High Strange - Rendlesham Forest

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Over the holidays in 1980, several days of sightings occurred in a forest surrounded by two military bases in eastern England. Payne speaks with two of the members of military who witnessed "Britain's Roswell." Want more? Our High Strange music playlist is now available exclusively on Apple Music. Visit the link in our show notes or go to apple.co/highstrangeplaylist  To access our book list, go to apple.co/highstrangebooks  To find us in Apple Maps, go to apple.co/highstrangeguide For ad-free listening and bonus content, subscribe to Tenderfoot+ now! Members get all episodes ad-free plus bonus content throughout the season. Sign up at apple.co/highstrange. For Spotify, Google, and other Android users, visit tenderfootplus.com. Follow along on social and the web: @highstrange on Instagram @highstrange on TikTok highstrange.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For all 10-or-foot-plus subscribers, you'll also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season. For more information, check also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season. For more information, check out the a little bit disfined. It's spreadin' on Haspen. It's comin' this way. It's definitely comin' this way. It goes back out into the farmer's field, directly overhead at very high speed. At least 15 people in weapon storage areas saw the objects in the sky.

To a highted run, one h to the left, deep-strike itself. Here's something very, very strange. This is where that has been. As to this, trying to approach you. We move up to the edge of the forest, and when we tried to get close, it went back out into the field. It knew we were trying to get close.

He's coming towards now. This is where it's starting off. Sparks are coming towards now. This is a really funny move. Sparks are coming off it. So bright, it was like looking at the sun. There's the DM coming down to the ground. This is beyond anything that we're familiar with. Welcome to High Strange. The year was 1980, Suffolk, England. Tensions between Russia and the US were high.

There is imminent danger of some kind of Soviet military action. There were two bases in eastern England, ran by the US Air Force. This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace. They housed the most advanced weapons in the world there, ready for deployment at any second. Right around Christmas time that year, the forest behind this US military base will become the location of Britain's very own

Roswell event, known as the Rindlesham Forest Incident. Charles Holt, a military commander on the base, headed into the forest to investigate rumors of lights in the sky when he experienced an encounter of his own. This was the third night in a row that separate military officers claimed to have experienced something unexplainable in the forest. I reached out to one of the witnesses from the first night. His experience is arguably even more bizarre than Holt's.

Forty years later, gathering these different accounts. I'm hoping to try and piece together what really happened here This is Jim Peniston. So how many guys believe in your foes? At this point, I'm convinced that UFOs are not a matter of believing, but rather the question is, what are they? There are outlier cases like this one that still puzzle our government today. The real question we're asking ourselves is do you believe these are extra terrestrial or are they some other natural phenomenon we don't fully understand yet? Or

are these guys simply mistaking what they saw in bellishing their stories or just flat out making them all up? That's the real question here. You told this story a thousand times. I was going to say over a thousand times right? We're fastening about the story and... I don't have a story though. I don't have a story. The story sounds like something to you read when you're in great school.

So what is it though? This is an investigation by United States Air Force on December 26, 1998. This is going to be a rough night's sleep tonight. What? I'm talking about these are triggers, everything here is a trigger. There's just nothing, there's no way around it. What I was seeing with stuff I had never encountered in my life, or sensein, in the trauma of dealing with it,

I've always been able to tell you everything it wasn't, but there is a problem when it comes down to what wasn't. I don't know what it was. Jim's story begins on December 26, 1980, shortly after midnight. I was fifth generation military. At that time, I was in charge of base security for Woodbridge. Our job was to protect aircraft, weapons, plus the personnel on the base. The night started pretty much as usual. I had done my guard mount, which is a briefing that you give your 15 guys that are going to be working with you, putting my stuff down and grabbing a cup of coffee.

Sergeant Coli says, did you hear that call on the radio? I said, no, I missed it. Central Security Control, our control center, is trying to get a hold of it. He had a direct line, talked to Sergeant Coli, he was a senior controller. I said, well, what's going on?

He says, well, they though brief you when you get out there. He would tell you on the phone. He would tell me on phone, which was odd. I'm being dispatched for a situation. What it is, I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. I arrived at the escape, the contact the senior law enforcement controlman, DASA Bud Stefan, said, what's going on Bud? It just sort of points over. Maybe pre-ary yards is over to Reynolds and Forest adjacent to the gate. I could see lighting above the forest and in the forest.

