HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, caudate putamen.
MARCUS PARKS
Caudate putamen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The caudate putamen is where psychic abilities lie inside of the brain. The cuadate putamen.
MARCUS PARKS
And who is telling you that the caudate putamen is where the psychic abilities lie in the brain?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was reading the preface to the new Lue Elizondo book. And he talked about the caudate putamen.
MARCUS PARKS
In what context?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He said that maybe when we're having psychic... How do you put it? Like a tête-à-tête with an alien, when you're having psychic communications with an alien, because they believe... So Lue Elizondo was trained in remote viewing as a part of his way in. Because apparently the hemisphere, the hemi-sync technology that was given to the CIA by the Monroe Institute was taught to a lot of these guys that worked in counterterrorism as a way to... Apparently he was taught how to be psychic and he says the caudate putamen is where aliens and us meet up. It's the hotel lobby where aliens and us talk.
MARCUS PARKS
So how does this jibe with the third eye people, with the pineal gland people?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It actually probably is in there but pineal glands at this point are entirely crusted over, there's plastic in the semen.
MARCUS PARKS
They're all calcified because of the fluoride in the water in the water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's in the water, it's why we can't be psychic. It's how we didn't know what was gonna happen 10 days ago was going to lead to a democratic surge.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We had no idea because we couldn't activate our caudate putamens!
ED LARSON
I think it's great we have plastic in our semen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, whatever.
ED LARSON
Makes you strong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just glad that it's going somewhere.
MARCUS PARKS
It floats better.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's gonna be sticking around on earth a lot longer.
MARCUS PARKS
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks, I'm here with the heavily plastic semened Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, my semen's teflon.
ED LARSON
Yeah, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It don't even stick to my wife.
ED LARSON
I came a water bottle.
MARCUS PARKS
That's Ed Larson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
He came an entire water bottle.
ED LARSON
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're like a recycling plant.
ED LARSON
That's right. They put it in me and I shoot them out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, hey, whatever goes in the butt comes out the dick.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I heard.
ED LARSON
Poland Springs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just so you know, before we get into today's incredible chapter of alien attacks, I did want to address something up top about our-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah and I know that it's Colorado, not Wyoming.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, so good work. Good work now.
MARCUS PARKS
Now.
ED LARSON
One day we're gonna undress something up top and it's gonna be so hot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I always do but I get yelled at for my nipples on YouTube. But I did some research and I got some great feedback from people. And one of the big questions that came back was hot dog penis, Phil Schneider, how?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I got really like a disconcerting email from a nurse that says apparently, and this is just something we all to look forward to, there's a thing called urethral erosion.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That happens when you have a catheter in too long which is what Phil Schneider had. I guess if you don't properly... I think with a catheter, I might be incorrect but I believe you're supposed to kind of pull it in and out and every once in a while.
ED LARSON
Clean it occasionally.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think so.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think you're supposed-
ED LARSON
It's covered in piss and blood.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not supposed to set it and forget it.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I don't think you're supposed to leave anything like that in your body for too long of a period of time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think so because what it does is it turns your penis into a very, very wicked loaf of bread. And eventually it eats through the urethra lining and creates a split in the penis. And that's what Phil Schneider was dealing with and the blood that was on the crime scene when they found him was probably the blood from him yanking the catheter out of his penis.
ED LARSON
Oh, in order to kill himself because the pain was so bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In other words, there was a reason why the cops had told the family let it go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It wasn't a conspiracy, it's just you're gonna throw up. You're gonna be upset.
MARCUS PARKS
You're gonna wanna forget about this move on.
ED LARSON
So he fileted his own penis to get that out?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Quite possibly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well no but the old fashioned way, rope pulley.
ED LARSON
Oh rope pulley. I thought he like cut it up the vein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no. Like a lawn mower.
ED LARSON
Oh like a lawn mower.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's one of the possibilities at the very least.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey and I'm down for any possibility that's out there.
ED LARSON
Yes. And if you're still listening, thanks for joining us.
MARCUS PARKS
So our next story of alien attack-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When aliens attack two!
MARCUS PARKS
Occurred near Winnipeg, Manitoba in the year 1967. Although it is debatable as to whether this one was a deliberate attack or some sort of accident. Like say if a trucker runs over a deer, would you call that an attack?
ED LARSON
By the deer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd say it's an attack by... Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And that will be one of the questions we shall be asking on this episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very, very good. I actually feel like this is more of running into an alien's version of the club.
MARCUS PARKS
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is all about don't touch a parked UFO.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But no matter the intention, the person involved in what came to be known as the Falcon Lake incident was indeed injured by his encounter with the UFO and suffered continuous health problems as a result of his encounter with the unknown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is very, very common outside of a direct physical attack. As we know, one of the big things that they are currently researching inside of the world of the anomalous phenomena, all these various new Pentagon programs like AAWSAP, what they are trying to look at, one of the big things they're looking at is about how people get extremely sick when they're around any of this stuff.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And how that will eventually be one kind of a way we could weaponize it. But it's really more of the disconcerting thing of like why do you get some form of weird body rash/pink eye/cancer from a UFO?
ED LARSON
If I saw a UFO, I would have to touch it.
MARCUS PARKS
You think so?
ED LARSON
I think if I saw one just sitting outside and it crashed, I'd be like so we're all gonna like get in there, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, of course.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we're just trying not to go back to work.
MARCUS PARKS
Well our subject today for this first story is a Polish immigrant named Stefan Michalak who settled in Winnipeg with his wife and children following WWII. An uncomplicated man, Stefan worked as a mechanic at the Inland Cement Company and never had any interest in UFOs before his encounter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like the color gray!
ED LARSON
Your name ends in -halak just in case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! I work in things that stand still!
MARCUS PARKS
Well Stefan's passion was actually amateur prospecting. And every spring he would head to the forests and mountains of Manitoba to prospect for minerals, silver, or if he was lucky, gold.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gold! That Canadian gold!
ED LARSON
Polish gold is copper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Polish gold is copper. I've heard that. Believe me, I got turned away from many jewelers with a pile of Polish gold.
ED LARSON
Those are pennies, sir.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Agh! Lincoln, you lied!
MARCUS PARKS
And so it was on one of these solo prospecting trips in the spring of 1967 that Stefan had his unfortunate encounter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't mean to insult any other amateur prospectors but it-
MARCUS PARKS
Sounds like great fun. I love rocks.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think this is good for you. But it does feel like it's an extremely sad man's hobby.
MARCUS PARKS
I would put it above metal detectors.
ED LARSON
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it sounds like he wasn't that above metal detectors. You know what it is? Why do I feel like if I had a metal detector, if I just do it kind of in my neighborhood or close, like that's kind of like that's fine, it's cute, it's an affectation. But if I travel-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To stay in a hotel to metal detect all morning, that's a cry for help.
MARCUS PARKS
But he's not metal detecting. I think this is a beautiful thing that I would love to do. It's an excuse to go out into wilderness.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's giving yourself an activity to do as you wander the gods' great beautiful Canadian wilderness.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every rock is a member of the rock family. That's all I can see him doing each time. Just being like and there's a rock.
MARCUS PARKS
Igneous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah, another rock.
ED LARSON
Sedimentary. I think it's cooler than the actual... Yeah, I agree with you, Marcus, because at least you're going out to nature.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You're going to get it yourself. When you're metal detecting you're just looking for other people's shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. Yeah, you're a scrounger.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well on May 19th, Stefan took a bus to Falcon Lake in the Whiteshell area 80 miles east of Winnipeg and got a motel room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He took a bus to a motel to go look at rocks?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fine. No, it's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's great.
ED LARSON
It's not a rich man's hobby.
MARCUS PARKS
He's an uncomplicated man. That's how I describe him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like the color of gray.
MARCUS PARKS
He awoke at dawn the next day and left at 5:30 am.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely because those rocks get up early. You gotta make sure you get out there as soon as you can because other people, they won't be there crowding around the good rocks.
ED LARSON
Yeah, what's the saying? The early worm gets squished by the rock?
MARCUS PARKS
He carried a map, a hammer, a compass, protective goggles with green lenses, paper and pencil, and a few snacks. Now around noon, Stefan was working some quartz out of the ground when he noticed that some nearby geese had been frightened by something and were fleeing the scene.
ED LARSON
Get away from my quartz, geese!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These are my rocks, geese. I claim these rocks with my eyeballs but I will leave them here for the good of nature.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Stefan looked to the sky, he saw two cigar-shaped UFOs descending upon his location.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.
