Latest / Fist Full of Dirt / FFOD349 : Appalachia After Dark / Halloween with Micah Hanks

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FFOD349 : Appalachia After Dark / Halloween with Micah Hanks · Fist Full of Dirt

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_10: Welcome to Fistful of Dirt, the official podcast of Monte Oak Properties.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_10: Whether you own a small farm, lease land, or just love hanging in your backyard, we're all about the outdoor lifestyle and how to get the most from your time in God's great outdoors.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_10: Now here's your host, Ronnie Cuz Strickland.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_13: Semi-Live.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_13: You've been working on this episode.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_13: You look like you cramming for finals.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_13: This is the most fun you have all year long.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_06: It is.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_13: I don't I it's no secret.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_13: This is gonna be the uh 2026 Halloween edition of a Fistful of Dirt.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_13: Well, we can just have a little fun.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_13: We don't have to teach anybody anything.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_13: We don't we don't have to talk about food plots or turkey hunting or anything else.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_06: I love it.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_06: I felt like I was gonna need you to pull me out with a rope.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_06: I was down so many rabbit holes trying to figure out what direction we were gonna go because we've had listeners call in, we've done Bigfoot, we've done UFO, we've done so much, and I'm like, where do we go from here?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_06: And I ended up finding a real creepy but real 911 call.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_06: And then I just started looking at the region because it was in North Carolina, and then you kind of pull back a little bit, and then you're in the Appalachian Mountains, and everything's old and spooky, and there's superstitions.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_06: And I I just thought, yeah, that's the direction we're gonna go.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_13: Well, I love it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_13: I hadn't heard it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm about to hear it for the first time, as y'all are not.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, but I'm waiting until I'm further away.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, sir.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think of it?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_13: Holy cow.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_13: Clearly the guy in the truck wasn't acting.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_06: No, that was when he screams, it's not human.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_13: Yeah, that kind of gave me some goosebumps, too.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_13: Look, I y'all can laugh.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_13: I you know, I've been around people who just roll their eyes about superstitions that oh you there's forces at work out there that we don't know about.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_13: Look at my age, I don't care if you believe it or not.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_13: I'll give you an example.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_13: I just attended the funeral service, full military honors for Colonel Tom Kelly, which was incredible.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_13: So glad Tysi was there.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_13: Both the boys, Daniel and Neil were there.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_13: Started the church, then we went to the Alabama Veterans Memorial Cemetery, full military.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_13: It was just beautiful.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_13: Wow.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_13: And there was a big pavilion there where they do the final thing, folding the flag and all that.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_13: And when we left, walked outside, Neil was sitting there and pointed up, and there was two fully mature white-headed bald eagles flying in a circle around that pavilion.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_13: Oh, wow.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_13: And just glided and glided and glided, and I'm like that there's no way that was just a coincidence.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_13: It's like I'm telling you, and everybody said, Yeah, that's uh that's Colonel Tom and Miss Helen, who passed nine years ago.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_13: But there's always forces at work, whether you believe them or not.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_13: And uh and there's a lot of things that convince me.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_13: One was talking to Kevin Burleson out at heart of Texas about the UFO him and his three guys saw it.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_13: And I'm like, he's the last person in the world that would make something uh say anything about a UFO.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_06: It's the credibility, the character of the people that make some of the stories so compelling.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_06: Because you know these are good, normal, honest people.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_06: I watched a million interviews on this guy after the fact, military guy, impeccable reputation in his community, which to me makes that call so much more real and so much more scary.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_13: You know, that part of the world, the Appalachians, they're they're kind of they can be a little spooky anyway, just the way the fog and the mist does.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_13: I've been out there turkey hunting and don't go out there much anymore, not because of that, it's too steep.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_13: But holy cow, that is uh you get around Winston-Salem and all that kind of stuff.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_13: It's just a lot going on.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_06: And I wanted to get into like why.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_06: Why is there a lot going on up here?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_06: And you know, we've got a real good buddy.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_06: I've got a great friend that lives up there, and he's kind of he's into all the same stuff.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_06: When people ask how we met, I say we met in a rabbit hole, always looking for Bigfoot, always got our eyes on the sky.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_06: But he lives up there and he knows more about this than we do, and I wanted to bring him on as a guest.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_13: Well, this is this is your week to shine, Lauraine.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_13: So and I'm I'm telling you, I'm on pens and needles, so I want to I wanna hear it, and I'm about to hear it for the first time.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_13: This is Laureen's rendition, the 2026 Halloween special.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_08: If you enter the Appalachian Mountains, you are stepping into another realm.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_08: What lives there isn't part of our world anymore.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_08: You have three rules.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_08: Follow them carefully.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_08: Rule one, if you hear your name being called, ignore it.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_08: Don't say hello, don't ask who's there.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_08: It's not a person.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_08: Every word you speak gives it permission to come closer.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_08: If the voice starts to sound like someone you know, even your own voice, it's already testing you.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_08: Close your eyes.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_08: Rule two.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_08: If you decide to camp, never let the fire die.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_08: It's not for warmth, it's a barrier.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_08: When the flame flickers low, the woods will grow silent.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_08: And when the silence lasts longer than a breath, it means something's watching from beyond the tree line.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_08: Feed the fire now.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_08: If you see shadows moving inside the light, don't look up.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_08: Rule three, if you see a deer carcass, don't touch it.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_08: They use it as a trap to attract anyone who makes noise or approaches out of curiosity.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_08: If you hear something walking after you pass, keep moving forward.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_08: Never run.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_08: It follows movement, not fear.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_08: And if the mountain whispers your name again, but this time it sounds exactly like you, don't turn around.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_08: Because by then you're not alone anymore, and the mountain doesn't let everyone leave it.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_06: And the deeper I went down this particular rabbit hole, the more I found myself drawn to the Appalachian Mountains.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_06: Those mountains are old, real old, and tucked away in some of those hollers and ridges are generations of stories about weird stuff, strange lights, unexplained encounters, and things people swear they've seen but just can't explain.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_06: Now I don't know what's out there, and I'm not saying I believe every story, but I do know somebody who spent a whole lot of time trying to figure them out.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_06: And I can't think of anybody better to take us a little deeper into this mystery.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_06: Except we're not in the camo cave.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_06: From the high mountains of Appalachia in a bunker below ground, we're speaking with one of my favorite people on the whole planet.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_06: He's an author, an investigative journalist, a researcher, a fellow podcaster, co-founder, and editor-in-chief of the debrief, and host of the Micah Hanks program.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_06: I'm lucky enough to call him a dear friend.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_06: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the Camo Cave, my good buddy Micah Hanks.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_07: How are you doing there, Lawreen?