S5 Ep8: Hello Yankee Boys

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Oh, and the show is not for kids and definitely not safe for work, unless the place you work at is super chill and cool. To subscribe, visit StrangefulThings.com or search for Strangeful Things on your podcast platform of choice. That's Strangeful Things, making weird shit fun to hear. Hello, Mystery Solvers. It's time for Perhaps It's You, your favorite Unsolved Mysteries rewatch podcast. I'm Liz. And I'm Samantha. And we have a special guest today. Hi, Rob. Hello. What's happening? You're joining us over the interwebs. I know. We've made this happen. It's kind of incredible because last time it was so damn difficult. I'm really appreciating why the first five episodes of every podcast is terrible.

They're all just absolute trash. Just trash. It takes that long to figure out how to record remotely. And we cheated that by recording our first episode at the Brooklyn Park Library. And then like basically never recording remotely ever because we learned that we hated it. So can you give me like an idea of what your library is like? Because I just like you guys are in a bigger city. So like mine is very kind of what we call it is Adirondacky. So it's got like wood finishes on the inside. There are stuffed dead animals everywhere. So like what is your library like? Dead animals? Very different than that. Yeah.

hennepin county has a very nice library system and the brooklyn park library in particular which is not by either of us but it's very new so it has like a little recording studio in it which i think is actually meant for like teenagers to record music but uh people from the community can just sign up once a month to to take up a little time but it has like a almost like a full-on children's museum in it the place is a palace that's pretty cool i wouldn't consider it either of our libraries because it's like 30 minutes from both of us I've been there a total of one time, and the recording studio is so popular that we could not sustain going to that library every time. It was kind of like, well, you can record here once a month, and maybe, actually. Maybe. Because, yeah, it's really not meant for that, but it was extremely nice. I did have to crawl through a hole in the wall at one point. Oh, wow. Well, it's set up for musicians, so there's actually one room to play music, and then it's connected to another room for your sound engineer person. But we needed the microphones in the same room as the computer, which it's not set up for at all.

But hey, we appreciate their help getting us started because we got enough positive feedback to that first episode that we were like, fine, we'll just bite the bullet and buy some stuff. Did it lead to like a ton of five star reviews? No, but we heard from, no, I mean, no. But we did hear from Mike and Josh at Uncovering Unexplained Mysteries like within an hour. I don't know what kind of Google alerts those guys have set up. Oh, yeah, they're stalking. They were immediately like, heard your podcast the second it was released, not even on iTunes. Loved it. Keep up the good work. And so we were like, all right, I guess. We also didn't know there were other Unsolved Mysteries rewatch podcasts because that's how much work we put into it ahead of time. Zero pre-work went into this, literally. And so all of a sudden it was like, oh, they've had one for like since before you could stream Unsolved Mysteries. I don't even know what black market they had to go on to find episodes to produce their podcast. But clearly that's how much work they put into it. And they're not even.

be the only ones. There was other Unsolved Mysteries rewatch podcasts. Had we known that ahead of time, we probably wouldn't have even done this, to be honest. No. But then it helped that we got positive feedback from, you know, experts in the field of Unsolved Mysteries rewatch podcasts. That's good. That's good. It was the encouragement we needed to keep doing something very foolhardy, which is this podcast. Yeah, that's good. I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that because I'm here now. I feel like we should have introduced you, Rob. I feel like most of our listeners probably know who you are, but you are a fellow podcaster. Do you want to talk for like a minute about your podcast since we're on the subject? Yeah. How did you get started, Rob? So I initially got started by helping out with research for podcasts.

particular Astonishing Legends. And then I started just name-dropping UFO cases that people could cover for podcasts. And eventually I was like, why don't I just do it myself? Because I'm good at this, I guess. So then I created Our Strange Skies in late 2017. We've been going kind of strong for the most part. There have been lulls, but you have those moments. But I basically talk about UFO incidents. I tell UFO stories, which there is such a rich history with the subject that you can tell stories endlessly and you'll never get bored. So that's...

what I've been doing for the last like two and a half years. Have you found that making a podcast has made your life infinitely weirder? Weirder and more stressed out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Same. I'm thankful that this podcast has made my life a lot weirder and I, I feel like I needed that in my life and I appreciate it. If you can dial that up. Yeah. It's definitely add spice. It's like the spice. You don't really think that you're going to add a lot to any dish and you end up like adding half of it. Yeah. That's, that's what this is.

That's a really good analogy. Yeah. Making this podcast both improved my life and made it so strange. I feel like the weirdest, I was trying to think of what would be the weirdest thing that has come out of this podcast. And I feel like I'm torn between someone writing a Mothman romance novel with me and Liz as characters. I cannot wait for that to come out, by the way. Actually, that might take the cake as the weirdest thing. Does anything stand out for you, Rob, as a moment that made you stop and be like, wow, I never thought when I started this podcast that I would be doing this?

In the first episode that I ever did, I did this stupid thing where I was going through all the ways that you could sense a UFO. So it's mostly your visual senses, but sometimes people hear things or they smell things. And when I finally got the taste, I was like, don't lick UFOs because you don't know where it's been. That's been one thing that has come back to haunt me over and over again until I finally did a really dumb PSA about it. And then people will still randomly message me or something and say, I'm going to lick a UFO if I come across it. And I'm like, dear God, I have done the world a disservice.

By putting that into the universe? No, I think you were very clear that they should not do that. Yeah, and I think with this case today that I'm here for, we will get that point across, I think. Oh, you wouldn't want to lick this UFO for sure. You should put that on a t-shirt. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm going to work on that. That seems like a merge opportunity is don't lick UFOs.