I turned around to him, said, what is it? He says, I don't know. Inside the forest, you could see orange light. You could see a red light, you could see flickering like that. It would appear to be a fire, like something's burning. But the strange part of that,

over the top of the canopy of the forest, there was a bubble of light over the top of it. Well, I'd seen out there, it didn't make sense to me at all. Whenever it's there, I had to be really live up. So my question to the bud was, he'd be here at Crash, and he goes, oh no, they'll land it. There was no way a helicopter or plane could ever land in that forest. The trees and minerals from forests at the time were used as a crop.

Hundreds of trees planted about five feet apart from each other, which would make it nearly impossible for conventional aircraft to land there. He went back to the East Gate and called in to report where he was seeing in the forest. Reach Central Security Control, it's now a security problem. Five guys pick up, got five guys on mine. I says, well, I think there's a possible air of craft crash in the forest.

They lost contact with an unidentified bogey on radar. They know where it came from, came from our ease. And all this stuff is happening mega fast. When we were given permission to go off base, we had a crash kit. I pulled out the camera, security control was starting to break up and I couldn't really understand what they're saying. On base, they used repeating systems for their radios, which allowed their walkies to cover

a much longer distance. Basically, there's never a dead spot. But for the first time in his career on that base, Jim was having trouble reaching the command post on his radio. Even though I wasn't hearing nothing of radio, I'm talking. I'll get to the edge of the tree line. What was coming out of the forest was a white light. It was so intense that you couldn't really see any inside the center of that light.

Started taking pictures. I could feel static electricity on my face and skin. At first I thought it was maybe a dreddle in, but it continued. My movements felt labored, like walky, waist deep, and cool water. I'm starting to wonder now, is this a ruse? Is this something out here to distract us? I started to get worried. As I got to the edge of the forest,

I have been in a helping hand situation on the radio. It's real, and I'm armed. I used all the film up the camera. Started going out this final burn. This bright white light just exploded. I hit the ground. I was getting very scared, very concerned for my own wellbeing. I know that what I'm seeing is nothing I trained for.

I personally thought this is an unsavviedable situation. Everything out there is something I haven't seen before. I get up off the ground. The white lights started to dissipate. And when I did, I could see nothing but this black aircraft, this black triangular craft inside this white light. Did you ever see anything like that before? Crafts like that didn't exist.

He pulled out his pen and notebook and started documenting as many details as he could about what he was seeing. The craft itself was warm to the touch. He described it feeling very smooth, like black glass. Well, I looked there and he said, I can see white beams of light, there's trio coming out from underneath the craft.

I wonder if that stable, I wonder if it's secure. I tried to move it, and I pushed on it. You literally tried to move it. The leader tried to give it a shove, the seafood move. This didn't move at all, it was solid. Fixed to the ground somehow with this technology. How can this be? I started to look for things that my aircraft needs to fly, exhausts and intakes and things like that. There was void of all those things.

There was no openings, there was no crew compartment, had nothing. Basically it was a flying brick. This thing couldn't fly. You need all those things for your aircraft to fly. I go out and record all that stuff down in my book. The craft itself was warm to touch. Smooth, glass-like metal. Still doing my security checks on the radio, but I'm getting nothing back. During my interaction with the craft, the air fell electric. I don't know how to explain that.

Boy, the hair was lifting and the back of the neck and arms and the face The hair was lifting and the back of the neck and arms and the face. Come back around and I could see writing, writing on the side of the craft. That's a good thing I'm thinking. I'm hoping this says, Nassala or something. As I got closer, it was writing like we had. It was like bliss. As I got closer, it was writing like we had. It was like bliss.

Victoria bliss, which put the emotion back into a panic. What did it look like? They were writing. There's five symbols. They were different shapes. The one that stood out the most was the one that was above those five. There was another one which was larger and had a circle around it. It was a triangle with this huge circle around it.

The size of a big dinner plate was circle. I put my hand on the a triangle that was above the other glyphs. All of a sudden I have a blinding pure white light. I cannot see nothing else. I eliminate all that. It's hard to see things that don't make no sense at all. More things that don't make no sense, like ones and zeros and things like that. They had terrified me. I gained my wits back, lift my hand back off, and it stops.