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_07: You know, I hear around here uh a very special guy refers to you by the name Lawreen, and this is my first time in the Camo Cave.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_07: That's right.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_07: So I'm extremely excited.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_07: And also after that wonderful intro, I'm really nervous now, so I don't know what to do.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_06: I'm the nervous one always.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_06: That's that's my role.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_06: And yes, I answer to Laurene, Lauren, I'll answer to a lot of things around here.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_06: So whatever you feel comfortable with, I will answer to it.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_07: Well, you know, I mean, my special nickname for you for many years has been Bebo.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_07: And it probably has to do in a funny way with uh one of our mutual interests.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, you know, you and I've often discussed over the years, including last night, uh, you know, our fascination with the wild men, better known in America as Sasquatch.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_07: There's a colloquial, you know, term for that.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, even my grandmother used this, but you certainly use it down your way in Mississippi, and that is booger.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_07: And you know, we we used to laugh about that, but it's become so endearing that now we all say it all the time.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_07: Yep.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_07: And I think it was just a natural transliteration, right, from booger right on over to bow.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_07: So which is just another weird little word that I picked up as a kid, but you know, that's kind of how this stuff goes.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_07: The etymology of oddity.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_07: So anyway, yeah, it's wonderful to be here.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_07: And yes, we are good friends of many years.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_07: Uh we don't get to catch up often enough.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_07: And so when you invited me, I thought, yeah, yeah, that's how I want to spend Halloween.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_06: Halloween.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_06: I'm so glad you're here.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_07: You know, right off the bat, also, I just want to mention, too, um, you know, y'all are very special to me, your whole family, in fact.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_07: And uh uh back during Hurricane Helene, when that swept through Appalachia a few years ago, your family came up here.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_07: Cuz was up here in Asheville making deliveries, uh, and uh, you know, I couldn't thank your family enough for coming up here and what they did, bringing things to the mountains uh while we were in need.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_07: So again, you know, uh having known you for a long time, I mean, that just kind of solidified things.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_07: My only regret was that when they were here, I wasn't able to go out there and meet Cuz and have a cup of coffee.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_07: So, you know what, we're still overdue for that one of these days, but I wanted to uh say thank you to your whole family for what you guys did for us here when we were in need in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_06: That's just a very cuz thing.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_06: He's he's always told me if you can't find a good guy, be the good guy.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_06: And you're like that.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_06: You're always the good guy.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_06: If you can't find a good guy, you are the good guy.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_06: And so I'm uh the only regret I have from that trip is that y'all didn't get to hang out.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_06: I was like, you would absolutely adore one another.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_07: Well, it's still on the bucket list for one of these days.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_06: So I mean, that's what happened.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, being here in the camo K, that's the next best thing, I think.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_06: Well, good.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_06: We're so glad to have you.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm gonna just jump right into it.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_06: Speaking of cuz, in the opening segment, I played a snippet of audio from the Pinder County 911.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_15: I'm kind of in the middle of the wood at the moment.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, sir.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_03: I'm familiar with the area.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: What was that, sir?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: Are you okay, sir?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, what's in the ride?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: There's something in the bed of your clock.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_06: What was your initial reaction when you heard that call?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_06: Because that's your neck of the woods.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, it's you know, fairly close, a few hours away, and the story behind this one is kind of odd because unlike a lot of you know audio that makes its way online and there's very little context for it, uh, you know, there were some YouTube content creators, uh, you know, and and and others who jumped all over this.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_07: They wanted to know where the call originated from.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, it was confirmed with the police department in question that they remembered when it came through.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_07: Uh and and they could confirm that this was not some sort of a viral hoax that somebody just created and put up online.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, it it was authenticated as having actually originated from that police department.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_07: Now, in terms of what we hear in the audio, I mean, the the thing that stands out the most is when the gentleman driving down the road says something leaps into the back of his truck and he you know proclaims very loudly, that's not human.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_04: That's not human.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_07: He leaves very little to the imagination, and yet everything to the imagination because we don't know exactly what it is.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_07: And so the theories are all over the place.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_07: You know, people have said on the nearer side of sanity that it was a deer.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_07: And look, I know as the fine folks at Mossy Oaks do, there are a lot of deer.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_07: And in in the southeastern United States, I have them in my yard and black bears and possums, raccoons, skunks, everything.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, it's like a bamboo movie in my front yard every day.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_07: So my first inclination would be to think white-tailed deer, but then there are these other speculations.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_07: You know, what if it was something else?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_07: What if, you know, this had been something uh, you know, supernatural?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_07: And one of the odd things about this call is that in addition to whatever ends up in this guy's truck, allegedly, it was the fact that he had seen what he perceived as being a person, maybe looking similar to an injured person.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_07: You know, some would say it was a ghost.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_07: He sees this while he's driving down the road.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_07: So again, it's hard to really understand exactly what this person had seen.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_07: We can't rule out that it might have just been a prank.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_07: But you know, I try not to, when it comes to cases like this, lead with, well, it's obviously a hoax, just because it sounds extraordinary.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_07: There are a lot of things, as you know, Lauren, that can contribute to why something seems extraordinary and some things very well could be extraordinary by our standards.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_07: You just never know.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_07: So beyond that, really, there's not a whole lot of context, and this one kind of remains perplexing to me.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_06: It is so weird.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_06: And I ended up, of course, digging into that a little further.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_06: And there were some people that were trying to dox the guy and and find out who he was and put his name out there and find out he had sold the truck and people were trying to track down the truck so they could see the claw marks that were supposedly on the back of the truck.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_06: But I did see an interview, he seemed like a very nice, normal gentleman.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_06: I think he was in the military and he was on leave when this happened, and he just comes across very level-headed.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_06: But when you're listening to stories like that, how do you separate the truly unusual stuff from events that could potentially have conventional explanations?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_07: That's a good question.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, a lot of the time it comes down to uh, you know, are the things that people are describing uh circumstances that have a simple alternative explanation?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_07: Now, for your uh the the the benefit of your listeners, uh, because I listen to your podcast all the time.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_07: I'm not sure that um the listeners, of course, of Fistful of Dirt would be listening to my shows.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_07: So my background is primarily as a broadcast journalist.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_07: You never would have been able to tell that, I'm sure.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_07: Nowadays I work as a science writer and a reporter covering space and science for my own website, the debrief, and also for space.com.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_07: Now, I have long had an interest in the unexplained.
