High Strange is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free, but for ad free listening, exclusive bonuses, and early access to episodes, subscribe to tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus dot com or on Apple podcasts. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. This
episode contains references to sexual assault and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised. This was physical. I really struggled with it. The more I remembered, the weirder it got.
Something has physically happened to me, like in an interview like this half an hour ago.
It turned on.
What do you mean.
You've been talking to it ever since? It's working now right now.
You can see it.
You can feel it. Can I feel it? You're not, you can feel it.
It's right here, right under my hand, right now. This is a piece of biomechanical technology, an alien implant.
I'll tell you this story.
Hey guys, real quick. I know it's annoying. I mean, I hate doing it. But if you're enjoying High Strange, could you please pretty please rate and review it, and also hit the follow button on your podcast out I don't know the algorithm likes this stuff. It means a lot to us and it helps us in the charts. And also I want to hear your genuine feedback. It takes literally thirty seconds and you can do it right now as you're listening. It means a lot to us.
You're a tenderfoot and to me personally, enjoy the show. Welcome to High.
Strange, Welcome to let me King lie God I. Closing covers of the third guy, Whittley Shreeper says, they're really out there.
He is Whitley Strieber.
There is the book, and it is a continuation of his enormous bestseller Communion.
In the late nineteen eighties. I Reeber had a moment in pop culture.
After I finally realized that this probably was real, something that was non human, that was intelligent, started trying to challenge it to get through my fear. Over a period of months, I formed a relationship with them that I believe could be a template, almost almost as if they have one end of a phone and we've had two wires.
How do you know you're not nuts well.
First of all, we were flooded with thousands of letters from people who basically wanted to know if I could help them explain what had happened to them. And these stories, one after another that had elements to them, unpublished elements to them that suggested that this is much more than a dream, that there is something happening to people that's similar from case to case.
Late night television talk shows, bestsellers. But outside all the mainstream success, there were hundreds than thousands of people who reached out to him privately, who were saying this happened to me too, some details that weren't even public. And that's when the question shifts not is Whitley lying, but more like, why are so many people describing the same thing? What happens next is where Whitley's story gets even harder to categorize.
About a year later, one of my neighbors came over to the house. He shows up and he says, Whitley, I saw that happen, and I nearly dropped my teeth. He was a retired state trooper. He said we were driving home about two o'clock in the morning on that night, and he said, I saw what I thought was the Goodyear blimp in a field.
He said.
I stopped because I thought that us be in trouble or it wouldn't be there in the middle of the night. Got out of the car, struggling through the snow, going toward it to try to help them. It was obvious to him something's wrong. As he moved toward it, he heard screaming, and he began to move faster. In his mind it was a blip that had gone down and people in it were screaming, so he needed to get
there to help him. Then lights turned on all over it started making a growling noise and coming toward him. Very quickly panicked, jumped back into his car and drove off. He said to me, I'm just so embarrassed, ashamed the fact that I ran. And I said to him, if you tried to help me, god knows what would have happen to you. Then I knew, I knew this had really happened. In my opinion, that was me in there then, So what he thinks too, It was the right time and the right night.
Everything. Many people have read your book. You caught my attention.
Okay, how often do these people visit you?
I have been with them a couple of times. They're real, and I was not unconscious or in an altered state of mind. One night, this very peculiar event took place.
Yeah, you were visiting.
It was in May night in nineteen eighty nine. It was about eleven o'clock at night, and had just turned in and I was going to sleep. Were open because it was warm, and I heard crunching up gravel in the driveway. I thought, very bad news. It was clearly a vehicle of some kind. Plus they had no car lights on. I had a shotgun under the bed and a pistol in the door beside the bed, plus a bank of switches that could turn on floodlights.
All around the house.
As I became fully awake, I heard a man's voice say, condition red. I'm not talking about aliens now, I'm talking about people. I started to go for the lights. The man and woman standing in the doorway of the bed. They looked like people. I was scared to death. Alarm system was right beside the door of the bedroom. Led was still red. In other words, they hadn't breached the system, but they were still in the house.
They had to have breached it.