Speaking as a serious business woman. Well, I forget that the last time that you were on mine, you were giving me business advice and you were telling me to get abducted by aliens. And I still haven't, but I thought that would be great for your brand. I still do. I stand by that. Okay. Yeah. That's totally fair. Totally fair. We're serious business women with a serious business, which is this podcast. And you're getting this advice for free, Rob. You're so welcome. I know. I appreciate it. The weirdest thing that happened to me lately is that a couple of weeks ago I was sad and I was trying to cheer myself up by looking at old things.

from japan from like the 90s and i came across this bank like a little children's plastic bank of a penguin that's winking and i said on twitter someone buy this for me and within minutes someone did what and it came in the mail and it's the greatest thing jennifer if you're listening thank you i love that i love that penguin so much you have no idea how do i get that superpower i want that superpower i had no expectation that that was going to happen but it did and i'm very thankful it looks like something i would have had as a child but i just didn't and now it's i feel like it completes my life I'm adding that to an iNote, and I'm going to try to put that out into the world. It's kind of like The Secret, only a little different. Yeah, it's like The Secret mixed with being a fin dom, which is really where our brand is, actually. We often talk about putting things into the universe, and we also just demand money. Man, that is perfect. That's perfect. I think that's a great point to start off this episode that has nothing to do with either of those things.

of Unsolved Mysteries. Definitely. Do we have any updates before we jump into the episode? I have one minor update, which is that we were talking about the Instagram account the other day for Kristen St. Kat, and I said how to spell her name wrong.

Oh, yeah. Saint spelled out. Yeah, it's not SP. So I just wanted to correct that so you can find it because it is a really great account. She does make really cool art. I think we've talked about that before, too. But we were actually talking about her psychically drawing people's future husbands. So if you want to see people's future husbands, it's Kristen spelled with a Y. So K-R-Y-S-T-A-N and then Saint spelled out cat. And I really like that someone's future husband is a street shark. That's amazing. Everybody remembers that show. Or the guy that's saying how bizarre. That's someone's future husband. Oh, OMC. Yeah.

What are those wavy arm blow-up doll things? I don't know what those are called. Wacky, waving, inflatable tube men. He's an uninflatable tube man, but he's a flat earther with someone's future husband. They're so good. They're so good. I really want someone to buy. That's what I want now as being a fin dom. I want someone to buy me a drawing of my future husband from this person and find out who he is. Is he a flat earther that's also an inflatable tube man? Or a street shark? I need to know. That's a weird existence. Holy God.

I have another update and I'm sorry, Rob, I'm going to have to put you through an Animal Crossing update because we have big developments in the world of Perhaps It's You Animal Crossing. The first is that we did an Animal Crossing meetup and it was the highlight of my life. It was the best. Thank you to listener Gary, who's also a moderator of our Facebook group, who suggested that we do an Animal Crossing meetup that we did. So many people came. I told everybody to wear a mystery-solving outfit, so people came in their little characters had trench coats and mustaches. And we met a huge thank you to listener Bruce, who let us come to his five-star island. He set up a little, like, swap meet on his beach, and we traded goods. How did Bruce get such a nice island? I assume, like me, playing for many, many hours. Far too many hours of Animal Crossing.

very creative he has all kinds of fun areas of his island so it's nice to like walk around and look at things he made a little treasure hunt he wrapped gifts and hid him around his island so everyone could run around things it was delightful so cute i feel like maybe there was like 12 to 15 people that came over a period of a couple hours it was so fun everyone really enjoyed it we will do more but they're going to be kind of like informally planned probably because there's like a limit of how many people can do it at once and i don't know my recommendation if you want to participate is to join our facebook group there's like a mega thread about animal crossing because look a lot of us are into it right now including my co-host Liz who has just downloaded the game I've convinced her to join us well I saw everybody at the meetup and I wanted to go so that inspired me to finally get it and then I got to visit Samantha's Island and see her museum and it was extremely relaxing Liz came to my island last night we had a little trip to the museum it was delightful what kind of museum is this it's huge and it has an aquarium it has a butterfly house it has whole entire dinosaur skeletons yeah for those that maybe aren't familiar with animal crossing animal crossing if there's it's a non-competitive single player game you can go like visit your friends and stuff but it's just there's no like competition aspect their whole point is just to like build your island how you want and then catch bugs and fish and you can find fossils and you can sell them you can display them you can keep them but you can also donate them to a museum on your island that's run by this owl and then blathers blathers slowly gets bigger and bigger and they've

This is honestly impressive. The designers of this game went all out. There's like a butterfly house. It looks like the detail is amazing. But like little lights on the steps like they have so that you don't trip. Like why bother to put that in there? But it's so good. And the music in there is so relaxing. I just like it if you go to a desert desert desert island and you start like civilization when the first things you need apparently is a museum. They were like, oh, you caught five fish time to get the museum curator here. And I was like, all right.

That's weird. Makes total sense. They've recently added art to it. So you can buy art from this fox that comes to your island. But sometimes he sells fakes. So it's like a gamble whether or not you're going to get a real or a fake. You have to look at it and spot if it's a fake or not. Samantha has the girl with the pearl earring in her museum. And when you go up to it, it gives you actual facts about the painting. It blows my mind. You can ask Blathers and he'll tell you if you give him a fish. He'll give you facts about the fish. It's so much fun.

