Mysterious Universe - 35.02 - MU Podcast - Close Encounters of the Texas Kind

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Thank you for joining us! Support your favorite show at the link below and catch this episode’s Plus+ Extension and access to all things Mysterious Universe. Michel Whittington has compiled an ode to such unexplainables in a book called “Close Encounters of the Texas Kind”. Its pages are the inspiration and contain the stories brought forth for this episode. From the first reported flying saucer, before Kenneth Arnold, to death from above, to the most bizarre series of encounters with an unexplainable technological wonder that remains a mystery which continues to amaze and delight to this day. Then for our Plus+ Extension, we piece together the story of the Gulf Breeze Six, a crazy story about six military intelligence analysts who went AWOL because of messages received during ouija board sessions. Their mission? To stop the impending arrival of the Antichrist! Were these the collective delusions of young, impressionable soldiers? Or was it yet another example of low level entities sending their victims on a wild goose chase? Close Encounters of the Texas kind Article - Denton’s 1897 Aeroship Invasion Article - Close Encounters of the Lone Star Kind Article - The 1897 Texas Airship Invasion  LinksPlus+ ExtensionThe extension of the show is EXCLUSIVE to Plus+ Members. To join. click ⁠HERE⁠. Gulf Breeze Six Arrest and Aftermath Vance Davis Coast to Coast AM interview transcript Unbroken Promises: A True Story of Courage and Belief  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose Google Fi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees.

Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Universe Season 35 episode number two, we have an outstanding show for you find folks today all about the freaky woo-woo found in the Lone Star State. From the first reported flying saucer before Kenneth Arnold, mind you, to death from above, to the most bizarre encounters with the highest of strangeness, all without having to leave the comfort of, just I guess, wherever you are right now, I suppose. I'm your host, Brandon Thomas, and with me as always is Joe you think you can dance Hodgson.

Oh, it's great. I look forward to your names for me every time. Trust me. I love it. I do too. Mary is helpful in those as well. So thank you. And shout out. We actually have a team of folks. Yes, our group that we meet with has submitted some as well. And thank you for those. We are going to go through them all. So what is this that you're getting into now? You didn't give me much of a heads up on this, and I kind of like it that way when we don't tell each other what we're doing. Yes, Sam. What is it? So this is actually inspired by a book, and most of the stories come out of this close encounters of the Texas can. You all came on.

So this is by Mitchell Whittington, and it's a badass book. It's an autographed copy, actually, that I found, again, in a half-price bookstore. Shout-out. He's got a sexy picture of him on the back there. I highly recommend it just for the author photo, honestly. So it's 23 house publishing, and it's an amazing little book. It's just got 30 years or so stories in here about freaky woo-woo in the Lone Star State, which is, of course, my home. This is where I was born, sort of shot out of my mom. She decided to do it in Fort Worth, Texas. And there's a story that pertains to that. We've got quite a few freaky woo-woo out here. If you look into the Texas history, it's riddled. Especially you've got, you know, even zoned things, sort of cryptids are kind of hanging out in East Texas, and you've got, you got UFO is just kind of doing whatever the hell they want. And it's just a wild place with all sorts of anomalous stuff,

especially the airship flap of 1896, 1897. That whole thing involved specifically California and Texas. And we're going to go through some of it. Very nice. Yeah. Well, I have, well, for Plus, I'm doing a story submitted by a listener for something I'd never heard of before. And I gave you kind of a heads up, but it's called the Gulf Breeze Six.

It's from the early 90s, some soldiers that went AWOL for a really weird reason. So that'll be coming up in plus. I did want to mention at the top of the show, too, though. We haven't, I don't think we've mentioned it on the show, but we are on Instagram, we are on Twitter and we are on Facebook. So if you want to follow us there, we are posting, you know, show updates. And I recently, just a couple weeks ago, took over the social media end. So I'll be posting more, probably funny memes or, you know, mostly show updates.

but I will, as I'm settling into this role, I'll be posting more stuff. So it's at Mysterious Univ, no-earse, on X and Instagram, and then Mysterious Universe on Facebook. So find us over there. Give us a faller, and you can DM me all of your dickpicks. So we're looking forward to that. Yes, social media is Joe's baby. So you all have fun.

Have fun. Hester the shit out of me. I love it. I'm really much, I'm really looking forward. to the plus extension that you got coming up to. It sounds incredible. It's intriguing. I can't wait. Well, it's one of those ones that there's not a whole lot of information on. And there's, as far as I could tell, there's one book written by one of the six that went AWOL. And it is $300 on Amazon for a used copy because I believe it's out of print.

Couldn't even find a PDF. I didn't want to venture into the dark web. So I kind of piecemealed together this whole story based on news reports and the guy that wrote the book actually went on coast to coast. So there's some transcripts from that. So if it's a little disjointed, that's because it is, just like Camelia was, kind of. I had to piece these together. But it's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, same, man.

That sounds incredible, dude. But before we get into this episode, I feel it important to point out the passing of a pioneer in the critical thinking space. Eric von Daniken has decided Enough is Enough and moved on to that great mystery in the sky Presumably escorted of course by A chariot of the gods, right? And some style.

Of course. I think it's got a sweet sound system And some rims and it's also got that little license plate thing That flips up like James Bond When it goes through Tollboos. Not a lot of people know about that. So in honor of his honorary soul-heeding I have prepared a little tribute

In the form of a poem. This poem is titled Vondanagan's last shenanigan. Twas two thousand and twenty-six, the tenth day of January, when intellectual explorer and overall badass Eric von Danikin disembarked for his sanctuary. But for the wisdom of the gods and their grand design, he'd had enough fun, and now was his time.

He'd unmasked all of the mysteries he could to discover the hidden, intellectual wood. Insights on wonders long buried in the land. lost, curiosity, his compass, no matter the cost. Von Danikin's final shenanigan wasn't in presenting the past. He gifted us with fire by ferrying questioning, the gift that's sure to last. So go boldly on, you whimsical proletariat, for the gods have called you home in a godworthy chariot.

