Episode 02: Something Physical

Summary

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High Strange — Episode 02: Something Physical

Release date: February 13, 2026
Host: Payne Lindsay (Tenderfoot TV & iHeartPodcasts)
Key Guests: Whitley Strieber, Nick Pope, Nick Cook, Dave Davies

Episode Overview

Episode 2 of the new season dives into the tangible aspects of UFO encounters—those that leave behind physical evidence and trauma. The episode interrogates what makes these incidents difficult to dismiss: not just stories, but recurring elements, corroborating witnesses, unexplained wounds, and even alleged implants. Revolving around testimonies from well-known experiencers, investigators, and skeptics, the episode challenges listeners to reconsider what reality means when so many describe the same impossible things.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Whitley Strieber’s Physical Experience and ‘Alien Implant’

• Strieber’s Struggle with the Physicality

  • [03:19] “This was physical. I really struggled with it. The more I remembered, the weirder it got. Something has physically happened to me.” – Whitley Strieber
  • Strieber details a persistent experience with what he claims is an “alien implant”—a sensation felt right under his skin, “a piece of biomechanical technology.”
  • He insists it activates or reacts, even during the recording ([03:39], [16:19]).

• Neighbor’s Corroboration

  • [06:58] A neighbor, a retired state trooper, recalls seeing an object the night of one of Whitley’s experiences, thinking it was the Goodyear blimp down in the snow, hearing screams, and witnessing a craft emit growling sounds before fleeing.

• Intrusion Incident & Alarm System Mystery

  • [09:08] Whitley describes a night when two human figures appeared in his bedroom, bypassed his security system (alarm not tripped), and paralyzed him before a flash of light.
  • [11:46] Post-incident, a powerful unexplained magnetic field was measured on his garage door, corroborated by an alarm technician.

• Discovery and Persistence of the Implant

  • [12:46] A cyst develops in Whitley’s ear, which a doctor attempts to remove on videotape. The object is white, mobile, and retracts when touched ([14:15]), described by a lab technician as “biomechanical technology” with moving cilia ([15:31]).
  • Despite attempts to extract it, the implant persists: "It's still there right now? Right now." ([15:17]).

• Physicality & Skepticism

  • The episode highlights how these are not just dreamlike or psychological events, but experiences with tangible physical evidence—open alarms, objects, corroborating witnesses.

2. Global and Historical Perspective on UFO Encounters

• International Nature of the Phenomenon

  • [21:34] Payne emphasizes, "UFOs are not an American phenomenon. They are a worldwide phenomenon… People all across the world describe encounters with the same shapes, the same paralysis, the same missing time, the same physical effects... all the same information."
  • Nick Cook concurs, "[It] is very international. It's a global phenomenon." ([21:34])

• The Calvine UFO Photograph (Scotland)

  • [22:13] The episode explores the 1992 Calvine UFO photo: “diamond shaped craft hovering in Scotland… quite a remote area.” – Nick Cook
  • The photo is considered one of the clearest UFO images ever, but provenance is unresolved—the original photographers vanished ([23:14]).
  • Nick Pope reveals: “Having seen all six images... we all concluded this was a real solid structured craft, about 75ft across, and we have no idea what it is, how it even flies.” ([24:15])

• Secret Military Tech as Possible Explanation

  • Speculation that the craft could be a classified US military prototype (“Aurora”) operational at the nearby Macrihanish airfield, designed to fill intelligence gaps around events like Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait ([25:12]-[26:44]).
  • Even if true, this only adds to the confusion: "UFOs present a brilliant smokescreen" for governments to hide black projects ([30:38], Nick Cook).

• Official Acknowledgement of Phenomena

  • The U.S. Director of National Intelligence’s 2021 report affirms that “the phenomenon is real”—though what it means is still undetermined (extraterrestrial, interdimensional, psychological, etc.) ([30:38], Nick Cook).