Awesome. That is amazing. Maybe one day if I find the time, I will hop on this bandwagon. Look, you're going to need a lot of time. I have devoted so many hours to this, but it's soothing. I have like hardly anything else to do because I can't go anywhere. And being able to visit other people in the game has been extremely fun. And this is one of the things that like this podcast has improved slash made my life stranger, right? Like I'm meeting up with random people that are all wearing trench coats in this game to go catch fish in this video game. It's so fun. This is like the way that you're making it seem is like a 90s epidemic right now, but like that's still amazing.

Yes. Yes. So that was my Animal Crossing update. Thank you for bearing with us. That was very important. It was. Honestly, it's the most recent I've had in a long time. I mean, I should have been watching Unsolved Mysteries last night, but I was too busy visiting Samantha's Island, so I had to watch it this morning. I overachieved and I watched this episode twice, so yeah. Good for you, Rob. Someone's holding this podcast together. It's not the host. Nope. If you're following along at home, we are on Season 5, Episode 8. And I just want to mention, Rob's got our first mystery here, but we're seeing a different trench coat look from Stack.

He's wearing like a black turtleneck and then the trench coat is open. Oh, yeah. Kind of into it. This is like it's a casual snack, but also kind of not. No, it's like casual explorer. OK, who was Elaine's boss on Steinfeld at that catalog? Oh, yeah. Jay Peterman. Yeah, Jay Peterman. It does. I talked to Samantha earlier today and I said, why was this not a fashion trend? This didn't blow up in any other way in any way at all. And I'm kind of upset about it. And not only that, like at the beginning of this thing, the smirk on that man's face, I think he thought he was going to send set fashion trends going.

I mean, it's not too late. We could still adopt this look. Rob, you could still adopt this look. Oh, believe me. I will. It looks a little hot. It's a fall winter look. The thought of wearing a turtleneck under a trench coat right now makes me want to die. But this fall, I'm telling you, we could bring it. We could make it happen. We do need to get some trench coats. Next time we're together, maybe we'll go trench coat shopping. Rob, you're in the first segment, which Robert Stack starts off by saying some people who see UFOs are called crazy. Wonder why that is, as he clearly thinks this man is insane.

Yeah, judging by the smirk on his face, he does. I'm like, wow. Like, calm your butt down. Did you even talk to Stefan Mikkelak there, Stack? Probably not. Look, joke on Robert Stack. We know UFOs are real now. Yeah, that's true. He looks like a fool. A stylish fool. So for this, we'll set the stage here a little bit because I think that if you give...

this uh incident some context about what was going on you you kind of realized that ufos were just doing a lot of stuff in 1967 but uh it was a huge flap year it was their year yeah it was their year if you were a ufo 67 you know how there was the golden age of skyjacking oh yeah this is the golden age of just being a ufo yeah um and in fact uh two of canada's most prominent cases uh would come from 1967 uh one of them was the shag harbor incident which uh a number of eyewitnesses saw a strange object crash into shag harbor nova scotia it's one of their biggest cases they have a ufo festival there like every year they have for the past couple years except for this one obviously but uh yeah uh but mothman was in full view of everybody in the point pleasant slash ohio valley area just flying everywhere scaring the shit out of people um yeah and you know mothman brought some ufo sightings some men in black encounters poltergeist stuff you know injured cold smiling a little too hard everywhere don't even say that name I hate him so much. I think Indrid Cold had a kinder face than most people depict him, but, you know. With that name, I doubt him. Yeah, I really doubt it. I hate that name so much. I can't even explain why. It, like, makes my stomach turn. If you really want to know, according to Woodrow Darenberger's daughter, Indrid Cold died in 2018, 2019. Oh, thank God. Good. But, you know, that is what there is. That's a sigh of relief.

Yeah. There are also a number of encounters by motorists who either hit UFOs or aliens with their cars or found their cars invaded by ETs. Basically, there was a lot of stuff with cars going down, too. There's one case in Idaho in which an alien got out of a UFO, got into a car, and drove it into a field. How would you claim that on your insurance? You have to lie and say it was a deer? And they're like, why are there all these metal scrapings? And you're like, metal deer. Just write it down. I just need the money. Just write it down. It'll be fine. Just make it up if you have to.

The most credible incident to come from 1967, though, is the one that I'm here to talk about today, and that is the Falcon Lake incident. So the witness in this case, his name is Stefan, and they call him Steven because, you know, it's American crap, and you've got to project your American bullshit on a guy from Poland. I think Robert Stack just doesn't really care. It's not even a hard name to say. It's just Stefan instead of Steven. Yeah, yeah. His last name is Mikalak. He is from Poland, and he emigrated to Canada following World War II. And he found work as an industrial mechanic, and...

his his love and his hobby was in geology and amateur geology they called him a rock hound on the show but basically he would spend his weekends in the remote manitoba wilderness on the search for quartz veins as quartz veins would often lead to silver deposits that's really what he was interested in was so rude to this man they could have called him an amateur geologist instead they called him a rock hunter oh they called him a rock hound a rock hound okay it's just a dude who picks up a rock yeah yeah Yep. So the weekend of May 20th was like no other for Michelac. He had driven up the night before, rented a hotel, and set out at 5.30 the next morning. Okay, Stefan, the rocks are still going to be there in the afternoon. He's an early bird. This is not hunting. You don't need to go out at 5 in the morning, a time I refuse to acknowledge. Okay, that's fine. But he didn't find anything until 9 a.m., so he had a little time. It took him a while to get out there. He was out there from 5 to 9, and he didn't find anything until 9?

9 a.m. Look, being an amateur geologist is hard work, Samantha. We want to know. Yeah. I mean, I believe that, actually. I'm sure I'm not cut out for it. Yeah. Oh, it turns out I have to wake up in the morning. So, no. Hard pass. Yeah. Screw that. So, yeah. By 9 a.m., he had stumbled across the quartz vein. He was digging through to see if there was any silver underneath it. And, you know, he had lunch around 11 a.m. And then he continued his exploits by 1130. 45 minutes later.