• 17:58
  unknown: Yes.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_07: And I've had to, over the years, because I got too much stuff going on, I've had to whittle that down to uh, you know, what the United States military these days calls UAP or unidentified anomalous phenomena.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_07: Traditionally, those are the same thing as UFOs.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_07: And then I love the the folklore and you know some of the traditional indigenous American beliefs and also modern reports involving alleged Sasquatch or Bigfoot sightings.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_07: Big controversy in that field right now, as you know.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_07: Now, when it comes to studying UAP or UFOs, I still like calling them UFOs, you know, there are so many things that people can see in the night sky that really look strange.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_07: And if you know what you're looking at, they aren't that strange.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_07: But more often than not, people, and I've done this too, this is how I know this.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I've seen those things that look really strange, and then I end up calling up a friend at NASA or somebody, and they say, Oh, you saw the space station.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, you know, that was a satellite.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_07: And having gone through a lot of that process of trial and error over the years, thinking I saw something really interesting, understanding what that is, kind of earmarking it and saying, okay, that's what that looks like.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_07: A big one these days, Starlink satellites.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_07: People report Starlink satellites all the time.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_07: And they really think they're seeing something anomalous because of the way these things appear in the sky and sometimes the way that they reflect light.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_07: It can create optical illusions that, strange as it sounds, look like an object flying in a circle when in fact you're seeing the Starlink train as light's reflecting off of each individual Starlink satellite as they move through the sky.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_07: So, you know, those kinds of things they can be explained if you know how to do it.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_07: And so back to your question when it comes to separating those things which could be truly anomalous, you know, from the ordinary, it really comes down to having a good observer.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_07: And so one of the things that I really like about trying to evaluate these kinds of cases is when you get to know these observers, you know, there are some who would call themselves skeptics and they would even call themselves debunkers, and they would say, you know, you have to you have to try and rule out all these things and debunk the extraordinary claims.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_07: I don't like doing it like that.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_07: I find that often when I can explain something that a witness has seen, it's because they provided me a really good description of what they saw.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_07: And I can listen carefully and I can take notes and I can, you know, look at uh Stellariums, you know, star maps, or, you know, radar data, Flight Radar 24, or one of those similar, you know, apps that you'd use to track aircraft.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_07: I can look at all that, and sometimes I can tell exactly what it was that they saw because they gave me such a good eyewitness account.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_07: So to me, it's not about debunking, it's about vindicating the witness.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_07: You know what?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_07: You were absolutely right.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_07: You did see this.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_07: There was a big light in the sky, it wasn't an airplane, it was exactly where you said it was.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_07: Now it turned out to be a rocket launch, but I couldn't have figured that out if you weren't a great observer.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_07: So, you know, vindicating those witnesses is what it's about for me.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_07: Now, sometimes though, you get down to these cases where you can't explain what people saw.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_07: And there are a few of them, a residuum of unexplains, whether it's UFOs or other things.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_07: And again, this case down there, uh right here in the old North State that we're talking about, this is one of those that I could speculate all day about whether it might have been a deer, what was going on.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_07: We just don't know.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_07: But again, the witnesses, the law enforcement officers, the people who have seemingly brought a lot of data and credibility to this case, they certainly make it one that stands out due to the quality of those involved and their professions and the merit that that brings to this story.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_06: What a great answer.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_06: So that kind of that kind of goes into, I was gonna ask you when you're listening to one of these unusual stories from an observer, is there something that you kind of listen for, like to kind of vet the people to decide if you're in or if you're out on what's being discussed?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and unfortunately, one of those things that I think you'll start to kind of pick up on is when people come to you and they tell you they've seen something unusual.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_07: Let's say it's a UFO.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_07: Uh the one of the number one things I look out for that's kind of red flag is.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_07: They'll tell a really good sighting and then they'll say, Oh, and this is like the fourth or fifth one I've seen.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_07: My gosh, I mean, I see these things all the time.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_07: And so that's a that's kind of one of those things that makes you go, oh, so you see a lot of UFOs.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_07: And unfortunately, that will often be an indication that this is a person who has, you know, a tendency to see things that they may not be familiar with and immediately conclude, ah, another UFO.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_07: You know, another another variation on that, Lauren, would be uh the the folks who go outside and they say, I watch UFOs have sky battles every single night.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_07: Now they're looking at satellites, you know.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_04: Of course.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, they're stepping out during the barbecue at night and they're watching uh just after the sun's gone down.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_07: And so the satellites that are being illuminated from across the horizon, they're watching those satellites.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_07: And when you see a couple of them that are on a perpendicular course, they can really, when you're watching them, people often talk about them flying in figure eights around each other and doing all kinds of crazy things.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_07: Yet again, optical illusions can cause these things to look like they're flying in circles when really they're just flying on perpendicular paths.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_07: I have seen clouds moving around a light that caused it to look like it was moving.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_07: And when you're focusing on that, for instance, a star or a planet, if you're not paying attention to those clouds that they're moving around it, it'll make it look like that object's moving.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I have fallen for that uh optical illusion as well.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_07: So again, when I hear people say, oh man, yeah, I mean, come over to my house.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_07: We see these things every night.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, unless these are really, really good descriptions that make me think, okay, maybe, maybe something really is going on, that would be one of those red flags.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_07: Now, by contrast, when somebody says, you know, I never really believed in UFOs, you know, never really believed in strange creatures or anything like that, never seen anything like that.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, and I was driving down the highway one night and then this thing happened.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_07: Those kinds of cases where somebody just this was outside my worldview and then it just invaded my reality and then it was gone as quick as it came.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_07: Those kinds of things really are the ones that make me go, okay, yeah, tell me some more.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_07: And of course, if you've got a multiple witness sighting, and if people happen to capture video or imagery, you know, yet again, a story is often really neat, and I can usually tell a lot from just a story, but you give me a good photograph or video, then we really got something to talk about.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_06: Something to sink our teeth into.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_06: So this episode, it kind of from the 911 call, and then I was like, I gotta talk to Micah.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_06: I just went down the whole Appalachia rabbit hole.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_06: And it just I would say we could do a whole entire episode just on that region because it is just rich.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_06: And I know it's because it's old and that has to have something to do with it, but why do you think that area is so rich in folklore and superstition and unusual stuff that happens?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_07: Well, you think about the traditions that it came over to the Appalachian Mountains, you know, from across the pond, you know, when the early Irish settlers and the English settlers, my family's partially from Scotland, and then the rest from Wales, you know, there were traditions uh that were brought along with them.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_07: Now, the people who were here first, of course, the indigenous Americans, they have incredible traditions.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_07: Those are the, to me, some of the most interesting ones.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_07: Right here in North Carolina, uh, Western North Carolina, in fact, where I am, we have the eastern band of the Cherokee, and they tell their stories of the uh Yoonwee Junste, I believe is how they pronounce it, uh, the little people.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_14: Long before fairy tales crossed the Atlantic, the Cherokee were already telling stories of the Yunwee Tsoonsti, the Little People.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_14: They weren't remembered as a vanished people, but as neighbors of the mountains, living in hidden forests, secluded coves, and deep caves.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_14: Small in stature but powerful in spirit, they were said to help those who respected the land, occasionally punish those who didn't, and guide lost children home.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_14: Even today, stories persist of tiny footprints appearing outside forgotten sand caves deep in the Appalachian Mountains.