3. Perception, Reality, and the Limits of Explanation

• The Nature of Reality and Perception

  • [34:16] Payne muses on how everyone’s perception is filtered through prior experience, expectation, and cognitive bias: “Reality is not a fixed thing. It's an experience…”

• The Challenge of Multiple Truths

  • The show underscores the destabilizing effect of high-strangeness encounters: "They don't just challenge what you believe, they challenge how you know anything at all." ([34:16])
  • "[T]wo people can live in entirely different worlds without ever leaving the same place." – Payne Lindsay

• Institutional Responses and Unresolved Cases

  • [37:03] Nick Pope, formerly of the UK Ministry of Defense, recalls, “The things that I had access to in that job was the archive... since 1953... hundreds and hundreds of sightings.”
  • “Maybe 99% of all of this is going to turn out to be misidentification, sensor error or hoax. Something fairly mundane. But don't throw out the baby with the bath water.” – Nick Pope ([38:11])

4. The Broadhaven School Encounter (1977, Wales)

• Firsthand Witness Experience: Dave Davies

  • [43:26] Dave Davies, one of the Broadhaven schoolchildren, recounts his lifelong effort to rationalize what he saw: "If there was a conventional explanation for what I saw that day, I'd have already gone. Fair enough... But there is no other explanation..."
  • Sixteen children and one teacher independently reported a landed, dome-and-cigar-shaped, silver craft ([45:56]).
  • Dave describes the moment: "I stepped over the perimeter fence and as I got one foot over, it literally rose up from behind trees." ([45:39])
  • All drawings of the UFO were strikingly similar; the story has persisted for decades.

• Physicality Emphasized

  • "What we saw was definitely physical, though it was beyond our understanding." – Dave Davies ([45:56])
  • Nick Pope provides official context, calling this an enduring unsolved case.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Implant Experience
  • "This is a piece of biomechanical technology. An alien implant. I'll tell you this story." – Whitley Strieber ([04:01])
• Skepticism and Data
  • “When something repeats itself like that across borders, across generations, across technology gaps—it stops being like folklore and becomes more like a data set.” – Payne Lindsay ([21:34])
• On Military Secrecy and Distraction
  • "UFOs present a brilliant smokescreen... everything becomes mixed up in a great miasma of real information and crap... and that suits a lot of people in the intelligence world." – Nick Cook ([30:38])
• Institutional Truth Concealment
  • “Our standard line to the media... was always downplaying. 'There's nothing of any particular defense significance...' But the reality, of course, was quite different… [we had a] huge archive, hundreds and hundreds of sightings.” – Nick Pope ([37:03])
• Personal Testimony
  • “If there was a conventional explanation for what I saw that day, I'd have already gone. Fair enough... But there is no other explanation...” – Dave Davies ([43:26])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment Theme | Timestamp | |:------------------------------------------------:|:-----------:| | Whitley Strieber’s physical experiences | 03:19-16:19 | | Neighbor corroborates Strieber’s experience | 06:58-08:41 | | Alarm system & post-encounter physical evidence | 09:08-12:17 | | Physical “implant” under skin; lab assessment | 12:46-16:26 | | Worldwide recurrence of UFO phenomena | 21:34-22:01 | | Calvine, Scotland UFO photograph | 22:13-25:12 | | Black project theories and “Aurora” aircraft | 25:12-29:45 | | Military use of disinformation/skepticism | 30:38-32:50 | | Perception, consciousness, and reality | 34:16-37:03 | | MoD’s secret UFO archive | 37:03-38:41 | | Broadhaven School UFO sighting (1977, Wales) | 38:56-46:46 | | Dave Davies’ firsthand narrative | 43:26-46:46 |

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Episode Takeaways

• The episode takes listeners deeper into the “nuts and bolts” of high strangeness—the moments that challenge not only what is believed, but how we believe and discern fact from fiction.
• Through firsthand accounts, corroborating witnesses, unexplained physical evidence, and classified military context, the episode blurs the line between folklore and data, body and mind, and asks: when experiences are truly “something physical,” how can we keep ignoring them?
• The official story doesn’t just “wobble”—it fractures, leaving persistent questions about consciousness, perception, government secrecy, and the universal pattern of high strange events.

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Tone:
Curious, skeptical yet open-minded, engaging with both data and the inexplicable.