Was it in your head or physically there? I was trying to determine whether or not it was physically there or in my head, okay? When I took my hand off that symbol, I had my night vision, which is impossible. I had perfect night vision once I took my hand off the craft. After that happened with the light, I was never going to vision once I took my hand off the craft. After that happened with the light, I was never going to touch that craft again. Also, I started to see what I perceive as activity.

All of a sudden, the color light that had dissipated inside the fabric of the craft started to come back and started moving around in the craft. So I backed away for about 10 feet. I got on the ground, tried to dig a hole. I was thinking that I had activated something when I touched it. I thought I was gonna explode. The crash started powering up.

And moved back through the trees. and move back through the trees. It had no air displacement at all. There's absolutely no sound. All aircraft make noise. That's a fact. All of these flaps, all of them need a propeller or intakes or exhaust or near the scat fly. A few seconds later, it just took off.

It was gone and it would blink to the eye. After the craft departure, all of a sudden I could start hearing things. And merely after it went on a site, I could start hearing winds. I had full radio contact. Jim Penison was the head of security at the time, not just some on-duty guard. The head of security on a US military base that held nuclear bombs, ready to drop on Russia at any given moment. He spent his career in the Air Force, and specialized in recognizing aircraft. Multiple witnesses saw the same things over the course of three days on the base.

After the incident, Jim typed a report recounting his experience, submitting it to the higher ups. He took notes in his note pad, and drew several sketches of what the craft looked like. I got to see these for myself, and I'll post them on the high-strange Instagram and TikTok, just go to at high-strange. I'm no expert on anything aircraft related, but even to the layperson, Jim's sketches of the aircraft looked nothing like the US Air Force has, then or now. After I had my encounter in a forest, I went back and talked to all the participants that were involved the first night.

Here's Charles Holtz again, the man who recorded the third night of the incident on his tape recorder. Panniston borrows Cabana Sack. They told me a cleaned up version of what happened. They were told what to tell me. In fact, Cabana Sack brought me a typed statement. He didn't type it. He couldn't type.

Words that he would not have used. Holt seems to think, or is at least hinting at the idea, that the report submitted by his buddy, or as at least hinting at the idea, that the report submitted by his buddy were merely a cover story. Basically, said we saw the lighthouse, I think. The British tabloid press had a field day with reports of the incident, with stories of flying saucers, mysterious lights, and even aliens. The times of London, however, dismissed the incident and poked fun at the other newspapers. It quoted this man, Vince Thurkettel, a forester who works near the alleged landing site.

Thurkettel told CNN that the UFO was merely a beam of light from the nearby Orford Lighthouse. But if you didn't know it was a lighthouse, if you thought it was something small, maybe two or three meters across, pulsing white in the forest, yes, it looks as if it's within the trees, and it does appear to light up the trees as well. When your senses are heightened, a adrenaline pumping, and you're out in the woods at night, looking for something weird. Common sense says, does a good chance you might find it. I don't think we're ever going to get very far with a rendal shrimp forest incident. This is Mick West again, an investigative UFO skeptic.

I don't know if this is ever going to be a determination of exactly what happened there. I think there are plausible explanations for certain aspects of it. There was a lighthouse. That's crazy. It wasn't the lighthouse. I'm buried from here with the lighthouse. And the lighthouse is the Dora Ferdinesse, where for next to the little small fishing village on the coast, out on the island. Two little pubs out there have very good food and reasonable prices. I have pictures of me standing

here. The lighthouse is over there and the object was out here. How could the lighthouse reflect off the windows of the farmhouse when the lighthouse houses two or three miles out that way? The lighthouse theory quickly became the easiest and most rational explanation. But why would all these highly trained men interpret a lighthouse as some strange foreign object three days in a row? I mean what's the point? The lighthouse was always there anyway. A little strange to suddenly take note of it and make a huge deal out of it all. The game warden was also familiar with the forest.

Dismissed the lighthouse theory outright. At the moment we're standing on the Orphid Key and quite clearly you can see the lighthouse over there, flashing. The light from the UFO was totally nothing like the light from the light here. We know that people make mistakes. We know that people, even with the best of intentions and with the best of observational abilities, can sometimes perceive things to be other than the way they actually are.

