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Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.
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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.
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The ancient Roman satirist Juvenal famously said that the secret to being loved as a ruler is not good governance, but providing the public bread and circuses, food and entertainment. But it must be said that people sometimes are particular about what sort of circuses they're presented. Escapism and politics, although seemingly very far apart, often collide in the most turbulent of ways. That said, William Macready wasn't thinking of this when the Curtain Rose on May 7th of 1849. He was one of the most acclaimed British actors of his era, and he was focused on his craft. He stepped out onto a stage in Manhattan, ready to perform the lead in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, and was greeted by a wall of jeers and boos. Macready froze. He hadn't even delivered a line yet, and already the audience was turning against him. Moments later, the crowd began to throw rotten vegetables at him, as well as eggs and coins. It was so noisy that Macready and his fellow actors struggled to make themselves heard over the rabble. And this wasn't the first time that locals had disrupted Macready's performances. Earlier that week, someone had thrown a dead sheep onto the stage. It was an actor's worst nightmare, and everyone knew that there was only one person to blame. You see, that very same night, at a nearby Broadway theater, another performance of Macbeth was underway. And the lead there was an American named Edwin Forrest. The rowdy audience that had disrupted MO were all fans of his. It seems that these Shakespearean actors were in the midst of a public feud. Forrest was everything that Macready was not. Boisterous, unrefined, populist, in a word, American. Macready said as much to interviewers, and Forrest responded by attacking Macready's tour of America. If he couldn't be there to disrupt a show himself, he would encourage his fans to do it for him. And honestly, 19th century New York City was primed for this sort of theatrical turf war. The ruggedly handsome forest was the perfect proxy for the working class, and the restrained MacCready was seen as refined elegance and a British import that appealed to the city's elites. After the May 7 humiliation, though, Macready announced that he would return to England. Wealthy New Yorkers persuaded him to stay a little longer, though. On May 10, he would perform Macbeth again, and this time they would be watching for rabble rousers. Police officers were posted inside the theater and outside. The state militia was told to stand by. And they actually had good reason to be concerned. Incendiary posters started to appear on street corners, encouraging people to show up. At the Astor Place theater protest, Macready referring to the venue as a British aristocratic opera house, a crowd began to gather there. As the play began, the crowd outside grew enormous, while inside, the witches proclaimed, by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Heckling began. As soon as Macready took the stage, the hecklers were grabbed by police and taken out of the auditorium. The state militia, meanwhile, were losing control of the situation outside. The crowd, you see, had swelled to around 10,000 people, a mix of protesters and curious bystanders. Someone doused the gas lamps in the square, making it impossible for militiamen to see the size of the protest. And soon after, it turned from a protest into a riot as men threw objects at the militia, including paving stones pulled up from the street. Inside the theater, Macready finished his performance in spite of the chaos outside and the sounds of breaking glass. As soon as the curtain fell, he disguised himself and slipped out the back entrance. Meanwhile, in an effort to control the mob, the military raised their muskets and fired into the air. And when that did not stop the hail of stones, they opened fire again, this time into the crowd. The mob dispersed in terror. In all, 22 people were killed and over a hundred were injured. Macready fled back home to England, and Forrest closed his engagement with the Broadway theater soon after. But as Shakespeare himself wrote, what's done cannot be undone. It was not the first riot in New York history, nor was it the most violent, but in more ways than one, it was the most theatrical. Growing pains, as the American theater scene violently asserted its identity in defiance of the British. But for those involved, so foul and fair a day they had not seen. It was the evening of March 13th of 1997, and amateur pilot Kurt was on his descent into the Phoenix airport when his son Oliver pointed to the sky. Following Oliver's gaze, Kurt saw something unlike anything he had seen in the air. Oliver. A cluster of six lights soaring towards the airport in a perfect V formation. Something about the lights unsettled him. They were hypnotizing. But the longer he stared, the more confused he became. He couldn't put his finger on it, but they just weren't quite behaving like any aircraft that he knew. So Kurt decided to call the lights in on the radio. When he reported the lights to air traffic control, he was met with a confused pause. Then an authoritative voice told him that they didn't see any lights in the area that he had indicated. In fact, they didn't see anything at all. Nothing had appeared on the radar whatsoever. As far as they were concerned, Kurt and Oliver were seeing an unidentified flying object. They may have been some of the first witnesses of the Phoenix Lights in 1997, but they were far from the last. That evening, thousands of other people in Arizona spotted the strange lights flying overhead. Hundreds of photos and videos of the lights were taken, making the incident one of the most recorded UFO sightings in American history. On the ground, residents of Phoenix seem to spot two distinct types of aircraft. Earlier that night, starting around 8pm Multiple witnesses spotted a group of five or six reddish orange lights that formed a V formation. This was the group of lights that Kurt had reported. This V was first sighted near henderson, Nevada, nearly 300 miles north of Phoenix, and reportedly traveled slowly through the Phoenix Mountains toward the city. Later in the night, around 10pm another group of lights flew over Phoenix. These ones were in a straight line, and rather than flying forward, they seemed to hover near the city. Some people even thought that they saw some of these second lights fall out of the sky. Just like the earlier lights, these ones disappeared almost as quickly as they had first arrived. And for weeks, the Phoenix lights had the city in a chokehold. The media frenzy blamed everything from aliens to Russian spies. To calm things down, the Arizona governor hosted a bizarre press conference where he claimed that he had found the person responsible for the lights and then brought on an aide who was dressed in an alien costume. The joke helped to reassure the public that they weren't under any imminent threat of alien invasion. But the truth about the lights was no laughing matter. While the night of March 13 featured two separate UFO incidents, both groups of mysterious lights were caused by the same thing. Operation Snowbird. You see, in 1997, the Air National Guard were conducting exercises out of an air base in Tucson, Arizona. One of these, codenamed Operation Snowbird, was meant to test the capabilities of the A10 Thunderbolt attack planes under winter conditions. While commercial planes typically employ blinking lights to help with visibility, military planes don't have to follow the same flight rules. So when a group of six Thunderbolts launched in a V formation, they kept their lights steady as they crossed Phoenix and headed south to Tucson. The second sighting also involved Thunderbolt planes. But it wasn't the lights on the aircraft that struck people as odd. Around 10pm A group of Thunderbolts launched from a military airfield south of Phoenix. These planes were practicing, dropping slow, burning flares. The light from the flares, when seen from far away, seemed to fall slowly toward the ground, just as people reported seeing in the second UFO sighting. The Phoenix lights gained a lot of attention when they first appeared, but were quickly explained by the Army National Guard. Except some witnesses missed the memoir. In fact, Kurt, the amateur pilot who first called the lights in to air traffic control, didn't discover the truth until two years later. He was in his house in California when he noticed his wife watching a news program on UFO sightings, and Kurt instantly recognized the incident the newscasters described as the one that he and his son Oliver had witnessed in 1997. When he told his wife, Goldie, she hardly believed him. It all sounded too coincidental. Not just that he had witnessed the event, but that he, Kurt, had been the first to report it to the authorities. After all, who would believe a big Hollywood star like Kurt Russell would spot a ufo? It honestly sounded out of this world.
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I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities Podcast. The show was created by me, Aaron Manke, in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series and television show and you can learn all about it over@theworldoflore.com and until next time, stay curious.