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Astonishing Legends Network.

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

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

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And I'm not sure exactly when you're listening to this, but in my timeline, I just recovered from a pretty brutal trip to the dentist. To back up a little bit, until I was born in the United States, my family's bloodline consisted mostly of Southern Italian goat herders and cheese makers with really shockingly good genes, except for the teeth. Cullaris are unlucky in gum and in roots, and all of that came to a head for me for the second time last week, and I had to get a tooth pulled. The worst part is they had trouble numbing me. So after about like probably 15 injections around the tooth, because I just kept asking for more and more and more, the dentist said we should try the one, two, three method, which is just counting to three and pulling. And we did, and there will be an episode on dentists in the future. That will be my grand revenge. But for right now, we've got aliens to talk about. And my terrible experience in the chair made me think a lot about the poor souls who have been under the extraterrestrial knife over the years. Because while we've touched on the history of abductions throughout folklore, looked at the first alien abduction case ever reported and examined two extremely compelling abduction stories from mid-20th century America, we haven't really talked much about the physical aspects of alien abductions. The probings, the implants, the radiation burns. All the different kinds of trauma present in abductions and close encounters. So punch a dentist for me and get ready for the last episode in our series on alien abductions. This one's gonna hurt.

What are we scared?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the theme song.

I think it's important we all agree here to not punch dentists or anyone else for that matter. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we won't. And they won't either. We're just all having a little fun here. Okay, good. You may proceed. What are we?

Scared. Now it is time for Time Fired. Scan the waters of time. What's up guys? Chris and Ed here. We're gonna cut right to the chase. Making and growing this podcast has been one of the most fulfilling projects we've ever been a part of. We had no idea that sharing all the things that freak us out with you would result in such an awesome community of fans.

And we wanna grow that community. That means more fears, more content, more interaction, killer merch and more, well, just more. But we need your support to do all that.

The podcast will always be available for free, but starting next week, you'll be able to head to scaredallthetimepodcast.com or any of our socials or most of the podcast players you're already using to join our supercast and choose how much more involved with the show you want to be. What's supercast? Well, have you heard of Patreon? Supercast is like that, but better.

Some would call it super. I mean, they do. It's a portmanteau is what we're saying.

True.

Is it though? I think it is.

I think it is.

Anyway, we'll have three fear tiers to choose from, each packed with fun rewards from ad-free episodes to discounts on merch to something we're calling Frog Plus for all you frog heads who are unlike me and want frogs to join you for every episode. Also live shows, monthly AMAs, an exclusive button to the Month Club.

And probably a bunch of other stuff that Ed will kill himself trying to make.

Yeah, that's probably true. And again, the podcast will always be free with ads, but we're excited to take this whole thing to the next level. So next week, check our socials and scaredalltimepodcast.com for access to even more dope stuff. We hope to see you there.

All right, moving on with housekeeping. I guess we'll start just with a quick disclaimer right off the top. Not that you probably are confused about what the fuck episode you're listening to at this point, but this is the probing episode. So I know some of you let your children listen to this show and I am totally cool with that, but there is some sexual stuff in this episode. It's kind of unavoidable. So just a heads up, not too crazy, but I feel like we should say something.

Yeah, it's not bad.

And shout out to Alex Paul, our buddy who's terrified of aliens. I know he's been listening to these episodes.

So if he got this far, then that's huge for him. So congrats.

Yes, so congrats.

Another shout out.

You got a shout out, go for it.

I have another shout out. Shout out to Scared All The Time producer, Confidant. I guess Chris would say Consigliere. He's an Italian creep.

Consigliere.

And all around great person. She just had a birthday is what I'm getting at. And happy birthday to Tess. We have no idea how old you are. And keep that information to yourself. It's fine with us.

If we're doing a birthday segment, happy belated birthday to my sisters who are born three days apart, but multiple years apart. So happy birthday to Mimi and Rachel whose birthdays are the 13th and the 16th of April.

Oh shit, a lot of birthdays.

I don't know how old they are either.

No one knows this stuff. Happy birthday to Sam, my nephew. He was on April Fool's Day. Are we just gonna hit all the April birthdays?

Yeah, we'll just hit all the April birthdays. Who else is out there?

I guess Mr. Disclaimer, whose name is a mystery. Happy birthday to him. That would fall into the belated birthday category.

Yeah.

We'll stop there.

Sure. Also thought we'd just quickly point out that your hosts here at Scared All The Time are on the cutting edge of culture. I think we've predicted the return of UFO mania.

Or we've caused it.

Or we might have caused it based on both Will Smith's triumphant return to perform Men In Black with super producer and rapper J Balvin at Coachella.

So whatever you feel about that guy, he's out there returning with Men In Black, unprecedented move.

I have very few feelings about him other than I will say maybe this is just because we're old at this point, but it put a smile on my face to see Will Smith in his element happy and performing again.

I'm surprised no one ran up and slapped him.

He's just the most like, he was like the mainest of the mainstream when we had a mono culture. And it's kind of nice to be reminded of that once in a while.

And now he's a broken person.

He's a very broken sad person and trapped in like a reverse Rapunzel situation in his own home, I feel like, just up in a tower somewhere.

Well, for some other UFO mania news, before Will Smith jumped on stage for a good reason this time, we have the return of the Alien Abduction sketch on SNL, which people, it's a fan favorite. And who saw that coming? So yeah, a lot of wacky revivals of UFO stuff from Culture.

Big article in The Hill by Merrick von Rennencamp, friend of the show, not really, but he's the guy who interviewed me. He just posted an opinion piece in The Hill about the history of UFOs and their interaction with American nuclear sites, stretching back as far as we've had nuclear sites. Very interesting article. I highly recommend checking it out. This has been Culture Corner with Chris and Ed.

Well, yeah, that's the conclusion of Culture Corner with Chris and Ed. You know, in the event that we're causing all of this, it might come up again.

True, true. But I think that's enough lead up. Let's get to, Ed, you should drop in like a drum roll or maybe some trumpets.

Yeah, more work for me, great.

Or Men in Black by Will Smith.

Immediately sued. Then he goes and listens to me talk shit on him a minute ago. I don't need that in my life.

Okay, so here's the exciting announcement. We...

Have a season finale coming up in I guess a week from when you hear this.

Yes.

We are so insanely happy and pleased and excited to announce we did a crossover episode. We did a crossover episode. It was very funny, very cool podcast that we like called Let's Get Haunted. They're joining us for the finale.

And we talk about, well, I guess it is kind of alien adjacent, huh? We didn't plan that very well.

Not really. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll hold off on the topic per usual, but it's something that overlaps the two shows interests. And if you don't know who they are, look them up. They're really cool.

Yeah, it went really well. And I wouldn't be surprised if you see more crossover stuff. I really feel like there's a kismet, like they're sort of the girl version of us in many ways.

They're an older show, so really we're the guy version of them.

Exactly, that's true. But it was a good time. Can't wait for you guys to hear it. It's gonna be a great way to end the season. And yeah, we'll be taking a break after our season finale for just a couple of weeks to back up some more episodes. So in case I lose another tooth, we won't miss another week. But during that time, there will be much more of the Supercast information coming out. So there will be plenty to tide you guys over and keep you excited. But yeah, we've been very excited about announcing that for a while now and it's finally real.

So without further ado, Alien Abduction Part 3 begins now.

All right Ed, so how are we feeling about this series so far? Has it made you more afraid of Alien Abductions, less, is your opinion unchanged?

I think my opinion's unchanged. It's unchanged in terms of like how scared I am of it, but I'm really enjoying learning all this stuff and getting a deeper dive. Really, more importantly, it's been fun to participate in the deeper dive. I feel like I've read a lot of crap and seen a lot of crap, but they don't let me talk on those. So this is nice.

Yeah, I think it's safe to say, I've thought more about aliens these past couple of weeks than I have in a very long time. I actually had a couple of alien nightmares, although nothing abduction based, more alien invasion based. I actually, we should do something on this sometime, but there's apparently, so I was having these dreams where I was looking up at the sky and seeing all these ships hovering and darting overhead. It was all very apocalyptic. And when I was researching, I came across this thing that people have reported called the Night of the Bright Lights, which is apparently a recurring dream that lots and lots of people have of looking up in the sky and seeing dozens or hundreds of alien ships shooting around in the sky between the stars.

I thought you were gonna mention the Battle of Los Angeles.

No.

With like the lights and the sky and the potential alien component.

No, no, no. It's called the Night of the Lights Dream. And I wanna research it more. But I didn't have time to research it too much this week because I was busy going down so many damn rabbit holes in this episode. I was telling Ed off mic, some of these episodes, I mean, they're all really fun to research, but the problem is some of them, like Eatin Alive or Amusement Park Disasters, are actually, those are the best ones for me to research because there's kind of a very specific group of events to pull from. And then there's a lot to learn about those events. Whereas something like Alien Abductions, especially when we're this far into it and we're talking about implants and probing and stuff, there's just so many. And every time you click to a new article, it mentions a new name and a different guy who brought somebody else to talk to somebody else. And you could spend forever going down through all these and figuring out which ones seem real, which ones have evidence, which ones don't have evidence.

Well, that's a nice thing about a deadline is you can't spend forever. It's, we have to put the show out. So that's the last name you're gonna look at and then we go and record.

But I want everything to be right.

Well, that's not gonna happen. Even if we thought we were right, you'll find somebody who sends us an email that says, oh, actually I found this.

For the record, no one should be using this fucking show as any sort of source or research on anything.

No, definitely not.

But in an effort to bring our listeners and you, Ed, up to speed on some things I actually learned this week as I was chasing down these leads, I actually have a correction or less of a correction and more of an addition. In episode one, I said that I was pretty sure that the Antonia Vioboa subduction in 1957 was the first alien abduction ever reported. But I was wrong. This week, I discovered an article from a magazine called Magonia published June, 1993, that put forth a number of abduction and near abduction stories that came as a wave in 1954. So these happened in and around France, according to this article in Magonia. The earliest report of an abduction attempt comes from a French newspaper called L'Aurore on September 12th, 1954. It states that an M. Philly, like the letter M and last name F-I-L-I, M. Philly, of Tehran was on the balcony of the second floor of his house when he saw a luminous object hovering 20 meters away. Inside the object was a small man dressed in black with a trunk like an elephant's.

