: what I like doing is bringing the concepts of folklore
Speaker 1: studies to a really broad audience because people don't always
Speaker 1: think in terms of what folklore is doing in a culture.
Speaker 1: We hear the word folklore, we tend to think untrue stories,
Speaker 1: old stories, maybe rural, rustic, peasantee stories. We might have
Speaker 1: sort of a brother's grim model in our minds of folklore.
Speaker 1: And the reality is is that folklore is are really
Speaker 1: contemporary form of cultural expression. Yes, it comes from the past,
Speaker 1: but the whole point of it being folklore is that
Speaker 1: it keeps itself relevant by adapting and changing dynamically so
Speaker 1: that when it was relevant in the past, it can
Speaker 1: adjust to be 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. So the term actually that folklore has
Speaker 1: use for this, which I love, is eco typification. It's
Speaker 1: borrowed from botany, basically the study of plants and the
Speaker 1: way that they emerge differently even though it's the same
Speaker 1: species in two different climate and geological and geographical environments,
Speaker 1: because it's being responsive to its context. And so folklore
Speaker 1: is seen as operating in that same way, you can
Speaker 1: have the same story, the same legend, the same fairy tales,
Speaker 1: show up in two different places, and it's going to
Speaker 1: be morphologically distinct because of the context of those two
Speaker 1: different places. It's going to be meeting the needs of
Speaker 1: a different time, maybe a different culture, and if region,
Speaker 1: a different language, family, all those sorts of things. So
Speaker 1: it's it's not that folklore is old. It's that folklore
Speaker 1: is continuously adapting. That's what makes it relevant, and that's
Speaker 1: not how people think of folklore. So that's what I
Speaker 1: like to talk about with people, is that it's it's
Speaker 1: this way more sort of psychological, communicative, symbolic form of interaction,
Speaker 1: more than just the old stories model that we often
Speaker 1: have exactly I mean, which you know is And it's
Speaker 1: interesting too to think about the awareness people had of
Speaker 1: stories like that. If we look at the Brothers Grimm's
Speaker 1: um early draft of their eighteen twelve volume of Stories,
Speaker 1: that story Hunsel and Gretel, the woman who's mean in
Speaker 1: the story and pushes the kids out of the house
Speaker 1: and sends them out into the woods to get rid
Speaker 1: of them is originally their mother, and the grim brothers
Speaker 1: themselves were like, oh, you know, we're collecting these stories
Speaker 1: to be a reflection on you know, German culture and spirit.
Speaker 1: That doesn't make us look right, Let's make it a
Speaker 1: step mom. And it's sort of like, hey, Alex, guys,
Speaker 1: but we we read into that so much and we
Speaker 1: now are left with this incredible trope of the wicked stepmother,
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, that was a real conscious decision
Speaker 1: made we assume so that German moms didn't look bad
Speaker 1: by the editors of these stories, who, in their call
Speaker 1: for collecting folklore, were like, hey, scholars of the world,
Speaker 1: don't change anything about the stories you collect, because the
Speaker 1: way they emerge from the mouths of the people is
Speaker 1: the way that they are meant to represent culture. And
Speaker 1: then here they are editing them the leaders. You know.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's funny. I'm just thinking about trends in
Speaker 1: folklore since like past World War two, you know, because
Speaker 1: I'm kind of looking starting in moving forward. I guess
Speaker 1: what are the major trends are are there? Yeah, It's
Speaker 1: it's hard to say because folklore is so big and
Speaker 1: so encompassing that there's so many different genres of folklore.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have the narrative genres of folklore like stories.