There are classic cases like the Cottingly Ferris, where these two girls took photographs of Ferris, are there are classic cases like the Cossingly Ferries where these two girls took photographs of Ferries and they managed to convince a whole bunch of people that these were genuine photos of Ferries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a big investigator of such things at the time. They stuck to their story for decades.

People once they buy into a certain explanation, it's kind of difficult for them to admit that they made stuff up. Once they've told the same story over and over again, it almost becomes like a memory. They're not really lying as such. They're simply just telling the same story, which happens to be false.

How could so many credible people from the military come up with the exact same lie? The same exact misinterpretation of something so completely normal. What are the odds they were all just mistaken, or hallucinating? If their job is to guard and protect a military base, and they're dreaming of fantastical stories of foreign lights in the sky that didn't actually exist, then that would be pretty concerning on its own, wouldn't it? I met the lighthouse keeper, Keith Simmons. Then that would be pretty concerning on its own, wouldn't it? I met the lighthouse keeper Keith Simmons. We met him and talked with him. The lighthouse has three lenses.

Red and green shine out to sea and white to land. He said, if you saw a red light, you couldn't have seen the lighthouse. You had to be out to sea to see the red light. So people say, yeah, red light you saw was the lighthouse. There's no way. It's not the lighthouse. The lighthouse is in a different location. 25 for 30 degrees away. There's agencies that have a whole lot more information than what they're reviewing.

The following week from the incident, an unmarked plane came. Normally, when planes, even the U-2s and SR-71s, which occasionally dropped them when they had a problem, we provided security for this plane, provided their own security, and had their own people in uniform, which were not Air Force uniforms. Unmarked planes are not unheard of. There's a company known as Janet Airlines that shuttles employees from the Las Vegas Airport to Area 51. You'd at least think that if unmarked planes full of unknown uniformed employees were landing on the base to collect information,

they, whoever they are, seem to find this incident just a little bit interesting. Seems like a lot of extra unnecessary work for a lighthouse. It was obvious nobody else was going to invest to get nobody else was going to do anything even though they did do things in the background behind the scenes so to speak. I didn't know anybody else was in the background playing games. I didn't know any of this. I wasn't told to be quiet.

It was sort of inferred that I should be quiet and I already knew that. But I still got the three and four star endorsements on my report cards. I still got promoted, because I knew it was credible. When it comes to trolls' holds, I'll be honest. It's hard not to believe them. I get disappointed with all the disinformation that's out there, but I can't do anything about it

except just tell the truth. He doesn't claim to know what he saw that night, but I can't do anything about it except to tell the truth. He doesn't claim to know what he saw that night, but that it was certainly something they were beyond unfamiliar with. I have not ever said I saw a little green man, I never saw any entity that I could identify. I know what I saw, but I don't know what it was. I sure like to know. It's obviously whatever we're seeing in the sky has the ability to do phenomenal things. Change shape, change size, change color, going for nominal speed. Do things that we just can't even imagine.

He wrote down in his own memo that he and several other military personnel saw multiple objects in the sky. It quote, red-like sun object that pulsed and shed into particles before splitting into five separate white lights and then disappearing in the sky. It's hard to imagine someone of sound mind running around with a cassette recorder, chasing a stationary lighthouse all night. The tape itself feels genuine. It sounds like they really don't know what's going on. I wish I knew more, but I don't. I am firmly convinced that we're not alone, I can tell you that, but I don't know what we're faced with."

Charles Holt went on to investigate the supposed landing site of the unknown aircraft, and he found indentations in the frozen ground. So something, whatever it was, had to have physically been there. Or someone went out of their way to make it look like there was. That feels like we're entering conspiracy land a little bit. Halton's crew members also took Geiger counter readings. They found the radiation on the indentations in the ground were significantly higher than the background. And while they were examining the site, they were interrupted by their own first-hand UFO encounter. and each time they made an attempt to get closer to it, the object moved further

away from them. Never once have I seen a lighthouse move. So what else could these things be exactly? Were they truly under intelligent control? Are they extraterrestrials, aliens, spirits, AI from the future? I could go on and on. Or is it none of those things at all? Something simpler and much more rational, but easily misinterpreted is something strange.

