April 27, 2023 • 38 mins
A light in the sky in a small town in Ohio was seen by police officers from several different surrounding departments, eventually one of them got as close as they could. Payne speaks with the police dispatcher and dives into the actual recordings of the incident.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
High Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you
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it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot
plus subscribers. You'll also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season.
For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
As I was in wrapped, five or six calls start
coming in about a huge light in the sky. I
was at a stop sign. A big beam of light
came upon my vehicle. All at once. My car, shut off,
(00:51):
my computer, my radio. I saw a huge light in
the sky just hit my car. I had no idea
what it was. I slammed my car in park, got
out of the car. There was no sound. I couldn't
hear anything. It lit this whole street up. Discovering there
(01:15):
no sound, Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I hop that Appliant J played the appliant o' play
it cry you right for mission.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Welcome to High Strange. A little after midnight in nineteen
ninety four, strange lights were seen over the northeastern sky
of Ohio. Local residents from all around Trumbull County began
calling into local news stations to report it. The following
is the actual tape from the nine to one one
(01:47):
dispatch center, and I dispatched.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
You report to any objects in the air but minutes.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Roy Anne Rudolph was working at the dispatch center that
night and Youngstown, Ohio.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
I was a dispatcher telecommunicator at the Trumbull County nine
to one to one center. The first few hours were
relatively quiet. Everybody was just settling in and we get
a call from one of our local media personalities from
a TV station and I get that.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
My health it could be saying normal saw something. Oh
it's no noise, no noise, it was low flying and
put the glowing object.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
We started getting a couple of phone calls about people
who were seeing a light in the sky. How many
called in, But I, I really don't know what that
would be.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
At first, she thought this whole thing might be a joke,
or at the very least a misinterpretation of something normal
in the sky, like a balloon or a plane. But
it wasn't long before she started receiving her own calls
to the police station.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
The calls started spanning out a little bit from that area.
Then the calls became more and more frequent.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Ten hundred people already wreak, ran up and down.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
They hi ufo, okay she is, I mean I got
a purpose.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
You were all masks.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
She tried to rationalize the report she was receiving, starting
with the most obvious. It's a hoax or a small
plane or a helicopter. Probably nothing worth a learning her
police officers about. But the nine one one calls were
multiplying faster than she could keep up.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
I just can't quite make it ostrolizin ocular that budger
has not moved.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
They were upset by the object not moving.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
That's thing half thought.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
There's tends.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Notice that I don't wanted it.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
See a red glow open that guy huge.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
I don't want their predators an osculars.
Speaker 7 (03:41):
I can't quite bake it out.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
They're changes colors from white to.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Red, the green, but sect.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
That has not moved.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
They have gone any drisk and because I don't want
the good can look.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
They were really upset because there was no noise.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I didn't hear it now the only time I had
with my car, Well, what.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
W it moving?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Or yeah?
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Bowing like up in the air, blowing getting further away
from it.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
The townspeople were clearly genuinely concerned. She took it upon
herself to inform the officers of the situation. At this point,
it warranted some real investigating.
Speaker 5 (04:17):
What typically happens is you dispatch the units, and I
picked the officer I thought would respond without getting upset
that I sent them on this because it just sounded
so it just sounded like a lot to process. Of
the three officers, I picked the one officer who was
a friend of mine who I didn't think would be
upset that I sent him.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
My name's Stobe Malaro, Liberty Township, Ohio. I'm a police officer.
We were used to getting calls like that to see
one thirties would be training and they would shut their
lights off, sometimes open them up, So there was no
big rush in going to check this out.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Toby was dispatched to investigate what exactly was going on here.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
Hey, listen, there's some people who are flipping out. There's
seen some lights in the sky and they are panicky
about this. He said, all right, I'll head that way,
give me a minute.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
As I was en wrapped, five or six calls start
coming in about a huge light in the sky.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
We continue fielding calls and all of a sudden, other
police units in the general vicinity start seeing it.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Bob I Pwhere to god?
Speaker 5 (05:21):
Horror called in on an unidentified object? Every liberty horror
call or call on an unidentified flying object.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
And you beat off the gun and encloy bottom high to.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Check out, isn't that a UFO? Yeah, we got like
these calls on it earlier taste.
Speaker 8 (05:42):
Luckily, what would you believe was the least opinion hid
out of the.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
UFO And we got like hid calls on earlier.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Today and they're looking again left within yet a couple
of different people the officers did they call it?
Speaker 1 (05:54):
One of the hold officers, I did he fall covering
it like a ten minute man.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
It's pretty messed up. We got across some last playing
we got.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
The night.
Speaker 7 (06:04):
Over.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
A dozen officers had reported to roy Anne that they
had seen a UFO, and she passed this information into
all active law enforcement units in the area an attempt
to triangulate where this thing was.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
These are seasoned police officers, people who have great credibility,
and now they're seeing some things. And you start hearing
these other departments talking over the various frequencies and the
other dispatchers are speaking and conversing about these lights. These
officers were ten twenty miles apart from one another, and
they're all saying they're seeing these formations, they're seeing these lights.
(06:35):
And that changed.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Everything from like a white the white at read to
Paul thinging green labor.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
What did you really think it was?
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I don't know any here, conor kill whatever it is
the big under Klam provid.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
It became clear that whatever was happening in the skies
wasn't going away anytime soon. Multiple police stations are reporting
the same things. What they were seeing in the sky
that night was reported to be as big as a
football field, hovering low and emitting no sound at all.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
When you start hearing people who have been respected members
of the law enforcement community and you say, okay, this
now has a little bit more credibility, what do you do?
Speaker 8 (07:21):
How do you handle that?
Speaker 1 (07:23):
One of the officers who witnessed the object that night,
named Lieutenant James Baker, decided to climb an abandoned radar
tower to get a better look. According to Baker, there
wasn't just one UFO, but three, forming a triangle and
flashing color in Unison. Multiple officers were in pursuit of
the object in their patrol cars speeding through town trying
to keep up with it.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I told him to call the airbase to see if
they had anything on radar or if they had some
type of plane at or something going on.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
Ah yeah, dude, at the orient, IM look attach to
plate the department.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
We recorded some flying.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Object at our action.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
You know, if anything, it should be in our airspace
at the time, close to.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
The ground, the UHD belt.
Speaker 8 (08:06):
But I go, I am a little young.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Not out there.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
I'm not there, and go.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
I didn't anticipate I'd get a lot, but I certainly
didn't expect to hear there's nothing.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Within a sixty mile radius. Nothing at all was appearing
on the FAA's radar systems.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
I would like to think it could have been something
from the air base. My conversation with the gentleman that
I spoke with at the airbase, it was a little
bit unsettling, only because his sincerity, the honesty in him
telling me I see nothing, and made a shudder because
you expected him to come back with some kind of answer.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
It was a December night, but it was really hot
out time. It was like sixty degrees was close to midnight.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Well heading to the scene of the latest sighting, Toby
was approached by a nervous bystander in the neighborhood. He
was standing in the street and waved him down as
he approached in a squad car.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
He actually stopped me when I was coming down the road,
walked out to the street and said it had just
been over his house.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
The man was visibly unsettled and claimed that just moments
ago he had seen the objects hovering directly above his house.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
I said, what was this over your house? I'm looking
at the skies. I don't see anything. To be honest
with you, I thought maybe this guy had been drinking
a little bit. What direction did it go?
