Mylar Batman

podcast Ephemeral. Alex is an executive producer of Strange Arrivals and his creative input has been invaluable. This episode of Ephemeral, titled simply UFOs, looks at some of the same things the first two seasons of Strange Arrivals did, but in a completely different way. You can hear it now by searching for Ephemeral on the I Heart radio app or wherever you listen to podcasts, and listen at the end

of this episode for a sneak preview. Closer to home in Marietta, Washington, you will experience slip terror of Bigfoot. It all began on the night of June six. Rita Graham was sitting on our couch watching TV. Suddenly a giant, hairy hand crashed through the window and groped about. The monster was next seen by Tom Stern and three days later in a boy scout camp. In all, the small

town experienced twelve encounters within thirty days. Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, the Luckness Monster just three of the monsters you will see in The Mysterious Monsters, A shocking look into man's encounters with the unknown. The Mysterious Monsters. H I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals, Episode thirteen my Lar Batman. On July, the Invernous Courier, a newspaper in Scotland, reported an incident involving Mr and Mrs Spicer, tourists from London.

As they drove along the banks of Loch Ness. It was horrible, an abomination. About fifty yards ahead we saw an undulating sort of neck, and quickly followed by a large, ponderous body. I estimated the link to be thirty ft. Its color was dark elephant gray. It crossed the road in a series of jerks, but because of the slope, we could not see its limbs. Although I accelerated quickly towards it, it had disappeared into the loch. By the time I reached the spot, there was no sign of

it in the water. I am a temperate man, but I am willing to take any oath that we saw this loch Ness beast. I'm certain that this creature was of a prehistoric species, likely spurred by a new road that allowed for better views of its waters. This was just one of a number of sightings of something in loch Ness. In December n the British newspaper The Daily Mail commissioned a filmmaker and big game hunter named Marmaduke

Weatherall to find the Lochness Monster. On December, he discovered footprints on the shore that he said, we're from a quote, very powerful, soft footed animal about twenty ft long. This turned out not to be true. They were in fact made using a dried hippopotamus foot that served as a base for an ash tray or umbrella stand. Weather All

was humiliated four months later. In April, a physician from England named Robert Kenneth Wilson claimed to take a photograph of what appeared to be the neck and head of some prehistoric looking creature emerging from the water. This became known as the Surgeon's photo, and it is the iconic photo of the Lockness Monster. And this wasn't the only case where a piece of visual evidence caught the public's imagination.

Mysterious creature is roaming this wilderness, the creature that has confounded scientists, baffled investigators, and captured the imagination of millions of people. We've all heard of the reported sightings of this creature, a creature most of us know as big Foot. We've read about it and our newspapers, and heard about

it on radio and television. And some of you, like me, might have been skeptical about these reports, wondering how it could be possible for a sizeable population of eight foot five monsters to live among us on the edge of our industrialized society. I was skeptical. I was also tantalized by what I heard, so I decided to find out

for myself whether Bigfoot was fact or fiction. In October of nineteen seven, thirty three years after the Surgeon's photo, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were riding horses along Bluff Creek in Humboldt County, California. Patterson was in the midst of attempting to film a movie based partly on actual stories of a group of cowboys tracking a sasquatch. Patterson may have already done some filming over Memorial Day weekend,

which would become important. Later in the early afternoon, Patterson and Giblin claimed they saw a figure standing or crouching by a stream. Patterson dismounted, grabbed his camera from a saddle bag, and chased the creature, who had begun to

retreat from the two men and their horses. The beginning of the film, which lasts just less than a minute, is confused and jiggli as Patterson runs with the camera in hand, but there's a several second shot of this ape like creature striding away from Patterson, turning to look back at him, and then continuing on. For most people, this is the image that comes to mind when someone

mentions Bigfoot or Sasquatch. I bring these two examples up because the advent of photography and film created a new kind of folklore, one that is particularly important to UFOs because it is one thing to hear about someone seeing a huge, seemingly prehistoric creature in a lake, or even foot ape that walks like a man deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. But having a visual artifact makes the story vastly more compelling Utah State University folklore

professor Lynn McNeil. Then we start adding in not just the narratives, not just the stories, but this additional media that comes to us from this particular time in our culture, where there's more everyday people out there with cameras. There's more visual media than just textual. We're able to capture things and share them with each other in unprecedented ways,

and that changes how we talk about this stuff. I don't think there's any question that the surgeons photo and the Patterson film are critical pieces of the Locknest Monster and bigfoot folklore's They are the first or among the first things you think of when you think about these two legendary creatures. But here's the thing, they're both almost definitely hoaxes. The Surgeon's photo is nearly always shown cropped

to accentuate the image of the creature. The uncropped photo includes the far shore and a wider expanse of lake, and suddenly, with this context, the creature doesn't look so large. In fact, two men Marmaduke. Weather all Son and Stepson, both at different times, confessed that they had helped in creating a hoax to get revenge on the Daily Mail for its treatment of Marmaduke after the Hippo foot incident.