Thank you for existing, Mr. von Danikit. Your legacy lives on and those of us touched by your smile. Godspeed, good sir. Golf clap, golf clap. Do you have a favorite Von Daniken story? Oh, not off the top of my head, no. I've actually got one, and I'm going to share it. So it's not my story.

This is a third-hand account, okay? But it's by dear, dear friend Mark Olly, incredible author. I know that we're going to cover quite a few of his stuff. He's wrote an incredible book. It took him 42 years on King Arthur. He's also got the Green Man, the UFOs, the Roswell of UK. We're going to cover a lot of his stuff. So Mark Ali, he had this incredible,

encounter with Eric von Danigan. So Mark speaks in the same circles. He was on ancient aliens season 19 and Eric von Danikin and him happened to be seated across from each other at this event in the green room, right? And von Danikin's sitting there and he's shoveling like pudding or something in his face. He's just eating. And everybody was sort of looking around at Mark going, oh my God, you know, this archaeologist historian sitting next to this guy that questions all of those kind of things and what's going to happen? And Mark was actually incredibly sweet to him. He's said, you know, thank you so much for your work. The book sat on my dad's bookshelf and I thumbed through it. You inspired me a ton as an archaeologist to really question and, you know, all of those

kind of things. And, you know, what do you think the next step is or how do you feel about all of the claims that you've made? And he said that he just put his putting down. He looked him dead in the eye and he said, did you know that there are 263 question marks in that book? And then he picked it back up and kept eating. And that's it. It's this reminder that the question marks were the important part of his work. He asked questions. He didn't declare anything. He inspired us to think. He recalls that story differently. So some people say it's 238. He sort of throws numbers around. I looked it up in his 323 question marks in Chariots of the Gods by Eric von Danikin. And that's the point is to ask questions to look at things differently.

Very nice. Very nice. So now let's take a gander at some close encounters of the Texas CAND. This is by Mitchell Whittington. Being the greatest country in the world, Texas has seen its fair share of mystical happenings. The freaky woo-woo isn't concerned with its fascinating past, independent power grid, lack of state tax, righteous independence, and ammunition totals. The The lone star state is home to rich culture, honky-tongs, and some of the most bizarre unexplainables, including UFOs and German submarines in the Gulf of Mexico, indigenous star beings, and being the first reference to the saucer-shaped objects long before Kenneth Arnold. Fireballs from the sky, smoking women on horseback, unexplainable airship sightings, crashes, and

landings, inexplicable encounters with otherworldly creatures, all without shucking off your spurs. Author, historian, and folklorist Mitchell Whittington compiled a few of these odd encounters in a book called Close Encounters of the Texas Kind. I'm going to be linking it down below. Definitely get this thing again, just for the author of photo. Revealing the mystery that spans generations of what's really happening

all around us in this God-kissed land. Native peoples have known about the visitations of what they call star people since the times long before the invention of Buckees and South by Southwest. Many legends include origins from faraway places only visible in the distant star clusters from which they're known to be near. The Hopi, of course, have a creation story that originates in the Pleiades Star Cluster.

Bitch Pleiades. The Dakota tribe speaks of the abode of the ancestors, again, the Pleiades. Many other tribes speak of sky beings being part of their history as well. In fact, this Wallace Black Elk was an Algon-Soo shaman. He lives from 1863 to 1950. In his book, Black Elk, the Sacred Ways of a Lakota,

he relays the story of seeing a UFO come down out of the sky and communicating with him telepathically. He writes, So when I went to the vision quest, a disc came from above and landed on top of me. It was concave, and there was another one on top of that. It was silent, but lit up. luminescent and those tobacco ties lying up there like little light bulbs. These little people came out, but in each group spoke a different language.

They could read minds and I could read theirs. I could read them. So there was silent communication. You could read it like when you read silent symbols in a book. So we're able to communicate. They're all humans, so I welcomed them. I said, welcome, welcome. That's an interesting part of that quote.

He said there were different groups of people. They all spoke different languages, but they were all human. And so he welcomed them in. Well, they all spoke English, obviously. Yeah, and then it's interesting, too, to think of the concept of welcome. Have you thought of welcoming mats? Have you done this in your home? Pulled your welcome mats off your door?

Or do you have a welcome mat? I mean, I have a mat. I don't know if it says welcome or not. I don't think so. Because if you think about it, it's sort of the invitation, right, for anything to come in. It says, welcome. You had to pull those away before the vampires show up, because they'll come right in.

That's all I'm saying. You know, just be mindful. So Black Alc later became Catholic, which is interesting as well. He has this encounter with these things and then becomes Catholic, which has some interesting connections to not only UFOs, but possibly demons. I don't know. He did, though, delineate the difference between spiritual and the mystical realm

and that they are not extraterresticals. He thought that they were completely different things. 1873 Bonham, Texas. This one's called the Sky Serpent. An incredible aerial phenomena was observed and reported by several eyewitnesses in 1873 in the town of Bonham, Texas. Descriptions varied from an oval-shaped craft to a cigar-shaped craft to a saucer-shaped craft to a straight-up serpent in the sky. All the classics. All of them. Not only reported in the newspapers of the day, it was also noted in Donald Kehoe's landmark 1950s book, The Flying Saucers, are real. Now, Kehoe writes in that book.

I took out the file of old sightings, glancing through it. I saw excerpts from the 19th century astronomical and scientific journals and extracts from the official gazettes. Most of the early sightings had been in the Great Britain and on the continent, with a few reports scattered around the world. The American reports did not begin until the later part of the century. One of the first incidents was in Bonham, Texas in the summer of the summer of the United States. of 1873. This is Kehoe writing about this. It was broad daylight when a strange fast-moving object appeared in the sky southwest of the town. For the people of Bonham looking at the thing, they just could not believe their eyes. The only flying device known

was the drifting balloon. But this thing, tremendous, and it was speeding so fast that its outlines were a blur. Terrified farmers dove under their wagons. Towns people fled indoors. Only a few hearty souls remained outside in the streets. Probably my answer, so there were the ones out there going, what's that? The mysterious object circled around bottom twice, and then raced off to the east and vanished. Descriptions of the object vary, as we said,

from an oval to a cigar to a round disc-shaped type thing. The details of the bottom siding were later confirmed by Kehoe's friend, the mutual UFO network. He was a newscaster. He was a guy named Frank Edwards, who investigated the campaign. himself. Says Kiho about that, 24 hours after the bottom incident, a device of the same description appeared in Fort Scott, Kansas. Panic-stricken soldiers fled the grounds as the thing

flashed overhead. In a few seconds, it would disappear circling off to the north. Is that what you would do, by the way, with your time machine UFO thing if you were given a chance to take a ride in one of those things, is you just sort of scoop over, you know, and freak out all the temporal locals? Oh, 100%. I mean, I'm sure that's their off day. You know, they've got to fly around and freak people out because they know they're going to, especially if they have wagons. I mean, if these things are out of space and time, then they've seen all kinds of stuff. So why not freaks some people out?