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_14: Whether those stories are true or simply part of the legend, one question remains.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_14: Are the Yunweed Sunsti still hiding deep within the mountains?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_07: So many traditions of little people in various traditions from around the world.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_07: And again, our Scotch, Irish, and English uh you know forebears that came over from Europe, they too brought stories of fairies.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_07: So you think about those traditional beliefs, you think about the traditions, and again, some of the the kind of universal factors, I mean ghosts.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_07: Everybody in cultures all around the world have their views about ghosts, their beliefs about ghosts.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_07: Now, the anthropologist would tell you, you know, this is kind of a vestige from earlier beliefs that involved worship of ancestors and things along those lines.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_07: You know, for my own part, I'm not so sure about that because I mean you hear in our modern times people who tell very vivid stories of having seen what you could only call an apparition.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_07: Um, you know, I've never had one of those experiences myself.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_07: I'm one of those really boring guys, but I'm still very intrigued by the stories.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm you've heard those stories.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_07: We all hear those stories.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_07: I've heard those stories from hunters who've been out there, they'll get out in the woods and they'll be in, you know, an old swamp or something that might have had uh, you know, some relevance to the Civil War or something.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_07: And you'll hear ghost stories even from hunters, which is really wild to me.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_07: But I mean, I've I've heard so many of those stories that to me, I can't help but feel like there is some kind of phenomenon that maybe we just can't quite figure out.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, you know, I'll hear physicists often say it's impossible for a ghost to exist because there's no way that any kind of energetic expression of a human being could exist outside their human body after they've died.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm thinking to myself, well, I mean, first of all, that seems to be based on the presumption that you're you're thinking that a soul or a spirit is what we traditionally think of a ghost as a being, but what if there's something different?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_07: You know, we hear about this so-called phenomenon from time to time called time slips, where people claim that they go through an area and they find themselves in a area that looks different from how it's supposed to in modern times.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_07: And the premise is what if time can slip and we can find ourselves in a different, temporarily at least, in a different kind of you know, space where we're seeing the same space, but maybe from a different era.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_07: Now, uh to me, that isn't necessarily so much suggestive of paranormal phenomena as it is maybe, hey, there could be something about physics and space-time dimensionality that we haven't quite figured out yet.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_07: But what if, what if what we call ghosts are actually some part of that?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_07: And you know, what if one day, once we figure out whatever that is, that won't be quote unquote paranormal or supernatural.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, it will be normal, it will be science, but we just ain't figured it out yet.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_07: So, in my opinion, I mean, I I find it fascinating that all around the world you have those traditions.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_07: But in Southern Appalachia, I mean, it's such a melting pot, you know, with the indigenous Cherokee here and and people from you know Europe, people from all parts of the world, all having brought their traditions here.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_07: And yeah, you you you find a lot of it here in Southern Appalachia.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_07: So when I grew up, I was hearing the stories about um, you know, the famous Brown Mountain Lights.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_07: That's right.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_07: I was hearing the stories about uh the haunted Grove Park Inn, which is here in Asheville.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_07: Uh there are many homes, historic homes that are reported to be haunted.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, all these kinds of traditions.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_07: And there was an excellent author who collected that kind of folklore, if you want to call it that, uh, Nancy Roberts.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_07: And she traveled around and she wrote these stories, and you can still find her books, but I mean she wrote excellent uh stories about these famous locations.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_07: And as a kid, you know, I was just fascinated in all of it, and I had to try and get out to all of them.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_07: One of the most interesting ones is called The Devil's Tramping Ground, which is a strange circular fig, like kind of a feature on the ground off the main highway out near Siler City, North Carolina.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_07: And uh the theories are that it might have been, you know, an area where there was a natural salt deposit.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_07: One theory is that it might have been where a horse had walked in a circle actually as part of a grinding, a grain grinding uh operation or something.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_07: But the traditional beliefs are that when you go there, nothing will grow on that spot.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_07: If you uh you know place any kind of you know, sticks or stones or vegetation, it's always supposedly gone by the next morning.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_07: You know, who knows exactly what that is?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_07: Again, I think that the probable uh theory right now, according to my brother who recently did a deep dive down into this, is that there's a natural salt deposit there, and that that that salt presence, the salinity, I guess, uh keeps uh plants from growing there.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_07: But in any case, I mean it has a tradition that's been growing around it for a long time, and people still go there.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_07: It's still sort of a a site of interest, and people travel there to try and figure out what's going on at the devil's tramping ground.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_07: And as the name entails, the uh common folklore uh associated with it is that the devil himself walks there and that it's his treading in a circle there at Silo City uh that has caused that spot that nothing will grow.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_07: So again, you know, those kind of folk tales they're ubiquitous throughout the mountains here, and I've always enjoyed them.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_06: I love that.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_06: That reminds me so much.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_06: You can almost throw a rock and hit this spot on the Natchez Trace that's not that far from where we live, and they call it the witches dance.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_06: And there are circles where grass won't grow, and they said it was because that's where the witches would dance barefoot.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_06: I love that kind of stuff.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_06: They've got plaques and they've dedicated a whole little rest area to it now.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_07: And what about haunted bridges?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_07: Have you got those down there?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_06: Oh yeah, the Sokotanchi Bridge, which don't ask me to spell that, but we've got lots of spooky bridges, railroad tracks.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_07: Oh yeah.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_07: Basically everywhere you go in in you know, rural parts of of North America, you're gonna find those stories.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_07: And it it's really interesting to me that uh a lot of them have very similar names.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_07: Like for instance, we have a Helen's Bridge and a Helen's house here in Asheville.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_07: And uh I went online a few years back and I did a search for you know Helen's Bridge, Helen's Mountain, Helen's House, and I mean a lot of them came up.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_07: A lot of websites, a lot of ghost investigations looking into these things.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_07: Similar thing about 191, right down here by the French Broad River.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_07: There's a story about a guy or a girl, depending on which version of the story you hear, and they're a hitchhiker.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_07: One of the most common ones is it's a girl and she's in a prom dress, and that you pick her up and you take her home, and then you get there and she's not in the back seat, and you go to the door and you say there was a girl, and she said she lived here, and when I got here, she wasn't in the backseat, and the parents go, We got another one.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_07: And then they tell the sad story of how their daughter died on prom night many, many years ago.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, these stories, yet again, a lot of them you can tell, they have those kind of hallmarks of folklore, right?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_07: Where they it's like an archetype, uh, and and they they each town kind of have their own version of that.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_07: But then, you know, you'll meet those people who swear up and down, no, no, no, it's not us, you know, it's not just folklore.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_07: I actually had that happen to me.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_07: I have been there, I've had that experience firsthand.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_07: Which is always kind of fascinating to me.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_07: For instance, Helen's Bridge here in Asheville.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I couldn't tell you how many people have gone up there and claim they've had strange things happen at Helen's Bridge, and you know, people who have told me that they've seen the ghost walking down there on 191.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_07: So I wonder sometimes, I mean, what are the kind of things that contribute to that?
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_07: I do know one time my brother and his wife and I, we had flown out to Utah and uh we were we were driving out through the Uinta basin in the middle of the night.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, it was so late.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_07: We'd flown into uh probably somewhere in Colorado before that, and then we had driven over the mountain to Utah.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_07: And so, I mean, we were coming in really late, we'd been on the road for a couple of hours, and we see this guy out there, I mean, in the middle of nowhere, and he's just wearing like overalls, right?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_07: No shirt, just overalls, and he's thumbing a ride.