According to them, it was a small model maybe two ft high, placed on a toy submarine and then photographed the enlisted Wilson, the English doctor, through a mutual friend to give the photograph authenticity it wouldn't have had if it had come from someone in the weather all family. Similarly, there are questions about the Patterson film. Without getting too deep into the weeds, there's an issue about the dating of the film, because there were very few labs that

could develop the kind of film he was using. Critics question whether Patterson could have recorded the footage on the date he says he did and have it developed by the time it was made public. They point to the filming of the movie that took place over Memorial Day weekend and note that Patterson would likely have had a bigfoot costume for those scenes, the implication being he filmed

a hoax video at the time. Further, and more damning biologists who have looked at the film note that the Bigfoot doesn't have a realistic physiology and is most likely a man in a costume. But regardless of the authenticity of what was filmed, these two visual artifacts are critical parts of their respective folklores. Photos and videos, of course, are also very important parts of the UFO folklore, especially recently with a number of unclassified UFO videos released by

the Pentagon. The ranks of UFO videos and photographs have also been plagued by hoaxes well. There is no single image that has the iconic power of the Surgeon's photo or the Patterson film. Two early photographs that set the expectation for the stereotypical flying saucer were taken in nineteen fifty just outside the town of Sheridan, Oregon, by a farmer named Paul Trent. These photos have come to be associated with a larger town not far from Sheridan called McMinnville.

It's one thing to trust your neighbor when he's like I saw some weird lights over my farm and then I lost three hours of my day. I don't know what happened, but I woke up in a ditch and I had all these bruises. You know, you tell me what that means. It's another thing when your neighbor tells you that same story and then shows you a photo that he took, and you're like, oh, yeah, I can't explain what those lights are. They don't look like an airplane,

they don't look like anything I'm familiar with. That word of mouth culture is now being bolstered by additional things. The sighting occurred at seven thirty in the evening on maybe eleventh. Here's Evelyn Trent, who first saw the object, describing what happened. I had to look up and I've seen this thing and I ran into the house. You'll know about it. We went one look after a camera and I with the other way after a camel the

green above the let's we found it. The best thing, I have to say, It would be just about the size of the shoes without any strings ing not I said. It was all flat on the bottom and it was still recolored. I was about to lunking it, but there was no smoke, no noise either. What we just suppose the let the flight wires away and I just you know,

the distance and stuff. I just don't know if it could have hovered for a while and all just like that, and he's just a picture, and right, just the picture. He ran the film the re rose in order to take another one, and as his turn, and just to folve very The two photos are taken from similar, though not identical vantage points. In the lower left of the frame is a house or shed with an oil tank

set on the side that faces the camera. An expanse of sparsely wooded flat land ends at what appeared to be low hills in the distance. Not far away. On the right side of the frame is a telephone pole, and wires can be seen going from the pole in each direction. In the foreground, electrical wires hang across the top of the frame. An objects seems to hover in

the air in the center of the shot. In the first photo, the object is tilted down to the right and away from the camera, and enlargement shows what seems to be a flat circular or bottom and perhaps a kind of rounded dome on top. In the second photo, the object is still tilted somewhat to the right, but is no longer tilted away, and you can see that the top section is raised and flattened like a mesa, and there's a point that sticks up from the middle.

As you heard Evelyn Trent say, she thought it was roughly the size of a parachute. The photos were a sensation and taken to be genuine. The Condon Committee undertook a scientific study of the photos and found no evidence

of a hoax. In the conclusion to the section on these photos, the researcher, an astronomer named William Hartman, wrote, this is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated geometric, psychological, and physical, appeared to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object silvery metallic disc shaped tens of meters in diameter, and evidently

artificial fluid in sight of two witnesses. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out of fabrication, although there are some physical factors, such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives, which argue against the fabrication. This validation by the United States government let the photos a greater degree of legitimacy. Now it's the government.