He was startled by some geese that were agitated by something. He wasn't quite sure, but like the way that he shook his head at those geese, it was like, I am so annoyed that you broke my concentration. My note is man shakes head disapprovingly at geese. Why is this reenactment? He's like so annoyed at these geese. Like you're in the forest. You're going to hear birds. Yeah. He's so cute though. This is the most like adorable old man. Yeah, he is. And he's, he's a genuinely good person. So when he, when he looked up.

uh from his rocks he could see two strange what he believed to be cigar-shaped objects hovering high up in the air and as mikalak recounts the tale for unsolved mysteries he's like looking up it's as if he's reliving it that day all over again because he's kind of got this worried look in his eyes like I've got to recount this story again for a TV show, but one of the objects flies off, but the other one lands nearby on a rock field. And this thing is like very silvery. It's a silvery, it's basically a silvery flying saucer. And I must say, given how UFOs are often depicted on the show, because most of the time they're not accurate, this is probably the most accurate one they've ever done. He said it was like a cigar with a hump.

At first, from that far away, that's what it looked like. That was my question, because I wasn't sure, given how he described it, and then how it looked in the reenactment, if what he saw once it landed was the classic UFO shape, or if Unsolved Mysteries was taking artistic liberty with that. No, for this one, it's pretty damn accurate to what he actually saw. But don't get me wrong here, the CGI in this is god-awful. The way that this UFO comes down, I'm like, it looks like...

You know, whoever did the CGI on this literally made it seem like the UFO was on a string. I'm like, you're CGI. You're supposed to not do that. But here, it looks like it's dangling on a string. Old CGI was real bad. Yeah. Basically, anything would have been better. Literally, a model on a string would have looked better. Like you said, though, this is not the worst we've seen. No, it sure isn't. It sure isn't. So with nervousness and an unsteady voice, he kind of gets a little, not choked up, but his voice gets a little unsteady. Mikalak tells us that despite...

the fact that the ship did not have any markings he believed it to be an air an experimental aircraft american aircraft of some kind the first thing he looked for was a nasa logo which just made me picture a nasa logo on a ufo which is hilarious right right i think a very logical reaction though it shows he's in like a very like grounded state of mind he was like oh this must be nasa my other note was that he assumed it was dumb americans which is also fair and logical yeah completely logical uh i think that's what you know kind of lends credence to this case is that He never believes that it's aliens. He believes that it's some kind of American craft. And the UFO remained there long enough for him to sketch out the craft in a small notebook. Allegedly, the UFO had landed and stayed there for about 30 minutes.

His son, Stan Mikalak, claimed that his father described its design as seamless, as if it had been molded from some singular form. So that's something that you hear often with UFO accounts, is that they almost seem like they were formed out of one single piece of metal. It's like, because there's no maker's marks, there's no seams, there's no rivets, nothing. And that's kind of what this UFO was like. um after an unknown length of time a door on the craft opened up and he could hear frantic voices inside uh and the way that he describes them is like adorable so adorable he's like so great i love it uh but uh he um doesn't he yell out like hey oh yeah yeah um the best thing to yell out if you yell out yeah he couldn't really recognize the accent but one voice appeared to be higher pitched than the other uh it's unsure what language he thought they were speaking but uh mikalak he was slowly approaching and uh

Yeah. While he approached the craft, he said, OK, Yankee boy is having trouble. Come on out. We'll see what we can do about it, which is great. And then he when he got no response. If I see a UFO, I promise that's what I'm going to say. Just say, yeah, Yankee boy. Yankee boy, are you having trouble? I help you. Yeah. And then when he got no response, he followed it up in Russian and then German, Italian, French, Ukrainian, and then back to English again. They only tell you a couple of different languages on Unsolved Mysteries, but he knows a lot of languages. Oh, it's impressive. Yeah.

He's a very smart man. Serving in World War II, I think he learned every language he could for any kind of combat situation that he would have been in. So nearing the opening, the light coming from the inside of the ship was so bright, he had to lower the visor on the goggles that he was wearing because he was a welder by trade, and he had welder's goggles with him because they do a pretty good job protecting your eyes. If you're wearing them, it shields you pretty well against rocks and stuff. He was able to appear inside for just a few moments before the door to the craft closed.

No admittance for this guy. What a bunch of assholes. Yeah, it makes you go, what do they want? Here he is very politely offering to help in multiple languages. Like, did they just stop there because they're going to get the silver first? Yeah, right. What do they want? Right. And seemingly this thing looks like it's kind of made of silver. So he could see a cluster of lights flashing on and off in sequence before the door closed. And he put his hand up to the craft to touch it for a second and it cinched his glove. It just like burned it. So he pulled it away really quick. And then the craft lifted up.

And kind of swiveled in the air and readjusted. And it aimed this rectangular grid with holes in it toward Nikolak. And a blast of hot gas then shot out toward him. And it immediately caught his shirt on fire. These aliens are rude. He's been so welcoming. And this is how they treat him? Right. Bad manners. Fucking aliens just farting on people with their UFOs. It's not right. So he described it as having a sulfur smell. Which is like this thing literally farted on him. Yeah, literally. Quite literally. It fucking farted on him. Like a bunch of assholes.

and rude yeah rude it traveled all that way and for what to fart on this poor rock hound yeah exactly like that's the thing like was it having some kind of mechanical issue or what because I'm wondering if it was waiting for Mikkelak to run off or something like that in order to do whatever it was going to do. Maybe it didn't like being called Yankee Boys. Maybe it did not like being called Yankee Boy in whatever language. But Mikkelak was now in this really intense pain. He tore off his shirt and his undershirt and he just threw it to the ground. Which is burning in the reenactment, which is amazing. Yeah, there was a putrid smell in the air, an electrical burning mixed with sulfur. Ed Barker on the show, who is called a producer. I don't know why. Ed Barker, he's a museum curator.