Speaker 1: We also have the customary genres of folklore like holiday
Speaker 1: practices and gestures and ritual and and greetings and leave
Speaker 1: takings and all that sort of stuff. And we have
Speaker 1: belief based folklore, which might be entirely conceptual or steeped
Speaker 1: in folk religion, or come out of superstition or the
Speaker 1: supernatural or something like that. All of these things are
Speaker 1: so big on one scale and then manifest so individually
Speaker 1: within families, within communities, within cultural groups, that it can
Speaker 1: be hard to point to big trends other than the
Speaker 1: fact that folklore on the whole, especially the most up
Speaker 1: to the minute contemporary genres, which interestingly are usually urban
Speaker 1: legends and jokes. Those are two forms of folklore. Um
Speaker 1: so stories that we tell as true and you know,
Speaker 1: humorous anecdotes that we make as commentary on things. Um
Speaker 1: those forms of folklore are really really representative of the
Speaker 1: time that they come from, and so there's some of
Speaker 1: the most adaptable. We actually have studies of urban legends
Speaker 1: that go back to ancient Rome, where we can see
Speaker 1: the same legend type being told in like the first
Speaker 1: century a d that is still being told now but
Speaker 1: just about things relevant to us now rather than things
Speaker 1: that were relevant to us then, and knowing that folklore
Speaker 1: does equal work reflecting a culture and shaping that culture,
Speaker 1: we see a lot of the same themes that we're
Speaker 1: cropping up in, you know, post war, not just America
Speaker 1: or the West, but the world. Um an increase of
Speaker 1: visual media was a huge thing that was happening there.
Speaker 1: Obviously DEO stayed big, but television was booming. So we
Speaker 1: start to see people think in terms of images more
Speaker 1: than words, and that of course has only grown thanks
Speaker 1: to the Internet and our ability to now combine images
Speaker 1: and words in all sorts of new ways. But we
Speaker 1: see folklore reflect that. We suddenly start getting genres of
Speaker 1: folklore that scholars referred to as xerox lore and facts lore,
Speaker 1: and we get things like visual legends, so instead of
Speaker 1: telling a story, we just get an image of something.
Speaker 1: And you can see how something like UFOs, something that's
Speaker 1: relying on visual input or photography or you know, mapping
Speaker 1: 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. And we're also entering this period of time
Speaker 1: where you know, where politics are booming, and there's bipartisan
Speaker 1: support for anti communist efforts and the Cold War and
Speaker 1: all of this, and we see that as well. We
Speaker 1: see people develop this new relationship with the military with
Speaker 1: their governments where, you know, we don't have an ongoing
Speaker 1: international conflict to worry about, so we worry about what
Speaker 1: we can't see. You know. The Cold War is it's
Speaker 1: called cold for a reason, right, It's this freezing out
Speaker 1: of each other. It's not hot, it's not engaged, it's
Speaker 1: not blood boiling anger. It's silence. It's secrecy. And we
Speaker 1: start to wonder, well, what are the secrets? What is
Speaker 1: it that we don't know? And this fixation on things
Speaker 1: like conspiracy and um the information that's out there that
Speaker 1: we might be getting glimpses of an unsatisfactory explanations for
Speaker 1: any time there's a vacuum of knowledge, things like legends,
Speaker 1: things like superstition just rush in to fill that void.
Speaker 1: We want to understand. There's actually a really cool, old
Speaker 1: old study that was done by some psychologists looking at
Speaker 1: rumor and how rumor works and folk cours know that
Speaker 1: rumor and legend are really similar, and they came up
Speaker 1: with what they uh called the rumor equation. And no,
Speaker 1: this is not deeply scientific, but it's pretty revealing when
Speaker 1: we think about it. What they said was that the
Speaker 1: reach of any rumor, the power of a rumor, the
Speaker 1: spread of it, is equal to the topics importance multiplied
Speaker 1: by its ambiguity. So if we have a topic to
Speaker 1: us that's incredibly important, but we have all the info,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna talk about it. There's gonna be new
Speaker 1: stories about it, but we're kind of gonna rest easy.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be like, Okay, really important, Thank goodness, we
Speaker 1: know everything. If we have a topic that's incredibly ambiguous
Speaker 1: but we don't really care, then we're sort of like whatever,
Speaker 1: I don't need to know, it doesn't matter to me.
Speaker 1: The minute you start that multiplying, exponential growth of something
Speaker 1: that is both unbelievably important. So of course we can
Speaker 1: use this as a barometer for our culture. Right what
Speaker 1: has always been important to us? Our military security, the
Speaker 1: lives and safety of our children, our personal health and
Speaker 1: die violence, anti crime, things like that, plus or multiplied
Speaker 1: by this question of ambiguity. I don't have the answers.