It'd be like checking your iPhone at somebody in the medieval times, you know, they'll think you're a demon. Right. We're like buzzing Sentinel Island, you know, with something, anything, honestly. You know, you could probably do it in a hang glider and they'd be like, what the fuck? Quite a different description came from. from that of a farmer named Hardin, who says that he looked up in the sky and he was shocked to see

what appeared to be an enormous flying snake, banded with yellow stripes, gyrating in the sky above him, dude. Undulating, undulating, palpitating even. So here's the news, I'm going to just, the verbatim the news article of the report. Singular phenomena. A few days ago, Mr. Hardin residing

some five or six miles east of this place, saw something resembling an enormous surplus but floating in the cloud that was passing over his farm. This is honestly also kind of how Chinese dragons are depicted, you know, in clouds and majestic as fuck, and they're just in those images of them. They're always just floating through clouds looking badass. There's one thing Asian people love it as dragons. That is true.

Several parties of men and boys at the book fields observed the same thing, and they were seriously frightened. It seemed to be as large and long as a telegraph pole, and it was a yellow striped color that seemed to float along without any effort. What year was this again? 1873. Hmm. They could see it, cool itself up, turn over, and thrust forward its huge head as if striking at something,

displaying the maneuvers of a genuine snake. The cloud and the serpent moved in an easterly direction and was seen by persons a few miles this side of Honeygrove. The question is, what is it? And where did it come from? I think you're doing more of a like a 1930s radio voice. Oh, I applauded. You think they sounded like that in the late 1800s?

Do we have recordings of audio from the 1800s? I don't think so we just get to make it up because we don't have them. So they probably sounded something like that. Prove it's not. How about that? But that is a great question. What the fuck is this thing and where did it come from? You know, because to some people it looked like an oval and a cigar-shaped craft.

And even that, it's depictions varied, which you could say if it was a, you know, I guess a solid craft, it could from one angle look just sort of like an oval if you were edge onto a cigar-shaped craft. So it depends on it, I guess, if it was coming at you or if it was coming or going, you know, if you would describe it a certain way or not. But the curveball of the serpent, like, what is that about? It could be shape-shifting, too.

Malfunctioning cloaking, or they actually are physically shape-shifting. Nanotech. Nanotech in the 1800s. If you could shape-shift as anything flying through the sky, what would you choose? something unexpected so I don't know a car chitty chitty bang bang yeah but musk did that already

that's a specific car yeah yeah yeah yeah the car in space that looks you know it's real because it looks so fake totally real is that is what the man said yeah yeah that is what he said so this next heater takes place in 1876 in palestine or palestine depending on where you're from Texas and it is called Death by Fireball. April of 1876, a young man is walking down a road near Palestine, Texas, as a woman rides a horse the same direction on the same road. Suddenly, a ball of fire flew down out of the sky and struck the woman on horseback.

She burst into flames and rode away in terror. The young man ran to town to get help and returned. with a group of people to assist in the odd incident. They found the unluckiest woman in the world on the ground. Her clothes had been burned off of her body. She was, though, able to tell them that a fireball struck her in the chest. Ooh. The woman died the next day, and the horse was found, but its mane was all singed up.

Several newspapers covered the story like an article in the Leavenworth Times in Leavenworth, Kansas. So here's the article from this thing. I'm going to read it verbatim. burned to death by a meteor. April 6th, 1876. An intelligent black boy was trudging along a highway at night in the vicinity of Palestine, Texas. There was a negro woman riding a horse in the same direction as the boy was going. The intelligent black boy reappeared in Palestine that night, out of breath, and as pale as he could get.

He said a firebaud come out of the sky and struck the woman and said her ablaze. The horse ran away without the woman, and it was on fire. as well on his back. Well, because it was a racist horse, obviously. God damn, racist. He ran back to tell him what happened. The people went back to look after further peculiars of the incident. They found the woman lying on the ground with all of her clothes off, but with life enough in her to tell them that she'd been struck in the breast by a ball of fire. The horse was found with his mane singed and the woman died the next day. The people think she was hit by a meteor. Do you have any guesses on what this teat-seeking was?

missile may be? Probably not a meteor, I'm assuming. Right in the tit. So he asked about ball lightning. So ball lightning is a reported incident. It can't be recreated in labs where a sphere of electricity flies through the air before just quefeing out of existence. It's, again, unable to be recreated in lab conditions. Ball lightning is a myth as far as science is concerned. So also, being struck with a meteor would be roughly like getting smoked by a cannonball, so there'd not be much left to identify. Right. At the very least, there'd be a massive hole all the way through her.

Right, yeah, no, just, yeah, obliterate her upper body there. And, I mean, depending on the size, but something moving at that impact, it doesn't matter how big it is. It's just going to fucking shred you. Right through. Dude. So, if not a meteor, for reasons that have been made very clear, if not, for the fabled ball lightning due to its far too impossible to duplicate and therefore verify and therefore scientize and therefore weaponize and therefore does it exist eyes then what it was an

unidentified flying object and that's why it made the book one that seemed to be made out of like fire and fury and it also had in-cell accuracy cases unsolved and therefore plopped percuriously in the folder of the freaky woo-boo-boo So just fireballs come out of the sky As a possibility now, huh? I don't remember ever hearing a case like that Somebody getting hit by You said this place was steps from the water

We just haven't found the steps yet How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time,

college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.m. slash college PC. A fireball. Yeah, and that's the thing.