• 33:58
  unknown: Oh, wow.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_07: And uh that's the last thing you want to see out here on this road.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_07: And I can tell you right now, that poor guy's gonna be thumbing all night because nobody's gonna pick him up.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_07: You look so scary though, you know, and I'm thinking, well, that'd probably be one way that you could come up with a story about a haunted highway and a and a scary hitchhiker, you know.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_07: I don't know, that one might not be about a a prom date that went wrong.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, it might have more to do with a serial killer from the looks of that guy, but you know, either way, it looks like something out of a horror movie.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_06: And then you you start to think too, it's gotta be a lot of um spoken passed down stories when you end up with a Helen's bridge and a Helen's house, you know, you think, oh, it it's like that game where you tell it and and little details get left, but you remembered the name Helen.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_06: So uh that's kind of curious too.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_06: We have some things like that where there's some overlap with names, and I just love to hear how all that came to be and you wish you could trace it back to the the original origin.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_06: Like who who saw the overall hitchhiker and how did the story get started to begin with?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_07: I know the answer to that one.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_07: It was me.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_07: I saw the overall hitchhiker.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_13: You know, old timer builds knives with durability in mind.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_13: They also wanted to be a tool that is comfortable enough to work with day after day.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_13: Since the beginning, old timer has made knives for those who don't rely on others to get the job done.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_13: I love that.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_13: Old timer built for generations.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_13: You know, there's nothing I love more than teaching my grandkids how to be better woodsmen.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_13: The Onex app helps me do that in a way that makes sense to them.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_13: They're all about apps and that phone.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_13: Using Onex to set optimal wind on stands that should or shouldn't be hunted on certain winds makes it easier for them to understand that, hey, a north wind blows from the north, not to the north.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_13: Using that little slope angle layer when teaching them how to read topographical maps, but the color codec shading makes it a lot easier to explain to them what tightly static topo lines mean.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_13: Bottom line, Onex Hunt makes learning fun for those young ones.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_13: It still helps me find success in the field.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_13: It's an easy-to-use platform.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_13: Hey, even I can do it.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_13: I suggest it for any age outdoors.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_10: You're listening to Fistful of Dirt.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_10: Presented by Monte Oak Properties.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, the tale of the Brown Mountain Light.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Legend has it, you can see those mysterious lights on a fallen light, but no one has ever been able to explain what causes them.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_12: While scientists believe the brown mountain lights are the result of unusual chemical reactions or reflected light, local folklore tells a ghostlier tale of spirits roaming the mountain.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to the lightings.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: I like to believe it.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_12: Using a special night camera, we believe we captured one of the darting brown mountain lights.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_12: It was visible only for a few seconds.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_12: This man also saw the lightning.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_09: It didn't look like an airplane light or a beacon.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_09: It didn't look like a car headlight.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_09: I think it was something very unusual.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_12: Scientists have long tried to pinpoint the cause of the lights.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_12: 82-year-old Winnie Biggerstaff wishes the scientists would stay away.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_11: I guess it's more fun not to know what they are because it'll still be a mystery.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_11: Just leave it as it is.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_06: And when I was studying and and going into that region, and what can we talk about?
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_06: Of course, the brown mountain lights is one of the first things that pops up.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_06: And when I clicked on the link, it took me to Micah Hanks.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_06: Because he's talked about this many times.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_06: And I was like, Well, this is perfect because I know him.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_06: So we'll just get Micah to tell us.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_06: For those of our listeners who have never heard of the Brown Mountain Lights in North Carolina, tell them what it is.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, well, I mean, yet again, this is a kind of phenomenon that you'll probably hear about in a lot of different places.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_07: I'm not sure of anything specifically there in Mississippi, but uh over in Texas near Marfa, there are lights that people see uh down on the South Carolina coast.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_07: Around Somerville, people say that they see lights.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_07: Um, there's an area up in Pennsylvania where I know people say that they see lights.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_07: So, you know, ghost lights, spook lights, you know, haunt lights, whatever you want to call them.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, these are things that are seen all over the place.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_07: But Brown Mountain is probably one of the most famous, I would, I would argue.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_07: And uh a few of the reasons for that probably have to do with the way that this phenomena has kind of progressed throughout time.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_07: So the earliest sightings began uh back in around 1911, 1912.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_07: The first newspaper accounts also appeared around that time.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_07: Now, almost immediately people started saying, Yeah, but those lights had been seen much earlier.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_07: And then in the 1920s, a U.S.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_07: geological uh uh service um researcher came down, George R.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_07: Mansfield from the USGS, he came down to North Carolina and he investigated the lights.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_07: Now, very intriguingly, in his investigation, he said, sure enough, you can go up there on what's called Ginger Creek Ridge, where you're looking out across the valley at Brown Mountain.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_07: And Brown Mountain is a long sloping ridgeline that you can see.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_07: It's actually in the Black Mountains adjacent to the Limville Gorge, uh, down probably closest town would be uh Morganto, if we're talking about Brown Mountain proper.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_07: But again, often what people will do is they'll drive up to a little town called Limville Falls, and they'll drive up to what's called Wiseman's View.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_07: It's a beautiful lookout.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_07: And up there on that cliff from Wiseman's View, you look across toward the uh Brown Mountain area.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_07: And first what you see is Table Rock, then you see Hawksville Rock, these two beautiful, prominent mountain peaks covered in stones, and then off in the distance beyond them you can see Brown Mountain.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_07: So, I mean, it's a good place to look and you can see everything that's happening in the gorge, and often people say that they see these lights right there in the Lumble Gorge, too.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_07: So beginning around 1911, 1912, people began saying they were seeing those lights, and a lot of folks from down in Morganto in the area of Lake James, they claim that when they were looking back up there toward Brown Mountain, they could actually see these lights.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_07: When Mansfield starts his investigation, he is immediately getting stories from people going all the way back, some of the old timers who were alive shortly after the Civil War.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_07: And they were saying that, you know, by maybe the 1860s, they were actually seeing these lights, which is intriguing because even Mansfield noted, there's no way that we can verify this.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_07: People say that they saw these lights, but we don't have any photographs or anything documenting this.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_07: But that was intriguing to him because he said around that time there wouldn't have been railroads in the region.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_07: Now, what Mansfield determined in the 1920s was that the oncoming headlights of railroads, uh, locomotives on railroads, I should say, that was absolutely what people were seeing.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_07: He said that most of these could be positively traced to locations where he found railroads, and that at certain times of day, coinciding with when those trains came through the region, that bright headlight on those trains was what people from up in the mountains were looking down into the valleys and they were seeing.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_07: So he said to his satisfaction, the Brown Mountain lights were just railroad headlights, but he couldn't quite explain why some people back in the 1860s and 70s, before there were railroads in the region, they too said they remembered seeing lights.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_07: Now, another kind of interesting thing about this that really only came to light in the last few years, there were some researchers, including a geologist named Ed Speer, who wrote a book about the Brown Mountain lights, and I got to know Ed pretty well.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_07: And he and others had begun to notice that there were mentions of very similar things, ideas around that same time.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_07: A particular one that appeared in the famous novel called Master of the World by Jules Verne.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_07: And Jules had created this character, uh, Rober.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_07: And in fact, I think the first novel was called Rober the Conqueror.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_07: In his sequel called Master of the World, Rober, who was a guy who piloted a airship, uh, had made his base on top of this big mountain called the Great Erie, and it was based, guess where?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_07: Outside of Morganton, North Carolina.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_07: Now, fun fact about Jules Verne, he never traveled, I think, you know, outside of France.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_07: He was never very far from his own home.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_07: He didn't go out, he wasn't a well-traveled person, but he read a lot, and he had a tremendous imagination.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_07: And so people naturally wanted to know you know, how did uh Jules Verne know anything about Morganton, North Carolina?