MARCUS PARKS
But as they got closer to the ground, the classic cigar shape described by so many UFO witnesses became more of an oval and both craft flew together completely coordinated as if they were one ship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
But suddenly the ship farther away stopped its descent as the ship closer to Stefan continued its way to the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I see a very interesting rock down here. Cling-clong. All right, Mr. Boring man, I'm gonna go look at space tits.
MARCUS PARKS
It landed on a rock-
ED LARSON
Hell yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
About 50 yards from where Stefan was standing. The other ship more menacingly floated over to Stefan and descended until it was only 15 ft above him and it hovered there for three minutes. It then ascended, changed color from red to orange to gray, tilted, turned bright orange, then flew away without ever making a sound.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate the color orange. It's too exciting.
MARCUS PARKS
The other UFO however hadn't moved from its landing spot, although it was shifting colors from red to reddish-gray to light gray, sometimes even glowing with a goldish hue like hot stainless steel. But the most impressive action the ship took was when it opened at the top and emitted a purple light so bright it hurt Stefan's eyes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's cool. I like the purple light, it feels like Prince is in it.
ED LARSON
Yeah, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now as it often happens in situations like this, Stefan found himself unable to move for some time and could only stare at the UFO as warm air began wafting from the open hatch, carrying the pungent odor of sulfur.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
UFO was farting.
MARCUS PARKS
Stefan also heard a sound which he described as a soft murmur like the whirl of a tiny electric motor, paired with a hissing sound that seemed to be the result of air being sucked into the craft. After a while, Stefan was either allowed to move again or he got over the shock of what he was looking at because a lot of people freeze when they see UFOs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is honestly one of the big explanations of why, which is the major complaint across all the various portals on the internet is like if we have these super incredible cameras in our pockets and at our disposal at all times, why in the fuck is there not any good primo footage that much? You've seen some examples of very good footage.
MARCUS PARKS
I've seen examples of footage.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've shown you both some very compelling UFO shapes. But the idea is that because of the psychic nature, because of the caudate putamen, the UFO and you connect and oftentimes you are held in a moment of awe instead of reaching for your phone to take pictures of it because you are now communing with the eternal.
ED LARSON
Dude, I don't even take pictures at birthday parties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I don't take any pictures of my friends.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'm really bad at all-
MARCUS PARKS
Me too.
ED LARSON
College and my first five years in New York, I got nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No pictures.
ED LARSON
It's like it didn't even exist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. No, it's true. We had no pictures.
MARCUS PARKS
So once he was able to move again, Stefan pulled out his paper and pencil so he could take down a sketch of the craft. Wanting more details, Stefan got brave enough to walk towards the UFO, although he had to be careful to not look directly into the purple light because doing so caused red dots to appear in his vision.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It seems like the UFO is both telling him to go away and come here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it's laying on, the idea is that it's laid on a rock in front of him and ostensibly opened its butthole at him. It's shooting fart waves at him. But it's also sort of beckoning a little bit. It's like a (whispering) come see the butthole.
ED LARSON
Screw my butt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come, don't you want to be near this butthole? And so he goes towards it.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a trap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Classic trap. Never follow an open butthole anywhere.
ED LARSON
Spoiler alert.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Stefan got closer and closer to the craft, he heard human-like voices which he thought sounded American. So Stefan edged to the craft's opening and called out, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Canadian accent) "Okay, Yankee boys! Having trouble?"
MARCUS PARKS
Well he was actually Polish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(polish accented nonsense)
MARCUS PARKS
There was of course no answer, so Stefan tried the same greeting in Russian, German, Italian, French, Ukrainian. And finally, in what I think was a bit of wishful thinking, Polish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If only.
MARCUS PARKS
If only. But still he got no response.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, he knows a lot of languages for simple mechanic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah well he came from Europe after WWII. So I would imagine he came from a point in Poland where a lot of people spoke a lot of different languages. At least enough to conversationally get along.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was like that in Poland? I thought Poland was a monoculture.
ED LARSON
I don't know for sure.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm not really sure about that.
ED LARSON
I haven't really discovered anything about our people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no, no.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everything that you do discover, you're gonna find out it's actually pretty troubling.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just sort of let the Nazis in.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's lots of vodka and sausage I imagine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, there's some troubling politics as well. But hey, I love eagles.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I would imagine just living central European state, you pick up a lot of different languages.
ED LARSON
For sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But do you think he wasn't just like hallo? Hallo! Hullo! Hallo.
ED LARSON
I mean I guess I know hello in like four different languages at least.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well he then got a little braver and approached the open hatch so he could look inside the craft through the opening that was emitting the purple light. See Stefan's prospecting goggles had green lenses for contrast enhancement-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh.
MARCUS PARKS
Which made it easier to spot subtle color variations in rocks and minerals to find specific ores or gemstone. And so with that green filter, Stefan found he could look into the purple light. And when he leaned over and looked into the craft, he saw a maze of lights, direct beams running in horizontal and diagonal paths that flashed with no discernible pattern or purpose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like Xanadu.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Or ELO.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, very much like ELO.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool. I wonder if Jeff Lynne was on that. Because it looked like him going down being like hey man, yeah, have you heard my new song Telephone?
MARCUS PARKS
Now Stefan guessed that the craft's walls were about 20 inches thick, that was the last detail he noticed. It seemed like someone else had noticed he was taking a peek because two panels quickly slid over the hatch opening and a third panel dropped down from above, closing the hatch entirely. As it has been described again and again, Stefan was amazed to see that the craft had no seams or soldering after the hatch was closed, giving it the appearance of being a single piece of metal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) How does flying machine work without steam? How does zeppelin rise?
MARCUS PARKS
But this is when the UFO seemingly attacked. After the hatch closed, a screen opened, appearing to be a part of some sort of ventilation system. The craft then tilted suddenly and a sharp beam of heat shot from the craft directly at Stefan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(farting)
MARCUS PARKS
Who felt a searing heat in his chest as his clothes caught fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(farting)
ED LARSON
I love that you're the one who believes in this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know!
MARCUS PARKS
I know. I try my hardest to like give this a little bit of legitimacy, give it some suspense and give it some mystery. Oh man, there's so much mystery that it tilted and this beam of heat shot his chest and his shirt caught aflame! And you're fucking dumb ass is like (farting).
ED LARSON
You made us go to Contact in the Desert. Marcus and I didn't ask.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A true artist works his whole life just to let it go.
MARCUS PARKS
He tore off his shirt and threw it to the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he did get caught on fire.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he got caught on fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got caught on fire and also he did touch it with his hand. So he went and he touched it with his glove. And the first thing that happened is the tips of his gloves all fucking melted. And he was just like (Polish accent) oh gosh, my gosh! And then it zapped him with the fart ray and he literally burst into flames.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But once Stefan was no longer on fire, the craft ascended with a rush of air, changed color and shape, then disappeared in an instant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(farting)
MARCUS PARKS
See that was the time to do it. Stefan said that the only things left behind were the smell of sulfur and some moss that had been set aflame which Stefan quickly stomped out. He then checked his compass and watched as it spun wildly for several minutes before it finally righted itself. Now at this point Stefan's whole day was just fucking ruined.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) I will never find rocks while on fire.
ED LARSON
He's probably naked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) I scare every gerbil I see looking for rock now, fully naked here, smooth as hell. Like an ape at the river.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he didn't feel much like prospecting anymore. So he started examining the site where the craft had landed. But as he approached the area he said he became incredibly nauseated and he got a headache. But once he stood at the site itself, he said that it looked as if it had been swept clean with the broom, no debris, no broken branches, and no disturbed rocks. Instead he said all that remained was a six inch tall mound of dirt about 15 ft in diameter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay. No one could pile, no human can pile dirt like this.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Stefan's headache got worse almost immediately, which was followed by weakness and near constant vomiting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Polish vomiting is hard too. You see it all over Greenpoint.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I've done it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I've seen both of you Polish vomit. I've seen Polish vomit in Poland. I'm the only one here who's actually been to Poland.
ED LARSON
I know, it's upsetting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa yeah. How did he go to the father country and we haven't?
ED LARSON
I don't know but we need to do a pilgrimage at some point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I want to go to the Żywiec factory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh it's beer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I went because my wife wanted to go to Auschwitz. And so did I.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey.
ED LARSON
I wanna go to Auschwitz.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey.
MARCUS PARKS
You should.
ED LARSON
It's weird to say.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, buy tickets now, they sell out. They're crazy, dude. The laser show at Auschwitz is out of control. But don't bring a bong in, they'll kick you out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But do stop by the snack bar that's just outside the door. It's all right, I bought a donut.
