Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 325: Men in Black Part III - Time Crime

Episode Date: July 14, 2018

​Join us for the conclusion of our Men In Black series as we cover the myriad of Men In Black encounters during the Mothman saga of 1967 plus the possibilities that the MIB are actually the good guys or possibly just scary nerds. The Other Side of the Door Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Fantastic Dim Bar Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Li

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. Why fuck your glass? That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? So have you been receiving strange phone calls? No, a little bit.

In what way would you define a strange phone call? Strange phone call meaning a number that I do not recognize with a stranger on the other end. Now, what do they say? Like, hello, is Marcus there? Like, is it like the Men in Black thing where they go like... Is Gwen Stevenson there? No, there's a queer Riverton here.

Gwen Stevenson? I've been experiencing quite a bit of high strangeness. Really? Since talking about it in the last episode, or maybe it was the first episode of the Men in Black series about my... I'm gonna say dream of a man in flannel in a red and black checkered flannel shirt

standing at the foot of my bed with a kind of like mushroom cut with eyes his face reminded me of Michael Ironside, the cover of Scanners. Yeah. That's like a thing. A flannel shirted guy? Yeah, that's the thing that people see. I was listening to a podcast called Strange Familiars

that also had collated a bunch of people talking about it and also the same thing. It's in Mothman prophecies as well. John Keel drops it off. So I'm like, I'm seeing him. Is it possible that you're just seeing a working-class hero? Because that's what flannel men wear. Anyway, this is the last podcast on the left, everyone.

I am Ben Kissel. There's Marcus Parks. In studio, he traveled all the way from beautiful Last Angeles to be here. I did it. You did it? I did it. Oh, what a miracle it is to be big.

I will, but honestly, I'm pretty spooked. Yeah, dude. You should be, man. I mean, I'm a union man. I'm not afraid to get mud on my hands and end dirt in my creases. You're the sag union on the actor side. So I don't know if that's really... It's a union.

Feel these hands. Feel how coarse these hands are from reading scripts. This is the softest thing I've ever felt. Wow. That's like Mr. Burns' body from The Simpsons. All right, so we're on to our third... What do you call it? A third episode of the Men in Black?

I don't know why there weren't episodes I could not think of. We're on episode three of the Men in Black series. A lot of stuff to get to. Early onset dementia. Yeah, yeah, we'll be fine. So the last two episodes, we have covered sort of like the origins of the idea of the Men in Black. And we covered the two people that were kind of mostly responsible

for the idea of the Men in Black came from Albert Bender. We talked about... We talked with Gray Barker. Gray Barker. With Gray Barker. And so this is kind of the original 1950s leanings, but we never really... We try to sprinkle a little bit of what they're like in action.

Yeah. And the man who really fucking discovered what they're like on the ground and what their day-to-day is like. Right. It was written in a book called The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel, which is not just about mothman. It's also about mosquito people and there's a series of different jokes they could make.

It is very, um, triggering. I know. I know. I actually have to tread very lightly here because I know you're very serious about this subject. And now I'm in the room. Right. Right.

Just like you... And you got grip in hands. So remember, our Men in Black Tulpas, creations of the things that Albert Bender could put into the psyche of the American people. And then we are proliferating them with our own imaginations. Right. Or are they the fingers of the Black Lodge inching down the panties of the American people so they get to the little clit?

Oh my goodness. All right. Slime it with your fucking little weird nuckle of stumps. Oh, okay. Leave Lady Liberty alone. All right. You know what, Tulpa, though, what I realized? Freddie Krueger.

Ah. He's a Tulpa. He only exists if everyone remembers him. A sorda. Sorda. They think I'm not a Tulpa. What the? Okay.

I don't even... We'll do this off here, then. He's seen in real life. So can Freddie remember Freddie Part 2 when he's at the beach or the pool party? No. He gets brought in. Yes.

And that's a dream. It's always a dream. No. Not the pool party when he actually got brought in. We are way off track here. But when he was in there... She has time to come through. No.

No, Freddie really did. This is Jason. That is when he gets actually brought into this. No. The pool party, he was pulled in. He was at the party. The hot dogs were there. Actually, I would say that he is correct with New Nightmare.

And New Nightmare is absolutely a Tulpa. It's happened many times. Okay. There we go. I'll take it, Marcus. No. You're actually correct. No.

Freddie Krueger is absolutely a Tulpa New Nightmare. Nailed it. All right. So what we're going to talk about today, where we're going to begin, we're going to begin with The Mothman. And we're going to go from there. Now, The Mothman is something that we have talked about many times throughout the last seven years, but we've never done like a full

Mothman deep dive. Cool. So now we're going to get... This is going to be about a five-foot dive. All right. Don't dive. Jump and feet first. This is just the tip.

Okay. Into Mothman. All right. Now, The Mothman was a gigantic winged creature with glowing red eyes that allegedly terrorized the small West Virginia town of Point Pleasant from late 1966 until the end of 1967, spreading fear and, in some cases, severe conjunctivitis. That Mothman give you the dookie feet.

Well, what is conjunctivitis? Pink eye. It's pink eye. It's pink eye. Yeah. Well, what was that town doing in the bedroom? Yeah. That's what I want to know.

They were rationing their toilet paper for our boys in Vietnam. Oh, okay. Well, thank you for watching. Everyone served. Everyone served. Honestly, to have been in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1967, so much weird shit was happening all at once. She got John Keele running around with a magnifying glass and a Sherlock Holmes hat

and just filled with just like shaking women. And John Keele was always holding them and comforting them, being like, I'm used to going around in TNT areas at night because I face fear with both eyes and both feet. My belt firmly off my pants. Now, so John Keele, he was a professional paranormal researcher? Yes. Okay.

Yeah. Among the, I would say among the premier paranormal researchers of the time, he was the guy that wrote the fickle finger of fate. Oh, I like him. Still one of my favorite quotes of his is that he's like, I was speaking to a woman that was real slender. So slender, in fact, there's no way she'd win a Raquel Welch lookalike contest. Oh my goodness.

The fickle finger of fate also sounds like a way you can get conjunctivitis. Be very careful out there, folks. Now, we don't have time to go through all the sightings of the Mothman one by one, but just know that the entire gear-long saga culminated with a collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15th. Also understand, it is a lot fucking weirder than you think it is because the Mothman prophecies the movie with Richard Gere, the human hamster wheel.

He is not a person that, I know, it'll never be old. But that's not how it goes. The Mothman is something that is, it appears in many different fashions. There's a lot of high strangeness that was happening during the time period as well. And it was just like a dude, the way they would say it, with big protruding, big floppy red eyes sticking out of it. And it would stare at you, and then the wings would unfold from behind it, and then it would just rise to the sky.

And then it could also follow you, it's fucking weird shit. Yeah, it would follow cars on high-speed chases. And a lot of the activity happened around an old TNT factory, an old abandoned TNT factory like the kids would go. You know, they'd drink and have parties and all that type of shit. But for some reason, a lot of it was centered around this specific area. No kidding. A lot of dome talk.

Yeah. The Nobel Peace Prize was actually created by someone who made his living off of creating TNT. And then he felt really bad, and now he gives people little necklaces. It made up for it. It does. It totally makes up for it. Well, like I said, the whole thing culminated in the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15th. 46 people died in that collapse.

And the sightings of the Mothman have been sporadic ever since. But the Mothman was not the only strange creature to haunt Point Pleasant in 1967. The old Toby Richards. Oh, yeah. The gold pocket sniffer. Oh, no. Keep those pockets clean. So for that entire year, numerous people in and around Point Pleasant had encounters with the men in black.

Although I will say it's very difficult to ascertain exactly what the men in black's purpose was. I think that we covered it a little bit in the last episode. It is paranoia in action. It is literally the representative of high strangeness. They show up because what else was happening at Point Pleasant at the time period in West Virginia? Buckets of UFO sightings. Not just Mothman sightings, but gigantic birds, poltergeist activity. The whole thing.