Somehow, because you can't get in the house without breaching it. Forget floodlights. I'm going for the Benelli Riot gun under the bed. The next thing I know, they pushed me over onto my right side. I can't move, can't see. I'm totally helpless, paralyzed. He's pushing the side of my head into the pillow again and again like that, and the woman's voice is talking very gently. A couple seconds later, there's a huge flash of light. I jump out of bed.
I grabbed the pistol. I run through the house looking for a breach in the system. There's nothing. It's all intact. I think, is this a lucid dream or what happened? I go out to the garage. Alarm systems still intact.
It's not tripped. So on damn, garage door is wide open, and that's not possible.
The alarm system is still armed and the garage doors wide open. Sometimes you rationalize that, well, I called the alarm man, I said, something screwed up with the alarm system. My garage door is wide open. I'm looking at it, and the system's not tripped. He comes over his gus meter finds this incredibly powerful magnetic field on the garage
door that we have no explanation for whatsoever. It's not his switches, it's just there magnetic field so powerful that the door was wide open and the switsch hadn't been tripped.
We're not talking about dreams or sleep paralysis. We're talking about a locked house, a homeowner with a firearm, an alarm system that never trips, and people, not aliens or ghosts, but other people inside his home. When he says, I'm not talking about aliens now, it almost becomes more confusing, and fear sounds different when it's human.
A few days past and my ear begins to hurt.
His ear would turn red and he felt this little bump inside it. The doctor says, it's a cyst. My ear would turn red. I touched this and I feel a bump.
My ear would turn red, and I'd hear this noise. About three or four years later, we moved down to Texas, my home down of San Antonio. Having dinner with some friends. One of them was a doctor, and I mentioned my ear. He feels it, and he said, it feels like a little sister to me. I can pop it out at my office. Come over tomorrow morning. We go to his office and we videotape the whole thing. This is what happened.
I didn't take an incision around there.
Again, he opens an incision, he sees a white disc.
But this little laugh Whitley did in fact film this. I wouldn't say it's the best quality ever, but it looks like he's actually at the doctor.
When he touches it with his scalpel.
It moved on its own, but it goes.
I guess it went on under.
But that's the heart.
Aren't just say again?
Waves actually now, well he's talking it, but it went under.
I mean I got I got a loopis there's some here?
It goes under the skin down into my ear.
Lobe, like a little tiny white disc.
It's all in the video.
It's there.
He got a little corner of it with the scalpel. Can see the doctor looking at it and describing it and seeing it move on its own. The implant is real. He puts in a stitch and I go home. The morning after that, my ear starts burning things in my ear lobe. I can feel it, and it moves back up here where it.
Is to this day. It's still there right now, right now? Can you see it. You can see it. You can feel it.
No, you can feel it's right here, right under my head right now.
Oh yeah, yoh.
Lab technician calls him and says, is this a practical joke? He says, no, it came out of a patient's ear. DAB tech said, this is a piece of biomechanical technology. This is a piece of metal that has cilia on it, and they're motile, they move.
What does that mean?
Cillia are little hair like things that enabled something to move. That's how it moved down into my ear lobe. Something has physically happened to me, like in an interview like this half an hour ago.
It turned on.
What do you mean.
You've been talking to it ever since? It's working now right now.
The whole thing seems like a fever dream. Is Whitley just going around life further narrating its fiction, making up stories and writing books about it? Maybe did these things actually happen to him? And if they didn't, does he still believe they did? And what does that mean exactly? I'll admit I've gone back and forth a lot. I come from true crime. I'm used to looking for some universal truth, a verdict yes or no. True or false,
no gray area. The thing is, you don't have to believe Whitley Straeber for this story to matter, because stories like his exist everywhere.
The first thing I like to dispel is a frequent misconception that UFOs all limited to this country. Very often people ask me, how come I never hear about UFOs in other parts of the world. How can we only hear about UFOs in America. Well, UFOs now not in American phenomenon. They are a worldwide phenomenon. That's one of their most dramatic characteristics.
People all across the world describing counters with the same shapes, the same paralysis, the same missing time, the same physical effects, different languages, different belief systems, all the same information. And when something repeats itself like that across borders, across generations, across technology gaps, it stops being like folklore and becomes more like a data set.