What is it? There was a, I mean, a witness saw it happen. There's all kinds of weird stories, though, especially from the 1800s before, you know, cell phone cameras and whatnot, but I remember seeing all kinds of articles

that are, it was just high strangeness in general. Oh, man, gross. second head, you know, and was that early tabloids or did they just see weirder stuff back than than we do now with all of our cameras? It's a great question. And that's the thing is if now are we preventing the freaky woo-woo or magic really from expressing itself more openly because we've got cameras everywhere? Probably because it seems like, you know, especially Bigfoot, it's a prerequisite when you find a Bigfoot that you have a potato camera. So it seems like

the more cameras that are out there, the less these things are captured, which is kind of strange. But is it because they have a sentience about them and they know that they're being recorded? There's plenty of UFO cases where they seem to know if you're recording and that's why they drain the battery or, you know, kill your car or whatever the case is. You know, it seems like they know that something's observing them and they can tactically avoid them. Yeah, what's interesting if you think about flybys and stuff like that too. And there's plenty of getting caught on camera. I'm not saying that. But let's say something is just sort of of moving. Think of the number of cameras, ring cameras, store cameras, municipal cameras,

street cameras, things like this. It would need to black out as it moved through an area, which would call way more attention to the thing than just if it moved on through and got filmed real quick, breeze and through. But it's interesting also, if I was a sentient, something like that, I would kind of get in the AI network and say, hey, flood this place with AI bullshit so that nobody could ever tell if a genuine UFO was caught on anything. And in that way, you're in open sight. Like, people just have to see it, eyewitness it, and just go from there. You just can't believe anything that you see on camera anymore.

No, and that's funny, too, because I saw a video of supposed ball lightning the other day. I'm like, oh, wow, somebody finally caught it on film or on camera. That made me sound old. I apologize. And no, it was obviously AI. It looked cool. Don't get me wrong, but it's an obvious AI video. So it's like, okay, we are at that point where you literally can't believe anything

you see on video anymore, unless you have the discernment to know that that's an AI video, which people of a certain age seem to not have that ability. And so it propagates on social media. And you have people sharing and, oh, wow, look at this amazing thing. And you're like, oh, let me see this amazing thing. Oh, it's AI again. Okay. I'm getting dear friends beyond the boomer generation that are sending me stuff. And I'm like, you guys know this is AI right. And they just don't. And you know, so. They get mad, too. They do. They're like, but, well, it doesn't matter. It's cool. I'm not, it's not the point.

It just, yeah, okay, but just know it's AI. Like, don't just know what you're doing here. That's all. Don't be fooled by the damn thing. Use it. Just don't be fool by it. This guy didn't save a wolf from a trap and then the wolf became his best friend. That didn't happen, okay?

Well, maybe, but just not in the way you depicted. Plus, he's got six fingers. They're getting really good at that, though. They're honestly getting really good at the mimic. But it's the transitions and movements for me. They're so unnatural that you can see, even cut frames. I get editing and direct. cutting cup frames and things like this, there's something to human movement that you just can't

duplicate. Even with augmentation, if you're moving things and speeding them up, slowing them down, it's not like what the AI is doing. So again, like you, I completely agree. Now, it's interesting, too, is that inevitably, that you won't be able to tell. And this again, this, I've said it, this is when we're all free, dude. This is when we're all free, because nothing can be proven or disproven. You just, none of it. It's great. Yep. And even the AI detectors are having problems with detecting AI videos now. So, I mean, but the reason I can always tell is because they're either too perfect. There's something about an AI picture in general that's too perfect.

And I can't put my finger on what it is, but it's the way the lighting is, the everything's just way too on, you know, like what you would want a picture to look like, which nobody ever really gets. They are getting better at the six fingers thing, but AI still can't spell at all when it's making images. I don't understand that. That should be one of the easiest ones, right? But if you think about it, I remember from a study about somebody talking about dreams and why you couldn't read in your dreams, and it's got to do with the left brain, right brain thing. So if you think about it, their inability to be able to, I guess, assemble letters in a legible way.

And this is why they're foiled by us being able to just click capital and lowercase letters in a box and check I'm not a robot and get into shit. It's fascinating when you look at what foils it or what throws it off. what should be very intuitive but isn't at all. It's fascinating, man. And it's just getting easier and easier, just to ignore altogether, honestly. But it's also making humans far more valuable. The artists and musicians and all that that were

kind of rattled by this at first, fear not. I'm telling you, all it's doing is making you more valuable. Lean into it. It's all good. We use AI on the show. We love it. You can't do two graphics a week for this thing without it. But we're very aware of it. It is a tool.

We're very specific of it. All this, though, is us. Yeah. So it's the blending of the two. We're not Luddites, but we're also not being at best we can. It's a tool. That's right. It is a tool. All right. Let's get to our next case here. 1878, Denison, Texas. You know where Denison, Texas is? No idea. Well, this is the case of the first flying saucer. This is long before satellites in the sky, about 25 years before the Wright Brothers ordeal. Said because powered flight's been around since long before then. Do you want the power of the power? Flight run down for the nerds. Yeah, of course.

That defend the Wright Brothers' first powered flight. All right, here it is. You ready? Powered flight existed in various forms long before the Wright Brothers' 1903 success, with earlier attempts, including steam-powered airships by Henry Gifford in 1852, brief hops in a heavier-than-aircraft by pioneers like Clement Ader in 1890 and Gustav Whitehead in 1901, and even earlier steam-powered models by John Stringfellow great name, 1848. So while these demonstrated powered flight, the Wright brothers, achieved the first sustained,

controlled, heavier than air powered flight, a key distinction. For what? What was it like seven seconds or something? There you go, nerds. Yes, it was for enough to claim the title and to have that image put on license plates of the state that had happened in. Some 69 gig of years before it, the Kenneth Arnold siding on a new title. June 24th, 1947, we have the report of the first flying saucer, and it happened in Texas.