Oh shit.

Philly felt magnetically drawn towards the object, but when he screamed, it broke the spell and the object took off.

Yeah, Babar coming down, say what up.

I didn't realize Babar was A man in black? An alien, but apparently that's where he came from. He came from the sky. It's like when they rebooted Ninja Turtles and they were gonna go with, you know, they're all aliens. The original Michael Bay reboot was gonna be an alien based.

Ah, I didn't know that.

Ninja Turtles. No one wants that. That's why they didn't do it.

There's a famous, Brian Michael Bendis, I think, the comic book writer. There's a famous story where he met with one of the television networks or studios or whatever. I think it might have even been for one of the Spider-Man animated series. And like one of the questions he got from the executive was, this is not, he talks about it all the time. Apparently this is not a joke. The executive asked, does it have to be a spider?

Yeah.

It's like, are you fucking serious?

Yeah.

His name's Spider-Man.

I've heard a similar story about an early attempt at Aquaman where the execs were like, does it really need to have anything that happens underwater? And I was like, cause I think prior to advances in special effects, I'm sure that was a very difficult hurdle to clear. But anyway, so M. Philly was not abducted, but it does seem like this object was attempting to coerce him or abduct him because he was drawn towards the object, but it took off before anything happened. 11 days later though, in the letters column in Paris Match, came the earliest known survivor report of somebody who had been abducted or I guess experienced or maybe not a survivor. But Mr. GB. I don't know why everyone in mid-century France is going just by abbreviation.

Yeah, I don't know. You know how in mid-century America, we talk about this all the time. Like they put your full name and address in the newspaper all the time, no matter what happens.

Yeah, well, Mr. GB of Marseille recounted how as a boy, so he was recounting in 54 that this happened to him when he was a boy, so maybe the 30s. He'd been walking along the bank of the North Canal when he was seized by two men from behind bushes. They were tall, slender and dressed in what looked like flexible metal diving suits. They carried him into a strange object which had square or rectangular portholes. Inside was a flexible couch on which he sat. If this was the 90s, I would just think maybe he got kidnapped to the SNCC set.

Yeah, I'm like, God, I want the SNCC couch.

Yeah.

Everything's flexible though, so I don't know what that means, like a waterbed?

It sounds like he just got abducted, not by aliens.

Yeah, like does it say it's a flying ship or is it just a van? Do they have vans in France at that time?

It's described as a strange object which had square or rectangular portholes, which maybe if he'd never seen a car before. That would kind of.

Or he's right there on the riverbank, maybe it's a submarine.

Yeah, the boy began to weep and some minutes later an opening appeared in the ceiling of the cabin and he was on the ground again. Hey, that sounds like a submarine.

Yeah, go up to get to the ground, yeah.

Yeah, he found that he had to walk for most of the afternoon to get back to where he had been taken from, though he had only been on the craft for about five minutes.

Wait, this is a full blown daylight kidnapping? It's the middle of the afternoon. I mean, he walked the afternoon post-abduction.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I have to imagine that it was like 11 a.m. he's kicking a can down by the river and then a couple of tall goons pop out from behind bushes and they say, getting this U-boat, kid.

Tall, flexible goons.

Yeah, a couple of Cirque du Soleil performers say getting this sub and then it's like, oh, are you gonna cry the whole time? They get the fuck out and then they just, they booted him.

Yeah, as they should have.

No one needs a crybaby.

No one needs a crybaby. So this article from Magonia covered these abductions and near abductions that happened in 54 in France. It also mentions that prior to even that, they dug up some sort of, I guess I'd call them proto-abductions that sound sort of abduction adjacent. These include the claim of Albert Greer, a farmer outside Zanesville, Ohio.

So this is America now. So that's how you know you're getting a full name, baby.

Yeah, Albert Greer, a farmer outside Zanesville, Ohio, said that his brother levitated away as a blinding flash sped northeast in December of 1953. So Albert Greer killed his brother, I assume. And then also Magonia mentions that there was an alleged kidnapping of a girl by two glowing entities with fish-like hands in Brofst, Denmark on September 12th, 1953.

Fish-like hands meaning they had fins?

I guess.

You had fins for hands?

I guess. I would assume that fish-like means fins for hands and not that each hand looked like a fish.

I mean, at least if the hands were fish, then you can grab on because there's mouths. You know what I mean? But if it's just a fin, then you're dropping everything. And that begs the question. Was it a successful snatching or was it like, oh, we can't get purchased with these fin hands? Just go, I guess. I'm sorry to bother you.

It says alleged kidnapping of a girl. I don't know. So this is mentioned in the Magonia article, which is footnoting it from another source. So I don't know by alleged kidnapping, if the girl ever came back. I don't know what happened to this girl. Sounds like they would have found her at the bottom of the sea, maybe.

I can't help but notice there's a lot of these are, and you know, this goes, I think I said this many episodes. I think in our space episode, maybe I talk about how the ocean and space are the same thing.

A point on which I will debate you until the end of time.

No, they're the same thing. But I do find it interesting that there's so many aquatic inferences here. We do have, oh, I think that could have been a submarine. Oh, fish, fish hands. Oh, they're by the water. It does seem like once again, space and bodies of water being the same thing popped their dirty heads into the conversation again.

To be clear, we're inferring the submarine in the Paris match GB of Marseille story. Nothing in there. He does say that they were dressed in what looked like flexible metal diving suits.

Diving suits, portholes, which you usually use for.

Yeah, but that does bring to mind if you've never seen a space suit before, you would call that a flexible metal diving suit.

No, of course, yeah.

So, I don't know.

Well, we agree to disagree and the debate rages on, I guess. It is weird. Did they, have they all jumped out of bushes at this point?

Yeah, aliens, in starting in the 60s, they learned teleportation. Prior to that, they just jumped out of bushes.

This is a real question. It feels like there's multiple here where they're coming out of bushes, right? Or I mishear that.

Well, the GB of Marseille said that he was seized by two men who jumped out from behind a bush. This one from Brust, Denmark, just says it was an alleged kidnapping of a girl by two glowing entities with fish-like hands. There's no mention of bushes.

Okay, well, there's no mention of there not being bushes either, so.

And Albert Greer's brother just Supermanned away. Apparently, he levitated away as a blinding flash.

He zipped off.

He zipped off, sped northeast. Peter Rogersen, the author of the Magonia article, points out that these stories are all very bare bones as far as alien abductions would go. No sex, there's no medical examinations. There's nothing very traumatic at all.

That's because they're doing it at, that could be for lunch, like in the stark light of day.

Well, part of the reason I bring up and part of the reason I'm so obsessed with tracking down each of these things and like chasing these threads as far back as I can is I do think it is interesting that, you know, alien abductions, it does seem like they evolved in the sense that once one piece made its way into the story, then that piece would kind of stick around. But prior to that, you wouldn't really see, like there's no mention of probing or implants or anything in any of these stories.

Yes, but as we did get to probing and implants and more fantastic elements, I can't help but notice they've dropped a lot of the Bush material.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? So it's definitely evolving and part of that evolution might be editorializing because these stories have to be put out into the world. And so if it's gonna get put out by Weekly World News or by this French magazine, the guy might just be like, you know what, I'm gonna throw in something that makes this interesting for the reader.

Yeah.

Or remove things that aren't interesting for the reader. For all we know, every abduction starts with the rustling of a Bush.

Yeah, well, correct. Editorial standards have evolved at the time as well. And I think that's something I've encountered a bunch of times in nothing particular in this episode or the other Alien episodes. But there are, like when you start looking into like cryptid stories from the 1800s or something, a lot of people will remind you, if it was in like the 1830s, just because it was in the newspaper doesn't mean it actually happened. Rumor in innuendo would be printed. Tall tales would be printed.

It's still happening, but.

Sure, but it was much more, you know, while we can debate the veracity of all the information that ends up in the New York Times, they are not likely to publish a story that two cowboys shot a dragon out of the sky in Missoula, Montana or something.

And that's why they're the failing New York Times. If they should throw in a couple time slip articles every now and then. I'm sure they had a bump when they finally put UFOs on the front page, like a year or two ago, three years ago.

I would love it if the New York Times bought the Weekly World News and just made it a section in the paper, because everyone needs a little Weekly World News in their life.

I think so, yeah. It's not just for grocery store checkout lanes anymore.

Sad story about the Weekly World News, it hasn't been available in print for a long time. I wanna say like 10 or 15 years at least. I love the Weekly World News. I actually, when I was out of work during the writer's strike, I cold emailed the owner slash editor of the current version of the Weekly World News on LinkedIn. And it was like, it's my dream to write for your paper. Please, if there's anything I could do or any way I could be involved, please let me know. And I never heard back from him.

That makes sense.

But someday, someday.

It's weird that it's not in print anymore because like the crap I see in the checkout line magazine rack is the dumbest. It's always like a 35 page remembrance of Princess Diana, like collector's edition. I'm like, who is this for? Why is this here? At least give us Weekly World News. I wish I had better examples right now, but they're always hyper specific and for no one.

Well, they're hyper, I think they're hyper specific for grandmas and the nonas that go to the grocery store and will buy something with celebrities in it. Because celebrity media, sort of like country music, is one of the last things that you can sell.

That's true, yeah, people will pay for it, yeah. I mean, just ask Beyonce.

Everything else has been cannibalized by the internet. So I think celebrity stuff, yes, you could still sell that at the counter. Aliens and astrology and monsters and Elvis and ghosts and all that kind of stuff. Doesn't seem like anyone's buying that to put in their house anymore, which is a bummer.

It's no good. You could probably, we could start a blog or update our blog on this show and then you can kind of have a piece of that.

True, so like I was saying, the Magonia article points out that these stories are all very bare bones with nothing very traumatic in them. And I think it's a good example of how, even though this article was published in 1993, it was already a good example of how these abduction stories kind of grow and change with time. But that takes us to one of the elements of abduction stories that I think is one of the, people don't take it very seriously because it's kind of silly, but also genuinely one of the most invasive and scariest elements of alien abduction stories. Ed, say it with me, anal probes.

Anal probes, I said it a little late, but I knew it.

Now you might think that Scared All The Time is the kind of podcast that would try to make a joke out of our fears about anal probes by being glib and making jokes. And I'll have you know that we reject that impression and we'll proceed with only the highest of editorial standards on this episode, I swear. We've mentioned anal probes a few times throughout the past two episodes.