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For new listeners:
Even if you’re unconvinced by abduction stories or alien implants, Episode 2 builds a case that simply too much strangeness, too many physical traces, and too many similar witness accounts exist for all of it to be dismissed. Instead of clear answers, the show offers a tantalizing, confounding invitation to look again—with fresh eyes.

Transcript

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[Whitley Strieber]

Well, many thanks, good sir.

[Tara Davis Woodhull]

Here is my Discover card. They accept Discover at Renaissance Fairs? Yeah, they do. Here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Get it with the times.

[Whitley Strieber]

With the times.

[Tara Davis Woodhull]

You're playing the lute. Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

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[Payne Lindsay]

High Strange is released every Friday and brought to you absolutely free. But for ad free listening exclusive bon and early access to episodes, subscribe to Tenderfoot plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV or their employees. This episode contains references to sexual assault and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised.

[Whitley Strieber]

This was physical. I really struggled with it. The more I remembered, the weirder it got. Something has physically happened to me.

[Dave Davies]

Like.

[Whitley Strieber]

In an interview like this, half an hour ago, it turned on.

[Payne Lindsay]

What do you mean?

[Whitley Strieber]

You've been talking to it ever since. It's working now, right now. You can see it. You can feel it.

[Payne Lindsay]

Can I feel it? Is that weird?

[Whitley Strieber]

No, you can feel it. It's right here, right under my hand right now. This is a piece of biomechanical technology. An alien implant. I'll tell you this story.

[Payne Lindsay]

Hey, guys, real quick. I know it's annoying. I mean, I hate doing it. But if you're enjoying High Strange, could you please, pretty please, rate and review it and also hit the follow button on your podcast app? I don't know. The algorithm likes this stuff. It means a lot to us and it helps us in the charts. And also, I want to hear your genuine feedback. It takes literally 30 seconds and you can do it right now as you're listening. It means a lot to us here at Tenderfoot, and to me personally. Enjoy the show. Welcome to High Strange.

[Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to Larry King Live. Tonight, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

[Whitley Strieber]

Whitley Schreiber says they're really out there. He is Whitley Strieber. There is the book, and it is a continuation of his enormous bestselling Communion.

[Payne Lindsay]

In the late 1980s. Whitley Strieber had a moment in pop.

[Whitley Strieber]

Culture after I finally realized that this probably was real. Something that was non human, that was intelligent, started trying to challenge it, to get through my fear. Over a period of months, I formed a relationship with them that I believe could be a template. Almost. Almost as if they have one end of a phone and we've had two wires.

[Nick Cook]

How do you know you're not nuts?

[Whitley Strieber]

Well, first of all, we were flooded with thousands of letters from people who basically wanted to know if I could help them explain what had happened to them. And these stories, one after another, that had elements to them, unpublished elements to them that suggested that this is much more than a Dream that there is something happening to people that's similar from case to case.

[Payne Lindsay]

Late night television talk shows, bestsellers. But outside all the mainstream success. There were hundreds then thousands of people who reached out to him privately who were saying, this happened to me too. Some details that weren't even public. And that's when the question shifts. Not is Whitley lying? But more like, why are so many people describing the same thing? What happens next is where Whitley's story gets even harder to categorize.

[Whitley Strieber]

About a year later, one of my neighbors came over to the house. He shows up and he says, whitley, I saw that happen and I nearly dropped my teeth. He was a retired state trooper. He said, we were driving home about 2 o' clock in the morning on that night, and he said, I saw what I thought was the Goodyear blimp in a field. He said, I stopped because I thought that it must be in trouble or it wouldn't be there in the middle of the night. Got out of the car, struggling through the snow, going toward it to try to help them. It was obvious to him something's wrong. As he moved toward it, it. He heard screaming and he began to move faster. In his mind, it was a blip that had gone down and people in it were screaming. So he needed to get there to help him. Then lights turned on all over. It started making a growling noise and coming toward him. Very quickly panicked, jumped back into his car and drove off. He said to me, I'm just so embarrassed, ashamed, the fact that I ran. And I said to him, if you tried to help me, God knows what would have happened to you. Then I knew. I knew this had really happened. In my opinion, that was me in there. That's what he thinks too. It was the right time and the right night. Everything.