Speaker 1 (09:30):
He said?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
South.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
At first, Toby didn't believe this man, but that was
about to change.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I told him to go back in his house, go relax,
and I'll check it out. I continued down the street
the direction he told me he had it south.
Speaker 5 (09:46):
Toby arrives in the area, marks himself in the area.
We have what we call a checkup, what's called a
code six, and that means everything okay with you, and
if it is, you acknowledge that nothing's wrong. I gave
Toby several Code six and I was getting nothing back.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Toby went radio silent.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
I don't know if something bad happened to him. I
don't know if something happened to his car. I don't
know if he had an accident. But he was not responding,
and that's a problem when you're a dispatcher. That is
the worst fear of any dispatcher.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
She continued to send out the RUOK communication called Code six,
but for ten full minutes she was getting no response
at all. At this point, the situation escalated to all
hands on deck. Officers from all around the county were
sent to check on him. It felt like an eternity.
Speaker 5 (10:36):
There are times when people, Hey, I stepped into the
restroom and I didn't bring my portable with me. There
are times when that happens. But you have a responsibility
to send people start them in that direction. It's a lifeline.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I was at a stop sign. A big beam of
light came upon my vehicle all at once. My car
shut off, my computer, my radio. I was still in drive.
A huge light in the sky has hit my car.
(11:10):
I slammed my car in park, got out of the car.
I had no idea what it was. Initially I thought
it was a plane. However, there was no sound. I
couldn't hear anything. I had that physically shilled my eyes.
Just an intense, bright light about one hundred feet above
tree level. It lit this whole street up, just covering
(11:33):
there no sound. It was long, oval in shape, the
size of a football fielder better. I was trying to
determine exactly what it was. I've never seen anything that intense,
that bright without making noise. And then all of a sudden,
(11:54):
it just shot off. As it moved on, everything in
my car turned back on. My car started back up.
At that point, I started a radio my location. They
were asking me if I was Code six. Was meant,
are you okay? They said I was off air. I
(12:18):
think like four minutes. That didn't seem right. I said,
I'm fine. I told them what I saw the direction
of travel of the light. I gave them a direction
of travel, and they start pursuing the lights another jurisdictions
start picking that up, saying that we see it. I've
(12:39):
lived there all my life and I know that these
planes fly. You know, maybe the air Force is trying
out a different type of airplane and they're not going
to tell you what they're doing. As time progressed, we
tried to get information from the military base. They didn't
want to even say anything about it. That's where my
(13:01):
rationale came that it was something from the base itself.
I really didn't think it was anything more than that
initially until the calls were coming back that there's nothing
up in the sky. Then I didn't know what to think.
Why would they be lying it was a strange occurrence.
You know, I don't want to get into is it
(13:23):
from another world? I you know, I didn't want to
get into that, but hey, anything's possible. My logic, my
way the rationalized. What I saw was it was something
from the military base, some type of plane they were
testing out, and obviously they don't want that information to
get out.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
I don't know what went on that specific night. That
was a complete anomaly. I'm hesitant to put any kind
of title on it or label it. I expected to
come back with something tangent you could offer people, and
there was nothing we could provide anybody.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
For me, knowing the area, knowing that we have an
air base, that just made sense to me. Everybody denied
that it had anything to do with our military base.
From the base, they said they had nothing on radar
at all. Maybe for someone else it being aliens would
fit their logic, But our base is one of the
bigger air force bases, you know, could it it came
(14:28):
from there?
Speaker 1 (14:28):
That's what I was thinking.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I just know that I've been a police officer for
thirty years. I've never had anything like that ever happen before.
There's been sightings forever, going back to before christ. I
don't know exactly what it was, but I know what
I saw.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
Being in law enforcement, you want solutions, you want finality.
There's nothing finite about what happened that night.
Speaker 7 (15:11):
Last Thursday, on the Paul Benzaquin Show, Wei heard a
carefully documented account of the sighting of an object in
the sky.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
In the long history of UFO sightings throughout the entire world,
it's certainly safe to say they're not all alien spaceships.
Speaker 7 (15:26):
Her husband and her fourteen year old son had seen
an extremely bright object sixty three degrees high on the
eastern sky. She said it could have been as bright
as the moon and was traveling at a speed her
husband calculated at twenty two thousand.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Five hundred miles per hour and no matter how strange
those lights in the sky may appear, things are not
always what they seem.
Speaker 7 (15:46):
The sighting would ultimately be identified, for the object was
well known from the outset. When Missus Clinton was asked
if the object was as bright as the moon, she
said it could have been. Of course it could.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
It was the moon.
Speaker 7 (16:02):
The moon, she described, was one day less than full,
and by simply omitting its name, she caused a flurry
of calls. Based on the most identifiable object in the
night sky. It is fair to wonder this among the
nine thousand UFOs reported over the past ten years or so,
how many.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Were like this one.
Speaker 6 (16:26):
She just kind of illustrates the illusionary perception of shapes.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Here's Mick West, investigative skeptic.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
There was a minor case on Twitter a while ago
where someone in Orlando was seeing these circles of lights
in the sky. It looked like a giant alien spaceship
covering above the clouds. Luckily she got the street sign
in the video shot, and I tracks down which street
that was, and where she was standing and what direction
she was looking in, plugged it into Google Earth. Five
(16:57):
miles over in that direction was Disney World. The obvious sounds.
Was use looking at the Disneyland light show and there
was a low clouds reflecting that light show. You get
things that match, but you can't come out and say
one hundred percent that's what it was. It's a coincidence
that in five miles in that direction was Disneyland, and
(17:18):
they often have light shows with Reynolds from Forest. It's
a coincidence that in the direction they were looking there's
a lighthouse. Does it solve it one hundred percent? Not
for everybody, but I think it really moves that explanation
to the top of the list.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
For decades, UFO hoaxes have continued to muddy the water.
It's like Bigfoot or the Locknest Monster. As soon as
you find out that really crazy video you saw was
just a prank, it can start to make you question
everything in a lot of these UFO hoaxes have been
pretty damn convincing.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
A strange site, red blinking lights could be seen across
Moors County, New Jersey.
Speaker 6 (17:57):
Last night.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
I looked up outside and I was really scared, and
I just saw these five red light One night in
New Jersey, there were multiple reports of a UFO outside
the suburb of Morristown.
Speaker 8 (18:13):
At eight twenty eight, the Hanover Township Police received the
first of seven nine.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
To one one calls. There were dozens of witnesses, panicky
phone calls to police, an extensive local news coverage.
Speaker 6 (18:26):
It was unsettling, Yeah, for sure, just because you're watching
something that you have no idea, you've never seen before.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Eyewitness accounts are not always accurate.
