July 2, 2020 • 11 mins
Many people make outragious claims, and some of them even prove to be true. Either way, they make for great additions to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:27):
of Curiosities. In the nineteen thirties, J. B Ryan and
his wife Louisa explored a new frontier in the field
of psychology. They started a program at Duke University examining
whether subjects possessed something called extrasensory perception, also known as
(00:51):
e SP. This new field of study, which is often
referred to as parapsychology, was ridiculed by professors and academics.
Experiments were conducted using a special deck of cards with
one of five different shapes printed on each. Subjects would
try to guess what shape was on the other side
of the card without being able to see it, and
the results were well mixed. Still, that didn't stop Rhyan
(01:15):
and others from testing the limits of the human mind.
Looking back, though, it might be fair to say that
they probably should have looked a little lower. Joy met
her husband less while the two were still in high school.
They had gone to a party together and ended up
dancing all night. Although it wasn't his skills on the
dance floor, she remembered years later, it was his manly,
(01:35):
muskie smell. They remained together through college and got married
shortly after, both of them entering the medical field. Post graduation,
Less became a doctor, Joy a nurse. Over the next
ten years, they raised three sons together and almost never fought.
By all accounts, they had a perfect marriage. But one
day Less came home from work at the hospital and
(01:57):
Joy noticed something different about him. His smell was gone.
That manly odor she'd fallen in love with had disappeared,
and its place was a foul, musty stench no amount
of soap would remove. After that, they fought more often,
especially when Joy mentioned his smell. Over the following weeks
and months, their relationship got worse, but so did her
(02:18):
husband's demeanor. He was a lot more quick to become
angry with her. He yelled more and had lost all
the patients he used to have. Joy could tell something
was going on with him, but she couldn't put her
finger exactly on what it was. Her nose on the
other hand, knew exactly what was going on. It just
hadn't told her yet, so she told Less to go
(02:39):
in for some tests. Joy believed that he had a tumor,
one that was causing a shift in his personality, but
the doctors told her that there was no tumor. Instead,
they gave a very different diagnosis Less, it turned out,
at Parkinson's disease. He Enjoy would manage the symptoms for
the next two decades, even as they worsened. Less eventually
(02:59):
had to leave his job at the hospital when his
mobility made it impossible to keep up. He wasn't sleeping
well either, and his hands shook, and then in two
thousand twelve, Joy accompanied him to a support group for
Parkinson's patients. They showed up late that night, so by
the time they arrived almost all of the seats were taken.
As soon as she stepped through the door, though, Joy
(03:20):
was hit in the face with an all too familiar stench.
Every single person smelled just like her husband. Some people
had it less, while others were barely tolerable. But Joy
finally realized why her husband's odor had changed. When he
was in his early thirties. She had detected his Parkinson's
ten years before the symptoms were bad enough to warrant
(03:40):
to diagnosis. She hesitated to tell him, though, after all,
the idea that someone could smell a disease sounded far fetched. Still,
she had to know, and his reaction surprised her. It
all made sense now why she kept complaining about his
sudden woodsy scent that wouldn't wash off. So they flew
over Ease to speak with Dr Tila Kunath, a Parkinson's
(04:02):
researcher and neurobiologist at the University of Edinburgh. During the
Q and a portion of one of his lectures, Joy
stood up and asked whether Parkinson's had a smell. Dr
Kunath was thrown He never thought about it that way,
but he didn't think so. Months later, he heard about
a study where dogs were able to detect cancer purely
by a patients scent. It was a eureka moment that
(04:25):
caused him to invite Joy back to the university to
participate in an experiment of his own. He assembled a
group of subjects, some with Parkinson's and some without, and
gave each of them a T shirt to wear that
night as they slept. The next day, they gave those
shirts back. Dr Kannath then presented the T shirts in
a random order to Joy, asking her to take a
(04:45):
whiff and score each one by how much of the
Parkinson's she could smell. She sniffed each one and noted
where on the spectrum each subject fell, like whether they
actually had the disease and at what stage, and the
results were incredible and almost all cases she was able
to accurately detect Parkinson's on the T shirts from the
group of the diagnosed patients. From that point on, Joy's
(05:07):
knows would unlock new avenues for Parkinson's research, and she
was even listed as a co author on Dr Kuldneth's study.