Didn't laugh once.

Didn't laugh once. I wanted to go deeper.

Okay, now see what you're doing, you piece of shit.

On the subject. Because as we've seen, the concept of penetrative sexual contact between humans and aliens seems to be a pretty prominent trope in modern alien abduction stories in the post Betty and Barney Hill era. Sometimes it does seem to be enjoyable and consensual, like what Antonio Villamoas experienced, and other times it is horrible and very non-consensual, like the Hills or even in Pascagoula, even though it wasn't explicitly sexual, a man getting a wiggly middle finger shoved down his throat is pretty awful.

Anyone.

Or I should say anybody getting a wiggly middle finger shoved down their throat is pretty awful. So the first thing I wanted to do in researching this was get a historical sense for how and when the scary non-consensual stories started to appear. And the answer was surprising. And again, in Chris's Additions Till Last Week follow up, the non-consensual anal probing actually started with Barney Hill. And I say it's surprising because I didn't come across these probing claims last week. And I think that's because I was focused on the content of the first book about the Hills, The Interrupted Journey, and the 45 minutes of tape of Barney's hypnosis sessions.

Is the second book called The Journey Continues Up His Ass?

What I had missed was twofold. One, that there are actually eight hours of tapes of the Hill's hypnosis that have never been released. So nine hours total. And two, I had missed a report released in 1965 by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon. This report, I've linked in the show notes, is written by investigator Walter Webb, who I think we did mention.

We did, yeah, he had spoken to them.

But I hadn't found this actual report, the full report that he had made, which is scanned and has been put on the internet so you can look at it. But in this report, Webb stated that during the hypnotic regression, Barney Hill stated that, and now this is a quote from the report, a cylindrical object was inserted up the rectum and once again, the witness believed something was extracted. This is the only source we have for this claim since no one else, as far as I can tell, has heard the tape that it comes from. So the only place that we have this anal probe from the Hill abduction is in this Webb report. The report did become public in the 60s, but the anal probe piece didn't really catch on the way that it did in the modern era. And I think we can speculate as to why. Maybe society was just not ready to have a discussion about something so invasive and violent and sexual. It was maybe better to ignore it. Whatever the reason, there's very little record of any other anal probes in the lore until 1987, which is when horror writer, Whitley Striever publishes blockbuster nonfiction book Communion, in which he recounts abductions under hypnosis performed on him by Bud Hopkins. Now, I don't know, Ed, are you familiar with Bud Hopkins or Whitley Striever at all?

I am not familiar with Bud Hopkins. I am familiar with the book Communion.

Yes.

But I'm not familiar with the, I never read it. I just know it exists. And I know it's really scary, actually, I think, of a book.

Yeah, well, I mean, part of the reason it's so scary is because Whitley Striever is the guy who wrote The Howling and They Hunger, I think. He was already an established horror writer who then said that he had been abducted from a cabin where he'd gone to, I think, for Christmas.

He wrote Wolfing and The Hunger and Communion.

Wolfing and The Hunger, that's what I was thinking. So he was already a published, well-known horror fiction writer who then was like, oh yeah, by the way, I got abducted by aliens and then turned that into his whole career. Bud Hopkins is also an incredibly interesting guy who was a modern artist who was friends with, or acquaintances with Rothko and de Kooning and was a very successful artist who found himself obsessed with UFOs after he spotted one and wrote a couple of articles for like the Village Voice and then people started writing him mail and then Bud Hopkins suddenly started going out and saying he could hypnotize people and-

Okay, I'm starting to see, based on some of this person's acquaintances, based on some of the places that published his works, based on the year it happened, I'm gonna go out and limb and say that maybe Barney Hill's anal probing was not put in the paper because we ain't talking about gays at any point, which is anything up a guy's ass, not even like gay people, but I'm saying anything even close to that, not happening. Then what's happening in the mid to late 1980s? We have the AIDS epidemic.

You are beating me to it, my friend.

Like we have this heightened fear. Now I joke about this all the time, not joke in a way that's like ha ha funny, but I watched Schlock with my friend Dan and we made these little drinking bingo cards over the years with squares of things that have to happen in the movie to prompt a drink, stuff like the family's drinking milk with dinner, K-Five Blazers show up, and one of the boxes on the card is called Queer Fear, which is anytime that is an element of either a joke or whatever it may be where a character reacts to their masculinity being challenged in some way, where it's just like, ugh, don't look at me, ugh, don't look at me. And man oh man, it might as well be a free space on the card because you're going to fucking drink. So yeah, looking at this time period, I'm not at all surprised that they covered up anal probing in the 60s and then very comfortably included anal probing in the 80s because of the AIDS epidemic and the perceptions around that and the people in the White House at that time and all that shit.

Well, literally the people in the White House. We'll get to that in a moment. Both Hopkins and Stryber are pretty controversial figures in UFO circles, which is one of the very way too far deep rabbit holes that I spent way too long going down and isn't really pertinent to the conversation here. What is pertinent is a passage from communion that as far as most people can tell is really the birth of the modern age. And Stryber recounts an awful probing. He says, quote, this is a quote from communion, soon I was in more intimate surroundings once again, there were clothes strewn about and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, was sort of a network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow and triangular in structure. They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression I was being raped and for the first time I felt anger. So it's also I think really interesting to note here that Stryber never called these beings aliens. He knew something had happened to him at the cabin, it was sort of that I had missing time, my memories were fuzzy. The alien connection was something that Hopkins made after the regression sessions, but it is an interpretation even furthered by the now infamous cover of Communion, which features that painting that I'm sure most of you have seen of the classic gray alien.

Which will be in the show notes.

Yes, which will be in the show notes. So my big question here was, when the first episode of South Park airs in 1997, just 10 years after Communion is published, alien anal probes were so well connected in people's minds that the first episode of South Park, the pilot was called Cartman Gets an Anal Probe. So what happened between 1987 and 1997 that made this so connected in people's brains that it was like a meme that like everyone sort of knew it? And I found a really interesting theory on r slash ask historians and Ed, this is what you were saying, that theorizes it might be thanks in part to Ronald Reagan. I didn't know this, but President Reagan struggled with colon polyps and cancer throughout his presidency. And in 1985, he underwent a colonoscopy and colectomy during which he transferred power over to the vice president temporarily. And his followup colonoscopy and polyp removal was even more widely publicized. And that happened in 1987, the same year that Communion was published. On top of that, this post points out that the AIDS crisis was in full swing at this point, and homophobic fears revolving around anal penetration would have been at an all time high. And so you and this guy think alike, and the theory here is that between Communion being a bestselling book and the public talking about colonoscopies and the AIDS crisis and all of that being in the air that now we were open to talk about these things, even if derisively, whereas in the 60s, you just didn't talk about that sort of thing.

Absolutely not. Yeah, pre-Stonewall, all that, you're not having that discussion, no one's, that's not in the news. And then cut to, you got these bigots running around being open-minded about aliens, but then closed-minded about everything else. And so they were more than happy to be like, see, anyone who wants to be in your ass is a fucking monster. Like that's...

I mean, yeah, I think people, it was sort of the scariest thing that could happen. There's even Dan O'Bannon who wrote Alien.

Alien, yeah. And then Return of the Living Dead is so fucking good. And Life Force, hugely expensive movie that was a massive failure.

Oh yeah, the Tobey Hooper space vampire movie.

Yeah, there's a lot of nudity and a lot to like in it. And it's a canon film, it's a super expensive canon film that was a massive failure. And it's just like a naked lady walking around the whole movie. But it's an interesting movie. And it was definitely one of those movies that helped destroy a studio.

Right, right.

He wrote Total Recall, shit dude. He wrote a lot of good movies and a lot of real pieces of shit. So that's the business. But he's no longer with us. RIP, God bless.

RIP, God bless. What I was gonna say is Dan O'Bannon described, and I was just looking up the quote here to make sure that I got it right so I don't mess it up. But he described the face hugger as homosexual oral rape to make the men in the audience cross their legs. So they very openly knew what they were doing in that movie. I guess you could, that was 79, so some of those ideas might have also been floating around out there in the air. Basically, my point is that I think the idea that alien anal probe mythology grew out of cultural fears as opposed to specific cases, I think is a very valid point because outside of communion, there aren't really that many well-known cases between 87 and 97 that are worth mentioning. I actually looked this up. According to supernatural historian Jason Colavito, there were only a handful of other instances of anal probes between 87 and 97. The first comes from a book called Secret Life, published in 1992, in which author David M. Jacobs claimed that aliens conducted rectal examinations with an instrument shaped like a wire whisk. So don't make cupcakes with that when you're done with it.

Well, not after, before, whatever you want.

Put it in the dishwasher. Also in 1992, UFO researcher Carla Turner defined anal probing as one of the key elements of an alien abduction. Genitalia and anal probes are performed on children as well as adults. And she said that numerous reports confirmed anal probing.

Well, she seems like a lot of fun at parties.

Carla Turner is not a lot of fun at parties. RIP, God bless, she died of cancer in 1996.

Well, I mean, before that, obviously. I'm not gonna drag her body to a party. I'm saying before that, she seems like a buzzkill being like, you know, they also fuck kids. It's like, okay, thanks, whatever her name is.

Even before that, if you go to her memorial website, which I have listed in the show notes, you will find yourself on the precipice of crazy. I don't wanna talk shit on this woman because I did not research her that extensively.

It's never stopped you before.

Yeah, but her memorial website is hosted on zerzetzung.org. Zerzetzung is German for decomposition and disruption. It's also the term for the psychological warfare employed by the Stasi to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 80s. And this website's banner reads, Welcome to the CIA Dictatorship, now featuring classified MKUltra neurotechnology and claims that carless cancer was given to her on purpose as part of a murder plot on behalf of the US government because of what she discovered about alien abductions.

I mean, look at this Boeing ship, man. For all we know what it is, who knows? For all we know, this is your reading fact. Who knows, man?

Yeah, I don't know if the cancer gun is real, but if it is, maybe they turned it on Carla Turner.

Carla, RIP, God bless.

Carla, RIP, God bless. So in 1994, the other kind of anal probe worth mentioning is John E. Mack's abduction.

I'm sorry, is his name John the Letter E. Mack's or John E.