Come out. On the early morning hours of January 25th, 1878, farmer John Martin, which is close to Martian, by the way, was out hunting, and he had an unusual encounter that was also reported in the Denison Daily News titled A Strange Phenomena, the contents of which reads, from Mr. John Martin, a farmer who lives some six miles south of the city, we learned the following strange story. Tuesday morning, while out hunting, his attention was directed to a dark object high up in the southern sky. The peculiar shape and velocity with which the object seemed to approach riveted his attention, and he strained his eyes to discover its character.

I love the way they wrote back then, by the way. This is the quoting the news article. It's somewhere in between old English and modern English. They still use like fancy words, but... It's classy and just the way they look at language is so cool. When first noticed, it appeared to be about the size of an orange, which continued to grow in size. After gazing at it for some time,

Mr. Martin became blind from long looking. Have you ever heard of that? Oh, it happens all the time, yeah. Okay. And left off viewing it for a time to rest his eyes. This is another recommendation they got if you're on screens a lot. to look up, to look at a landscape, like make your vision go out far. It's good for your eyes.

On resuming his view, the object was almost overhead and had increased considerably in size and appeared to be going through space at a wonderful speed. When directly over him, it was about the size of a large saucer. I'm thinking like held out at length. That's probably how he determined that. It was evidently at great height. Mr. Martin thought it resembled as well as he could judge a balloon, which seemed to be, to him, the most reasonable solution for the strange phenomena.

He thought he was also under the impression that it was some of the heavenly bodies. If you think about Miracle of the Sun, Fatima, right? It went as rapidly as it came and was soon lost to sight in the heavenly sky. Mr. Martin is a gentleman of undoubted veracity, and the strange occurrence, if not a balloon, or something else you already know, therefore you know what it is, it deserves the attention about scientists. I'm sure they have top men working on that, don't you do? They were a lot more open to, you know,

investigating these things back when it first became mainstream that people were seeing them. And then they seemed to be just kind of shut down and reserved for the tabloids after that. And, I mean, what a great way to discredit something is put it in tabloids. I know plenty of people that used to, you know, read the Inquirer or the Sun,

whatever these tabloids are. And it's funny how they make a reference in men in black to, oh, we do tell people about him. And he picks up a bunch of tabloys. He's like, look, we tell people about us right here. That's it. It's right there. It's fascinating, man. When you think about this, because they did, they just reported the shit out of these things.

It was sensational. It was fun. And you think about, like, the freak show traveling circuses. You think there was all sorts of crazy shit going on here. And yeah, like you said, no cell phones. It was the telegraph. And so you got to enjoy wild stories like this. And people have the curiosity for it, obviously.

and they were, you know, it's sold papers, so they chucked them in there, and people have fascinating encounters. The Dallas Weekly Herald and the Daily Oklahoman, two of the regional newspapers that picked up the story, but the case remains a case of, say, what? Nobody knows. Like a lot of these stories. Left with more questions. Say, what? Have you ever heard of the Marphalites or the Minmin lights or anything like that? Minmin, minmin, min, yeah.

Okay. 1883, the Marfa Lights, the mysterious floating lights. Now, the first documented sighting was in 1883 by local rancher named Robert Elson, who was driving cattle, Yehah, a few miles past Marfa, when he and his cowhands saw some flickering lights along the horizon. I'm afraid that they were seeing Apache fires. They kept their cattle moving, keeping a vigilant eye on the lights. The next morning, they returned to the spot during daylight,

and they found nothing after searching the area that they felt the lights were coming from. No campfire remains, no nothing. An Apache legend spread about the lights that were seen, that they were spectral lights, and they were actually the spirit of an Apache chief that had been executed by the Mexican Federal Guard, the native lord tells of the wandering spirit of the chief

seeking justice for those had done him wrong. Years later, the Marfa lights are famous and can be seen in different colors, including white, yellow, pink, green, and blue, sometimes appearing to be moving across the mountain, other times motionless, while on occasion they pulsate with intensity, while others, they just steadily glow.

Does it say anything about how big they seem to be? It doesn't, actually. Because they're so far off in the distance, it's tricky to judge the distance. Some folks think it's the headlights on the nearby Highway 67, which would make sense due to the 1888, three-ness of the area where the first reported encounter happened where there were no cars driving

on the non-existent highway that wouldn't be constructed. Yes, I looked this up, to run past the area until the 1930s. Now, there is a federal government-funded Marfa Mystery Lights viewing center at the cost of three-quarters of a million dollars when the city allocated funds for its construction. It's attracted many a curious questioner and a music festival to boot. My wife's been there. She's been there with her sister and her friends. They went out. She's got a tattoo out there. So what do you think about that? Marfa lights, just lights floating around

out in the distance there. I mean, it sounds like a lot of orb stories. This one is a little more colorful, but at least you didn't mention red, because I've heard the red ones are the ones you want to steer clear of. That's right.

Green is in that list, though, and same thing. Oh, green is bad, too. I've heard. Which ones are the good ones? Good and bad. Well, people like, you would know if a green one came out,

you'd be like, that's a red one, fuck, because you're eye thing. You're disability. I'll just say they're all bad and avoid them. I don't plan on doing that every show, by the way. It just comes up, man. It's so handy. You're turning into my wife.

Oh, God. All right, so let's do another story here. These are just short little fun stories here about just freaky shit that happened in Texas. Hit him in Quinn. You guys got any Texas stories, by the way, send them in. You know, I'm very curious to see this is a home state. We're still here living on Texas. Now, this one happened in 1897 in Granbury, Texas.

and this is the great Granbury airship. This is bizarre, man. This one's wild. It really fits, though, into the narrative of the airship stuff. And you're talking to airships like the old school Hindenburg style things. Yeah, like dirigible style, but much more bizarre in construction. More of the Charles A.A. Del Shau stuff. Have you gotten into his stuff at all?

Is that like steampunk type of stuff? Yes. They're these awesome. And that is the other thing. My love language is a Del Shau piece. So if you guys want to find some Del Shouhout. works and send them to me, that I will receive openly, and thank you. So this story spans the entire country, but it was centered in Granbury, Texas.

