Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
You are tuned in to Coast to Coast AM. Connie Willis here with you find me at Connie Willis dot com. I think you'll enjoy the shows that I've got for you, the newsletter, come on, go along with me, have a good time, Blue Rock Talk, Connie after Dark and Connie Willis the podcast that's free, and I appreciate that you do that. When you do that, you'll hear people like who I'm talking to right now tonight. He'll be on eventually here with my podcast and my Blue Rock Talk.
So I'm looking forward to that to Preston, and so are the people that you know, my blue rockers. So thank you for looking forward to that in the future. You are all over the place. You've got a YouTube channel. You're also you have a website, Preston Dinnitt dot weeble dot com.
Excuse me, yes, that's right.
Get that wee bley in there. Don't forget the weebly you all. Preston Dennitt dot we bleed. Oh you're the weebley guy. Yeah, you're the You're the weeblely Preston Yeah, that's me. That's me, and Preston is a p R E S T O N. And the Dinnett is with the two ends and the two t's and the two e's d E N N E T T you can do a song and the Weebley has two e's too.
Oh my gosh, you know it it today. You know, it's like you got to find like one word that everybody will remember right to get to your your stuff. It's really kind of difficult. The memories are gone memories, they're just gone nowadays. But you're finding people that are pulling up some memories and remembering these encounters at the drive in, and I just think that's awesome.
Yeah, it's truly amazing.
Nice new content.
Yeah, like I said, it really shocked me. I thought I pretty much covered the field uptown inside, and no, there's always something new to learn. I don't know why I keep thinking that, oh, I've heard it all, because no, you haven't. Something always comes along and turns everything on its head, and this absolutely did.
Yeah, so what are so okay? So you know, there's just like a handful it seems like to me there's just a handful of drive ins now that are still around or or are more starting to pop up again. I can't imagine that, But are they I loved them, they were great. But it's a whole different world now. But are there still some out there? And is this phenomenon still happening?
Oh yeah, yeah, there used to be thousands. The real heyday was the city. Yeah, sixties and seventies, thousands upon thousands. This was the thing to do. People will go there and there were playgrounds, prize giveaways, they work shows, petting zoo's, balloon rides.
Mud wrestling. There was mud wrestle these.
Really, I kid you not, I'm not.
I'm not joking. We found this out last night.
It was the thing to do. But it did start to fade away in the eighties when we got you know, VCRs Home Entertainment. But there's still several hundred that have hung on, and I've got current cases all the way. I think the most recent one that was real solid, because I found some later, but twenty fifteen that was the most recent, really good case I found, which is still fairly recent. Don't tell us, Oh you know, what I'd really like to do, Connie is kind of take you on a journey through time.
Oh, thank you absolutely.
Because I mean it's like a movie how this rolls out.
Yeah, it's a story within a story with stories in there. So no go please, thank you. The stage is yours.
Go ahead. It starts in the nineteen fifties, right, and this is when it did really ramp up. As you know, the Modern Age of UFOs was nineteen forty seven and onwards with roswell in a huge super wave, and this is when society really started to take notice. Of course, it does go back thousands of years, but this has unprecedented what's happened to humanity since the Modern Age of UFOs nineteen forty seven and that's when this started to happen.
And the earliest case I could find is significant, I think, because it has something really interesting to say about how we treat this subject. And that occurred at the Starlight Drive in on July twenty second, nineteen fifty Spartanburg, North Carolina.
There was a colonel or gosh, let's see, I believe it was a writer who was at the movie, a military officer though, and he was there with his wife when this sort of dirigible like object sort of just I went by the theater I think he didn't think much of it until it returned, and then it came back a third time, and by the fourth time it's clear that it is doing something. And he described it as the dirigible object, the sort of rounded bottom, silvery white,
and that fourth pass, it came very very low. And he wasn't the only one who saw it at this point. Several people in the theater saw it. So he sent a report to the Air Force, and I tracked this report because you know there's a lot of documents online. This was reported to the Precursor Project Blue Book and actually went to Colonel John Meads at the commanding General at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Now, if you know anything about UFOs, right Patterson is UFO Central. That's where
we do the studying of foreign technology. So this is important because this shows that our government is fully aware. I thought, well, maybe that's a coincidence, but I don't think so, because it wasn't long after that August twelfth, nineteen fifty two. This is one of my favorite cases. Terrorists driving in Bakersfield, California. It's a big theater space for six hundred and fifty cars, and again there's a
military officer in the audience. The early cases were mostly military officers, I think because the reporters didn't believe regular citizens and they wanted really good witnesses.
All right, right, makes sense, yep, right, I agree with you yet.
So, yeah, this is in Bakersfield and there's about six hundred cars there or so when this UFO drops down. This one was prescribed as cigar shaped. There's all different types of course, saucers and egg shaped and cigars and so forth. This one was cigar shaped. And it comes zoom, stops right above the screen, flashes its lights at the audience, and then darts off. So this is a real quick one. But a lot of people saw it and started calling
the local sheriff's office. Deputy Sheriff Leroy Hatfields has taking the calls one after another, and after the fourth or fifth call, he's like, the phone is still ringing. He's like, hold on, I'm going to just go down there. And goes down there and still finds about one hundred people just talking about it, and it takes the testimony of about thirty of them. They were lining up. He's like, that's it. My arm's tired. I've got what she's you know the report. I think I know what you've seen
or I've got the descriptions. So he sends he writes it up right, and sends this report to the nearest Air Force base, which turns out to be Edwards and Edwards don't even get me started on Edwards because they have had so many UFO sidings and landings and all kinds of stuff. It's the UFO magnet there, so they
know what's going on at any rate. It goes to a blue book officer there and he writes up this report marks at action and sends it the next day to the Air Technical Intelligence Command again at Wright Patterson, and the copy goes to Enter Air Force Base in Colorado, which is where we track all the incoming and outgoing traffic, and get this to the Director of Intelligence at Washington, DC.