Speaker 1: I don't know the answers. It's possible someone is trying
Speaker 1: to keep the answers from me. You put those things
Speaker 1: together and you are just asking for a wildfire spread
Speaker 1: of rumor of legend of conspiracy theory. So what would
Speaker 1: be an example of that sort of apex? You know,
Speaker 1: I think um one of the most recent examples that
Speaker 1: we have a lot of good data on a lot
Speaker 1: of good folklore data would be nine eleven. It's sort
Speaker 1: of a peak example where if we think about the
Speaker 1: rumors and the legends that spread immediately in the wake
Speaker 1: of September eleventh, two thousand and one, we saw people
Speaker 1: hinting at the idea that there were people in this
Speaker 1: country who knew this was going to happen. So one
Speaker 1: of the most popular legend cycle is that we saw
Speaker 1: was that someone, usually a white American, would do some
Speaker 1: sort of kindness for someone of Middle Eastern descent, would
Speaker 1: be just a maybe a titch above normal levels of
Speaker 1: thoughtful or tipping someone a little bit extra, helping someone
Speaker 1: out in a way they didn't need to. And then
Speaker 1: that person says to them, hey, you keep yourself and
Speaker 1: your family away from the World Trade Center on September eleven,
Speaker 1: and that person is like, whatever, WEIRDO, Okay, thanks, you know,
Speaker 1: and then they go on and then after the event
Speaker 1: they realized what had happened. Um, and that legend type
Speaker 1: among folklorists is known as the grateful terrorist. It's horribly
Speaker 1: xenophobic and racist, obviously, but it it does that thing
Speaker 1: folklore does where it just encapsulates people's anxieties, people's fears,
Speaker 1: the tenor of the moment, where what we see is
Speaker 1: this suspen Asian and and these are I mean, it
Speaker 1: sounds now, however many years we are out from September eleven,
Speaker 1: twenty years almost um, it seems ridiculous. It seems like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, that's an awful story to have told, Like
Speaker 1: it almost seems like a bad joke. But at the
Speaker 1: time when this thing of unbelievable importance and also just
Speaker 1: unspeakable ambiguity, nobody had any idea what was going on.
Speaker 1: I remember that morning, the general thinking was that it
Speaker 1: was an accident, right, there's no way this happened on purpose,
Speaker 1: until there was a second airplane involved, and suddenly that
Speaker 1: vacuum opened up and all of these stories just got
Speaker 1: sucked into this explanation and you could see that multiplication
Speaker 1: of importance our personal safety and national safety and ambiguity.
Speaker 1: Who the heck is doing this to us? What is happening?
Speaker 1: How can we make sure it doesn't happen again? Who
Speaker 1: can I trust? Who can't I trust? Leads to just this,
Speaker 1: like you know, conflagration of rumor and legend, where any
Speaker 1: story that seems to give me a spec of control,
Speaker 1: who I know to trust, who I know not to trust,
Speaker 1: is going to latch on because we want to start
Speaker 1: a signing blame. We want to start constructing a future
Speaker 1: where we're in control of this not happening again, or
Speaker 1: if it's going to happen again, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be there. Um. So yeah, so we get these stories
Speaker 1: that I mean and think we we can think about
Speaker 1: so many more stories of people claiming to have witnessed
Speaker 1: um people of certain ethnic backgrounds celebrating in the September eleven. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there were a lot of That was another one
Speaker 1: where the legends were very visual. There were photographs that circulated.
Speaker 1: Every one of those photographs was traced to an event
Speaker 1: that had nothing to do with that date or that moment.
Speaker 1: None of them were true, but they seemed to provide sense,
Speaker 1: not good sense, not sense we liked very racist and
Speaker 1: xenophobic sense. But it seemed to make sense out of
Speaker 1: the the comprehensible, and that drive to make sense of
Speaker 1: things is really what what pushes a lot of rumor
Speaker 1: and legend in arenas like this. You know, one of
Speaker 1: the things I'm kind of interested in is why do
Speaker 1: you does UFO folklore seem to have this staying power? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is an awesome question, and the answer exists on
Speaker 1: several levels, because there's staying power and then there's staying power.
