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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.

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

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And you're listening to part 2 of our series on Alien Abductions. If you haven't listened to part 1 yet, what are you doing? We cover a whole bunch of great stuff in that episode from my own weird abduction dreams to fairies, changelings, and the history of supernatural abductions in folklore. And we wrap up with the first documented case of alien abduction in human history, a very sexy story out of Brazil. So make sure you go put that episode in your ears so that you can enjoy this week where we get into the case that made alien abductions a modern phenomenon, the Betty and Barney Hill abduction. Before this story broke in 1965, alien abductions were basically unheard of. In 1975, NBC aired a made-for-TV movie based on the Hill's story. And by 1977, in just those two years, from 1975 to 1977, alien abduction cases jumped 2,500%. Many of them mirrored the Hill's story. Others were much, much stranger. So rub your tummy and look to the stars. That's a joke for people who listen to part one. So go listen to part one, because we're going where no man, well, where lots of men and some women have gone before into a spaceship.

What are we? Scared. When are we?

Now it is time for.

Scared all the time.

All right, welcome back. Little housekeeping this time led by Ed. Ed's leading housekeeping today, how exciting.

Hey, look at that. Go Ed. I like this. This is nice.

It is nice. Couple things. You watched the eclipse this week. Did you get a chance to see? And it wasn't great in California, but did you get a chance to see anything?

No, I didn't because it wasn't going to be great. And so I was busy when it happened.

I always look and I still have some shitty, I don't know, glasses from 2017 or whatever. That one was, it was a partial one last year in October. So I have these glasses laying around, you know? But I went and looked, it's pretty cool. My brother took his family to Canada to watch like a better version. I guess like any place where it was gonna be really good, they were just gouging the shit out of prices to like for Airbnbs or for hotels and stuff. But then he was like, let me expand my search into Canada because I can still drive to Canada. And apparently it was drastically lower. Like they were not just fully capitalized out to the max up there. So he got a really super reasonable, like any other week's prices and he went and saw it and he had a great time.

That's amazing. Yeah, if I could step outside and see a full solar eclipse, I definitely would. I paid attention to see if I felt a vibe shift and I didn't feel a vibe shift. But then later in the day, the first AI music generator came out and the vibe definitely shifted.

Oh yeah, no, we'll get into that. Chris and I were driving recently and we're talking a bunch about the state of commerce and artificial intelligence and all these other kind of big ideas and the crap that we talk about when we're not on mic that we'll try next season to actually talk about on mic, especially as more and more crap comes out that is scary and bums us out and all that type of shit. Computers are messing up our day. That said, yeah, you're right. That's definitely a vibe shift. So you did discover a vibe shift.

I did. And I think the sun did it.

The sun, well, the moon did it, I guess.

The moon did it.

As it often does, all changes the moon brings, whether it's menstrual or werewolves. That's a big change maker. That's why we landed on its face. Showed it who's boss. That said, I was actually, I was watching the, in Mexico was like the first totality or whatever was happening in Mexico first. And I just was watching it, it was counting down and I was like, it'd be crazy if something happened. I like put a story up on our Instagram about it where I was like, they don't know the context to it, but in my brain I was like, are the dead gonna rise?

Yeah, is the ground gonna shake?

Are we gonna see this on TV? Like it would be, not here. I want it to happen like where it's going total darkness. It's like isolated incidents of insanity. And then when it went totally dark in the first spot, whatever news network we were watching, all of the cameras got really shitty. They got really shitty, like artifacting, like when your Skype goes crummy, you know, and you can only hearing every third word. I was like, do we need the sun for good internet? Like why the fuck does it suck all of a sudden? Like other channels figure it out, but it was really messed up. It happened like right when it went total.

That's spooky. I don't like that.

Yeah, it's nuts. All right, moving on. Next order of housekeeping business. How's your tooth?

Fuck man, better, better. The past couple of days, the pain has subsided. And then this morning I went in for a checkup to make sure it was healing. And it literally took like 30 seconds. The dentist just opened my mouth and he poked at the hole. And he was like, excellent, great. All right, see you in three months. So three months I get an implant. And three months after that, when the implant like takes hold or something, then they give me my new tooth, which all sounds very expensive. And no one's given me kind of fucked this dentist. When I asked him how much this is all gonna cost the day that they did it, he was like, I don't know, the desk will help you figure that out. And I was like, well, just cause you know, rent's coming up soon. Like I think it was actually the day that I was in there, April 1st. Rent was gonna come out of my bank account.

Came out of your mouth, bro.

I was like, you know, I was like, it's just cause rent's coming out. So like, if this is gonna be a lot, I might have to do a payment plan cause I can't just give you a bunch of money today. And he was like, okay, I'll get somebody. He seemed annoyed about it. And so they haven't even discussed how much this implant's gonna cost. I suspect more than I wanted to. So maybe I'll just get a fucking, one of those George Washington style, put some wood in there or something. It's in the back, so no one can see it anyway.

Like a donkey tooth or something.

Bro, get me a donkey tooth.

Look down when you're walking. I'm sure somebody dropped a tooth in this shitty city. All the meth heads out there. There's a couple of teeth laying around. Dude, just pick one up and ask if they can pop it in.

I saw something on the paranormal subreddit. I didn't follow the thread, so I don't know where this ended up, but someone posted that they had just had two siblings and a step sibling all died within a few days of each other, and then they woke up and they found a molar laying on their bed. And it didn't belong to her and it didn't belong to her husband. They didn't know where the molar came from. So maybe I should ask her if she can send me her haunted molar and I can pop that sucker in.

Yeah, you kicking that to the curb? You getting rid of that molar? Send it over.

One of her siblings will probably have been a serial killer or something. And I'm gonna wake up in the middle of the night, my molar will be throbbing and I'm thinking about slitting people's throats.

I mean, that's the problem with-

Dude, we just came up with a movie, Dead Tooth.

Oh, Dead Tooth.

And a guy gets a tooth replacement from, you know, a serial killer and slowly turns into the serial killer.

It's not the most original idea, but it's a great title. So I think we should run with it. We should run with it. Scared All The Time presents Dead Tooth.

I feel like if there's one thing we've learned in this industry, the original ideas don't necessarily make it the furthest.

No, the original ideas in this industry, it's that's a tooth that doesn't take in month three. That they're like, oh, this isn't gonna take hold. Just bring a tooth in that's more like die hard on a plane or whatever.

Yeah, well, it's basically, what was that movie? Body Parts with Jeff Fahey, I think. And he gets like a, is it a heart, a killer's heart? And then he goes like cutting off other people's arms or something.

I don't remember the whole thing. What was the movie you're talking about? There was a lot of schlock that ran with that. It was like, got a hair transplant. Now I'm a killer. Got a fucking new leg. Now I'm a killer. I got a whatever. Scud the Disposable Assassin does that stuff.

Dude, the hair one would be called Split Ends.

Split Ends, dude.

Split Ends, dead tooth.

The listeners at home know we can't afford to make any of these. We're already talking about like, maybe I should just let our teeth rot. Like we can't afford to fucking fix them. So I don't think we're gonna be able to get the studio, Scared All The Time studio off the ground anytime soon.

No, but when we do.

Good to hear your mouth is well on its way to being filled with teeth.

Thank you, thank you. What else we got?

I guess we should check in on our body stuff. Like how are you doing in the square department?

I don't wanna spoil things for the audience cause I'm sure we're gonna jump into this with you in a second, but my squareness is I have not lost as much weight as you've been able to. I have not been focused on diet very well, but I have been working out every day or almost every day in boxing VR. So my heart strength is great. I feel good every day.

Imagine how strong it would be if they put the heart of a killer in you.

I know, I know. And for the first time in a long time, I can tell I'm getting actually like real abs, but they're just currently still under some belly fat, but I can tell that they're like actually forming.

I don't even touch that part of my body. I don't want anything happening where I can't see it.

True, but how's your, you've been getting very square.

Yeah, no, it's going great. I'm batting over 500. I think I did like 17 or 18 days last month, according to my like gym check-ins on the app, but I do go to the gym and yeah, and I take my diet really seriously the last couple months and yeah, I'm down like 13 pounds, 14 pounds.

Hey, soundboard.

Congratulations. Yeah, it's been great. I feel great going up and down stairs and I'm not out of breath. I love it.

Awesome, man.

So yeah, getting square rules. Hopefully everyone else is out there a little inspired to do a little exercise. I hated exercise and now I'm kind of into it.

Yeah, same, same. It's good for you.

And I bring my Scared All The Time towel with me, my Don't Fear the Square towel and no one ever comments on it, but one day they might.

Hey, we're getting that merch going. It's starting up the merch machine.

Well, I guess the next part we could talk about in this nice long Ed Ran housekeeping is big announcements the next couple weeks. Real big announcements.

You guys don't even know.

You guys don't even know because we're not announcing full things yet, but we have a very cool season finale set up. A crossover with a podcast that we're into and we're sure you either already know or you will become a fan probably after because they're really, really rad and we won't say anything yet. But next week, if you're listening to this, on a weekly schedule, we'll announce who it is with some fun art. But yeah, we're really excited for our season finale. It's gonna be a blast. And then for next week, you don't have to wait, guys. Next week, believe it or not, we're doing our first, maybe last, who fucking knows, we're doing our first part three. We're having some fun with aliens. So hopefully you are too because we're doing at least one more, definitely only one more installment. So just know the alien stuff's gonna be around for at least one more week and then back to other shit. So yeah, pretty excited. We have a really great show. And I know from what we've heard online, people are really liking Alien Part 1, which is why when we were doing Alien Part 2, we were like, hey, people are into it. We're having a fun time. So let's maybe do three. And so we're doing three. And yeah, without any further ado, let's get into Alien Abductions Part 2.