That town was going nuts for an entire year. Yeah, it sounds horrifying. So let's get into some of those UFO sightings because that's what we're mostly going to focus on today. It's not the Mothman, but everything that was happening around the Mothman that doesn't fit on a t-shirt. It sounds sort of like the town that the Monster Squad took place in at this point. It seems like the portal of hell has opened up or something. It's like that. And it was maybe a little bit colored by John Keel.

But I will say that he was in the center of all of this craziness. And he kind of just accidentally birthed the modern idea of the men in black with his book and with discovering these fucking weird little dudes showing it. Okay. So in the same month that the Mothman showed up, November 1966, what Jim Keith, Jim Keith being the guy that wrote casebook for the men in black, what Jim Keith called a quote unquote professional woman. That's very nice. She had shoes on. That's very good.

She had the first localized run in with a strange character in Gallipolis, Ohio, just a 12 minute drive away from Point Pleasant. Gallipicus. What a place to visit. Is it Gallipolis? It's either Gallipolis or Gallipolis. Gallipolis? Gallipolis. You know it's something else entirely.

We're going to yell that. It's going to be like gullibleese or like some dumb shit. You've got the nation's most shallow pool. Come wait in it. So the professional woman said one night she was almost blinded by a flash of light as she was walking out of her office building. And when her eyes refocused, she saw a large, noiseless, cylindrical object land in the parking lot. She said two men with pointed noses, pointed chins, high cheekbones and dark complexions walked out of the craft wearing coveralls. They approached her and asked her a few personal questions, then seemed to get stuck on one phrase.

They love the personal questions. Yeah. There's something about asking them like, where do you live? What is this city? Are you married? Like very strange. And then again, what we've talked about in the previous incarnations of the men in black and the other examples, you seem to kind of be opening up against your will. Wow.

This is a perfect commercial for the tactical flashlight. I think that really could have saved her in this situation. Because you know George Norris already spinning this. I'm certain that he has spoken with Jim Keith and he has spoken with any derivative of John Keel since that being like, I've ever thought that maybe the men in black would be truly scared by my seven foot tactical flesh. Gotta make that money somehow. Well over and over again, these guys asked the woman in a high-pitched sing-song voice quote, What is your time? What is your time?

Even worse, these episodes haven't been about the men in black. They've been about musical theater nerds. Oh, the real horror is out there and it's real. So when the professional woman had no answer, the two men got into their craft and flew away. But interestingly, the professional woman saw the same two men dressed in normal clothing, walking the streets of Gallipolis later on and both of them simply nodded to her and kept walking. We saw our answer on the internet. It is peanut butter and jelly time.

Great song, very catchy. And who doesn't love that kind of time of the day? But it's very strange because then it goes back to speaking to the idea that Jacques Vallée says that UFOs and these kind of experiences are supposed to help us consider our own place within the universe, which essentially means, like, they're asking about time to make us think about time. What is time? What does it matter from late? What does it matter if I take off my pants right now? Yeah, I ate a bunch of edibles before walking out the door today.

Who gets a fuck about Mark? I hate my stupid boss. I think you might be on that Martin Lawrence weed if that's happening. Deep cut to his life. So you're saying that UFOs are traveling back in time to tell us to relax? Yeah, bro. Yeah, dude. Fuckin' take a chill pill, man. And yes, maybe we'll scoop up some of your fucking eggs or put a dick-suckin' machine on you so that we can make our people stronger, Frankie. At least you got to be fucking, yeah, Frankie says relax.

Frankie says relax. Huh. All right. Well, I like that about them, though. Oh, yeah, that's fine. Well, after that last encounter with the cylindrical object, that January, a woman named Mary Hire, who was most responsible for local Mothman journalism, got a visitor to the Athens Messenger where her weekly column was published. She is a... she took to this role. As soon as she became, like, the funnel for all UFO information,

this, I don't... I honestly couldn't find a picture of what she looked like, but I do imagine, you know... Beautiful in every single way. I just imagine it's the teapot from Beauty and the Beast. Well, he doesn't love that. He doesn't love that. I imagine her getting up for work in the morning, bringing her driver's seat chair up, you know, her entire car is covered with old coffee cups and newspapers and just like, got to go to work, and she's already in the parking lot of the job

because she doesn't have a home, so she's always early. She's ready to go. If you never leave, you can't be late. Well, she had already had a column in the Athens Messenger before all this shit even started about, like, weird shit that went on in the area. It was called, I think, where the rivers meet or where the waters flow or something like that because Point Pleasant, and this is also an interesting paranormal thing, is that Point Pleasant sits on the fo... where two rivers, the Ohio River and another river meet,

and a lot of times, paranormal activity we know will occur around bodies of water and a lot of paranormal activities occur at these, you know, forks of rivers. Cool. Also at natural gas deposits, like our U.S. government. Man, full hot air. Well, Mary said the visitors she got at the Athens Messenger was only about four and a half feet tall, had black hair cut in a bowl style, and she wore shoes with thick soles along with thick black glasses.

Now, I wonder, could this have been, and this is just speculation, could this have been the dwarf from the Black Lodge? I don't know if he was working then. Isn't that a little bit tall for the dwarf? Wasn't the dwarf, like, two feet tall? I'm not talking about the literal guy who played the dwarf in Twin Peaks. I'm talking about, because remember we talked in the last episode, we talked about the Moon Child, and we talked about what Alistair Crowley said

was actually in the Black Lodge, and one of those was a dwarf who loved music, so it's possible that this dwarf could have been the dwarf from the Black Lodge doing a little bit of groundwork. Well, he's technically, he's more of like a phantom of the super-spectrum of the little person from the Black Lodge. Could be. Could be. It's like an ultra-fucking spiritual digital copy.

He also maybe reminds me of the looking-like-a-man woman from Mad TV. Could be. Maybe he's a failed child actor. They always grow real weird. Yes. Head first. Yeah. Well, Hire said the man opened by asking for directions to a nearby town,

but he soon became transfixed on a ballpoint pen laying on her desk, picking it up and looking at it like he'd never seen anything like it in his life. You seen these people? You seen these people at the fucking bank? What, we got all day? Huh? We got all fucking day? It does remind me of Henry's bit.

I think it was during Picton where... Oh, hey, look at this pen. Look at it. Look at it. It's tits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a funny bit. Well, Hire, she told him, it's just a ballpoint pen.

She said, just keep it. Yeah, just keep it because she was just trying to get him out of there so she could get back to work because he's a weird little backwards man. Sit near just like steering, click, click, click, and she's just like, all right. Now, weirdness does make me horny. My name is Mary. Hi, hello. But honestly, this is not the time.

Meet me at six o'clock at happy hour. Please get out of here. Sure. Well, he wanted it more than she needed it. Well, as soon as she offered up the pen, he let out, she said, it was like a high-pitched shrieking. Yes! Yes!

Yes, I love it, yes! And that man went on to be the president of TD Bank. He has so many pens. And then he's just scurried out the door, clutching the pen in his hand. I wish to be so happy over such a small item. Yes, he's truly a piece. Again, the aliens are here to say, Frankie, say, relax. All right, all right!

Well, soon after that, hires started getting the telltale men-in-black phone calls. You know, the ones where she'd answer the phone and there'd either be nothing but silence, or there'd be like electronic noise, or there'd be like these intermittent beeps. But nobody would, no actual person would be on the other end. John Keel actually brings up a good point about the beeps, which is then a thing he would go on to ask. Every single time he would meet somebody that had a UFO experience, either they had a sighting or an abduction, he'd say, you're getting calls with beeps and weird breathing on it.

And they would say like, well, a lot of times they do hear the beeps, but a lot of times people who remember abduction scenarios, it starts with a series of beeps. So what if the beeps over the phone are hypnotizing you, essentially like getting you, like it's like a pre-suggestion for when later on you are walking, or maybe it's a post-suggestion. I don't know all the fucking prefixes. It's a suggestion. It's a suggestion. And then you walk in and you hear the beeps again, snap into trance state, and the aliens

just come scoop you up, scrape your eggs, and toss you back on the street like other hillside stranglers. Now, this is a serious question. If John Keel leads with that, have you heard the beeps? Have you heard the static? Is it possible he's suggesting those things to the people and then they're like, oh yeah, yeah, I've heard the beeps. No.