[Payne Lindsay]

Many people have read your book.

[Whitley Strieber]

You caught my attention.

[Dave Davies]

Okay.

[Whitley Strieber]

How often do these people visit you? I have been with them a couple of times. They're real. And I was not unconscious or in.

[Payne Lindsay]

An altered state of mind.

[Whitley Strieber]

One night, this very peculiar event took place. Yeah, you were visited. It was a May night in 1989. It was about 11 o' clock at night. Ann had just turned in and I was going to sleep. Windows were open because it was warm. And I heard crunching of gravel in the driveway. I thought, very bad news. It was clearly a vehicle of some kind. Plus they had no car lights on. I had a shotgun under the bed and a pistol in the drawer beside the bed. Plus a bank of switches that could turn on floodlights all around the house. As I became fully awake, I heard a man's voice say, condition Red. I'm not talking about aliens now, am I? I'm talking about people. I started to go for the lights. There's a man and woman standing in the doorway at the foot of the bed. They look like people. I was scared to death. Alarm system was right beside the door of the bedroom. LED was still red. In other words, they hadn't breached the system, but they were still in the house. They had to have breached it somehow because you can't get in the house without breaching it. Forget floodlights. I'm going for the Ben Ellie riot gun under the bed. The next thing I know, they pushed me over onto my right side. I can't move, can't see. I'm totally helpless, paralyzed. He's pushing the side of my head into the pillow again and again like that. And the woman's voice is talking very gently. A couple seconds later, there's a huge flash of light. I jump out of bed. I grab the pistol. I run through the house looking for a breach in the system. There's nothing. It's all intact. I'm thinking, is this a lucid dream or what happened? I go out to the garage alarm system still intact. It's not tripped, still on. Damn garage door is wide open, and that's not possible. The alarm system is still armed and the garage doors wide open.

[Payne Lindsay]

So how do you rationalize that?

[Whitley Strieber]

Well, I called the alarm man and I said something screwed up with the alarm system. My garage door is wide open, I'm looking at it, and the system's not tripped. He comes over, his gauss meter finds this incredibly powerful magnetic field on the garage door that we have no explanation for whatsoever. It's not his switches, it's just there. Magnetic field so powerful that the door was wide open and the switch hadn't been tripped.

[Payne Lindsay]

We're not talking about dreams or sleep paralysis. We're talking about a locked house, a homeowner with a firearm, an alarm system that never trips, and people. Not aliens or ghosts, but other people inside his home. When he says, I'm not talking about aliens now, it almost becomes more confusing. And fear sounds different when it's human.

[Whitley Strieber]

A few days pass and my ear begins to hurt.

[Payne Lindsay]

His ear would turn red and he felt this little bump inside it. The doctor says it's a cyst.

[Whitley Strieber]

My ear would turn red. I touch this and I feel a bump. My ear would turn red and I'd hear this noise. About three or four years later, we Moved down to Texas, my hometown of San Antonio. Having dinner with some friends. One of them was a doctor. And I mentioned my ear. He feels it and he said, it feels like a little cyst to me. I can pop it out at my office. Come over tomorrow morning. We go to his office and we videotape the whole thing. This is what happened. Let me go ahead and just make an incision around that. Feel it again. He opens an incision. He sees a white disc.

[Tara Davis Woodhull]

Oh, that looks a little white thing.

[Payne Lindsay]

See this will last Whitley did in fact film this. I wouldn't say it's the best quality ever, but it looks like he's actually.

[Whitley Strieber]

At the doctor when he touches it with his scalpel. It moved on its own.

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I guess it went under, but that's the hard part.

[Payne Lindsay]

But it disappeared again.

[Whitley Strieber]

It's actually moving now.

[Podcast Announcer]

Well, he's poking it, but it went under.

[Payne Lindsay]

I mean, I got a little piece on.

[Tara Davis Woodhull]

Here's some more on here.