ED LARSON
Nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the vomiting was strange because Stefan claimed that he hadn't been sick in 25 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) Never sick! A true immigrant's lifestyle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it is. But despite this, Stefan said that he couldn't make it more than a few steps before he had to stop and vomit again and again. Furthermore, the red dots that had previously been caused only by looking into the purple light began to fill his vision. And large red spots appeared all over his chest where he'd been burned by what we can only assume was a UFO exhaust port.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It did also kind of seem like one of those alarms, like you're stepping too close to the vehicle.
MARCUS PARKS
Viper, viper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Why don't they do that anymore with cars?
MARCUS PARKS
Because they don't work. Car alarms don't work, people just ignore them and since people ignore them, it gives the thief plenty of time to disarm them and then just steal the car anyway. They don't work at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But can't it just say something like this car's not filled with gold! Like I don't know, maybe something fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Viper, viper. Disoriented, Stefan finally made it to the highway about a mile from where he entered the forest earlier that day. From there he found an RCMP station, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And told the local Mountie his entire story. And the Mountie of course didn't believe him. So Stefan was left to deal with it on his own.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now the RCMP is one of the largest UFO studying bodies in the world.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The RCMP actually take UFO sightings extremely seriously in a Canadian serious fashion.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where they-
MARCUS PARKS
They work on it three hours a day?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Once a month?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And if they see you working on it, they tell you how they could do it better than you.
MARCUS PARKS
But then they're not gonna do it better than you, they're just gonna tell you how they'd do it better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they want to go on vacation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Working for the weekend. It's a whole country that's working for the weekend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, good for them.
MARCUS PARKS
Stefan worried that whatever he'd been exposed to might be contagious, that he'd been irradiated somehow. So he, unlike Phil Schneider, was hesitant to go back to his motel room. But since he was exhausted and the only other option was to lay down and die on the side of the road, he decided to risk it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, this is also super immigranty of the fact that he was set on fire.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well his shirt was set on fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I count that as set on fire.
MARCUS PARKS
Do you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If I didn't have a shirt anymore, if I burned a hole in my shirt, that's burning all of my shirt. If there's enough flames to consume my shirt and I take it off me, if I'm walking around with no shirt on, I've been set on fire.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
ED LARSON
He also is covered in red dots which I assume are burns.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
They could be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Radiation burns.
MARCUS PARKS
Once he returned to his room, he documented everything he'd just seen and experienced in his journal. After that, he went to the motel restaurant and asked a server if there was a doctor on staff. She said their local physician wouldn't arrive until July and the nearest doctor was 45 miles away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus Christ. But they definitely had flapjacks.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No doctor, no police, but there's a diner which is their courthouse.
MARCUS PARKS
And so Stefan returned to his room and called his wife. He told her that he'd been burned in an accident and needed their son to pick him up at the Winnipeg bus depot. She agreed to pass on the message, so Stefan walked to the bus stop and waited a fair distance from the other passengers so as to not contaminate them as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's just sitting there, no shirt on, no rocks.
ED LARSON
He's got a shirt.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's got a shirt by now, he went back to the hotel. So he got an extra shirt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so you just sit there, you didn't get to see any rocks, you're all fucking rock blue balled.
MARCUS PARKS
He had a rock morning.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean but I don't know if he got too much rocks.
MARCUS PARKS
Not too much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then once that happens that ruins the whole rock vibe because the whole point is to sit out there with the rocks, have a couple of beers, sit more with rocks, go back, eat a sandwich, go back out to the rocks, sit there for a while. It ruined the whole thing for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now he's got to take the bus.
ED LARSON
Yeah. I say don't get mad at the rocks you can't find, be happy about the rocks you see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a good way to live life.
ED LARSON
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Every day. Especially crack rocks.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once on the bus, Stefan sat in the back as far away from everyone else as he could get.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) I certainly was not just set on fire by alien! If anybody wants to feel bad for a man.
MARCUS PARKS
And when his son picked him up in Winnipeg, he was taken to the Misericordia Hospital to see if someone could figure out how to treat his ailments. Now it seems like it is on record that Stefan told the doctor who treated his burns that he was hit by exhaust coming out of an airplane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is just as insane as a UFO.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. But Stefan in his book 'My Encounter with the UFO'-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you say it correctly?
MARCUS PARKS
(Polish accent) 'My Encounter with the UFO'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
ED LARSON
You're supposed to take the 'the' out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
(Polish accent) My encounter with UFO!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. (Polish accent) Never good, always bad. Hate shirts! Leave the pant.
ED LARSON
(Polish accent) Shirt bad, rock good!
MARCUS PARKS
(Polish accent) By Stefan Michalak. Send to Penguin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just leaves it outside of the zoo.
MARCUS PARKS
(Polish accent) You publish book, Penguin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) I know you, Penguin! I know you publish book! If not, I choke you to death, you endangered fucking pig. You pig bird! It's fucking stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he said in his book that neither he nor the doctor spoke great English. So something was probably lost in translation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he sounded afeared and he came in and he did have a really insane explanation. He was covered in burns.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It was all weird.
MARCUS PARKS
And when Stefan woke up the next day, he was in even more pain and still had red dots in his vision. But he had new symptoms as well. He smelled like sulfur, just as the UFO had, and people said that his breath smelled terrible where before it had been just fine. In fact what they said, they didn't necessarily say that his breath smelled awful, they said that his mouth smelled awful.
ED LARSON
Ooh. Rotten teeth, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know that. I know that smell. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ever smell a guy who's got bad lips?
ED LARSON
Oh yeah. Or they got like stomach problems, sometimes it just always smells like puke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pure acid, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The smallest mercy was that he'd finally stop throwing up but only if he didn't eat. Eventually the only thing he could keep down was toast, eggs, and milk. And in the following months he dropped 20 pounds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) Honestly that's all I really like to eat anyway.
MARCUS PARKS
(Polish accent) Toast, egg, milk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) Milk, water, vodka.
ED LARSON
Nauseous all the time and milk was on the list?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Milk helped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Milk helped. They say shit to my father... Like doctor talks to me, I'm in 2024. When a doctor talks to my father, it's 1924. He says stuff like if your father didn't drink five glasses of milk a day, I don't think he'd still be here. Or like if you stopped your father from smoking cigarettes, I don't think he'd still be here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just being like I feel like both of them things are the reason why he ain't doing great right now.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Stefan wasn't shy about telling people what had happened to him. And eventually word got to a reporter from the Winnipeg Tribune who arrived at Stefan's home and interviewed his family. The subsequent story caught the attention of the aerial phenomena research organization, APRO.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Who are probably best known for backing Travis Walton during the fire in the sky saga. And much like Travis Walton, APRO was the first outside organization to believe Stefan's story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're here to believe you.
MARCUS PARKS
Now just three days after Stefan was allegedly exposed to UFO exhaust, Barry Thompson at APRO sent him to the National Atomic Research Center in Pinawa, Manitoba for radiation testing. Three days later!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Falcon Lake incident is considered one of the most heavily documented UFO cases in the world. Mostly in North America. But they ran tests.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They went and looked at a lot. He went and told this ridiculous story to several people.
ED LARSON
But he was covered in radiation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was. With burns.
MARCUS PARKS
He was covered in radiation burns, not covered in radiation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
But how would he have faked that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get into some of the explanations later. None hold water as far as I'm concerned.
ED LARSON
Okay, cool.
MARCUS PARKS
But while they were waiting for the results, Stefan, Barry Thompson, Dr. Roy Craig of the University of Colorado, and a reporter from Life Magazine headed out into the woods to see if they could find the landing site. They couldn't. Likewise the RCMP and the RCAF, the Royal Canadian Air Force, they both had trouble finding the site Stefan described. Meanwhile Stefan's health problems got worse and they got weirder. By week three, his chest started itching and blisters appeared in a V-shaped rash in the center of his chest that ran to his ears.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he was all covered. Yeah, full V, dog.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Scarlet lettered.
MARCUS PARKS
For what? What's the scarlet letter for?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very hairy.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd say (Polish accent) vodka.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) Vodka.
ED LARSON
Vodka.
MARCUS PARKS
No explanation could be found. And the best answer doctors had was that it might have been an allergic reaction. And so they gave him an ointment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) What are you put cream on me? What am I, some kind of potato? This does not do! I was attacked by alien fart! You gave me some kind of goo. I'm supposed to cover myself in some kind of some crumbs? For what? For burns? V-shaped burns? Very hairy. UFO man came! He spray me with fart. You give me cream?
ED LARSON
It's all right, he'll be dead in a couple days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) I heard you. I heard you!