Creating a world where the beeps exist. No. No. I'm gonna say it again. I'm gonna say it again. I'm gonna say it again. He also had a very in-depth breakdown of the difference between heavy breathing calls that you get from a men in black and the heavy breathing of the sex nut who supposedly masturbates while

he listenings to a female voice of the lie. Did he use the term sex nut? Sex nut? Sex nut. Really? Huh. What do you want to ask? Sex nut.

It's just me. Well, a couple months after Mary Hire got that visit from the little guy and then a couple months after she got sort of getting the phone calls, a UFO allegedly swept through her backyard with a search light. And pretty soon after that, Mary Hire got her first visit from the men in black. Cool. Now, one interesting thing about the men in black of Point Pleasant, West Virginia is that by all accounts, it was said that instead of having the pasty white complexion that

many people have described in the past, these men in black had darker skin and looked Asian. Really? Now, he's some kind of Asian. This is an interesting, another interesting fact about John Keel, is that what he'd like to do is he'd carry this card and he's like, when you met the men in black, tell me, when was the race of the creature? Was it this? And it was just pictures of different people of different races and he'd make a point

to it. And the general consensus was Laplander. What's a Laplander? I don't know. All right. Interesting. So we're getting some more diversity in our men in black. Very much.

And as soon as we have women in black, which they already do. We do. All right. I like this. Yeah. Well, Mary's first run in was with two near identical men who were black overcoats and black suits. She said they showed up at her offices and asked her what she would do if someone told

her to stop writing about the paranormal. The specific quote was, what would you do if somebody ordered you to stop writing about UFOs? Oh yeah. Interesting. And in a brassy response typical from Mary Hire, she said she'd tell them to go to hell. Kiss my grits. Wow.

Yeah. She's very, she says that a lot of people are like, and them men in black, they come near to try to tell me what me right about. And I say, you know what? You kiss it. You kiss it. Miss it. Oh, she was brassy as hell.

Oh my. And then she went to the Ohio brunch beat, talking about avocado toast and Bloody Mary's. And after she said that, the men in black left without incident. But later that day, Mary was visited by another odd stranger. She said this man spoke with an intense stutter and a strange indefinable accent and had freakishly long fingers. Okay. My name is Dick Brown.

He announced in a hesitant manner. I am a U-B-P-O researcher. Oh, Mary pushed aside the pile of papers on her desk and studied him. The day was ending and she was ready to go home and try to get some sleep at last. After a brief, almost incoherent struggle to discuss UFO sightings, Brown stammered, what would you do if someone ordered you to stamp right about UFOs? He does sound like Ren. He got you a real Ren and Stimpy moment there and I really liked it.

Yeah. I mean, it started with sin times, my arms spin back and then eventually went into like you idiot. Yes, he did. Indiscernible. I love it. So she's just wrapping up her day and this guy comes in and just starts creeping on her. Yeah.

She asked her the same questions that the twins from earlier that day had asked, but instead of giving the same answers, she thought like, well, this is weird. I want to needle this guy for some information. So she asked, are you working with those two guys from earlier that day? And Jack said no, but he was friends with Gray Barker. By this time, both Gray Barker and John Keele had descended upon Point Pleasant and had made Mary's acquaintance. So taking the Gray Barker leak, I don't know if they made love.

They did not. They did not. John Keele is very professional and he was always talking about how professional he was and kept a low profile. He didn't want to shake things up. He didn't want to draw attention to himself because he's a flashy city boy in this small country town. He had a trifold of all the races of the nation, of the world, really.

So taking the Gray Barker lead, Mary asked if Jack knew John Keele. Now this was apparently a sore spot for Jack. Really? This is what he said. And I used to think the world of Keele, then a few meetings ago, I bought a magazine. And he says he's seen UFOs himself. He's a liar. Wow.

He's in roast mode. He's going after John Keele. But there's something about it. It's like, I know I'm joking about it, obviously, but it's kind of like we like doing the bit about talking about Freddy Freaker, right? Like you see this thing that's like super fucking obviously fake and it's a weird thing. But if you were to see it in real life, like if the thing popped up in front of you, you'd lose your fucking mind.

No, you got to kick it and then you got to burn it and then you got to do a whole like see-hunts ritual. I mean. But the men in black, to me, like obviously I'm making a bit of a yuck about it. But there's something about the incredible high strangeness of this thing, just showing up in your office. Because there's enough of these witnesses. This is now where I'm at in the research of this.

There's enough of these witnesses that have seen this weird ass, I don't know what to say. Like just, I mean, I keep using the term high strangeness that have seen this type of bullshit that it's like, well, there's something to it in my mind. Strange forms all around. Well, one of the things that I think makes point pleasant, kind of unique to this sort of thing is that there was never really a panic. You know, like there wasn't, it wasn't like these like huge panics that you see a lot

of times when they talk about like mass hysteria, there's usually like a huge panic. There were a couple of times where like dudes loaded up their guns and the trucks and all drove out to the tea factory. Oh, you got to, I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to. Yeah, but from the most part, like the citizens are just like, what the fuck was that? Could that be contributed to their more chillaxed attitudes, being like, yo, relax.

And then maybe that's why there wasn't the panic. I would see him like, is that when the original sightings for the Mothman came out and all these UFO sightings and they would go to the police is that it was such a small town that the police, the most part, like, believed them. They were, they were believing these kids coming in and grown adults and professional people that are coming in and saying like, I'm seeing fucked up shit. Right. Like what's happening.

And so these cops were shit. We're like, let's go get them. Yeah. Get them. Because they're already like, cause they're like, that's action, man. I would have been in the back of a pickup truck immediately drinking the Bud Light because of what you did in the world. I get so much.

I never had a Bud Light lime in my life. That is not true. No, that is true. You are rewriting history. No, bud. Wait, Jackie. No, Jackie. Oh my God.

Oh, please. Change the past. Jackie Zabrowski, your sister. She said that she was drinking Bud Light lime. And she drinks whatever gets to her lips. But that's what you thought of. But that sounds like a lot of fun. It does.

Yeah. Now after the statement about Keel, Jack left Mary Hire's office to visit an actual witness to the Mothman, a young woman named Connie Carpenter. Connie had seen the creature as she was driving home from church the previous November. She was among the favorite. I'm trying to go to church. All right. I'll look at you.

Got to. Well, she was among the first witnesses and had one of the most harrowing experiences. And she actually, besides, I think that she talked to a couple of people about it. But then after that, she refused to talk about Mothman for like 30 years. Really? Yeah. Was it a negative experience for her? Was she like sort of laughed out of town?

Well, she got the aforementioned conjunctivitis pretty bad. Well, that's what they're saying is that the conjunctivitis comes with the light from its eyes. It seems to form some kind of sunburn. And I guess that's what it's called, KLEAGUE conjunctivitis, according to John Keel. And a part of it is that you can also get it from being on the beach too long. Yeah. Interesting.

It seems like kind of a weak super weapon for this Mothman creature. Yes. It's sort of on par with like buzz from the Toy Story, which I have to reference all the time. Well, I'm not sure if it's like a weapon. I think it's just like a side effect because like her eyes are like swollen up. They turned like her eyes swelled up. They turned red.

She got a real nasty itch. And the whole thing lasted about like two weeks. It isn't an instant thing. It's something that happens afterwards. I see. Yes. There was a story of another two couple that were visited by UFO. They were necking, completely nude in the back of their car up by the TNT factory.

And a UFO, a light shown into their car and it went all over their fucking penis and the top of her vagina. Really? Yeah. And what happened is that the next day, they couldn't go to the police because they were stepping out on their significant others, but they were completely sunburned from head to toe. Like violently, vividly sunburned.