It is very international. It's a global phenomenon.
UFOs are not an American problem. They never were. They're reported by pilots in South America, tracked on radar in Europe, documented by militaries in Asia, whispered about in places that don't benefit from telling the story at all. The phenomenon itself is global. Nick Cook has spent in his career in investigating classified aircraft programs.
Having investigated classified aircraft programs, the Calvine picture, it's like no plane I've ever seen.
The Calvine photo. In nineteen ninety two men were hiking near Calvine, Scotland, and took a series of photographs. What they captured would later be called the clearest UFO image ever recorded.
The Calvine photo shows a source of diamond shaped craft hovering in Scotland. Quite a remote area near Calvine.
This little corner of central Scotland has become the center of activity.
It's what's known as a hotspot, an.
Area I where have people claimed to have seen unidentified flying objects. The Calvine photograph, which some people have touted the world's best photograph of a UFO, it's quite clear.
This photograph could be real.
This good circums actual evidence that says that could be a genuine UFO.
Since you're only hearing this, if you want to see the photo yourself, go to the high Strange Instagram. It's just a high strange.
The problem with it is its provenance. Whoever took the photograph disappeared off the face of the earth. No one has been able to find the individuals who actually took the photograph, if.
They ever existed. There was a diamond shaped craft, stationery, structured silent, and if this story wasn't strange enough, the people who took these photos have never been found.
One of the early investigators of the case, Royal Air Force press officer Craig Lindsay, kept one print.
Its surfaced later a Ministry of Defense produced another photograph. There was some kind of trail to this thing.
The story was killed under circumstances which remain murky to this day.
This is Nick Pope. For years, his job title at the UK Ministry of Defense was literally one word.
The Ministry of Defense telephone directory was about two inches thick. There were very detailed job descriptions, something like coordinating Officer for updating NATO war books, deep specialist stuff. But with regard to my job, it just literally said UFOs. So it was a little bit of a question mark. Having seen all six images and having seen the intelligence community analysis, we all concluded this was a real solid, structured craft about seventy five feet a grass and we have no
idea what it is how it even flies. This is pretty extraordinary stuff. Not all of the UFO sightings that we get are going to be where the balloons or the planet venus.
What I always like to do is look around in a sort of geopolitical sense as to what's happening at the time.
Nick Cook isn't a UFO investigator. He's an aviation journalist who spent years embedded in classified aircraft programs. Part of the whole UFO debate is whether some of these things people are seeing are actually ours new technology, secret technology.
Suspicious thing about it.
The Calvine photo was snapped on the eve of Sadam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
Iraq invades Kuwait and overthrows its government. Iraq's president, Sadam Hussein warned that he would turn Kuwait into a graveyard if any foreign country tried to intervene.
I was covering a lot of classified US craft programs, like the Stealth Fighter, which had been developed in secret during the nineteen eighties. There was another mythical beast called Aurora. An Aurora was reputed to have gone really fast, five times the speed of sound, maybe six mythical because there were sightings of it, but never anything officially revealed or admitted. But there was plenty of technological evidence that this thing was built in the black in secret.
Nick Cook had seen stealth programs years before they were public. He understood sometimes secret tech can hide in plain sight. Does this explain the Calvine photo.
Aurora just happened that one of its operating bases was on Scottish airfield called Macrahannish, which is not a million miles from Calvine. Late eighties, early nineties. A good deal of those pro have not seen the light of day. I went to interview the boss of the Locked Martin
skunk Works. I sat down and we started talking about all the aircraft programs he'd worked on, and he said, I've worked on fifteen real flying aircraft programs while I've been here, but I can only talk about twelve of them. Locked Martin Skunk Works. Their mantra was, if you can imagine it, we can make it happen. Whatever you dream up we can do. Where money meets imagination, you get the most phenomenal innovation breakthroughs now talking of the Aurora
in the late nineties. I then interviews the head of US Air Force Research and Development programs. A guy called General George Mulner on the day he retired. On the record in that interview was black programs, secret stuff. Here we were able to talk about secret programs. I could ask him anything I wanted. It was like, finally here we go. I said to him, so, let's talk about whether you might have commissioned a Mark five plus hypersonic s byplane. And he said, let me tell you a story.