They call him a producer? Yeah, his title is producer. That's what a producer is, what Unsolved Mysteries would call someone who makes porn, because they couldn't say that on TV. Right, right. That's what we would call a producer. Not a museum curator. You could just call him a museum curator. No, it's too scandalous, Samantha. It's better the public not know those museums are curated. Yeah, by porn. Yeah, it's curated porn. Is it? Is it not? Can we prove that? I mean, prove it's not. Unsolved Mysteries might know something we don't know about it.

My note about Ed is that he could be most valuable eyebrow. Yeah. Strong eyebrow game. He's got insta eyebrows. Oh, yeah. He has two mustaches above his eyeballs. I think he wins. Yeah. I don't have a mustache pick, so. I have a mustache pick, but his eyebrows could be. He can win for most valuable double mustache that happens to be eyebrows. Most valuable double mustache that happens to be eyebrows is not a great hashtag, but.

Maybe we can think about that. I kind of halfway expected him to pick up a 2x4 and a hammer and just go to town. Yeah, he's going to fix the house. Yeah, definitely. He comes on screen to tell us that Mikalak started to vomit as he fled the area, and that would be something very common going forward. His vision was hazy, but when he finally made it back to his pack, the compass he was using to lead him toward the road started to spin uncontrollably, and he wasn't sure why. It's because these aliens are dicks, that's why. Alien farts, they fucked everything up.

But now, completely disoriented. And I just want to say, the actor that played Stefan Mikulak has clearly never stumbled a day in his life. It was a new skill, and, you know, he tried it out. He wasn't a natural. I appreciate the languages that he was, like, speaking, because he seemed pretty confident there. Not confident in the stumbling down a mountain game, but, you know, we'll let that pass here for a moment. If I had to pretend to stumble down a mountain, it would look like sketch comedy. It would be so bad. But, I mean, I'm not a professional actor, so, I mean, there's that. So, Mikalak, he'd been using the compass to kind of just, like, point him in the direction of the road, and since it failed, he did his best to orient himself that way, and it took up a little while, but...

Unsolved Mysteries doesn't show this. He would emerge on the road probably about an hour later, and he flags down this passing car. The first one he had seen, it just drove right past him. But then it turned around. The man identified himself as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. And Mikulak told the man his story, and when he did, the man responded by saying, and I quote, sorry, but I have other duties to perform. And then he drove off. I gotta go. Wow, that's rude too. Yeah, yeah.

What a bad day. Yeah. Like I, I now have, I, since I covered this case on my podcast, I have had severe distrust of the RCMPs. Wow. Yeah. Harsh, but fair. Yeah. It took him like.

a couple hours to actually get back to town he was a few miles out um but he was wondering if he was radioactive so he was doing his best to kind of avoid people but would ultimately take a bus back to winnipeg where he lived so doctors were baffled by his condition he had clearly suffered some kind of burn um and it appeared on his abdomen in a grid like shape and it was the shape of the exhaust vent that he had sketched out in his book um He was not kept in the hospital and instead was released. His symptoms worsened over time. He had bouts of nausea and there was a sulfur like smell that lingered with him for weeks at a time. Oh, yeah. Before I forget, when Mikalak arrived back in Winnipeg, he had phoned ahead to his wife to tell her that something had happened to have, you know, someone there for him at the bus station to take him to the hospital. It was his 10 year old son, Stan, that took him there. So I had this image in my head. I'm like, OK, what was the public transit situation like? Because if not, is Stan driving him?

to the goddamn hospital. His 10-year-old drove him to the hospital? Yeah, the guy that appears on this episode took him to the hospital. Oh, yeah. As a 10-year-old? Yes, as a 10-year-old. Yeah, we're never sure if he... Honestly, that sounds like something that would happen in America today. I'd be like, look, I can't call an ambulance. It's going to cost me $10,000. Where's my 10-year-old? Just put me in the back of a wagon and drag me there.

Get me a goddamn big-ass radio flyer. Let's do this shit. So, yeah, his symptoms persisted for even months. He would lay in bed for days in a stretch at times. UFO researcher Chris Rakowski, who is one of Canada's preeminent UFO investigators and has been looking into the subject for decades, appears on screen, and he tells us that his burn was actually more similar to a chemical burn and not like a burn from, say, like an open flame source. So he was tested for radiation exposure but tested negative. Six weeks after the encounter, Mikalak would return to the site with a friend named...

gary not bob which you know he yells out to bob in the show but his friend's name was gary and where the craft had landed oriented all right yeah wait he's disoriented coming back he's so disoriented from his experience he doesn't even know his friend's name anymore god damn it well that's fair that's totally fair um so where the craft had landed on this field of rocks there was a large circular burn mark just singed into the rock there were a number of trees and branches nearby that looked to have sustained damage from some kind of heat source as well A collective of Canadian Air Force members and scientists descended on the site, taking measurements, soil samples, and testing for radiation. The Geiger counters that one of the guys carried registered really high levels of radiation within that burnt patch. And it was later determined by one of, I forget the exact department within Canada, but there was a vein of radium running underneath where that site was. So still, fuck that.