Speaker 1: If we want to look at the legend type of
Speaker 1: the UFO visitor, where we have odd, often vaguely humanoid,
Speaker 1: sometimes a little extra tall, slender creatures descending from the
Speaker 1: sky or perhaps emerging from another dimension to interact with humans,
Speaker 1: often to kidnap them, often to interfere with their bodies
Speaker 1: in some way. We've just described centuries of fairy lore,
Speaker 1: you know, other creatures, slender, humanoid, mysterious, powerful emerging from
Speaker 1: the mists, taking us away. Being kidnapped by the fairies
Speaker 1: and taken by the fairies is a longstanding tradition. Um
Speaker 1: So if we want to call that UFO lore, we
Speaker 1: could very very easily. But taking a shorter view of it,
Speaker 1: where UFO really takes on these sort of technological pseudo
Speaker 1: scientific ideas of space and space travel and extraterrestrial life.
Speaker 1: The question of the staying power of that, I think
Speaker 1: is really multifaceted just on its own, because we know
Speaker 1: that belief doesn't stick around for no reason, and we
Speaker 1: know that one straightforward, if hard to accept answer is
Speaker 1: perhaps people keep talking about UFOs because people keep seeing them,
Speaker 1: because they're there, they're real, people are having encounters. That
Speaker 1: is a possibility that it does us no service to
Speaker 1: discount when we wonder, wow, why do people keep talking
Speaker 1: about this? It's like, wow, why do people keep talking
Speaker 1: about Bigfoot? Maybe because they keep seeing him? You know,
Speaker 1: that's one answer that we don't need to erase. But
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 the story? Clearly there's some
Speaker 1: other beneficial not meaning always positive, but meaning it serves
Speaker 1: us in our psychological and you know, social needs. Some
Speaker 1: beneficial outcome of believing in this possibility. I'm going to
Speaker 1: make a quick detour just because I think it's important
Speaker 1: to point out that legends, as a genre of folk
Speaker 1: narrative are a legend about possibility. For a long time,
Speaker 1: legends were defined by folklorists as stories told as true,
Speaker 1: whereas fairy tales are stories told as fiction and myths
Speaker 1: our stories told sort of as sacred revelation. Right, Legends
Speaker 1: are the ones that we're told as literally true. We've
Speaker 1: nuanced this since then to talk about the idea that
Speaker 1: what legends do is they allow us to symbolically discuss possibility,
Speaker 1: and the possibilities of reality are a thing that human
Speaker 1: beings love to discuss. We really want to chew over
Speaker 1: the potential boundaries of reality. Could this be? Could this
Speaker 1: not be? Could this happen? Is this real? And UFOs
Speaker 1: are something that clearly there's both ambiguity and importance in this.
Speaker 1: It matters to us to not be alone in the universe,
Speaker 1: and we aren't sure if it's going to be a
Speaker 1: good thing or a bad thing when we get that answer.
Speaker 1: So we see that combination of social and cultural import there,
Speaker 1: and then we also see something that simply starts to
Speaker 1: make more more sense I mean, it is an accepted
Speaker 1: scientific principle that there's probably a planet out there in
Speaker 1: our infinite universe that can sustain life as ours can.
Speaker 1: It does not make sense that we would be unique. Um.
Speaker 1: Then we start adding in not just the narratives, not
Speaker 1: just the stories, but this digital additional media that comes
Speaker 1: to us from this particular time in our culture, where
Speaker 1: there's more everyday people out there with cameras, there's more
Speaker 1: visual media than just textual. We're able to capture things
Speaker 1: and share them with each other in unprecedented ways, and
Speaker 1: that changes how we talk about this stuff. It's one
Speaker 1: thing to trust your neighbor when he's like, I saw
Speaker 1: some weird lights over my farm and then I lost
Speaker 1: three hours of my day. I don't know what happened,
Speaker 1: but I woke up in a ditch and I had
Speaker 1: all these bruises. You know, you tell me what that means.