Well, nothing more romantic than necking in the car in a parking lot of a TNT factory. Have you tried it though? No. No. Well, when Jack showed up at Connie Carpenter's house, all he wanted to know was what kind of relationship existed between Mary Hire and John Keel. He didn't want to know anything about the Mothman. Then Jack went over to the home of Mabel McDaniel, who had seen the Mothman soaring over Tiny's

Drive-In restaurant in January of 1967. Oh, I want to go to Tiny so bad. But it's interesting is that the Men in Black in the last episode, in the example that is from Point Pleasant, was also named Tiny. Really? Was also named Tiny. Really? Yeah.

No, it's a burger place. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And once again, Jack talked his way inside by saying he was a friend of Hire, Barker and Keel. But this time, Jack had brought along an oversized tape recorder. And it's weird. Jack Brown walked into, it was a party that what they were having with friends and family,

like it was like a barbecue, it was nice. Jack Brown shows up with this fucking bowl cut, and he's like, you need any sides? Do you want macaroni salad? Oh, I do. And they're like, oh, very good. And then it's just like a handful of just bark and something like, prepared it from goblins, and so he goes in, he brings up his fucking tape recorder and he's just like fucking with it.

Just like asking random questions that people are like, do you know John Keel? John Keel is a liar, which is like a very sweet southern little party. And it's just this fucking demon is in the middle of it. I mean, I got to give him credit nowadays. It's much easier to do something like that. He's got to carry around this thing and probably like a radio flyer or something. I mean, it seems like kind of a fun party favor. Oh, it's a great party favor.

But the problem was is that he's sticking the record or the stick in the microphone in people's faces, but he didn't know how to turn the recorder on. Oh. He's not doing anything. Wow. He's not actually to ask, he's not recording anything because they said that he sat it down and he just like fucked with it for a while and he couldn't figure out how to use it.

So he just went around and started asking people questions without ever turning it on. But this guy's just sitting in the middle of your living room all dressed up like he's from the Adams family with a big tape recorder and it's really fucking weird, man. These huge long skinny fingers. Yeah. Just remember, again, it's like an entity is playing make believe as an FBI agent. Right. Right.

Okay. Interesting. Yeah. And still he did not ask any questions about the Mothman or any questions about the UFOs because by this time, like the UFO sightings are just coming left and right in Point Pleasant. Only thing he wanted to know was what Mary Hire would do should someone ask her to stop reporting on the paranormal. So she's gotten this question multiple times now.

Yes. From many tiny weird men. Yeah. And each time it's just kissed my ass. And now the weird tiny men are asking strangers what they think Mary Hire would do. And they're like, I'll say, I'll give you the Mary Hire answer. Nope. No.

Leave her alone. And he kept repeating one sentence over and over again. And he'd repeat the sentence to every witness he visited. He said, They are not hostile. Who are? They are not hostile. The UFOs.

They are not hostile. Well, we don't know. He's just saying. We don't know what he's referring to. He's just saying they are not hostile, which is very similar to the Woodrow Darenberger story when he was met by a creature named Injured Cold that when he and he showed up when Injured Cold basically mentally told him to roll down his window so he could speak at him. And he was like, do not worry.

We are from a country far weaker than yours. And then I'm going to put a little humor in here with a really funny joke there. He rolled down her. She rolled down her window and then he said, you got any Grey Poupon? Remember those commercials? This isn't a joke as well. Honestly, it gets to a point, man, which is like, it's not a joke. And you know what?

You didn't have the Grey Poupon. You know what they're going to do? They're going to make some Grey Poupon. That was always a funny name for a condiment. Yeah. It is. Yeah. Titchy bump.

I don't remember that. Well, after Jack Brown showed up, Point Pleasant seemed to be overrun with UFO sightings coupled with encounters with strange men. One witness saw a UFO as he was driving home. Then when he was driving down the same stretch of road a week later, he saw a man standing in the exact spot where the sighting had occurred. Then the witness said the mystery man was very tan and was wearing an unidentified uniform. And in the mystery man's hand was a box with a large dial affixed and a wire was running

from the box to the other man's hand. What could it be? I don't know. A box full of TNT. The TNT factory is nearby. No, dude. It's stuff. It's like, if it's real, if it's not just a bunch of people afraid of road workers, it's

afraid of somebody that is like, you're basically looking at somebody that's looked at research equipment from, from either a mental picture or looked at somebody using like something you like a radiometer or something and he says like, that's what official men use. Anyway, it's a prop comedian or anything like that. Well, Jim Keith has a very interesting theory about all this type of stuff and why it was so strange and why none of it seemed to make sense and why there were so many of these guys around. Yeah.

Is that Jim Keith, one of his theories was that this was actually a test run for a secret government PsyOps program. Oh, yes. I mean, we'll get to that though, because there's more of that I would even cover. I do believe that it is the CIA propagating their own paranoia that they're creating by throwing in like ringers in there to make people paranoid all the time. Yeah. Just weird stuff that people like this.

I mean, I think this like big box with a big dial that like with a wire running out of it. It's a great example of just they're just trying to confuse people. And if you see something that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, then it's going to make you paranoid. You're going to think about nothing else. So they're kind of Truman showing this entire town with like macabre weird stuff. Somewhat.

Is this guy working like, is he like nine to five? I stand like, what do you do all day? I stand holding this box on the side of the highway until 430 p.m. You're a field man for the CIA. I don't think you ask a lot of questions. I think get the uniform. You put it on, you stand there until they tell you to stop and then the van comes and picks you up, takes you back to Richmond, Virginia.

Great place. Trippy stuff. Well, after that, Men in Black just started showing up around town. In August, a witness said he saw two Asian looking men dressed all in black grinning at him. And he said they had trouble walking away like they were confused or drunk. It's very strange because they keep saying Asian looking tight man. But they also say deeply, deeply tan, which is interesting.

And it's the strange shaped heads and bad haircuts. But it also just sounds like tourists. Could be. And so it's like, but I don't know how they got to Point Pleasant except for all the UFO talk. So that's the other thing too is that there's a lot of UFO talk about Point Pleasant. So I imagine if people are showing up to kind of see what the hubbub's all about. But the Men in Black stuff just increases as it goes.

Right. I assume the good people of Point Pleasant understand what human form looks like and what these mysterious creatures look like. These motherfuckers are sticking out. That's a part of it. And it's also kind of what we talked about in the first episode, where it seems like the Men in Black show up to specifically make it about them. Yeah.

Now, another woman who was a witness to both the Mothman and the Men in Black was Mrs. Marcella Bennett. She said she was forced off the road by a man driving a Redford Galaxy. And bizarrely, the man was wearing a bushy fright wig. There's something about this. Honestly, you're laughing? He creeps me out. No, it's horrible.

Think about it. It's the Freddy Fricker thing all over again. A dude in a huge red wig is trying to force you off the road in the middle of the night. Why is he doing it? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. Why is he doing it? What purpose does it serve besides increasing the paranoia? Yeah. Yeah. Strange stuff. And then, we're knocking on doors, calling themselves census takers, and asking way too

many questions about the children of the household. All the children shit, obsessed with the amount of their weights and their heights, and it's very, very strange. We're just being like, at some point, you're like, Mr. Sense and Span, you're trying to make like a life-size body mold of my child to have sex with. No, we aren't just interested in the taste of their feet. Oh my goodness, you can't do that. No, strangely enough, the crescendo, the Mothman story, begins not in point pleasant,

but 600 miles away in Mount Misery, Long Island. Oh man, oh man. What are we going to name our crappy town? Okay, I got an idea, okay? We call it shit, fuck Long Island. Oh, that's a little bit long for the license plate. Okay, I'll put your shit. You know what, let's go with Misery.

Yeah, all right. There. It does still involve Mr. John Keele. This guy is everywhere. He's everywhere. He puts himself, it's a little bit of a Gonzo story, Mothman prophecies, he definitely puts himself in the center of it, but in a way that's so charming. Yeah.

