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Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And late last year, while walking to the train in the middle of the day, I looked up in the sky and I saw a UFO. If you were listening to this show last year right around Christmas, you might remember me talking about this. It was a white or silver sphere hovering around Culver City with an LAPD helicopter circling nearby. I don't know if the helicopter was circling the object or something else, but it definitely drew my attention. So I watched it for a few minutes from the street and this sphere was just sitting there, not growing and changing shape or size. And if I was seeing a UFO, I was like, I should have a picture of this. So I took some pictures. It just sat there after about 10 or 15 minutes, I walked away. And a few hours later, the news broke that some strange white spheres had been caught on video hovering around Air Force One as it took off from LAX. My sighting had occurred right around the same time and it seemed to be a really similar object. So I posted my pictures on Reddit and was soon contacted by the Daily Mail and a great reporter named Merrick Von Rennenkamp, who's been doing some great work in the UFO or UAP space over the past few years. So I say all this to say, well, I can't say exactly what it was that I saw and I definitely can't say whether or not it was aliens. It was weird and it got me diving back deep into all kinds of the alien shaped corners of the internet. And it was down there in the depths or I guess maybe out there in the stars that I found one of my oldest fears reignited, the fear of alien abduction. Now, when I was a kid, I was the opposite of scared all the time of being abducted by aliens. I actually thought it would be really cool. Who wouldn't want to go on an alien spaceship and meet aliens and finally know for sure if we're alone in the universe? Of course, I thought I would be friends with them. I even wrote a couple short stories about getting abducted and making friends with an alien and then hiding them from the government at my house. And I think the government like killed my parents at some point, it was a long time ago. But the older I got and the more I read about the experiences aboard these other worldly ships, the scarier it got. The probing, the surgeries, the forced impregnations, the helplessness, all bad, all very scary and all ripe to talk about on this show. So join us listener, as we beam aboard an alien ship and it's us who's doing the probing for once.

What are we? Scared. When are we?

Scared all the time. Hey everybody, welcome back. We wanna kick off this episode with a quick rundown of a little bit of listener mail. We've been getting lots of listener mail and we do read all of it. We've been so busy putting the show together that we're not great at getting back to all of it, but we're gonna try to get better at that.

No, we get back to people all the time. We just don't follow up on, if we say that sounds like a great idea, we'll do that. Like we haven't done a lot of following up on the great idea that we're going to do, but I think we get back to almost everybody. We just, if it's got a big idea in it, sometimes we kick the can a little bit because we don't have time to do that big idea.

Sure. I should say, if we haven't gotten back to you, please know we've read your email and we just have been so busy putting this fucking show together every week. That we, things slip through the cracks. So forgive us, but we do have a couple of emails we wanted to touch base on before we kick off this episode. The first is from Cassie who actually wrote, we would have covered this on amusement park disasters, but she wrote us literally in a nice little universal coincidence here. She emailed this to us the day that we were prepping that episode to go out. So last Wednesday, we got this email. It was too late to put it in the show or anything. But Cassie wanted to let us know about a water park that is being constructed on an infamous lake in Georgia, Lake Lanier. There's a whole very somber, very tragic and violent story connected to Lake Lanier, which I think despite what Ed and I just said about not having time to get into any of the big ideas that we get in these emails, we do think we might actually do an Amusement Park's part 2 that we would cover this. So we're not going to go into the whole story, but it is very sad. I wouldn't really call it an amusement park disaster. It's more of a pre amusement park tragic history, but good God, it's some bad shit. As Cassie says in her email, the vibes are off at Lake Lanier. I agree. So we've got that. I also wanted to read this email from Alicia, because Alicia is a fellow Pennsylvanian, and I love Pennsylvanians. She also had a little bit of a Hershey lore here. She says, hey guys, I absolutely love your podcast. I listened and still do listen to Astonishing Legends, shout out Scott and Forrest, and have been for a lot of years. And I love that you guys are able to have your own podcasts. We do too. We love it too, Alicia. I'm glad you enjoy it. Alicia says she's from Pennsylvania, currently living in Schuylkill County, but used to live in the Lebanon area and worked a lot of jobs at Hershey. I will say that I have heard Hershey Lodge is haunted, but I know from personal experience that Hotel Hershey is. I used to work nights and definitely heard and seen a few things. Love you guys and hope you keep making more episodes for years to come. Hell yeah, Alicia. I have been to Hotel Hershey a bunch. My high school prom was actually at Hotel Hershey. I've never experienced anything there. There's lots of stories that have floated around. But Alicia, if you want to send us a follow-up email and let us know what you've seen and heard, we'd be very interested to hear about it.

Speaking of Pennsylvania, because Pennsylvania might be able to try and claim him for part of his time in Carlisle, we have since learned who Jim Thorpe was.

Yes.

We did not know.

No. Ed and I know a little about a lot, but we know nothing about sports.

Sports is definitely a blind spot for us.

Pro wrestling, I know a lot about. But I would say that is a, well, I wouldn't say it's sports entertainment. I would say it is a sports-based product.

Yeah, I just feel like we don't know enough about the big sports. I know a lot about motor sports and stuff, and then you know a lot about wrestling, but neither of us could, we'd be so bad at a trivia night for like, oh, baseball, football, any of that type of shit. We don't really know anything.

Oh, I've been bad at trivia nights. I've been in trivia teams where like, you know, all of our friends for the most part, a lot of our friends are like movie people. And so when the sports category comes up, good God, it's a massacre.

Yeah.

But anyway, we got an email from Brandon who said, but we also got emails from a lot of people, including Ed's dad. Yup.

Got a text from my dad. Yeah.

A text from your dad. We got an email from Brandon that says, guys, Jim Thorpe is one of the greatest athletes of all time, an Oklahoma icon and a sad story. I know more than just me is sending you this, but come on. It's actually a great story. Check him out, Brandon. So thank you, Brandon. Ed checked him out.

Yeah. And it is a great story.

So, Ed, do you want to share what you've learned?

Yeah. I mean, well, you know, like you said, Native American gentleman from Oklahoma who did spend time in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was first seen to be, wow, this guy could do anything. Pick this guy. Every sport we know nothing about, he was amazing at.

So baseball, football, basketball.

I mean, I don't know about basketball, but hold on. Wait. Yes. Everything he tried, including basketball, boxing, lacrosse, swimming, hockey, handball and tennis.

Holy shit.

And also went to the fucking Olympics and destroyed there all the time and all that type of shit. So he was maybe the greatest athlete ever. And yeah, we didn't know who the fuck he was. My dad admitted that it's funnier. The content we were able to make out of thinking he's someone else was funny. But yeah, it's just something we didn't know. And so thanks for letting us know. And I'm glad I looked into it. It definitely had a crazy, interesting life. And there's a lot of sadness there too. So thanks everyone for sending us stories that are interesting and sad.

All right. Well, with that all out of the way, Ed, I think it's time to explore the wild and weird world of Alien Abductions.

Part 1, baby.

So this one gets requested a lot and with good reason. Stories of Alien Abductions are usually pretty fucking terrifying, filled with all kinds of physical and emotional traumas that haunt abductees for the rest of their lives. I've never been abducted and I certainly never hope to be. But for years, probably like middle school into high school, it really freaked me out because sort of like my awareness of sleep paralysis and our old friend the Hat Man, the fear of being abducted loomed large when it came time to go to bed. I started getting really uncomfortable with closing my eyes out of fear that when I opened them, I would be laying on a slab of the sky somewhere, unable to move and having horrible experiments performed on me. Ed, were you ever afraid of getting abducted by aliens?

It's weird because I was more similar to you in my youth of like, I wanted to be friends with aliens.

Yeah.

To the point where like, I loved X-Files, watched it every week. And my cousin and I had like my dad's office. My dad was, he's a plumber, but he also had like an office for doing like invoices and stuff. And he had like an old typewriter that he would use for like invoices. But we would use the typewriter to make like our own X-Files. And we would go out at night with like flashlights and like lay on a trampoline and look up at the sky and then like take notes of what we thought we saw. And then we would type up the X-Files of like night whatever. We zero sightings. And then we would put them in a folder. And my dad let us keep a folder in the work filing cabinet. And we had like an X-File amongst a bunch of plumbing invoices.

I can't believe we've never talked about this before. I didn't have a typewriter, but I also had a filing cabinet where I kept my own X-Files.

Oh, wow. Well, heard it here first.

Some of them were like me going out to look, but a lot of it was just I would like read something in a book, you know, one of those like time life books or something. And then I would like write up notes on it and be like, OK, this is a case. And if if anyone ever comes to me asking about Bigfoot, I have all my information. I have all my X-Files. It was in like one of those accordion folders with like the loop thing.

Yeah.