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_07: Well, he most likely was reading these travel logs, but intriguingly, what he was writing about in Ro in uh Master of the World preceded the first sightings of the Brown Mountain lights.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_07: And in the book, he talks about how people in the little towns of Morganton and the nearby towns up there in the mountains, they could see eerie lights and smoke from up there on top of the Great Erie.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_07: Sure enough, within a few years after, or maybe around the time at least, that English translations of Master of the World made their way to audiences in North America, people started seeing lights up there in the mountains near Morganton.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_07: Now, nobody calls Table Rock or any of the other associated mountains the Great Erie.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_07: This had kind of been just a fictional trope that uh Jules Verne created for that story, but some, and again, my colleague uh Mr.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_07: Spear, he would argue that, well, it was actually Jules Verne and his stories about you know the the wicked rober and his airship.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_07: That probably was the genesis of the Brown Mountain Light.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_07: I would differ because in addition to Spear actually saying, well, no, people definitely see lights, but they have a common explanation.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, there are also sightings of these lights that rise well up above the ridge lines and travel up into the air.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_07: And in fact, I have had uh several colleagues of mine who have seen these, who have photographed them.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_07: Um, Charles Braswell, who's a photographer down and around Charlotte, North Carolina, he's photographed these lights many times.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_07: And then there was a professor at Appalachian University, rather skeptical, but again, a good scientist.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_07: He was an astronomer named uh Dr.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_07: Dan Caton.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_07: He's still up there teaching uh physics and astronomy at App State.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_07: But uh Dan was the big skeptic, and he said, you know, if there's anything going on, we'll figure it out pretty quick, or we won't see anything.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_07: And so he says, I'm gonna set up cameras that are watching Brown Mountain at all times.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_07: We'll put them in people's houses up there on the ridge.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_07: If there's anything showing up, we'll get it on camera.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_07: Well, Dan sure enough started getting things on camera.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_07: And much to his surprise, he said, Yeah, I mean, ball lightning-like phenomena, transient luminous phenomena does seem to appear over Brown Mountain.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_07: Now he said, it's not UFOs, it's not something weird.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_07: He says, whatever it is, it's probably plasmas, but there's something going on.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_07: And again, Dan just kind of left it at that.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_07: So in short, it's very intriguing that the progression of ideas about what's going on at Brown Mountain have taken us from people seeing these things in the early part of the last century, many saying that they had known about them earlier.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_07: There were also claims of Indian legends, you know, that told about seeing the Brown Mountain lights.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_07: Unfortunately, historical records do not confirm that.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_07: Now, it's definitely possible there could be oral traditions.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_07: You know, we can't discount that, but there aren't any written records that can conclusively say that prior to the 1912, 1913 period, that people had described and knew well of the phenomenon seen there at Brown Mountain.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_07: There's nothing that documents that.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_07: Um, but we certainly do have documentation of lights that appear in the sky over that mountain today.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_07: And so I think it somewhat, yet again, vindicates those witnesses and that over the years, but there were multiple attempts to try and explain this away as being railroad lights or just, you know, cultural things, people wanting to see stuff after they read Jules Verne.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_07: Now, some of those people very well may have actually been seeing strange things.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_07: And, you know, for years I've gone down there with friends.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_07: Now, one quick story, because he'll be mad at me if I don't tell this.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_07: I was down there one chilly night with my friend David Weatherly.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_07: We jumped in his jeep, rode up the mountain together, and um, as we were standing there, it was very cold, and I didn't really think I was seeing anything, but looking across, we were at Wiseman's View looking across at Table Rock, and I I kind of thought I was seeing just a the slightest kind of a hint of a little glowing something.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_07: And he said, Are you seeing that?
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_07: And I said, Well, what are you seeing?
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_07: And he says, It's like a little electric something kind of dancing through the trees.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_07: I'm like, I do think I'm seeing that, but I'm not sure it's it's really just anything more than my eyes playing tricks on me.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_07: And David looks over at me, he says, Namica, if we come away from here and you try to say that you didn't see the brown mountain lights, I'm gonna be mad at you.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_07: So to honor my friend David Weatherly, as I promised, yeah, we both saw something.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_07: Yes.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_07: Or at least we thought we did.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_07: Now, to me, that's not.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_07: And again, the only reason I was hesitant is because the light phenomena that is captured on camera and on film sometimes, I mean, these are large glowing orbs of light.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_07: They're brilliant, they're bright, they seem to move through the sky, they remain illuminated.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_07: One of the most interesting videos I've seen in recent years, my good friend Jesse and Joe, they were up there, they're from down in the Greenville, South Carolina area, and they travel around the region doing, you know, investigations and things.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_07: And Jesse and Joe went up there, and I got a message from Jesse one evening saying, we caught something on camera up there at Brown Mountain that I think you need to see, Mr.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_07: Hanks.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_07: And I said, Okay, let's take a look.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_07: You know, I get a lot of messages like that, but Jesse's footage was fascinating.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_07: They were live streaming this, I think, or at least attempting to.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_07: I think they had like a Starlink with them up there.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_07: What they filmed was on a windy night, very cold in February, and there are these lights that come up off of uh table rock, they drift up into the sky, and then one of them just sits there and hovers for forever.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_07: Now, I had a friend at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and I showed it to her, and I said, you know, what do you think this is?
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_07: And she says, I think it's probably just a candle balloon.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_07: And I said, Well, but I mean, on a windy night, I know how high those winds, how strong the winds can be up there in the Limble Gorge.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_07: Boy, again, just asked David Weatherly, who was with me that night.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_07: It's very uncomfortable.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_07: But I don't think there's any way that a candle balloon on a windy night, and she confirmed that.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_07: In fact, in the footage, you could see the wind blowing in the trees and things.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_07: And so she said it was extremely windy, very cold and uncomfortable.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_07: But we were watching these lights and just couldn't stop looking at them.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_07: Whatever this light is, it goes up there and it hovers and it stays for a long time and then it moves around a little.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_07: And I was looking at this, waiting just to see it again bank and turn and then get dim, thinking it was an aircraft, you know.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_07: And it never does.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_07: These things just remain and then another one shows up, and there are a couple of them.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_07: So, you know, I can't say that there's some paranormal phenomena in Jesse's footage, but I can definitely tell you that what she filmed is harder to explain than a celestial phenomenon.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_07: It isn't consistent with a great big planet sitting there, and planets don't, you know, move in circles.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, they'll move, they appear to be moving through the sky, but again, that actually has more to do with the rotation of the earth.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, these objects would hover, they would move in circles.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_07: Doesn't seem consistent with candle balloons, doesn't seem consistent with aircraft.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_07: I don't know what she filmed, but it was definitely interesting.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_07: And again, that video is actually still available online.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_07: Um, I'll have to get a link for that.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_07: But Jesse and Joe, my friends, I think they uh they've got all kinds of things on their YouTube channel.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_07: So that that's one of the best ones I've seen in recent years.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_06: Wow, you know that's on my bucket list to come up there and go try to find the Brown Mountain lights.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, see, I've never seen anything except for maybe what I saw with David.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_07: But if you came up, I'm sure we would immediately see something.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_06: Of all the things, of all the weird, paranormal, spooky, it's the Halloween episode.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_06: If there were one story that you would want Cuz to hear, what is it?
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, there are two that really come to mind.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, let's hear it.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, so when I was a kid, uh one of the stories is that uh Bruce, so my father was in this band back in the 1960s, a garage band.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_07: They were called the Satyrs.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_07: The drummer in the band, Bruce, and my dad had always known each other, and they actually kept in touch a little better than some of the other guys in the band.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_07: And when I was a kid, they would play in bands together that would go out and you know, do gigs at country clubs and things like that.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_07: And I would go over there with him because I love music and of course grew up to be a musician myself, but I would go over with my dad and listen to the guys.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_07: And so we always called Bruce the drummer, Uncle Bruce.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_07: And dad said, Well, you know, one night while we were over there, he says, You should ask Bruce about what he saw out there in Madison County when he was a teenager.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_07: And I said, Well, okay, cool, yeah.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_07: So I went up and I said, Hey, Uncle Bruce, what was it that you saw in Madison County when you were a teenager?
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_07: And he says, Oh, you mean that thing?