There was one hiccup though. During the shirt study, Joy
had made a mistake. She had claimed that a shirt
she smelled had belonged to one of Dr Kenneth's Parkinson's patients,
when in fact it had come from one of the
healthy control groups subjects Well, sort of you see. Months later,
(05:32):
that same subject pain Dr Kuldnath a visit and told
him that they could no longer participate in the healthy
control group and the reason why would blow everyone else away.
That test subject had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease,
and Joy Milne had found it before anyone else with
just her nose. When more than one person is planning
(06:08):
to commit a crime, it's a good idea for everyone
to get their stories straight ahead of time. One break
in the narrative and the cops will have no problem
getting one culprit to roll on the others. Charles and
Calvin weren't criminals, but they did have a surprising story
to tell the authorities. On the night of October eleventh
of nineteen seventy three, Charles was the foreman at a
(06:28):
shipyard in Mississippi, and nineteen year old Calvin had just
arrived in town and was looking for work. His father
and Charles had been buddies years earlier, so Charles was
only too happy to lend a helping hand. Charles gave
the young man a job and even rented him a
room in his apartment. To celebrate. After Calvin's first day
at the shipyard, Charles invited him to go fishing after work.
(06:48):
They spent a few hours casting their lines, watching the sunset,
and waiting for the fish to bite, and that's when
something strange happened. Charles reeled in his empty line and
bent down to grab more bait for his hook when
he heard a strange zipping sound overhead. A blue light
flashed and a thirty foot long craft emerged out of nowhere,
landing nearby, and then the dome on top opened. As
(07:14):
it did, a bright light nearly blinded the men, and
then three creatures appeared from inside, seeming to float several
inches off the ground. Charles and Calvin froze, later recounting
to police that they had been paralyzed by an injection
from one of the creatures. Sharp pincers reached out and
grabbed both of the men, pulling them toward the ship.
(07:34):
When it was all over, the men were deposited back
at the pier where they had been abducted. Calvin reached
towards the sky and screamed after the creatures. Eventually, the
two of them made their way to the local police station,
and they told their story. The officers initially believed that
both men had been drinking a bit too much that night,
but Calvin was out of control. Assuming that something had
(07:55):
indeed happened near the docks, one officer brought the men
into an interrogation room. He asked them questions about what
had happened. They told their story again, beginning with the
fishing nextpedition, then describing the odd sounds and the flashing lights.
Charles told him about the alien creatures with their sharp claws,
which caused the puncture in his arm, but Calvin begged
(08:16):
his boss not to say anything. Those people will come
back and get us. He said, they don't want us
to talk about it, but Charles ignored him and kept going.
He talked about the sparse interior of the ship and
the giant eye that scanned their bodies from overhead, how
the beans had flipped them over and around so they
could examine them from all angles. Yet the men hadn't
(08:36):
been worried. At the time. They were being communicated to
telepathically by one of the aliens, who told them that
everything would be all right. Calvin said he assumed the
voice was coming from the fourth creature in the room.
He said it looked more like a human than the rest,
that had large, kind eyes. When they had finished telling
their tale to the police, the officer left the room,
but hid a tape recorder to record their conversation. After
(08:59):
he was gone. He expected Charles and Calvin to laugh
and joke about how they were pulling one over on
the cops, or making sure that they had gotten all
the details of their story right for the next round
of questions. Instead, the two men talked about everything they
had encountered, and it was clear there was genuine fear
in their voices. Other officers attempted to find holes in
(09:22):
their stories. Charles and Calvin were even subjected to polygraph tests,
but they both passed. In fact, nothing the authorities through
at them could crack through to the truth that they
assumed was underneath a lie. By all measures, these two
men believed that they had actually experienced an alien abduction.
Newspapers all over the country reported their story. Charles even
(09:44):
went on television, sitting down with Dick Cavitt and Johnny Carson. Well.
Calvin did the opposite and went into hiding. He immediately
went home after his night at the police station and
bathed his body in bleach, hoping to remove any trace
of whatever the aliens had done to him. Calvin never
talked about what he'd seen. He eventually moved on and
got married, taking jobs here and there, always avoiding the
(10:07):
spotlight at all costs, but forty five years later, Calvin
finally published a book with his side of the story,
a story just as convincing today as it was back
in nine and he wasn't alone. Since then, another witness
has come forward who claimed to have seen the same
blue lights in flying Object months after Charles Hickson and
(10:29):
Calvin Parker. She too hadn't told anyone for over forty years.
Maybe it was a true close encounter, or an elaborate hoax,
or even a lie that got wildly out of control.