Okay. Now, in early 1967, a woman whom Keele refers to only as Jane was abducted along with her boyfriend from their car, and neither one of them remembered anything from their encounter, but a few months later, Jane started getting phone calls. On a May 17th, Jane answered the phone and a metallic voice on the other end said, listen carefully, I cannot hear you. The voice then instructed Jane to go to her public library and read a specific page in a specific book on Native American history.

Jane did so the next day, and when she arrived at the library, she found the building was empty, safe for her and the librarian. Jane said the librarian was dressed like a woman from the 40s, like a woman out of time, but to put that into perspective, that would be like saying you saw a woman dressed like it was 1998. That's all we see. That's all we see. That's all we see.

It's called Williamsburg. Right. But what I would say is that you know what's really strange, you see someone out of time and then doing that like thing from Ghostbusters where it's like, shhh. Oh. Dude, Ghostbusters has some legit scary moments. Yes. The librarian had dark skin, black eyes, black hair, and only spoke in broken English, and

the librarian just so happened to have the book that Jane was searching for sitting on her desk. Jane's instructions were to look at page 42, and when Jane did so, the print shrunk more and more until she couldn't read it anymore. Then the words grew until Jane could once again make out what they were saying, and this is what the page said. Good morning, friend. You have been selected for many reasons.

What is that you are advanced in auto-suggestion? Through this science, we will make contact. I have messages concerning Earth and its people. The time is set. Fear not. I am a friend. For reasons best known to ourselves, you must make your contacts known to one reliable person.

To break this code is to break contact. Proof shall be given. Notes must be kept of the suggestion state. Be in peace. Signed, a pal. Geez. Alright, so she's got to tell one person about this. She's obviously also, and then if it's not real, she's suffering a massive, psychotic

breakdown. Well, Jane left a little bewildered, but pretty soon she found she was being followed everywhere by the librarian. What? And eventually the librarian attempted a conversation, but Jane thought, something a little bit off about this woman. She said that the librarian seemed as if she was a body without a soul, and she laughed as if she was emotionally disturbed.

If you naturally laugh like Santa Claus, you should be put into a mental asylum. Yeah, it's like everyone who paid big bucks for Gallagher tickets and they don't want to admit to themselves he's not funny. I gotta say, $500 ticket, I will laugh at anything that he does. Man, but that makes all the sense in the world. So the perfect spies, shh, quiet, sneaky, watching what you read, watching what you read. I've never heard one speak.

No. They don't do it. They do speak. So if you had a question to that for a moment. When was the last time you attempted a conversation with the librarian? When was the last time you walked? The last time I had to go to a periodical, and which by the way, I had a periodical class in high school.

Thank you for that. So needed. When was the last time you walked into a library? When was the last time you walked into a library? I don't have to. I mean, I just collect books. I would say like 10 years ago, I used to go to the Manhattan Public Library a lot. The Dewey Decimal System was the dumbest thing that's ever happened in the history

of books. Library sciences. It makes all the sense in the world. Creepy people. Well, when the librarian actually did speak to Jane, she just asked weird questions. One of these questions was, is there any AU here? AU is the symbol for gold on the periodic table. But Jane couldn't figure out what this librarian would have for gold, especially if she's

asking about it in scientific terms. And on another occasion, the librarian popped out from an alleyway, scaring the hell out of Jane, and said, quote, Peter is coming. Why are you interested in our mount? Peter is coming very soon. Jeez. And as the librarian said this, a black Cadillac pulled up behind Jane, and it was driven by, again, an Asian looking man with olive skin, sunglasses, and a gray suit.

And out of the back came another guy, again, grinning. And the driver introduced himself. He extended his hand to Jane and told her his name was Apple, but spelled A-P-O-L. And just as is typical with the men in black, Apple's hands were as cold as ice. Apple then handed Jane a disc wrapped in an old parchment and told her, wear this always, though they will know who you are. That's crazy. Now, at this point, Jane had no idea why she'd been chosen for any of this.

And remember, all this was happening in New Jersey. And so, Jane reached out to John Keele and mailed him the disc. Oh, big fucking mistake. You don't go just nailing the way, nailing the disc. I guess not. Yeah, it didn't work for BTK. That's for sure. Apple, Gwyneth Paltrow's son.

That's right. Gwyneth Paltrow's son. Oh, this is the precursor to the goop. And so, John received the package, inspected it, and then mailed it back. But when the package returned to Jane, she found that the disc was bent, had turned black, and smelled like rotten eggs. John Keele put it up his ass. Did he just like, how does this work?

And he just sat on it for 30 minutes? Mail tampering. Well, yeah, the men in black are actually known for mail tampering. Well, that is a part of what we'll get into even deeper a little bit later on the episode. Here's a sort of trickster version of this, where they found people dressed as men in black going through people's mails, ripping up envelopes, and just like throwing them in the street and kicking packages and shit, like a bunch of little fucking goblets. If I saw that I'd say, that's a federal crime, sir.

That's a federal crime right there, sir. So after that, Keele figured he needed to glean a little more information about all this business with Apple. So he went with the old tried and true UFO abductee method of hypnotism. Ooh. And the session started with Keele talking to Jane, but pretty soon, Apple took over. And reportedly, all Apple wanted to talk about at first was gossip about Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.

Ooh. You think they're fucking... Oh, it's weird because it was a full five years after Marilyn Monroe had died. Well, I think they're fucking... I think you're right about that. And then the conversation turned serious, and specifically, it turned towards Point Pleasant West Virginia. Apple gave a dire warning to Keele that a disaster was set to happen on the Ohio River,

and many people would die as a result. So Apple was speaking through Jane. Yes. Okay. Now, John Keele, at that point, he'd been going in and out of Point Pleasant for about a year, and he knew that Point Pleasant sat at the confluence of the Canoah and Ohio Rivers. And that's why Keele wrote this in a letter to Mary Hire on November 3rd, 1967. I have reason to suspect there may soon be a disaster in the Point Pleasant area that

will not be related to the UFO mystery. A plant along the river may either blow up or burn down. Possibly the Navy installation of Point Pleasant will be the center of such a disaster. A lot of people may be hurt. Don't even hint to anybody. Anything about this. If I had to guess, I would say the TNT plant, most likely to blow up. TNT plant had been disused for about 20 years by that point.

Yeah, man. It was just domes. And where you go get horny. I guess so. How many kids came out of Point Pleasant named TNT? I don't know. Like five or six. And they were immediately murdered in the Army.

Oh. Well, thank them for their service. The date John Keele gave for the disaster was December 15th, 1967. And on that day, in Point Pleasant, the Silver Bridge, which went over the Ohio River, collapsed and 46 people were killed. So John Keele just sat there and was like, called it. I mean, essentially. That's crazy.

Yeah. Now it's said that the bridge collapsed because of a fatal flaw in the construction. But two days before the disaster, a couple of guys were seen climbing on the side of the bridge. I do want to say that I believe that the real version of the Mothbend Prophecies movie should be made with John Keele, like fucking bussing crimes and screwing knives in the middle of fucking like this little small town. He's a UFO reporter because this stuff is just some of the most compelling, the funnest

stuff in High Strangest and UFO lore. We didn't even get to touch Woodrow, Devin, Darenberger. We didn't even get to touch him, which is a fantastic story. We'll learn about the people of Lanellus. One day we'll do a whole episode of it and end Indrid Gold. Who plays John Keele, you think, in a film? Who do you think? Me, man.

Does he look a lot like you? Yeah. He's just wait till I shave my head, buddy. Oh, yeah. You know what, him and Jay Allen Heineck, you know what I love? Sport in the Van Dyke. Oh, yeah. Oh.

Now, for this entire series, we've seen the men in black as villains, or at the very least, annoying weirdos. These guys are literally and figuratively the black hats of the UFO universe, intimidating people, sometimes killing them, but always weirding everyone out. Sounds like every libertarian at a dinner party, which is always, oh no. But paranormal researcher and author Joshua P. Warren has a theory that the men in black are actually the good guys. It is his contention that the men in black are, in fact, time cops.