And I put it in a filing cabinet or at one point I got a briefcase and I put it in there.

Yeah, that makes you cool. That makes you way cool.

Dude, when you bring it to school, you're even cooler.

Don't bring it to school.

Oh, I learned the hard way. Don't bring the briefcase with your X-Files to school. No one else will think it's as cool as you do.

Okay, first off, lose the briefcase and just bring trading cards.

Yeah.

The better way to go about it. But no, I did that. And so I was also like pro alien and and we'll probably get to this later. Maybe it depends on what you're going to talk about. But, you know, and I had my caricature drawn by an abductee.

So was it a caricature of you being abducted? Was that like the gimmick or?

No, no. I think that man didn't talk about the abduction anymore. But it's like a guy who, yeah, it was a fairly it was like a fairly famous. It was from the Allagash, one of the Allagash people. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Who also, I believe, provided in like that Unsolved Mysteries episode about it. I'm pretty sure those are like his drawings that were provided of like the events or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And I wish I still had that caricature, but we'll get into that if are we going to talk about Allagash?

Not in part one.

Okay, so I'll talk more about the meeting of them.

All right. Cool.

But that all changed, though. So my love of aliens and not my love, but I'm saying like Your marriage to an alien dissolved. My marriage to an alien dissolved when I saw Fire in the Sky.

Yep.

And that for me was like, you know what? I don't think these people are great.

Yeah.

That's when like nightmares about aliens began and not like, how did you sleep? Oh, amazing. I had another dream when I was holding hands with an alien. That was dreams prior to Fire in the Sky.

Yeah. I assume that probably large sections of our audience have seen Fire in the Sky. But if you haven't, it's a nightmare inducer. And part of what's so scary about it is that the first hour and a half of the movie is like sort of just looks like a made for TV lifetime movie about these guys who are abducted. And it's interesting and like it's fine. And in the last like 15 minutes of the movie is just the most horrifying thing you've ever seen. When the guy finally remembers his abduction experience, it's like they switched directors and got like just some nightmare factory to make the last couple minutes of the movie.

And it looks really good. I mean, like it looks great pre, you know, CG and all that crap. It just like there was so much really great imagery that was art designed and production designed and shot amazingly and scary.

Yeah.

Holy smokes. Like I'm not even a fan of syrup on my waffles and pancakes because of that movie. Like there's so much.

So much goo.

No, not even the goo. There's a famous syrup scene like in the movie that, you know, reignites his flashbacks.

Yes.

And so I'm like, if syrup does that to that guy, then I'm hold the syrup, please, mom.

Yeah.

Anyway, yeah, if no one's seen it, definitely check it out, but just be prepared that it's, there is some very terrifying stuff in it.

Yeah. The closest I've ever had to an abduction experience is a recurring nightmare I might have, might have talked about in the Hat Man episode. And I can't remember exactly what age I was when I started having this recurring nightmare, but probably like four or five, because it's one of my earliest memories, I think back on it to this day. And so I'd have this recurring dream that I'd be in my bed asleep, and then I would be aware of being lifted up out of my bed. And I'd sort of come to, because I floated out of my room on my back, and then floated down the stairs in my house. And at the bottom of the stairs, there was this room that would eventually become my mom's office, but at the time it was just sort of an empty room with a couch in it. And I'd get very gently laid down on the floor, and then I would be aware of multiple people or beings or creatures. They were never, I never saw them, but I felt them there. And this really heavy presence would either hold my chest, or sometimes my arms and my legs down. And eventually the weight would move up to my ear, and it would start panting and heaving and snarling, and I would get really, really scared, and I'd feel like I was gonna die, and then I'd wake up. And so I wouldn't call it an alien abduction, but part of what I think is so interesting about it is that it almost feels like a proto-abduction. Like if the details were different, if the figures were more clear, if I floated out my window instead of down the stairs, it has these similarities to an alien abduction, but just really hazy. And I think that's ultimately what I'm most curious about with this topic. Is this phenomenon physical? Do biological or technological entities physically remove people from the planet and bring them to another location? Or is it a more, for lack of a better term, let's call it spiritual phenomenon that happens somewhere in the blurry reality between sleep and dreams and other dimensions?

Interesting question.

Yeah, as I tend to discover when I start doing research on these topics, you could probably teach a college course on this subject and still barely scratch the surface. We're going to split this episode into two. The first half that you're listening to right now is going to cover the history of abductions in folklore up through early UFO contactees and through what, as far as I can tell, is the first recorded and reported alien abduction case in human history. And then the second episode will pick up with the Betty and Barney Hill story and abductions post Betty and Barney Hill. And believe me when I tell you, there is some crazy shit in both halves, so I highly encourage you to listen to both. And before we dive in, I should say to our true believers that even though we're going to talk our usual shit and sometimes take a pretty skeptical eye towards these cases, we're doing it lovingly. I think anyone who talks about their experiences is brave, and I never think they're outright lying. Experiencers believe what they are saying. They believe what they've gone through, and we're never going to get anywhere dismissing their stories outright. And we also won't get anywhere if they don't come forward to tell us about them. So don't get it twisted. Just because we're busting balls on this show, if you have an experience, it would be a helpful thing for you to come forward, and we're just busting balls lovingly because that's the only way that Ed and I know how to express love. So I will die on the hill that abduction experience is our part of our reality. Just like ghosts, Bigfoot, time slips, and so many other mysteries, these experiences speak to something we don't understand about either our world or our minds. The question for me is what?

The question for me is, was that in your vows, that they're like, listen, my love language is busting balls. Just know this. Hey, Anna's parents, good to see you.

Anna's parents listen to this show, so.

I know.

It's okay. My wife and I communicate through ball busting on a fairly regular basis, but I treat her parents with the utmost respect.

I never suggested you didn't. I don't think you needed that second part.

Well, I've never busted a parent's balls. Maybe my own mother's, certainly my own dad's, but.

We should change it to busting chops because there's a lot of confusing language now all of a sudden. Anyway, what were you saying about aliens?

Well, we'll come back to aliens. One of the reasons I don't doubt the reality of these cases is that they have always been with us in some form or fashion. Tales of folkloric creatures abducting humans and scampering away with them are as old as history. Fairies, in particular, seem to have a predilection for kidnapping children. And not Tinkerbell style fairies. Although some people have drawn parallels between Jamberry's Peter Pan and other older fairy abduction stories. But before the early 1900s, fairies or fey, as they're sometimes known, were not magical beings made of light and pixie dust skipping through the woods. They were creatures anywhere from four inches to seven feet tall, depending on whose local lore you're going on. And they had their own rules and cultures. And they kind of ranged from mischievous gremlin type behaviors, like, you know, if your milk got stolen or you found the eggs were crushed or something, it would be the fairies. But they also were involved in like wholesale abduction and murder.

Well, that's the thing where it's like, oh, my biscuits were stolen. It was like, that's a four inch fairy took what they can. And it was like, oh, my whole family was stolen. It was like, that's a seven foot fairy took your family.

I mean, it could also be a small fairy delivers travels. They have magical powers. So sometimes it didn't matter how big they were. I mean, to me, when I was doing the research and I saw these references to like seven foot tall fairies, to me, at that point, you're talking about a troll, not a fairy.

I mean, I feel like that's dangerous language in the fairy community where it's like, whoa, troll.

Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's watch it.

Only we can use that word, you know.

So I found some really great information about all this at askaboutireland.ie, which sounds like a fake website, but I swear isn't. The link is in the show notes. And according to the wee lads over there, tradition says that abductions took place, fairy abductions took place to increase the strength of fairy stock and because they needed red blood in order to secure their place in heaven. Sometimes they were said to leave a fairy changeling in place of the person they had abducted. A changeling being a sick, wisened fairy that merely resembled the human left behind. And I'll pause here to say, immediately, this is one of those things that makes me see a parallel to alien abductions. Not that aliens need red blood, but the idea of fairies abducted people to increase the strength of fairy stock really mirrors the modern alien abduction idea of, you know, forced impregnations or the idea that they're breeding with us somehow. So that kind of idea has been there for a very long time.

And also this idea of replacing someone is definitely a fear I'm going to go down in this show at some point, not this episode, but that's something that I do get weirded out about. Am I talking to Chris on this episode or is Chris in a fucking closet somewhere and you're a scroll or whatever? That stuff definitely bugs me out.

We are about to go down that road right now, my good friend.

Well, there goes an episode, listeners.

So to prevent fairy abduction, boys were apparently more often abducted by fairies than girls. So parents would dress boys as girls to confuse the fairies and, dare I say, possibly confuse their children at some point as they got older.

It's the opposite of Treasure Island. It's the opposite of Treasure Island where they have to dress that girl as a boy, otherwise it wouldn't be safe for her on the pirates.

