Transcript
Lowe's Advertiser (0:01)
Pro Savings Days are back at Lowe's with limited time savings on the supplies pros need. Get up to 40% off select major appliances plus save an additional $100 on every $1,000 you spend on select Major appliances. And don't miss your chance to activate and earn three times the points on select DeWalt and Klein tools Lowes we help you save Valo. The 328 selection varies by location while supplies last. See associate or lowes.com for more details on qualifying items.
Erin Mankey (0:33)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild.
Erin Mankey (0:42)
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Narrator (1:06)
Are we truly alone in this universe? This question can mean many different things based on the tone in which it's asked. If asked in a tone of hope and wonder, it makes us reflect on the majesty of the universe, infinite space and possibility among the stars and all that. But it can also be asked in a tone of apprehension or fear. Loneliness is comforting in a sense, because that would mean that no intelligences beyond our own are scrutinizing the planet From Dark void of Space Anxiety about extraterrestrial invasions is well over a century old. First we looked to the heavens and saw gods. Then, as the industrial age took over post Enlightenment, we looked to the heavens and saw another version of ourselves. And in the H.G. wells book the War of the Worlds, Britain at its colonial peak is itself colonized by a force whose technology far strips their own. Even then, the fear of extraterrestrials was just a fantasy. It wasn't until the mid 20th century that these fears seemed to be coming true. First, the Roswell incident in 1947 triggered a wave of speculation about spacecraft from another world. Then, over the ensuing decades, many individuals throughout the world started sharing their own strange stories. The earliest UFO encounters were spiritual, optimistic. But starting in the 1960s, something changed in the character of these stories. They started to become more sinister. In 1961, the husband and wife couple, Betty and Barney Hill, told a story of their own encounter with aliens. But their story had a gap in it, a lapse in memory seemingly explained by alien technology. For a brief time, the aliens had taken both of them aboard their ship and studied them like animals. More and more stories of this kind proliferated over the decades. Abductions became terrifying, scientific and more. The concept of Probes, implants, bodily invasion all became fodder for the study of aliens, stoking the imagination of a public that had been absorbing alien invasion movies since the 1950s. In 1985, a woman named Kathy Davis claimed that in the midst of several abduction experiences, she had been impregnated with a hybrid child, half alien, half human. Over the years, experts and entertainers have argued about the veracity of the alien abduction reports. But no one has argued that the fear these stories produce is very real. The creatures of nightmares don't need to exist in physical space to provoke the imagination. So it's perhaps unsurprising that enterprising business people sought to make a profit off this fear. In the mid-1990s, a Florida based insurance brokerage began providing insurance policies for people who were concerned about the risk of alien abduction. A largely sarcastic enterprise, this insurance provider issued $10 million policies that would pay out at a rate of a dollar per year. A few years later, the London based brokerage Goodfellow, Rebecca Ingrams and Parson started issuing policies of their own. These policies insured customers against not only abduction, but but impregnation as well. This claim could be purchased regardless of your sex, as the possibilities of alien technology remain unknown. And this British company wound up selling thousands of these policies, but only came close to paying out twice. Once for an Enfield man who in 1996 claimed a $1.6 million policy, showing as evidence a claw left behind by his abductors. The second time, however, he gave them pause. You see, Sometime in the 1990s, the cult known as Heaven's Gate purchased $1 million policies for each of its approximately 30 members. And this very nearly backfired in Goodfellow's face when the entire cult died in ritual suicide in 1997. Wary that someone would come to try to collect over $30 million, the brokerage paused any new policies for a time. Since then, they have resumed their policies and have never paid out a single one. We turn to insurance to protect ourselves from unseen accidents and tragedy. The most unpredictable of these are also known as acts of God. Even though most insurance policies cover acts of God, it seems that aliens require a higher burden of proof.