Now it's an institutional element of our culture who we know isn't joking around, and they're taking it seriously, and they're producing documents and they're gathering photos, and you start to go, okay, wait, hey, wait a minute, like the authority that institutions lend to the already powerful word of mouth consensus of folklore is really something that you can't underestimate. In his section on the mc minville photos in the Condon Report, Hartman had noted that it was possible that

this was a hope. Another possibility can be considered, however, the object appears beneath a pair of wires, as is seen in Plates twenty four. We may question, therefore, whether it could have been a model suspended from one of the wires. This possibility is strengthened by the observation that the object appears beneath roughly the same point in the two photos, in spite of their having been taken from two positions, and in fact this may have been what happened.

Skeptical investigator Robert Shaefer has shown that the lightning conditions and the photos indicate that the shots were taken around eight twenty in the morning, not seven thirty in the evening, as the trends claimed. French researchers published a technical paper showing that the physics of the positions of the object in the two photos indicate that it is a small model hanging from the electrical lines in a light breeze

a short distance from the camera. A researcher named Joel Carpenter suggested that the object was a mirror from an old truck. The post war era saw an increase in the ability for people to produce or consume visual culture. Cameras became increasingly easy for non professionals to use, and the influence and presence of television, of course grew exponentially.

So we start to see people think in terms of images more than words, and that of course has only grown thanks to the Internet and our ability to now combine images and words in all sorts of new ways. But we see folklore reflect that. We suddenly start getting genres of folklore that scholars referred to as xerox lore and facts lore, and we get things like visual legends, so instead of telling a story, we just get an

image of something. And you can see how something like UFOs, something that's relying on visual input or photography or you know, mapping and things like that. The ability to share that information, the ability to pass around that evidence, just gets that much stronger. In an organization called To the Stars Academy released three videos taken by Navy pilots in two thousand and four and two thousand fifteen showing blurry images of things in the sky that the audio released along with

the videos indicated could not be identified. The videos were posted on the websites of The New York Times and The Washington Post, accompanying stories about a secret Pentagon project allegedly investigating UFOs rebranded as u a p s Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. This story, to some degree is still unfolding, and I'm not going to argue about the merits of the videos, but what strikes me is how indistinct they are.

The objects in these black and white videos are either blobs the result of heat detecting cameras, or dots moving against the background. There's no way you could see the films and then describe the objects in them. Contrast that to a still photo that was put out to the Internet by a newly formed online magazine called The Debrief that shows a photo taken from the rear seat of an F A eighteen super hornet of a metallic object

in the sky. Supposedly, the Defense Department was stumped. The object is in the distance, but it's clear to see you can describe what it looks like. In fact, you can describe it well enough that it took practically no time for the Internet masses to not only identify it as a milar balloon, but as a batman my lar balloon.

But while this photo was quickly explained, the previous three videos exists in that realm we've talked about throughout this season where no single explanation has been accepted by the culture. So it lives in that folklore realm. But there is attached to the videos a sense that the Department of Defense has legitimate questions about them, and this is important

when people evaluate them. When we start to see any sort of institutional acknowledgement of that, like the declassified reports that have come out from the U. S. Military of we caught these things on camera, what are they? We don't know, that sort of admission from that level of authority, and just bam, suddenly a whole slice of people who previously were maybe on the skeptical side, are now just like WHOA. That was what was missing for me. That was the resonant piece that's going to get me to

take this seriously again. And so it's an ever shifting landscape, but one in which we can stand back and see really big themes, but we can also zoom in and see really really specific, small scale symbolic moments that are generating that larger theme. So these videos have been absorbed, at least at this moment, into the larger UFO folklore. But what accounts for our continuing fascination with UFOs when the culture loses interest in so many other paranormal phenomena

after the break? Why have UFOs maintained their place in our culture while other paranormal interests seemed to come and go. One answer, of course, is that there might be more to the UFO phenomenon the just stories. Maybe we are being visited again, Lynn McNeil. We know that belief doesn't stick around for no reason, and we know that one straightforward, if hard to accept answer is perhaps people keep talking about UFOs because people keep seeing them, because they're they're

they're real, people are having encounters. That is a possibility that it does us no service to discount. When we wonder, wow, why do people keep talking about this? It's like, Wow, why do people keep talking about Bigfoot may because they keep seeing him. You know. That's one answer that we don't need to erase. But what explains it if UFOs

aren't real? After all, we don't have the kind of evidence that you'd expect from a phenomenon that has been going on for at least three quarters of a century. Let's say that we cannot confirm the existence of UFOs. We don't have one that most of us know of, right, We don't have one to look at to take apart to dismantle, to analyze with what tools are available to us?