So I know that Betty and Barney Hill Abduction is one of the gold standard stories of UFO-ology up there with Roswell, Rendles from Forrest, and now the Go Fast videos that came out a few years back. But I think it's worth revisiting for those who haven't heard of it. Ed, have you? Are you familiar with Betty and Barney Hill?

I know the name. I feel like I recognize that they exist. I think I've been listening to stuff in this space long enough, but I honestly don't know any of the details of it.

Yeah, I think a lot of people who read a lot about UFOs and alien abductions are probably in the same boat because this case really set the template, set the standard for what an alien abduction is, but the details of it are really fascinating. And I think kind of steeped in American history and a very interesting relationship between the Hills as a couple. So there's a lot of details to get into. But yeah, it set the template for every alien abduction to follow. And we will try to use some of the recordings from the actual psychiatrist's tapes who treated them, because those recordings are publicly available. Some of the tape is hard to hear. So some of it we'll probably be putting into the episode and some of it Ed and I might just act out and read. But we'll get there when we get there. Let's start with the basics. Who were the Hills and what happened to them?

And do they have eyes?

These Hills do have eyes and they're not nuclear mutants though.

Sure.

They're very normal people. By all accounts, the Hills were an exemplary couple. Barney was a postman and Betty was a social worker who was active in their New England community and in the civil rights movement. Quoting here from an article on history.com, Barney worked a grueling night shift at the post office, driving 60 miles each way to his job. And Betty's job handling state child welfare cases was no easier, no shit. That sounds like probably one of the most stressful and depressing and very occasionally rewarding jobs you could have, but poof. The little free time they had was devoted to their church and activities related to the civil rights movement. And it's important slash relevant to note here that the Hills were a mixed race couple. Barney was black, Betty was white. And even in liberal northeastern circles, they lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is not too far from Boston, which at the time was like one of the most racist cities in the world. So this was still pretty uncommon. And there's a really interesting book by Matthew Bowman called The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America, that examines the case through this lens. Bowman's book doesn't give credence to the idea that Betty and Barney Hill were abducted by aliens, which is why we aren't really gonna discuss it on this show, but it does offer a cultural reading of the entire experience. As a review on Slate so eloquently puts it, the Hills moved through various disciplines of authority, the military, the church, psychiatric professionals, always with the goal of fighting an established credible person who would not only take them seriously, but also give shape and meaning to what they had experienced. Their failure to find validation in these traditional institutions offers in Microcosm, a story of the failure of a specific narrative of American progress and success. So if you find this topic interesting, please do check out the book. We'll put an Amazon link in the show notes.

But it's not an affiliate link or anything, so you could just as easily go to the library. Like it does nothing for us.

Or that, sure, sure. It's easy to find, anywhere you want. In any case, Betty and Barney had been married about 16 months at this point, and they were so stressed at their jobs and so busy that they hadn't had a honeymoon yet. So they took a last minute trip up to Montreal and Niagara Falls as sort of a delayed honeymoon. It was a really impulsive last minute decision. They saw they had some time and kind of got wrapped up in it and decided to take this trip, but they didn't have time to go to the bank before it closed for the weekend. So they got in their car with less than $70 in their pockets. It was a kind of a rush, stressful, not really a great honeymoon trip. And on the last night of their three-day trip on the way back home, they stopped in a Vermont diner to recharge before driving back, which, God, to stop in a Vermont diner in 1961 in the fall, that's gotta just be, I wish I could go there. Just sounds so pleasant.

It does sound pleasant, but it could be less pleasant, I guess, if you're a mixed-race couple in 1961.

Well, they figured that if they pushed through the night, they could beat the wind and rains from an approaching hurricane and left the diner around 10 p.m. estimating that they could reach their house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire between 2 and 3 a.m. at the latest. Now from Wikipedia. Around 10.30 at night, Betty saw what she first thought was a falling star in the distance, except it appeared to be falling up. Because it moved erratically and grew bigger and brighter, Betty urged Barney to stop the car for a closer look as well as to walk their dog, Delcie. Barney stopped at a scenic picnic area just south of Twin Mountain. Now, Ed, have you ever been up this way? I know you're a Northeastern guy from Connecticut. Have you ever been up in this area?

Oh yeah, no, we'd go skiing with my brothers in Vermont every winter, which I don't consider those vacations as it was like a four hour drive.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, I was up in Vermont pretty regularly. New Hampshire less so. I think New Hampshire, we would just drive over the border to buy state alcohol. You know, not my family. I'm saying like in college.

As a family trip, you and your mom, your dad, your brothers get in the car, go get a couple of cheap handles of vodka.

Yeah, just, well, we can get, we're a Dubra family. So it was already $6. No, this was like in college. You know, we'd go, you know, whoever had a car would go over into New Hampshire and we'd get a bunch of booze for parties and stuff and not pay taxes.

Yeah.

But no, I spent a lot more time in Vermont. I love it. That's where I got my caricature done by the Allagash people.

Yeah, it's beautiful. I only bring it up just to say some of these areas up there. I don't know exactly where Twin Mountain is, but some of this is isolated. Like depending on where they stopped, it is a dark and spooky road that you don't really want to be stopped for too long on. So through binoculars at this picnic area, Betty observed an odd shaped craft flashing multicolored lights travel across the face of the moon. Because her sister had once claimed to have seen a flying saucer, Betty thought that might be what she was seeing too. Barney disagreed. When he looked through the binoculars, he saw what looked to him like a commercial airliner traveling toward Vermont on its way to Montreal. Except as soon as he came to that conclusion, the craft rapidly descended towards them without looking like it had turned. Barney would later say, This object that was a plane was not a plane. Which is such a spooky line.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

So the Hills get back in the car and continue down the highway watching this thing in the sky. It seems like it was kind of following them. And then suddenly the UFO lowered itself in front of their car and hovered silently as though it was waiting for them. So Barney stopped in the middle of the road, gets out with the binoculars again and a gun. He did bring a gun with him on this trip.

Hell yeah, dude. New Hampshire, live free or die.

Yeah, dude, he was living free. He was ready to go if these aliens were trouble. Unfortunately, they were too far away. I guess to shoot. I shouldn't say unfortunately. What am I talking about? Why would you want to shoot an alien?

This gotta be a reason. Listen, it's stand your ground laws.

Yeah, if an alien comes to your door and you blow him away, not on you.

It's not on you.

It's not on you. There's actually, if you haven't seen, what was that movie that was on Hulu last year?

Galookago on Hulu?

No, not Galookago on Hulu. It's like a home invasion movie with aliens. It's pretty good.

Yeah, don't look up or no one's going to save you or.

No one's gonna save you.

Close enough. The movie they were thinking of is 2023's No One Will Save You.

That was basically Stand Your Ground, the alien version, though. That was a Stand Your Ground movie.

Okay.

In any case, Barney looked through the binoculars and this time the craft was close enough that he saw about 10 aliens, although the number has fluctuated.

Are they riding outside like tailspin?

Yeah, they're ghost riding the whip down from Venus.

Yeah, sounds like it.

No, he described the ship as basically like a pancake. Floating in the road with this big row of glass or maybe not glass, but big row of windows in the front.

Okay, so it's like Tony Stark's house from like Iron Man 1 where it's like that floor to ceiling windows in a circle.

Sure.

It doesn't matter, it's helping me.

I was gonna say sort of like LaForge's glasses or whatever those are in Star Trek.

Oh yeah, totally, yeah.

Like that.

Okay, so we both have for our own personal visual cues.

We both have horrifically nerdy references for this.

Yeah, sure.

So he saw about 10 aliens through this window with huge eyes and grayish skin staring back at him. They wore shiny black or dark blue uniforms with matching caps and Barney would later tell investigators that they were somehow not human, which the huge eyes and gray skin would tip me off as well.

Yeah, but it sounds like they're also dressed like postmen like him, so maybe he's a little confused, you know, about like, oh, well, I mean, they're different looking dudes, but.

I didn't pull this exact quote later, but on the tape, which again, we're gonna try to use some clips. I really encourage anyone who's interested in this to listen to the full Barney and Betty tapes that are available. I don't think all of the tapes they made are actually online, but the ones that are online, you should listen to the whole thing because they are super compelling, but you really get a sense for how vague and dreamlike a lot of these experiences really are. And at one point, Barney describes them as looking like Nazis in these uniforms.

Sure.

It only comes up once, but it's this sort of, it's black or maybe it's blue and they have these hats. One guy he says is wearing a scarf, which is an odd detail for an alien.

Well, that alien rode in the Red Baron's plane right beside the UFO. That's why he had that sick scarf, dude.

It is September in Vermont, so throw a little scarf, cute hat, whatever.

I do love once, so it's 12 aliens, and I just love that that one alien's getting shit the whole time from the, like, oh, fucking scarf, really? Like, it's fucking cold out there, dude. You refuse to turn up the heat because of, I don't know, whatever, and now I have to wear a scarf and they treat me like shit.

I feel like if they're going to pluck up pumins for experimentation, that would be like wearing your nicest clothes to go pond fishing or something.

I don't know.

Your friends would be like, what are you wearing a fucking scarf for? You gotta get waders on.

No, I think it's a cold thing. I think he's just one of the aliens is frail.