Yeah, fairies were also believed to be frightened of iron, so tongs would sometimes be placed over the cradle. Babies could also be sprinkled with holy water, or in echoes of a little bit of homunculus lore, you could also sprinkle your baby with urine because fairies did not like dirty babies.

Oh my god, there's other ways to dirty your baby.

Yeah.

If it's simply dirty, they just don't want it dirty, then I don't know, sprinkle some fucking coal dust on it.

I mean, urine seemed to be the thing that comes up again in a few minutes.

I guess everyone was so poor, it was like, what can we get for nothing? I guess piss is fucking free.

Yeah, exactly. You couldn't even spare dirt because you should be planting things in it. So it's like, well...

Yeah, exactly.

The changing idea, like you were just saying though, really left out to me for its parallels to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where, I mean, no one's getting peed on in that movie, but...

Not enough jellyfish bites in that movie, that's why.

Well, I mean, it seems like the way that you could prevent your friend being body snatched was to just pee on them. So maybe, hey, maybe this is IP, we can do a reboot, Scared All The Time presents Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Scared Home Video presents...

Yes, Scared Home Video and these aliens can't stand buckets of hot piss and shit.

Invasion of the Body Snatcher 2, IP'd on you. That's the title for no one.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 2, piss fountain.

What doesn't rhyme?

It doesn't have to rhyme, it just has to be evocative.

Well, I don't know.

Anyway, Blumhouse, call us. As I dug deeper into this strange form of what I would consider abduction, I stumbled across what I think is one of the earliest and craziest examples of a crime tied to an alien, or in this case, fairy, abduction story, the death of one Bridget Cleary. Have you ever heard of this one, Ed?

No, if you didn't have a diary. I know no Bridgets without diaries.

Okay, wait, what Bridgets do you know with diaries?

Just that famous one, Bridget Jones' diary. It's the only Bridget I know that I can think of off the top of my head, just in any part of my life.

I was thinking of Anne Frank.

Her name's not Bridget.

No, I know, but I was like, when you said Bridget's diary, I was like, her name's Anne Frank.

No.

And so that's why I asked. Well, Bridget Cleary lived in Tipperary, Ireland with her husband, Michael Cleary, and her father, Patrick. The Clearies were sort of an interesting family for the time. So this is like the, I think this was 1895, late 1800s. And the Clearies were middle class and doing pretty well compared to most of the other people in their town because Bridget sold eggs and worked as a seamstress in addition to her husband's salary at his job. And in that way, Bridget really represents this sort of emerging modern woman where she was literate, she dressed well, she worked, which was an outlier in their kind of rural town, which was still heavily agriculture-based and even reading and writing, there was still a lot more oral tradition at the time than reading and writing. So they were an interesting family and Bridget did have one old school belief though. She believed in fairies. Despite all the warnings in folklore that warned people to stay away from fairies and their territory, Bridget loved visiting fairy circles, which we'll talk more about a little bit later on. But essentially these are circles in the grass or sometimes mushrooms in a circle in the grass that's where fairies are supposed to frequent. And in particular, there was this early medieval circular fort called a Ring Fort near her town that had come to be known as a fairy fort. So she loved visiting this fairy fort and it's possible that on Monday, March 4th, 1895, it's possible she spent some time there when she went to deliver eggs to her father's cousin, Jack Dunne, near Kyla Granagh Hill, I think.

There's no way, whatever, near a hill.

Near Kyle's Hill where this fort stood. All we know for sure is that by the time she got home from her deliveries, she was sick. She spent the rest of the day in bed complaining of an unusual pain in her head. And it wasn't super unusual that she'd be sick. Her delivery route was like a two or three mile walk and it was still snowy this time of year. So an illness would make sense that she could have caught something. And they did have a doctor come over. The doctor diagnosed her as having a sort of a bullshit diagnosis of quote, nervous excitement and slight bronchitis, which sounds like everything I ever tried to stay home from school for. I was nervous and had slight bronchitis.

It seems like bronchitis is doing the heavy lifting here though. I don't know if nervous excitement is what's keeping her in bed.

Well, this is back when you could diagnose women with anything.

Oh my God, official diagnosis hysteria.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, what's weird here is that her husband, Michael, wasn't as concerned with the actual illness as he was with his growing conviction that the woman laying sick in Bridget's bed won't be able to deliver the eggs.

The business requires this woman to walk six miles and if she can't, we simply will have to sell the chickens in the coop.

Well, no, he was much more concerned with this growing conviction he had that the woman laying sick in Bridget's bed wasn't his wife at all.

He thought it was a fairy.

Yeah.

And he knows that the fairies won't know the route. And so again, it all comes back to his real issue is we're going to lose our egg business.

Well, he claimed, first of all, the egg business. I don't think, I couldn't actually find what Michael's job was, but I don't think he was in the egg business. I think Bridget just delivered eggs.

Based on egg routes, he meticulously designed.

Yes, he spent years being like, this is perfect.

He said, and now if only I can get a woman to walk it, we'll be in business.

He's like, I've done all the drawing. I've done the hard work.

Yeah.

What's more interesting than Michael's possibly real, possibly fake chicken or the egg business is that he claimed that this ill woman in bed was two inches taller and quote, too fine to be his wife.

Oh, shit, dude. And if it's actually his wife, she's like, I'm right here. That's the rudest thing you've ever said.

I know, that's fucking brutal to be sitting there like, damn, who's this hottie that's definitely not the woman I married?

Yeah, if he didn't say the first part about it not being his wife, it's actually a wonderful compliment where it's like, oh my God, thank you. Like even now, like that's true love.

Yeah.

Like even at my worst, my guy sees me as a babe. But no, he started the sentence with, oh my God, my wife would never look this hot in bed sick.

Exactly. Well, in fact, Michael believed that Bridget had been replaced by a fairy changeling as she passed by the fairy fort on Kyle and Granaugh Hill. Now, no one's entirely sure how Michael came to this conclusion exactly, but it's likely that good old Jack Dunn, the man that Bridget was busy delivering eggs to, had something to do with it. Because he wasn't just her father's cousin, he was also a charismatic local Shanahee, which is basically like a storyteller with a concentration in fairy mythology. And it was certainly Jack Dunn who encouraged Michael to escalate things after a priest gave Bridget, or whoever, whatever hottie it was in that bed, her last rites. The priest wasn't too concerned about the illness, the last rites were more of a precaution, you know, everybody was super Catholic in this area. But Jack Dunn told Michael that he had to act immediately, or the real Bridget would be lost forever. He said, quote, it is not your wife is there. This is the eighth day and you had a right to have gone to Ganey or Dennis Ganey, the local fairy doctor, on the fifth day. So by the eighth day of wife being sick in bed, Jack Dunn is telling Michael, what are you doing? The fairies took your wife. We know this because this lady's too hot.

Yeah.

You need to go see the fairy doctor. So Michael.

Hold on, wait, the question. What was the fucking shit about five days? Where it's like, there's another guy who's not the cousin, who's a fairy doctor in town, who's also like, you got a five day window to use me. Anything beyond that, like your coupons don't work no more.

No, no, no, the window wasn't Ganey wouldn't help after five days. The window was that Jack Dunn felt that waiting eight days of your not wife laying in bed was way too long and that he should, if he had the right to go to the fairy doctor on the fifth day, which must have been sort of like a local custom or something.

Oh, so it was like, don't show up before day five, which is to say that like, if your wife's still hot longer than five days, it's probably a fairy, in which case go to the fairy doctor.

I guess, yes. He had the right to go to the fairy doctor on the fifth day. I don't know if that's a legal right or if that's just a turn of phrase, but yes, he should have gone earlier. He let this go too long. So Michael finally visited Gainey and came back with a mixture of herbs that needed to be boiled in quote, new milk, which is the nutrient rich first milk produced by a cow after calving, which again is starting to get into like homunculus territory here.

Yeah, very specific.

I guess he somehow found the new milk, which sounds like pretty difficult, but I guess maybe they had plenty of cows. But that night, Michael forced this whole concoction down Bridget's throat while done and three male cousins pinned her down in bed.

I don't like that.

Relatives outside the house heard someone, likely Michael, shouting, take it you witch or I'll kill you. And the men threw urine at Bridget and shook her yelling, away with you, come home, Bridget Boland, in the name of God. Michael asked his wife then to answer her name three times. Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God? The men then brought her to the fireplace and held her over the grate, because ordeals by fire were known to drive out the fairies while they repeated their questions.

Wait, why was they by the fire? What was gonna dry out?

I think they basically were trying to torture the fairy out of her.

This is a bad situation for a sick woman, that you're trying to turn into faux gras by force feeding them shit.

Fatty milks.