MARCUS PARKS
A couple of weeks later though Stefan was contacted by a man named Gerald Hart, who is somewhat of a mysterious figure in this story. We have no idea who exactly Gerald Hart was or where he came from. But we do know that he was somewhat of a bad influence on Stefan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well one of the worst I'd say byproducts of ufology and something like this happening to you is that legitimately weirdos show up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so Gerald Hart was this guy that like... It's funny, this is a funny relationship.
MARCUS PARKS
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Gerald, or Gerry as he insisted he be called-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With a G!
MARCUS PARKS
Was loud, boisterous, and had a dirty mouth no matter who was around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cock!
ED LARSON
Pussy! Oh I'm sorry, is that your fucking mother?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry about that. Don't want to be crass around that whore.
MARCUS PARKS
Hell, I'm hungry as a cunt. Let's get outta here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's get outta here! I gotta eat a pile of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm gonna shit myself over to the fuck house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) I like this guy. This guy gets it, man.
MARCUS PARKS
But Gerald Hart was genuinely interested in helping out with Stefan's UFO mystery. But where Stefan had failed before to find the site of the landing, after six hours of wandering the woods with Gerry, they found the remains of Stefan's burned shirt and the tape measure he dropped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here, here's your dirty shit and here's your fuck pile. Cock, fuck, shit, ass.
ED LARSON
Told you I'd find it you fucking pussy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) You are the funniest guy I've ever been around, man. You're fucking funny, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
They also found pieces of metal and submitted them to CAPRO, the Canadian version of APRO. Canadian Aerial Phenomena Research Organization.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the dishonest version of the UFO group because the one that is super honest is the NOCAPRO (no cap, bro).
ED LARSON
Very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
That was a real long road to walk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's called trying to understand the youth. Just trying to understand the Zoomers, right, trying to get on their level.
ED LARSON
Bet. Bet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bet. Yep. That's a dead type beat.
ED LARSON
Deadass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
Indeed. Well they found pieces of metal, submitted them to CAPRO. No such luck. It's just metal. Now Stefan's rash would disappear and reappear continuously over the next five months. But in September things only got worse. He was suddenly struck by a burning sensation on his chest and neck which only got more intense as it spread throughout his torso. Before long, his entire body began swelling up and it turned purple, reaching such a size that he couldn't get his shirt back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) What am I, some kind of fucking Willy Wonka child that turn into grape? I'm sick of this fucking shit. All of these guys come and tell me... Gerald, you taught me a way to fucking express myself that makes me really feel like king fuck.
MARCUS PARKS
His vision then failed, he got dizzy, and he said he felt as if he was levitating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) I am some kind of top!
MARCUS PARKS
But after being taken to the hospital, he fully and mysteriously recovered a few hours later and doctors had no explanation as to why any of this should have happened other than that he must have come in contact with a substance that caused some sort of extreme allergic reaction. Couldn't tell him what though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pine cones.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, pine cones. Now during all of Stefan's up and downs with his health, he became closer friends with Gerry Hart. But since Gerry was a bit of a foul-mouthed bastard, Stan's wife believed that his influence was destroying Stefan's relationship with the RCMP who were still in charge of the open investigation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stefan, how about we get the fuck out of this fucking bullshit? All right, leave your bitch at the house and go fuck with some pigs. All right? Come on, let's go fuck with the RCMP. All right? They're called Mounties for a reason, they want to get mounted like a bunch of bareback fucking animals out there, all right.
ED LARSON
Why don't you bring your cock to this cunt-filled diner and get some fucking pancakes?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) Okay, you're right! I am hungry.
MARCUS PARKS
See after hanging out with Gerry, Stefan would curse a lot more, amongst other bad habits picked up from Gerry. In other words, Stefan thought he was so cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He got a new buddy.
MARCUS PARKS
He wanted to be just like him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's got a cool guy, cool buddy named Gerry.
ED LARSON
He only hangs out with rocks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is it. This is the biggest addition to his social calendar that has ever happened to Stefan.
MARCUS PARKS
Gerry Hart was a capital D, capital P, Difficult Person. And eventually under Gerry's influence, Stefan stopped cooperating with the RCMP. Hart, he believed that taxation was theft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure, yeah. Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
And therefore refused to pay his taxes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Thinking that if I just say I don't have to pay taxes that the government has to accept that. And was as a result arrested twice for tax evasion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen here, Officer Buttfuck, I gotta let you know I'm a sovereign ass citizen and I will not be detained. I'm a living fucking soul. I am not your corporate entity, you motherfucking dick sucking piece of shit. Arrest me! Oh I dare! Ow! Ow! Ow! I need a lawyer!
MARCUS PARKS
Gerry also liked calling the Internal Revenue Service the Infernal Revenue Service.
ED LARSON
Not bad.
MARCUS PARKS
And he called civil service 'snivel service'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on guys, that's some fucking funny shit.
MARCUS PARKS
And pretty soon Stefan was also saying (Polish accent) Infernal Revenue Service.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) The bastard fuck from hell. They come and take invisible money, huh?
MARCUS PARKS
Playing on Stefan's prospecting hobby, Gerry even roped Stefan into spending serious time hunting for untapped nickel and silver claims outside of Winnipeg. And this is in 1967.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is kind of sad. Gerry's monetizing his hobby.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I know. It really sucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gerry, come on. You're pushing it, buddy.
MARCUS PARKS
He's just one of those guys. That's about the time that Stefan's wife stepped in and told Gerry to stay away. Although Gerry did continue to call the house and stop by uninvited. As Stefan's son remembered it, Gerry would stop by every six months or so for years afterwards and then one day just fucking disappeared.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry guys, I gotta go fucking die by suicide.
ED LARSON
You fucking stupid gun!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Bye, bye, bye! Can I do it in front of you? Can I do it in fucking front of you?
ED LARSON
I'm gonna suck your fucking cock, gun!
MARCUS PARKS
Well I'm fucking off to shit cock fuck land up in the goddamn fucking shit sky!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bye, Gerry!
ED LARSON
Do you think he had Tourette's?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she was just hating on this man with Tourette's and then he's just like a perfectly normal nice man.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in the end, Gerry only hurt Stefan's investigation because Gerry's status as a subversive individual in the eyes of the RCMP made them suspicious of Stefan's whole story. But in 1968, after shaking off Gerry Hart, Stefan and a new more reliable friend named Marty McGregor returned to the UFO site with a geiger counter and found a spot that was emitting a significant amount of radiation. But just one spot. And after chipping away at the rock, they found a piece of metal that seemed to have once been molten. Stefan and Marty dug up two 5 inch pieces of zigzagged pieces of metal which they only half jokingly pegged as UFO droppings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's funny, Stefan. (Polish accent) Yeah, my friend. I have to have a friend. I know it's very vulgar but they call these UFO periods because they fall out of the big hanging pussies of the UFOs. And now I think how he thought and I think Gerry all fucked up. (Canadian accent) Oh yeah, that sounds about right. Oh Gerry! Oh I know a Gerry.
MARCUS PARKS
(Canadian accent) Oh foul-mouthed Gerry. Yeah, I know him My mom dated him for a couple of months back in 1959.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Canadian accent) Yeah, there's a bunch of things he called me as a boy that I won't repeat out here. I don't wanna get these squirrels offended.
MARCUS PARKS
The material however, instead of being the sort of exotic material that Jacques Vallée has, Jacques Vallée loves showing like we have no idea what this metal is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the Art's Parts famously.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Yeah, yeah. This turned out to be nothing more special than silver.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's interesting because now we know more metallurgically that a lot of times these metals that are left behind... Because UFO quote unquote "droppings" are way more kind of prevalent than we kind of talk about.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like there's very little actual physical evidence of a UFO. But every once in a while you will see like molten metal seems to drip off one of these objects and then pile up. And a lot of times when they go and get them tested, they will be earthbound metals, just normal metals, but it's the way they are compiled. They're either too pure, like that's one of the things that came out, I forget, one of the cases we just did. Where it was aluminum but it was like pure aluminum. So you would have to buy it, you'd have to assemble it and make it. So it's weird.
ED LARSON
It wasn't that cut up shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's just weird. It's stuff like that where it's like they are chemically... The rocks sometimes are like chemically organized in a way that we don't normally see.
ED LARSON
Now do we think it could have been a meteorite maybe?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Possibly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now over a year after his encounter with the UFO, Stefan was still fainting on a regular basis. His burns and rashes still came and went and he was still having headaches. So he was taken to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The Mayo Clinic found nothing physically wrong with him. So thinking that it might be psychosomatic, Stefan was also psychologically evaluated.
ED LARSON
At the mustard clinic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Sorry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stupid.
ED LARSON
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stupid.