Speaker 6 (18:39):
You got very different accounts from different people. Some people
will just say they saw a light. Some people will
say they saw like a triangle shaped craft, or some
people say they saw things that were the size of
a football field flying overhead.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
In two thousand and nine, a group of friends decided
to document their own UFO hoax.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
All right, here we go.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Here's the flare.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
What we're doing is we're just putting a little fishing
line around the bottom of it.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
They tied flares to helium balloons and one at a
time just let them off in the air. We're about
to go out and do our int all hoax, and
you what kind of reactually can get. And before they
knew it, people were calling into local news stations. The
prank has worked. The unifleet, it's all over the News
News Twell, New Jersey. Just as they planned. They folded
(19:28):
the whole town into believing an alien spacecraft was about
to take over New Jersey.
Speaker 8 (19:36):
Roadside flares attached to helium balloons.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
But how easy are these to really pull off? And honestly,
how common is it?
Speaker 6 (19:46):
The difficult thing with UFO hoaxes is really have people
keeping quiet about it. There was a case in France
where the fated say UFO sighting by attaching a light
stick to a drone. Some people interpreted them as being UFOs,
And there's all these different accounts obviously because there's different people.
It's not hard at all to fake things. Tie something
(20:10):
to a drone or have a drone with big splashing
lights or something fly that over a few neighborhoods and
someone's going to see it. If you wanted to simply
create something that people would interpret as a UFO, it's
not that hard.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Well, let's just see then, if I wanted to make
my own UFO hoax, could I actually pull it off?
And will I go to jail? I'd met with my
team and one of our producers, Dylan, was super into
the idea, and he took it upon himself to create
a UFO hoax master plan.
Speaker 8 (20:47):
We were sitting around drin gets some beers at a bar.
We came up with this idea of creating our own
UFO hoax. How hard would it be to make our
own UFO. We considered flying up five or six drones
with a bunch of different colored lights on it. It
could we build something and fly it over the city,
or like, how legal would that be? How illegal would
that be? Would we all end up in prison for this?
Building it in Atlanta over the city just seemed like
(21:09):
a bad idea. In general, there's a good chance we
could get arrested for flying an airspace restricted airspace. We
almost needed a more open area somewhere where we could
get away with this.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
We were filming some promotional videos for the podcast in Sedona, Arizona,
and decided since we're out here, might as well make
the best of it.
Speaker 8 (21:28):
Right out the middle of the desert. We figured, Hey,
this could be the perfect time to try this out.
We're in the desert, we're not near any airports, so
we'd come up with all these different concepts of how
to do this. I finally settled on this idea of
creating a helium filled saucer shaped balloon. I talked to
Paint about it, and we decided this would be the
perfect time in place to do something like this. I
(21:50):
built a prototype to begin with, just to make sure
that this concept would actually work, and I built the
prototype out of a really thin plastic sheeting, basically the
plastic sheeting you'd put down if you were to like
paint your house or something. The sheeting that I used
was incredibly thin, which was great for my weight to
lift ratio. It made the craft very light, but it
also made it very puncturable. It made it very likely
(22:12):
to pop or explode because it was just so thin
you could almost stick your finger through it just trying
to work with it. The first thing I think is
I need a thicker plastic sheet because that's going to
make this craft more durable. It's going to make sure
that when we send it up it doesn't catch on
some tree branch somewhere and just rip a big hole
in it. But that also means it's four times the weight,
and this weight ratio is the biggest thing that I'm
(22:33):
struggling with. How do I make this craft light enough
that it'll float, but big enough that it can be
seen and strong enough that it's durable and won't blow
in the wind and explode in the sky or catch
on something or rip. The big thing with helium bloom
is it has to be incredibly light. You need a
lot of it to pick up even a little bit
of weight. One hundred and fifty cubic feet of helium
(22:56):
to fill this thing. I spend pretty much a full
day just looking on Arizona for helium. Apparently there's a
helium shortage in America right now. So I finally find
some industrial warehouse that has an excess supply of helium.
So I walked in and I'm just an average looking
guy and I walk in. I'm like, hey, I need
one hundred and fifty cubic feet of helium, and he's
what do you need that for it? It's a lot
(23:17):
of helium. You're filling something up. So that was very
direct with him about it. I'm building a UFO. He
laughed and said, well, you know, I'll sell it to you,
but I better not see this on the news later.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Well that's kind of the point. The whole goal is
to get this thing in the air and on the news.
Speaker 8 (23:34):
I have all these materials, thousands of dollars worth of materials,
just strewn around our Airbnb. Taping every part of it
that I can think of, looking for holes, looking for
any place where helium can escape. Any hole that's bigger
than the atom of helium it'll leak out of. Taping
(23:55):
every edge, every corner, every crease. I've rechecked. I've done
the math two or three times. The amount that we
have will fill this craft, and it should be light
enough and buoyant enough that it'll float.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Sounds like a solid plant. I watched this. Dylan and
the rest of the crew put together this craft outside
the parking lot of our Airbnb.
Speaker 8 (24:20):
This has to work. This hoax has to work. We've
spent so much time, so much money has been invested,
and it's going to work. It's now two am, because
I spent all day. It's below freezing outside. You can't
see anything in front of you. Taping the last little bit.
Put the lights on. I turned the lights on. We're
(24:42):
ready to go. Pick this thing up. It's nine feet
across in diameter.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
It's huge.
Speaker 8 (24:53):
We start to fill it up.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Is it going in there?
Speaker 8 (24:57):
It's filling, It's looking great. I'm getting really excited I did,
my confidence of this is totally gonna work.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Really quick.
Speaker 8 (25:10):
Then all of a sudden, the helium tank just fizzles out.
That was all the helium. This thing isn't even half
full of helium yet not floating by any means. It's
definitely still crashing to the ground. All that time invested
and there's no more helium. It was devastating, and I'll
(25:31):
admit I definitely had to just like go sit down
in a corner somewhere and just question all my life
decisions coming up to that point. I cried in a
corner by myself. And then after that I just got
so fed up with it. I was so angry and
I had nowhere to release my anger, so I released
it on the UFO. It was such a solid design.
(25:56):
I felt pretty good about destroying that which I had created. Yes,
even though our hoax didn't work out, I think I
still learned a really valuable lesson. Hoaxes are really hard
to pull off. You hear all these stories all the
time about everything in the sky must be a hoax.
It must be a balloon, it's a drone, it's something
(26:18):
like that. But the truth is, things that don't look
like commercial aircraft nine times out of ten. Take a
lot of very capable knowledge to pull off. A million
things need to go right and nothing can go wrong
for something like that to really happen. But again, I'm
no scientists, I'm not an engineer, just some guy.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Dylan was greatly disappointed. But at the last minute we
decided to try one more thing. We took our drone,
then suspended a really bright led light from the bottom
of it, then just flew it up in the air
as high as we could get it. And I will
say it does look pretty uphoe. You can check it
(26:59):
out for yourself on our Instagram and TikTok page. Just
go to at high Strange I uploaded the full length
UFO hoax adventure or shall I say fail, Sorry, Dylan.