Man, we need time cops. This is usually my favorite. Yeah, buddy. No kidding. We need some kind of keyboard. Like, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. And then it's a bunch of like, is Jean-Claude Van Damme dressed up like the Bob-a-Dook,

traveling through time, kicking people, oh no, Sylvester plays Jean-Keele in that version of the time cop story. Now, Warren's theory is that the men in black are actually crime-fighting crononauts whose specialty is time crime, meaning the reason why they show up around UFO sightings is because the people in the UFOs are also crononauts who are here to futz around with time for their own personal gain. That's a time crime right there. That is a time crime.

And I will warn you, Kissel, that you will get a $175 ticket in time bucks if you do not refer to aliens as crononauts. Right. I can't even pay that. I don't know what that is in human dollars. It's five years of your time. Oh! Wow.

Well, Warren thinks that it's possible that all the weird dudes showing up around Point Pleasant were actually crononauts who spent a full year battling one threat or another, threats such as the Mothman who may be an evolved being from millions of years in the future. Who's fucking not supposed to be in our timeline? That's time crime. He comes back here to like show his face, but we're not supposed to see him yet because Mothman is technically a very good professional basketball player from the year 3000.

No kidding. Oh, more like the year three million. Whoa! Yeah, I don't like the wings. You'll have to raise the hoop a little bit, seems like it's cheating. Time crime. Oh, watch out. Mothman's got nards.

That's where it comes from. Monster Squad. Well, in fact, Warren believes that the reason why men in black show up around certain cryptid activities is because those cryptids are actually hyper-evolved creatures from Earth's future. For example, when the Chupacabra first showed up in Puerto Rico, he almost immediately slaughtered a local farmer's prized pig. Oh, no! That's amazing.

I love it. And you know, if Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jean-Claude Van Damme, if he did get the pink eye, he'd be like, oh my God, you must have met the Mothman. He'd be like, no, that was the fickle finger of death. No, yes, that was actually a man night. But you know what he would do? He'd have that conjunctivitis, and then he'd wrap a bandana around his own eyes and start fighting.

Does he have to see? Pretty soon after that pig got slaughtered, the men in black showed up. Now, could it be that slaughtering that prized pig had some sort of ripple effect on time that something in that pig's future could have set off a chain of events that could affect someone millions of years in the future was the pig, a time fulcrum? It was a time pig. It was a time pig, and it cuts to the year 3 million, Donald Trump's heads in a big floating glass jar like in Futureama with his big floating robot dick, and that pig was supposed to be

his wife. Oh, man! Time pig! Time pig! I love time cops, by the way. I love the whole theory. Cuts to, also, them back, you know, who's part of the whole crew, Rasputin, he gets pulled in time print, and that's where I make this look good, comes from, put him to the lore

of men in black, where he's hanging out with them, and you're like, this guy's hilarious. He's really great. He's got a huge cock, and then Jean-Claude Van Damme's like, I do not need a cock to fight. And he takes his own cock, and he puts it up his own ass, and he's like fighting a blind nerve dick. Oh, he could do it. Jean-Claude can do a lot.

Oh, yeah. And we can go even further than this pig-time pig-time repel. Think of it in the context of the Mandela effect. The Mandela effect, for those of you who don't know, is a theory that claims our reality is constantly shifting in both major and minor ways. And yet, some people, some of us, our memories, don't shift with it. It is so named because millions of people, including myself, distinctly remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison back in the 90s, complete with a huge funeral.

I absolutely remember this. It was a celebration because apartheid was over. No. Huge funeral. Okay. But Nelson Mandela actually died a free man in 2013. You just, so you mean to tell me, it's the men in black, they showed up at Nelson Mandela's thing while he was sick, and they're like, you need robertus and he's just like, robertus

and does sound good, my fellow country man. You're from Asia. Wow. Yeah, the example most people know about the Mandela effect is the whole Berenstein, Berenstain bear thing. Some people remember as Berenstain as I do, but it's always been Berenstain, which is ridiculous. A lot of folks say the Sinbad was in a Genie movie, which he was not in.

I will say the Berenstain, because you know what it reminds me of, it just makes me think of those Charmin bears with their shit covered toilet paper. Yes, they always had a lesson in those books. Now Warren's example is a photograph of the mythological creature known as the Thunderbird that was supposedly published in a men's adventure magazine back in the 60s. And although numerous researchers clearly remember seeing the photograph, no trace of it has ever been found. Warren's theory is that there are people constantly traveling back in time for their

own advantage. Sure. I would. Yeah. You feel like a vacation? No, it's time crime. Yeah, it's time crime. Technically, it's time crime to do it frivolously.

Okay. That's what I would say. If I was a future time crime administrator, I would say frivolous time travel is probably like dumb unless you go to sanction areas where you can go, where there's no interaction with the other people, where you have to go and mark them off. This is very deep into time legislation, which I will present more and more as the episodes go on. Yes, I'd like to hear your amendments on that.

Well, sometimes the time criminals are stopped by the men in black. And sometimes they aren't. And when they aren't, the nature of our reality changes. And for some reason, some of us remember the reality the way it was before the alteration. And the reason why the men in black dress the way they do, and this is a core in the Warren, is because they could reasonably pass themselves off as regular people at almost any point in the 20th century. Because there's something more classic than the simple black suit.

Simple black suit, black, white shirt, that's kind of what you go for if you're like going to a presentation or kind of stuff. It's very simple, very classy, and they also would drive 1960s cars to look like they're completely new. Yeah. Oh, man, I can already just, I feel like I do want to start grabbing a bunch of people by their coats and just screaming like, time crime, like, where are you from? Time crime!

Are you committed to time crime? That's interesting. Yeah. You commit a time crime against yourself every time you black out. Really? Because you're illegally time traveling to your own rules. Because that's in your legislation? Yes.

Yeah. I mean, and you know, someone in a black suit and a fedora and a tie, they might look a little more out of place in like 1995 and say 1955, but they still aren't completely out of the ordinary. Because think of it this way, if these time cops are policing the whole of time, then logic follows that their wardrobe department has to limit themselves to centuries rather than decades. Yeah.

And they had to get out of the coveralls time period. Because we see that with the aliens too, with a lot of coveralls or suits. And now the grays stick to simply nude. Yeah. Right. Which I think is really important. But on the other hand, all of this could just be blamed on nerds. Yeah, man.

On nerds. Yeah. No. Nerds. On nerds. Nerds. Well, naturally, I think that that is to, yes, that's understood. What do you mean?

Just because they're dressing with like pocket protectors and they look a little out of place because that's what's happening. No, no, no. Weaponized, organized nerds. Weaponized nerds. Yes. So way back in 1956, Thomas Townsend-Brown founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a.k.a.

NICAP. Okay. NICAP was one of the more serious organizations with people like former CIA director Roscoe Hillencoder on their board of directors. Yes. Roscoe Hillencoder does sound like a very serious man. Oh, does he? Oh, yes.

Yeah. He has sock garkers. Like, I can guarantee that, like, or my grandfather or something, grandfather was underpants one time and it was like a full suit. Oh, yeah. But that was true. NICAP actually got some real heavies in the very beginning. Yeah.

People that went and joined and that were a part of the established spook nation of this country, the people from the OSS that turned into CIA, they were there. They were a part of creating NICAP. Sure. They took themselves very seriously. I believe that this is after they retire from the CIA. This is like their retirement, I guess. I actually think Roscoe Hillencoder was the first director of the CIA.

Oh, yeah. I mean, they had some heavy, there was some Navy guys in there, like military guys. Because we took this fucking seriously. Yeah. This was until, like, until they finally disbanded Project Blue Book, like, we were, they were actively trying to find out whether or not this is a threat and then also kind of surreptitiously, the CIA kind of makes their own UFO group that can also help them investigate other UFO groups for commie behavior.