John the Letter E. Mack. The guy, in 1994, John Mack's book, Abduction, described a tube inserted in the rectum as part of an alien abduction. And in the book reported that under hypnosis, an abductee named Peter Faust said he was anally probed. We're gonna talk more about Mack and Faust in a minute, but here I want to point out that this particular probing case is interesting because John Mack and Bud Hopkins already had a close working relationship at this point. So I think it's kind of curious just a few years after Communion comes out, now another guy is dredging up stories of anal probes from another subject.

And it sounds like more hypnosis, right? These are all coming out through hypnosis, which seems a little fucking suspicious.

Yes. Stryber and Hopkins would later be split on whether or not the anal probes were used to sample fecal matter from humans, which is what Stryber thought, or used to electro stimulate the male prostate in order to collect sperm, which is what Hopkins hypothesized.

Okay, Hopkins is definitely more fun at parties.

I was going to make a joke that I guess in Hopkins hypothesis, women would never get an anal probe. But that made me wonder if women have ever reported receiving an alien anal probe. So I looked and strangely enough, after a pretty deep dive, again, I haven't dedicated my entire life to this, but I spent most of the week looking, I couldn't find any notable stories of women who have recalled an alien anal probe with or without hypnosis.

And what do you have to go to, like page 73 on Google before you're past all the Pornhub links and stuff?

There were, sometimes when I searched Pornhub links would come up, sometimes they would not. But most of the women's stories did seem to revolve more around fertility. Like Betty Hill had that needle inserted into her stomach and it was described as a pregnancy test. In 1993, I found a story of an abductee named Kelly Cahill who reported a strange triangle shape near her belly button where she said one of her alien abductors leaned over her belly as if to kiss her. Hopkins, Bud Hopkins, recorded one woman's story that is eerily similar to Satanic Panic cases in which this woman was abducted three times. The first time impregnated with an alien seed, then abducted a second time to have her stomach cut open and the fetus violently removed, and then a third time to meet the child. So it's weird that lots of women have reported alien abductions, but none have reported the anal probing, which if you approach the phenomenon psychologically is pretty interesting.

And it goes against what the Carla whatever was saying where she was trying to say that it's ever present, that it's like part of the checkbox of were you abducted.

Yeah.

So fucking Carla. I think it's queer fear. Simple as that. And that's right. Especially if we don't have it come up as much in a more modern alien abduction take, which we'll get to, I'm sure. But if it's kind of had its heyday during this heightened queer fear, it's just a term I use. Not like I don't know if that's a real thing.

It is. Yeah.

You know, time period. Then yeah, it just seems a little like, you know, it was already in the subconscious of the world. I don't know.

Or alternatively, Bud Hopkins is right, and anal probes are designed to make dudes bust in a cup. You know, there's this like, that's the other reason that it only happens to men, is that they really do use it to stimulate the prostate. But I don't know, either way, well, not either way. I think if it is psychological queer fear, that makes a lot more sense than if alien anal probes are a real physical thing. Because they already had it figured out with Boas, if the idea was to get male seed, there's way more pleasant ways to do that.

You bring a pointy-chinned lady, if it's a straight guy, and if it's not, then I guess you bring a pointy-chinned gentleman. And if you are, in fact, able to use telepathy or speak to us with, what is it, ESP or... If you can look in my head, you should know pretty quickly which chin to send in, is what I'm getting at.

Yeah. People are probably tired of me saying this every time we talk about aliens, but I do think it's worth repeating that if aliens are real, I have a hard time believing that their ships and medical procedures would be anything but indistinguishable from magic to us. There's no reason that an alien ship that gets all the way here is then using this medieval probe for anything.

I get it, but I also... We've had this discussion. I've been on the other end of this in the past with you. And I think there is a version, or it seems, do you think maybe the really good shit is off on more important missions and more important planets? And then you have these kind of idiot aliens who are like, I mean, look, if I can just borrow the old shit, I'll be back on Tuesday. Like, I got my own weird kink to deal with. I'm gonna go do this on Earth, and I'll be back. And they're driving like jalopies where the really high-end stuff that you're talking about, that's off on planets who don't even know yet doing interesting missions.

But I get, well...

Or these are literally like cars where you drive a piece of shit, I drive a piece of shit, and it's like, it gets us to where we need to go. But we keep thinking, I don't know, like, oh, a spaceship is an organization, came together to fund an interesting project in a scientific endeavor that is going to leave the planet Earth and it's going to enter the solar system. And no astronaut farmer is doing that. You know what I mean? Like, we're not just getting in our jalopies and leaving Earth, but if you're living on a planet that's so advanced, maybe your Honda Civic can just travel to another planet. I think the problem is we're dealing with broke aliens, dude. We're only getting broke busted aliens.

My question would be, okay, fine, to take your Honda Civic metaphor, why is everything inside your Honda Civic from the Bronze Age? You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't know. Like, everything in my Honda Civic is as advanced as the car itself.

Yeah.

I did see someone online pushing back with the argument that not all technology advances equally. It would be like saying if you took an ancient Egyptian into the present, that they wouldn't believe we still use knives to cut our food because knives are so old. How does such an advanced race, why are we still using them?

Yeah, why aren't we cutting broccoli with lasers?

And they have a point, but I also then, it's like ancient Egyptians lived what, like five, three to five thousand years ago or something. If we're being visited by beings from other galaxies, they have more than five thousand years on us. You know, five thousand years isn't really that long of a time.

I guess, I don't know. I don't want to meet any of these fucking things. So I don't care if they were born yesterday. Get the fuck off our planet, pal.

Well, in any case, there's one last bit on anal probes that I'd like to touch on. It actually connects to some of the other subjects we've discussed on this show. In my research this week, I discovered a paper published at Penn State in 2012 by Joseph Laycock called Carnal Knowledge, The Epistemology of Sexual Trauma in Witches' Sabbaths, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Alien Abduction Narratives. So this guy wrote like the meta paper that ties together almost everything that we've talked about. We've touched on all of these subjects, and the paper is really long, so I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'm just going to read the abstract.

At a certain point, this should make you leave school. Like, this is a ridiculous paper.

But I'm glad it exists because this is, I find this so interesting. And it's really worth reading the whole thing. It's just, it's very long. So I'm just going to read the abstract here. The abstract is this, quote, There are strong similarities between the confessions taken from accused witches in early modern Europe, the testimony of Satanic ritual abuse taken by modern therapists, and accounts of alien abduction given under hypnosis. In each of these narratives, a subject describes horrible sexual transgressions performed on them at the hand of a mysterious other, the thorny penis of the devil, the bizarre anal insertions of Satanists, and the mysterious probing of aliens. The motive behind these sexual acts is never revealed, and the existence of the perpetrators is usually in doubt. This article suggests that sexual trauma serves an epistemological function. For such apparent victims, a belief in demons, Satanists or aliens provides a meaningful worldview and narratives of sexual transgressions maintain and even compound these beliefs. Carnal knowledge, knowledge through sexual encounters, is privileged above visual or auditory encounters, and is therefore more useful for constructing meaningful cosmologies in which human beings may interact with the divine. Carnal knowledge was a privileged form of epistemology in pre-Christian cultures. Since the days of the early Christian church and the equation of sexuality with sin, carnal knowledge has survived in the form of masochistic and traumatic sexual encounters. So, brother, that's the good shit. I love that kind of thinking. This idea that these stories are sort of a way of seeing and knowing and a more seemingly true or real way of interacting with the divine than even sight or sound. That's a really fascinating idea to me.

Carnal knowledge is knowing in the biblical sense. Is that what you're saying? Where like they used to say to know someone was like coded message to mean like you fucked them.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that what that whole piece you just read me was saying and I didn't pick that up?

Yeah, quote, carnal knowledge, knowledge through sexual encounters, is privileged above visual or auditory encounters.

I mean, I guess. I don't even know how to take that guy's quote. I mean, it's like just say that it's more intimate, I don't know, more vulnerable. I don't know. Is this guy saying that we need to fuck every alien we meet?

No, I believe what Joseph Lacock is saying here is that humans have some sort of a psychological urge to interact or commune with the divine and that there is something about the sexual aspect of communion with the divine that feels more primal to us, that feels like this primal or carnal knowledge that if we have that kind of encounter with the divine, that it feels more true or more real. And that that's why somehow deep within us, when we tell these stories to each other about witches or satanists or aliens, that these tropes keep popping up because it's more meaningful than just seeing or just hearing. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. I looked at some of these things being included as trying to lend credence to the story by being like, hey, if this wasn't true, why would I even tell you it? It's embarrassing otherwise.

Yeah, I don't even know if it's so much the idea that this sexual component is added to make the stories feel more real. It's not like trying to sell a line of bullshit. Like maybe for, I guess it's possible. Somebody, I was reading another article about Whitley Stryber at one point tries to remember the smell of one of the aliens because there's some philosopher or scientist or somebody who has suggested that smell is more valid of a memory.

It's the greatest like sense memory. Yeah, like you walk into a Dunkin Donuts anywhere in the country, you'll think about Dunkin Donuts anywhere you've ever been. I mean, that's just a very personal experience, but yeah, sense memory is insane.

Oh God, I love the smell of Dunkin Donuts.

Yeah.

It takes me back.

Exactly. And anytime you walk into one, you just feel like you can see every Dunkin Donuts you've ever walked into.

Yeah. So some people have accused Stryber of adding that detail as a way of helping to sell his story. I think what this quote is suggesting though is less that sexual details are added to make things seem more believable and more that these stories bubble up as sexual because there's something even more primal about that than experiencing these things through other senses. But also this is like stuff that you go to college for and I don't really fully understand it.

Yeah, no, we didn't go to those schools. Yeah, no, I don't think we had to turn in any papers, let alone whatever the hell this doctorate thesis is.

Yeah. So basically that explanation rings more true to me than abductions and anal probing being a physically real experience carried out by beings from another planet, but I'm open. There's a chance I'm wrong. And to try to prove to myself that maybe I'm wrong, I wanted to look into another kind of very frightening, very painful, very scary abduction experience, which is the alien implant experience. The idea of waking up with a strange implant beneath your skin after being abducted by an alien is almost as common an occurrence in pop culture as getting probed is, but the history of it, I think, is almost even stranger. According to that Magonia article that I mentioned up top, the concept of alien implants can be sort of traced to a March 1957 Long John Neville radio show interview with ufologist John Robinson, in which Robinson recounted a neighbor's claims of being kidnapped by aliens in 1938 and kept subdued by quote small earphones placed behind his ears. What's interesting about that alien kidnapping or one might call it an abduction from 1938 is A, it would be old and B, the guy wasn't kidnapped or abducted to a spaceship. He was taken to a cave, which I think is kind of interesting. Then in 1938, the idea of being taken to a spaceship maybe wasn't in the lexicon yet, but a cave would have made sense.