Some of the most infamous UFO cases throughout our history
(27:21):
have clearly challenged all rational explanations. It doesn't mean that
they're entirely true, but they've stood the test of time
enough that they still puzzle us today. But there's a
difference between claiming to see strange lights in the sky
and living out a literal nightmare. Some cases are not
just weird or hard to explain some of them are
(27:43):
flat out terrifying, and the following story takes the cake
for the scariest claim that I've ever heard, Say and Farnie.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Who will be speaking to us long distance from Forceless,
New Hampshire.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Oh, which one have I got on a miner of
I got your photo? That's you, Barney?
Speaker 6 (28:04):
Are you there?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
On September nineteenth, nineteen sixty one, newly Weed's Betty and
Barney Hill were traveling overnight along US Route three, a deserted,
empty road in the mountains of New Hampshire. What transpired
that night changed their lives forever, and would arguably inspire
and shape the horror genre of alien encounters in pop
culture forever. We have to go back to nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
It starts as full into this overe Yes, that's ry
September nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 7 (28:34):
That's when whatever happens happened.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yes, Barney Hill worked for the Postal Service and his
wife Betty was a social worker. It was a cool,
crisp night, the moon visible in the clear sky. Barney
was driving down USU three as their dogs slept at
Betty's feet.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Betty and I were He's setting from a vacation rip
in Canada and arrived in New Hampshire closem chopped in
a town called cold Brook, mil Ham. Here happy with
Poppy and the hamburger, and we laughed Bob.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
After Barney finished his burger and Betty had a slice
of chocolate cake. They figured they could make it home
from the diner at around two or three am. The
roads were basically empty that night, as it was too
early for ski or hunting season. While gazing at the moon,
Betty noticed a bright star to the left of it,
and then another star appearing right above it that was
slowly getting bigger and brighter.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Betty called my attention to the object alike for face
for for move after it, and decided to come in.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Barney was a World War Two vet and enjoyed plane watching.
He was almost instantly convinced that the objects was likely
something conventional and paid little attention to it.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Obviously, I was.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Totally close about and flying frogs and so your left falls.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Throughout their drive, they both continued to watch the object
as the trees and mountains surrounding them began obstructing their view.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Now that you can see in the sky like a
light lit the sky in the background.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Betty noticed that the lights on the objects were behaving
differently than that of a normal plane, but would typically
be a single red blinking light appear to be changing
colors in an unusual pattern.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
The objects is how blowing along the same directly that
we were going.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
For a moment, it felt like they were being followed
by the object.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
The object went around the wind.
Speaker 6 (30:49):
How in front of them.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Both Betty and Barney could see the craft clearly through
their windshield.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I got out of the gue and the objects which
brought it over the driver side of the cot, and
I became determined that to find outlass and had to
have some natural explaining.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
They stopped the car again again, got out, took with
them with binoculars that were on the front seat. They
looked through the binoculars and saw this object covering perhaps
a hundred feet above that cock and one side of
the road. The song movement.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I'm looking at it wins monoculus, and I can't believe
what I am seen.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Barney described the craft as wide as three telephone poles
and made no noise wins of monocalyus.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I can concerned what I call figures moving about at
a huge plate glass.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
That came to curve around.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Barney could see a double row of windows on this
pancake shaped object. He pulled into a nearby field to
get a closer look, when he saw something much more
unsettling inside the craft that was hovering there. He could
see half a dozen living beings wearing what appeared to
be black uniforms, staring directly at him.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
These thinkers that we're looking savingly sound was me because
the object was tilted and I could see with the monocalypse.
When I thought were going up, touching or pulling off, leaving,
I was just completely fasted to Betty has singed. I
pulled the monocolates waves on my eyes, stashing back to
the car, claiming to Betty, Oh my god, I said, Betty,
(32:33):
this is going to get answer. Guitar put it the
and the objectised it over his.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
They now got into that car and sped away for
what they thought was their own wives. The rounded the
curves to the left, and that car in expectedly just stopped.
The car vibrated.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
I felt with my hands on the steering wheel.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
I felt the singling.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Colum After a tingling in the steering column, they heard
a series of irregular beeps, then a haze came over them.
All of a sudden, they realized they had traveled about
thirty five miles from Indian Head to Ashland, New Hampshire,
(33:20):
with no recollection of that part of the drive. They
slowly approached what appeared to be a roadblock in the
middle of nowhere.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Alongside the road at round level was this immense, intense
firange globe. Several men dressed in rather strange uniforms were
lying across the road.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
They all stepped back, but one stayed behind and remained
looking at him. Their eyes were unlike anything he'd seen before.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
That wouldn't stop. The man came over, removed him from
the can escort them to the sauce of this light
in the woods.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Betty claimed that Barney was in some kind of sleepwalk
state and wasn't answering when she called.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
Out to him, and they would taking a boy who
purported to be a spaceship.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
They were placed on a metal table separate from each
other as humanoid like creatures began taking samples of their hair, skin,
and nails.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
For the next two hours, they were submitted to a
complete physical and intellectual examination. Question about the life when
they asked, so they just entered another world when they
into that spaceship.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Over seventy years later, the Betty and Barney hillcase remains
one of the most horrifying and hardest to debunk cases
in American history. Yes, please.
Speaker 9 (35:00):
Never forget that day.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
This is Kathleen Morten, the niece of Betty and Barney Hill.
Speaker 9 (35:06):
I was thirteen years old in nineteen sixty one when
Betty and Barney were abducted.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
She recalls vividly the day that all their lives would
change as a family.
Speaker 9 (35:17):
My mother was on the phone with Betty.
Speaker 6 (35:20):
I listened.
Speaker 9 (35:22):
My mother was concerned, and I knew that something was wrong.
When she hung up the phone, she told me Betty
and Barney had seen a flying saucer up close the
night before. They were afraid they'd been contaminated.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Prepared for a space white legend name my habitat, and
smoked a lean g This is a beanbag. I've been
going gene because a cool Now she was over c
(36:06):
penn up.
Speaker 4 (36:06):
I'm be Tokyo, Japan.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
In the bands of supert show Sneve budon.
Speaker 7 (36:11):
Top ton of vert riding.
Speaker 9 (36:12):
Then you you gotta being down and saying the park Peal,
We've been a Down, John Nack and nine help those
Boom nat.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Of Guys, we a na a Devil.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for
free every Thursday. But if you'd like to bene the
whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus
on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now.
Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange,
and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email
(36:46):
us at tips at high strange dot com. High Strange
is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with Cadence thirteen, created,
hosted and edited by myself, Payne Lindsay executive producers or
myself in Donald Albright, editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner
and myself. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, Sound design,
(37:10):
mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney,
Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, Meredith Stedman, and Sidney Evans.
Our cover art is by Polygon. This episode features the
song Space Cadet by metro Booman featuring Gunna. Written by
Wesley tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler, Wayne Alan Ritter,
(37:32):
and Jack Quies Webster. Performed by metro Booman featuring Gunna
courtesy of Republic Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises
for metro Booman in three hundred. Entertainment for Gunna Special
thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA,
the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck Media and Marketing, as
well as Chris Corcoran and the team at Cadence thirteen.
(37:55):
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.
High Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you
absolutely free. But if you want to bene the whole season,
it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot
plus subscribers. You'll also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season.
For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
As I was in wrapped, five or six calls start
coming in about a huge light in the sky. I
was at a stop sign. A big beam of light
came upon my vehicle. All at once. My car, shut off,
(00:51):
my computer, my radio. I saw a huge light in
the sky just hit my car. I had no idea
what it was. I slammed my car in park, got
out of the car. There was no sound. I couldn't
hear anything. It lit this whole street up. Discovering there
(01:15):
no sound, Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I hop that Appliant J played the appliant o' play
it cry you right for mission.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Welcome to High Strange. A little after midnight in nineteen
ninety four, strange lights were seen over the northeastern sky
of Ohio. Local residents from all around Trumbull County began
calling into local news stations to report it. The following
is the actual tape from the nine to one one
(01:47):
dispatch center, and I dispatched.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
You report to any objects in the air but minutes.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Roy Anne Rudolph was working at the dispatch center that
night and Youngstown, Ohio.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
I was a dispatcher telecommunicator at the Trumbull County nine
to one to one center. The first few hours were
relatively quiet. Everybody was just settling in and we get
a call from one of our local media personalities from
a TV station and I get that.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
My health it could be saying normal saw something. Oh
it's no noise, no noise, it was low flying and
put the glowing object.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
We started getting a couple of phone calls about people
who were seeing a light in the sky. How many
called in, But I, I really don't know what that
would be.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
At first, she thought this whole thing might be a joke,
or at the very least a misinterpretation of something normal
in the sky, like a balloon or a plane. But
it wasn't long before she started receiving her own calls
to the police station.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
The calls started spanning out a little bit from that area.
Then the calls became more and more frequent.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Ten hundred people already wreak, ran up and down.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
They hi ufo, okay she is, I mean I got
a purpose.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
You were all masks.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
She tried to rationalize the report she was receiving, starting
with the most obvious. It's a hoax or a small
plane or a helicopter. Probably nothing worth a learning her
police officers about. But the nine one one calls were
multiplying faster than she could keep up.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
I just can't quite make it ostrolizin ocular that budger
has not moved.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
They were upset by the object not moving.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
That's thing half thought.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
There's tends.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Notice that I don't wanted it.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
See a red glow open that guy huge.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
I don't want their predators an osculars.
Speaker 7 (03:41):
I can't quite bake it out.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
They're changes colors from white to.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Red, the green, but sect.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
That has not moved.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
They have gone any drisk and because I don't want
the good can look.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
They were really upset because there was no noise.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I didn't hear it now the only time I had
with my car, Well, what.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
W it moving?
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Or yeah?
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Bowing like up in the air, blowing getting further away
from it.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
The townspeople were clearly genuinely concerned. She took it upon
herself to inform the officers of the situation. At this point,
it warranted some real investigating.
Speaker 5 (04:17):
What typically happens is you dispatch the units, and I
picked the officer I thought would respond without getting upset
that I sent them on this because it just sounded
so it just sounded like a lot to process. Of
the three officers, I picked the one officer who was
a friend of mine who I didn't think would be
upset that I sent him.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
My name's Stobe Malaro, Liberty Township, Ohio. I'm a police officer.
We were used to getting calls like that to see
one thirties would be training and they would shut their
lights off, sometimes open them up, So there was no
big rush in going to check this out.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Toby was dispatched to investigate what exactly was going on here.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
Hey, listen, there's some people who are flipping out. There's
seen some lights in the sky and they are panicky
about this. He said, all right, I'll head that way,
give me a minute.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
As I was en wrapped, five or six calls start
coming in about a huge light in the sky.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
We continue fielding calls and all of a sudden, other
police units in the general vicinity start seeing it.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
Bob I Pwhere to god?
Speaker 5 (05:21):
Horror called in on an unidentified object? Every liberty horror
call or call on an unidentified flying object.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
And you beat off the gun and encloy bottom high to.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Check out, isn't that a UFO? Yeah, we got like
these calls on it earlier taste.
Speaker 8 (05:42):
Luckily, what would you believe was the least opinion hid
out of the.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
UFO And we got like hid calls on earlier.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Today and they're looking again left within yet a couple
of different people the officers did they call it?
Speaker 1 (05:54):
One of the hold officers, I did he fall covering
it like a ten minute man.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
It's pretty messed up. We got across some last playing
we got.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
The night.
Speaker 7 (06:04):
Over.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
A dozen officers had reported to roy Anne that they
had seen a UFO, and she passed this information into
all active law enforcement units in the area an attempt
to triangulate where this thing was.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
These are seasoned police officers, people who have great credibility,
and now they're seeing some things. And you start hearing
these other departments talking over the various frequencies and the
other dispatchers are speaking and conversing about these lights. These
officers were ten twenty miles apart from one another, and
they're all saying they're seeing these formations, they're seeing these lights.
(06:35):
And that changed.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Everything from like a white the white at read to
Paul thinging green labor.
Speaker 5 (06:46):
What did you really think it was?
Speaker 3 (06:49):
I don't know any here, conor kill whatever it is
the big under Klam provid.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
It became clear that whatever was happening in the skies
wasn't going away anytime soon. Multiple police stations are reporting
the same things. What they were seeing in the sky
that night was reported to be as big as a
football field, hovering low and emitting no sound at all.
Speaker 5 (07:12):
When you start hearing people who have been respected members
of the law enforcement community and you say, okay, this
now has a little bit more credibility, what do you do?
Speaker 8 (07:21):
How do you handle that?
Speaker 1 (07:23):
One of the officers who witnessed the object that night,
named Lieutenant James Baker, decided to climb an abandoned radar
tower to get a better look. According to Baker, there
wasn't just one UFO, but three, forming a triangle and
flashing color in Unison. Multiple officers were in pursuit of
the object in their patrol cars speeding through town trying
to keep up with it.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I told him to call the airbase to see if
they had anything on radar or if they had some
type of plane at or something going on.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
Ah yeah, dude, at the orient, IM look attach to
plate the department.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
We recorded some flying.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Object at our action.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
You know, if anything, it should be in our airspace
at the time, close to.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
The ground, the UHD belt.
Speaker 8 (08:06):
But I go, I am a little young.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
Not out there.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
I'm not there, and go.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
I didn't anticipate I'd get a lot, but I certainly
didn't expect to hear there's nothing.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Within a sixty mile radius. Nothing at all was appearing
on the FAA's radar systems.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
I would like to think it could have been something
from the air base. My conversation with the gentleman that
I spoke with at the airbase, it was a little
bit unsettling, only because his sincerity, the honesty in him
telling me I see nothing, and made a shudder because
you expected him to come back with some kind of answer.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
It was a December night, but it was really hot
out time. It was like sixty degrees was close to midnight.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Well heading to the scene of the latest sighting, Toby
was approached by a nervous bystander in the neighborhood. He
was standing in the street and waved him down as
he approached in a squad car.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
He actually stopped me when I was coming down the road,
walked out to the street and said it had just
been over his house.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
The man was visibly unsettled and claimed that just moments
ago he had seen the objects hovering directly above his house.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
I said, what was this over your house? I'm looking
at the skies. I don't see anything. To be honest
with you, I thought maybe this guy had been drinking
a little bit. What direction did it go?