[Whitley Strieber]

It goes under the skin, down into my earlobe, like a little tiny white.

[Payne Lindsay]

Discipline.

[Whitley Strieber]

It's all in the video. It's there. He got a little corner of it with the scalpel. Can see the doctor looking at it and describing it and seeing it move on its own. The implant is real. He puts in a stitch and I go home. The morning after that, my ear starts burning things in my earlobe. I can feel it. And it moves back up here where it is to this day.

[Payne Lindsay]

It's still there right now?

[Whitley Strieber]

Right now.

[Payne Lindsay]

Can you see it?

[Whitley Strieber]

You can see it? You can feel it?

[Payne Lindsay]

Can I feel it?

[Whitley Strieber]

Is that weird? No, you can feel it. It's right here. Right under my hand right now.

[Payne Lindsay]

Oh, yeah.

[Whitley Strieber]

Whoa. Lab technician calls him and says, is this a practical joke? He says, no, it came out of a patient's ear. Lab tech said, this is a piece of biomechanical technology. This is a piece of metal that has cilia on it. And they're motile. They move.

[Payne Lindsay]

What does that mean?

[Whitley Strieber]

Cilia are little hair, like things that enable something to move. That's how it moved down into my earlobe. Something has physically happened to me, like in an interview like this. Half an hour ago, it turned on.

[Payne Lindsay]

What do you mean?

[Whitley Strieber]

You've been talking to it ever since. It's working now. Right now.

[Nick Cook]

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[Payne Lindsay]

The whole thing seems like a fever dream. Is Whitley just going around life further narrating its fiction, making up stories and writing books about it? Maybe. Did these things actually happen to him? And if they didn't, does he still believe they did? And what does that mean exactly? I'll admit I've gone back and forth a lot. I come from true crime. I'm used to looking for some universal truth, a verdict. Yes or no, True or false, no gray area. The thing is, you don't have to believe Whitley Strieber for this story to matter, because stories like his exist everywhere. The first thing I like to dispel is a frequent misconception that UFOs are limited to this country. Very often people ask me, how come I Never hear about UFOs in other parts of the world? How come we only hear about UFOs in America? Well, UFOs are not an American phenomenon. They are a worldwide phenomenon. That's one of their most dramatic characteristics. People all across the world describe encounters with the same shapes, the same paralysis, the same missing time, the same physical effects, different languages, different belief systems, all the same information. And when something repeats itself like that across borders, across generations, across technology gaps, it stops being like folklore and becomes more like a data set.

[Nick Cook]

It is very international. It's a global phenomenon.

[Payne Lindsay]

UFOs are not an American problem. They never were. They're reported by pilots in South America, tracked on radar in Europe, documented by militaries in Asia, whispered about in places that don't benefit from telling the story at all. The phenomenon itself is global. Nick Cook has spent his career investigating.

[Nick Cook]

Classified aircraft programs, having investigated classified aircraft programs. The Calvine picture. It's like no plane I've ever seen.

[Payne Lindsay]

The Calvine photo. In 1992, men were hiking near Calvine, Scotland and took a series of photographs. What they captured would later be called the clearest UFO image ever recorded.

[Nick Cook]

The Calvine photo shows a sort of diamond shaped craft hovering in Scotland, quite a remote area near Calvine.

[Tara Davis Woodhull]

This little corner of central Scotland has become the center of activity. It's what's known as a hotspot, an area where people claim to have seen unidentified flying objects.

[Nick Cook]

The Calvin photograph, which some people have touted the world's best photograph of a ufo. It's quite clear this photograph could be real. There's good circumstantial evidence that says that could be a genuine ufo.

[Payne Lindsay]

Since you're only hearing this, if you want to see the photo yourself, go to the high strange Instagram. It's just.

[Nick Cook]

The problem with it is its provenance. Whoever took the photograph disappeared off the face of the Earth. No one has been able to find the individuals who actually took the photograph, if they ever existed.

[Payne Lindsay]

It was a diamond shaped craft, stationary, structured, silent. And if this story wasn't strange enough, the people who took these photos have never been found.