Yeah, feeding them fatty milks, tossing them by a fire, they're covered in fucking pee. Like, this is a shit night for anybody.

Well, by midnight, the ritual seemed to be completed. Bridget was apparently, quote, wild and deranged, according to her cousin, Joanna, who was there. But Michael seemed satisfied, and her relatives thought there had been some sort of catharsis, so.

Yeah, if someone force fed you, threw pee on you, tossed you in a fire, yeah, I feel like you'd be a different person.

Yeah, yeah, you would be. So the following morning, at Michael's request, the priest said mass in Bridget's bedroom to banish the evil spirits that were left in the house.

The priest who came in, he was like, oh, Rick's like pissing, milking here. What the fuck did you guys do?

Well, listen, religious rituals back then, who knows? I'm sure he'd smelled plenty of weird things.

No, it's the 1890s, like the automobiles on the way. Like, I don't, I think that priest is just using holy water and stuff.

That's true, that's true.

Like, he's not using pagan ritual shit.

But keep in mind, none of this is really a secret. Like, neighbors heard screaming all night. They were just too afraid to intervene or do anything. They just kind of kept to themselves.

Yeah, take that people who were like, nobody knows their neighbors anymore, America's changed. I know this isn't America, but it's always been that way. It's always been like, did you hear fucking gunshots? Yeah, let's not deal with that. Someone was just shot, by the way, like three apartments down. A woman shot her boyfriend to death.

Did you hear it?

We heard a lot of sirens. And there's just that like, for rent sign on there now. And I'm like, I'm like, oh man, glad I didn't feel the need to stick my nose into their business, you know?

Yeah.

I do always find a for rent sign funny after an event.

Yeah. The next day on Friday, March 15th, Bridget got out of bed and dressed in her usual fashionable clothes for the first time in 11 days. I guess she forgave her husband or Michael was glad that she was back because everything seemed to be fine until later in the day when Michael and Bridget had some family members over to the cottage for tea. During this tea time, Bridget made the horrendous mistake, apparently, of asking for some milk, which rekindled Michael's suspicions that she was still possessed by a changeling because fairies are known to yearn for fresh milk.

You fed her milk last night. Nobody asked for milk. You burst a door open and were like, drink this milk, drink this milk, like that. Okay, per usual, it's a bad husband. It's always, always look to the husband first. Like, believe women.

An argument broke out over the milk, apparently, and Bridget snapped and said to her husband, your mother used to go with the fairies, and that is why you think I am going with them.

Oh, shit, in front of other family members.

Yeah, so snap back. She called his mom a fairy-loving whore. And this seemed to send Michael right over the edge. He demanded that Bridget eat three pieces of bread and jam and say her name again each time. She answered twice and ate two of the three pieces, but when she hesitated with the third, her husband flung her to the ground and said, if you won't take it, down you will go. In front of the entire family, Michael forced the bread and jam down Bridget's throat. He tore off her clothes and grabbed a hot stick from the fire and held it to her mouth.

Okay, a neighbor not wanting to get involved, I get it, but like your whole family sucks.

Yeah.

Like if no one's being like, Michael, please. Like that's fucking a shit family, dude. But like a neighbor being like, well, they're at it again.

Yeah, these were her cousins and I think her father was there for this. So he struck her head against the floor and then set her like undergarments, her chemise on fire and then poured paraffin lamp oil over her to encourage the flames to burn hotter.

So he killed her.

He killed her. Her body's burning in the middle of the house in front of all these people. And Michael said, she's not my wife. She's an old deceiver sent in place of my wife. Bridget, according to the family testimony, blazed up all in a minute and then they ran and huddled in a nearby bedroom. The flames got so big that they barricaded the family in the room.

Good.

And then once the flames went out, Michael wrapped his wife's body in a sheet and shoved it in an old bag. He left the house, locked the relatives inside with the corpse. And then he came back after an hour with a knife and threatening to kill Bridget's cousin, Patrick Kennedy, if he didn't help him bury Bridget's body.

Dude, there's more of you than this guy. Just like fucking rushed the terrorists at this point.

Yeah, I don't know. It's unclear. Like we have all this testimony because there was a court case, which we'll get to in a second, and everybody gave testimony in open court. So we have a pretty good version of events. It's a little unclear why anybody was going along with this other than maybe they were just so scared of Michael for whatever reason that they were like, okay.

Or they were like, came over to be like, hey, we're here to see how Bridget's doing and bring you some tea. And like, I understand you guys had a rough couple of days, she's been ill. And then they get there and they're like, damn, do you remember Bridget being seven feet tall? And it was like, maybe Michael's onto something. I don't remember her being a fucking NBA player.

The two men, Patrick and Michael, carried Bridget's body to a boggy area about a quarter mile uphill from the cottage and buried it in a shallow hole. Back at the cottage, Michael made the rest of the family swear that they wouldn't tell the authorities. Then the next morning, Michael turned up at a local church with good old Jack Dunn, who wanted Michael to speak to a priest, but Michael was so upset that he was just kneeling in front of the altar, weeping, tearing his hair and asking to go to confession. And at this point, the priest was like, this guy's not fit to receive the sacrament of confession. And Dunn tried to explain that he wasn't at the cottage at the time of Bridget's death, but Michael had claimed to burn his wife to death the night before because she was a changeling.

Oh, where'd he get that idea from, Dunn? Did someone tell him about his wife might be a fucking changeling?

Yeah.

Sounds like Jack Dunn has some culpability in all of this.

The priest understandably thought they were both insane and reported their conversation to the police, which I feel like, I mean, I guess technically it wasn't confession.

He wasn't getting confession, yeah.

But for a priest to be like, yo, you guys are nuts, I'm going to the police. You really have to be presenting, I feel like, as very crazy.

He's presenting as Protestant.

Yeah, that too. For the next few days, the police searched for Bridget and questioned the friends and relatives. Michael was banging on that his real wife would come back. For three consecutive nights, he waited at the Ring Fort on Kyla Grana Hill, where he believed she would appear galloping on a white horse and that if he cut the ropes that bound her to the horse, she would be his forever. Which, she would have been yours forever if you didn't burn her to death and throw her in a bog.

Yeah, if you didn't fucking terrorize a person for 48 hours and kill her in front of her family, good shot, you'd still be together.

Yeah, on Wednesday, March 20th, so this is all happening over the span of a couple days. She first got sick, I think, on March 4th or something.

Dude, the people in town are just, we're looking at fucking almost two weeks people aren't getting their eggs delivered.

Yeah, and for at least a day or two, they were being delivered by a seven foot tall hottie.

Oh my God, yeah.

I imagine her, what's the name of the woman in Resident Evil 9 or whatever, the eight foot tall, the giantess.

Why the fuck would I know that? Who's still playing Resident Evil 9 installments in?

Lots of people. Anyway, on Wednesday, March 20th, the Royal Irish Constables issued arrest warrants for eight people from Bridget's circle, as well as the fairy doctor, Dennis Gainey, who they should have arrested that guy, I feel like, a long time ago.

Yeah, Dennis Gainey's no good, dude.

Yeah. Two days later, the cops found Bridget's body, and then just a few months later, beginning of July 1895, after a two day trial, Michael was found guilty of manslaughter.

I'm sorry, Michael the husband?

Michael was found guilty of manslaughter.

He should be found guilty of first degree murder. She didn't dart out in front of his car, I didn't see her.

Get this though, get this though, get this. So he was found guilty of manslaughter and imprisoned, along with Jack Dunn, Bridget's father, Patrick Boland, who lived at the house, and four of Bridget's cousins, including Patrick Kennedy, who helped bury the body. The judge ruled out a verdict of murder, because they had all acted out of genuine belief.

That's, come on now.

So in 1895, eight people got away with a group murder, because the judge was like, ah, they thought she was a changeling. Can you blame them?

That's so dumb. I guess that means that fairy folklore was so deep in that culture.

Yes.

That they genuinely, even people in positions of power, like judges and stuff, were like, I don't know, my mother told me about fairies when I was a kid and her grandmother told her about fairies. Like the turn of the century is about to happen.

Yeah, yeah.

And they're still being like, yeah, I fucking could have been, you know? For all we know, they're still getting away with murder over there because of fairies.

We have at least one.

This is precedent in law.

We have at least one or two Irish listeners, I think.

Let us know, could you get away with murder if you plead insanity through fairy worry?

Not even insanity, you just plead sane and that your wife was a fairy or was a changeling and that you had to get rid of her. So to be fair, there is some evidence that Bridget may have had a lover and that that may have had something to do with-

That doesn't make it okay. You're not allowed to-

No.

My girlfriend's cheating on me. That gives me the right to terrorize her then light her on fire.