For about six months, from November 1896 to May 1897, which also is that airship flap, the Sonora Arrow Club, and whatnot. The mysterious airship was reported from the west coast of California all the way up to the Great Lakes, totaling hundreds of sightings during the time of this one particular airship. That was the thing with Del Shale's work, and he had a bunch of different airships. And all of them were built, we don't think, but at least a few of them were, and they were in variety. And honestly, the way that this is described and there's images of it that you can look up, it looks crazy. It's like a huge fish with bat wings.

So it does have this steampunk kind of vibe going to it, but it doesn't look like anything that I've seen that Del Shoe drew, but it's in that same family. And you know, Del Shoe wasn't the only one drawing and designing these things at that time. There were a few people in that club. So there were numerous witnesses that described a 60-foot-long cigar-shaped craft with wings like a bat. The airship was also noted to have an intense searchlight in the front, which made kind of a whirling noise as it moved through the air. Some witnesses reported speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, and then the craft would vanish, just as mysteriously as it appeared.

April 16th of 1897, the craft would bring its bat-wing wonderment to the fine folks of Granbury, Texas. The first being reported a few months before then in Sacramento, California on November 17, 1896, there was an employee of the railroad that said that he saw two men in a glass gondola that was hanging down from a long, large, cigar-shaped craft. A few months later, at about 9.30 p.m. at night, it was seen over Hastings' Arkansas, and it was illuminated by a very bright light, sailing above the city for about half an hour before simply disappearing. From there, Kansas, Iowa, then Missouri, would witness its bizarreness, a man in St. Louis, Missouri, claiming that he had been captured by a crew of the ship

and held prisoner for three weeks. According to that man, he saw the pilot, said that he was not human and did not comment further on the rest of the crew. Then the craft moved on to Arkansas with another man claiming to have met the crew and had a very different experience to report. He said that they met an older man, a young woman, and two young men, and that they said that they were on their way to Mars in the airship. As you do. Would you tell people what you were really doing if you had this airship or just make shit up? Oh, I'd be making up all kinds of stuff. but is this in the time frame where these were used a lot? No, no, they were very rare.

Yeah, okay. Big balloons were known, but they weren't around and popular. As we've been told by history, but also we've got a lot of conflicting reports about history and saying that the vanilla sky was a phenomenon when these things were just everywhere. It seems this one's just exceptional for these reasons, but also you're talking late 1800s, and maybe this was the beginning of the rollout of the technology of airships. They just do it like this, perhaps like our government's, doing with extraterrestrial craft that's been re-engineered.

That's where I was kind of going to go with it too, is that if you want to believe that the government is 20 to 30, some people say even more than that years ahead of us as far as technology, which I don't have any reason to doubt that. Why would they let us, you know, have access to high technology when they could use them as weapons because that's their favorite thing to do? So it, the story of UFOs follows that same kind of trajectory where you have the UFOs kind of matching the tech at the time or a little bit ahead of it. Yeah.

So the 1930s, 40s sightings are like almost steampunky, you know, saucers and they're kind of clunkier or shaped a little different. And then as you go on, they get smoother or, you know, faster or they do weirder stuff. And it just seems like it keeps up by, I don't know, 20 to 30 years ahead of our tech. Exactly. I'm thinking of the Viking stories that tell about a boat that was flying. It was a boat like you would see. water like they would, but it was a mode of transportation available to them, but it was flying in the

sky. And so that's the thing. Boats don't do that, but that was the thing that they were most familiar with that would move anywhere, right? Well, yeah, it'd be like in the Bible, Ezekiel calling it a chariot in the sky. Exactly. It's the only thing we have that moves, so it's a chariot, but it's in the sky. So it sounds weirder than it probably is. Like people depicted with wings in paintings, they couldn't, they didn't have wings, they could fly. Right. And so they put wings on them in paintings to depict that they could fly, not that they had physical wings. When it was really just jet packs. Yeah.

Fuck yeah, man, that's awesome. So, you know, what is the truth here? Is it too hard to believe? No matter what to tell them? Is it bullshit? Not on a need-to-know basis, so fuck them? Are they aliens? What's what the sex slave they took in St. Louis?

So what do you think about the occupants? The breakaway civilization idea, too, where it's just a different sector of people that are just out there, you know, play. the true elite, if you will, they're out there playing with their toys and they don't really care about us. We're monkeys to them. Yeah, but I refuse to call them elite. No, just for lack of a better term, the turds. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but be honest, if you had that airship and you landed in a place where you couldn't take everyone, you couldn't move on, but you needed like, I don't know, you wanted to travel, you wanted to see the sites and you need to land and take a piss and stuff like

this and then some of these folks come up to you, do you, what do you do? I mean, do you share the technology because I'm sort of thinking again of if you go to sort of South America to some of these tribes and you ride by with a car and they've never seen one are is it the same thing like do you do they have the same perplexities when it comes to this this incredible technology probably we think of that with the cargo colts and things like that yeah just wild to think about man you know in the scale of it like how would you react how would you offer information to those folks I don't think you could be honest with them honestly no because like I said it'd be like explaining an iPhone to somebody in the middle in the medieval ages

I mean, that's an example. It's been used a ton, but it's the same idea. Why would you, yeah, make something up. I'm going to Mars, whatever. You wouldn't understand what I'm even doing right now, so why try? The concept of butterfly idea is being introduced to Caterpillar Mines. We're trying to explain algebra to your dog. There you go. It's just a waste of breath. None of us have any use for it, by the way, dog.

So, but Tennessee must have been on their way to Mars because somebody reported to a local newspaper that they had seen the airship on the ground after apparently landing. Two men were working harder than a cat trying to bury a turd on a marble floor to make repairs to the craft. The country became obsessed with tails of the flying feature and flocked outside to see if they could catch a glimpse or even perhaps a chance encounter with the fantastic mystery sailing freely above the rest of the schmucks

with some dope-ass shit and a devil-may-care attitude. The object was then seen in several more states, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. Finally, though, with emptying its chamber pots over the moosh-boosh of samplings of the late 1800s United States America, it was now time to get to the main course, Texas. You tell we're proud to be from here? Everything's bigger in Texas, including your heads.