[Podcast Announcer]

One of the early investigators of the.

[Whitley Strieber]

Case, Royal Air Force press officer Craig Lindsey, kept one print.

[Nick Cook]

It surfaced later. The Ministry of Defense produced another photograph. There was some kind of trail to this thing.

[Nick Pope]

The story was killed under circumstances which remain murky to this day.

[Payne Lindsay]

This is Nick Pope. For years, his job title at the UK Ministry of Defense was literally one word.

[Nick Pope]

The Ministry of Defense telephone directory was about 2 inches thick. There were very detailed job descriptions, something like coordinating officer for updating NATO war books. Deep specialist stuff. But with regard to my job, it just literally said UFOs. So it was a little bit of a question mark. Having seen all six images and having seen the intelligence community analyses, we all concluded this was a real solid structured craft, about 75ft across, and we have no idea what it is, how it even flies. This is pretty extraordinary stuff. Not all of the UFO sightings that we get are going to be weather balloons or the planet Venus.

[Nick Cook]

What I always like to do is look around in a sort of geopolitical sense as to what's happening at the time.

[Payne Lindsay]

Nick Cook isn't a UFO investigator. He's an aviation journalist who spent years embedded in classified aircraft programs. Part of the whole UFO debate is whether some of these things people are seeing are actually ours. New technology, secret technology, suspicious thing about it.

[Nick Cook]

The Calvine photo was snapped on the eve of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

[Payne Lindsay]

Iraq invades Kuwait and overthrows its government. Iraq's President Saddam Hussein warned that he would turn Kuwait into a graveyard if any foreign country tried to intervene.

[Nick Cook]

I was covering a lot of classified US aircraft programs like the Stealth fighter, which had been developed in secret during the 1980s. There was another mythical beast called Aurora. And Aurora was reputed to have gone really fast, five times the speed of sound, maybe six. Mythical because there were sightings of it, but never anything officially revealed or admitted. But there was plenty of technological evidence that this thing was built in the black, in secret.

[Payne Lindsay]

Nick Cook had seen stealth programs years before they were public. He understood how sometimes secret tech can hide in plain sight. Does this explain the Calvine photo?

[Nick Cook]

Aurora just happened that one of its own operating bases was on a Scottish airfield called Macrohanish, which is not a million miles from Calvine. Late 80s, early 90s, a good deal of those programs have not seen the light of day. I went to interview the boss of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. I sat down and we started talking about all the aircraft programs he'd worked on. And he said, I've worked on 15 real flying aircraft programs while I've been here, but I can only talk about 12 of them. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. Their mantra was, if you can imagine it, we can make it happen. Whatever you dream up, we can do. Where money meets imagination, you get the most phenomenal innovation breakthroughs. Now talking of the Aurora in the late 90s, I then interviewed the head of US Air Force research and development programs, a guy called General George Mulner, on the day he retired. On the record in that interview was back programs, secret stuff. Here we were able to talk about secret programs. I could ask him anything I wanted. It was like, finally, here we go. I said to him, so let's talk about whether you might have commissioned a Mark V plus hypersonic spy plane. And he said, let me tell you a story. So he goes, what would you do if you were me? We have a Mark 3 reconnaissance aircraft in the Blackbird that we are retiring. We have a new generation of spy satellites able to deliver real time reconnaissance digitally, which is a first. But those satellites aren't quite ready yet, so we have a gap. What would you do? So I said, well, I'd probably fill it with an interim capability, something that's just going to do the trick in the short term. So he goes, go figure. My inference from his statement is that a few prototypes of this aircraft were built. It filled the gap and then they got rid of it. If you wanted to Put reconnaissance on the ground very quickly. Around about the time Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait. You might want to send a very fast spy plane to take reconnaissance imagery. You had an air base very close to Calvine in Macrohanish where a lot of spooky things were going on as a result of the invasion of Kuwait. The United States has put six warships.

[Payne Lindsay]

In the Gulf on high alert, and another six are on their way.

[Podcast Announcer]

The crisis has found the Prime Minister.