No, no, no. In no way am I saying, let me be clear. Let me be clear, folks, let me be clear. I'm not saying that it makes it okay.

But I mean, it also shouldn't be something to evoke or elicit a response is what I'm getting at. Like it's, this guy sucks. And I don't care if she was fucking everybody and the fairies. Well, the fairies, that would make it more like than he was right, there were fairies.

I agree with you. What I'm saying is in maybe to be fair is the wrong phrasing.

You're having a hard time not saying in defense of Michael.

No, I'm not saying in defense of Michael. I'm saying-

Sure sounds like it.

No, what I'm saying is did Michael really believe this or was Michael mad about something else and found a way to try to get away with killing his wife by acting like he truly believes she was abducted and replaced by a changeling?

Sure, this is a Picket Fences episode. Now it's like, okay, my plan was I can murder someone and use the belief structure in this town of fairies to have a 80% chance of getting there with murder.

Yes.

And he ended up knocking it out of the park because he's like, if I just put that crazy look in my eye, if I'm afraid of fairies and do it in front of enough people that I might get away with this, and he did. And what's a manslaughter charge get you over there? 13 days, 14 days?

I don't know, something like that. Long enough for the new milk to come back and then you're back home. But yeah, no, my point is just, there's only three things that happened here. Either she was replaced by a changeling, which is extremely unlikely, Michael went crazy and truly believed it, or there was something else motivating the murder of his wife. And what I'm saying is, there is evidence that she may have had a lover and that might have played into why he would have wanted to kill her. And then he pretended.

Well, I hope she was a fairy because the rest of it is greasy. And I feel that if she wasn't a fairy, her dad's a massive pussy.

True.

If he was there and he just let it happen, that guy should get extra time in prison for being a little bitch.

So here's the other really interesting part. Again, not in defense of Michael, but he wasn't diagnosed by a psychiatrist at the time because psychiatry was still really young as a science at this point. But modern psychiatrists think he may have been suffering from a rare mental disorder known as Capgras Delusion. And I won't say too much about Capgras Delusion because I think we could do a whole episode on it. But it's one of the scariest mental illnesses I've ever heard of. It's the belief that a loved one, family member, friend, or even pet has been replaced by an imposter. So this is a real mental illness that people can have where they wake up one day and they look at their wife and go, that's not my wife. And Capgras Delusion wasn't described until about 20 years after this case went down in the early 1900s. But it does certainly sound like something that might explain Michael's extreme behavior because in modern cases, people have bought guns, they've shot at their loved ones, they've hidden from them, they've locked themselves away because they're sure that this person that they've known their whole lives is no longer this person. So-

I mean, that could just be dementia.

It is closely related to dementia and schizophrenia, but it happens to younger people too. Like that's what Capgras Delusion is. It's basically a very specific dementia that happens to people who aren't going through dementia yet. So the history of belief in changelings could also be rooted in some of those stories.

But I think the thing that kind of undercuts that idea for him is that there was that idea in that culture that this is not out of the realm of possibility, as evidenced by a judge agreeing with that. I mean, yes, could that guy have snapped and had this disease or whatever the fuck it is? Sure, but if anything, if he had it, it wasn't combated in any way. If anything, it was supported. They didn't come in and be like, no, your wife's, it is who she says it is. You just have Capra disease or whatever. No, they were like, oh no, she probably is. And here's a bunch of weird remedies.

Well, right, I guess what I'm saying is I wonder if the lore of changelings is really the sort of secret history of Capra disease or Capra delusion in the sense that people who truly believe this in the past were all suffering from the same mental disorder and it was not understood as a mental disorder. It was, well, we need an explanation. There's always been schizophrenic people and modern schizophrenic people think the CIA is talking to them through a radio transmission in their molar and schizophrenic people back in, there's been stories of people who talk to, what's it called? There was some ancient-

Miss Cleo.

No, there was some ancient transmission machine or something that I remember, I've read stories of people who have thought that that's what was communicating with them. Like mental illnesses in the past would have expressed themselves as folklore, not mental illness is I think what I'm saying.

Okay, sure. I'm gonna say it's a tough thing to diagnose when you have folklore, that's all I'm saying is the folklore will blank, but you're saying as well.

Yes.

Folklore will blanket any underlying issue.

We're saying the same thing.

Yeah.

You might even say we're going in fairy circles. Oh.

I'll put in some CSI music.

Yeah.

That we'll get sued for.

Which is a great transition to the next part of this episode because we're about to learn about fairy circles. It's one of the other elements that is associated with fairy abductions and I think also has some parallels to alien abductions. So fairy circles are places in the world that are naturally occurring where there's either a circle of mushrooms that grows in almost a perfect circle or sometimes it just looks like shorter or dead grass that's in a circle. And back in the olden days, times of yore, these circles were rumored to be where fairies hung out and sometimes when it was the dead grass, it was like where fairies had danced in a circle the night before. But it turns out, we now know, fairy circles are naturally occurring and they form when there's about 60 different species of fungi that do this, but they're formed when these species of fungi grow into natural circle formations below ground and then sprout up into a ring of mushrooms. The reason that sometimes you find them in the form of dead or short grass, whether the mushrooms have grown or if they've been knocked over or whatever, it's because the mushrooms, the mycelium, I think it's called, the roots of the mushrooms, even beneath the soil have a nitrogen heavy diet. So they'll feed on all the nitrogen in the soil, causing the grass above ground in the pattern of where the mycelium is, all that grass will wither. So these fairy circles are also not always cute little rings, they can get massive. One of the largest fairy circles ever found is in Belfort near Northeastern France. It's formed by a fungus called Infundibulus cybae geotropa.

It's formed by a fungus. What we're saying is it's just formed by a fungus.

Yeah, it's formed by a specific type of fungus and it is 300 meters or 980 feet in diameter and over 700 years old. So these fairy circles could get big and they've been around for a very long time. And the reason that I think they have parallels in abduction lore is because they remind me a lot of crop circles in the sense that they are seen as markers of something inexplicable. They're not entirely the same because crop circles have been pretty conclusively proven to be the work of pranksters and artists where fairy circles are these natural formations. But the idea that the supernatural expresses itself through symbols in the earth feels almost primal to me. Just as an aside, who's to say what causes crop circles anyway? Because the modern idea of the crop circle started in the 1970s, but researchers have discovered a small little woodcut book called The Mowing Devil that describes something that sounds a lot like a crop circle back in 1678.

Wow.

Basically, this little book tells the tale of a farmer who was too cheap to pay laborers to cut his oats, and so overnight, the devil did the job instead. But it's described as the devil cutting these oats into round circles, and the accompanying woodcut shows this little picture of a demon crouching over the oats, which lie in crop circle-like rings all around him.

Wait, so the devil rewarded that man for being a fucking miser?

I guess.

He's like, ah, I'll do it, I guess. I thought there was gonna be some sort of, you know, O'Henry thing in that story where it was like, and then the devil cut his crops, but salted the earth at the same time to show.

I don't know, maybe cutting them in circles was a bad thing. I'm not sure.

Everyone's gonna make fun of you?

Yeah, like what? It doesn't really matter. Crop circles are for another time. What's important here today is that most fairy rings play another important role in fairy abduction stories. Sometimes they are just evidence of where fairies were said to have danced the night before, but in other stories, they're the place where our world and the fairy world cross over. So fairy abduction stories don't involve getting sucked up into the sky the way we imagine alien abductions today. They usually feature the abductee discovering the fairy circle and being transported to another world or dimension after stepping through it. Or sometimes if the fairies are being mischievous and abducting a human, they take the human to one of these circles to whisk them to the fairy realm.

Sure, which is a totally different dimension.

Yeah, I mean, you can call it a dimension, you can call it the space between spaces, but yes, it's a different place. And people, when they step through into that fairy realm, that's where things get a lot more interesting and a lot more alien abduction-esque because sometimes people would be in the fairy realm for what seems like only minutes to them, only to be reported missing for days, weeks or even years at a time.

Yeah, you got to love that. I love any kind of time dilation element of a story because it's always such a bummer. Unless it's like Dragon Ball Z where it's like, oh, a day here is a year in there and we can train for a year for this fight in two days. I do like that too. That's very, I think A Wrinkle in Time has time dilation as well. But in that kind of reverse way where it's you can use it to your own benefit, but almost every other time it's, maybe it's going to come up, I don't know. But like an interesting got fucked over by time dilation is also Flight of the Navigator.

Yeah, well Flight of the Navigator isn't specifically going to come up.

But I mean, it's an alien abduction that has time dilation. And also when I was a kid, kind of made it seem like aliens are fun and cool.

Yep, which was a lie as we know.

It's a huge lie.