If it was like a metal or iron cave type of thing, steel cave could be another name for like a UFO. But also, do you remember that Nickelodeon show Prometheus and Bob?

Oh, yeah.

About like the alien in the cave, man. It was part of that like Kazam or Kablui or the fuck was it called?

Kablam.

Kablam.

I loved Kablam. The superhero toys.

Toys were great. Yeah. And then I think, yeah, might have even had Eek the Cat in there. I don't know.

But Prometheus and Bob, yes.

It immediately made me think of Prometheus and Bob, of like the idea of an alien and caveman technology together at last.

Yeah. I mean, the providence of this story is really dubious. I don't think it's considered one of the more realistic stories in UFO lore, but I do think it's interesting. 38 is early and small earphones would have been, I don't even know in 38.

But also behind the ears, right? Like aren't there like little patches or things you can put behind your ears to help with like vertigo and motion sickness and stuff? So there is stuff going on right there on the back of your head, I feel like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mention it because it is the earliest story I could find of an abductee interfacing with alien technology in a way that is reminiscent of implants. And then according to a Skeptical Inquirer article from 1998, reports of alien implants really kicked off with the alleged abduction of a Massachusetts woman named Betty Andreessen in early 1967. However, and I think in probably not great for the veracity of her case, the case wasn't really publicized widely until 1979 when a guy named Raymond Fowler published his book The Andreessen Affair. Under hypnosis, there it is again.

Yeah, it's like you always say as of last week, going under hypnosis is fiction osmosis.

Yeah. Andreessen claimed the aliens had implanted and then removed a device in the form of a small spiked ball by inserting a needle up her nose, which is awful. A needle up the nose next to dental work is probably one of the worst things I can imagine.

You can get to the brain from there. That's what the Egyptians were doing.

Yeah, well, and we've all post-COVID, we've all had the swabs. Can you imagine something two or three times as long as that going up into your fucking head?

No, I can't, but I'm sure if I do five minutes of Googling, I'll find a bunch of conspiracy theorists who are like, every time you got a COVID swab, you're getting a spiky ball put in your brain from the government. So, you know, it's out there.

So Fowler, Raymond Fowler, who wrote the book, The End Recent Affair, speculated that the BB ball-sized implant could have been a monitoring device.

Did you have a BB gun growing up?

I did not.

We did. It was the most fun.

I had Nerf guns and all my friends had. They were like BB guns, but they shot little plastic balls.

Yes. Yeah. Those are airsoft. We had a regular BB gun. We had a regular like pump action BB gun that was, I remember it being like, this is wildly unsafe because it would be like my brother and I both not having the strength to pump it. And then like it would be two kids trying to pump it together. It was like just unsupervised.

One's holding it between the other one's legs, like to brace it and looking straight at it.

Yeah. Yeah. Basically so that we could, because it had to be like pumped enough times that air compresses to shoot the BB or whatever. So we would work together to get it pumped. And then, you know, we had set up a little cardboard box with action figures on top of it and would shoot it out in the yard. But we lived kind of, we weren't like, we didn't have like neighbors right there or anything. So it was, you know, you can kind of do what you wanted.

Yeah.

But it is, I think fondly back to unsupervised BB guns.

I think unfondly on BB guns because the only, so my friends had airsoft guns by the time I was in like middle school. But when I was in elementary school, there was this kid that lived next to my grandmother named Ken, who I later heard became a neo-Nazi.

You do hate to hear it.

When he was a kid and not a neo-Nazi, to be very clear.

He was part of the neo-Nazi youth.

Yeah. I went over to his house to play Sega Genesis or something. And at some point, I remember we went to this tree house he had and he had his BB gun in the tree house. And we were sitting up there and this squirrel came along the window. And he goes, watch this. And he took the BB gun and got it as close as he could to the squirrel and pulled the trigger and popped the squirrel, it seemed like right in the side of the head. And the squirrel like, you know, I don't know if it died or what happened, but...

Yeah, shooting squirrels in a barrel with a BB gun is definitely a piece of shit move. And I'm not at all surprised that they would later then go on to be an older piece of shit. But shooting toys with your brothers is perfectly fine and we're not garbage people.

For sure, for sure. Well, soon after Andreessen claims that these aliens had implanted a ball in her nose, another woman named Dorothy Wallace came forward with similar claims about a small spiky ball that was implanted and removed from her nose. In time, David Jacobs, a historian turned abduction researcher, found the Andreessen-Wallace type implant to be stereotypical among abductee claimants. He noted, the object is as small as or smaller than a BB, it is usually smooth or has small spikes sticking out of it or has holes in it. The function of this device is unknown. It might be a locator so that the targeted individual can be found and abducted. It might serve as a monitor of hormonal changes. It might facilitate the molecular changes needed for transport and entrance. I believe he means of human beings from their bedroom to the ship.

Sure.

It might facilitate communication. Sometimes nosebleeds occur after this procedure. Both child and adult abductees have seen physicians for nosebleed problems and have discovered odd holes inside their nose.

Can't all be cocaine. Can't all be cocaine-related deviated symptoms, not on these kids.

They're like, we're just seeing a huge uptick in nose implants right around the Miami area. We're not quite sure what's going on. Jacobs also notes that several abductees have reported that a ball-shaped object either dropped out of their nose or was expelled when they blew their nose. Now, notably, all of these expulsions happened before this person knew they had been abducted. And in each case, they thought they had inexplicably inhaled something and discarded the object or lost it. So, in other words, there were people who, when either put under hypnosis or in whatever way came to believe that they had been abducted by aliens and had an implant, are then remembering, oh, hey, there was that time that I sneezed and something came out of my nose and I didn't know what it was, but I don't have it anymore because I thought it was trash. But they're always saying it happens before they knew because obviously if you knew you'd been abducted by aliens and you sneezed a fucking BB-Bolt with spikes on it out of your nose, you'd be like, oh shit.

I should hang on to this. Yeah, this is proof.

Yeah, but unfortunately, they hadn't remembered their abductions yet. So by the mid-90s, the X-Files was huge and stories of alien abductions and implantations had become tabloid fodder. This decade also saw the rise to prominence of Harvard psychologist John Mack, who we briefly mentioned earlier. And really, it saw his rise to prominence in the world of UFO investigations because John Mack was already a pretty prominent guy, and that's what makes him so interesting. Again, this is one of those rabbit holes I could have gone down for a whole other week just reading about this guy's life. But basically, John Mack was legitimately one of the stars of Harvard University. He was one of the brightest minds at Harvard, and he was one of the men who forged Harvard's Cambridge Hospital Department of Psychiatry into a premier teaching hospital. He was a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He was certified as a child psychoanalyst, and he was a chairman of the executive committee for all five hospital-based departments of psychiatry that make up the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In the 90s, he also got way wrapped up in the abduction mystery to the point that Harvard ended up investigating him to figure out if he was losing his mind.

Oh, good. I see that Harvard still has that going on these days. I don't know the vetting process over there.

Yeah. As Psychology Today noted in 1994, Mack has published over 150 books and articles on subjects ranging from nightmares to teenagers who kill their mothers to Russian children's feelings about nuclear weapons. And so his excursion into the realm of ETs has elicited an outcry of contempt, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, confusion, interest, and even admiration from his colleagues. No less than Carl Sagan, a friend of Mack's, tried to reality check him at the urging of another mutual friend. Quote, I tried to argue that on issues of this importance, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, Sagan says, and John would have none of that. He was quite content with anecdotal cases and his judgment that these people must be telling the truth because they are so extremely distraught.

But didn't Sagan kind of famously have like a falling out with Harvard?

Ooh, good question, I don't know.

Yeah, before he went to Cornell, I'm pretty sure he worked there for a while and then left because they denied his tenure. And it made no sense, it was very unexpected. And I guess they told him, your scientific focus is too broad, but the real reasoning seems to just be like, we don't like that you're more popular than Harvard. Like, you're a famous person. I mean, it's from what I could tell. It's just, hey, you're on TV, you're a rock star fucking scientist that overshadows your position here, so get the hell out of here. We're not gonna approve of your tenure, really weird.

That's fucking dumb.

So it's funny that he's the guy who's like, tell me again about why it is you get to work here and be the head of all these departments if you're losing your mind seeing aliens everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, John Mack, I think he was a very smart man who by all accounts was very invested in, you know, making the world a better place, doing all kinds of nonprofit stuff, really interested in the way the human mind functions. And every interview I've seen with him, I mean, clearly he thought he was on to something because he did put his entire career at risk for decades chasing this stuff down. And really one of the things that I think is interesting that would be a whole other episode would be, I think I mentioned this earlier, but the person who brought all of this to Mac's attention was Bud Hopkins, the artist turned UFO investigator.

Turned bestseller.

Turned bestseller. He and John Mac had a mutual friend in common and John Mac had started exploring this sort of like breathwork therapy. There's a term for it that I'm blanking on right now, but it's this sort of breathwork that can like, some people think you can have all kinds of spiritual experiences. John Mac claimed that when he tried it, he became like a 10th century Mongol who was watching his four year old son be decapitated. And it sort of opened his, I don't want to say it opened his third eye because I don't think that's a term he used, but it sort of opened his mind up to everything beyond just the pure psychology that he was studying and somebody, one of his friends, introduced him to Bud Hopkins, who showed him a whole bunch of UFO evidence that he'd been collecting. And Mac was particularly impressed with the way that all of the interviews with these abductees sounded as if they had experienced genuine psychological trauma on a level beyond a hallucination.

Well, here's a question for you that you might not have the answer offhand. Did his time at Harvard, did Mac's time at Harvard, like was he there at the same time as Timothy Leary, which would have been the late 50s, I think, early 60s?

No, I don't believe so, but I did find someone did compare him to Timothy Leary in the sense that this is a smart, accredited guy who took on a very unusual interest and then kind of went around the world, tried to spread the idea and made a lot of enemies in the process.

