Somewhere in the Skies - Just Another Tin Foil Hat | The Meridian Flying Machine

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Starting point is 00:00:42 Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Welcome to just another tinfoil hat with your host, Zilia Edgar. Join Zillia as she walks us through some of the most bizarre UFO cases and incidents of high strangeness. Malvin Stevens, a truck driver for the Cook Truck Line, was on the road from Memphis, Tennessee, to Meridian Mississippi. Suddenly, up ahead on the road, he saw a large silver egg-shaped object. Thinking that it must be a weather balloon blocking his path, he stopped the truck and got out of the vehicle, only to be met by three strange men coming out of the object. Today, we are going to be discussing the fascinating case of the Meridian Flying Machine.

Starting point is 00:01:27 This case involved a 48-year-old truck driver by the name of Malvin Stevens from Dyersburg, Tennessee, and occurred on November 7, 1957. He was about 15 miles northwest of Meridian, Mississippi, coming from Memphis, Tennessee, when he saw what he first thought was a weather balloon. He very shortly realized it was not. Now, here we have the fantastic inversion of the narrative where someone did not think a weather balloon was a UFO, but rather that a UFO was a weather balloon.

Starting point is 00:01:56 And I love that. Anyway, this quote-unquote weather balloon was a large silvery egg-shaped object that was blocking the road up ahead of Mr. Stevens. He said that it stood about five feet tall and 24 feet long. He stopped his truck about 20 feet away, got out to investigate, and noticed that this weather balloon was equipped with three single-blade propellers, one on each end and then one on the top. Now, no sooner did he kind of go up to it and start investigating. Did three little men get out of the object?

Starting point is 00:02:28 Stevens claimed that these entities stood about four and a half feet tall, were wearing gray suits, and had pasty white faces and jet black hair. He said that they approached him, appearing friendly and as though they wanted to talk, although the only noise that he could hear was this nonsensical chattering noise. Now, this was reported on heavily in the papers around the area, and some accounts claimed that Stevens actually shook hands with one of the strange little men. However, this is not mentioned in any of the later UFO publications. Now, whether the not reporting it in the UFO publications is a case of it seeming too weird, or simply, you know, if it was actually a journalistic invention for the papers to spice up an otherwise pretty short contact story, I have no idea. Now, it does look like, however, this was investigated by the civilian saucer intelligence of New York. They are the reference in the Center for UFO Studies, Humanoid Catalog, or the Humcat, which also includes an extremely strange detail.

Starting point is 00:03:25 In the Humcat, it states that Stevens claimed he felt paralyzed for the duration of his encounter, and that at a certain point in the encounter, the beings actually fell silent. After a shorter period of time where they just stood there silently, they turned in a style like in a military about face and filed back into the craft. Now, after this small discrepancy between the papers and the Humcat, the account ends the same way. As one newspaper put it, the tiny folk vanished, going straight, up. Stevens claimed that after they re-entered the object, it took straight off into the sky.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Now, although he noticed those propellers on the object, I can find nowhere if he specified if they actually started up or made a noise or anything. Now, when Stevens met up with other truck drivers later on, they said that he looked like he'd seen a ghost and was white as a sheet. Well, he was relaying what he had seen. And they also stated to the papers that he was known as a solid and respectable family man, not really given to practical joking. Stevens also mentioned that it felt like an eternity, although the mileage indicator on his truck showed that the whole event had lasted only two minutes because that is how long he was stopped for. Although there were no other direct witnesses to Stephen's citing,