So he goes, what would you do if you were me? We have a Mark three reconnaissance aircraft in the Blackbird that.
We are retiring.
We have a new generation of spy satellites able to deliver real time reconnaissance digitally, which is a first. But those satellites aren't quite ready yet. So we have a gap. What would you do? So I said, well, I'd probably fill it with an interim capability, something that's just going to do the trick in the short term.
So it goes go figure.
My inference from his statement is that a few prototypes of this aircraft were built. It filled the gap, and then they got rid of it. If you wanted to put reconnaissance on the ground very quickly. Around about the time Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait, you might want to send a very fast spyplane to take reconnaissance imagery. You had an air base very close to Calvin in Macrahannish where a lot of spooky things were going on. As a result of the invasion of Kuwait, the.
United States has put six warships in the Gulf on high alert and another six are on their way.
The crisis has found the Prime Minister with President Bush to coordinate the British and American responses. You might just want to divert attention away from that with some strange speculation about a UFO which then subsequently appeared. There are a lot of red flags in it.
For me, here's the problem with Colbine. The photo exists. It's a real physical photograph. All the analyzes exist. There's no debate on whether the photo itself is real.
It is.
But what are we looking at and why is there a big mystery behind who took these? Are we still learning things or are we just at a point where it's sweet.
Here's the whole thing about the UFO world, the very confusion about it. The whole thing is a wonderful distraction. If you're in the military and you want to hide things, break through secret stuff that might have happened in the US military. Well, let's put some real noise, disinformation noise around places where we want to keep things secret, Strange anomalous photographs that cover up the fact you're flying spyplanes that are secret. Still UFOs present a brilliant smoke screen.
Everything becomes mixed.
Up in a great miasma of real information and crap, and in the end it's very hard.
To work out what is truth and what is fiction.
And that suits a lot of people in the intelligence world. There's too much evidence from too many different directions, much of which converges on the same data sets, to say that everybody is making this stuff up. What you're beginning to get now is the military and intelligence world saying
there is a phenomenon here. In twenty twenty one, Director of National Intelligence published a report saying exactly that the phenomenon is real, and that was the first time an official body had admitted this was a thing.
What, of course, they.
Didn't say, because they professed not to know, was what was causing it. Are they extraterrestrials? Are they coming from out of space? Psychological people hallucinating stuff, or is this a middle ground that is worth investigating. Maybe they're interdimensional, it's some glitch in reality that is letting stuff through that we don't understand. I'm more inclined to look at that.
This, to me, is the unsettling part. Even if Calvin was secret human technology, that explanation alone doesn't close the case. It opens one more because the same shapes, the same movements, the same witness reactions. They show up long before nineteen ninety and long after.
Weird shit comes with a UFO sighting, poltergeists phenomena in their bedrooms at night, Bigfoot is seen in the backyard. All of this weird shit comes with it. If I'm inclined to look into what may be causing UFO sightings and experiences, consciousness is a really good.
Place to start.
How do we perceive reality? If you flip the aperture a bit, let's look at the nature of reality. Let's see if we can find out whether there are anomalies in the way we perceive reality which may explain paranormal phenomena like UFOs.
Most of us walk around assuming reality is just what's in front of us, what we can see what we can touch, what everyone else seems to agree is actually happening. But the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that reality is not a fixed thing.
It's an experience.
You can be in the same room as someone, hear the same words, watch the same moment unfold, and walk away with a completely different understanding of what just happened, not because one of you is lying, but because perception isn't neutral. What if multiple truths could exist. Your brain is constantly filtering, filling in gaps, making assumptions, protecting you so you can function without being overwhelmed. That's consciousness at work, not as some mystical concept, but as a practical system.