The most baffling aspect of this case were the burns that Mikalak had suffered when the UFO farted on him. So the burns would heal and mysteriously reappear once every three weeks or so, along with the nausea and the headaches. That's just cruel. Yeah, it is. There are cases where people have marks like that. I'll mention one of them at the end. I have so many questions about how the doctor came to this conclusion that he didn't have radiation sickness when he seemed to have all the symptoms of it. There was radiation found where he experienced this event. I don't understand how they were like, oh no, it's a chemical burn. Where did the chemical come from? What is their explanation for that? It seems like clearly radiation. I think when they do a radiation test, I'm trying to remember exactly. I don't know if it's like a blood test or something like that.

I think it's in your system. So like I was trying to, my friend Nate did an episode on his podcast called the conspirators about the, they were called the radium girls. They basically painted like luminous, luminous styles and clock factories. Like they literally had like radium in their bodies. So I think when they test for it, they actually, there are faint traces of it that they could pick up maybe in your blood or other kinds of stuff.

Yeah, but the difference in that is that they were exposed to small doses over time, whereas he would have gotten an acute dose of radiation. And I'm not a doctor, so I don't know how the test would differ. I assume he would have to be irradiated in some way, so maybe they didn't find evidence of that. But it just doesn't make any sense to me that they would come to this chemical burn conclusion when there were no chemicals there, but there was a radiation there. And it seemed like, you know, he had the vomiting, he had, you know, whatever. He didn't have a burn, yeah. Radiation sickness. And I just don't understand how they were like, no, it wasn't radiation. Yeah, yeah. That's a bad point to me. It is.

I think a lot of his symptoms aren't, are also not indicative of radiation poisoning. I don't think that burn is indicative of radiation. Well, it was a weird pattern, right? It was weird. Like that wouldn't have come from a vein of radium in the ground. Like it was like that sort of concentrated sort of non-organic pattern on his stomach. It would like, could not, I feel like that couldn't have come from a natural source. Right. Right.

So even more mysteriously, Mikkelak returned to the landing site a year after his encounter and found a number of high-grade silver fragments in the ground. They were pure silver coated with radium and uranium. And we're told that this type of silver is not easy to come by. And in one shot, Ed Barker, the producer, is holding them in his hands. Yes, Ed Barker is holding radioactive metal and seems to be happy about it. He tells us that it's no longer radioactive, but I'm not buying it. Skeptics, however, have always kind of discounted this aspect of the case.

And in UFO research, it's what we call the repeater problem. So the idea that people have additional UFO encounters or find additional evidence are generally labeled as not trustworthy, which I think is bullshit. It's in the exact same spot, though. It's just been something they missed the first time. Maybe. That's a possibility. Because when they were out there, the area was highly radioactive, allegedly. So I don't know how much further testing they did after they determined it was all right to go out there. But it could make sense that it was there.

these men are out there with a geiger counter going towards the radioactive area and like radioactive metal and then apparently keeping it as a souvenir i wrote this i wrote the same thing in my notes that he is holding radioactive metal in his bare hands yeah i don't i don't know exactly how radiation works when it comes to metal if you can like get it all off but i don't know that i would take that chance but also that is rude he's like i look i'm not saying stephan planted it but i'm saying i think that this was left because it's like basically saying that it was left there as like oh here's proof Like someone was faking it. And I'm like, okay, that's rude. Okay, wait, wait, wait. Question, Rob. Rob, did you put this medal there? Ooh, man. I traveled back in time and holy shit, you found me out. I went to Manitoba. I knew it! I found the spot. I found the spot. You couldn't miss it from the air because there was a huge-ass ring in that ground and I just like fucking dug that shit up and I put it in there.

I think it's a really weird idea to think that someone likes stuff and so much that he would make his story more realistic by planting this there and hoping he would find it. Yeah, that's the weird thing is like, how would we know that? How would anybody know that he would go back out there looking for anything? I don't think anybody had any idea. Maybe, you know, he was really gung ho about it and stuff like that. But how does the average person irradiate something? Like, it's not like also this metal is like some weird alloy. What? One of the wilder theories that I think Chris Rakowski had interviewed a scientist at one point, and he claimed that his theory.

was that Mikolak had gotten two pieces of uranium and was out in the Manitoba wilderness banging them together. What? Where did he get uranium? Where did he get uranium? This isn't back to the future. You don't go to the corner store and get uranium in 1985. It doesn't happen. It didn't happen in 1967. It's not happening now. Why would he do that? I don't know. That's the thing. What's the motive? It would be one thing if they were suggesting that he was involved in subversive activities, like he was some communist spy or something like that. Maybe, but not really. I don't think so, because if you're trying to pull off anything like that, why would you be out in the wilderness banging two pieces of uranium together? It makes no fucking sense. But that's the problem with this case.

banged two pieces of uranium together until he got a polka-dotted burn on his stomach. Which makes no sense. Can you even survive banging uranium together? Is that a thing? You would, and like, let's be honest, you would, they would find radiation on you. Samantha, I think there's only one way to find out. We need to go get two pieces of uranium.

go into the wilderness and bang them together in the interest of science i'm not looking forward to all the vomiting though rob i'm not sure you should get abducted this sounds like a bad time i'm gonna i'm gonna hold off on it i don't know what alien social distancing is like and i'm trying to i'm trying to be good about that yeah yeah that's nice that's nice yeah i think i'm gonna rescind my advice i think getting abducted at this point is probably not a good idea i didn't realize aliens were so rude they can be they totally can be. And in this case, this case they were, but yeah, a porn producer slash knockoff Bob Vila, Ed Barker believes that someone planted the silver to lend credence to the encounter. Yeah. Yeah. In other words, he sees a bad moon rising or some shit. But like, if you talk to people that have looked into this case, they don't think that Michael Ackeson had planted it himself. Nobody does, but there are a number of cases.

in UFO history where people have suffered negative health effects after coming into contact with the UFO. And I mean, you have all covered a few of those cases on here. You covered the Betty Cash, Vicki Landrum incident, and the Rendlesham Forest incident. And both those two incidents occurred around the same time. They occurred within days of each other. So there are a great many deal more incidents like that.