Speaker 1: It's another thing when your neighbor tells you that same
Speaker 1: story and then shows you a photo that he took,
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, yeah, I can't explain what those
Speaker 1: lights are. They don't look like an airplane, they don't
Speaker 1: look like anything I'm familiar with. You know, we just
Speaker 1: start to start to get that that word of mouth
Speaker 1: culture is now being bolstered by additional things, which of
Speaker 1: course sort of conveniently takes us to even that next
Speaker 1: level of authenticity or validation, which is, hey, this isn't
Speaker 1: just your neighbor now, it's the government. Now, it's an
Speaker 1: institutional element of our culture who we know isn't joking around,
Speaker 1: and they're taking it seriously, and they're producing documents and
Speaker 1: they're gathering photos, and you start to go okay, wait, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, Like like the authority that institutions lend
Speaker 1: to the already powerful word of mouth consensus of folklore
Speaker 1: is really something that you can't underestimate. I brought up
Speaker 1: Joe Nichols Roswell syndrome framework for the dynamic. The UFO
Speaker 1: stories sometimes go through the thing that happens sort of
Speaker 1: again and again in uphology is that like a case
Speaker 1: will occur and it will pretty quickly be explained, and
Speaker 1: then it will go dark, and then it will come
Speaker 1: back a little while later, sort of armored. So in
Speaker 1: the retelling, like these objections are sort of like pre
Speaker 1: you know, you have a pre planned explanation for it,
Speaker 1: and now everything can kind of make sense. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and that that is part of that dynamism that we
Speaker 1: see all folks are happening. Right. If someone had written
Speaker 1: a book about this and published it, and it were
Speaker 1: a copyrighted piece of work, it's it already exists. It
Speaker 1: is what it is. You know, the novel, that book,
Speaker 1: that newspaper article. Doesn't get to be updated. It's still exist.
Speaker 1: You can print a new version with new information maybe
Speaker 1: or something, but it's not dynamic in the way folk
Speaker 1: culture is dynamic. And one of the things that folk
Speaker 1: culture often does, especially in the genre of legend and belief,
Speaker 1: is that there is a developing performance of rationality. People
Speaker 1: know that being seen as a believer can automatically cast
Speaker 1: doubt on people's stories. You know, we we talk about
Speaker 1: belief in the supernatural or the paranormal as sort of
Speaker 1: this black or white proposition. Do you believe in ghosts? Yes?
Speaker 1: Or no? The average everyday person knows the correct answer
Speaker 1: is no, because that makes you a rational, scientifically minded person.
Speaker 1: For most people, though the real answer isn't necessarily yes.
Speaker 1: The real answer is something along the lines of a story.
Speaker 1: The real answer to do you believe in ghosts as well? No?
Speaker 1: Of course not. I mean who would. But after my
Speaker 1: grandpa died, there was like this one Christmas light and
Speaker 1: it was totally the one that he was always into,
Speaker 1: and it just started blinking like the day after he died,
Speaker 1: and it never stopped blinking, and we all just sort
Speaker 1: of knew, like that was Grandpa, you know, letting us
Speaker 1: know that he was still there with us for the holidays.
Speaker 1: So no, I don't believe in ghosts, but I mean,
Speaker 1: my Grandpa's in that Christmas light, like that very paradoxical,
Speaker 1: very contradictory answer, And that's never on the survey, you know,
Speaker 1: when we send out the survey of do you believe
Speaker 1: in ghosts? That's not an option, so everyone checks no.
Speaker 1: But the truth is that when someone wants to speak
Speaker 1: about a supernatural experience they've had, they grow I like
Speaker 1: the word armor over their story in anticipation of people
Speaker 1: who are going to say, okay, weirdo. You know I
Speaker 1: you clearly are an irrational thinker. So we see this
Speaker 1: performance of rationality, this intentional reality testing that takes place
Speaker 1: that hums a part of the story to say, now
Speaker 1: I thought it could be this, but then I realized
Speaker 1: it couldn't. Because of this, And I also thought that
Speaker 1: maybe it could be this, but that doesn't make any
Speaker 1: sense because of X, Y, and Z. And what that
Speaker 1: tells us is that people are actually being surprisingly rational
Speaker 1: when they talk about the paranormal or the supernatural, and
Speaker 1: that's not something we want to grant people always. When
Speaker 1: people are talking about things that we, in particular don't
Speaker 1: believe in, it's very easy to be dismissive and assume
Speaker 1: that they've jumped to supernatural conclusions. Oh, this person wants
Speaker 1: it to be a UFO. Oh, this person wants it
Speaker 1: to be bigfoot. And the truth is is that most
Speaker 1: people are going through this process of elimination and starting
Speaker 1: with well could it have been the lighthouse, No, the
Speaker 1: lighthouse is over there, it's over here, Or you know, well,
Speaker 1: could it have been a bear? No, I've seen bears,
Speaker 1: I've hunted bears, I know what bears look like. That
Speaker 1: wasn't a bear, And then they end up at this
Speaker 1: supernatural or paranormal conclusion that, for all that it might
Speaker 1: not be scientifically testable the way that we think of
Speaker 1: the scientific process, it's a rational thought process that they've
Speaker 1: gone through. And this is something that any folklorist who
Speaker 1: has done ethnographic work with people on the subjects of
Speaker 1: belief in the supernatural sees right away is oftentimes these
Speaker 1: are incredibly thoughtful, observant people who themselves don't want to
Speaker 1: have to have drawn that conclusion, and yet there's no
Speaker 1: other conclusion for them to draw. Sometimes the first episode
Speaker 1: of Strange Arrivals, like the first like three minutes or
Speaker 1: five minutes or whatever, is to be telling the story
Speaker 1: about how, you know, my best friend and his wife
Speaker 1: and me and my wife, we're having dinner out on
Speaker 1: a porch on this on this island, and we saw
Speaker 1: these lights, these red lights up is ways away. They
Speaker 1: were just there and they're moving a little bit. We
Speaker 1: went down the dock watching them, you know. We watched
Speaker 1: them probably for twenty minutes, and then they kind of disappeared.