Yeah, that's immediately where my mind's going to. So yeah, Harvard just constantly, they give people just enough room to fuck themselves up a little bit. They give them people just enough room to be like, hey, quarterly check-in, what are you up to now? I was like, oh my God, that, we gotta talk.

Whatever you think of the Ivy League, it's certainly a collection of very intelligent people who wanna make a name for themselves and want to contribute to the world. And I think sometimes find these branches where, I think, was it Harvard? It might not be Harvard. One of the major Ivy League schools has made a lot of progress on near-death experience research.

We got flatliners out there?

Well, they're not flatlining, but one of the major Ivy League schools has done a bunch of research, and I think they just changed the term from near-death experience to something that suggests more the idea that near-death experiences aren't near-death, they are the experience of death, and that there is, you know, actual clinical research to be done post-medical death.

I'm sure we're close to one of those movies where it's like, the person died, plugged these diodes onto their head, and we can see the last 10 minutes of their lives or whatever. I'm surprised, honestly, we haven't gotten to whatever that technology is, if we have like Neuralink in the news these days and stuff.

Maybe we should do an episode on near-death experiences because some of them are very scary and there is some genuinely very interesting, very real science around the idea that there's stages beyond brain and heart death or whatever that we can come back from. But anyway, where were we here? John Mack's book that we mentioned earlier, Abduction, hit shelves in 1994 and outlined his belief roughly that some sort of spiritual slash alien slash human hybridization program was underway in an attempt to save Earth from an ecological disaster. This book highlighted stories from a number of abductees, including Peter Faust, who believed he had endured years of sexual probing by hooded creatures who implanted chips in his anus and stimulated him to ejaculate. After eight hypnotic regression sessions with John Mack and a battery of psychological tests in the early 1990s, Peter Faust concluded that he was in some way spiritually yoked or betrothed to a female alien-human hybrid with whom he has multiple children. And then Peter Faust went on Oprah with John Mack and added to the media circus around abduction and implantations. And suddenly, by the mid-90s, abductees with implants were crawling out of the woodwork.

Well, that's the Oprah effect, man. Oprah puts you on her book club. You're going to have a huge spike. Oprah puts you on whatever the fuck this is. You're going to see a huge spike in that.

Yeah, although I put the video in the show notes, but Oprah, for a woman who basically is the reason that we have to deal with Dr. Phil.

And Dr. Oz.

And Dr. Oz. She's super dismissive of Peter Faust, to the point that I'm like, she questions him on the show. She'll be like, so what happened? And he's like, well, you know, ever since I was a child, I was being visited by aliens. And she's just like, that sounds like the dumbest tabloid story I've ever heard.

Damn, girl.

Like, damn, she's going in on Peter Faust, but Dr. Oz, she's like, yeah, sure, we should all be eating fly eggs or whatever to burn belly fat fast.

Yeah, anything that you can genuinely track his personal company's involvements in that week is now the thing for your heart or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, she, maybe that was the day she learned that you should give in to the charlatan. Where it's like, oh, why am I fighting back? I could be making so much more money by just hitching my fucking wagon to charlatans.

Yeah.

It was a teachable moment for her. I'd like to see her net worth before and after that year when she stopped dismissing charlatans.

Well, she also, didn't we, in our Satanic Panic episode, I feel like we covered...

Well, no, she had people on for Satanic Panic. We definitely did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think she was kind of dismissive then too, which, I mean, probably good for her, but...

Did she do an apology tour after, like she did with Million Little Pieces or whatever?

I don't know. You know, James Frey, who wrote that book, instead of receding and just going away and being ashamed, he just became like a successful screenwriter.

That makes sense.

He was just like, yeah, I made it all up, but it was moving, wasn't it?

Well, here's a bunch of other crap I can make up that's moving.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of charlatans, by the mid-90s in 1995, a California podiatrist named Roger Lear teamed with a hypnotherapist and chief investigator of the Houston UFO Network named Daryl Sims to perform surgical extractions on abductees who believe they had implants beneath their skin.

I mean, neither one of the people you just mentioned, you didn't say surgeon for either of those people.

Correct, correct. There was also a third unnamed surgeon who didn't want to be associated with the efforts who did help them do some of these surgeries. Although I believe Roger Lear did some of them himself.

Oh yeah, I'm not surprised by what I'm hearing. Doctors without borders, more like doctors without boundaries, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. So interestingly, none of these implants that they pulled out of these people looked anything like the BB balls that Andreessen and Wallace made popular. Instead, many of the implants removed by Lear and others were remarkably diverse. One of them looks like a shard of glass, another is this triangular, or some people called it a star shaped piece of metal. One person had a carbon fiber removed, so on and so forth. And it's also important to note that none of these 90s implants were located in the brain or the nasal cavity where all these stories had started. These implants that Roger Lear and friends were removing in their garage or whatever, were recovered from extremities, like toes, hands, shins and so on.

Well, the podiatrist knows his way around a foot.

I also think it's just really funny the idea that aliens are like, hmm, these useless toes, as humans call them, perhaps if we put our implants in there, no one would think to look there. And then Dr. Lear is like, no toe escapes his scrutiny. He's their greatest foe. They thought they were being sneaky.

He's a toe foe.

He's a toe foe. But the implication here is that all of these supposed implants are just foreign objects from accidents, falling, scraping your knee, getting hit with something and getting a little splinter that stays under your skin.

I have two right now. Well, they're a little unusual. People sometimes ask about them, but I have the two on my right arm from when that kid stabbed me with a pencil. So I have those two.

Oh shit.

Yeah, so they look weird. They look like these kind of dark blue, almost blackish, just under the skin things. But it's where the pencil had basically tattooed me.

Interesting.

I got stabbed twice with its pencil and they're both still there.

So is there actual graphite in there?

I don't know. I don't feel anything. I think it might just be tattooed in the sense that it went however deep it went. And it drew on all that. But why would it still be there? And I'm like 40. So I don't know. I'll put a picture of the show notes.

Well, these things, I mean, this one guy, Jesse Long, I was watching one of the interviews with him about the implant that was taken out from his leg. And it's this fairly significantly large, long kind of thin, like almost like a thin, skinny triangle sliver of glass, at least to the human eye, it looks like glass. But he says he was living with it in his shin for like 30 years. Because he said it was an implant that he got when he was a kid. And so it seems like living with this glass in your leg would have been insanely painful.

How long was it?

Just a couple of inches.

I mean, a couple inches is big.

Yeah, we're not talking like a tiny.

I thought it might have been a sliver or something.

No, it looked pretty big. I mean, they didn't hold a ruler up to it or anything in the show, but it looked significant. It was broken in two.

And if it wasn't painful, it was definitely at least noticeable. I mean, you had a couple inches of glass. You got a Dorito of glass in you.

Yeah, but this area is where tales of alien implants really starts to fall apart for me. None of the physical evidence ever seems to hold up. After all the emotional and physical pain and fear involved in getting the implants put in and the surgeries then necessary to get them out, most alien implants removed from people seem to be either prosaic or exaggerated bullshit. I actually found a quote from an article on Skeptoid that I think kind of sums it all up. When I first began researching alien implants, it was with great anticipation. I was eager to see neat, finely crafted tiny objects, perhaps even micro mechanisms or circuits. I was excited to see metallurgical proof of extraterrestrial origin, but sadly the more I looked, the further my spirits dropped. What I'd hoped would be a fascinating episode with some hopefully unanswered questions turned into a dreary slog through abysmal evidence, spectacular claims backed up by no evidence, and sad, obvious misunderstanding of basic scientific knowledge. And I will tell you, a dreary slog through abysmal evidence describes most of my research on this subject this week. It seems like a lot of bullshit. I am putting alien implants way near the bottom of things that I believe happen.

Well, it's especially interesting that like, I read this really great book that I might have mentioned on the podcast already called Chip War this past year. And it's just unbelievable the amount of circuitry we can put on things the size of part of your fingernail, you know, to make phones and shit. And it's like, we're doing that. And you traveled across the cosmos and you're putting sea glass in people? Like, that's what I'm saying. Like you have every opportunity. If you're flying across the cosmos, you should be able to have small circuitry or tracking devices or something and not just, it seems like maybe aliens are just accidentally leaving shit in people. And it's not an effort to track us or anything. It's kind of like when a doctor accidentally sews you back up with the scissors in. Where it's like, has anyone checked to see if any of these devices say like property of St. Vincent's Hospital?

Yeah. Or just at this point, maybe we can get to the bottom of it by hiring a lawyer and trying to sue whoever left it in there.

Oh my God.

And we'll follow that paper trail to the stars, baby.

Follow the money.

So at the end of this implant slog, I was basically ready to give up on ever finding any kind of physical evidence from alien abduction cases that I could believe. Until I stumbled across something I hadn't seen or heard of since we talked about the Antonio Villamois case in the first episode of this series. Radiation burns. Now originally, I'd planned to cover two more stories here. The Falcon Lake incident and the Cash Landrum encounter. Unfortunately, the more I dug into the Falcon Lake incident, the more it seemed like bullshit. And considering how much bullshit alien implants seems to be, I didn't want to go through a whole other case where at the end of it, I'm like, yeah, and this guy basically seems like he made it up and used a waffle iron to make weird burn patterns on his shirt.

Okay, the George Foreman grill incident?

Yeah, I mean, literally, the big compelling piece of evidence is that he said he'd been blasted by radiation that had come out of a grill on the side of this, not like a cooking grill, like a mechanical.

Like a car grill.

Yeah, that this radioactive heat had blasted him. And one of the things he presented as evidence was his shirt he was wearing that had this square pattern of weird burn marks. And somebody matched it to a waffle iron. And then somebody else matched it even more accurately to a piece of smelting equipment that this guy who was like, he was some sort of a miner or something in Canada, he would have had access to very easily. That was enough for me to kind of be like, eh.

Yeah, and it didn't help that like on this shirt or also imprinted from pressing it on this machine said like, JW Smelting and Sons or whatever.

He's like, no, no, no, those are alien symbols.

Yeah, you're looking upside down.

But Cash Landrum encounter, for my money and the reason that I wanna wrap this series up with this encounter is I think one of the most compelling alien encounter stories I've ever heard. To be clear, it is not an abduction, but to me this one is these people definitely saw something.