• 51:07
  unknown: That thing.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_07: So he said, You know, I was about 15 or 16, and I'd gone over to my cousin's house, and my aunt told my cousin and I uh go out behind the house and go up to the top of the hill to the chicken shack, get some eggs, and I'm gonna make biscuits, you know, and eggs and things for dinner.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_07: So it's just about dusk, and they're starting up the hill, and they hear all this commotion up there at the chicken house, and as they're walking up toward it, they can see they think there's a bear and it's getting into the chicken house.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_07: So um Bruce and his cousin start making a bunch of noise, you know, trying to scare this bear off.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_07: And as Bruce is watching, he says, the bear comes out and it stands up head and shoulders above the chicken house, and he says, But as it looks down, he can see a lighter-colored face and light colored hands.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_07: And he says, and they were crooked-looking hands, it was weird looking, but he says, and it started dropping eggs, and wherever this thing was, it looked at us and he says it walked off into the woods trying to carry eggs on two legs.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_07: Oh, it just you know, really freaked me out uh when I was a kid, thinking, I mean, what did he see?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_07: Was it a Sasquatch?
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_06: That's what it sounds like.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_07: And I asked him that.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_07: I said, Bruce, did you see a bigfoot?
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_07: And he says, I don't know.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_07: For what I know, for all I know, it could have been a crazy old man.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_07: Now, that was when I was a kid.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_07: Well, many years later, uh, Bruce came over to the house when the whole band got back together and the guys were kind of reuniting.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_07: And so mom and dad were entertaining them over at my house, and I went over to see all the guys, and we were hearing all these cool old band stories, and they were kind of reminiscing.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_07: But I remembered that story from when I was a kid, and I went over to Bruce and I said, Bruce, do you remember when I was little, I asked you about something that you saw out there in Madison County.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_07: He says, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_07: The thing.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_07: He goes kind of into detail about what it looked like to him, and he said, you know, the way it looked to me, it almost was like a sloth.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_07: You know, it was, it was hunched over and it had long, hairy arms and everything.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_07: Definitely stood upright and it walked on two legs when it left.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_07: But he says there was another part to that too.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_07: He says, So the next day I went up there and you could see the path through the brush that this thing had walked as it went off.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_07: And he said, So I started following it.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_07: And he says, I mean, this thing tore right through brush and thorn.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_07: And he says, and I followed it all the way through this pine thicket up until it went up to the other end of the woods and everything, and there was a cornfield there, and I could see the path through the cornfield where this thing walked.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_07: And he said, Then I just chickened out and I had to go back.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_07: He said, After that, I didn't want to follow it anymore.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_07: But uh, he he went up there and he could clearly see a path through the forest, whatever this thing was huge, you know, whatever it was, it was huge.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_07: And he could clearly see where it had moved the night before as it took off into the forest.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_07: Now, again, make of that what you will.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_07: It definitely sounds consistent with a Sasquatch.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_07: Bruce never called it that.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, you know, he just called it kind of a thing, kind of a creature, and it was something very, very strange.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_07: Now, the other story I would tell you, though, is a little more personal because this one was uh a really strange one for me.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_07: I got to know um a friend of mine by the name of Joshua Warren, who used to be a writer here in the Asheville area, and he wrote about ghost stories and folklore and things like that.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_07: But Josh, when he lived here, naturally I was drawn to him because of his ghost stories and things like that.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_07: And um I ended up going over there and becoming involved in some of his ghost investigations and things.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_07: He had an organization.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, and I initially started off kind of as the guy who would answer emails.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_07: And after a time, I ended up becoming an investigator.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, I also ended up co-hosting and producing a radio show that he hosted on Saturday nights.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_07: And when he would actually take time off, he would often ask me, you know, Micah, you want to go and just host the show?
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_07: You can just go in there.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_07: And the people at the radio station loved that because they were like, well, this way we don't have to put in a rerun.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_07: We don't have to pay for a host and for a producer.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_07: Micah can sit there and he can produce his own show, cue all the music, take the calls, and run his mouth.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_07: And we only have to pay one producer a producer's fee.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_07: So they loved it when I was the host on Saturday nights, you know.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_07: No contracts, no big bucks, no worries.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_07: Little did they know though that they were breeding a broadcaster.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, that's literally where I cut my teeth.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_07: And I'd go in there, I'd invite my friends to come in with me.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_07: We would cue the music, then we would open the phones and start the show, and I would say, have you seen a UFO over Western North Carolina?
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_07: If you have, I want to hear from you.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_07: The number to call is 1-828-298-5501.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_07: Outside the local area, you can call 1-800.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_07: You know, we'd just open up the phone lines and people would call in and tell the most incredible stories.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_07: So that's really kind of how I cut my teeth, not only in broadcast radio, but also in reporting on UFOs.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_07: Now that said, Josh and I, we had a lot of adventures over the years, and one night I was over at his house, and I overheard him telling a story to one of our friends that was there with us.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_07: And the story was so strange, it went like this.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_07: There was a guy in his family named Claude, Claude Calloway.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_07: And Claude Calloway had gone missing.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_07: He just vanished.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_07: And under very strange circumstances, how it happened was there was a family photograph that was taken, and everybody showed up in the photograph.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_07: This would have been back in the 1950s or so.
• 56:24
  unknown: Okay.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_07: Everybody was in the photo except for Claude, whose face seemed obscured or kind of distorted.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_07: Now, you know, he might have just been moving, sneezed or something when the photo was taken, but in any case, his photo didn't quite, you know, his his face didn't show up in the photo.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_07: And the family thought that was weird.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_07: So a few days later, he is sitting out on the porch and his dad's talking to him through the open window, and he's saying, you know, Claude, do you want a tomato on your sandwich?
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_07: And he doesn't hear anything.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_07: And he had just been talking to Claude.
• 56:55
  unknown: Yeah.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_07: And so he calls to him again, Claude, hey, Claude, what do you want on your sandwich?
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_07: And he goes out there onto the porch and Claude's gone.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_07: And he thinks it's kind of odd that he'd just been talking through the open window to Claude, and that in the middle of preparing for lunch, Claude just got up and walked away, but he didn't think too much of it.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_07: He just thought, I might have walked down the road or something.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_07: Well, they never saw him again.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_07: What?
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_07: Claude.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_07: He just vanished.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_07: Now, that was weird.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_07: But what was really weird to me, I'm listening to this story.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_07: I'm standing just a few feet away from Josh.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_07: And Josh I'd known for a few years at this point.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_07: We'd been working together in various capacities, you know, and I said, Hold on, what was this guy's name?
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_07: And he said, Claude.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_07: I said, No, no, last name.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_07: He said, Claude Callaway.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_07: And I said, I've got Callaways in my family, and I swear I have heard this story too.
• 57:43
  unknown: No.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_07: I think our family has the same story.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_07: So sure enough, my dad, who's really into genealogy, I tell him, I'm like, I think we might be related to Josh.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_07: And so my dad digs into the family.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_07: He goes and he calls Josh's mom.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_07: He calls other members of the family, starts digging into the genealogy, gets on ancestry, and he's like, Yep, Joshua Warren is your fourth cousin.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_07: We are related to them, and the link between us is the Callaways.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_07: Claude.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm like, well, yeah.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm like, I knew it because I mean when he was telling that story, I knew the same story.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_07: I'd heard all about Claude Callaway, our ancestor.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_07: And Dad goes, well, now hold on about that though.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_07: Now who told you that story?