Speaker 1: And for the first season of Strange Arrivals, what I
Speaker 1: was kind of interested in was how our our memories
Speaker 1: of it kind of differed and how something that happened
Speaker 1: like five years ago, we can like get into like
Speaker 1: knock knockdown, drag out arguments about how certain things happened,
Speaker 1: you know, But it also seems to me that you know,
Speaker 1: the way you interpret that which is something that like
Speaker 1: my friend and I, you know, don't know what it was,
Speaker 1: but we're like, also, don't think it was aliens um,
Speaker 1: whereas our wives are like, uh yeah, if that's like,
Speaker 1: what else would it be? So what part would sort
Speaker 1: of preconceived notions play in that process that you just
Speaker 1: talked about what you've hit on is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons that legends are this genre of debate, this genre
Speaker 1: of possibility, because you don't have to agree, you don't
Speaker 1: have to believe. Someone can tell a legend that they
Speaker 1: don't think is true to someone who thinks it might be,
Speaker 1: and that legend becomes this this central point around which
Speaker 1: a discussion of possibility can happen. Right folklorists in the
Speaker 1: past have looked at because folklore is under the purview
Speaker 1: of everyday people. It's not something that only those with
Speaker 1: access to publishing houses or you know, executive producers are
Speaker 1: able to make. We all get to share folklore. It's
Speaker 1: all equally genuine when we do. There's no single right version.
Speaker 1: My story about a UFO is just as legitimate as
Speaker 1: your story of a UFO because we're all in charge
Speaker 1: of it. There's these different dynamics that go into shaping it.
Speaker 1: So at the very far back end there's our shared worldview.
Speaker 1: You know, any any story that is collectively circulating in
Speaker 1: the United States is going to have its background some
Speaker 1: awareness of the basic large scale cultural structures of the
Speaker 1: United States that will be reflected in that folklore. And
Speaker 1: you can see that when you look at the folklore
Speaker 1: from a different culture, it seems exotic and strange and different.
Speaker 1: It's common and familiar to those folks with their cultural norms.
Speaker 1: So we can see those big scale norms reflected in folklore.
Speaker 1: But because everyday people are in charge of the dissemination
Speaker 1: and sharing in the shape of folklore, we also get
Speaker 1: much more small scale, individualized things. So we get me,
Speaker 1: my personality and my motivations and my intent, and you
Speaker 1: and yours. So when I tell a story, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: tell it differently than someone else's. What I think is
Speaker 1: significant or key or important is going to say one
Speaker 1: a lot about my culture because it's that larger cultural
Speaker 1: milieu that the story is coming from in the first place.
Speaker 1: But my telling of it's gonna say a lot about
Speaker 1: me too. Am I going to play up the potential
Speaker 1: alien elements here? Am I going to tell those down.
Speaker 1: It's also gonna be affected by who I'm talking to.