Call it whatever you want, but I'll stick to the
word that describes it best, curious. I hope you've enjoyed
(10:51):
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 Mankey 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
(11:13):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
(00:27):
of Curiosities. In the nineteen thirties, J. B Ryan and
his wife Louisa explored a new frontier in the field
of psychology. They started a program at Duke University examining
whether subjects possessed something called extrasensory perception, also known as
(00:51):
e SP. This new field of study, which is often
referred to as parapsychology, was ridiculed by professors and academics.
Experiments were conducted using a special deck of cards with
one of five different shapes printed on each. Subjects would
try to guess what shape was on the other side
of the card without being able to see it, and
the results were well mixed. Still, that didn't stop Rhyan
(01:15):
and others from testing the limits of the human mind.
Looking back, though, it might be fair to say that
they probably should have looked a little lower. Joy met
her husband less while the two were still in high school.
They had gone to a party together and ended up
dancing all night. Although it wasn't his skills on the
dance floor, she remembered years later, it was his manly,
(01:35):
muskie smell. They remained together through college and got married
shortly after, both of them entering the medical field. Post graduation,
Less became a doctor, Joy a nurse. Over the next
ten years, they raised three sons together and almost never fought.
By all accounts, they had a perfect marriage. But one
day Less came home from work at the hospital and
(01:57):
Joy noticed something different about him. His smell was gone.
That manly odor she'd fallen in love with had disappeared,
and its place was a foul, musty stench no amount
of soap would remove. After that, they fought more often,
especially when Joy mentioned his smell. Over the following weeks
and months, their relationship got worse, but so did her
(02:18):
husband's demeanor. He was a lot more quick to become
angry with her. He yelled more and had lost all
the patients he used to have. Joy could tell something
was going on with him, but she couldn't put her
finger exactly on what it was. Her nose on the
other hand, knew exactly what was going on. It just
hadn't told her yet, so she told Less to go
(02:39):
in for some tests. Joy believed that he had a tumor,
one that was causing a shift in his personality, but
the doctors told her that there was no tumor. Instead,
they gave a very different diagnosis Less, it turned out,
at Parkinson's disease. He Enjoy would manage the symptoms for
the next two decades, even as they worsened. Less eventually
(02:59):
had to leave his job at the hospital when his
mobility made it impossible to keep up. He wasn't sleeping
well either, and his hands shook, and then in two
thousand twelve, Joy accompanied him to a support group for
Parkinson's patients. They showed up late that night, so by
the time they arrived almost all of the seats were taken.
As soon as she stepped through the door, though, Joy
(03:20):
was hit in the face with an all too familiar stench.
Every single person smelled just like her husband. Some people
had it less, while others were barely tolerable. But Joy
finally realized why her husband's odor had changed. When he
was in his early thirties. She had detected his Parkinson's
ten years before the symptoms were bad enough to warrant
(03:40):
to diagnosis. She hesitated to tell him, though, after all,
the idea that someone could smell a disease sounded far fetched. Still,
she had to know, and his reaction surprised her. It
all made sense now why she kept complaining about his
sudden woodsy scent that wouldn't wash off. So they flew
over Ease to speak with Dr Tila Kunath, a Parkinson's
(04:02):
researcher and neurobiologist at the University of Edinburgh. During the
Q and a portion of one of his lectures, Joy
stood up and asked whether Parkinson's had a smell. Dr
Kunath was thrown He never thought about it that way,
but he didn't think so. Months later, he heard about
a study where dogs were able to detect cancer purely
by a patients scent. It was a eureka moment that
(04:25):
caused him to invite Joy back to the university to
participate in an experiment of his own. He assembled a
group of subjects, some with Parkinson's and some without, and
gave each of them a T shirt to wear that
night as they slept. The next day, they gave those
shirts back. Dr Kannath then presented the T shirts in
a random order to Joy, asking her to take a
(04:45):
whiff and score each one by how much of the
Parkinson's she could smell. She sniffed each one and noted
where on the spectrum each subject fell, like whether they
actually had the disease and at what stage, and the
results were incredible and almost all cases she was able
to accurately detect Parkinson's on the T shirts from the
group of the diagnosed patients. From that point on, Joy's
(05:07):
knows would unlock new avenues for Parkinson's research, and she
was even listed as a co author on Dr Kuldneth's study.
There was one hiccup though. During the shirt study, Joy
had made a mistake. She had claimed that a shirt
she smelled had belonged to one of Dr Kenneth's Parkinson's patients,
when in fact it had come from one of the
healthy control groups subjects Well, sort of you see. Months later,
(05:32):
that same subject pain Dr Kuldnath a visit and told
him that they could no longer participate in the healthy
control group and the reason why would blow everyone else away.