And as anyone who's seen Fire in the Sky knows. So there's another book besides A Wrinkle in Time that has a lot of time dilation shenanigans. And that book is Captured by Fairies, Folktales of Kidnappings, which is a book I found online. And if you sign up for like one of the free Amazon unlimited Kindle trials or something, you can download it. It's a translation of a bunch of different folktales. I'm not sure where they were originally sourced from, but there's a couple of really wild stories in this book that feel very alien abduction adjacent to me.

Sure.

One of them is a young boy who's picking flowers. When he hears music coming from the woods. So he follows this music deep into the woods and starts to get nervous, realizes he's pretty deep in there. And he's thinking about turning back when, quote, an invisible being crushed down all the low and tangled plants, thus forming for him a passage, which also sounds a little bit like crop circles to me. And the boy follows this path to a small lake where he says it's suddenly nighttime and the sky is full of stars. He grows tired, falls asleep and returns home days later, even though he thought he only fell asleep for one night. And then the other alien abduction part of this is that after he gets back, he tells his parents the story of what happened and he says that when he fell asleep, he was taken by a beautiful woman who showed him palaces of the most gorgeous description.

Beautiful, love it.

Pillars of glass supported arches, which glistened with every color and these were hung with crystals far exceeding anything which were ever seen in the caverns of a Cornish mine.

Oh wow. Hey, you know what that reminds me of visually? What the hell is that movie that you fucking loved? Midnight Man, After Midnight, no, what the hell is it?

Oh, with the kid on the run. Yeah, the invisible.

Midnight Boy.

Yeah, not Midnight Sky.

This movie has an excellent first 20 minutes.

Yes, yes, that's the part that I liked. When we saw the movie and we talked about it, those first 20 minutes, I was like.

They're amazing.

Fuck, this is perfect.

They're amazing. If only they had put the title of the movie in that first 20 minutes, you would have remembered it. 2016's Midnight Special is the movie they're talking about. But anyway, the imagery later in that film, when you see kind of the alien worldish stuff, it's very similar to what you're describing.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think a lot of different alien crystal kingdoms and stuff.

I mean, even Superman's dad gave him a bunch of crystals. They're crystal based economies.

Yeah, it also reminds me of what people see sometimes on acid or, you know, they'll see.

I've never seen those things on acid.

Well, you haven't, but other people have.

Well.

There's another story in this book of an old man returning from a fair and stopping along the road to take a nap. When he was sound asleep, the fairies came and carried him off, bagging all and took him under the earth. And when he awoke, he found himself in a great palace of gold, full of fairies dancing and singing. And they took him and showed him everything, the splendid gold room and gardens. And they kept dancing round him until he fell asleep. When he was asleep, they carried him back to the same spot where they had found him. And when he awoke, he thought he had been dreaming. So another very similar, this is gold instead of crystal, but a sparkling, shiny, palatial world. This is also, he says, underground, but I don't know how he knew it was underground. You get the idea.

Yeah, but it also sounds very similar, like until you can make the comparison between that and traditional alien abductions in the sense that there is a lot of like, oh, I was here and then I was returned to the same spot.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are stories in this book of people gone 20 years and even a bride who, on her wedding night, joins fairies for a dance in the fairy circle and returns the next morning only to discover that 100 years have passed.

Oh my God.

Which I thought was like, God damn, that's brutal. A couple of years-

Yeah, runaway bride.

Yeah, but this is why you and I don't dance.

You know, we've established what I need to dance on the show before. It's a whole pharmaceutical cabinet.

Yeah. Now, I mean, on that point, there is a lot more dancing and scenes involved in fairy abductions than alien abductions.

Yeah.

So that's a point in the column that these are completely different phenomenon.

I do like the idea of someone talking to abductees or experiencers and they just have a clipboard with a checklist that you have to go through. It's like, okay, were you taken for a long period of time? Check, all right. Were you taken and returned to the same place? Check. Did you see circles where there normally weren't? Check. It's like right now it's fucking 50-50. Was there a lot of dancing? Yes, there was. Okay, well, I'm happy to inform you that it was fairies. It wasn't aliens.

You know, aliens don't know how to boogie. Although, I mean, it also, it would be very funny to imagine an alien abduction where you get on the ship and instead of getting probed and stuff, the aliens, they put on some dubstep and you're there to dance.

Oh my god.

So, for hundreds of years, across every continent and culture, forest spirits of some type get up to this kind of shit. It's all very interesting, and maybe if fairy dances are scary to you, we'll do a follow-up podcast exclusively about folklore abductions and fairy dancing. But you people are here for the aliens, and we've teased you long enough, so let's just say, at some point between the 1600s and 1947, there was an evolution in our beliefs and stories about what was out there or up there. And 1947 is the year it really took off, because that's the year that Kenneth Arnold, a pilot, spots a formation of strange flying objects while he's flying near Mount Rainier. He describes them flying like saucers skipping across the water, which the press just shortens to flying saucers. And within a few years, people are reporting not just sightings of these alien ships, but contact with various kinds of beings piloting them. And this is where I think the development of these stories as modern myth gets really interesting. Because until Betty and Barney Hill are abducted in 1961, the idea of aliens taking people against their will is almost unheard of. Almost, I say, because we'll get to that. But what there's lots of in the late 1940s through the 1950s are contactees, not abductees. People who claim that they have made telepathic or physical contact with aliens. And again, each of these guys we're about to discuss probably needs their own podcast because they lived absolutely insane lives. One of the first public contactees in America came in 1952. There's this man, Orfeo Angelucci, who sounds like he would fit right in in my family.

Yeah, fellow spaghetti twirl and noodle bender, all right.

Orfeo Angelucci sounds like a brand of noodle, I feel like.

That's true. It's either a little bit better or a little bit worse.

Yeah.

Than the traditional.

What's for dinner tonight, Angelucci? Anyway, back at Angelucci's. In 1952, Orfeo Angelucci, who is a frail man who moved from New Jersey to California because he was afraid of thunderstorms and heard they didn't have any in California.

Yeah, they really don't. They really don't. It's crazy.

He claimed to have encountered a UFO while driving home from work in Burbank, of all places.

Hell yeah, he was a Disney animator.

Yeah. As he crossed a bridge over the Los Angeles River, he noticed a blue ball of light following him. He said the circular light was roughly the size of a beach ball and as soon as he noticed it, it quickly shifted its trajectory and appeared in front of the car. Angelucci slowed down and saw two green balls of light exit the larger blue one and start drifting towards him.

God, he watched it give birth. It's so rare. So rare to see an orb birth.

Well, it truly gave birth because the two green balls of light united, he said, to form a larger ball of light that became the disembodied images of superhuman extraterrestrial humanoids resembling the faces of a male and female.

So it was two separate beings.

Yes.

Okay, so the orb spit out Adam and Eve basically.

Yes, that's how I took it. And nowhere in here was it mentioned that it was a being with two heads. So I'm assuming it was an Adam and Eve type thing. Angelucci was asked to spread a message of peace and love and interconnectedness of all things. After that, the being stated they would return, they disappeared and they left Angelucci in shock as he continued his journey home. This encounter, like I said, this guy could have his own podcast, but it changed his whole life. He became obsessed with UFOs, wrote a bunch of books, had a bunch more encounters, but he was never abducted. That was 1952. In 1953, there's George Van Tassel, who claims to have been woken up one night by, quote, the occupant of a spaceship from the planet Venus, who invited him on board his spaceship and both verbally and telepathically gave him a technique for rejuvenating the human body.

Oh, I think it was a babe, because women are from Venus, they say.

That's true, that's true. I almost did a whole thing on this, and then it started to get kind of confusing because there's so many names and stuff, but a lot of these early beings do claim to be from Venus, which I think is a really interesting, you know, sci-fi detail element of like, at the time, all we really knew about Venus was that it was covered in heavy clouds, and no one knew until, I don't even remember if it was like the 70s or the 80s, but it took a long time for us to be able to learn anything else about Venus, and there were theories that it might be a planet that could have life beneath the cloud cover. So I wonder if that's why you see in the early 50s here, so many of these beings being from Venus, because we were pretty sure at that point that Mars didn't have any life. So Martians were almost passe, and now it's Venusians.

It's the next one over. I mean, it's our closest neighbor. So they're probably like, hey, yeah, we came over. It's the shortest drive from planet to planet. So Venus would make sense. You can see it in the night sky. It's right there. That's probably why. If they were like, hey, I'm from Pluto. I was expecting to meet Amoeba here. It took so damn long.

Well, in 1954, George Van Tassel got to work with a group of fellow believers that he brought out to the desert to use these instructions to build the Integratron, which is this dome shaped structure out in the desert that I believe is still standing.

If it's California, there's no reason for it to have like rusted away, yeah.