Speaker 1: Am I talking to someone who's standing there with their
Speaker 1: arms crossed, you know, giving me a real skeptical face,
Speaker 1: Or am I talking to someone who is like wrapped
Speaker 1: and listening and being like yeah, yeah, no, no, I've
Speaker 1: seen that too. I've seen that too. Whole different story
Speaker 1: emerges discursively between those two different people, right, And so
Speaker 1: all of these elements. As a folklorist, we're looking at
Speaker 1: these small scale, performative, emergent elements as well as those
Speaker 1: larger structural worldview things that that come from a culture,
Speaker 1: which means that any two iterations of the same story
Speaker 1: could be wildly divergent, you know, very symbolically different in
Speaker 1: what they're communicating, while still technically being recognized recognizable as
Speaker 1: the same story. So another thing I don't I don't
Speaker 1: really even know how to ask a question, but maybe
Speaker 1: just to get your reactions. So one of the things things.
Speaker 1: A couple of days ago, I ended up talking to
Speaker 1: this guy named Richard Doty who was in Air Force Intelligence,
Speaker 1: and his thing was too to basically muddy the waters
Speaker 1: in the UFO community by giving them misinformation and basically saying, look, uh,
Speaker 1: he kind of had this deal where it's like I
Speaker 1: want to I want to find out what's going on
Speaker 1: in the UFO world, and I will let you in
Speaker 1: on secret. Said only I know about, you know, as
Speaker 1: being an Air Force uh insider. And this is during
Speaker 1: the Cold War, and they're they're worried. Was that enough
Speaker 1: UFO people were actually seeing you know, special projects and stuff,
Speaker 1: and that they didn't want the Russians to be in
Speaker 1: the UFO community and be finding out stuff that might
Speaker 1: somehow help them. Um. So his thing was, I'm you know,
Speaker 1: I muddy the waters. So I was trying to get
Speaker 1: him to reflect a little bit about and I must
Speaker 1: say unsuccessfully, but I was trying to get him to
Speaker 1: reflect about how what he was doing was. It was
Speaker 1: it was sort of taking in like an already established
Speaker 1: narrative or set of ideas that would be consistent with
Speaker 1: those things, but but sort of have his own you know,
Speaker 1: he's doing it for his own purpose and uh, and
Speaker 1: he was just he was not willing to engage really
Speaker 1: on that beyond like I had a mission. You know,
Speaker 1: this is my mission. It wasn't hard to do. Like
Speaker 1: when you get people who believe it like that. You
Speaker 1: basically if you just kind of nod um, you know,
Speaker 1: and encourage them, they'll they'll like they'll do all the
Speaker 1: work themselves. But that was a little disingenuous because he
Speaker 1: was he did spread a lot of like super super
Speaker 1: weird stuff, so like an intentional culture jammer of the
Speaker 1: there's some of the stuff that you still see today
Speaker 1: is stuff that he spread, like back in the early eighties,
Speaker 1: like he was passing to people and then you know
Speaker 1: they're still around today. When people talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: the secret government programs, Wow, it makes me think of
Speaker 1: the fake news that you know, we've been dealing with
Speaker 1: since sort of the it's like it's like an intentionally
Speaker 1: weaponized version of legends. You know, someone who's trying sitting
Speaker 1: behind a desk trying to come up with what's going
Speaker 1: to stick. Because the difficult thing is this folklore moves
Speaker 1: almost on an evolutionary or a mimetic in the sense
Speaker 1: of Richard Dawkins memetics um model, which is survival of
Speaker 1: the fittest. You know, all this dynamism that folklore has
Speaker 1: that it everyone gets to tell their own version and
Speaker 1: shape it their own way. Also means that the elements
Speaker 1: that that last are the ones that work for the
Speaker 1: most people. So we see this communal shaping, this communal
Speaker 1: evolution of folklore, and as it moves through a population,
Speaker 1: it grows more and more generally applicable, so that I'll
Speaker 1: still tell it in my unique way, but if I
Speaker 1: add or play up an element that really resonates with
Speaker 1: a lot of people, it's going to become a part
Speaker 1: of it. And if I try and add an element
Speaker 1: that doesn't really resonate and it's just sort of it's
Speaker 1: going to drop out. I mean, by this principle, folklore
Speaker 1: is self correcting in how it is crowdsourced like Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: something that doesn't fit's gonna fall by the wayside. Something
Speaker 1: that really speaks to people's anxieties or curiosities, it's gonna stay.