So you don't think he's just stylish?

Well, I've never worn a scarf for style. So my brain immediately went to like, okay, it's for warmth.

To me, a scarf is like a beret. If you're wearing it, it's for style. I mean, I guess you could wear a scarf for the cold.

What do you wear when it snows?

I've never, well, I shouldn't say I've never worn a scarf, but I've almost never worn a scarf.

That's crazy.

You can ask anyone who knows me.

That's why you're sick all the time. I wear scarves, I wear hats.

I'm not sick all the time.

I'm starting that rumor.

I'm never sick.

I'm starting it and people already believe it.

It'll be our spinoff show, Sick All The Time. Violently ill all the time.

I don't think I can sit through stories of just gross sickness, but yeah, I very utilitarianly thought the scarf was for warmth.

All right, well, whatever the scarf was for, Barney was afraid of it and the people in the ship or the somehow not human beings in the ship. He felt as if they were communicating with him telepathically and he shouted, we need to get out of here. He ran back to the car and told Betty, they're going to capture us. He hit the gas, they took off down the road, but as soon as they did, the hills heard beeping sounds coming from the trunk of their car and they said they both felt a tingling sensation. They recalled making a sharp turn, running into some kind of roadblock and seeing what they described as either like a fiery orb or one of them said it was like the moon sitting in the middle of the road.

Oh, wow.

And then next thing they knew, they're at home, it's 5 a.m. pulling into the driveway and they don't know where the last two hours went.

Whoa, it's like a giant neuralyzer in the street.

Yeah, kind of, but again, the vagueness is, this is why, again, I encourage people to listen to the whole thing. The vagueness is coming from them. It is a fuzzy memory and a fuzzy experience, so a lot of this is kind of left up to interpretation. But what's not up for debate is that Barney's shoes were scuffed up, Betty's dress was ripped and dusted with an unidentified powder, while Barney had an odd feeling that someone had collected his semen. Which, listen.

I don't know what sense that is. That's a sixth, seventh sense, eighth sense?

If you come home covered in an unidentified powder feeling like someone has collected your semen, you either got abducted by aliens or you went to Studio 54.

That's gotta be the only two, according to you.

Either way, you end up, I think, probably with the same feeling. But the weirdness didn't stop there. The car's trunk, where they heard the weird beeping sounds coming from, now bore strange shiny circles that hadn't been there earlier. And when they held a magnetic compass near the spots, the needle on the compass spun wildly. Each of their watches had stopped and the binocular strap was broken. So the following day, the Hills called the nearby US Air Force Base in Portsmouth to report the incident. I dug up the actual report on the internet and it's not really worth reading here because there aren't really any details in it. The investigators were unimpressed with Betty and Barney's sighting because they didn't have any technical or scientific training to say what it is they were looking at. And the investigator concluded that the couple mistook the planet Jupiter for a UFO and filed the report with Project Blue Book.

You know, Jupiter, the most pancake of all the planets.

Yeah, at this point, Barney wanted to drop it, but Betty felt they weren't being taken seriously. So according to an article on Mental Floss, Betty went to the local library and checked out a book about flying saucers by Donald Kehoe, a retired Marine Corps aviator and the co-founder of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon, which was the leading civilian UFO research group. The Hills read the book and reached out to Kehoe, who responded enthusiastically and invited them to tell their whole story. Another NICAP member, an astronomer named Walter Webb, spoke with the Hills for six hours straight. So they finally find somebody who seems like taking them seriously. I started to get a little suspicious because they're pretty quickly involving UFO believers in this story.

Yeah, it's advantageous for them to have this be a UFO and not a fucking magnified picture of Jupiter.

Yeah, and when I say suspicious, I don't mean suspicious on behalf of the Hills. I just mean suspicious in terms of how this would color the story that they're telling over and over again. So anyway, they sit with Walter Webb for six hours and Donald Kehoe, and at this point, Betty starts having very frightening nightmares about being abducted and experimented on this alien ship. And for the next year or so, the Hills make trips back up Route 3, looking for the site of their encounter and any clues that might help explain what happened to them. In addition to Betty's nightmares, Barney develops a really painful ulcer and weirdly, a ring of warts around his genitals that needed to be surgically removed.

Oh no, he's got a lot of, seems like someone definitely was in and around his dick, I guess, cause he's like, I'm missing semen, I'm covered in fucking ringworms and everything else. It's like, what's that, what movie is that where they go through the fucking bog and they're all covered in leeches? It's like, no one else, just me, really?

The Great Panda Adventure?

No, fuck, but it feels very much like that where it's like, oh, I got ringworms, I got this, my fucking semen's taken. And Betty's like, oh, I'm good, I felt fine. I didn't have anything. And it was like, why just me? It's The Life Aquatic. That's the movie I was thinking of, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

By December of 1963, so a little more than two years after their initial encounter, the Hills end up in the office of psychiatrist Benjamin Simon for help treating Betty's nightmares, apprehension, persistent anxiety, and Barney's anxiety and insomnia, ulcers and high blood pressure. So just to recap real quick for the listeners, this is a little more than two years after their initial encounter. And the only people they've spoken with are Kehoe and the Air Force, but they haven't gone public. They've been spending two years trying to figure this out. And now Benjamin Simon wants to help them out. They turned to Dr. Simon because, here we go, he was an expert in, Ed, do you wanna guess?

I never remember the term transgressive meditation, translucent meditation.

Well, I think you're thinking of hypnotic regression.

I'm thinking of hypnotic regression. Is that not what this is?

That is what this is. Although they called it therapeutic hypnosis at the time.

Is he Canadian?

No, he's American.

Ooh.

A homegrown.

I don't know if it was like, oh, on our 14 second honeymoon in Montreal, we met a, they got another therapist up there practicing in hypnotic transgression or whatever, hypnotic, smooth talking.

Regression, yeah. Well, Dr. Simon had used therapeutic hypnosis, again, as they called it, extensively during World War II to treat military psychiatric disorders when he was chief of neuropsychiatry at Mason General Hospital on Long Island.

Yeah, when he was chief fucking scientist on the Montauk projects in fucking Long Island.

Yeah, I was gonna say, this sounds like a guy who definitely killed people in unlicensed experiments in the basement of some hospital somewhere.

A hundred percent. Like somebody where you're like, you have what in jars? And it was like, doesn't matter now, but I have, you name it, I have it in a jar.

Homunculus, he's got homunculus in jars down there.

He knows where the homunculus is buried in that place. Where that homunculus graveyard is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Hills believed that the root of all their problems was the night they couldn't remember and they hoped Dr. Simon could help them dredge up whatever was down there in the dark. Now, like I said, Dr. Simon recorded these sessions and some of them are available on YouTube. So we're gonna drop some audio in so you can hear the story from Betty and Barney themselves. But before we do, I wanna introduce a new mantra to the show. Ed, tell me what you think of this. Maybe we might have to workshop this, but could we come back to the phrase undergoing hypnosis means fiction osmosis? Is there anything there?

I mean, I know osmosis is, I know what osmosis means. If I'm forced to describe it, I don't, but I do know it. So osmosis would be like, I can give you something through, I've seen Osmosis Jones, is what I'm saying.

The classic film Osmosis Jones. I actually saw that in theaters.

Who didn't? Who didn't, dude? Frasier's brothers in it.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, dude, David Hyde Pierce, I think, is the voice of Osmosis Jones, either friend or enemy. I can't recall at this moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anywho.

This phrase to me.

It's clever, did you come up with it?

Yeah.

That's pretty good.

I bring it up, I introduce it. To remind people that the second you go under hypnosis, you open yourself up to incorporating details that are suggested to you by your environment, the hypnosis practitioner or the hypnotist, and anything else that might be kicking around in your head. And again, that's not to say the Hills are lying about their experience, but it's really, really hard to say for sure what's actually a memory in this case and what is something else. One thing that immediately leaps out in published transcriptions of the sessions is that Barney is extremely paranoid about how he is perceived as a black man in Canada.

How he was perceived when on the trip by Canadians he met.

Yes, by the world in general. He was anxious and stressed and paranoid.

Well, he does bring a fucking gun to Canada.

Yeah, he had it with him because he wanted to have one on their trip.

Okay, so he really did, was like, I'm going into Canada, fucking locked and loaded.

Yeah, well, this exchange that he has with Dr. Simon, Barney says, we arrived at night at this motel and I did not notice any name on the motel. The thoughts that were going through my mind were, would they accept me? Because they might say they were filled up. And I wondered if they were going to do this because I was prejudiced. The doctor says, because you were prejudiced? Barney says, because they were prejudiced. Doctor, because you were a Negro? Barney, because I am a Negro. So these concerns about race plague his entire recollection all the way up to his encounter with the spaceship. And even then, he mentions that one of the aliens reminds him of a redheaded Irishman. And when the doctor presses him to explain this, Barney says, I think I know why, because Irish are usually hostile to Negroes.

Oh shit, and always wearing scarves.

Yes, well, this is also the segment in the regression where he describes the Nazi like character as well. So he's seeing a redheaded Irishman, he's seeing a Nazi. And Barney did have experience in World War II, and not just experience, he actually was wearing dentures at this point in his life because he got concussed by a grenade blast and it had knocked his teeth out in World War II. So he had trauma from war, he had trauma from-

Turning back to a country that didn't appreciate his service.

Yeah, so there's a lot going on.

Bringing a gun to a country where you're just like, I don't even know what I'm gonna encounter. Because if it's anything like the last fucking years of my life, I might want to be strapped. And that's unfortunate that all that has to go into these sessions with him.