It's how you survive the day. But here's the part that messes with me. If your experience of reality depends on what you notice, what you expect, and what you ignore, then two people can live in entirely different worlds without ever leaving the same place. And once you realize that, lots of things start to click, and why arguments go nowhere, why certainty feels comforting, and why new ideas feel threatening
before they feel interesting. It also explains why encounters with the unknown are so destabilizing because they don't just challenge what you believe, they challenge how you know anything at all. When it comes to consciousness. Even our smartest scientists are still guessing. We can explain what the brain does, but not why it feels like being you. So every now
and then I try to check myself. Maybe my version of reality isn't the only one operating here, realizing that two people can be honest, vulnerable, and trying at the same time, but still be living in slightly different realities the same room, same words, same intention, but filtered through different histories, fears, and expectations, not because anyone failed, because consciousness does not always line up on the same frequency.
The Ministry of Defense standard line we dish out to the media and the public on this was that this subject was of no real interest. It was always downplaying. We just glance at these reports. There's nothing of any particular defense significance, but we take a look just in case. But the reality, of course, was quite different. Things that I had access to in that job was the archive.
We'd looked at this phenomenon since nineteen fifty three. We'd had a permanent research effort on it since nineteen fifty three, but reports went back further than that. We had a huge archive, hundreds and hundreds of sightings from different locations around the UK. Ninety ninety five, maybe ninety nine percent of all of this is going to turn out to be misidentification, censor error or hoax, something fairly mundane. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, because there's
something here. These things sit in the files must like an unsolved crime in a police file.
The whole plethora of UFO sightings that are out there, a lot of it is born out of witness testimony. The sightings that people are reporting today are not that different from sightings they were reporting fifty or sixty years ago.
One of those cases in the Ministry Defense file that doesn't have a definitive explanation to it. A whole class of school children seeing something.
In nineteen seventy seven in the small Welsh village of Broad Heaven. Something landed, not once, not briefly, multiple sightings in daylight. Sixteen school children, a teacher, no prompting, no group discussion, and they all drew the same thing. This is one of those stories that feels like it's right out of a movie. Because kids don't gain status from ridicule. They didn't have TikTok back then. Kids don't protect reputations, they don't know what to fake. Yet in all these
kids describe seeing the same thing. One of those kids has never stopped thinking about that day. His name is Dave Davies, and I flew all the way across the pond to try and track him down.
Yes, is that good? Right? Take me all the way back.
I mean, this is the thing that's been going around my head for fifty years. My intent that afternoon was to try and prove that there wasn't anything there. I failed. I've known skeptics who try and rationally way out of it as much as they can, But I don't think I haven't done that. If there was a convention explanation for what I saw that day, I'd have already gone fair enough, that's it then. But there is no other explanation for what we saw that day. I've spent nearly
fifty years, countless books, any sort of reference material. I've always pretty much shared. This is proof that I'm not lying. I wouldn't have wasted all my money and time on all this crap on the surface of it. You just say air flying sources, whatever. But the more you look at it, there is a trickster things sort of going on. There's a lack of logic to what they're doing sometimes and you just think it's completely mad. But it was just the sudden realization that I've got something in front
of me that shouldn't exist, but does. I went through the school as being the kid who saw the space ship.
A claim that something strange came out of the skies and landed in the Welsh village of broad Haven.
I stepped over the primitive fence and as I got one foot over, it literally rose up from behind trees.
Whatever it was was spotted three times by children from the local school.
What we saw was definitely physical that was beyond our understanding.
The children say the object had a large dome cigar shaped, silver in color. I've just been on the phone to their headmaster.
I know that the sixteen children saw it.
Suddenly, the silver cigar shaped object seem to pop up from behind the bushes.
How clearly did you see it? Well, I couldn't see its face.
How you say you saw a man as well?
Did you?
Yes, there was a thought in my brain I should leave.
Were you frightened at the time, Yes, and that's where the weirdness starts.
Hi Strange It's a production by tender f TV in association with iHeart Podcasts, Created, hosted and edited by myself, Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are myself and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner and myself. Original scorer by Makeup and Vanity Set, Sound design, mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana,
Sean Nurney, and Meredith Steadman. Our cover art is by Polygon Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, and Beck Media and Marketing. Check out the show's website at Highstrange dot com and if you're enjoying the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing the podcast and share it with your friends.
Thanks for listening.