Starting point is 00:04:41 earlier that day a nine-year-old boy stopped at a store in the nearby town of House, Mississippi to tell the shopkeeper that he had seen a, quote, balloon-like thing on the highway. Now, this is a great case for several reasons. The first being that in the papers, there are some truly great lines, such as referring to the entities as tiny folk or even chattering little people. I mean, two things which sound almost exactly like something you'd find in fairy accounts of a century previous. On the flip side of the space age, one paper, the Nashville banner, even referred to the object as Whatnick.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Considering Sputnik had launched just a month earlier, you can really tell where people's minds were. Now, regarding the timeliness of this encounter at the dawn of the space age, it's really intriguing to see that this UFO has a pretty outmoded as far as space travel is concerned flight model in the form of having these propellers. Not to say that you don't ever see propellers on UFOs. I mean, of course, there are plenty of sightings of flying machines and the airships from the turn of the last century that include propellers as well as wings. And they also occur with some frequency through the mid-century. But it's, it's a lot of the airships from the airships from the airships from the turn of the last century, but it's, seems to me that this detail almost reflects a kind of literal, um, literal expectation of the witness, I guess you could say, more than any sort of physical necessity. Again, I would love to know if the propellers actually kicked up when the object took off or not. However, I think that really what this has to do is, you know, so many sightings of these anomalous beings or entities or craft or whatever you want to call it, um, they effectively dress themselves in some regards to the expectations of the witness, almost as though this makes the experience somehow more

Starting point is 00:06:24 palatable. Like in this case, you know, specifically, he believed that these beings were coming from some sort of flying machine or spaceship. Spaceship means flight. Flight triggers this image of propellers. Now, although you don't have a direct witness to the exact same moment that Stephen saw this thing on the highway, you have kind of two different forms of confirmation. The first is Stevens Truck's mileage indicator. This shows that he stopped for two minutes on the road at roughly that spot for some reason. Now again, that reason being a weather balloon comes spacecraft, if I was going to make up an excuse, it probably would not be that. The second form of confirmation that you have is this other citing by the schoolboy earlier that day. He said that he saw a,

Starting point is 00:07:11 quote, big balloon on the highway. And kind of on that same vein, too, to go back to the weather balloon, thing. It really does seem like so often witnesses to anomalous events first try to normalize it to find a mundane explanation. And it's only when the mundane explanations fail that they have to go to an extra mundane explanation. In the case of Flatwoods, of course, the glowing eyes at first, everyone thought it was a raccoon. It ended up being this, you know, space age metal monster. In this case, Stevens believed it was a weather balloon. Suddenly he's talking to these three, you know, pasty-faced short beings that make bizarre chattering noises. Now, the beings remind me of two other really classic retro UFO encounters,

Starting point is 00:07:53 the Honeycut encounter from Loveland, Ohio, and the Simonton Space Pancake Ordeal. Now, the physical descriptions of the entities in this case bear's striking resemblance to the turtlenecked beings in the Simonton encounter, these kind of short, pasty beings with dark hair in matching suits. However, the more striking similarity to me is the behavior of the beings, which bears, again, a strong resemblance to how the beings acted in the Loveland encounter. The description in the Humcat of the entity's turning military style reminds me of how the three beings in the Honeycutt encounter in Loveland each made a simultaneous movement to face

Starting point is 00:08:28 the witness. Now, this is a commonality across other encounters, too, where multiple entities or objects or both are involved. A fantastic example of this is the Cisco Grove case, in which not only these entities, but also a nearby, quote, mothership fled from fire. Now, I think that this is evidence that in some cases, regardless of what the witness believes are, you know, separate entities or separate objects, or again, separate entities and objects, this strange detail of each kind of facet of this case, each apparently separate thing, kind of behaving as one, it seems as though then these separate things are a facade for some sort of just kind of bulk anomaly, kind of almost, I guess, like a bunch of finger puppets if the hand

Starting point is 00:09:13 pulls away and I guess also if the hand is invisible. And yet again, we have another case where the anomaly blocks the way of the witness. I can really only wonder why such a huge proportion of sightings of UFO's ghostlights, bigfoot dogmen, flying entities, phantom man-faced horses, and so on and so forth, seem to have the anomaly's preferred parking spot be right in front of a witness. And for today, I am Zelia Edgar, signing off. This has been just another tinfoil hat with Zelia Edgar. be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. For full video versions of these episodes, be sure to subscribe to just another tinfoil hat on YouTube.

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Somewhere in the Skies - Just Another Tin Foil Hat | The Meridian Flying Machine

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