Yeah, well, and it's in these sessions, in these hypnosis sessions, Barney recalls driving the car away from the UFO, but afterward feeling irresistibly compelled to pull off the road and drive into the woods, where he eventually sees six men standing on a dirt road. The car stalls out, he can't turn it back on or turn it over, it just dies. And three of the men approach the car. He said the being stared in his eyes with a terrifying mesmerizing effect. And under hypnosis, Barney says, oh, those eyes, they're there in my brain. He talks a lot about eyes, actually. There's a couple different quotes where he's referencing the feeling of these eyes pushing into his eyes and sort of the sensation of these men are reaching into his mind to control him somehow.

Literally a piercing stare.

Yes, yes. This next part, we'll play in full. It's about three minutes of audio because it's the only description we have from Barney's perspective of what happened inside the ship. So without further ado, this is Barney Hill's recollection of what happened inside the ship.

What makes you think of an operation? I was thinking about this when you were there on the road. I was thinking about this, and I was lying on my stomach. Where were you lying on your stomach? I thought I was inside something, but I did not dare open my eyes. I had been told to keep my eyes closed. Who told you that? That I saw through the binoculars. Was this one of the men in the road? Who were these men in the road, or what part did they play with? They took me and carried me up this ramp. Did you feel you were going to be operating on? Did you feel you were going to be attacked in any way? No, I was playing on the table, and my fly was open. And I thought, are they putting a cup around my private parts? I thought, how funny, if I keep real quiet and real still.

So Barney's next memory, basically, he remembers a little bit of being released from the ship and sort of making his way back to the car, but his next memory is basically being back in the car and watching Betty walking back towards him. So let's go to Barney for that.

And I am thinking it isn't too bad. How funny.

But not all is so level-headed in Barney's recollections. At times, Barney gets extremely emotional when recounting his experience under hypnosis. For instance, this section, when he describes the UFO getting close to them, it's a little fuzzy at the beginning here, but he starts by saying he wants to wake up.

You're in a deep sleep. You're comfortable, relaxed. Is it not going to tell you? It's right over my right. And I try to maintain control, so Betty can not tell I am scared. God, I'm scared. I gotta get my gun. All right. All right, that's all right. Go this way, deep breath. You've forgotten.

Part of the reason I think it's really interesting to hear this in their own words under hypnosis is because at least for me, when I hear the stories of people's abductions or seeing a ghost or satanic panic or anything like that, I think when you just read it, it's one experience, and when you hear it, it's another experience because you both hear the emotion that's often missing from the text, but you also hear the dreamlike vagueness of a lot of it that doesn't always come through in the text, or even things that seem like might be stated as fact in the text of someone's interview or regression. When you hear them say it, it sounds not necessarily like a fact, and then those pieces of interview get baked into articles and books on the subject and then become part of the story and they become repeated. But then when you go back and listen to it, you're like, oh, this isn't necessarily, it's extremely compelling, but it's not necessarily as cut and dry as I thought it was. So I think it's really interesting to hear it as it was when it came out. So anyway, that whole section is pretty disturbing, hearing him scream like that. And something that really sticks with me is that Dr. Simon took the completely reasonable step of making sure that Betty and Barney went through this hypnosis separately so he could compare notes on who said what and what lined up and what didn't. But they did always come together. So Betty was always sitting in the waiting room just hearing her husband scream like this. And she was pretty torn up by the whole thing. But interestingly, Betty's recollections of all this, of the experience, were much more detailed. In fact, most of what we know about what happened on the ship comes from her perspective, not Barney's. One of the first things that jumps out from her hypnosis sessions is the description of how she was taken from the car and what she was told by the beings who did so.

She says, He says, don't be afraid. We're not going to harm you, but we just wanna do some tests. When the tests are over, we'll take you and Barney back and put you in your car and you'll be on your way back home in no time.

Once she's on the ship, Betty and Barney are separated into different rooms and a doctor, as she calls him, comes in to examine Betty. She lays down on an examination table and the doctor brings over, well, let's just hear it from Betty.

I lie down on the table, on my back, and he brings over this. Oh, how can I describe it? They're like needles. There's a whole cluster of needles. And each needle has a wire running from it. And then they roll me over on my back.

And the examiner has a long needle in his hand. And I see the needle, and it's bigger than any needle I've ever seen. And I ask him what he's going to do with it. And he said, just a simple step to hold her leg. And I ask him what. And he said he just wants to put it in my nail. It's just a simple test. I don't know, it won't hurt. And he said, no, it won't hurt. And he sticks the needle into my nail. And I'm crying and I tell him, it's hurting, it's hurting, it's hurting, it's hurting. And then the leader, he goes over and he puts his hand, runs his hand in front of my eyes. And he says, I'll be all right, I won't feel it.

If you couldn't make it out, because this is one of the slightly fuzzier clips, but Betty says the doctor inserted the largest needle she's ever seen into her navel. She asked one of the beings who she called the leader why they did that to her, and she was told it was a pregnancy test. So this is the first appearance in UFO lore outside of the Boas case, but this is from the female perspective, because Boas had sex with a woman, a female alien, and it seemed like they were interested in taking his baby to space. And for some reason, these aliens seem interested in seeing if Betty is pregnant. She's not. They tell her she's not.

I don't know what year we started peeing on sticks, but it seems way easier than whatever the fuck this is.

Right? So, like, yeah, one of the curious things here is aliens seem to be way behind on pregnancy test technology.

I mean, honestly, if they put all that money and focus into space travel, then I get it.

Betty also, and this is another really fascinating element of this case, I think, she also recalled being shown a star map from the perspective of the alien's home planet. And she would later draw that map one of the enduring mysteries of this case is that she drew it, everybody said, that's interesting. But it wasn't until years later that a school teacher recognized the layout of the stars on the map and realized that it matched the sky map of the stars in the vicinity of Zeta Reticuli, which hadn't been discovered at the time of the hill's abduction. So Betty somehow drew a star map of stars that do exist that we didn't know existed in that order, in the way you would see it from that place.

So it would be no different than us drawing a map of like if we drew a map of our night sky and we gave it to some dude in fucking Alpha Zebulon or the hell you just said. And they're like, oh, you must have drawn this from Earth because this is the star chart. If you were standing on Earth. And so you're saying that all these years later, when they've now seen this sky for real with a telescope or whatever, he's saying she drew a real thing. Like this isn't fake.

Yes. Yeah.

Like whatever the fuck she drew, they couldn't have known then. Back then, they were like, this is gibberish. But it wasn't gibberish. It was the machine from contact.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's images online of her drawing against the map. And it's really convincing. Now that said, the evidence hasn't really held up. Carl Sagan himself pointed out that you could line up the stars Betty drew with lots of different points in the sky and kind of go, oh yeah, that sort of lines up.

Everyone was like, shut up, nerd.

And as more accurate models of the sky have been developed, her drawing has become less accurate. So the more definition we get of that section of the sky, the less her drawing seems to resemble it.

I don't know. As soon as we're done with this recording and someone asks me fucking in an hour what color was Chris's shirt, I'm gonna get it wrong. So I mean, the fact that she got even close, you know, like that she remembered it at all.

It's an eerie coincidence. It's really eerie. I will also say though, the way that she describes the star map being shown to her is so prosaic. She says that he pulls the map down on the wall, which I take to mean like in a school room, you know, you'd like pull a...

Yeah, you'd pull an old map down, yeah.

Yeah, so it's like, what?

I mean, these people, they're years behind on...

Map technology and pregnancy tests.

Yeah, on pregnancy tests, on map presentation options. Like, I hope they had that big wooden stick that our teachers used to have that they would like slap at that fucking map. And I'm like, this map's supposed to be made from pretty interesting material, probably found at the Roswell crash, is what they made these maps out of. Because people were always slapping them with those wooden sticks.

Yeah, that's the leap in technology that cannot be explained.

We got tinfoil and strong classroom maps.

She also, while Betty was on the ship, after she's left alone with... I forget if it was the character she called the doctor or the leader, but after she was left alone with one of them, she says to them, I'd really like to take a souvenir with me because no one's going to believe this.

Uh-oh, her and the Brazilian trying to steal clocks.

Yeah, well, the being that she spoke with said, all right, well, there's lots of stuff in this room, so if you see anything that you think you'd like, you could take it with you. And she pulls a book off the shelf and he laughs at her and says, you don't think you can read that. And she says, no, I just want something so that I can prove that this happened. And then before she leaves, it's taken away from her and they decide she can't have it. But she did have the thought that she should try to take something with her.

Yeah, and something that would reveal another language or would reveal, again, books? You came across the fucking solar system. Like, would you take the first spaceship your planet built? Are you in the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ship? Like, what the hell?

Yeah, she's like, why do you have Moby Dick?

Yeah, why do you have the Joys of Cooking, Volume 1?

So anyway, after months, I think it's about five months of weekly sessions, Dr. Simon comes to a conclusion. And Ed, you're not gonna believe this.

Satanist did this.

Dr. Simon came to the conclusion that Betty's experiences were just memories of her nightmares and that Barney's recollections were fantasies influenced by Betty's nightmares.

What? Hold on.

Points to Dr. Simon.

I mean, I thought you were gonna say that her shit was made up. I thought it was gonna get like misogynistic fast.

No.

I thought it was gonna be like, well, the lady just thought it all up and the guy, but no, I mean, at least he says you're both idiots and you're an echo chamber to yourselves.