Speaker 1 (09:30):
He said?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
South.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
At first, Toby didn't believe this man, but that was
about to change.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I told him to go back in his house, go relax,
and I'll check it out. I continued down the street
the direction he told me he had it south.
Speaker 5 (09:46):
Toby arrives in the area, marks himself in the area.
We have what we call a checkup, what's called a
code six, and that means everything okay with you, and
if it is, you acknowledge that nothing's wrong. I gave
Toby several Code six and I was getting nothing back.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Toby went radio silent.
Speaker 5 (10:05):
I don't know if something bad happened to him. I
don't know if something happened to his car. I don't
know if he had an accident. But he was not responding,
and that's a problem when you're a dispatcher. That is
the worst fear of any dispatcher.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
She continued to send out the RUOK communication called Code six,
but for ten full minutes she was getting no response
at all. At this point, the situation escalated to all
hands on deck. Officers from all around the county were
sent to check on him. It felt like an eternity.
Speaker 5 (10:36):
There are times when people, Hey, I stepped into the
restroom and I didn't bring my portable with me. There
are times when that happens. But you have a responsibility
to send people start them in that direction. It's a lifeline.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I was at a stop sign. A big beam of
light came upon my vehicle all at once. My car
shut off, my computer, my radio. I was still in drive.
A huge light in the sky has hit my car.
(11:10):
I slammed my car in park, got out of the car.
I had no idea what it was. Initially I thought
it was a plane. However, there was no sound. I
couldn't hear anything. I had that physically shilled my eyes.
Just an intense, bright light about one hundred feet above
tree level. It lit this whole street up, just covering
(11:33):
there no sound. It was long, oval in shape, the
size of a football fielder better. I was trying to
determine exactly what it was. I've never seen anything that intense,
that bright without making noise. And then all of a sudden,
(11:54):
it just shot off. As it moved on, everything in
my car turned back on. My car started back up.
At that point, I started a radio my location. They
were asking me if I was Code six. Was meant,
are you okay? They said I was off air. I
(12:18):
think like four minutes. That didn't seem right. I said,
I'm fine. I told them what I saw the direction
of travel of the light. I gave them a direction
of travel, and they start pursuing the lights another jurisdictions
start picking that up, saying that we see it. I've
(12:39):
lived there all my life and I know that these
planes fly. You know, maybe the air Force is trying
out a different type of airplane and they're not going
to tell you what they're doing. As time progressed, we
tried to get information from the military base. They didn't
want to even say anything about it. That's where my
(13:01):
rationale came that it was something from the base itself.
I really didn't think it was anything more than that
initially until the calls were coming back that there's nothing
up in the sky. Then I didn't know what to think.
Why would they be lying it was a strange occurrence.
You know, I don't want to get into is it
(13:23):
from another world? I you know, I didn't want to
get into that, but hey, anything's possible. My logic, my
way the rationalized. What I saw was it was something
from the military base, some type of plane they were
testing out, and obviously they don't want that information to
get out.
Speaker 5 (13:43):
I don't know what went on that specific night. That
was a complete anomaly. I'm hesitant to put any kind
of title on it or label it. I expected to
come back with something tangent you could offer people, and
there was nothing we could provide anybody.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
For me, knowing the area, knowing that we have an
air base, that just made sense to me. Everybody denied
that it had anything to do with our military base.
From the base, they said they had nothing on radar
at all. Maybe for someone else it being aliens would
fit their logic, But our base is one of the
bigger air force bases, you know, could it it came
(14:28):
from there?
Speaker 1 (14:28):
That's what I was thinking.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I just know that I've been a police officer for
thirty years. I've never had anything like that ever happen before.
There's been sightings forever, going back to before christ. I
don't know exactly what it was, but I know what
I saw.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
Being in law enforcement, you want solutions, you want finality.
There's nothing finite about what happened that night.
Speaker 7 (15:11):
Last Thursday, on the Paul Benzaquin Show, Wei heard a
carefully documented account of the sighting of an object in
the sky.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
In the long history of UFO sightings throughout the entire world,
it's certainly safe to say they're not all alien spaceships.
Speaker 7 (15:26):
Her husband and her fourteen year old son had seen
an extremely bright object sixty three degrees high on the
eastern sky. She said it could have been as bright
as the moon and was traveling at a speed her
husband calculated at twenty two thousand.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Five hundred miles per hour and no matter how strange
those lights in the sky may appear, things are not
always what they seem.
Speaker 7 (15:46):
The sighting would ultimately be identified, for the object was
well known from the outset. When Missus Clinton was asked
if the object was as bright as the moon, she
said it could have been. Of course it could.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
It was the moon.
Speaker 7 (16:02):
The moon, she described, was one day less than full,
and by simply omitting its name, she caused a flurry
of calls. Based on the most identifiable object in the
night sky. It is fair to wonder this among the
nine thousand UFOs reported over the past ten years or so,
how many.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Were like this one.
Speaker 6 (16:26):
She just kind of illustrates the illusionary perception of shapes.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Here's Mick West, investigative skeptic.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
There was a minor case on Twitter a while ago
where someone in Orlando was seeing these circles of lights
in the sky. It looked like a giant alien spaceship
covering above the clouds. Luckily she got the street sign
in the video shot, and I tracks down which street
that was, and where she was standing and what direction
she was looking in, plugged it into Google Earth. Five
(16:57):
miles over in that direction was Disney World. The obvious sounds.
Was use looking at the Disneyland light show and there
was a low clouds reflecting that light show. You get
things that match, but you can't come out and say
one hundred percent that's what it was. It's a coincidence
that in five miles in that direction was Disneyland, and
(17:18):
they often have light shows with Reynolds from Forest. It's
a coincidence that in the direction they were looking there's
a lighthouse. Does it solve it one hundred percent? Not
for everybody, but I think it really moves that explanation
to the top of the list.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
For decades, UFO hoaxes have continued to muddy the water.
It's like Bigfoot or the Locknest Monster. As soon as
you find out that really crazy video you saw was
just a prank, it can start to make you question
everything in a lot of these UFO hoaxes have been
pretty damn convincing.
Speaker 5 (17:52):
A strange site, red blinking lights could be seen across
Moors County, New Jersey.
Speaker 6 (17:57):
Last night.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
I looked up outside and I was really scared, and
I just saw these five red light One night in
New Jersey, there were multiple reports of a UFO outside
the suburb of Morristown.
Speaker 8 (18:13):
At eight twenty eight, the Hanover Township Police received the
first of seven nine.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
To one one calls. There were dozens of witnesses, panicky
phone calls to police, an extensive local news coverage.
Speaker 6 (18:26):
It was unsettling, Yeah, for sure, just because you're watching
something that you have no idea, you've never seen before.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Eyewitness accounts are not always accurate.