Yeah, I think you can visit this place.

Let's go. Let's go next weekend.

Oh dude, we should broadcast from the Integratron. They probably won't let us. So the Integratron was this sort of dome shaped structure in the desert that Vantassel believed would facilitate this technique for rejuvenating the human body, as well as time travel and continued communication with these other worldly beings. Interestingly enough, George Vantassel worked with Orfeo Angelucci at the same Lockheed manufacturing plant at the time that this happened.

Shit.

Though it's unclear from what I can tell how well they knew each other. And it doesn't seem like they ever, they didn't have like a YouTube collab at any point where they were like, we believe the same thing. They were just two guys from the same place who had, maybe there were some weird chemicals in the Lockheed plant.

I mean, their skunk works was probably making cool shit. So I don't know. I mean, they could have found each other. They'd probably be the only two people with sitting with no one else at lunch.

Also in 1953, a guy named George Adamski claims to have met a man from Venus named Orthon in the Colorado desert. According to Adamski's account, this large submarine looking ship made of a type of translucent metal landed close to him and its pilot, a Venusian called Orthon, disembarked and sought him out. Adamski claimed that people with him also saw the Venusian ship and several of them later stated that he had been in the desert with friends, so several of them later stated they could see Adamski meeting someone in the desert, although from a considerable distance. Adamski described Orthon as being a medium height humanoid with long blonde hair and tanned skin wearing reddish brown shoes, though as Adamski added, quote, his trousers were not like mine, which is such a funny sci-fi line.

He was wearing Jankos, big Janko jeans. He was crazy. He was dressed like a skater boy.

Adamski was meeting Fred Durst in the desert that day.

Oh my God, he comes from Planet Halfpipe.

Adamski said that Orthon communicated with him via telepathy and through hand signals, which seems way less advanced than telepathy. You feel like you've got one or the other, not both.

No, I think you get both because if you try and speak to me with telepathy, I'm going to freak out being like, what's his other voice? And maybe I'll like want to throw hands and then he'll have to put up his hands to be like, hey bro, don't hit me. I'm just talking into your head. You know what I mean? So I think that's also that's fucking language putting up like a please don't hit me two hands up.

Yeah, that's true. I guess if you communicate telepathically, you need to at least know the hand gesture pointing to your head and then pointing to their head.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, that's not that's me in there. I'm Professor Charles Xavier.

Yeah, Orthon warned Damski of the dangers of nuclear war, although he would unfortunately not allow himself to be photographed.

So can I get a can I get a snap? Can I get a shot?

No, literally, Adam Ski asked him if he could take a photo and he said no. And then there's this whole this is one of those like these whole podcasts. There's a whole other subplot where a dam ski gave Orthon a blank, not a blank piece of film like a blank photo plate.

Okay.

You know, like a big one and later received it back with like messages imprinted on it. And so there's all these other stories of a dam skin Orthon. But really, the reason I tell these three stories here is just to say, Alien Abductions, when they reared their head culturally, kind of came out of nowhere. It's not like the first people who ever met aliens were getting abducted. Most of them were meeting people or people like beings that were coming out of spaceships, often introducing themselves as being from Venus and also warning us of the dangers of nuclear war.

It also could be that Venetian or Venetian aliens just don't have interest in it. And maybe the abductors are a different fucking type of alien. All these stories are you being like, hey, can I take your picture? Can I come with you? Can we be friends? And all of these stories you've told so far have been like, you know what, I have plenty of fucking friends. It was nice to meet you.

Yeah.

I'm getting back in my ship. We kind of thought you guys would be cooler, honestly, and it seems like you're lame and dumb. So we're gonna go listen to alien fucking dance music up there that you guys will never know about.

Dude, the hose boys have a number one record on Venus.

Oh my god, did you imagine if the hose boys were they? Yeah, they were they're huge. The hose boys like we're huge on Venus or whatever those like I'm big in Europe type t-shirts are.

Yeah, the hose boys big on Venus.

But do you ever get that album live in downtown Venus?

I wouldn't get that album. But man, if I were a fan of this show, I would love that on a t-shirt.

Oh shit. Okay. Yeah, well, we'll work on it. More promises will be made.

Yeah. So I tell these stories just to show the primary mode of interaction with aliens culturally was these sort of contacts and meetings. Then, in 1957, we get what might be the first recorded alien abduction case in human history. This happened to a man named Antonio Villas-Boas, a 23-year-old Brazilian farmer. It happened in Brazil. On October 15th, 1957, he was up late at night plowing fields in what must have been the dark to avoid the scorching hot temperatures of the Brazilian day. And it was as he was plowing the fields that he looked up and he saw what he described as a red star in the night sky. So already, kind of spooky. According to his story, this star approached him in the field and grew larger until it became recognizable as a roughly circular or egg-shaped aerial craft with a red light at its front and a rotating dome on top. The craft began to descend and landed in the field where it extended three legs as it did so. Now, I'm immediately suspicious because I don't know what advanced alien craft needs a tripod landing gear. These things are crossing unimaginable gaps in space and time, but when they get close to the ground, all of a sudden someone has to turn a giant crank and extend a couple rickety legs.

I mean, the one in Flight of the Navigator doesn't need landing gear, but it's...

It's possible. I guess it's possible.

Maybe they don't want to scare anyone by being too advanced. Maybe they want to show up with some of these jalopies so that we don't completely freak out. Something a little more familiar to us.

But that's like saying if we ever visited the Andromeda galaxy that we would do it in a spaceship that looks like the lunar lander or something.

I mean, realistically it will, but yeah, I don't know, I guess it's weird, but it's not that weird. I mean, I didn't think of it. If anything, I thought about is that the way you described it is just so like the very traditional sci-fi UFO shape. Like almost like Tropy, how much that is what you described.

Yes. It's also very much Sputnik shaped, which had launched a month prior.

Bananas. No way. Sputnik's like a fucking circle with like antenna hanging off the back.

Yeah. That's his drawing kind of looks like that.

Oh, so the way you described it, I saw it as like a flying saucer, like a dome on top of another thing.

I think I can find one of the pictures. He drew pictures of it, I think.

Okay, but yeah, Sputnik would have launched 57.

Yeah, it was literally a month earlier. So you know, the Sputnik look also plays into that sci-fi three legged spherical kind of thing. Anyway, Boas freaks out and tries to make a run for it on his tractor, but its lights and engines die after just going a short distance. So he takes off on foot and is grabbed by a five foot tall humanoid wearing gray coveralls and a helmet. Its eyes were small and blue, which I was like, how, if it was wearing a helmet, how could you tell? But then I found a description of the helmets and it sounds like there was an opening around the eyes.

Okay.

So Boas could see that they were small and blue. And instead of speech, this humanoid made noises like barks or yelps. Three more beings then joined the first in subduing Boas and they dragged him towards the craft. Now, again, I'm not an expert in extraterrestrial intergalactic transportation design, but tell me if this sounds like something an alien spaceship would have. There was an open doorway towards the rear of the craft with the door laying outward horizontally like a castle drawbridge. There was a ladder hanging from the end of this drawbridge door, which appeared to be made of the same silvery metal as the craft's walls. The assailants forced Antonio onto the ladder and he realized it was somehow flexible and swung from side to side as he struggled.

So he had like a metal rope ladder hanging from the ass end of a ship.

Yeah, that feels more like fairy technology to me.

I don't know. I mean, I'm not going to look down my nose at a ship that made it across the cosmos, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It definitely feels a little fucking rickety, a little janky.

Yeah. But once inside, Boas said he was stripped of his clothes and covered head to toe with a strange gel that he said dried quickly and was not oily.

Fuck, I need that gel. Do you remember like the shit we used to put in our hairs in high school, like we're talking late nineties, early two thousands, we were still dealing with slippery gross gel that hardened all hard and shitty.

Yeah. Well, that covered his entire body and then he was led into a large semi-circular room through a doorway that had strange red symbols written all over it. Later, Boas would reproduce these symbols from memory. He said he'd memorize them. In this room, the beings took samples of Boas' blood from his chin. And after this, he was taken to a third room where he was left alone for what he guessed to be about a half an hour. During this time, some kind of gray smoke or gas was pumped into the room, which made Boas violently ill and he vomited in the corner of the room.

Oh boy.

And then... Ed, do you have some like a funky, groovy beat you could drop in here? Because things are about to get a little spicy.

Oh shit, I'll try and find something royalty free.

Boas claimed that he was joined in this room by another humanoid, but this one was female, very attractive and very naked.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, she was the same height as the other beings he'd encountered with a small pointed chin and large blue cat-like eyes. The hair on her head was long and white, but her underarm and pubic hair was bright red. So, somebody's taking some lengths to dye everything. The woman suddenly embraced Boas, rubbed her head against his face, and he said he became more roused than he'd ever been before.