However, you feel about it, a case like the Rindlesham Forest incident is a hard one to everything at all. Let's take a step back. Forget the ex files. Forget popping the culture and all the alien, the visitation stories. Here's Politico Journalist Brian Bender. Take this at face value. Sightings reported by credible people over sensitive facilities. And we don't know what they are. Just an air safety hazard.

The military should probably try to find out what those things are. If for nothing else to protect its own personnel, our job is to protect our troops. If our troops are seeing things that they think are potentially dangerous or is upsetting to them, it's our job to do whatever we can do to figure out what that is. Let's get scientists together and deal with what can potentially be a safety hazard. If we really want to maximize our resources, let's get the government to be more transparent, share more of what it might have, and its ability to gather more data.

You know, maybe not publicize all of that, but what if you shared that data with some scientists? If what we get out of this is a society where we pride ourselves on the search for knowledge. This is a topic that fits squarely into that. A whole new generation of people can put their minds to this. See if they can find more answers than their fathers or grandfathers or regor and fathers could. That would be a real victory. We're at a time in human history where technology is advancing,

assuming we get hardest at technologies and they don't kill us first. I think it would be a victory if there was a real career path. Approach UAPs as a discipline and be successful. That's the way to get down the road of knowledge. In 1950, an article was published in True magazine titled, The Flying Saucers Are Real. It was written by former pilot in retired Marine Major Donald Kehoe.

Donald Kehoe is likely the very first citizen researcher of UFOs. Unlike most of his peers at the time, he didn't rely on the government to provide him all the answers, but instead embarked on his very own investigation. At first, Kehoe was admittedly very skeptical that any of these reported sightings were something extraordinary. But after speaking to countless witnesses in numerous high-ranking military officials, he became convinced that some of these UFO sightings were of unearthly origin. Kihou would go on to sell millions of books about the UFO mystery, and his diligent approach to the subject helped create a much more pragmatic conversation

that still exists to this day. The road to knowledge is a long one, filled with roadblocks and potholes, but if we stop looking to the military to provide us all the answers, and instead turn to independent scientists from around the world who can collect all their own data, we might have a much better shot at the truth. When we say the size of the universe, that's the size of the region that we can see, the universe is expanding, so if we go back in time, it was denser. Back in time, eventually you get infinite density. That is the big bang when the density was infinite.

So that's the beginning of time, 13.8 billion years. This is Abbey Loeb, professor of science at Harvard University. Within that volume that we can see, which is basically the distance that light could have traveled in 13.8 billion years, there are about a trillion galaxies like the Milky Way. Within the Milky Way galaxy, there are tens of billions of stars.

You have more habitable planets like the Earth than there are grains of sand on all beaches on Earth. 10 to the power 21, just a huge number. Well, that's a brainbuster for you. The chance of us being special and unique is extremely small. We know that most of the stars formed 10 billion years before the present time, and the sun only 4.6 billion years ago. Most stars like the sun formed billions of years before the sun. Most planets that are habitable will be orbiting stars that are billions of years older than ours.

Of these tens of billions of stars, many of them have what we call Goldilocks zones. A fancy turn for the areas that contain habitable planets like Earth. As of today, we found 59 of the estimated 11 billion planets that could be inside these Goldilocks zones. If the technological clock started ticking around the same time as here. Then the civilisation predated us. I think that it's very likely that there could be probes visiting us. They had plenty of time to send probes that would fill up the Milky Way galaxy. Most likely, there was a scientist, smarter than Albert Einstein, on another planet who existed a billion years ago.

They could have launched probes that arrived to us by now, and that's what we are trying to find out. Let's find the smartest kid in our interstellar class of intelligence civilizations. We can learn from that kid. What Sherlock Holmes would say is never eliminate any suspect, any possibility. Put all of them on the table and if you eliminate them one by one, whatever remains must be the truth.

At the same time you have those scientists that don't want to touch it. Ridicule, which is also wrong. The correct thing to do is to collect enough evidence such that we will be convinced. The PanStar telescope in Hawaii was constructed to find near-earth objects. Since 2008, the PanStar's telescope in Hawaii has been using astronomical cameras and telescopes to track moving objects in the sky.