Speaker 6 (18:39):
You got very different accounts from different people. Some people
will just say they saw a light. Some people will
say they saw like a triangle shaped craft, or some
people say they saw things that were the size of
a football field flying overhead.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
In two thousand and nine, a group of friends decided
to document their own UFO hoax.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
All right, here we go.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Here's the flare.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
What we're doing is we're just putting a little fishing
line around the bottom of it.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
They tied flares to helium balloons and one at a
time just let them off in the air. We're about
to go out and do our int all hoax, and
you what kind of reactually can get. And before they
knew it, people were calling into local news stations. The
prank has worked. The unifleet, it's all over the News
News Twell, New Jersey. Just as they planned. They folded
(19:28):
the whole town into believing an alien spacecraft was about
to take over New Jersey.
Speaker 8 (19:36):
Roadside flares attached to helium balloons.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
But how easy are these to really pull off? And honestly,
how common is it?
Speaker 6 (19:46):
The difficult thing with UFO hoaxes is really have people
keeping quiet about it. There was a case in France
where the fated say UFO sighting by attaching a light
stick to a drone. Some people interpreted them as being UFOs,
And there's all these different accounts obviously because there's different people.
It's not hard at all to fake things. Tie something
(20:10):
to a drone or have a drone with big splashing
lights or something fly that over a few neighborhoods and
someone's going to see it. If you wanted to simply
create something that people would interpret as a UFO, it's
not that hard.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Well, let's just see then, if I wanted to make
my own UFO hoax, could I actually pull it off?
And will I go to jail? I'd met with my
team and one of our producers, Dylan, was super into
the idea, and he took it upon himself to create
a UFO hoax master plan.
Speaker 8 (20:47):
We were sitting around drin gets some beers at a bar.
We came up with this idea of creating our own
UFO hoax. How hard would it be to make our
own UFO. We considered flying up five or six drones
with a bunch of different colored lights on it. It
could we build something and fly it over the city,
or like, how legal would that be? How illegal would
that be? Would we all end up in prison for this?
Building it in Atlanta over the city just seemed like
(21:09):
a bad idea. In general, there's a good chance we
could get arrested for flying an airspace restricted airspace. We
almost needed a more open area somewhere where we could
get away with this.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
We were filming some promotional videos for the podcast in Sedona, Arizona,
and decided since we're out here, might as well make
the best of it.
Speaker 8 (21:28):
Right out the middle of the desert. We figured, Hey,
this could be the perfect time to try this out.
We're in the desert, we're not near any airports, so
we'd come up with all these different concepts of how
to do this. I finally settled on this idea of
creating a helium filled saucer shaped balloon. I talked to
Paint about it, and we decided this would be the
perfect time in place to do something like this. I
(21:50):
built a prototype to begin with, just to make sure
that this concept would actually work, and I built the
prototype out of a really thin plastic sheeting, basically the
plastic sheeting you'd put down if you were to like
paint your house or something. The sheeting that I used
was incredibly thin, which was great for my weight to
lift ratio. It made the craft very light, but it
also made it very puncturable. It made it very likely
(22:12):
to pop or explode because it was just so thin
you could almost stick your finger through it just trying
to work with it. The first thing I think is
I need a thicker plastic sheet because that's going to
make this craft more durable. It's going to make sure
that when we send it up it doesn't catch on
some tree branch somewhere and just rip a big hole
in it. But that also means it's four times the weight,
and this weight ratio is the biggest thing that I'm
(22:33):
struggling with. How do I make this craft light enough
that it'll float, but big enough that it can be
seen and strong enough that it's durable and won't blow
in the wind and explode in the sky or catch
on something or rip. The big thing with helium bloom
is it has to be incredibly light. You need a
lot of it to pick up even a little bit
of weight. One hundred and fifty cubic feet of helium
(22:56):
to fill this thing. I spend pretty much a full
day just looking on Arizona for helium. Apparently there's a
helium shortage in America right now. So I finally find
some industrial warehouse that has an excess supply of helium.
So I walked in and I'm just an average looking
guy and I walk in. I'm like, hey, I need
one hundred and fifty cubic feet of helium, and he's
what do you need that for it? It's a lot
(23:17):
of helium. You're filling something up. So that was very
direct with him about it. I'm building a UFO. He
laughed and said, well, you know, I'll sell it to you,
but I better not see this on the news later.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Well that's kind of the point. The whole goal is
to get this thing in the air and on the news.
Speaker 8 (23:34):
I have all these materials, thousands of dollars worth of materials,
just strewn around our Airbnb. Taping every part of it
that I can think of, looking for holes, looking for
any place where helium can escape. Any hole that's bigger
than the atom of helium it'll leak out of. Taping
(23:55):
every edge, every corner, every crease. I've rechecked. I've done
the math two or three times. The amount that we
have will fill this craft, and it should be light
enough and buoyant enough that it'll float.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Sounds like a solid plant. I watched this. Dylan and
the rest of the crew put together this craft outside
the parking lot of our Airbnb.
Speaker 8 (24:20):
This has to work. This hoax has to work. We've
spent so much time, so much money has been invested,
and it's going to work. It's now two am, because
I spent all day. It's below freezing outside. You can't
see anything in front of you. Taping the last little bit.
Put the lights on. I turned the lights on. We're
(24:42):
ready to go. Pick this thing up. It's nine feet
across in diameter.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
It's huge.
Speaker 8 (24:53):
We start to fill it up.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Is it going in there?
Speaker 8 (24:57):
It's filling, It's looking great. I'm getting really excited I did,
my confidence of this is totally gonna work.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Really quick.
Speaker 8 (25:10):
Then all of a sudden, the helium tank just fizzles out.
That was all the helium. This thing isn't even half
full of helium yet not floating by any means. It's
definitely still crashing to the ground. All that time invested
and there's no more helium. It was devastating, and I'll
(25:31):
admit I definitely had to just like go sit down
in a corner somewhere and just question all my life
decisions coming up to that point. I cried in a
corner by myself. And then after that I just got
so fed up with it. I was so angry and
I had nowhere to release my anger, so I released
it on the UFO. It was such a solid design.
(25:56):
I felt pretty good about destroying that which I had created. Yes,
even though our hoax didn't work out, I think I
still learned a really valuable lesson. Hoaxes are really hard
to pull off. You hear all these stories all the
time about everything in the sky must be a hoax.
It must be a balloon, it's a drone, it's something
(26:18):
like that. But the truth is, things that don't look
like commercial aircraft nine times out of ten. Take a
lot of very capable knowledge to pull off. A million
things need to go right and nothing can go wrong
for something like that to really happen. But again, I'm
no scientists, I'm not an engineer, just some guy.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Dylan was greatly disappointed. But at the last minute we
decided to try one more thing. We took our drone,
then suspended a really bright led light from the bottom
of it, then just flew it up in the air
as high as we could get it. And I will
say it does look pretty uphoe. You can check it
(26:59):
out for yourself on our Instagram and TikTok page. Just
go to at high Strange I uploaded the full length
UFO hoax adventure or shall I say fail, Sorry, Dylan.