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_07: And I said, Well, I don't know.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_07: I guess it was Aunt Jewel, you know, one of your one of your cousins or something.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_07: And Dad said, no, because nobody on our family on our side of the Callaways would have known those Callaways.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_07: He said, I never heard that story.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_07: And nobody on our side of the family would have known that story.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_07: So I mean, he says it's impossible that you could have known the story.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm like, but here's the thing.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I wouldn't have asked Josh what the last name was.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I'm I wouldn't have even asked about this guy if I hadn't recognized the story.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_07: And my dad's like, well, but I don't know how in the world you would have heard that story because nobody in our family would have known that.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_07: So the mystery within the Enigma is not only did this guy vanish after this eerie photograph, but somehow I seemingly recognized the story, despite nobody else on my side of the family ever having possibly heard it.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_07: And we've never been able to figure out exactly what happened there.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_07: Now, again, if I wanted to be a skeptic, I'd say there is such a thing.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_07: And I actually did when I was going to college, I dropped out to go work in radio.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_07: But before you I went to college for two years, maybe I'll go back and get a degree in physics, uh, you know, or something at some point.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_07: But I dropped out and uh went to work in radio.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_07: And before I did, I started studying psychology.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_07: I thought that actually that would be a career I wanted to pursue with a psychology degree.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_07: There is a phenomenon that you'll study called hindsight bias.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_07: And the idea is essentially that kind of like deja vu, when you hear something, you can sometimes misinterpret that as being something that you think that you've already heard when in fact you're hearing it for the first time.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_07: And that the psychological explanation for deja vu is that phenomenon they call hindsight bias.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_07: Well, anyway, I was fascinated by that when I was reading about it in school, and I wondered, I mean, could I have been exhibiting that?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_07: Could I have perceived a deja vu-like phenomenon where I thought I heard this story?
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_07: Well, maybe even if that's true, that doesn't explain, I mean, the the weirdness of this guy actually being related to me, and then it turning out that Josh and I were cousins.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, so I mean, in my opinion, almost any way you cut it, it's a really weird story.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_07: Even if you could say it was a coincidence that we were family members.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_07: I misremembered thinking I had heard this story before.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_07: Yet again, at the end of the day, there's this weird family connection, and we never found out what happened to Claude.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_07: Claude legitimately vanished into thin air and was never seen again.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_07: So again, that's my weird family story.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_07: One of them, there are others, but that's that's one of the ones I'd want cuz to hear.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_06: I cannot wait to let him hear this.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_06: Well, Micah, I've taken up enough of your time.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_06: I'm so glad you came and joined us in the camo cave.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_06: It's long overdue.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_06: There wouldn't even be a camo cave if it weren't for you and teaching me how to podcast.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_06: So thank you for that.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_06: I know our listeners are grateful.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_06: But where, if they want to come listen to your podcast, which I cannot recommend enough, your podcast is the reason I listen to podcasts at all.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_06: How can they find you?
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, you can find me.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_07: I'm pretty easy.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_07: Just look for micahanks.com.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_07: That's my website.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_07: And uh you can pretty much find everything I do.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I'm all over the place.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_07: Um, I've got a podcast uh that deals with the Sasquatch phenomenon.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_07: And, you know, I mean, at times it's skeptical.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_07: At times we talk to naturalists and people who are kind of on the fence.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_07: Sometimes we talk to full-blown believers.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_07: Some of these people call themselves knowers.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_07: They say, I don't believe I know I saw this thing.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_07: Well, you know, we try to feature all those perspectives and and all altogether making it uh interesting to ecologists and biologists and people who are out there doing science in nature.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_07: So, I mean, there's the Micah Hanks program, my flagship, Sasquatch Tracks is the other one.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_07: Um, and also, you know, I'm editor-in-chief of a science publication.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I know it's funny hearing me talk about folklore and stuff, and then they're like, yeah, you go right about astronomy and space and things by day.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_07: I'm really interested in everything.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_07: I am I am endlessly curious.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_07: I think to borrow a phrase that you used to use, you know, everything, I'm curious about it.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_07: And I and I love science.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_07: And I think that the things that remain presently unknown, uh, they're just friends we haven't made yet.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_07: One of these days we'll understand them better.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_07: So, yeah, folks can follow me at micahanks.com.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_07: You'll be able to find links to all the other stuff from there.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_06: Awesome.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_06: Thank you so much, Micah.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you, Laureen, and I hope we can do it again sometime.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_06: We will.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_06: Did you enjoy that?
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_13: Fast absolutely fascinating.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_06: I love the chicken coop story with Uncle Bruce.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_13: The thing.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_06: The thing.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_13: You know, and look, you can say whatever you want to.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_13: Nobody told the story.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_13: They wouldn't write books, they weren't wanting anybody to know about why wouldn't he make something up?
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_13: And only tell it if somebody asked you about it decades later.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_13: I'm telling you, there's uh there's something to it.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_13: There's always something out there that we don't understand.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_13: I can promise you that.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_13: That's why I got into reading the missing 411 library from Dave Pallitus.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_13: Just a lot we can't explain.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_13: And I was like, no, I'm a hunter.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_13: I I can figure this out.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_13: No.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_06: Nope.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_13: The deeper I got, the more confused I became.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_06: So more confused ten years later.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_13: Oh yeah.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_13: Still more confused.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_13: So uh I know you had fun working on that as Right Up your Alley.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_13: I know sometimes you get tired of editing stuff about food plots and tractors and tree stands and all that.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_06: I love it all.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_06: I promise.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_06: I love it all.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_13: Love it all.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_13: I do too.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_13: So wonderful, wonderful podcast.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_13: I had absolutely nothing to do with it once again.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_13: I got so many comments about the uh the salute to Colonel Tom Kelly that you put together.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_13: And I had I had I answered so many people, I had copied and pasted my reply.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_13: Thank you, that was all on.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_13: And I sent that 30 times to different people.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_13: So people are so kind.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_13: People are kind, especially people that listen to this podcast.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_13: So before uh we get out of here, we're gonna have something I don't think we've ever done.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_13: We're gonna have a bonus episode.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, y'all get two this week.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_06: I'll see you in two days.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_13: Thursday, right?
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_06: Thursday the 29th.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_13: We're doing a hunt the vote special, trying to encourage people to get out and vote.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_13: And I know you hear this all the time, and you know, some people don't like you getting political.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_13: It's not being political, it's being patriotic.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_13: That's right.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_13: Uh so we're gonna have a a little special with uh Keith Mark, the founder of uh Hunter Nation.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_13: He's relentless.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_13: He's uh good friends with Ted Nugent.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_13: He started uh the Hunter Nation thing and the hunt the boat thing, which is a great uh thing to join.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_13: You can all the information you could possibly need, but listen to him and what he's got to say about uh how powerful this group hunting, fishing, trapping, all these great people can be if we just stick together and go to the poll.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_13: So got a special bonus episode, I'm assuming Thursday.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_06: Thursday the twenty ninth.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_13: So all right.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_13: So from me and Laureen up in the Camo Cave, semi haunted again.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_13: God bless you all.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_06: In two days.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_13: There you go.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_10: Find your favorite place.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_10: Visit Mossyok Properties.com.