Yes, but also what I was gonna say is points to Dr. Simon for being the only hypnotherapist we've discussed on this show who isn't immediately writing this down and trying to sell a book.

Oh, true.

Being like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's think more about the aliens. What else do you remember? Did they have laser guns? Are they coming back?

And the leader. Was it the leader or the doctor who cut off all of your friend's limbs and made you drink their blood? Because I'm looking at a best seller on our hands if we can somehow get the devil in this.

Yeah, please, please. Anyway, so now so they've gone to the Air Force and now they've gone to a psychiatrist who have all kind of poo-pooed them. And the doubt seems to lead the Hills to kind of double down on their experience and their desire to prove that it happened. So they start to share their story with others. First, just a small church group. And then they give a talk to a UFO group based out of Quincy, Massachusetts.

I do think it's tough if they have to deal with so many institutions, like true institutions. A medical institution has rigorous thought process on what is and isn't, you know, whatever. Religious institutions have rigorous thought process on what is and isn't whatever. The military has rigorous, you know, it's weird. Like they have to go to these like three hierarchical, you know what I mean? It's like you're going to some staunch people to say some out there ideas and some out there shit. But I guess when you go to anyone who isn't that, you go to the UFO group, they're just like fucking jerking themselves off with excitement. So yeah, it's tough to find a non partial person to speak to about it.

Yeah, you get the sense that they were really trying to do this by the book. You know, they were trying to do this by the book to get an explanation and they just weren't. It's sort of like when somebody, you know, has an illness that doctors can't quite put their finger on and then they go to a new age person who's like, yeah, you know, you have some psychosomatic disease that may or may not exist or, you know, like you have more Jelen's disease. And it's like, no, they probably are sick, but the institution, the medical institution isn't giving them any help. So they're going to someone who's going to believe them and say, you know, we believe you're sick and here's a crystal to fix it.

But these people haven't, they haven't done that yet. They've gone to all of the traditional avenues of, and again, like not to make money, which is interesting at this point. They are just like, listen, all we know is we're missing a long track of time. And however we were before this event is not who we are now. Because we can't stop ourselves from trying to figure out why we're different. And no one has been able to fill in these fucking hours.

Right. And that's kind of what that book that I encourage everyone to read gets into is the question of how much like this were they actually already? Like what you just said, we're looking for someone to try to explain to us why we're so different. Like they were different because they were a mixed race couple and the book really explores the pressures that that put on them before all of this. Because they were always presented as, hey, look, these two pretty normal people had this crazy thing happen to them. But the book argues they've been having crazy things happen to them for years and that this was some sort of a psychological expression of that. And I think it's really interesting.

And if it ended up not being aliens, it ended up being something nefarious and very terrestrial. I think there is definitely an argument to be made, and we're not going to get into it here because we're not fucking professionals in any field. But I think there's probably an argument to be made that in the communities at this time, when they lived, the church, fucking predominantly white neighborhoods, fucking law enforcement, what have you, and perceptions in probably the black community as well, you know what, it's just easier maybe to say aliens. There's probably shit at this time where it's like, it's easier just to say aliens than some other fucking thing that might have happened. And it's just a horrible situation to be put in.

Yeah. So at this point, a columnist from the Boston Herald Traveler catches wind of their story, this guy, John Littrell. He gets an audio tape from the UFO lecture that the Hills had given. And he has some notes from other UFO investigators as sources. And with this information, Littrell publishes a column on the Hills that gets nationwide attention. And then United Press International picks up the column. It goes global. And boom, the modern alien abduction was born.

And how many years after the event? Is this like three, four? Because they spent two years trying to find the location. Then they went and talked to a bunch of doctors.

Yeah, they were abducted in 61 at the end of 61. And this story came out in 65.

So yeah, four years.

About four years. They did end up eventually, the Hills wrote a book. So, you know, they did do some press around it, but they never sought out the spotlight really. But yeah, their story gave birth to the modern alien abduction, the dark, lonely setting, floating into the ship, the experiments, the pregnancy test, and the returning home with missing time and memories erased.

Watches stopped. I've seen that in a million things.

Yeah, it's all there and it's all, there's somebody writing about it who, I'm gonna paraphrase and butcher it, but there was somebody writing about how one of the most exciting and interesting things outside of the alien aspects of this story is that it's one of the rare instances where we really can trace the birth of a legend to the story of one, in this case, two people, and we know the moment in the psychiatrist's office that these stories came out of their mouths, and we really can trace almost every alien abduction to that template.

Yeah, I mean, we've seen this.

Except the only person's story you can't argue was influenced by the Hills story is Antonio Villas-Boas, who was abducted in 1957, and what's really interesting to me is that the details are very different, but he talks about a lot of the same things, like there were medical experiments, blood was drawn from his chin, he had sex with a woman on the ship who indicated she was gonna take their baby to space, and here the Hills had different medical experiments performed, but there's this very similar aspect, and there's no way, his story was only ever made famous after the Hills, so there's no way the Hills had ever heard his story, and so I think it's interesting that they're both dealing with this same sort of medical and sexual curiosity from another planet.

Yeah, so the Venn diagram of these two UFO stories is, we got some perverts out there in the sky.

Yeah, yeah, they're wearing trench coats.

Yeah, we got a couple of perverts. When they came to Brazil, maybe they were like a lone group. They went back to where they're from, and they're like, it's pretty wild down there. Just, we can be making babies pretty regularly. And then now you have the Betty and Barney Hill story where now they're coming back a little bit more uniformed. They got the same uniforms on, their shits together. You know, the military is here to be like, who can we fuck, anyone? Whose semen can we take, everyone's? And it's like, all right, we'll check it out. We'll go to Earth. Space is brothel.

Maybe, yeah. There's that theory that we're like-

A backwater planet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's where the red light district of the universe. But the fact that those similarities are in place in both of these stories makes me think that one of four things almost has to be true. First, alien abductions happen and they're real and there is some extraterrestrial biological interest in the human body. Second, there's some patient zero piece of media out there that influenced both Boas and The Hills story with regard to alien interest in our biology and reproductive systems. There is some evidence that there was an episode of The Outer Limits that had just aired a few weeks before The Hills encounter and it didn't feature an abduction, but the aliens on the show do look really suspiciously like the aliens The Hills described and would later draw. But the content of the episode doesn't have abductions or experiments and Boas wouldn't have seen that episode before he was abducted, so I don't think it's that.

Well, then what about John Carter of Mars? I mean, that's like during the Civil War. Is that Edgar Rice Burroughs?

It's Edgar Rice Burroughs.

That motherfucker, he was abducted if you think about it. He was taken to Mars where he had to fight and save a princess, but it was. That's the 1800s, man. And he went to a different celestial body, and I'm pretty sure he fucked that princess.

But what I am curious about though is the specificity of the fertility and the medical experimentation elements.

Yes.

That feels new.

Yes, the scientific angle of it, and not just a human got swept kind of off the battlefield into a different battlefield where he's fighting a different kind of civil war.

Yeah. The third option is that somehow Boaz's story influenced the Hills story, which like I already said, I find extremely unlikely because there's no way the Hills had ever heard about his story. Or four, there is something deeply primal going on in our brains that we don't fully understand that causes some people to have these experiences even if they aren't objectively real experiences. Like there's some almost Jungian obsession with fertility and experiments and others that is rattling around in our subconscious causing havoc.

Well, I mean, loneliness is a killer and so maybe, I don't know, but like I'm just saying maybe some people just want interaction even if the interaction is negative, you know?

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I feel like the Hills had plenty of interaction with each other. Oh, no.

I mean, you're saying that people, I thought you were just saying that humanity might have this deep set like lizard brain. Is that what you were saying for number four?

Yeah, kind of. But I guess I don't I think there is possibly that lizard brain aspect to it. I don't know that loneliness necessarily has anything to do with it.

Well, I was making a half joke, but also not the dumbest theory in the world.

No, not the dumbest theory in the world. There's one other interesting possibility that's been floated that I don't think explains everything, but I do think is an interesting possibility that could explain part of it. And that theory is that Barney's experience at least may have been something else getting unlocked deep in his psyche. Accidental awareness of a tonsillectomy he'd had a few years prior. Accidental awareness, Ed, have you ever heard this term?

No, I mean, it's kind of amazing, two words smashed together, but yeah, so like accidental awareness of a medical procedure? Is it like you wake up when you're supposed to be asleep?

Yes.

Oh, okay, geez.

So new fear that we haven't done an episode on that maybe we should. Accidental awareness is the medical term for waking up during an operation, and until the last few decades, it was really pretty rarely studied. Whether or not these cases are the basis for alien abduction nightmares, as one 2008 study suggests, we do know that the emotional and psychological effect of an accidental awareness experience is just as terrifying as any alien abduction experience one might have.

Oh, 100 fucking percent, and it probably shares a lot of the same imagery. I'm laying on a lab table. There's a bright white light above me. I'm seeing people with masks on. I'm only getting their eyes. Everyone seems confused and scared. The only difference is, what happens with aliens, it's like whatever the fucking alien language is, and maybe if it's a language you're familiar with, a terrestrial language, you can hear like, fuck, do you have insurance? What do we do with this person?

We need to get rid of the body. And that's all absolutely 100%. That's the theory, is that it does sound a lot like the visuals of an abduction. I thought this quote was really telling because it describes the emotional journey of an alien abduction experience. This patient, this accidental awareness patient, describes his flashback to the ordeal like this, quote, it struck again days later as horrifying images and terror that rose from the depths of my being. I was once again in the grips of horror, again not comprehending, again trapped, again struggling to survive, yet wishing for death.