I actually covered a case on Our Strange Skies. It's like episode 16. It's a curious case of Dr. X. This mysterious doctor in France ends up having this UFO sighting. He witnesses it from his living room windows. And these two UFOs are casting beams of light in this French valley. And they basically come toward this doctor in his house. These two UFOs merge into one. And they aim this beam of light at him. Now, this doctor had had a lot of health problems. He had been involved in...

there was like a civil war that he was involved in after world war ii and he had suffered like uh injuries to his legs he had fallen off a ladder like days before this incident and he had like he basically had two hematomas on his leg so he ends up having this encounter with this ufo and it heals his legs so some ufos heal the others are dickbags that cause a lifetime of injuries too some of these people. So, like, Stefan Mikolak, those burns would reappear for, I think, pretty much the rest of his life. His burns that he referred to as his buttons? Yeah, yeah, that he referred to as his buttons, they would disappear. He's so cute! Yeah, he's really, like, he's the kind of, like, old man that you just want to cuddle for hours. I just wish we could go eat pierogies with him. Yeah.

Rest in peace, Stefan Mikulak. You wonderful man. For anybody that's interested in learning more about this case, because there's a lot of information out there, Stan Mikulak, who appeared in the show, and UFO researcher Chris Rakowski actually came out with a book a couple years ago. It's called When They Appeared. It's a really good source, and it's a really good read. It includes a pamphlet that Stefan Mikulak wrote like two years after the incident and didn't make any money off of. He actually lost money by printing it because he first printed it in Polish, and then he translated it to English.

It's a really good book. You should all check it out. How can people find the episode of your podcast where you talked about this if they are interested? Yeah, you can pretty much find us on any single podcasting app or you can head on over to ourstrangeguys.com. It's episode 17, the Falcon Lake incident. And I did that with my buddies, Brian and Angelo of the Double Density podcast. And it's a pretty fun take on this incident because there's just a lot of wacky stuff involved with it. But it truly is probably one of the most genuine UFO cases of all time.

All right, five listeners. That's what it's like when your podcaster actually knows what they're talking about. Sorry to tease you like that. It probably won't happen very much or ever again. Thank you, Rob. That was very informative and helpful. I try. I definitely try. And now we won't have gotten all the information wrong. So that's a big point. I really appreciated having a UFO segment on the show. I feel like I've gotten a little fatigued with true crime. And so I appreciated getting this episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Of course, we got Robert Staxmerkin. You know he's not taking this seriously. I liked it. Yeah, it was good. I really liked it.

Okay, Samantha, you are up next. Yes, so this is an unexplained death. And this is a death that took place at a women's prison in 1987. So Terry Lucas was an inmate at Frontera Women's Prison, and she died under mysterious circumstances. The day before she died, she told a prison guard, Betty Thompson, that she knew the fate of another prison guard, whose name was Jessalyn Rich, who had vanished in 1984. So this segment interviews Betty Thompson, who I believe...

I believe at the time she was no longer working for the prison, but I'm not positive about that. But she was the prison guard that Terry Lucas confided in. Jesslyn was another prison guard that worked at the same prison and she had disappeared, like I said, in 1984. She was a divorced mother of two and she was last seen at a country western bar with friends on November 11th, 1984. This reenactment is so ominous. Yeah, it is. It's really scary.

It's scary, but I have to say, the fashion makes it kind of hard to take seriously. It's kind of scary in a different way, the fashion. There's this shot of her, like, she gets up to go to the bathroom, and she goes in the bathroom, and that's the last time her friend sees her, but then she sees this guy, like, walk in that direction, and you kind of, like, see her shadow go out of the frame, and then this guy just, like, walk that way, too. Oh, it's ominous. After seeing this, I wanted to get my ass to, like, Nashville or something, get my ass to a honky-tonk, and just really go to town in one of those. Yeah, this country-western bar is a whole look. Although, based on this,

feel like i would avoid them i don't know they seem like dangerous places but it's not a ringing endorsement uh so jesseline's friend marilyn claimed that she uh that jesseline had looked at the door and suddenly was very afraid they were sort of at this honky-tonk they were having a good time and then all of a sudden like she could feel jesseline's tone just completely change and she looked past her at the door uh suddenly clearly terrified um quickly she excused herself to go to the bathroom and at this point like liz said marilyn saw a man walk behind her as she went to the bathroom and then this was the last time that anyone ever saw jesseline I hate it. Her family believed that she may have been kidnapped and murdered because they believed that she would have contacted her family. She had two young children that she was the sole carer for. She was also going to night school in criminal justice and had been actively pursuing her career. She had straight A's in night school. She had a day job. I hate this idea that people will just leave their life for no reason. It seemed like she liked her life and was happy with it.

This is where we get into what may or may not be a conspiracy to cover up what actually happened to Jeslyn because her family was like, would someone please look into this? Clearly, she's not going to leave her two young children. She has an established life. And the police are saying that she probably just ran off with someone. Right. And that feeds into how deep does this corruption go? Does it go all the way up to law enforcement? Because you kind of have to think so if they're saying they're not going to investigate this at all. And her brother's rifling through a trash and comes upon definite corruption. Yes. Yeah, definitely. So Jeslyn's brother, Gary.