Oh, I'm sure we're finding out some, a lot of stuff right now that we'll know about in about 50 years. Oh, yeah. And they tied up, I mean, the government, the CIA, they tied up the whole UFO thing and knots, not to necessarily discredit these guys, but to satiate these guys, where they did like Project Blue Book and they, you know, said, they shut up, they just shut them up. And then a lot of these guys, like, they looked at us like, oh, okay, like this is, that's totally above board, all right, we can quit doing this now.

But other guys like Alan Heineck looked at him like, no, the guys that actually worked on it were like, no, this is fucked up. They're not flipped. Yeah. It got totally flipped. Like, so it, it worked both ways. Now as Nick Redfern points out, the field of UFO research is by far the most jealous of all branches of paranormal studies.

He are just hungry for results. I don't know why they hate each other so much. They should just get together, maybe they can figure something out. They want the scoop. Yeah. But now when an organization discovers a story, they tend to want it completely to themselves. Because if it is the big, if it's the egg cracker, like if it's the one that blows the whole thing wide open, they want to be the ones to do it.

I mean, it's just all response or all credibility or all, what do you call that? All gratitude is just going to go to like a super wealthy person who's just to finance them. But part of it is that they, that never happened in the UFO community. It was always a struggle. They were always fighting over gas money. And they are also sort of taking the model from the people that, I mean, like the CIA and the FBI.

And they are all also hungry for their jurisdiction. And like, this is ours. This is our story. I think they should work together. Yeah. Because some people in the paranormal community believe that NiCat may have been taken cues from their CIA influenced board of directors. Because you've got a guy, you know, the first director of the CIA, a guy that was in charge

of G-Men, all in all sorts of like, not necessarily black ops stuff, but intimidation stuff. And you've got a guy up top telling them, this is how you go and talk to people. They think that the men in black, the people that, you know, criticize NiCat, they think the men in black were actually just pasty, socially awkward nerds sent by NiCat to intimidate UFO witnesses. Not to keep it secret from the public, but to keep the information from rival UFO organizations. Yes. All right.

Could be. Literally are doing it to keep other people like telling, don't tell anybody, don't let anybody tell you, don't tell anybody else's story, essentially so that they can control the flow of information. And then because they're super nerds, they are in uniforms, like honestly, men in black for the most part just drive like black car drivers. They dress like black car drivers where it's like the simple black suit, which is why they're all ill-fitting because they went to men's warehouse and didn't go to a tailor.

Right, right. You got to. So they're pasty like Seamus from the WWE, very white, frighteningly so. Yes. And this makes all the sense in the world to me. They're naturally awkward. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Of course they're nerds, though. They know about tech, wouldn't they have been able to figure out how to turn that recording machine on? Not when you're surrounded by people. That's a problem. Oh, nervous. Oh, nervous nerds.

Yes. You're a nervous nerd. You're a completely out of character. You put a suit on that's making you sweat all the time, but your hands are still cold because you got blood issues. Got to, yeah, always. And you have to sit there fidgeting with a tape recorder or a bunch of like women are staring at you.

Perhaps. They're not doing anything. Okay. Yeah, it's the opinion of many paranormal researchers that NYCAP is probably responsible for a large portion of men in black encounters over the years. And a lot of it has to do with just the name. See, if you're just like a country bumpkin in 1960 and someone from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena shows up at your door looking like a G-man and flashing

an official looking ID telling you to shut the fuck up about your UFO sighting. It's going to freak you out. Oh, absolutely. I totally get that. I'll tell you what, ma'am, we've heard tell about you speaking about UFOs to the papers and that must stop this instant. Also, I am running low on Mountain Dew code, Grant. Do you have any?

And I must, I must abscond it for the government. It's a time crime, my friend. That person's obvious from 1999. Anachronism! Anachronism! Oh, no! Time crime. Code Red did not come on board until 1999 or whatever it was.

I'm too soft for time jail. Uh-oh. She's in there with fucking Marquis de Sade and Hitler's double. Yeah, man. And if that country bumpkin tells that story to a whole other set of nerds that show up later, they're probably going to assume that it's all a part of a conspiracy and the story is only going to spread from there, especially when you combine it with the hallucinatory experiences of Albert Bender and the over-the-top writing of Gray Barker and John Keel.

I can see you getting whipped up. Yeah. Get real whipped up. That's a part of what we're talking about here, too. It's like, I mean, obviously we can consider the fact that everything is fake. Yeah. Like, we can talk about how. Obviously we consider that.

That's just kind of what, like, what we're going to immediately go into, the idea of misdirection. Yeah. Which, lots of men in black sightings are just simple cases of misidentification combined with confirmation bias. One woman who was married to a paranormal researcher almost lost her mind with paranoia because she thought a man in black was standing outside her building because she had been doing UFO research.

Right. This is the story of me and Natalie, by the way, what will eventually happen to us, but our paranoia is bringing us together. Probably shouldn't have guns in the house. And it turns out the guy, the man in his black suit, right, he was just a lookout for a local criminal organization operating on the block. So he was a criminal. He was a criminal.

If you stumble upon a real crime while looking for fake crime, you're still stumbled upon a crime. Well, Redfern also tells a more recent story about a researcher named Micah Hanks, author of Magic Mystery and Molecule. Ooh, what's that all about? Magic Mystery and Molecule. Okay. Well, Hanks was investigating a haunting known as the Pink Lady of Asheville, South Carolina.

Oh, that's nice, honestly. I just imagined somebody who looks like they've been spanked all over. Oh, no. Now, since the Pink Lady was haunting a high-class establishment called the Grove Park Inn, Hanks decided to dress the part of a patron and did all of his work in a nice black suit. Oh, I see where this is going. Yes. And of course, since he was a paranormal researcher, he showed up with his EMF meter, spirit box

and his EVP recorder and all kinds of goofy shit. And he was just asking weird, out-of-context questions to anyone who'd talked to him. He's an imperinable investigator, and we should be able to, like me with my lanyard, you should be able to announce yourself as a paranormal investigator, and all these prying ends of the what's in the how's and the why's should immediately end. And you give me truthful answers, and if not, you should be punishable by being struck with a reed. So basically, if you have enough instruments of pseudoscience, you have to be treated with

respect. How is it pseudoscience if I have it in my hands? So pretty soon after Hanks's research was done, rumors of an authentic man in black started a circulator on Asheville. And when Hanks heard this, he was just flabbergasted that a man in black should show up at the site where he'd done his research. I gotta go find that man in black, and I gotta destroy him with my tactical flashlight. Oh!

It could do that. And it took Hanks quite a while to put the dots together on this one, that he was the man in black all along. At that point, don't you just have to look in the mirror and be like, I have lips. Are my lips really? Like, what do you... This thin? Yeah.

I have joints. And again, that's not to say that there haven't been very real, very scary encounters with men in black, whether they're of a paranormal nature or not. John Keel covers a lot of this in a couple of his speaking tours, and also, Red Fern also covers this a little bit, where there's a phenomenon in the center of men in black, which is kind of involved like, either they are either trickster gods or guys doing things akin to the movie Funny Games. And it's stuff like, a guy was, like, especially in the Vietnam era, a person will show up

saying that they're from the Air Force to a family, to a house, essentially, where their son is serving in Vietnam. And he will say, unfortunately, your son is dead. We don't know what happened to him. He died in a POW camp. But the dude, he'd show up with wrong medals on, on his uniform, wearing sneakers with a regular suit on. And they would have the son, he'd have all of the information about their son correct.

Right. But then he'd tell them they were dead, and then the kid would show back up, and they would be like crying and shit, being like, where did, how did, where did you come from? And it's, it's these weird mental games. And it's, that happens again and again. It is this, this very high strangeness stuff, people pulling in front of your house, taking pictures of the front of your house, kind of like in gang stalking scenario, a lot of gang stalking stuff, like, and there's one story in particular that really there's some

about it really frightened me and it was a woman named Pat Hyde. She saw UFO and it beamed her with light, like a lot of these instances they were talking about. And she got, it's hit with this light. And she said she felt peace and she felt at home. She'd have been working for the FBI as a typist, but then this dude kept casing her like she would be outside in this black Cadillac would pull in front of the car, slow down, dude would look out, take a picture of the front of her house and roll out.