Oh, forget it. Forget it. It's fucking the worst. It's the worst. The only thing that's worse than a thing that I've always thought about and now have an official term for would be an accidental awareness whilst also not being able to move and speak, where it's like no one knows you're accidentally awareing it. That's like a top five terrible fear for me that I don't luckily have to go under do any kind of surgery and stuff. And anyone I know who's an anesthesiologist, I know they pay a lot in premiums or whatever for insurance purposes, but it is so fucking scary. And yeah, you must have insane PTSD from that. Because you have to go to sleep every night. So every time you wake up, you're like, oh, is it the time I wake up again with a fucking tube down my throat?

Right. I mean, part of the theory is that until pretty recently, most accidental awareness the doctors didn't know whether you were paralyzed or not. Well, I guess most of them probably were, but no one necessarily knew. Essentially, you would wake up, have this horrific experience, bury it, so that when you come to, you're not remembering that insane level of trauma of being awake during a surgery. And then you start having nightmares about it that are the scariest thing imaginable and that most people never would have put two and two together. Because the nightmares would be so distorted, they wouldn't go, oh, hey, I bet I woke up during my surgery. They're just like, what the fuck is this? Because it comes up five, ten years later.

Interesting. You think maybe they came to, the pain was so great, what have you, they just passed out again, and then it's...

Yeah, yeah.

That sucks. I know this is an episode about alien abduction, but now my brain is just fully in the headspace of that other more horrible, terrifying, could happen to you much more readily than fucking being abducted.

We'll probably do an episode on it.

We're gonna have to now.

But I'll get this spaceship back on the tracks by saying, essentially, this theory, it makes sense to me. The theory would go something like this. The Hills are coming back from their trip that has been stressful from the moment they left without even going to the bank. They saw something in the sky, probably a misidentified plane. They lose track of time as they're stopping and driving and it's dark, and they get home exhausted and woozy way after they planned to. And between the strange sighting, the lateness of the hour, and possibly Barney's concerns about racial tensions plaguing them or whatever he experienced in the diner, the couple is feeling anxious. It feels to them like something bad just happened, even though they can't remember what. Betty starts having nightmares that express as alien because her sister saw a UFO and she feels they just saw a UFO. So she tells Barney about the nightmares and the constant delving into and searching of his own memory to see if he remembers aliens, scratch the surface of an actually repressed trauma waking up during an operation, and once that opens up, then they're just echo chamber, oh shit, what happened to us?

All of that for me is perfectly adequate, but it doesn't explain any physical evidence. It doesn't explain the holes in the back of the car. It doesn't explain any ripped shirts. It doesn't explain the Studio 54 cum draining powder festival or whatever the hell they have.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and that's one of the hardest things that I found in researching this story. Pinning down how much the Hills remembered of that night before they started meeting with sympathetic UFO people and hypnotherapists and trying to figure out how many details got added along the way. Because when they reported to the Air Force the day after or two days after whatever it was, there's not a lot of details there. And they have since said that they didn't give details because they were afraid they wouldn't be believed. But I wonder if there were really, if there just weren't that many details to give. And some of these things got picked up over the course of the years that they were trying to figure out exactly what happened.

But something must have happened. I don't think you go to the Air Force, you take time out of your day, you prepare yourself to not be believed by people of authority. You're already living in this fucking everybody's judging us relationship. So something must have happened enough where they're like, we want to get a file done.

Yeah, I mean, my question is basically just if you'd ask the Hills the night they pulled into that driveway two hours later than they should have, if you ask them, what did you see? Would they have said, oh my God, we're so tired and I think we saw this weird thing that looked like a UFO and it was kind of following us and I'm zonked. Or how much of the story would they have remembered up to them being abducted if you'd ask them that night? And the evolution of that story is not well documented, as far as I can tell.

I mean, whether it's getting drugged or being abducted, I think there's an argument to be made that any kind of serious trauma on the body internally or externally, it's like, yeah, you might very well be groggy if it was just these fucking, they got jumped by some people and got drugged and you might not have a fresh recollection or fresh memories until a day or two later.

Yeah, I'm curious. Someone's probably written about this. I am curious if there's any evidence that at some point as they were stopping and looking at this thing with binoculars, if somebody saw them or started following them, either to rob them or because they didn't like that they saw a mixed race couple and that something went down, because it does seem like something went down.

Because there was some weird physical evidence, yeah.

The broken straps, the scuffs, yeah. It seems like something happened to them and I wonder if maybe they just were preyed upon by somebody out there or some group of people out there and it got warped into this alien story, or maybe they got abducted by aliens.

My hope at this point is they were abducted by aliens because I hate when people do shitty things to other people. But like I was kind of saying earlier, depending on your surroundings and your support group, what have you, there are times when tossing an alien in the mix can maybe seem like a good idea. And I don't say that as a joke. I don't envy anyone who feels like they would need to do that. But like the end of Deliverance, to not give anything away, doesn't, you don't follow these people beyond this evening. So it could very well be the after credit sequence of Deliverance is we just tell people it was aliens, right? To explain everything that we're coming back with and the people who died and what have you. I don't want to give anything away. I know this movie's been out for 50 years or whatever, but yeah, I could see a world where some very human fucked up shit happened and then they say this. But again, they're going to have to tell the Air Force something. They're going to have to tell the psychiatrist something. And the fact that nothing came out of the hypnosis sessions, nothing slipped, let's say, of yeah, a couple of people drugged us or a couple, you know, or we remember a second set of headlights coming down. But they do say they met six people in the woods or whatever. But I guess those are aliens. But I do think I'm giving me alien story, the benefit of the doubt, because under hypnosis, they didn't let it slip, I guess, that they were harboring a secret that they just had like a real shit night in the woods with a bunch of fucking creeps.

Yeah. And that star map.

And the star map thing.

The star map gets me.

And I'd be interested because this is 1961. I mean, yeah, we have science fiction media. We have World of Worlds. We have potentially television shows that are addressing intergalactic beings, I guess. But fucking so many elements that are part of this story, as you mentioned earlier, that would become tropes down the road. But at the time just didn't fucking exist. It's kind of crazy to think that they're going to cover up another story with a fucking L. Ron Hubbard level science fiction story, just two regular ass people who don't have jobs. They're not even school teachers or storytellers or radio people or entertainment people. It seems like an insane amount of details to come up with. Unless they go back to Barney and Betty's house and it's like you got a lot of science fiction books on these walls.

I mean, I think even if those details were coming out of their minds, I think they were coming subconsciously. I don't think at any point they sat down and said, hey, here's the story we're going to agree on. Especially when you go back and listen to those tapes. Something is pouring out of them. We just may never know what.

I mean, there are difficult subjects. You have a woman who is a social worker, essentially, correct?

Yeah.

They're hearing fucking terrible stories all day, new stories all day, what have you. And then you have a veteran of World War II, who also has a lot of racial strife issues. Yeah, if there's a lot to pour out of two individuals, I would say great candidates to just really need to sit back and let a lot pour out. I would say it's a veteran with a stressful job who has external stresses outside of their work in military record and a woman with a stressful job who's heard a lot of fucking messed up shit.

Yeah. But we have some other stories to get to this episode, so we will move on for now from the hills. But yeah, absolutely fascinating story. Another alien abduction story that I've always found really interesting that's a little bit less well known is the Pascagoula abduction. Now, no one has done as culturally astute a dive into this case as Matthew Bowman did with the hills in his book, but someone should, because I think there is a big Southern Gothic story to tell about myths, masculinity, and cultural expectations in the American South. Our abductees this time are a 42-year-old man named Charlie Hickson and a 19-year-old man named Calvin Parker. Charlie died in 2011.

RIP, God bless.

RIP, God bless. But Calvin is still alive and has started to open up about the abduction for really the first time in his life. There's an article I'm going to quote heavily from here. Well, basically, I'm just gonna read it, which I never do, but this is a really great article built around one of the only extensive interviews with Charlie, so it's an incredible source. It's called The Pascagoula Abduction, written by Alexandra Kennan Shaheen and originally published in Country Roads Magazine, September 2021. It begins, For 46 years I kept it a secret. I didn't even tell my wife about it, Calvin Parker told me in his thick Mississippi accent, referring to the evening of October 11th, 1973. That evening, Parker was fishing on the Pascagoula River with his friend, Charlie Hickson. It was his first day on the job at FB. Walker and Sons Shipyard, a job Hickson had helped him get. He was 19 years old, his wedding was a month away with aspirations to live a simple life. He says, quote, I wanted to get married, wanted to have children, wanted to have grandchildren, wanted to buy a house, retire and fish. He says, now 67 over the phone from the back porch of his current home in Moss Point, Mississippi. It had all started when Hickson asked Parker if he wanted to go fishing after work. Parker, new to town, hadn't brought his fishing gear with him. So Hickson offered to loan him some of his. Now for a man that loves to fish from the South to offer you use of his fishing equipment, that's like him offering you his wife, Parker said, just unheard of. The article continues, the men tried fishing in one location, but the swarming bugs prompted them to head back to the shipyard where there were fewer lights to attract insects. Parker pointed out posted signs to Hickson when they pulled up, but Hickson brushed off his concerns about breaking the law and said, that don't mean nothing, I fish here all the time. They walked down to the old pier, cast out their lines and waited for a bite. I distinctly remember, I was looking at a boat across, I think it was an old ore boat that they do the weather with and it was made out of steel. And I was thinking to myself, now how does something made out of steel float? Parker remembered, that's where my mind was and that's what I noticed the blue hazy lights coming in from behind. You could see the reflection across the water. Thinking the lights were the police, he turned to Hickson and said, Charlie, we in trouble. You lied to me and we fix in to go to jail.