Why do we keep telling this story? Clearly there's some beneficial outcome of leaving in this possibility, not meaning always positive, but meaning it serves us in our psychological and social needs. On August six, the first nuclear weapon to be used in war was detonated above Hiroshima, causing destruction at a scale unimaginable before that moment. In an instant, an estimated eighty people were killed and tens of thousands more would die in the days to come. Everything within a two

kilometer radius of the detonation site burned. The destruction was on a scale that had previously been thought only possible by gods. Now though through technology, man had acquired that power. What did that mean? How could fallible humans be trusted

with that kind of destructive potential? After people, and particularly Americans, were confronted with the fierce, nearly supernatural power afforded to them by technology, less than two years after the bombing of Hiroshima, Kenneth Arnold saw objects flying around Mountaineer and debris was found on Mac Brazil's ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico, and this became the form that this strain of folklore would take. The reality is is that folklore is a

really contemporary form of cultural expression. Yes, it comes from the past, but the whole point of it being folklore is that it keeps itself relevant by adapting and changing dynamically, so that when it was relevant in the past, it can adjust to become relevant now. So, yeah, folklore dies out, folklore disappears. For a long time, people thought of folklore as the survivals of a past age. And what we now know is that it's not so much that it's

dying out. It's that it's changing its face in order to keep up the early days of the modern UFO era. Explicitly acknowledged the centrality of the new destructive forces in human hands. The so called contact e s were people who in the nineteen fifties claim to have interactions with very humanlike beings from outer space that brought messages of

peace and concern over the development of nuclear weapons. Here's Aaron Gallias, hosts of the Saucer Life podcast, talking about the most famous of the contacts, a man named George adam Ski. In nineteen fifty two, George Adamsky has a meeting in the desert with a being from a flying saucer. He's from the planet Venus, and he communicates through gestures that the Venusians are concerned because of atomic explosions they've

detected coming from the Earth. These other civilizations have already passed beyond this stage of development that Earth is in, and this might spell doom for the balance of the Solar System. The same message was delivered by Claw to an alien visitor in the classic science fiction film From the Day the Earth Stood Still. If you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced

to a burned out cinder. In fact, many of the encounters we've looked at this season have taken place near nuclear facilities. Roswell is near White Sands Missile Test Range, site of the first atomic bomb test, and R F. Bentwaters in Curtland Air Force Base, both house nuclear weapons. The link is unmistakable. But why. Part of folklore development is the adaptation of traditional stories to a framework that

makes sense in the context of the times. If we want to look at the legend of the UFO visitor, where we have odd, often vaguely humanoid, sometimes a little extra tall, slender creatures descending from the sky or perhaps emerging from another dimension to interact with humans, often to kidnap them, often to interfere with their bodies in some way. We've just described centuries of fairy lore, you know, other creatures slender, humanoid, mysterious, powerful, emerging from the mists, taking

us away. Being kidnapped by the fairies and taken by the fairies is a longstanding tradition. So if we want to call that UFO lore, we could very very easily. This modification of existing stories to fit the context of a culture or a time is a common phenomenon in folklore. So the term actually that folk has use for this,

which I love, is eco typification. It's borrowed from botany, basically, the study of plants and the way that they immerge urge differently, even though it's the same species in two different climate and geological and geographical environments, because it's being responsive to its context, and so folklore is seen as operating in that same way. You can have the same story, the same legend, the same fairy tales, show up in two different places, and it's going to be morphologically distinct.

Morphology is the study of words and how they relate to other words in the same language. Syntax studies the structure of sentences. Morphology studies the structure of words. Because of the context of those two different places, it's going to be meeting the needs of a different time, maybe a different culture in different region, a different language family, all those sorts of things. So it's not that folklore is old, it's that folklore is continuously adapting. That's what

makes it relevant. People have always used stories to make sense of the forces that seem to control the course of their lives. You can think of the seasonal flooding of the nile, or the cycle of birth, life and death,

or national origin narratives. I think that UFO folklore has developed as a response to our ability through technology to assert control over the natural environment our lives the most pressing problems facing us, and at the same time create immense seemingly insurmountable problems, such as our loss of privacy and anonymity in the computer age, and of course, climate change.