ED LARSON
I'll go, I'll leave.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no. I liked it, I liked it. Take your seat again.
ED LARSON
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
And it was determined that he both believed his story and it was a mentally healthy individual, he was not considered to be lying or disturbed. They were like this guy's fine. There's something weird going on with him, we just don't know what the fuck it is. Now after Stefan told his story, a lot of people took advantage and a lot of people did their best to discredit him. In the former category, the Canadian version of APRO, that's CAPRO-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They agreed to publish Stefan's book, 'My Encounter with the UFO'. But Stefan never saw any of the profits.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A true Polish book deal.
ED LARSON
It's a TV movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
When it came to people who didn't believe him though, most went with the old Canadian standby of saying that he got drunk out in the woods by himself and imagined the whole thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The problem with that though is that the RCMP investigation specifically said that Stefan had not been drinking that day. This rumor apparently came from a local bartender who said that he'd served Stefan four or five beers the night before the encounter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, man.
MARCUS PARKS
That's not really an amount of note the night before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
ED LARSON
I had three last night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's not drunk anymore.
ED LARSON
No. No, no, no. Yeah, I think four or five the night before, you get some sleep, especially when you're Polish. That's nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's literally how else... That's called medicine to a Polish person.
MARCUS PARKS
But there was also an RCMP officer named Paul Bissky who said that it was proven that Stefan consumed alcoholic beverages, quote, "to some considerable extent". Bissky said that when he tried to get Stefan's story straight on the night of the encounter after the initial interview, he'd found Stefan at the Falcon Lake motel bar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where the hell else are you gonna go after you got fucking set on fire by a UFO?
ED LARSON
If I get blasted by a UFO-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm getting hammered.
ED LARSON
I'm getting hammered!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
When asked about the encounter again, Bissky said that Stefan shrugged his shoulders and laughed it off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) Everybody farts, bunch of shit happens. I saw rock. There are lots of weird stuff, man. Don't bother me, dude. Hey, get Caroline on the phone.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as such, Bissky's hypothesis was that Stefan had been drinking and barbecuing and had suffered some sort of grill accident that had burned his chest. Embarrassed, Stefan made up the UFO story to cover his own drunken misadventure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does feel like though, I mean it's not like he was there to be a police officer investigating a homicide. He's going rock looking. I think that if he had burned himself on a barbecue while hammered, he would have laughed about it in a way. But first of all, he's out in the middle of fucking nowhere.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's rock peeping. He's not bringing a barbecue set up.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's not barbecuing. And the burn on his body was really interesting. It was a series of circles. You see the picture of him laying on it, it's a really weird specific burn.
ED LARSON
Could be coals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well coals I actually would push against. Because you know coals, they form like a mound and you push them all together. They're not individual, fully identical circles and they look like they're in a pattern-like grid on his belly.
ED LARSON
Oh it was like every burn was the same?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You should look at it, it looks like a Connect Four game board.
MARCUS PARKS
Like an exhaust port.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Bissky aside, there are a few points to the story that might point towards hoax maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
For one, the site showed normal levels of radiation. Where in many UFO landing sites, the Geiger counters show a significant height in the readings throughout the site.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it depends on how far it was since the landing was and when they tested for radiation.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as other witnesses go, there was a forest ranger tower close to the landing site that had a perfect view of the clearing and the ranger on duty made no report of a UFO or any other strange occurrence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's where I also got your ass in a fucking corner, all right. Because UFOs also appear to people in different ways and different things. And multiple people have seen the same UFO once but have all seen something different but have seen a shape in the sky. We actually noticed that when we went to Stephenville to do our aforementioned never released pilot thing. I don't know what the fuck's gonna happen with that. But you listen to truly one of the largest seen at one time UFO sighting of all time. And they're all saying oh it looked like something else. So it's very interesting that way.
MARCUS PARKS
There was also a golf course just a mile away. And from Stefan's description of the UFOs takeoff angle, it would have flown directly over the course where many a Canadian were enjoying a day on the links. That being said, there were 20 reports of similar UFOs in the Falcon Lake area around the same time as Stefan's encounter. And just because no one reported seeing a UFO doesn't mean that they didn't actually see one.
ED LARSON
And when Stefan mentioned it, he said that it changed shape and color multiple times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes. And also the reason why people don't... There's so many things that you could say, especially if you're Canadian. There's so many things you're like (Canadian accent) oh I don't care. That could be whatever.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Canadian accent) Oh it's some kind of funny looking bird. You know what I mean? Mostly you're just trying not to interrupt the golf day.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, they really don't like to interrupt their day, do they?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no. No. No, sir.
MARCUS PARKS
But no matter what other people said, Stefan maintained the same story about his UFO encounter for over 30 years until the day he died in 1999. And as a cute little nod to his story, the Royal Canadian Mint actually issued a commemorative Falcon Lake UFO coin in 2018 showing Stefan Michalak standing before a UFO.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cool. I like that because it really was extremely documented. Several people, there was a lot of research that went into this. The RCMP really does take UFOs seriously. There's something about they are supposedly under orders that if you say anything about seeing a UFO, they have to take a report and submit it.
ED LARSON
But if he was soaked with radiation, he probably wouldn't have lived another 30 years.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing. He was not soaked in radiation.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Even his lymphocyte levels which should have been like off the charts were normal, everything was normal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It could have just been a burn or it could have been something that we don't understand what it was that happened to him. Or is it a thing that you get hit with it once? I don't know. And I don't know why his body kept reproducing it again and again.
MARCUS PARKS
Now it's debatable as to whether or not that last story was an attack or an accident. Although one could say that the UFO burned Stefan on purpose to get him away from their craft, like honking a horn.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. No, that was an anti UFO theft machine.
ED LARSON
Or he fell asleep on a water heater.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Or it was airing out its butt. Also you know I like that stuff where the UFO itself is the alien.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the UFO has no actual idea that you're even there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
None. Oh yeah, none.
MARCUS PARKS
Or doesn't care.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will largely say that the phenomena does not care about us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well likewise there could be debate on this final story as to if the aliens were indeed the attackers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! Now it's the best one! We haven't done this one!
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But no one can argue that the humans involved believed an attack was taking place when the goblins descended upon a farm between Hopkinsville and Kelly, Kentucky in the mid 50s. (bluegrass guitar plays)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We do need some bluegrass. We should get some bluegrass guitar. Because it'd also be super cute to get some kind of like bunch of goblins on a porch playing the wash basin, playing the tub.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The bom-bom-bom. That'd be cool as hell.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm sure there's somebody out there that's done the bluegrass. Like (singing) now there's some goblins down in '53.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Country goblin jamboree. That's what we need.
ED LARSON
Whoa my god! So are goblins aliens?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well goblins are kind of what they talked about. There's little monsters and little creatures all follow into the world of the anomalous phenomena. And there's many species of these things that we could meet. These are very similar to Grays but they have ears.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while Kelly, Kentucky is a small village of only about 300 people, Hopkinsville is the self- proclaimed batter capital of the world. They produce 2 million pounds of flour in a day, in addition to brownie mix, pancake mix, Cracker Barrel biscuit mix, and up until recently this was where Red Lobster cheddar biscuits were made.
ED LARSON
Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're still making them. You can buy boxed ones.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can buy the boxed ones. That's just flour. Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
All right, well good for Hopkinsville.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also one of the extremely huge center for baby batter.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Oh hubby, you're going to the farm and making your batter again?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. It's time to sow what I've reaped. (moaning) Oh god, I'mma cum on this piece of corn.
MARCUS PARKS
If you're going to Hopkinsville, don't forget to put the chains on the tires, the roads are slick. Real slick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Slick. Slick.
ED LARSON
Well if you're gonna have biscuits, you gotta have gravy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're not getting better at the show. You know what I mean? Like we're not getting better at it. I am not getting better at this show. We've been doing it for 13 years.
MARCUS PARKS
But if you're not in the batter business, then you probably know the name Hopkinsville more for the oft told tale of the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who's in the batter business?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean how many people do you think are involved in ordering Cracker Barrel biscuit mix to all the various Cracker Barrels across America?
ED LARSON
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aunt Jemima.
MARCUS PARKS
Thousands!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aunt Jemima, is she like...
ED LARSON
Could be two million.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It could be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is Aunt Jemima like the fucking head of the Capistrano family? Is Aunt Jemima like the head godfather of batter?
ED LARSON
Well Aunt Jemima is not a real person.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never?
ED LARSON
Like Uncle Ben, they're just people who-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's just a racist caricature.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They never kissed?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a fucking sad thing.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
That would be delicious. Going over there for dinner?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's weird. It's weird.