So this is the 19 year old saying this.

Yeah.

He's Parker?

Yeah, Parker, yeah.

So Parker's 19 year old. So he's not like the smartest guy. He's just looking at a boat being like, what the fuck does that work?

I don't know, maybe. And have you ever heard of people going to jail for fishing in the dark?

I haven't. I mean, I know my dad has to get his fishing license re-upped and stuff. I think there is some bureaucracy involved with fishing and fishing seasons. And for all I know, I guess there could be something where it's like, you can't fish somewhere because it's, I mean, I don't know, this is the 70s in Mississippi. I don't know how much environmental protection stuff there was, but I think there's elements where you could certainly be fined, but like, oh no, we're going to jail is, yeah, that's a little much.

Yeah, I mean, Parker, I guess, was concerned in any case, but it doesn't really matter, I guess, what he was so worried about, because when the men stood up and turned around, they said they didn't see police cars, but instead a long ovular craft floating around two feet from the ground, emitting a blindingly bright light. He described two of the creatures grabbing Hickson and one grabbing him. And that's when it carried me aboard the craft. Now, I want to stop here to interject the description of the creatures from another source, because they're not described in the article and they're crazy looking.

Well, they're bulky. We know they're bulky.

We know they're bulky. They're so crazy looking that I think the first time I ever heard about this was not as an abduction story, but it was as like a cryptid story about the Pascagoula aliens. They're so bizarre, they get lumped in, I think, with like the Dover Demon and stuff sometimes. So Parker and Hickson would describe the beings as quote, about five feet tall, had bullet shaped heads without necks, slits for mouths where their noses or ears would be. They had thin conical objects sticking out like carrots from a snowman's head. They had no eyes, gray wrinkled skin, round feet and claw like hands.

They're some mole men.

They're mole men, they're bizarre. People have drawn them before. I don't remember if Parker and Hickson ever ended up drawing them, but people have drawn based on their descriptions. They are insane.

It's like biblical angels.

Yeah, kind of, yeah.

When you read about what angels really look like and you're like, oh, what?

Yeah.

How many eyes? A thousand eyes.

Where do you even fit those on a head? So back to the Country Roads article, quote, Parker said the creature stopped at the door and injected him with what he described as a go to hell shot. Oh, what? Oh, whatever it was ushered him from absolute terror to a sort of peaceful apathy. The go to hell shot is also what they gave me at the dentist last week.

Oh shit.

I didn't care what happened then.

So you think he's a couple of bulky dentists maybe grabbing him.

It might be a couple of large necked dentists who have plans for Mr. Parker. Parker described being taken aboard the craft down a hallway and into a room where the creature placed him on an examination table made entirely of glass. According to Parker, at that point, the gray wrinkled creature that brought him aboard the ship left the room. That's when something came out of the ceiling about the size of a deck of cards. He says the square shaped object circled around him making a series of clicking noises. I never thought about it until here lately, but it was like this MRI I was in, except the click wasn't that loud, Parker explained looking back. And then it just shot back up in the ceiling. Then a smaller being entered the room, which Parker said made him feel more at ease. He couldn't move his body, but rolled his head toward the creature. She was normal, he said. Matter of fact, if I'd been in a bar room drinking or something and was single, you know, at this time, I'd probably have asked her out on a date. She looked just like a human, except for its middle fingers. Her two middle fingers were real longer than what an average person's would be.

Oh man, they almost nailed it. Whoever is working on their human decoy department was like, I'm pretty sure we nailed it. And it was like, what about these two crazy long fingers?

Yeah, I'm imagining this ship full of aliens being like, hell yeah, dude, they are never gonna notice us.

They're never gonna notice.

And you cut to a wide shot and they're just dragging middle fingers like spaghetti along the ground.

Oh my god, excuse me, ma'am. Do you, actually, don't worry about it. Why did you become so, nothing, no reason. You know, mama said if there's nothing nice to say about someone, do not say anything at all. So nice to meet you and your crazy long fucking noodle fingers.

Yeah, so shades of the Boa story here, this attractive female alien.

I don't know, I'm taking Boa Lady any day. She had a, what, like a sharp Reese Witherspoon chin.

Yeah, a sharp chin.

Yeah, this guy's like, hey, can you grab me that thing from over there without moving at all, thanks.

Thanks.

Well, this alien, Parker recalls, that without saying a word, the creature put its left hand on his jaw and opened his mouth. That's when she took her right hand and started running it down my throat.

Oh no, that long ass finger?

Yeah, he starts gagging. She scratched it up real bad and it was bleeding. It was a darn mess. It pulled its hand back out. Parker had the impression that it didn't want to hurt him anymore. Then it made a groan from deep within its throat. He says, quote, I don't know if you ever heard an alligator's mating call where they vibrate the whole air around you, but that's how it sounded.

This is a person who's like, boats, what a mystery. But he has a scientific knowledge of fucking reptiles?

I mean, the detail about that alligator mating call, something about that gets me. It's so specific and it feels like such a weird detail. Yeah, so that's when the creature that Parker said initially brought him aboard the craft, I really believe to this day it was a robot, he added later, returned and carried him back to the bank of the river. That's where the story really starts, he said. And then my life turned pretty much to hell right after that. Parker said his first instinct, which Hickson initially agreed with, was not to tell anyone about what happened to them. But on the drive back home, Hickson changed his mind. He thought they needed to tell someone about what happened despite Parker's protests. Hickson dialed Kiesler Air Force Base in Biloxi and briefly explained what happened to them before being told that they didn't handle UFO reports anymore. Project Blue Book was finished, they said, and to call the local authorities.

Wait, so by 1970, whatever this is, is Project Blue Book a publicly known entity at this point? Would they openly be like, hey, this thing called Project Blue Book, we don't do that anymore?

I don't think it was ever really all that secret because the whole point of Project Blue Book was to use J. Allen Hynek to discredit UFO sightings. And then he eventually got kind of drummed out because he was a little bit too, he was very skeptical of a lot of what he discovered, but he was too-

Sympathetic.

Sympathetic, yeah. For some people in the government, they didn't like that he was like, no, no, no, there's still some stuff here that we can't really explain. They were like, oh great, well, hey, we're done.

Yeah, adios. So remove it from the telephone menu. So I guess it was a time when you can call the Air Force and be like, oh, to speak to a representative, press one. To speak to a Project Blue Book, press two.

Yeah.

To talk about planes with just some old timer who likes talking about planes, press three. And we're like, wow, this is government money.

Oh dude, that would be such a great make work program for vets, just like staff them up at like army vets and Air Force vets, like guys who just man a phone line to talk to people about planes and tanks and.

Oh my gosh.

The cool things they drove. That would be very popular.

It seems like a good way to use people.

Yeah, I'd love that, I'd love that. At the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, the men were questioned separately about their experience, then put in a room alone together where they were secretly tape recorded. So the phrasing in the article is a little confusing. They were put in a room together where they were left alone and secretly tape recorded. And this is part of what makes this case so convincing because the cops didn't just record the interview they did with Charlie and Calvin, they left the hidden tape running after they left the room. The idea was that they'd capture these guys on tape talking about getting one over on the cops or trying to make sure that they're getting their story straight when the cops come back in the room, but instead they captured two men who cannot wrap their heads around what just happened to them. And the reason we know this is because 47 years after the fact, someone who was working at the Pascagoula Police Department that night, or I guess not Pascagoula Police Department, but the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, someone who was working there that night leaked the tape. The tape is a little scratchy. It's not as easy to make out as the Betty and Barney Hill tape. So Ed and I will maybe act out a piece of it here if that's a little easier to understand.

I'll be Charlie Hickson. And I'm looking this over and it seems, has anyone ever read like Huck Finn or anything? It's written in this dialect that's, I don't know. We're not adding this. Whatever it sounds like is how it's written. So here you go.

Okay, so Ed's gonna kick this off as Charlie Hickson and I will be Calvin and you will enter the theater of the mind.

All right, fade in. I've never seen nothing like that before in my life. You can't make people believe.

I don't wanna keep sitting here. I wanna see a doctor.

They better wake up and start believing. They better start believing.

You see how that damn door come right up?

I don't know how it opens on. I don't know.

It just laid up and just like that, those son of bitches, just like that, they come out.

I know, you can't believe it. You can't make people believe it.

I paralyzed right then. I couldn't move.

They won't believe it. They're gonna believe it. One of these days might be too late. I know all along there was people from the other worlds up there. I knew all along. I never thought it would happen to me.

Charlie also says on this tape, Jesus Christ, God have mercy. I thought I'd been through enough of hell on this earth and now I gotta go through something like this, which is such a wonderfully crotchety Southern hard ass thing to say. After you listen to this tape, I don't know how you can think that, again, that these two didn't experience something, just the confusion in their voice.

Yeah, if our performances didn't reveal it, just the staccato, barely on the same page. These are people basically having conversations with no one, essentially. It's as if they're not really responding to each other. They're both just in awe. They're both just talking out loud about things that confused them from the previous couple hours.

Yeah, if you look at the transcript, it's great writing, honestly. If you wanna learn to be a screenwriter, it's a great example of how to write a conversation. I would love to hear actors perform it just because-

Not us.