That test subject had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease,
and Joy Milne had found it before anyone else with
just her nose. When more than one person is planning
(06:08):
to commit a crime, it's a good idea for everyone
to get their stories straight ahead of time. One break
in the narrative and the cops will have no problem
getting one culprit to roll on the others. Charles and
Calvin weren't criminals, but they did have a surprising story
to tell the authorities. On the night of October eleventh
of nineteen seventy three, Charles was the foreman at a
(06:28):
shipyard in Mississippi, and nineteen year old Calvin had just
arrived in town and was looking for work. His father
and Charles had been buddies years earlier, so Charles was
only too happy to lend a helping hand. Charles gave
the young man a job and even rented him a
room in his apartment. To celebrate. After Calvin's first day
at the shipyard, Charles invited him to go fishing after work.
(06:48):
They spent a few hours casting their lines, watching the sunset,
and waiting for the fish to bite, and that's when
something strange happened. Charles reeled in his empty line and
bent down to grab more bait for his hook when
he heard a strange zipping sound overhead. A blue light
flashed and a thirty foot long craft emerged out of nowhere,
landing nearby, and then the dome on top opened. As
(07:14):
it did, a bright light nearly blinded the men, and
then three creatures appeared from inside, seeming to float several
inches off the ground. Charles and Calvin froze, later recounting
to police that they had been paralyzed by an injection
from one of the creatures. Sharp pincers reached out and
grabbed both of the men, pulling them toward the ship.
(07:34):
When it was all over, the men were deposited back
at the pier where they had been abducted. Calvin reached
towards the sky and screamed after the creatures. Eventually, the
two of them made their way to the local police station,
and they told their story. The officers initially believed that
both men had been drinking a bit too much that night,
but Calvin was out of control. Assuming that something had
(07:55):
indeed happened near the docks, one officer brought the men
into an interrogation room. He asked them questions about what
had happened. They told their story again, beginning with the
fishing nextpedition, then describing the odd sounds and the flashing lights.
Charles told him about the alien creatures with their sharp claws,
which caused the puncture in his arm, but Calvin begged
(08:16):
his boss not to say anything. Those people will come
back and get us. He said, they don't want us
to talk about it, but Charles ignored him and kept going.
He talked about the sparse interior of the ship and
the giant eye that scanned their bodies from overhead, how
the beans had flipped them over and around so they
could examine them from all angles. Yet the men hadn't
(08:36):
been worried. At the time. They were being communicated to
telepathically by one of the aliens, who told them that
everything would be all right. Calvin said he assumed the
voice was coming from the fourth creature in the room.
He said it looked more like a human than the rest,
that had large, kind eyes. When they had finished telling
their tale to the police, the officer left the room,
but hid a tape recorder to record their conversation. After
(08:59):
he was gone. He expected Charles and Calvin to laugh
and joke about how they were pulling one over on
the cops, or making sure that they had gotten all
the details of their story right for the next round
of questions. Instead, the two men talked about everything they
had encountered, and it was clear there was genuine fear
in their voices. Other officers attempted to find holes in
(09:22):
their stories. Charles and Calvin were even subjected to polygraph tests,
but they both passed. In fact, nothing the authorities through
at them could crack through to the truth that they
assumed was underneath a lie. By all measures, these two
men believed that they had actually experienced an alien abduction.
Newspapers all over the country reported their story. Charles even
(09:44):
went on television, sitting down with Dick Cavitt and Johnny Carson. Well.
Calvin did the opposite and went into hiding. He immediately
went home after his night at the police station and
bathed his body in bleach, hoping to remove any trace
of whatever the aliens had done to him. Calvin never
talked about what he'd seen. He eventually moved on and
got married, taking jobs here and there, always avoiding the
(10:07):
spotlight at all costs, but forty five years later, Calvin
finally published a book with his side of the story,
a story just as convincing today as it was back
in nine and he wasn't alone. Since then, another witness
has come forward who claimed to have seen the same
blue lights in flying Object months after Charles Hickson and
(10:29):
Calvin Parker. She too hadn't told anyone for over forty years.
Maybe it was a true close encounter, or an elaborate hoax,
or even a lie that got wildly out of control.
Call it whatever you want, but I'll stick to the
word that describes it best, curious. I hope you've enjoyed
(10:51):
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 Mankey 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
(11:13):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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