Yay! Andes, Texas was the first to claim witness to the flying phenomena on the night of April 12, 1897. The city recorder and his companion, saw a dark form moving in front of the moon and simply realized that it was the famous craft that everybody was talking about. 24 hours later, it was seen over Denton, Texas on April 13th,

being described as 50-foot-long and shaped like a cigar with two large mugs extending from the fuselage, one coming out of each side. It had a broad tail in the rear, and it had a blade resembling the cut water of an ocean-going ship on the front, matching other sidings. The large searchlight was reported

with smaller lights running down the side as well. So this is the thing. It looks like an ocean liner, a cut water. You think about the maritime nomenclature and how they do this with pilots. Pilots read and knots. It's all nautical. So what do you think about that, that the air around you and that is just a less dense water

and we're sort of on the bottom of somebody else's ocean? That's pretty, I mean, an old idea, kind of, but if it does have to do with, you know, buoyancy and mass and all that kind of thing, it makes sense in theory, but apparently we haven't caught up to that yet and figured out how to make a ship fly or have wings. Somebody has, and then you've got the reports of the jellyfish in the sky and these weird creatures flying around, and, you know, maybe there's sky snakes or really underwater snakes as far as this other ocean above us is concerned.

It's just fascinating when you think about these things. I think of sky jellyfish, all those things, too. Exactly. And then you try and stick them into the narrative that we've got and just things don't match. And I mean, who knows? This could be a huge augmented reality realm anyway, and none of it's fucking real. So then at 8.30 p.m. the next evening, it was seen some 90 miles southeast of the city of Corsicana. Half an hour later, it was seen at 9 p.m. in Weatherford, Texas, by the local badasses there.

And you haven't seen anything like that out there? No, we have not. I look at the Scott quite a bit. We built a huge sort of patio viewing area off the back of this barn that we built out there, overlooking this huge hill, and you can see forever. And we go out there and stuff sometime, you don't see. I mean, you'll see these glowing, what people call satellites. I guess they're moving very linearly, though.

Nothing weird and odd that moves around in darts and change a shape or appears out of nowhere. Nothing cool like that yet. Well, boring. I know. We're open to it, though. So later, a Crescent Railroad employee told the Dallas Morning News, this is dead straight. Now I'm convinced there is something in this airship business. For several prominent citizens of this locality also saw the ship.

Continuing to be seen throughout the night, the airship was over Paris, Texas at 2 a.m. and then further south in Peoria and eastward over the city of Orange in East Texas, which basically West Louisiana, to be honest with you. They have a lot of crypted weird shit happen out there, a lot of pine trees and all that kind of stuff, so a lot of interesting things in East Texas as well. Filled its interest in East Texas and was seen by a lawyer. in Hillsborough, which is back in the middle of the state. He said that it appeared to land behind a hill not far away.

From there, it begins its Hot Girls tour of the North Central part of Texas, being reported in Sherman, Greenville, Garland, Dallas, Boo, and Fort Worth. Yay! And Cisco. An employee of Joe. Am I supposed to know this? No, just all these, this one particular kind of employee has been the one that's been reporting these kind of things.

this story. Railroad worker? Yay. Pacific Railroad workers said that he met the crew and they landed their ship in their last stop in Texas and that they had landed to repair the large searchlight that people had been seeing shining down from the craft to the peasants below. Sort of like the Tennessee siding where the man met the crew and they told him that they were heading to Mars, this rag-tagged bunch of ne'er-do-wells was heading down to Cuba, loaded with dynamite to participate in the Spanish-American war by bombing the Spanish forces. They just have a rolodex.

They just come up with a different one every time they talk to somebody. The very next day. Friday, April 16th, the now tremendously famous airship was over Granbury, Texas. Seen at 9.10 p.m. passing over the city's parade grounds where the local militia was holding an evening drill. The commander was also the local newspaper editor of Mr. Newt Gresham. Thinking that it was some kind of aerial invasion, the level-headed Mr. Gresham gave the order to fire upon the ship, as you do. Being a community militia, though, untrained and whatnot, they all fired and they all missed, only succeeding in waking up most of the town.

The yards of the townfolk filled with its townfolk as they ran outside to see what the ruckus was all about. The ship was seen all over the town, everybody speculating wildly on what the strange site could be. Newspaper editor and militia playboy Newt Gresham said it looked like a large fish with wings. Another spectator said that it looked like an airship ran by electricity, while yet another offered that it's a cloud of some mysterious substance of some phosphorescent qualities. A swamp gas, obviously. As the bewildered townfolk watched, the airship flowed southward over Comanche Peak, never to be seen again by the eyes of Granbury.

Some people speculate that this is the very same craft that crashed in Aurora, Texas the very next day, which happened on April 17, 1897, which is only an hour and 14 minute drive from Granbury. And that's something that we're going to talk about on the next plus show as we continue our woo-woo with the text-terrestrial two-step, though the description of both the craft

and the alleged occupants are described differently in that case. but it's an airship that crashed, just 56 miles from the side of the last known siding, just hours before in Granbury, Texas. And it seems odd either way. Is there any, you know, footage, not footage, I guess, but pictures of wreckage, or is there any other evidence besides these, you know, first-hand accounts? The Granbury craft never crashed. So it just sort of landed, it flew off.

They didn't get any souvenirs from the thing or anything. But the Aurora crash, yes. Allegedly there was crash material retrieved and some of it was disposed of it in this well over there. and yeah, hit this judge's windmill and pissed him off. It ruined his flower garden, he was tweaked. It was in the newspaper. They had a burial for the occupant

and they were going to cover it. It's fascinating. Mary and I went out there on our 11-year anniversary, actually. It's only 30 minutes from where we live. Hmm. Yeah.