Not us, but real actors, because there's so much to interpret in the words and so many emotions that I think you could pull out of this because they're just so shocked. But Parker tells us that after the deputies listened to the secret tape recording, which he and Hickson didn't learn existed until much later, they took them more seriously. Parker urged the authorities not to tell anyone about what he and Hickson reported. I wasn't going to tell a soul, he emphasized. But when we got back to the shipyard the next day, they already knew. When they got to work, FB. Walker and Sons Shipyard was swarmed by news vans. Parker estimated that around 200 reporters were there hoping to talk to him and Hickson.

So who told them?

I don't know. I mean, I don't know if it's like.

So the cops immediately left and were like, you won't believe the fucking shit we just saw. By the way, their names are Charlie Hickson and fucking whatever. And you can find them at this address.

And this is where they work.

It wasn't like they showed up to work. It was like, you guys won't believe what we heard. These two dudes, they got, they dealt with some fucking crazy aliens, whatever. No, they were like, hey, Hickson and Parker heard what happened to you specifically last night. Like that's kind of fucked up.

Yeah, I don't know if he's insinuating that the cops told somebody or exactly how it got in the news. I mean, in my imagination at least, like small town, deep south in the seventies, there's a lot of gossip. You know, there was a lot of, you're not gonna believe who walked in last night.

Yeah, there's no way someone's, yeah, I don't think that they're like firing up the presses at 11 p.m. to make sure this hits the morning news before factory workers go in.

No, he says when we got back to the shipyard the next day, I mean, who knows? This is the way memory works, right? Like maybe it was a couple days before the news van showed up. But the point is he lost his job. He says, of course I lost my job at the shipyard because people wouldn't leave me alone. He drove back home to Laurel hoping to leave the events of October 11th behind in Pascagoula. So Parker says, quote, and it started from there. It was just like a roller coaster. I went to work. The reporter would show up at work while I was working. And you know, the people you work for, eventually they get tired of that. So I'd lose another job.

Oh my God. Where's Charlie at this point? Where's Hickson?

I don't know.

Cause if Parker's getting it bad, then Hickson must be like, you know, you vouched for this guy. You gave your fishing equipment to some dude who's some sort of alien bait.

Hickson was the older guy. He was more established. He probably had more relationships at the job site.

Got factory tenure.

Yeah, I don't know what exactly, but you know, it does seem like Parker kind of got the shit end of the stick here.

Parker, the one guy who was like, hey, let's not tell anybody. Let's just not tell anybody.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and it says, so this article says, eventually Parker went by the name Randy to avoid the press. And he says, and that's where I went from there to hide, but this has followed me all my life. Parker, still a religious man, had once considered becoming a preacher. Another dream derailed that night. It took so much credibility away that I wouldn't have enough people come in that would believe me, I didn't think. When a documentary reporter later asked him, how would you feel if I told you I didn't believe you? Parker answered, you know, fella, that's your opinion. If you want to believe it, you can. If you don't, you don't. I know what happened. I know I'm telling the truth.

Love it. That's a great quote.

It is, yeah.

That's how we should all live our lives for a lot of different things.

Truly, truly. The article then goes into a whole bunch of stuff about the books that Parker has written and his relationship with his wife and his publisher, none of which is really relevant to the discussion here, but it does end on a happy note. I think this is really cool too. This might be a Scared All The Time field trip someday. In 2019, a historical marker was placed near the Pascagoula River across from the site where the alleged abduction took place. This is the quote at the end of the plaque. It remains the best documented case of alien abduction, particularly since there is a secret tape involved and not one, but two witnesses. When it was officially unveiled, Parker was so overwhelmed by the emotions of finally having the story he was ridiculed about for decades legitimized that he cried. It was one of the happiest moments in his life and that is rare that such memorials to UFO incidents exist, Philip Mantle, Parker's publisher said. There are a couple in different parts of the world, but they're usually placed there long after they're dead and gone, you know. Thankfully, Calvin was there to see it and enjoy it and have it officially unveiled.

This is 2019.

This is 2019.

In 2020, it was torn down with all the rest of the Civil War shit.

There's, well, there's a, it reminded me too, there is a Betty and Barney Hill marker on the highway in New Hampshire, but they were dead way before that got placed. So it is, this is probably one of the only.

Instances where the person got to see it.

Yeah, and got to have people say, we believe you. I mean, maybe we don't know what happened, but, and I think that's again, what's so compelling is if you listen to this tape, which you should, even though it's hard to hear a little bit, go to YouTube and listen to it, something happened. Something happened and-

These guys, you know, we like to say out in the show, I think you've said it before, it's that thing where it's like, if these people are acting, give them the Academy Award now. That old saying that we've come back to a couple of times on the show. I don't know what that is in terms of a barometer of the truth, but it does give credence and as evidenced by our inability to act out their evening, acting is hard actually.

Well, that's sort of an interesting, I think, side road here to discuss eyewitness accounts and whether or not we believe them and how good of actors people are. I think something that's really interesting to me as someone who has directed actors and thinks about this, a lot of times I will listen to eyewitness accounts and in the back of my mind, I'll be like, okay, how would I direct this? Like, what would I be telling this person or what would I be trying to tap into to get these emotions out? And that's why surprising emotions in eyewitness accounts tend to convince me because I think even if people are good actors, most people are not instinctually interesting actors. And by that, I mean, like, if someone is gonna tell a fake story, there's sort of a performance that your average person would consider to convey scared or, you know, concerned or confused or whatever, and they'll kind of give you that performance. But when you listen to a tape like this, or you listen to, I forget which couple it was, but one of the most convincing ghost stories I've ever heard is on a very early episode of Unsolved Mysteries. To me, it's convincing because of the reaction of one of the elderly couple telling the story, the husband, has this reaction that is so honest and so true and so believable, but so not what your average person would go to as this is how I'm expressing this story or this emotion.

Okay, sure.

And so that's what's convincing to me sometimes, because I believe that people can be convincing and can act if they want to, if they're properly motivated by who knows what. It's just that you hear something sometimes that is so true without seeming standard, and that's what's really convincing.

Yeah, I was part of a court case thing like two years ago, year and a half ago, where we had to look at a bunch of security camera footage of two people, and to me, and I'm not saying I'm an expert in the field, but as a person who's worked in our industry, been around actors, been on set, as not a director like you, but I was like, there's certain takes here, not takes, but it means security camera footage, where it seems like they're playing for the camera, and it's regional theater level acting. These thoughts ended up being true, I was not wrong, but you just watch a bunch of security camera footage and like, okay, yep, that one they didn't know, that one they didn't know, okay, this one, now you can see the moment they realize, oh, we're being recorded. And they've changed to act towards, you don't look up at the fucking camera, but I'm saying like now they start acting, and the thing is, they're not fucking actors. You can see they don't know what to do with their hands. It's just so stupid. So yeah, there is something to seeing someone who's not an actor and they tell you a story or something that they had worked on beforehand, and it's got all these very, I think, telling markers. So when you do have a recording, like you were saying, that seemed genuine or the emotion came out at a weird time, not like a rehearsed time, it adds a lot to the stories.

Yeah, and I think it speaks to, though we don't know what some of these people did experience, I think in the same way that actors draw on experiences that they are conscious and aware of to give life to their performances, I think people like The Hills and like Parker and Hickson, you know, that emotion is coming from somewhere. It's coming from something, and in their case in particular, I don't think it's coming from something that they drew upon.

It's coming from the thing that just happened.

Yeah, yeah. You know, who knows? It's very weird. But like I said, a marker or a plaque was put down and thankfully Calvin was there to see it and enjoy it and have it officially unveiled. So that is the Pascagoula Alien Abduction encounter, and I feel like it's a natural place to stop with Parker and Hickson's story here and call this part two before we move on to part three, because I think part two between Parker and Hickson's story and the Hills Abduction story, I think really focuses on the emotional experience of going through an alien abduction, but there are people who have experienced physical symptoms after an alien abduction, or in some cases, not an abduction, but a very, very, very close encounter.

Which we've touched on a little bit with like Boas and stuff, right?

Yeah, I mean, Boas was, he ended up on the ship, but there's a few other people who have had Boas-like encounters where they didn't technically get on a ship. So next week, we're going to dive further into the physical scars and reminders that you may experience post-alien abduction. Things like alien implants, radiation burns, evidence of probing, stuff like that. That's the real mean meat and potatoes of the things that scare us about being abducted by aliens.

And in case you thought aliens were over, turns out when you start looking into aliens, there's a lot there. So we're going to do one more release, guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as with a lot of the things we try to cover on this show, you know, I know Betty and Barney Hill is a pretty standard alien abduction story, but it's just so interesting. I couldn't say no. But we'll try to dig up some lesser known stories from people where their stories haven't been explored a million times over already. And see what kind of conclusions we can come to about what's up there in the skies and how interested they are in...

And what's going on down here in the land, baby.

These bodies, these square bodies down here on Earth. These shapes that they don't understand because they're just fucking stick figures up there.

I've never seen a muscular alien of you.

No.

Shit, thank God, right? I think that's a very different abduction story if it's like a bunch of muscle-bound aliens.

Well, the Predator is pretty shredded.

Predator is shredded. Predator is super shredded. But he ended up landing in the jungle with some of the most shredded dudes. So it's a fair fight in a lot of ways.

Yeah, that's true.

So anyway, next week we'll be shredded and we'll have more stories.

Until then, this has been Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola. And we will see you next week for, believe it or not, more alien stuff. All right, see you then. 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.

We are in this together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===