Speaker 1: That is incredibly hard to fake, and it's incredibly hard
Speaker 1: to do it in one go. The best example we
Speaker 1: have contemporarily of this, interestingly is slender Man, who was wholesale,
Speaker 1: almost perfect as an have been legend from the minute
Speaker 1: of his creation. There is absolutely crowdsourcing and where we
Speaker 1: ended up with Slenderman, and he absolutely has already evolved
Speaker 1: almost to an unrecognizable character from what he started off
Speaker 1: as initially as that whole communal process of dynamic folklore
Speaker 1: shaping has happened to him. But with something like this,
Speaker 1: with like a disinformation campaign, with fake news, or with
Speaker 1: someone who is attempting to muddy the waters, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a uh, you know, shotgun blast of attempts, and
Speaker 1: of them are going to fail. People don't believe things
Speaker 1: for no reason. It needs to click, it needs to resonate,
Speaker 1: It needs to work for them. What percentage of the
Speaker 1: you know, mud that got spread around they're stuck. I
Speaker 1: don't know, But it's only gonna stick around if it
Speaker 1: seems to work, in which case, yeah, it might confuse things.
Speaker 1: But if anything, it's working, and it's just going to
Speaker 1: continue to promote that stuff more than necessarily poke holes
Speaker 1: in it or deflated interesting. I should have, you know,
Speaker 1: having this conversation, I'm realizing that the first season of
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals, I probably should have talked to to you
Speaker 1: because like the second, you know, there's twelve episode. Eleven
Speaker 1: episodes probably the last four are really about how the
Speaker 1: alien abduction story changed over time to incorporate new elements
Speaker 1: and and I kind of sort of argue that it
Speaker 1: it kind of collapsed under its own weight, and that
Speaker 1: it's just like it kept becoming more and more extreme
Speaker 1: until it was like, well, millions of people are being abductive,
Speaker 1: but most of them don't know what it is, and
Speaker 1: they're making hybrids who might walk among us. And then
Speaker 1: it's like, well where do you go from there? You know,
Speaker 1: it's like you've kind of reached the apex of of
Speaker 1: insanity as far as that goes, and it just kind
Speaker 1: of collapsed. Well, And the more the more specific and
Speaker 1: elaborate story gets, the smaller the population that accepts it
Speaker 1: usually gets, you know what I mean. It's like there's
Speaker 1: a happy medium of there are probably aliens, they've probably
Speaker 1: messed with us, that really seems to resonate with people
Speaker 1: on a very broad scale, and we can start getting
Speaker 1: into specifics of that and watching those specifics resonate in
Speaker 1: different ways with different people, depending upon again their worldview,
Speaker 1: their cultural background as well as their own personality, as
Speaker 1: well as the small you know groups that they do
Speaker 1: the majority of their communicating within um. But when we
Speaker 1: look at that you know, lowest common denominator, we get
Speaker 1: the clear idea that a lot of people think UFOs
Speaker 1: are a possibility. We get the clear idea that a
Speaker 1: lot of people think some people have seen him. We
Speaker 1: get the clear idea that a lot of people think
Speaker 1: our government knows more than they're telling us, or the
Speaker 1: governments of the world no more than they're telling us.
Speaker 1: And when we start to see any sort of institutional
Speaker 1: acknowledgment of that, like the declassified reports that have come
Speaker 1: out from the U. S. Military of we caught these
Speaker 1: things on camera, what are they? We don't know, that
Speaker 1: sort of admission from that level of authority, and just bam,
Speaker 1: suddenly a whole slice of people who previously were maybe
Speaker 1: on the skeptical side are now just like, whoa. That
Speaker 1: was what was missing for me. That was the resonant
Speaker 1: piece that's going to get me to take this seriously again.
Speaker 1: And so it's a it's an ever shifting landscape, but
Speaker 1: one in which we can stand back and see really
Speaker 1: big themes, but we can also zoom in and seem
Speaker 1: really see really really specific, small scale, symbolic moments that
Speaker 1: are generating that that larger theme. So so this has
Speaker 1: been awesome. This has been super interesting. Yes, I agree,
Speaker 1: this has been super interesting. I appreciate all your questions.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much. Hey, thank you, Okay, take care, bye bye.
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D
Speaker 1: Audio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode
Speaker 1: was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by
Speaker 1: Miranda Hawkins and Josh Same, with executive producers Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankey. Learn more about Strange Rivals
Speaker 1: over at grimm and mil dot com, and find more
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Speaker 1: favorite shows.