ED LARSON
I'm watching Rob make notes to cut it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's gonna have to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Cracker Barrel employs 77,000 people.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's not the batter business.
ED LARSON
I mean it kind of is the batter business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's the breakfast business.
ED LARSON
It's lots of biscuits.
MARCUS PARKS
No but there's a lot. If I go to Cracker Barrel, I eat the biscuits. That's what I eat at Cracker Barrel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, of course. But I like the country fried pork chop.
ED LARSON
And what do you think that's covered in? Batter.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, buddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, am I just supporting batter?
ED LARSON
You are. You're a batter boy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I don't think you realize how much batter plays in your everyday life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, I do. Oh I do. Don't worry about that. All sorts.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblin attack involved a number of alien-like creatures terrorizing an isolated house full of tobacco farmers. This story would actually inspire one of my favorite horror movie franchises, the Hopkinsville goblins, this is the inspiration for Critters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Oh okay, awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And is also inspirational to one of my favorite nonfiction paranormal long form web series, Hellier.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Now while the goblins get all the press-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This wasn't the first time that this area of Kentucky had been visited by something extraterrestrial. In June of 1808, a family traveling west saw an unidentified object in the sky which they took as an ominous sign from god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
But as it goes in many UFO encounters, a spot near where the object was seen, possibly the spot where it landed, remained a barren circle where no vegetation would grow for decades after.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One day we will do a series about visions of Mary and Catholic visions as connected to UFOs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because like the Virgin of Guadalupe, all those things where they see a version of some like religious entity, it's always a UFO. It's awesome.
ED LARSON
Mary could have been an alien.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, dog. That pussy? She don't make losers.
MARCUS PARKS
More than a century after that sighting, in 1952 75 eyewitnesses at a nearby lake saw an oval- shaped spacecraft which hovered over the water for 30 minutes before taking off at an incredible speed. But that was merely an appetizer for what happened on August 20th, 1955. See at around 6:30 that evening, a state policeman, a state trooper, an investigator at nearby Fort Campbell army base, and a nearby farmer all saw huge balls of fire in the sky all at the same time. And they only reported their sightings later on. This fire was also seen by a man named Billy Ray Taylor who worked a tobacco farm right in between the towns of Hopkinsville and Kelly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you think that tobacco farmers are like the punks of batter town? This is a flour batter town.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a batter town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're making tobaccy. So do you think when it comes down to it, they're a thorn in the side of the old batter industry?
MARCUS PARKS
I'd say the batter, they're the odd ones out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I think the batter people are surrounded by tobacco people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
ED LARSON
Also everyone who works in a kitchen needs a smoke break.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta smoke cigarettes. God, I miss it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Billy Ray Taylor described the fireballs in greater detail. According to Billy Ray, there were three balls of different colors. Blue ball in the front, pink ball in the middle, red ball bringing up the rear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the property where Billy Ray lived was home to a fair amount of Kentuckians. There was Glennie Lankford and her three children as well as her two sons from a previous marriage, that was Charley and Elmer Sutton. Elmer, he was also called Lucky because of his uncanny ability to win rigged carnival games.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) The key is you gotta go through the back.
MARCUS PARKS
There was also their wives, Vera and Alene.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
As well as Alene's brother, OP Baker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And Lucky Sutton's friend, Billy Ray Taylor and his wife. All but four of these people were between the ages of 18-30 all were present the night the goblins attacked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is my one question. Is it one household?
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Busy.
MARCUS PARKS
Very busy household.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Busy people.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when Billy Ray-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's where the batter's going.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because as far as I can tell, you got Glennie who's the mother who had Charley and Elmer with the man whose name was Sutton. And then I think Mr. Sutton died. And then she remarried and had three more children from another guy, he also died. And then one of Lucky's friends, Billy Ray Taylor, moved in. And also Alene's brother after she married Lucky, he also moved into the house. So you just got a bunch of people all working this tobacco farm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, that's good.
MARCUS PARKS
That takes a lot of labor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I get it, absolutely. And Lucky was just happy that he had an open bed.
ED LARSON
And in Kentucky you can have a child at 10.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can, you're totally allowed.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when Billy Ray saw the lights in the sky, he ran back to the house to tell everyone what he'd seen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Hey everybody, there's globes!
MARCUS PARKS
They at first suggested that he might have just seen a bird. But Billy Ray said it wasn't a goddamn bird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I know birds.
MARCUS PARKS
(Southern accent) I know what a goddamn bird looks like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I know what a goddamn bird looks like. It's got four feet, it's got two heads. I know what a bird does. A bird is something that go down in the swamp, it's got webbed toes and it jumps up and down.
MARCUS PARKS
Lucky then asked him if he'd gone crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) No! If I'd gone crazy I would have said wooey-wooey-woo, hh ding dong, I'm Napoleon!
MARCUS PARKS
And Billy replied that he knew what he'd seen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I know what I saw!
MARCUS PARKS
That is to say he knew what he saw.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I know what I saw!
MARCUS PARKS
And he was sure that what he saw was (Southern accent) one of them flying saucers what they've been talking about in the papers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I knew it was them big city Yankee flying machines.
MARCUS PARKS
But just as they were talking it through and Lucky was starting to admit that maybe it was just the heat playing tricks with his eyes, Lucky and Billy Ray looked in the woods behind the house and saw a glowing silver figure with two huge yellow eyes with its arms in the air as if to surrender.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like Freddie Freaker.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's a lot like Freddie Freaker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Its legs were dangling but while the legs weren't moving, the creature was still floating towards the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is my favorite. I love shit. This is my favorite type of alien like movement and phenomenon.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like it when it's in the cartoony realm-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of like very, very strange. Because in one way, like you could say the more ridiculous, oh maybe they're making it up. But actually it's so far-
MARCUS PARKS
I'm on the other side of it, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me too.
MARCUS PARKS
The more ridiculous it is, the more I believe it.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's hard. You know what it is? And I don't mean... Yes, obviously there's imagination everywhere. I know we've all watched Reading Rainbow. So I know that there's imagination everywhere. But-
ED LARSON
Do you think it might have been a butterfly in the sky?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're a debunker! I feel like if you're a tobacconist in 1950s Kentucky, you might not have the most vibrant imagination that's ever lived. Maybe I'm wrong.
ED LARSON
Yeah well 75 people saw something.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean they saw something a few years earlier, yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
So it's not crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, people see stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, there's stuff out there. And when it comes to like the more ridiculous it is, the more I'm apt to believe it, there is a line of credulity there where if it feels like it is being made ridiculous on purpose, then you can always tell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because there's always these sorts of things about these stories that are so strange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Idiosyncratic.
MARCUS PARKS
Idiosyncratic. That's the word for it. It's idiosyncratic. And it sort of makes you feel uncomfortable when you think about it. And they are uncomfortable talking about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very much so, very freaked for some reason. I mean this very much so freaked them all out.
MARCUS PARKS
Now once Lucky and Billy Ray saw this creature, they began preparing for battle, collecting as much ammunition as they could find for their .22 rifle and their 12 gauge shotgun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Now if I'd never seen a floating Russian before, I'm seeing one now.
ED LARSON
How slow was it coming towards them that they were like running to the barn and loading guns and coming back outside?
MARCUS PARKS
Pretty slow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was, they were like floating.
MARCUS PARKS
And they were ready to defend their home from whatever it was that had come to earth with those balls of fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I heard the British were coming back with flashlights for eyes so they could see in the dark.
ED LARSON
If the British are coming back, they're not going to Kentucky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) They're coming back to get our beloved land.
MARCUS PARKS
Lucky covered the front door and Billy Ray took the back, while the rest of the family thought that both of them had lost their damn minds. But while they were in the middle of making fun of their defenders, another floating 3 ft tall creature appeared with its arms raised in the air outside the back door. This time Billy Ray got a much better look and saw that the creature was silver-skinned with long, thin, clawed hands and webbed fingers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Oh my god, it's a New Yorker.
MARCUS PARKS
Its head was large, its ears were big and pointed, and its yellow glowing eyes were more on the side of its head rather than facing front.
ED LARSON
Yeah, see I don't want to shoot an alien but a goblin gets shot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is what they're saying.
MARCUS PARKS
At that point the elder in the room, 50 year old Glennie Lankford, screamed and fell to the floor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(screams)
MARCUS PARKS
As the creature floated towards them, Billy Ray fired his rifle through the screen door which brought Lucky and the rest of the crew to the back door to see what had happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just that movement of the guys going...
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, be sure to show the movement on the podcast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, man, hey. Patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft. You can actually see me do that act out joke.