Given the unprecedented power of technology, it doesn't seem too surprising that a folklore developed around the existence of technology that is superior to our own in some unknowable way. I think it's important to point out that legends, as a genre of folk narrative, are a legend about possibility. For a long time, legends were defined by folklorists as stories told as true, whereas fairy tales are stories told as fiction and myths our stories told sort of as

sacred revelation. Right, legends are the ones that were told as literally true. We've nuanced this since then to talk about the idea that what legends do is they allow us to symbolically discuss possibility, and the possibilities of reality are a thing that human beings love to discuss. We really want to chew over the potential boundaries of reality. Could this be, Could this not be? Could this happen? Is this real? And UFOs are something that clearly there's

both ambiguity and importance in this. It matters to us to not be alone in the universe, and we aren't sure if it's going to be a good thing or a bad thing when we get that answer. So again, you have two possibilities. One is that there really are craft in our skies whose origins we don't know. But if there aren't, we have a story or a collection of stories that speaks to something about our age. Are we alone? And if we aren't and we are being visited,

these beings must have technology far beyond ours. We have a sense that technology advances along certain lines, and therefore these beings can give us some insight about where we are headed. And our ambivalence about the exponentially expanding power of technology is reflected in these stories where we have no idea of the intentions of these visitors except for fiction or in the disinformation spread by people like Richard Doughty,

their motives are opaque. Take for instance, the mysterious binary download that Jim Peniston says he received from the ship bringing the clearing in Rendel shimp Forest. He says his ship came from six thousand years in the future to give him this information, but he hasn't figured the code

out yet. It's not known, And this, I think is important when we think of what the relationship between humans and technology might be like six thousand years in the future or at any time or place where technology is greatly advanced. Is it a good picture or a bad picture, utopia or dystopia. There isn't a consensus answer to this question, and the UFO narrative doesn't offer one. It reflects our uncertainty.

Next week, on a bonus episode of Strange Arrivals, I talked with Colin Dickey, the author of The Unexplained Mythical Monsters Alien Encounters. In our obsession with the Unexplained, the three topics that ended up being sort of the driving force of this book, not just cryptis and aliens, but

also the lost continents of Atlantis and Lamaria. I wanted to try and figure out a way to account for them, a kind of hypothesis that would encompass these three areas and why they seemed to be so interrelated to one another. And as promised, here's a clip from my ephemeral episode available wherever podcasts are found. Betty and Barney Hill crossover from Canada into northern New Hampshire and they stopped to have a snack at the diner in this place called Colebrook.

They eat. As they're leaving, they see it's around ten o'clock at night. They started driving south. They get into the White Mountains and they see that there's this light that seems to be following them. They stopped at a turn off and they get out and they look at it. Barney thinks that maybe it's a plane, but they can't hear any noise. They get back in the car, but with his sense that something up and the sky is following them. They drive through this area called Franconian Notch.

I've driven through it many times. It's this really beautiful road, but on either side or these very steep mountains, so it feels fairly claustrophobic. They stopped right by the old man in the mountain and they see an actual craft and that's the point which you know it gets real. They get back in the car start heading further south. They kind of get out of Franconian Notch into more open area over their car, they hear this craft. They pull over and the craft goes off into this field.

Barney gets out and he's got binoculars. He looked like the kind of man who would have binoculars handy in his car. He's looking up and he sees beings inside the craft looking back at them. I don't think you had to get it earlier that they were pretty human looking, and you have to consider that looking at anyone in a window ten stories up with the binocular the only thing you can discern is that they look human, and nothing good task about it. They jumped back into the car,

take off down the highway. They feel these kind of buzzes in the car, very subtle vibrating, and it was b B B B B b B, and they realized they're like thirty miles down the road with no memory of driving it. They go into Conquered trying to find a cop to tell about what happened, get a cup of coffee, don't find either. Drive the rest of the way back, arriving at about five in the morning, but they were expecting to show up around three based on

when they've gone through Colebrook. So there's a couple of missing hours, listen and subscribe to Ephemeral Now wherever you find your favorite shows, and learn more at Ephemeral Thought. Show. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart three D

Audio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manki, and special thanks to Wendy Connor's creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related

audio on archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm and Mile dot com, and find more podcasts from my Heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. For more information on folklore, visit the American Folklore Society on the web at American Folklore Society dot org. A SHO on the East