Some of the most infamous UFO cases throughout our history
(27:21):
have clearly challenged all rational explanations. It doesn't mean that
they're entirely true, but they've stood the test of time
enough that they still puzzle us today. But there's a
difference between claiming to see strange lights in the sky
and living out a literal nightmare. Some cases are not
just weird or hard to explain some of them are
(27:43):
flat out terrifying, and the following story takes the cake
for the scariest claim that I've ever heard, Say and Farnie.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Who will be speaking to us long distance from Forceless,
New Hampshire.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Oh, which one have I got on a miner of
I got your photo? That's you, Barney?
Speaker 6 (28:04):
Are you there?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
On September nineteenth, nineteen sixty one, newly Weed's Betty and
Barney Hill were traveling overnight along US Route three, a deserted,
empty road in the mountains of New Hampshire. What transpired
that night changed their lives forever, and would arguably inspire
and shape the horror genre of alien encounters in pop
culture forever. We have to go back to nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
It starts as full into this overe Yes, that's ry
September nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 7 (28:34):
That's when whatever happens happened.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yes, Barney Hill worked for the Postal Service and his
wife Betty was a social worker. It was a cool,
crisp night, the moon visible in the clear sky. Barney
was driving down USU three as their dogs slept at
Betty's feet.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Betty and I were He's setting from a vacation rip
in Canada and arrived in New Hampshire closem chopped in
a town called cold Brook, mil Ham. Here happy with
Poppy and the hamburger, and we laughed Bob.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
After Barney finished his burger and Betty had a slice
of chocolate cake. They figured they could make it home
from the diner at around two or three am. The
roads were basically empty that night, as it was too
early for ski or hunting season. While gazing at the moon,
Betty noticed a bright star to the left of it,
and then another star appearing right above it that was
slowly getting bigger and brighter.
Speaker 4 (29:33):
Betty called my attention to the object alike for face
for for move after it, and decided to come in.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Barney was a World War Two vet and enjoyed plane watching.
He was almost instantly convinced that the objects was likely
something conventional and paid little attention to it.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Obviously, I was.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Totally close about and flying frogs and so your left falls.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Throughout their drive, they both continued to watch the object
as the trees and mountains surrounding them began obstructing their view.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Now that you can see in the sky like a
light lit the sky in the background.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Betty noticed that the lights on the objects were behaving
differently than that of a normal plane, but would typically
be a single red blinking light appear to be changing
colors in an unusual pattern.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
The objects is how blowing along the same directly that
we were going.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
For a moment, it felt like they were being followed
by the object.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
The object went around the wind.
Speaker 6 (30:49):
How in front of them.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Both Betty and Barney could see the craft clearly through
their windshield.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I got out of the gue and the objects which
brought it over the driver side of the cot, and
I became determined that to find outlass and had to
have some natural explaining.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
They stopped the car again again, got out, took with
them with binoculars that were on the front seat. They
looked through the binoculars and saw this object covering perhaps
a hundred feet above that cock and one side of
the road. The song movement.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I'm looking at it wins monoculus, and I can't believe
what I am seen.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Barney described the craft as wide as three telephone poles
and made no noise wins of monocalyus.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I can concerned what I call figures moving about at
a huge plate glass.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
That came to curve around.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Barney could see a double row of windows on this
pancake shaped object. He pulled into a nearby field to
get a closer look, when he saw something much more
unsettling inside the craft that was hovering there. He could
see half a dozen living beings wearing what appeared to
be black uniforms, staring directly at him.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
These thinkers that we're looking savingly sound was me because
the object was tilted and I could see with the monocalypse.
When I thought were going up, touching or pulling off, leaving,
I was just completely fasted to Betty has singed. I
pulled the monocolates waves on my eyes, stashing back to
the car, claiming to Betty, Oh my god, I said, Betty,
(32:33):
this is going to get answer. Guitar put it the
and the objectised it over his.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
They now got into that car and sped away for
what they thought was their own wives. The rounded the
curves to the left, and that car in expectedly just stopped.
The car vibrated.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
I felt with my hands on the steering wheel.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
I felt the singling.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Colum After a tingling in the steering column, they heard
a series of irregular beeps, then a haze came over them.
All of a sudden, they realized they had traveled about
thirty five miles from Indian Head to Ashland, New Hampshire,
(33:20):
with no recollection of that part of the drive. They
slowly approached what appeared to be a roadblock in the
middle of nowhere.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Alongside the road at round level was this immense, intense
firange globe. Several men dressed in rather strange uniforms were
lying across the road.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
They all stepped back, but one stayed behind and remained
looking at him. Their eyes were unlike anything he'd seen before.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
That wouldn't stop. The man came over, removed him from
the can escort them to the sauce of this light
in the woods.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Betty claimed that Barney was in some kind of sleepwalk
state and wasn't answering when she called.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
Out to him, and they would taking a boy who
purported to be a spaceship.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
They were placed on a metal table separate from each
other as humanoid like creatures began taking samples of their hair, skin,
and nails.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
For the next two hours, they were submitted to a
complete physical and intellectual examination. Question about the life when
they asked, so they just entered another world when they
into that spaceship.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Over seventy years later, the Betty and Barney hillcase remains
one of the most horrifying and hardest to debunk cases
in American history. Yes, please.
Speaker 9 (35:00):
Never forget that day.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
This is Kathleen Morten, the niece of Betty and Barney Hill.
Speaker 9 (35:06):
I was thirteen years old in nineteen sixty one when
Betty and Barney were abducted.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
She recalls vividly the day that all their lives would
change as a family.
Speaker 9 (35:17):
My mother was on the phone with Betty.
Speaker 6 (35:20):
I listened.
Speaker 9 (35:22):
My mother was concerned, and I knew that something was wrong.
When she hung up the phone, she told me Betty
and Barney had seen a flying saucer up close the
night before. They were afraid they'd been contaminated.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Prepared for a space white legend name my habitat, and
smoked a lean g This is a beanbag. I've been
going gene because a cool Now she was over c
(36:06):
penn up.
Speaker 4 (36:06):
I'm be Tokyo, Japan.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
In the bands of supert show Sneve budon.
Speaker 7 (36:11):
Top ton of vert riding.
Speaker 9 (36:12):
Then you you gotta being down and saying the park Peal,
We've been a Down, John Nack and nine help those
Boom nat.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Of Guys, we a na a Devil.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for
free every Thursday. But if you'd like to bene the
whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus
on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now.
Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange,
and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email
(36:46):
us at tips at high strange dot com. High Strange
is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with Cadence thirteen, created,
hosted and edited by myself, Payne Lindsay executive producers or
myself in Donald Albright, editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner
and myself. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, Sound design,
(37:10):
mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney,
Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, Meredith Stedman, and Sidney Evans.
Our cover art is by Polygon. This episode features the
song Space Cadet by metro Booman featuring Gunna. Written by
Wesley tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler, Wayne Alan Ritter,
(37:32):
and Jack Quies Webster. Performed by metro Booman featuring Gunna
courtesy of Republic Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises
for metro Booman in three hundred. Entertainment for Gunna Special
thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA,
the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck Media and Marketing, as
well as Chris Corcoran and the team at Cadence thirteen.
(37:55):
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.
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