And to be doubly fair, we started Alien Abductions with a fairy story. So if we wanna end with a radiation story, that's our prerogative.

True, true, I just mean it's not, we've covered a lot of actual abductions and no one gets abducted in this story.

Sure, true.

If you're here because you're afraid of being abducted, I'm about to let you down.

And stay away from the bushes.

Yes, stay away from the bushes. And the bendy Frenchmen who hide amongst them.

Yeah, the baguette in a turtleneck that comes out from the bushes.

So the story goes like this. On the evening of December 29th, 1980, a 51-year-old woman named Betty Cash, her friend, a 57-year-old woman named Vicky Landrum, and Vicky's seven-year-old grandson Colby Landrum were driving home to Dayton, Texas in Cash's Oldsmobile Cutlass after going out to eat. So sick car, first of all.

Hell yeah, dude.

Granny's cruising. Around 9 p.m. they saw light in the sky that they thought was a plane approaching Houston International about 30 miles away. But a few minutes later, they saw the light again, now much closer and brighter. The light was emanating from a huge diamond-shaped object hovering at treetop level along the side of the road. This craft was expelling flames from the bottom and emitting enough heat that the women felt it inside the car. Landrum told Cash to stop the car, fearing that they would be burned if they got closer. She was also a devout, born-again Christian and interpreted the object as a sign of the second coming of Christ.

I mean, if you're looking for it, you can see that anywhere, I think.

Well, she's, Landrum is quoted as saying, that's Jesus, he will not hurt us. Which is such a wild thing to say in this situation that it strikes me as real. Like, how scared and confused and reaching for an explanation must you be? To identify the giant fire diamond is Jesus, who is, as far as I know, famously a man and not a giant fire diamond.

That would be his dad.

Yeah.

But they're one in the same, there's three people in one, so.

Like, whatever they saw was so inexplicable that it shook them on a spiritual level.

Sure.

Which I think is like, point one in something happened. So, Cash and Landrum get out of the car to examine the object, but Colby, the grandson, was so scared that Landrum ran back to the car to confront him.

Wait, comfort them or confront them?

Comfort him.

Oh, I think you said confront, and I was like, oh my God, did they run back to me? Like, stop being a pussy, all right? That's Jesus, okay?

Get out here, they grabbed me.

Just get out here and say hello to Jesus. We can't, you meet Jesus maybe once, twice in a lifetime, and you gotta present yourself to the best of our ability, and you're in here crying like a little bitch.

Get out.

So I say comfort makes more sense.

Comfort, yes, yes, yes. She ran back to the car to comfort her grandson. Her friend, Cash, remained outside, mesmerized by this object in the sky. She reported that as she watched it over the next few minutes, flames shot out of the bottom of the object, flaring outward to create the effect of a large cone. Every time the fire dissipated, the UFO floated a few feet down towards the road, but when the flames blasted again, the object rose about the same distance. So that right there, that sounds human to me. That sounds like some kind of rocketry as opposed to a space and time jumping warp drive.

Kind of sounds like an invisible hot air balloon, weirdly. It's just like hot air balloon technology of like that blast of fire and stuff and moving up in the same amount as that fire would get. Like, cause it's not flying away, right? It's just going up a little bit?

Yeah, it's just hovering.

Yeah, so that sounds like, I think they have an invisible hot air balloon.

In any case, when the heat got to be too hot.

Listen how dismissive that was of my invisible hot air balloon idea.

No, no, no.

By idea, I mean theory. And by theory, I mean definitely happened.

I think, look, if I were developing top secret air programs for the government, invisible hot air balloon would be pretty far near the top of my list. The only reason that I might shy away from it is just, I feel like if you show up in an invisible hot air balloon, you're immediately reading as sort of a mustache twirling bad guy, and we wanna present as the good guys.

They'll know we're the good guys because we left the flame visible. We're not trying to sneak up on anybody. We're not trying to hear what you had for breakfast, like those hermunculus people.

But clearly, I mean, maybe the reason that none of this ever went anywhere, if this was a experimental ship, is that the government was like, ah shit, they just think it's Jesus Christ. We can't be flying this thing around, having people just think that they're meeting their Lord and Savior.

Yeah, I don't know. I do feel like whoever was working on this definitely lost their job. If the idea was to be stealth in some way, a giant cone of fire that people mistake for God probably is not getting across what the government's asking for, no matter which, like whatever planetary being, it's like, hey, let's get in and out unnoticed. I have a different idea. I'm gonna show up in like a Monster Jam vehicle.

Yeah. Yeah, they're like, no, no, no. Look, this is just a prototype. It will soon look nothing like God.

The backtrack, yeah. Yeah, so good.

In any case, when the heat got to be too much, Cash ran back to the car, but the metal of the car was now so hot that she had to use her coat to open the door. The heat was so intense that one of the pieces of evidence in this case is a handprint that her friend Vicky Landrum left on the dashboard because the dashboard was melting.

Wow.

And when she put her hand on it, you know, it wasn't like dripping off, but it was soft enough that when she put her hand on it and removed her hand, it hardened back into a handprint on the dashboard.

That is nuts.

Yeah.

And definitely bringing down the resale value of that vehicle.

Yes. The women said that they then observed the object being escorted away by a group of 23 Chinook helicopters with US Air Force markings on the side. Cash took the Landrums home and that night, all three witnesses experienced similar symptoms. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, weakness, a burning sensation in their eyes and feeling as though they were suffering from a sunburn. Over the next few days, Cash, the woman who spent more time out of the car, her symptoms worsened. Large painful blisters formed on her skin and by the time she went to the emergency room just a few days later, she could not walk and had lost large patches of skin and clumps of hair. The Landrums didn't get it as bad, I assume because they spent more time in the car, but they still both reportedly suffered from a lingering weakness, skin sores and hair loss. Strangely, this I think is also really weird and really interesting. All these symptoms are similar to symptoms caused by ionizing radiation, but experts say that it's unlikely that that's what they were exposed to because in order for these symptoms to come on so rapidly, the dose of radiation should have killed them in a few days, but all three of them survived.

Interesting.

Cash was later treated for breast cancer and Landrum developed a cataract in one eye, but those were the only lasting effects.

Yeah, it's like you have Chernobyl level radiation poisoning, but you got a milky eye. That's crazy.

Yeah, and so some people have suggested, and I don't know the chemistry of this or whatever, but some people have suggested that maybe they were affected by some sort of a chemical, some kind of an aerosol that was involved in this ship and that it wasn't radiation, because if it were radiation, theoretically it might have killed them. Also, interestingly, Cash and Landrum eventually sued the US government in civil court for damages, but the case was ultimately dismissed, so they got nothing. I respect the hustle.

Yeah, do you think those 23 Chinooks were just filled with lawyers?

Well, that, to me, the 23 Chinooks feels like a detail that maybe they played up for the lawsuit, because that's a really high and specific number of Air Force helicopters.

It's also one of the most kind of obnoxious helicopter, too. It's just so big. It has the two rotors.

Yeah.

It's just such a, I don't know, what was in your backyard? If you said there was 23 cats, I could believe it. But if you were like, there was 23 elephants in my backyard, I'd be like, excuse me? So the fact that the sky is filled with like one of the largest helicopters we make and there's just so many of them is so crazy to me.

And that despite the fact that they're looking into the eye of God.

The eye of Sauron.

That they counted 23 exactly and they all had Air Force markings. Seems like something the lawyer would have been like, now, how can you be sure that they were the US Air Force? Do you have a recollection of them being marked?

Also, if it's God, wouldn't it be divisible by seven? Isn't seven always the number in religious stuff?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

23, I don't believe, is cleanly divisible by seven. Or by three.

I don't know what any number is divisible by. I'm not good at math at all. Anyway, all of this makes me wonder if Antonio Villaboas was exposed to or abducted by a similar sort of test craft because he also had those symptoms of radiation sickness. Now, the craft that he saw looked nothing like this and these women didn't go on board the craft, but his case, the Boas case and this Cash Landrum case are, if you don't include the Falcon Lake incident, the only two cases that I found that have such a obvious chemical or radiation poisoning component to them.

You probably thought you would find more.

Yeah, well.

Considering it's, because Boas is such an old story. That you think that would have seeped into more, like some of these things we talked about, like some of the Betty and Barney Hill stuff where it's like, oh, there are elements of that. It's like Superman, okay? Superman's from 1939. There's a new Superman movie coming out next year. There's just some things that stick around. Yeah. And there's elements of Betty and Barney Hill that stuck around. They show up in so many stories. And so something as old as Boas, you'd figure that radiation would play more into stuff. And it's interesting that that's something that didn't stick around.

Well, especially coming out of the nuclear era where radiation was something that was a memeable component to these stories. People knew, they at least had an idea of what radiation could do because it was on the tip of everyone's tongue. So it's particularly strange that there weren't more radiation elements baked into some of these stories. I almost feel like this story is so concrete, although there are skeptics, there is some research out there that questions the timeline of the events and how much hair loss and skin loss these women actually suffered and there's some skepticism around it. But generally, this case is so concrete that I have to wonder, or I have to almost assume that they did witness some sort of secret earthly technology.

Yeah, it does sound a little bit like, I'm not saying anyone stole the craft.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? It's not like some guy, there wasn't a sky king of the Air Force who was like, I'm taking the flaming ball for a ride and no one's gonna stop me. But I could totally see, because we do, we have skunk works and we have stuff and that's above board and they test really high altitude bomb air stuff and surveillance crap. It's like, I wouldn't be surprised, but I feel like no one was really developing balls of fire. I feel like no nation thought that's the best form to go by.

Yeah, that's the weird thing about it, is that it does everything about it, including the rocket firing. It almost sounds like an early attempt at a reusable rocket, like the up and down motion of the jets firing and turning off and firing and turning off. All of that, plus the Chinooks, plus the radiation, all sounds like they witnessed some sort of an experimental technology. The thing that doesn't click there for me is, yeah, what the fuck, it wasn't a stealth bomber. It doesn't sound like an early stealth bomber. It doesn't sound like an early drone.

Didn't seem like it moved fast.

Yeah, it's a giant diamond shaped ball of fire in the sky. So what the fuck was it? And have they made a better version of whatever that was? Because that's insane.