So they knew wow beginning, because back in the fifties, if you saw a UFO, you're hoaxing, you're hallucinating, you're misperceiving. Go away, there's no such thing. But they knew, they knew the whole time.
Oh yeah, yep, I agree with that. Okay, I'm gonna sit back, hold on, let me go get some pop going. Hold on, wait a minute, I need some more butter. Okay, okay, hold on, I'm ready. I'm ready to go.
All right, here's another one. Things aren't even getting exciting yet. This is just the introduction. This is the little cartoon at the beginning of a movie. Here's another case which really struck me profoundly. This was July seventeenth, nineteen fifty four, Saint Louis, Missouri, at the Skyline Theater. All the people are at the theater when suddenly this red glow starts to sweep over the parking lot and off to the side, this time not next to the screen as usual. This
one's unusual. Net way is this UFO. It's really bright, it's casting this eerie light. It's oval shaped, it's quite low, about fifty one hundred feet off the ground and just sitting there. So everyone, of course, in these cases, they stop watching the movie and look at this thing, which is much more interesting. And some people are getting scared and staying in their cars, and others are getting out and looking at this thing. It's an eerie silence kind
of settling over the whole parking lot. One of the witnesses was this young man who was very interested. He was just a kid, right seven or eight years old, gets out of his car with his family and looking at it. He doesn't realize it, but his father works at the local airport not too far away and is also watching it through binoculars from the control tower. He's got lots of pilots and stuff in his family, so
he's very interested in all of this. And right when people start to run towards this thing and try to get closer, it takes off straight up. But this left this one young man, his name is Peter, with a lifelong interest in UFOs And it was years later, as an adult he was best friends with Robert Gribble who had started the National UFO Reporting Center and was diving it up and Peter, his last name is Devenport. I'll take it over. This is Peter Devenport, the National UFO
Reporting Center. And yeah, it's because of that sighting that the lifelong interest that basically he said it himself in his own words, inspired him to become the president of the National UFO Reporting Center. Makes me wonder if these UFO guys knew what they were doing when makes sort of like this guy needs to know where real, he's going to be doing important work in the future. I don't know, I'm speculating there, but.
H no, I can see that. Yeah, I totally I totally get that. That makes sense. That's you know, no coincidence, is right, and.
One more part of the pre show because this is when I stud this is when I started to really wonder what's going on here. There was a case at Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island in Canada. I don't have the exact date, and really I don't have much details at all, but from according to one witness, there were UFOs hovering over this theater so many times it came repeatedly.
Some of these theaters are visited repeatedly. It came over so many times that the owners actually put it in their marquee started to advertise, I want to see a UFO come to our theater. I'm like, okay, because yeah. I did find a number of cases like the Uma
Drive in in Arizona, where was visited repeatedly. Normally they'll pick one theater, go off to another one, and then another one, kind of like a I don't know, a concert tour or you know, a book signing just place to place to place, like advertising really, so I think that's what they're doing. Okay, they are doing this intentionally because they know people are watching.
Is anybody getting pictures of any of these? By the way, any pictures?
Oh and a few of the later ones they didn't really come out, so I mean, I guess it's hard to take a picture at night of a glowing object.
But back then.
Nothing great. Unfortunately there were with the school yard encounters. They did get some great ones, but which is very similar to this. But no, it wasn't until the sixties that it really started to get exciting. And this is when I'm like, I know what's going on here, because there was this one case that really tipped it off for me, and that was in May of nineteen sixty three at the Wellington Circle twin And this was investigated by George Fawcett, who, if you're a fan of the
early UFO guys, he's a hero. He investigated a lot of cases, a great pioneering researcher. And this is in Medford, Massachusetts. And these two discs dropped down and then moments later down right on top of the first two. The first two were in a row. The second two came right on top, and then two more came, so there's sort of two columns now and then two more. So we have two columns of a total of eight discs. And at this point the people were all looking at them,
not really watching the movie. And that's when these discs put on a forty five minute long display, started playing like musical chairs, darting around, rotating, darting back and forth, dancing is how people described it. And after forty five minutes they came back into the two columns and took off.
Well, isn't that interesting because like old Spielberg did the uh don't du dn't du du you know, put on this whole spectacle with close encounters right exactly? Remember that that was like this whole thing. I mean, that's what that reminded me of them doing that. I wonder if they picked that up from there, could be there's an idea why not as a good one? Wow? Forty five minutes?
Can you imagine?
No, that'd be great?
Wow. I mean that's when I started to realize, Okay, I think I understand this because in that case that people weren't too freaked out. Sometimes they absolutely lose their minds and just screach out of the theater. But that's when I started to realize, Okay, they are targeting the theaters specifically, because there was a case not long after that two years June twenty nine, nineteen sixty four at
lant To, Georgia. All the kids were in the bleachers because the bleachers back in those days for some of the people who wanted to watch the movie not from their car.
And that's right.
This is disk sort of showed up in the back, you know, over the trees, and one kids shouts out, hey, look at you f out and kind of the kids just look like, hey, yeah, and it goes off and then this same kids jumps up. He's like, it's back, it's coming, and it comes right over the bleachers twenty fifty feet high and just the ere everyone in the bleachers scatters. These are mostly kids. They're running for their cars.
The main witness who reported this, I think, was to move on ran with his cousin or sibling to the snack stand and hid in there well, and he's looking for his parents' cars because everyone's just losing their minds. And finally he's like, let's creep out and see if we can get there. But this disc is right over right, exactly overhead, and he finally sees his family and they're waving at him and make rush into their car and take off. That one cleared the theater.
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coasta m dot com for more