Shapes Shifted

accept them, well, that's a different story. Lee Parish left his girlfriend's house in the wee hours of a frigid January morning in nine The trip back to his house and Prospect, Kentucky should have taken less than ten minutes. As he drove along the pitch black highway, a cigarette perched between his lips. Something near the tree line caught his attention. It was long, roughly ten ft by forty feet, in a shape of a triangle. It burned a reddish orange,

and it was moving. Soon it was right above him, and a moment later his car radio cut out. Lee couldn't move, and neither could his car. And then the shape was gone. It flew off like a rocket until it disappeared into the distance, leaving the young man confused and scared. He eventually arrived home, his mother waiting by the door for him. It's so late, she said, where

have you been all this time? He told her he had just left his girlfriend's house ten minutes before, around one am, and she said that that was impossible because it was almost two o'clock in the morning. Puzzled by the loss of time, Lee went to bed but found it hard to sleep. His eyes burned whenever he shut them, and a quick look in the mirror explained why they were completely bloodshot. The next morning, he couldn't remember a

thing that had happened. His mother, instead of calling a doctor, contacted a different kind of expert to help her son recall what had transpired the previous night. She reached out to a hypnotist by the name of Lawrence Allison. His area of expertise was in helping people regain hard to access memories, specifically in people who had contact with UFOs.

The hypnotist, along with a pair of local UFO investigators, invited Lee and his girlfriend over to his home that evening for a session He put the young man into a trance and asked him to walk through the previous night's events like he was telling a story. Lee told him about the glowing rectangle, which turned to black, then white, before everything went dark. Suddenly he was in a round,

white room surrounded by three oddly shaped beings. To his left, he saw a tall wall shaped black creature with a small round head and an arm like pole sticking out of it. When the creature touched him, Lee said it felt like burning ice. On his right was a smaller creature, boxing in shape and colored red. It had a kind of nondescript arm jutting in front of it like the black one. When this creature touched him, it sent a

sharp needle like sensation all throughout Lee's body. And then there was the last being, the white one, as Lee called it, about as tall as him and shaped like a mailbox. It had two arms that it kept against itself, and it glowed with a bright light, and Lee said that he understood this creature to be the one in charge. It didn't touch him, though it only watched. It made a kind of scraping sound before the three beings merged into one and disappeared. Lee woke up in his car

as though no time had passed at all. The rectangle above him sped away before he resumed his drive home. When he woke up from his trance, Lee remembered everything. The UFO investigators asked him questions about what had happened in the car during the dents and whether he'd ever encountered such beings before the car had floated in mid air. He told them he didn't actually get in and out of it, but was phased through it to get into

this ship. And while he personally had not had any close encounters in his life, his mother had experienced at least three. Although Lee himself had witnessed UFOs from a distance on several occasions, the story of an alien abduction by a soul witness isn't much of a story. People will come out of the woodwork all the time to make walth claims for attention and money, But Lee Parish's

tail is a bit different for two reasons. First, another UFO investigator who lived a few miles away had reported his neighbor's children screaming wildly at something in the sky. There was a round, white object with a dome on top, which hovered briefly before zipping away. And second, the day after Lee's incident, his car malfunctioned. When the mechanic took a look inside, he noted it would need significant electrical work to get moved, and again because of the damage,

though was completely unknown. Curious, what didn't you say? Millions of thoughts run through our minds each day, what to eat, what to wear, whether we're going to make it to that meeting on time, or if we said the wrong thing on that date last week. It's enough to keep us awake at night, wondering how we can pause the images in our brains. But one man didn't want to silence them. He wanted to use them to show the

world what was going on inside his mind. His name was Ted Serios, and he'd been a Chicago bellhop during the nineteen sixties before finding fame as a photographer. Ted wasn't just any kind of photographer, though he claimed to be able to project an image from his brain onto a of film using telepathy. He would hold something he called a gizmo to his head, a small paper tube of some kind, and the other end would be pressed

against the lens. Then Ted would concentrate, his body would tense up, his eyes wide open, and his mouth a straight line. His limbs would tremble, and the veins on his forehead would throb, and then he would release the camera. When the film was developed, much of the time what came out was an image that was either completely white

or completely black. There was no visible object detectable anywhere in the photo, but every now and then a blurry image of a landscape or a structure would appear, and it happened often enough to catch the attention of Dr Jewel Eisenbud, who put Ted through a battery of tests over the course of three years, hoping to gain some insight into how the former bellhop was able to conjure up the images. For one, Ted was drunk when he

took his photographs, like really drunk. Eisenbudd thought maybe he was even an alcoholic, given his lack of self control and disregard for social standards. Still, the doctor was impressed by the results. During one experiment, several people had gathered in another doctor's home to watch him perform. Serrios asked for a suggestion, a place or a thing for him

to imprint on the film. The daughter of the host was going to be leaving soon to study at the University of Rome, so she asked him to produce a picture of one of the school's buildings. She carried with her a folder of photos from the university for reference, which she held far from Ted's view. He went through his process of concentrating and yelling until he'd sufficiently transferred

his thoughts to the film in the camera. When it was developed, a photo of a vague structure appeared, which looked a lot like the picture of the Roman church in the girl's folder. Sadly, what Ted had produced didn't convince everyone in the room. The good doctor was the only one who believed in his abilities, and his word got out about the man who could project his thoughts on the photographs. Professionals of all kinds wanted a closer look. A man named Nile Root decided to see exactly what

all the excitement was about. He and six others spent an evening with Serios watching him perform his miraculous feet, paying close attention to the gizmo that he claimed he needed to focus his mental energy. Everyone in attendance was told to bring five rolls of polaroid film with them. As the night wore on, Serios got increasingly drunk, shoving the paper tube against his head and demanding whoever was

holding the camera to take a photograph. It was during one of those particularly drunk moments when Root caught a glimpse of what might be behind the images supposedly coming straight from Ted's mind. The photographer was in such a state that he flailed his arms around as he shouted at the guests. As he swung his hands, Roots saw it something shiny inside the small tube in Ted's hand. It could have been a piece of micro film, which, when photographed by the camera's lens, would have produced the

ghostly blurry images that had captivated Dr Eisenbud. In fact, magician and skeptic James Randy, also known as the Amazing Randy, proved such a theory on national television. He held an inch long tube with a magnifying glass on one end to his head and on the other end was a slide of thirty five millimeter film. Randy placed the tube to his head and lined the end up with the camera lens. The photographer took the picture, and what came out was a distorted but clearly visible version of the

image on the slide. Serio swore he never used tricks or slide of hand to create his own photographs, but it didn't matter. Once the explanation came out, the eccentric Bellhop faded from the public eye for decades until he resurfaced on television in the nineties. Asked one last time to prove his powers were real, Ted couldn't produce a single image on film. Maybe his powers had worn themselves out. Or perhaps, if you're of the believing kind, the explanation

is a lot more simple. Ted's unusual ability just wasn't fully developed. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it

over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.