[Nick Cook]

With President Bush to coordinate the British and American responses. You might just want to divert attention away from that with some strange speculation about a ufo, which then subsequently appeared. There are a lot of red flags in it for me.

[Payne Lindsay]

Here's the problem with Calvine. The photo exists. It's a real physical photograph. All the analyses exist. There's no debate on whether the photo itself is real.

[Whitley Strieber]

It is.

[Payne Lindsay]

But what are we looking at? And why is there a big mystery behind who took these? Are we still learning things or are we just at a point where it's peaked?

[Nick Cook]

Here's the whole thing about the UFO world, the very confusion about it. The whole thing is a wonderful distraction. If you're in the military and you want to hide things, break through secret stuff that might have happened in the US military. Well, let's put some real noise, disinformation, noise around places where we want to keep things secret. Strange, anomalous photographs that cover up the fact you're flying spy planes that are secret. Still, UFOs present a brilliant smokescreen. Everything becomes mixed up in a great miasma of real information and crap. And in the end, it's very hard to work out what is truth and what is fiction. And that suits a lot of people in the intelligence world. There's too much evidence from too many different directions, much of which converges on the same data sets to say that everybody is making this stuff up. What you're beginning to get now is the military and intelligence world saying there is a phenomenon here. In 2021, Director of National Intelligence published a report saying exactly that the phenomenon is real. And that was the first time an official body had admitted this was a thing. What, of course they didn't say, because they professed not to know, was what was causing it. Are they extraterrestrials? Are they coming from outer space? Psychological people hallucinating stuff? Or is there some middle ground that is worth investigating? Maybe they're interdimensional, it's some glitch in reality that is letting stuff through that we don't understand. I'm more inclined to look at that.

[Payne Lindsay]

This, to me, is the unsettling part. Even if Calvine was secret human technology, that explanation alone doesn't close the case. It opens one more. Because the same shapes, the same movements, the same witness reactions, they show up long before 1990 and long after weird.

[Nick Cook]

Shit comes with a UFO sighting. Poltergeist phenomena in their bedrooms at night. Bigfoot is seen in the backyard. All of this weird shit comes with it. If I'm inclined to look into what may be causing UFO sightings and experiences, consciousness is a really good place to start. How do we perceive reality? If you flip the aperture a bit, let's look at the nature of reality. Let's see if we can find out whether there are anomalies in the way we perceive reality, which may explain paranormal phenomena like UFOs.

[Payne Lindsay]

Most of us walk around assuming reality is just what's in front of us. What we can see, what we can touch, what everyone else seems to agree is actually happening. But the older I get, the more obvious it becomes that reality is not a fixed thing. It's an experience. You can be in the same room as someone, hear the same words, watch the same moment unfold, and walk away with a completely different understanding of what just happened. Not because one of you is lying, but because perception isn't neutral. What if multiple truths could exist? Your brain is constantly filtering, filling in gaps, making assumptions, protecting you so you can function without being overwhelmed. That's consciousness at work. Not as some mystical concept, but as a practical system. It's how you survive the day. But here's the part that messes with me. If your experience of reality depends on what you notice, what you expect and what you ignore, then two people can live in entirely different worlds without ever leaving the same place. And once you realize that, lots of things start to click. Why arguments go nowhere, why certainty feels comforting, and why new ideas feel threatening before they feel interesting. It also explains why encounters with the unknown are so destabilizing. Because they don't just challenge what you believe, they challenge how you know anything at all. When it comes to consciousness, even our smartest scientists are still guessing. We can explain what the brain does, but not why it feels like being you. So every now and then, I try to check myself. Maybe my version of reality isn't the only one operating here. Realizing that two people can be honest, vulnerable, and trying at the same time, but still be living in slightly different realities. The same room, same words, same intention, but filtered through different histories, fears and expectations. Not because anyone failed. Because consciousness does not Always line up on the same frequency.