Near Earth objects, the kind Hollywood loves to make movies with Bruce Willis about, big asteroids that could potentially wipe out the planet. Well, I'm glad someone's doing this. I mean, remember what happened all those dinosaurs? The whole purpose of it was to find 90% of all the objects bigger than 140 meters the size of a food-board field. On October 19, 2017, the telescope spotted an object roughly 21 million miles away. Here was an object that passed close to Earth within a sixth of the air sun separation and was about the size of a footboard field. The data they were receiving started splitting the science community.

All of its characteristics were different. It didn't seem to look or behave like a typical space rock. It's believed to be somewhere between 300 and 3000 feet long. An avi-lobe became increasingly convinced that the object was of interstellar origin. It was given the name Amua-muah, and it's likely the first object we've ever seen from outside our own solar system. Because of its unusually high speed and trajectory, scientists became convinced that it came from somewhere else, somewhere far, far away.

But where exactly? The more data they collected, the more science pointed to the possibility that this wasn't a rock at all. And maybe it was actually a piece of machinery. They flagged it and then they measured its speed and they realized, oh, it's moving too fast to be bound to the sun, it's actually interesting. The more we found about it, the more unusually looked. And I said, well, maybe it's artificial. The more we found about it, the more unusually looked. And I said, well, maybe it's artificial.

They said, no, it must be natural and then try to explain that normalism always concluded that it's something that we've never seen before. According to NASA, they concluded that the object has vents on its surface that emit jets of gases, giving it a non-gravitational boost in its speed. Because of how insanely forward it is from Earth, all we can see with our own eyes is a little speck of light, so the shape itself was determined by its light curves on a graph. A mu-a-muah is said to be 10 times longer than it is wide, like a pancake. Astronomers have never seen an object with such extreme proportions

at this rate of speed inside our solar system. My colleagues suggested that maybe, or more muah, this first object from 2017, maybe it's a hydrogen ice berged, an hydrogen ice bergore, dustbunny. I noticed that the object is so unusual that it couldn't be a rock or a comet. that it couldn't be a rock or a comet. It was moving too fast to be bound to the sun. Astronomers at first thought that it's a rock that originated from another star. As we collected more data, it looked very strange because the amount of sunlight reflected from it

changed by a factor of 10 as it was tumbling every eight hours. That's very unusual. It means that it had a very extreme shape. It's either the weirdest space rock scientists have come across, possible, likely even, or it's something different, possibly even artificial and origin. And other people said, oh well, maybe it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before. And I said, well, if that's the case, it could be also artificial origin. It was not a comet. It just shows that the game is not fair. A fair game should be to say this object does not appear to be a comet, we didn't see any evidence for that. It could be something unusual, it could be a rock of a type we've never seen before

which some people claim that's fine, But don't call it a comment. It's at the core of the way that experts respond to unusual things. They basically want them to conform with what they knew before. There was plenty of time for probes to arrive to us. Some of them may be equipped with artificial intelligence, some may look like space trash if they are not functional anymore. What my colleagues in the scientific community are doing is wrong. They are eliminating the artificial origin possibility just because it would have huge implications if it's right. In 1950, an Italian physicist named Enrico Fermi, the creator of the nuclear reactor, was

on a lunch break with his co-workers. He was discussing the recent UFO sightings in New Mexico, and he randomly blurted out, where is everybody? This question inspired him to do the math. If aliens do exist, well, then why haven't we all seen them yet? I mean, what are they waiting for? Fermi's calculations concluded that if they were real, then we would have been visited a very long time ago, and many times over since then. And out of the billions of planets

potentially growing civilizations, there should have been some evidence of them by now. But where are they? Why haven't they made contact if the probability is so damn high? This concept became known as the Fermi Paradox. Today in 2023, we need some way to prove that there is other intelligent life in the universe,

or that there just isn't. You could look at this two different ways. To me, the easy, more ignorant approach is the whole, well, why haven't they reached out to us yet? To me, that screams, we're so special, I'm offended, why haven't you introduced yourselves yet? If aliens were, in fact, real, and could travel to Earth from places so far away that we literally can't see them with our most advanced telescopes, then that would clearly mean they are incredibly

more advanced than us. In this case, we're like the cavemen in the universe, in terms of interstellar travel. Earth is like a little ant hill in the forest. How often do you sit down next to an ant hill in the middle of the woods and introduce yourself to them unless you're high on shrooms and unless you're an asshole you're not going to step on the ant hill and destroy it either. It's best just to leave them be. They're doing their own thing out there with their own colony, their own system. Now if the ants started talking to us well that might change things a bit, and I would definitely need the number for your shrooms guy.