MARCUS PARKS
Once they got there to find Billy Ray on the back porch, everyone watched as a clawed hand came down from the roof to touch Billy Ray's hair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) No! You quit playing with my hair, you're tickling me!
MARCUS PARKS
Alene grabbed Billy Ray and pulled him back into the house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Billy Ray, you get back here right now.
MARCUS PARKS
While Lucky ran outside and fired the shotgun through the roof.
ED LARSON
The alien pulled Billy back into the house?
MARCUS PARKS
No, Alene.
ED LARSON
Alene!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Alene.
MARCUS PARKS
His wife, Alene.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) My wife is an an alien, that's Alene!
MARCUS PARKS
And the creature, apparently hit, rolled off the roof, floated to the ground, then scampered back into the woods. Or I would say more retreated into the woods. They didn't really scamper, they floated.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry.
MARCUS PARKS
Because as it moved away, the Kentuckians got a better look at how it moved. It glided without moving its dangly legs, drifting forward using what appeared to be a strange motion with it's hips.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's a visual exercise you also can't see.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus was doing a sultry goblin twerk.
MARCUS PARKS
I would say I was sissying the walk a little bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes, you were sissying the walk, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I put some bass in that walk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Glennie had the young children hide under their beds while the other women found their own hiding places throughout the house while she and the men discussed what they should do next. But it seemed like every time the family calmed down enough to get their heads on straight, the creatures would reappear. Although there was never any sign that the goblins were there to attack, nor did they ever counterattack against the Kentuckians. For example, when Billy Ray fired at another creature that came up to the window showing his big glowing eyes, it just flipped backwards and disappeared.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cool. This is my favorite. I love it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They also noticed that the creatures glowed brighter when they were yelled or shot at. But that's the thing, it didn't really seem to make much of a difference if you yelled at it or shot at it. It kind of reacted the same way.
ED LARSON
Well it didn't know how we were attacking it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But also this is the key I think to the concept of indifference.
MARCUS PARKS
At one point though, Lucky and Billy Ray went out into the front yard to take the fight to the goblins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) We're gonna go out there, we can't be in the Marines. We're gonna fight for our home.
MARCUS PARKS
And when someone yelled at them to look up in the maple tree, they saw one of the goblins sitting on the branches.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sitting up here, hi, hello!
ED LARSON
Look at my nuts, you fucker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gerry?
MARCUS PARKS
Lucky and Billy Ray opened fire and again, the creature just fell out of the tree and floated away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bye bye!
MARCUS PARKS
Lucky soon hit another creature. And he said that the sound that it made when they actually hit one with a bullet, they could tell that they hit it because it sounded like a metal bucket being shot. Like ping!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pa-tink!
ED LARSON
So it was like a shield they had on themselves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Something was weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They also said that when they shot the gun, the guns would not make clear gun noises. That they would go like-
ED LARSON
Ba-bang! Pow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pow!
MARCUS PARKS
And on and on it went, with Billy Ray or Lucky shooting a goblin, the goblin running away, then returning again seemingly unhurt. The only thing that had any effect it seemed was turning on the lights which at least caused the creatures to flinch. Now by this point in the evening, everyone agreed that they were dealing with either goblins or demons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Is there a difference, Glennie?!
MARCUS PARKS
Glennie suggested they're probably goblins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Yeah, they gotta be goblins. I should know, my second husband was half goblin.
MARCUS PARKS
She said they weren't dangerous, they might not be dangerous, after all they're coming to us with their hands in the air. And maybe if we stopped shooting them, they'd go away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Billy Ray, have you tried high fiving them?
MARCUS PARKS
Well Lucky disagreed because even when they didn't shoot, the creatures kept coming towards the house. And he wasn't gonna find out what happened if one of them got inside or touched someone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, I just feel like it would have been like giving him a million dollars. Like they did all of this shit and that's when Lucky decided, being like (Southern accent) there's no way we can let these aliens in this house! And I should know, I'm the luckiest man here. I was born with 11 toes.
ED LARSON
Just Ed McMahon after drinking a bunch of barium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I've got a test in the morning for colon cancer!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's like the old Kids in the Hall sketch. Like (singing) somebody's gonna get $1000, who's gonna get $1000? And then you gotta wait and you get $1000 and the next person gets punched in the face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now eventually they did decide that if things stayed quiet for a bit, they'd all race to their trucks and speed to town. And after Lucky shot one more goblin off the roof, everyone scrambled to their trucks and drove to Hopkinsville at 11 pm. They'd been fighting the goblins or whatever they were for three straight hours. Now the family pretty much stormed the local police department, telling them that they'd been fighting little men all night. But after a fair amount of condescending questions, the sergeant on duty called up the police chief Russell Greenwell. Now Greenwell had remembered the incident at the Kentucky Lake just a few years earlier where 75 people had seen the UFO. So he listened to the family's story with all seriousness before calling the state police. He then for some reason also called the local paper. And pretty soon the area was awash with cops, reporters, and looky-loos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because this man wanted to arrest an alien in Kentucky.
MARCUS PARKS
The first state to arrest an alien.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could feel his pride being like (Southern accent) we're bringing them all in. This ends now!
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. Get the eyeballs here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) I want it now. I want them strung up because if we don't set precedent now, eventually there will be a goblin in the House of Representatives.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the cops said that there was no sign of goblins when they arrived. But they did find a lot of empty shotgun shell cases and a lot of holes were shot through the screens of the house, including chunks of wood that had been blasted off the window frames. No matter what was out there, these fucking dudes had spent all night long firing bullets.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they turned their house into Swiss cheese. They had holes in the ceiling, holes in the windows, holes in the walls. And so whatever they did, they were just shooting at something.
ED LARSON
I think they all accidentally ate mushrooms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who knows? Could be that ergot poisoning.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Lucky and Billy Ray estimated that there could have been up to 15 creatures outside the house that night. But they also did admit that it could have just been the same two little bastards showing up again and again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Honestly I counted every digit I have as soon as I saw one and there was exactly 13.
MARCUS PARKS
And as it was, their nightmare wasn't quite over. And this goes against the drug hypothesis.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
The next night, Glennie woke up to find another goblin hanging around outside her window. She woke up Lucky and again tried to get him to not shoot the damn thing but Lucky just said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) "No, mama, I'm gonna shoot that little man!"
MARCUS PARKS
And that's when Billy Ray also woke up, grabbed his rifle, and the two of them started blasting away again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were just happy, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Only to get the same result of the creatures flipping, floating to the ground, running off, and coming back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hi, bye! Hello.
MARCUS PARKS
This went on until 5 am. That's when the creatures disappeared for good, which was just as well because Billy and Lucky had just run out of ammunition.
ED LARSON
Convenient.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, very convenient.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in the days that followed, everyone who'd been involved in the goblin incident gave consistent accounts of what happened and what the creatures looked like to the authorities and reporters. If it was some sort of poisoning or drugging or anything, everyone would have seen and experienced something different. Pretty soon though, as it often went in those days, strangers stormed the farm to feed their curiosity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this happens in every one of these where this is the human factor of where people start talking about like oh they do this for the fame or the money or they want to tell a story.
ED LARSON
Yeah, prove it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. But it does create looky-loos like me. I show up at your home. Like if things happen like that and I can get to it, I'm there. I'm asking questions, I'm eating food, I'm throwing the wrappers on the floor. I'm fucking dumping my Starbucks at the ends of it, I'm just throwing it on the street. I'm ruining the neighborhood. All right? There's a lot of shit goes on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The house didn't have locks, so people just walked inside, grilled the family for details, stole their shit-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Oh come on.
MARCUS PARKS
And just generally acted a fool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Damnit.
MARCUS PARKS
The family called the state troopers to keep people away but all that did was keep the looky- loos outside of a perimeter until the cops left. Then after the cops left for the night, they'd return to the house pretty much just to make fun of Billy Ray and Lucky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Look, I'm a goblin! I'm a goblin!
ED LARSON
You're gonna get fucking shot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if I shoot you in the head?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Finally the family figured that if they were gonna go through all this shit, they might as well charge admission. So they tried charging 50 cents to enter the house, a dollar to hear the story, and $10 to take pictures.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
But since there were so many people, the whole system fell apart immediately and the simple act of them asking for money made a lot of people think that they'd made up the whole story for profit. I mean I don't know, it's a bad fucking investment. They shot up their entire house-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Spent who knows how much money on shotgun shells and fucking rifle bullets.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
For what?
ED LARSON
You gotta get that back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that this family was very Kentucky.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now some say that they do believe that the family believes that they were attacked by little silver men. And it's important to say that they were little silver men and not little green men. Because you could get Lucky and Billy Ray pretty fucking riled up if you call them little green men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Don't you dare misgender them. I know what they were.