Yeah, that was Mark 1, dude. I wanna see Mark 4 of the diamond.

Yeah, so like I said, I looked for more radiation stuff. There weren't really too many other stories. Interestingly, I do feel like this is of note. In 2022, the Defense Intelligence Agency released thousands of pages in response to a Freedom of Information Act. And these pages detailed a ton of UFO and UAP cases collected by the government. Now, when I say by the government, it was collected by AATIP or Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was the unclassified but unpublicized investigation revealed in a 2017 New York Times article, which was run by Luella Zondo, who has since become a bit of a grifter. But I say all that to say, it's not like this information that was released was smuggled out of the CIA or anything. This was an unclassified report that took a Freedom of Information Act to get, but it did describe, this report described 42 cases from medical files and 300 unpublished cases where humans sustained injuries after alleged encounters with anomalous vehicles, including UFOs. Some of these cases showed burn injuries or other conditions related to electromagnetic radiation, and some of them appear to have been inflicted by what the report called energy-related propulsion systems. The report also noted cases of brain damage, nerve damage, heart palpitations and headaches related to anomalous vehicle encounters. And there was also this, I wish there was more information about, one investigation into an unaccounted for pregnancy.

Hey, if there's anything Jesus is known for, an unaccounted for pregnancy is how he got here.

So I hope they accounted for the child that resulted from the unaccounted for pregnancy because we should keep an eye on that one. So yeah, we end this three parter pretty much exactly where we began, which is with me not having any clarity on whether or not alien abduction stories are real in the objective physical sense. Couple things I wanna mention before we wrap up. First, I think it's interesting, if not a little damning, to the objective reality argument. And I think Ed, you were just saying something about this a few minutes ago. Outside of the rough, almost dreamlike structure of being taken aboard a ship and experimented on, these stories don't share very much in common. The ships all look different. The aliens all look different. The technology they're using is different. And in big, important ways, not little nitpicky ways. The Pascagoula aliens had claws, or might have been robots. The Hills claimed that the alien ship was flat as a pancake. The Cash Landrum ship was a diamond. The Via Boa ship was oval shaped and had a rope ladder. You'd think if this was a real phenomenon, there'd be some level of consistency, right?

I mean, I feel like this lends credence a little bit to, and I'm not sure if I'm even keeping it in, but if I did keep it in, then I guess you'd be hearing this. I feel like it kind of lends credence a little bit to, my, everybody's just driving their Honda Civics here, man. Like, we got a guy showing up in a Daewoo, a guy showing up in a Ford, a guy showing up in a fucking Mazda, and that's why they all look different. Like, they'll go out and look at the cars right now on the street, they all look different. Well, they're becoming more and more similar looking every year. But, I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a couple alone, horny aliens driving their Honda Civics to the brothel of the universe that is Earth.

That is our slut planet.

But I will say this too about, like, in terms of everyone having different stuff and different techniques, and if what you're saying, if what you're saying is correct, which is they're all so different, I mean, what are the people who abducted, or at least brought on board, Boas, what do they make of all this? Are they just sitting around an intergalactic bar with a bunch of other aliens, and they're like, wait, what did you use? It's a giant ball of fire. It was like, okay, what did you use? And it was like some sort of pyramid dick that I put in someone. I was like, okay, moving on. What did you use? And it was like, hear me out, the longest middle fingers. Okay, so the Boas aliens must just be sitting back going like, just do what we did.

Yeah, we had it, except for the rope ladder, we had it pretty well figured out.

We had it pretty well figured out. Everybody left, did I leave a little bit of radiation? That's on us, that's just the way our engine works. We didn't know. But everything else, like, look, we got a baby up here, he's doing well, he's speaking our language. We're excited to bring him back to Earth on visits or whatever. But yeah, it's just interesting that, yeah, they kind of knocked it out of the park in 1957.

They did, yeah.

And then everyone since has stumbled in a big bad way.

Yeah, I don't know what to make of it. I mean, your theory that it's essentially different species of aliens approaching us with different technologies.

I'm not even saying that. I think they might all be the same species, just some people have nicer shit than others, just like down here.

What I'm saying is they all look different.

People on Earth look fucking different, dude.

Not that different, not the difference between like-

That's true.

Robot aliens and grays and-

That's true.

You know, guys wearing black jackets and scarves.

Not just anyone can wear a black jacket and a scarf.

That's true.

If they want to kill it on Tinder.

I saw a guy at the Santa Monica Pier the other day taking his Tinder photo in front of the big sign for the pier and it was hilarious.

How did you know it was a Tinder photo?

Just the way he was posing. He did one with his sunglasses on and one with his sunglasses off. And he had a friend in the street taking the pics.

Sure.

Yeah, I don't know. It's almost as if the phenomenon, if it's a real physical phenomenon, it almost is like it expresses itself differently to whoever is experiencing it. Like whatever is happening is so strange that our brains can't even interpret exactly what it is that we're seeing. So we fill in the blanks with our existing biases and pop culture images and memes, not internet memes, but cultural memes to kind of fill in the blanks. And that also ties into what we were saying that it's really weird that only a few of these cases involves what appears to be radiation poisoning. That definitely seems like it would be a consistent thing.

Yeah. I mean, I guess there's like quite injured cold or whatever. Like there's, there are the aliens who straight up say, or, you know, other beings that straight up say like, hey, I'm taking a form that wouldn't freak you out.

Yeah.

Although it sounds like these people aren't doing that. These people are like, I'm gonna, I'm coming out here. I'm fucking crazy gray giant-eyed fucking person. Other than maybe trying to design a robot that they really fucked up with those ladies' hands. It seems like no one's really taking too many pains to make something that wouldn't freak people out.

Yeah, and the fact that as we moved into the 2000s, the 90s burst of abduction activity definitely cooled off to the point that even John Mack suggested at one point that he's no longer alive, by the way. He was hit by a drunk driver in London in the mid 2000s, I think.

Wow, RIP, God bless.

Yeah, but at one point before he died, he was even suggesting that maybe the program, whatever it was, whatever this hybridization program was, was over or was winding down because we were finding less of these cases.

Oh, so interesting that he wasn't saying that it left the news cycle, it left the public consciousness because it stopped being relevant or there weren't enough things going on in our pop culture to keep it alive. He was literally saying that aliens have done all the research they're gonna do and they've moved on.

That was his explanation for why he was seeing fewer cases.

Yeah, sure.

Actually, you know, a really interesting bonus episode or something might be 2010s to 2020s Alien Abductions or something because I've been so invested in the history of it for these three episodes that I haven't looked too much at what abduction stories are like today. But we won't do a part four.

No, we're definitely not doing a part four as you can find this episode not on the main feed, whatever this new one's gonna be.

Yeah, the possibilities like the stars are endless and if I have to come down somewhere on what this phenomena is, I would put it pretty firmly in the hat man column. It's real to those who experience it. What it is an expression of, I have no idea. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that there are multiple layers of reality that we only experience a small fragment of in our day to day lives. Every culture and every religion has some similar stories about beings that whether it's gin or fairies or aliens, these things seem to be out there whether they are just in our heads or not. And so all that to say, I rank Alien Abductions right in the middle of the fear tier. I think Alien Abduction is something that I would be horrified to experience, but I don't know that it is even real in the sense that being eaten alive or falling off a roller coaster or whatever is. So I'm not super afraid of it, but if it ever happened to me, I'd probably shit my pants. So I think it goes right in the middle.

Yeah, it's in the middle of the fear tier because it's like, there's no part of these three episodes we've done where I've now gets to wipe my hands clean of Alien Abductions and go like, ah, it's all crocs. I feel like it's just we haven't been abducted yet. I don't know if it's gonna happen. But if it happened, my world wouldn't crumble and worldview wouldn't change. I'd just be like, shit, I'm being abducted. This sucks. Let's see what kind of stuff they do.

Yeah, great way to get your prostate massage.

Yeah, I was gonna make some joke and I didn't.

I mean, no, it's a good point. I genuinely, I'll say this, I genuinely thought that by the end of this series, I was going to be pretty convinced that Alien Abductions as a subject was pretty much a result of cultural memes and modern mythology. But I really think despite the flaws and questions and pieces of the stories that we've examined that don't quite all add up and don't quite all make sense, I really feel like Boas, Hills, Pascogula, Cash Landrum, these are cases that are gonna stick with me because there's something about them that just, these are four out of hundreds if not thousands of cases that are even more questionable. And these just have those elements of like, I can't quite explain them. And so I'm very open and I'm moderately scared.

I will say that we're people who it's becoming more and more established as we do this. And we don't even touch on it nearly enough, I think, because we get nervous about sounding dumb if we're wrong. But we do love the memefication in modern mythology of things. We do always seem to want, our gut wants to go to the well of what was in the newspapers, we do always want to look at the social situation going on in the world and in history and wherever. And I think we get excited about that. And if we do more bonus stuff, I bet you we'll talk more about that kind of things. But I think as much as we enjoy that, and as much as we want to get down to the nitty gritty of the minutia of what was on the radio waves at the time, we don't dismiss, like when we do hit something where it's like, that's unexplainable, I feel like we equally err on the side of the unexplainable. We're like, okay, we don't dismiss it. We do like to see how society plays into stuff. But I think when shit gets weird, we're on board with that.

Yeah, well, because if you're looking, I think for me, if I look at the supernatural as, forget even splitting it up into monsters, aliens, ghosts, whatever. If you look at the supernatural as something that in some form exists alongside us and always has and always will, I do think that there's a sociological element to how we perceive it. So just as interesting to me as the question of whether or not it exists is how it exists and how it exists to us at any given time. Because just like science, it seems like our ideas about these things evolve. And I think it's only through studying the sort of social and pop culture history of some of these things that you can really get to, you know, an understanding of what it is.

So yeah, totally. So Alien Abductions right in the middle of the fear tier. If any aliens are listening, what's up? We don't not believe in you, but I don't think you're gonna show up at my doorstep anytime soon. And that's a little unfortunate at times. Cause like I said, loneliness is a killer.

Next week on Scared All The Time, loneliness.

Oh shit dude, that's gonna be next Valentine's Day.

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.

With a very awesome season finale.

Very awesome season finale, very excited for it. And we can't wait for you guys to hear it too. We will see you then, bye bye.

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

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is a*****.

No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission.

Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Good night. We are in this together. Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===