[Nick Pope]

The Ministry of Defense standard line we dish out to the media and the public on this was that this subject was of no real interest. It was always downplaying. We just glance at these reports. There's nothing of any particular defense significance, but. But we take a look just in case. But the reality, of course, was quite different. Things that I had access to in that job was the archive. We'd looked at this phenomenon since 1953. We'd had a permanent research effort on it since 1953, but reports went back further than that. We had a huge archive, hundreds and hundreds of sightings from different locations around the UK. 1995, maybe 99% of all of this is going to turn out to be misidentification, sensor error or hoax. Something fairly mundane. But don't throw out the baby with.

[Nick Cook]

The bath water.

[Nick Pope]

Because there's something here. These things sit in the files almost like an unsolved crime in a police file.

[Nick Cook]

The whole plethora of UFO sightings that are out there, a lot of it is born out of witness testimony. The sightings that people are reporting today are not that different from sightings they were reporting 50 or 60 years ago.

[Nick Pope]

One of those cases in the Ministry of Defense file that doesn't have a definitive explanation to it. A whole class of school children seeing something.

[Payne Lindsay]

In 1977, in the small Welsh village of Broadhaven, something landed, not once, not briefly. Multiple sightings in daylight. Sixteen school children, a teacher, no prompting, no group discussion, and they all drew the same thing. This is one of those stories that feels like it's right out of a movie. Because kids don't gain status from ridicule. They didn't have TikTok back then. Kids don't protect reputations, they don't know what to fake yet. And all these kids describe seeing the same thing. One of those kids has never stopped thinking about that day. His name is Dave Davies and I flew all the way across the pond to try and track him down.

[Podcast Announcer]

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[Payne Lindsay]

Yes.

[Dave Davies]

Come on.

[Payne Lindsay]

Is that good? Yes.

[Dave Davies]

Right.

[Payne Lindsay]

Take me all the way back.

[Dave Davies]

I mean, this is the thing that's been going around my head for 50 years. My intent that afternoon was to try and prove that there wasn't anything there and I failed. I've known skeptics who try and rationale their way out of it as much as they can, but don't think I haven't done that. If there was a conventional explanation for what I saw that day, I'd have already gone. Fair enough. That's it then. But there is no other explanation for what we saw that day. I've spent nearly 50 years, countless books, any sort of reference material. I've always pretty much said, this is proof that I'm not lying. I wouldn't have wasted all my money and time on all this crap. On the surface of it, you just think, eh, flying sources, whatever. But the more you look at it, there is a trickster thing sort of going on. There's a lack of logic to what they're doing sometimes, and you just think it's completely mad. But it was just the sudden realization that I've got something in front of me that shouldn't exist but does. I went through school as being the kid who saw the spaceship.

[Nick Pope]

A claim that something strange came out of the skies and landed in the.

[Payne Lindsay]

Welsh village of Broadhaven.

[Dave Davies]

I stepped over the perimeter fence and as I got one foot over, it literally rose up from behind trees.

[Nick Pope]

Whatever it was, it was spotted three times by children from the local school.

[Dave Davies]

What we saw was definitely physical, though it was beyond our understanding.

[Nick Pope]

The children say the object had a large dome, cigar shaped, silver in color.

[Payne Lindsay]

I've just been on the phone to their headmaster.

[Nick Pope]

I know that 16 children saw it.

[Whitley Strieber]

Suddenly the silver cigar shaped object seemed to pop up from behind the bushes.

[Nick Pope]

How clearly did you see it?

[Whitley Strieber]

Well, I couldn't see its face.

[Nick Pope]

You say you saw a man as well.

[Tara Davis Woodhull]

Did you?

[Whitley Strieber]

Yes.

[Dave Davies]

There was a thought in my brain I should leave.

[Nick Pope]

Were you frightened at the time?

[Whitley Strieber]

Yes.

[Dave Davies]

And that's where the weirdness sort of starts.

[Payne Lindsay]

High Strange is a Production by Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeart Podcasts. Created, hosted and edited by myself, Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are myself and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner and myself. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set sound design, mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney, Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney and Meredith Stedman. Our cover art is by Polygon. Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station 16 and Beck Media and Marketing. Check out the show's [e-mail] and if you're enjoying the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing the podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for listening.

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[Tenderfoot TV Host]

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[Tara Davis Woodhull]

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