ED LARSON
Goblins are green.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this is the thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the Green Goblin is green.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Green Goblin is green. These are like-
MARCUS PARKS
Hobgoblin's more brown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were gray, so they were way more gray slightly-
ED LARSON
Covered in shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's the Hobgoblin.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
What do you expect? But yes, they were silvery gray.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But some people say it was just cats.
ED LARSON
Cats?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just think you'd find a lot of dead-
ED LARSON
Fucking cats?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'd find a lot of dead cats.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Also a bunch of bulletproof floating cats is a hell of a story on its own!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly that's even worse than aliens.
MARCUS PARKS
Way worse. I mean yeah, a lot of cats. But that's what they said is that like if it was fucking cats, we would have grazed at least a couple of them, you would have seen fur somewhere around the property. I mean these are farmers, they know how to shoot animals.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But also that's just as mysterious as aliens.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If the house just-
MARCUS PARKS
Bunch of cats? An abnormal amount of cats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If dozens of cats attack your house, what's happening in there?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you're not dog president-
ED LARSON
Sleepwalkers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that movie. That's right. Sleepwalkers!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was a good one.
MARCUS PARKS
There was also a theory that it could have been monkeys because there was a traveling carnival nearby that might have lost some monkeys around this time. But again, there would have been dead monkeys.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Or at least monkey fur, had this been the case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like they'd know it was monkeys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know they had very long arms.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, they had very long arms, yes. The final theory was that it was owls, specifically the eagle owl.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Owls are very, that's a common imagery with alien abductions.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Eagle owls can get as big as 3 ft tall, they can appear to float, and their eyes do glow in the dark. These owls are also highly protective of their young. So if someone had fucked with some baby owls, mama owl might come calling. But if it was an owl, it should have left behind the biggest amount of evidence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because shooting a huge owl with a 12 gauge shotgun at close range, it's gonna leave a lot of fucking feathers behind.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of fucking feathers.
MARCUS PARKS
And there was no evidence of owls, despite the fact that there was lots of evidence of hundreds of bullets being fired that night. And by the next year the entire family had moved away because they've gotten nothing but bad attention. But both Hopkinsville and nearby Kelly, Kentucky have both dabbled in their own cryptid days. Kelly, Kentucky had the Little Green Men Days Festival which is a bit of a kick in the teeth to the memory of the victims, if you ask me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
ED LARSON
It's like they're not listening!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also like the idea of-
MARCUS PARKS
They obviously didn't do the reading.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did not. But I also like a goblin festival, I wanna go. We never get go, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS
No, we don't ever get to go. We have to fucking work all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I wanna go so bad. I want to do that one Mothman Festival real bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We gotta turn it into work and then we can go.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you show up at a goblin festival, it could be a blowjob festival.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa. Cock goblin festival.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the thing is the Little Green Men Festival started in 2011, abruptly ended in 2017.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I bet you there were some kind of financial issues going on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I would imagine so. Hopkinsville however is hosting an Alien Invasion Day this coming August 21st.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We should all be careful about wishing for that though.
MARCUS PARKS
It's got food trucks, face painting, a dunk tank, a costume contest-
ED LARSON
Alien shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, what aliens like.
MARCUS PARKS
And an ominous sounding special surprise that will only be revealed at a later date.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Southern accent) Our sheriff, our very own Sheriff Tomlinton is an alien.
ED LARSON
That means I got a couple of asks out and no one said yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, (Southern accent) big surprise coming!
MARCUS PARKS
(Southern accent) Big surprise, big surprise going.
ED LARSON
Special guest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that you know what we just did? Put ourselves in the running to be that special surprise.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh hell yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm telling you right now Hopkinsville, if you can get us arranged to get down there in time. Oh no, we're gonna be in Australia.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh my god. We're looking at the poster right now, the flyer for it. They've got a batter walk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa. That's so funny, Marcus. It's aliens and batter. It's crusties and aliens. This is the weirdest combo of things I have ever seen. What the fuck? What combines pancakes and aliens other than Hopkinsville? I gotta go. I love pancakes. I love waffles. I barely eat them because of the carbs. But I'm looking at this, and if I was watching an alien dunk tank going on with the girl with no bra on and I'm eating a pancake. That's the funnest time I'm gonna have.
MARCUS PARKS
It's August 21st, 2024 from 4 pm to 10 pm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are you gonna have a wet alien contest? Because you should.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly you guys should do that.
ED LARSON
How wet can you get this alien?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It seems to be pretty wet.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's Aliens Attack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now I wonder why did they attack?
ED LARSON
They didn't attack.
MARCUS PARKS
Why did they approach?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What was it do you think? Obviously in the most like... How do you put this? This is a hazy world of the more adventurous side of ufology. Why are they approaching the cabin?
ED LARSON
I don't think it happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck you. Fuck you! How dare you?
MARCUS PARKS
Ostensibly-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Fuck if I know. I mean they may have just been drawn to the nearest life. Who fucking knows? Who knows with shit like this?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, what if fucking all they needed was a pack of Newports?
ED LARSON
It's very Space Invaders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you remember that one? Space Invaders was the one with the little Martians, right?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, what was that called? Little Martian?
MARCUS PARKS
No, Space Invaders was the one with the stoned ones.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The one with the little Martian guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they weren't the stoned ones. The cool ones.
ED LARSON
Cool ones, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh they were cool.
ED LARSON
Someone was Paul.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh Paul was bad.
ED LARSON
I didn't watch Paul.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I didn't watch Paul.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was stupid.
ED LARSON
I imagine Space Invaders isn't great now either.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I imagine it might not hold up.
MARCUS PARKS
Critters!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, I love this movie, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Critters however-
ED LARSON
Love Critters.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh Critters.
ED LARSON
One of the kids I grew up with, his uncle wrote it.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's awesome.
ED LARSON
He had a giant Critters poster in his house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hell yeah.
ED LARSON
I was like why the fuck you got this Critters poster? My uncle wrote it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Critters 2 was like my first favorite horror movie. Like I watched it over and over and over again. Critters Ball, oh man.
ED LARSON
I mean the Critters ball is so fucking awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No shit? The guy, the amazing character actor Royal Dano was one of the aliens in Space Invaders.
ED LARSON
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
So we just like filling time or what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I'm just kind of looking at just now and then you brought all this up. I'm just basking in it.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Space Invaders, they're hip, they're hilarious, Earth will never be the same. Patreon. com/lastpodcastontheleft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I loved Space Invaders. Patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft. There's no Space Invaders content on our Patreon.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But only here, you can only find it here on the show proper for some reason. Also go to our social media, TikTok @lpontheleft, Instagram, all the fucking horseshit. Twitch.tv/lpntv. Just so you know, some scheduling little things. So we're gonna have next week, we're gonna have our first one of these special episodes with you, Eddie.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Before we go to the land down under. And then we're going to be doing some kind of interesting episodes while we're in Australia. We are doing proper episodes but I'm super excited because we're gonna get a little spooky. We're gonna get spooky which we've never done in Australia.
MARCUS PARKS
No, we actually haven't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We've only ever done true crime.
MARCUS PARKS
Well yeah we did with Letta Me Out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We did Letta Me Out. We did Letta Me Out.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But now we're gonna do another big case and we hope we get to meet some of the people involved.
MARCUS PARKS
It's be nice.
ED LARSON
That's very cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll see. But hey, it's been fun, hasn't it?
MARCUS PARKS
Hasn't it? It has been.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just so glad my penis is intact.
ED LARSON
Still.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
For another couple of hours.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
To go home and make too much batter and fuck your wrist up again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What are you gonna do? When in Hopkinsville.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh hey, and also the fucking Can part four is out.
ED LARSON
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
The Can series is out in its entirety. So if you've been waiting until the entire series is out to listen, go listen now. It's a fucking amazing series. We're so fucking proud of the work we did with this. So go check it out and go hear the story of one of the most incredible bands of the 20th century.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love Can. I'm excited to listen to the series now that it's... I'm one of those. I wait til it's all out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You're gonna love it. You're gonna love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I'm excited.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, well hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
ED LARSON
Hail fucking Gerry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. Gerry's all right, dude.
ED LARSON
He's a fucking flappy cunt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. Where the fuck is that guy at, man? I wanna fucking smoke weed with him, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Fuck you, you motherfucking shit fuck. Nobody fucking hails me. I don't fucking hail nothing and nothing hails me, you fucking cock nut testicle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Polish accent) Gerry, you fucking the best, dude. I love you, Gerry. You're my fucking boy, man!