And eventually she was standing outside and a guy in a black suit did the same thing, came up to her and he started just out of nowhere talking to her about UFOs and he said it was a small town. So maybe some of the word had gotten out about her UFO sighting. This guy kept going on me like people better watch what they fucking say though about UFOs because, you know, they shouldn't be talking about that stuff. They shouldn't be talking about it. Next thing you know, she's getting pulled over by a man with FBI, with credentials looking

like whatever kind of badge it is, held against her will. She gets put in the back of the van with handcuffs on with these two guys dressed in black suits asking all these questions about UFOs. They put her into a, they take her someplace where they keep her up. Like she's like literally in a, like a freezer sitting on a cot, not knowing where she is. They're like, you're in a mental asylum because you're fucking insane. You've been seeing UFOs you'd be talking about and you can't keep. They kept her for like six or seven days.

Wow. Parents called like, call the police looking for her. She gets dropped off back in front of her house and they're like, this is just a warning and never talk about UFOs ever again. And what it comes down to, it's that like, I don't think that that's the IA people. I don't think it's the FBI people. These are people that are kind of like doing it for them, maybe not on purpose. Maybe it is the CIA doing things on purpose just to cause paranoia and confusion, or maybe

it is just fucking actual crazy people showing up and abducting you in the name of the men in black. And then are we not just propagating the same spiritual monster again and again? She's got to do what Jeffrey Lebowski did in the big Lebowski when he realized who's being trailed by that private detective. Go up to the window, grab him by the neck and ask him why the heck he's there. But that's a problem. It's two grown ass men.

You can't do like... It's not a little chubby guy in a Volkswagen bug. They're strong, huh? Listening to jazz. Yeah. That's not part of the men in black lore that I find very interesting. Like this idea of trickster god or supernatural being, fairies, like, you know, they do exhibit the same behaviors.

A lot of fairies taking souvenirs, like coming from your house, like exchanging, doing other weird, injured cold is such a weird story when it comes to the taking stuff and bringing it back. Like a guy getting his shoes stolen from a man by a man in black who stole his shoes. Maybe he broke one of their bongs and he's getting the Marcus Parks, Texas treatment. Taking his shoes. But there's a very... The center of this to me is bone chilling and maybe a part of it, that is why it really

does affect a lot of paranoia in my own mind. And I know I've actually gotten a lot of feedback from listeners saying the same exact thing. But whatever men in black are, we are making them. And I imagine, I mean, there's not been as many occurrences as there were in the past. But the things that still, you still hear about this shit all the time, the serious men showing up around UFO sightings, constantly discouraging people from being open-minded. Oh yeah, man. Watch your back for the men in black.

Is that it? That's crazy. Awesome. Men in black, a three-parter, fascinating stuff. I want to get one of those little devices from the films and erase my memory because I want to talk to one. Yeah. I can't have all that.

It's called beers. Oh yeah. Yeah. Time crimes. Time crimes. You do time crimes and get yourself time crimes. Time crimes. I just couldn't love a, I couldn't love a topic more.

It was great. This is so much fun to talk about and so much fun to talk about like esoteric shit again. Yeah. And the... Absolutely. Guys, so we'll be back. First of all, thank you to Patreon. Yes.

Thank you all for giving to our Patreon. We appreciate you. We have a great interview. As a matter of fact, Henry and I got a chance to talk to Ben Westhoff. He was the author of Original Gangsters and it was great. He filled in a couple of blanks. Marcus, he really appreciated everything you did. We gave him an opportunity for corrections and very little as a matter of fact.

He was very impressed. Awesome. Very cool. He said the same thing about Frank Lucas though. Oh, nice. And we're like, we know... Yes, we do. Yes, we got it.

We got it. Yes. And he's working on a book on fentanyl. I'm going to interview him. I'm going to milk in this guy for all the information he has. We're very big fans of this work. So yes, thank you all for giving to the Patreon and check out all those interviews. I think we've had some really, really exciting stuff and we're going to talk to this fella

more about Men in Black here coming up in the near future. We'll be speaking with Nick Redfern because I want to ask him more questions about what he knows and how has it maybe affected his own personal life because I know it's like affecting mine because I'm seeing the flannel man, which I don't think is good. From what like further reading I've done from Nick Redfern about like other essays that he's written about the Men in Black, he's just having a fucking great time with it. Man, he's cool as shit, dummy. He's just like, man, this is so much fun.

This is one of my favorite subjects. I love this. Always talk about Men in Black. I'll always write about Men in Black. Yeah, dude. I want to thank everyone that we met in Portland as well. Everyone was so incredible. That city was stunningly gorgeous.

I love Portland. I really didn't know what to expect because the last year there was a snowstorm and this was like perfect weather. No, we had genuine friends in Portland too and it's so great. It's so nice to be there and see them. But I would say we're also going to be in San Diego. Yeah, we got the Comic-Con July 19th weekend. It's my birthday, July 21st, and everyone needs to buy me a cake.

You've never celebrated your birthday in public before. Brooke has forced me to say because now I don't know, whatever. You have to celebrate yourself. Yeah, right. But you know. What? Birthdays are. Birthdays are for the dying, tunerals are for the living, I've always said it.

Yes, it's true. But you are going to be 44 years old. We're really excited to be celebrating. Time grab. That's a time grab. That's a time grab. That is a time grab. We are going to be taking a short summer holiday and when we come back, we're going

to be doing a subject that people have been asking us to do for a long time and I'm very fucking excited. We have a bunch of shit in the pipeline that is going to be, we're going to be doing a lot more weird shit because I miss it and I'm not. This wasn't weird enough for you? No. This wasn't weird enough? I will make this my whole life.

I will eventually leave all of this. I will leave you. I will leave. I mean like Natalie will come with me only just because she's going to be legally bound to me and she's also interested in it. I'm going to. I'm going to be. You brought the courts into it.

Running a men and black investigation at some point, also possibly trying to do the Anarchy and rights at some point because I want to see it for my fucking self. Right, right. But I need to learn how to sit still because I will say the Headspace app I have every time it reminds me to meditate makes me want to shoot a bunch of people in a town square. Okay, no, we're all. I hate that fucking app so much as some snooty British man just talking at me. You're telling me to tell me to take down to meditate right the fuck now that app gave

me a panic attack. Yes. It's doing it. We're all ready for your Gary Busey meets Randy Quaid phase. It's going to be great. It's actually going to be rejuvenating for my career. Yeah, maybe. Follow us on Twitter, which is the burning chariot taking us towards the end times at

Henry loves you and Marcus Parks at Ben Kissel, who's for some reason back on. Well, I'm just dabbling and I wanted to spread the word of a couple of things. You know, very good. And then also follow us on Instagram. The highlight reel of every single thing that you see that is at Henry loves you and Marcus Parks have been kissled the number one and follow everything last podcast left at LP on the left. And I don't know who Ben Kissel is on there because I looked for the Ben Kissel and I

think it's an account that I made. It was just in 2012 when it started, actually, I think we did have this conversation long ago where you made the Instagram account and you're like, I can't remember my password at all. And you can't remember what email address you sign it up with and so you just made Ben Kissel one. Well, you know what? That's fine.

But I will say this to everything that we talked about in these last episodes could obviously be fake. We acknowledged it before it's like obviously can be flights of fancy people be there are things that are that people misconstrue they do that stuff. But just for a second, if you allow yourself to open up your brain to all to let it in, you were surprised what else slips in there. That's right. Don't do that while driving or while operating heavy equipment.

All right, everyone. Thank you all so much for listening. We love you. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. And if I see a fucking man in black, I'm going to beat him to death with a tennis racket. You're in Wall Street? Check all of them.

I don't know. You always check. Hail me. All right. See you soon.