So if extraterrestrials haven't gone out of their way to contact us, maybe we should try contacting them. Both of Voyager 1 and 2 space probes created by NASA carried a type of time capsule onboard for this very same reason. In the event that some other civilization out there found the space probe, inside it would be our own little message in a bottle. It contains a gold plated copper 12 inch record with instructions on how to play it written in binary code.

We probably should have waited for the iPod to come out, but hindsight is always 2020. The concept of making contact with extraterrestrials is something that's inspired the greatest science fiction movies of our time. And while it's held its place in popular culture, it's also been the focus of many great scientists of our time. It's not just the science community, but civilians too. One man named John Shepherd spent his whole life building a machine to make contact with the Teas and he believes it actually happened. The heart of project strat is the broadcast operation. There are 60,000 volts running through his basement, powering a signal that's being straight out into space.

The possibility that something out there might hear and perhaps respond keeps John going. John lives in a quaint little town in Northern Michigan. And for over 30 years, he has literally been trying to contact aliens. Sounded an out signal. Trying out a lure. Trying to get some more information by luring the men close enough to get accurate electronic measurements. Some hard data, something on instruments.

He built a radio transmitter so enormous that it took up two floors of his house, with generators the size of cars, an unbelievably powerful homemade machine you'd only expect to find at NASA. After decades of beaming signals into space, collecting data and tweaking his instruments, one night, he experienced something that remains hard to rationally explain to this day. After years of sending his own signals into space, he was suddenly getting something back.

Contact as our local sheriff's department, he said on a deputy, I showed him on the siliskope screen Suddenly, getting something back, contacted our local sheriff's department, and they sent out a deputy. I showed him on the silo-scope screen what was coming on. With frequency on the machine, there was four more than just some strange anomaly. Something was out there intentionally causing it. There shouldn't be that other frequency in there, that's not part of it. Something caused that amount of energy.

I think something was attractive. For the space you know I'm a space cadet. Bit white, let you know my habitat. Aim lightest days like a lead tank. For the guisps, I'm a gritset. Smokled out of trade, need a wee plan. I did take a lane,, I think I wish I'm a rich set I smoke a lot of trade, need a weed plant I did take a lane, went a lane, and I sleepin' on the jeez There's a bean bag, I record a chain cause I cool right

She knows she was over, she didn't pay nothin' She's been talkin' yo, she payin' in the best of it Blue bear tea, she's a sleeper, n' nothin' Hot top turn the vert right in the middle of it You gotta bend down to say the perp, hell Man, we spit it down, copin' go to swathe Said it's drippin', tryna knock it night, help it High Strange is an eight-part series released weekly for free every Thursday. But if you'd like to binge the whole series right now, you can. Subscribe to Tinder Foot Plus on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now.

Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at HighStrange. And you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at PainLinsey. If you have your own UFO story, email us at tips at highstrange.com. HighStrange is a production by TinderfootTV in association with Cadence 13, created hosted and edited by myself, Payne Lindsay, Executive Producers or myself, and Donald Albright, editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner and myself.

Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, Sound Design Mixing and Mastering by Cooper Skinner, Additional Production by Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nerny, Meredith Steadman, and Sidney Evans. Our cover art is by Polygon. This episode features a song Spaces Cadet by Metro Boomin featuring Gunna, written by Wesley Tire Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leeland Tyler Wayne, Alan Ritter, and Jacques Weiss Webster, performed

by Metro Boomin featuring Gunna. Currency of Republic Records, underlic license from Universal Music Enterprises for Metro Boomin and 300 Entertainment for Gunna. Special thanks to Orin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station 16, Deck Media and Marketing, as well as Chris Corcoran and the team at Cadence 13. Check out the show's website at highstrange.com. And if you're enjoying the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing the podcast and share it with your friends.

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