Okay, this is a room that, I guess, fucking reeks like vomit, because he was just throwing up in this room and probably has vomit on his lips and stuff still.

Yeah. Well, it didn't stop the cat woman from rubbing her head against his face. Again, that was how she turned him on more hot than he'd ever been in his life, which I'm starting to wonder if maybe this guy just has a thing, like a weird fetish for chins that came out in a fantasy.

Yeah, because the blood was taken out of his chin.

The blood was taken from his chin. She has a small pointed chin. He says that he had sex with this woman and the female did not kiss him, but instead nipped him on the chin. So there might be some chin based psychology going on here.

Yeah, he's got a chin fetish and this other lady apparently has just no nose to smell through him. Reeks like fucking vomit.

Yeah, after they finished, the female smiled at Boas, rubbed her belly and gestured upwards. Boas took this to mean that she was going to raise their child in space. I kind of think it just means she was hungry after all that fucking. She was just like, I got to go.

Yeah, the cafeteria is upstairs. I'm going to leave you in this weird vomit gas chamber. For the next people that are coming to have sex with you, by the way. It's not the other way around.

No one else came by because Boas noted, he felt the female seemed relieved that their task was over.

Oh my God, I've seen that look before.

And Boas later said he felt angered by the situation because he felt as though he had been little more than a good stallion for the humanoids. So the humanoids gave Boas his clothing back. He got dressed and they took him on a tour of the rest of the ship. He did claim at one point he tried to take this weird kind of clock-like device off the side of a desk, I guess, as proof that this encounter was real. But he was caught by the humanoids and they took it away from him and they wouldn't allow him to take the clock device with him. He was then escorted off the ship, probably because they were like called the Bouncers.

He's trying to rob us now.

He's stealing our clocks. And he was escorted off the ship and he watched as it took off. It glowed the whole way into the night sky and when he returned home, he discovered that four hours had passed. In the aftermath of this, Boas developed strange wounds and bruises all over his body. Writer Terry Melanson states, among Boas' symptoms were pains throughout the body, nausea, headaches, loss of appetite, ceaselessly burning sensations in the eyes, cutaneous lesions at the slightest of light bruising, which went on appearing for months, looking like small reddish nodules, harder than the skin around them and protuberant, painful when touched, each with a small central orifice yielding a yellowish thin watery discharge. The skin surrounding the wounds presented a hyperchromatic violet tinged area.

This guy's taking the breakup pretty fucking hard.

Yeah, he was, he's going through it, man. So we'll get into this in a second. Doctors did eventually examine him, but not until a year later. And they felt that these wounds could be radiation poisoning, but it was too late to accurately test for it. Boas' story has been questioned over the years, but he's always stuck to it. He's never changed any details. And he tried to stay out of the spotlight until the 1970s when he did a go on TV to refute what he said were incorrect versions of his story that were starting to circulate.

Sure. People started being like, oh, you know, then he was approached by this ugly chinned woman. And he's like, well, I got to get on there and say that the chin was really something else. I actually haven't seen chins like that since that night. Like it was such a spectacular chin. They did stuff to my chin, too. We're not going to get into it. And everyone's like, OK, thanks for coming to the show. Please leave.

Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you for clearing that up. Also, I'm glad whatever the thing Chris just described also cleared up.

We didn't sleep together.

We just did chin stuff because of my religious upbringing.

Yeah. Yeah. So the other odd part of all of this is like the timeline of some UFO stuff is a little bit funky. Boas's story, even though this all happened in like 57, the story didn't really get popular until 1961 in the wake of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction. So there was this period of time where it had happened, but really wasn't something that anyone knew about. Nobody was asking questions about. When they did start asking questions, they discovered that the way that Antonio Villabalas' story had been discovered was that there was a Brazilian writer named Yao Martins who wrote the first installment of a magazine series titled Flying Saucer's Terrible Mission for the magazine O Crucero, which was sort of like a Brazilian version of Life magazine. And in this article published in November 1957, he describes cases of people in isolated places being attacked by aliens, including a case from Venezuela in 1954 about two boys who discovered a spaceship and small humanoids in the forest near their village. So anyway, Martins wrote this and he had asked readers to write him back with their own experiences. And among hundreds of responses he received, he developed a correspondence with one person, a young farmer, Antonio Villas-Boas. So this journalist is the one who discovered Boas' story because Boas was reading the articles that he'd been writing.

He saw the call to action.

Yeah, exactly. And they developed this correspondence. Martins comes to believe Antonio's story. And a year later, Martins flew Boas to Rio de Janeiro where he's examined by Dr. Olafo Fontes, who's the doctor who determined that the injuries that Boas suffered resembled those of radiation poisoning. But the extremely coincidental fact here is that upon questioning, Boas said he was abducted one day after reading Martins' original article.

Oh, what? So I read your article and then I took a melatonin and I went to bed and I had a crazy dream, potentially, you know, with all this information rattling around in my head.

Yes.

And, you know, I saw this would have been before Mac tonight. I don't know what the chin imagery would have been. I got him going. But so, yeah, so that kind of sours a little bit.

Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean he's making all this up. Memories can be fuzzy. And it's and I think it's forthcoming of Boas to admit to this coincidence. You know, if you say like, like if you say that, you got to know it sounds a little weird.

Yeah.

But he admitted it. And I agree with you. It's possible that the story scared him or otherwise, you know, worked its way deep into his brain and caused some sort of intense sleep paralysis.

But what caused the Chernobyl like effects all over his body?

Yeah, that that is that is one of the big unanswered questions of this story. But back to Boas and Martins, I also don't know how many details were similar between Boas' account that we just discussed and the writings that Martins published because I couldn't track down the original article that Martins had written. So I don't know if it was like the same story or it was just people saw aliens once. But I'm going to keep looking to see if I can find that article because I'd be very curious and I found some like PDF archives of the Cruiseros magazine, but I couldn't there were too many issues to go through and I couldn't track it down anyway. My point is, Martins was obviously intrigued by Boas' accounts, so it's safe to assume he wasn't just feeding him back the same story he'd reported or he would be like...

Yeah, I've read this before.

There's also the fact, complicating things, that according to some accounts, Boas and his brothers say they actually started seeing UFOs in the sky a few days or even weeks before the abduction occurred, which would have been days and weeks before he read the article. So I don't know at what point those details started coming out. You know, I'd be suspicious if that started coming out later.

Yeah. After people were like, well, that sounds a little coincidental. And then his brother's like, actually, we saw red stars fucking nightly for a while, for a while.

Yeah, exactly.

And then this, you know, Time magazine lands on my doorstep and I'm like, bro, does this seem like shit that we've been seeing?

Yeah.

Anyway, I'm going home. Hope you don't get fucked by an alien tonight.

You know, and then I also find it interesting how this was just a local story. We didn't find out about it until after the fact. So there's, there weren't people tracking it from the beginning. I'm curious how much, you know, in those couple of years, those four or five years between it happening and it getting attention, how much got fuzzy, how many memories changed, all that kind of stuff. And the last thing I want to mention is that I think there's a really interesting double standard at play with Boas and his claims. At first, a lot of the proponents of his story, people who believed him, emphasize that, look, this guy is a poor Brazilian farmer, like he's too provincial to make this story up, which is, I don't want to say racist, but it's certainly an assumption, you know, that like this guy's a backwards dummy. But then skeptics pointed out that, hey, wait a second, if Boas' family had a tractor at that time in Brazil, they're not backwards at all. This would have been a piece of farming equipment that was only available to a few very successful farming families. And wouldn't you know it, our guy, Antonio, turned out to be a really smart guy. Just a few years after his abduction, he became a lawyer. But then Boas' backers changed their tune from, well, he's too dumb to make this up, to, oh, he's actually too sophisticated to lie about such a thing. It would make him look bad.

Oh, jeez.

So what really happened to Boas? Was this whole experience a figment of his imagination that was inspired by a magazine article? Or did he really encounter something from another world that night? Is his baby up there somewhere in the stars? Or did his date just really want some pizza? And if this really did happen, why haven't more Alien Abduction stories featured a rope ladder? One final point in Boas' favor. He was able to tell his story without the help of hypnotic regression, which, as we know from our Satanic Panic episode, results in wild stories more often than not. Unfortunately, hypnotic regression is part of the most well-known abduction story of all time, the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. It's a mind-bending trip that would set the table for all Alien Abductions to come. And we're going to get into that next week, along with a look at some of the other most frightening and convincing abduction stories out there in Alien lore. Until then, I'm Chris Cullari, and I'm Ed Voccola, and us, or our changelings, will see you next week. Bye!

Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Good night.

We are in this together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===