It's very cool. They have a whole thing going on with it. But the memorial is not in the place where Jim Mars said that the body would be and where other accounts of the body would be. It's actually 33 paces to the southeast, I think. But it's exactly 33 paces away from where they put the memorial.

from where the actual thing is. Interesting number there. It's very interesting. I thought that was kind of silly. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't done with its sightseeing of the Lone Star State, even making an appearance on Easter Sunday at Codwell, which is down in Burleson County,

some 219 miles away from Granbury. The final siding was in Fort Worth, birthplace of legendary champions, such as Bill Paxton of Aliens, Tombstone, and Vertical Limit. You got Shelley Duval as, well, The Shining and Popeye. And then you have Brandon Thomas over digital publishing, and this beautiful thing we got going right here.

Seen flying over the home of a Fort Worth resident couple on May 12, 1897, and was never seen again. Next time, though, we're going to cover the Aurora and Tomato Man, and there's a few other cases in here that are just absolutely crazy. Tomato Man. Yes, it's fucking wild. They got a picture of this thing. An image of it is in the book, and some circulated.

Allegedly there were other occupants that were thrown from the thing that were gathered, but it's a wild story with this massive craft that crashed in Texas. And it's a crazy story. Interesting. Another one about some egg-shaped thing shutting cars down. We've got some stuff to talk about on that. And just some fascinating other cases that I'm going to pull out of that book. But for now, that's it, man.

I just wanted to throw you guys some... We haven't heard egg-shaped ones in a while. Yeah, and this was a really interesting blue-glowing egg-shaped one that would shut cars down and things as it would fly by. So it's a fascinating craft that just sort of flew between the mountains of this valley in this area and multiple people reported it, multiple people.

What year was that one from? I've got a long, damn you, Joe. Of course, don't have it. Don't have the enough time. Oh, 1957. How about that? Oh, okay. Relatively new, I guess. Yes, not bad, but it's in that late 50s, you know, early 60s flap of just wild shit,

and this is where they did start to change shape. You're right. evolve into something else right before our eyes. And it's fascinating, man. Yeah, now we just have cloaked craft and I guess three-eye Atlas, which interesting, haven't heard a peep

about that ever since. Yeah, what happened with that? Well, it was supposed to I think it was supposed to come closest to Earth at what, the summer or the winter solstice or Christmas, somewhere around that time. Yeah, the 19th December. That's right. It was built up, built up. My algorithm was just nothing

but 3-Ey Atlas and then just nothing. So, I don't know. Well, it sold some 10 issues during Christmas time, right? You know, because the algorithms are going nuts if you're glued to it. You're being advertised to. So, yeah, I would pop a story

about some weird shit coming out right before Christmas, make sure that it peaks through the buying season and then just kind of shut it off. Well, and to be fair, most of it was AI flop and people just making stuff up, really, about it. And fake pictures and the James Webb Telescope captures

this and they show it and then it's like oh this is actually an AI image but it did capture it. Where's the picture then? Yeah let's see it then. Well they're all composite images but they have to be. Remember that quote from the NASA graphics guy? Because they're so big. Why is that? Yeah we just take a picture of it. We'd go out there we can just

oh the Van Allen radiation belts are now an issue. Oh we we checked a few dudes through those a couple times didn't we? Hmm yeah they're fine though so weird yeah they're good makes them a little Gary Busey but they're fine. It's a wild thing and this is the weird part about it too because if something does land

and gets broadcast on news and shit like that, number one, I'm not watching the news, so you're going to have to tell me about it. And number two, would you believe it? Like, would you say, okay, this is true and authentic and genuine? Only if it was repeated by the media over and over and over again because then I would know it's true. That's right.

And this is the thing. If you see it online or you see it, I don't know that aliens are going to have that hard of a time now if anyone is here to usurp this place on coming on it. and just making themselves at home if they haven't already. It just feels like honestly also that we've been terraformed for their existence among us so that maybe they could just sort of come out. They can stop wearing the human suits and the masks and stuff and just walk around.

They're tired of it. Or they've just fully assimilated and they just look like us now. What about the lizard turds? Like they have the alleged technology that masks their appearance. It's some sound device or light device or something where they clip it on. I've heard different variations of this. It's either something they can do mentally or a device that they wear, and it basically projects that they are a human. But sometimes they fail, and you'll see these glitches that occurred.

Sometimes they happen on news, allegedly. I know, and those are always debunked as, you know, digital artifacts and all that. So we already didn't know what to believe 10, 20 years ago. Now with AI, it's like, I just don't believe anything anymore. And maybe that's right where we're supposed to be, not believing anything we see unless, well, yeah, even in real life, I guess, I wouldn't believe much. I mean, after Camelio and like the tech you were just talking about, it's like, if that can be done in real time or like holographic displays and, you know, these kinds of technologies, it's not just your screen that's lying to you anymore. It's your own eyes. That's right. And it's this idea of Project Bluebeam, you know, this technology that exists, this 7D hologram, this sky to skull, it can talk to you through your appliances and your room is going to tell you to do shit. And it's going to project Obi-1 Canobi up on top of it and float around.

tell you that it's Buddha Jesus. I think it might be interesting. It'll be a spectacle for sure. I'm looking forward to it in our lifetime. I don't know that I'll be fooled by it. I think that we'll see something like this and go, ah, shit. You know, it's just going to be. It might be.

Yeah, it'll be fun for a little while. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Brandon. That was crazy stories I've never heard before. Yeah, just some interesting Texas shit. We've got plenty more in the other one. I've actually got more for the plus show, because that's where we do it.

We sell it in on this. We call it in on this. free show here so that you guys come check out the plus shit because that's where the real magic's at so you guys can do that by signing up down below and get both shows when the new one comes out which is coming up after the break and we'll be going into the story of golf breeze six not gulf stream i keep wanting to say gulf stream but gulf breeze six so it's a place in florida where these dudes went awall dude and a chick don't want to leave her out but they they go awall because the Ouija board told them to. So we're going to be getting into that story after the break.

And if you want to get access to that, like Brandon said, mysteriousuniverse.org forward slash plus. And you can come hang out with everybody over there. Again, if you want to follow us on the socials, just search Mysterious Universe. You'll find us. And I think that's about a wrap for this show, right? Yeah. Well, if you are on Plus, check out the amazing story I have for you coming up next. And if not, we will see you all next Friday. Have a great week. Welcome back to your Plus extension. Thanks for being here on Plus.

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. First Citizens Bank.