Basically, the family was like, OK, no one's looking into this. So they're basically investigating themselves. Gary goes through her house and basically finds evidence that she knew about illegal activities and that she had been receiving threats from other guards at the women's prison. And they believe that this is why she was probably murdered as a result of what she knew. One clue was a torn up note that she had written to a co-worker. She wrote that another guard stated that, quote, anyone interfering with my drug activities will be taken care of.

I think we know what that means. So they find evidence that she's murdered. No one finds evidence that she just ran off, but the police are still like, no, she probably just ran away. That's what Unsolved Mysteries made it seem like. Right. It's the laziest goddamn investigating I've ever seen. Investigators, don't be lazy like this. Don't be lazy. Don't cover up corruption, you fuck. It seems like there's probably, maybe not an active cover-up, but like an...

inability like an unwillingness for them to even do anything because because the case essentially according to investigators went cold um and then on three years after she vanished in november of 1987 terry came forward and told betty thompson that she had been threatened by guards to keep quiet about what she knew and there is kind of a frightening reenactment honestly of the inside of this prison and a male guard like trying to get in to terry's cell she was in they called it the infirmary like She was in an area of the prison. I assume prisoners were sick and kind of by herself in her own cell. And this male guard is trying to get into her cell and she's crying. And Betty Thompson, who's interviewed for the show, says that she ran over there. And Betty is like, look, normally we have like the prison guards have each other's back, whatever. But this guy was clearly upsetting Terry. And also there's like protocol. You can't just go into someone's cell and like yell at them. Like clearly there's some sort of like way, like a procedure you're supposed to like interact with the inmates. And he is like clearly upsetting her. Also, she's in this area of the prison for prisoners who are unwell. And so she said that Betty says she got in between.

Terry and the guard and said you are not going into the cell well there's something scary about a man like insisting to go into a space where this woman like can't defend herself at all and I think it shows that Betty did actually like care about her yeah I think I think the the thing about it too is like she made this guard seem like he's almost like mysterious in a way because it's just like it seemed like she didn't know him all that well so like Yeah, good on her. It was, like, not part of his rounds or whatever. Right, right. He normally wouldn't have been in that area. Right. So she thought something suspicious was happening. And good for her for actually, like, standing up to him. Yeah, like, seriously, good on fucking Betty for, like, standing her ground as best she could the whole time. Because, fuck, man, things are going to go kind of south. I mean, I think Betty clearly displays some bravery. Like, it's not easy. Like, we'll see, like, later, like, what she's up against. And, you know, I don't know that a lot of people would have acted the same way that she did. But basically, so after this incident, Terry told Thompson that she had been threatened by guards to keep quiet.

Terry then told her that she knew what happened to Jeslyn. Terry, unfortunately, turned up dead the next day. So Betty said that she was going on her typical rounds and she noticed that Terry wasn't getting out of her bed, that her breakfast had been untouched, whatever. She goes in there and she chokes up as she describes finding that Terry is dead. She's emotional throughout this whole episode, so you can tell it's affected her a lot. Yeah, it's horrible. I mean, it's terrible.

disturbingly her body had been ignored and left in the cell for three days by the time that betty johnson thompson had found it uh and thompson told the nurses about terry's death and an investigation revealed that she had been brutally beaten and suffocated in addition blades of grass were found in her hair which makes no sense because she shouldn't have been outside she was in the prison infirmary uh the medical examiner immediately ruled that her death was a homicide. In fact, Thompson says that she talked to the medical examiner, and he said, who killed this woman? She's in prison. You should know who she's been with. Clearly, this was homicide. Yeah, it's obvious. However, Thompson says that after he met with high-ranking prison officials, her death was changed to be complications due to diabetes. Here's a fun little aside here. The coroner in this episode, he played a dermatologist on Scrubs. Yes!

thought that was him he did look familiar yeah is that the guy that passed away recently like very recently no that's um that's that's a lawyer yeah that's sam lloyd yeah that's so yeah i was like that guy is so familiar he has to be from scrubs that's really funny so because thompson was the one to have discovered terry's body there was like a lot of paperwork associated with it and she says that she was subjected to intimidation and essentially an interrogation sick that lasted six hours in which prison officials tried to force her to basically say like change her story to lie to say that you know the body looks differently, that this is why she died. And she refused. She said she wasn't going to do that. But after... I mean, she's in a prison and they're telling her she cannot leave. Also, that scene is like...

very uncomfortable to see her sitting at that table all those guards standing around their arms almost in like a circle yeah like like we're gonna fucking beat the shit out of you right now if you do not change your goddamn statement and uh yeah i i don't like any no and what thompson said that she was told eventually was that listen the same thing that happened to jeslyn could happen to you and at that point she was like well fuck and she agreed to sign the doctored report which was typed up for her however at the bottom of the report she wrote with her in her handwriting that she signed this under duress and that is not true which was like But she was like, fine. I mean, I don't want to get disappeared. I'll sign it. And then it's like, by the way, this is all lies. It's kind of amazing. At that point, the prison officials were like, well, fuck you. We can't take this. So they, according to Thompson, shredded the one that she signed, retyped it, and forged her signature.

I mean, what I'm assuming happened is she was like, yeah, yeah, I'll sign it. So she signs it. She writes the thing on there. Maybe they don't notice. And she was like, so I can go now. So she like, you know, bolts out of there and then they pick it up and they're like, wait a minute. We can't use this one that says signed under duress on it. So honestly, it's amazing. Yeah. Betty is my hero. So following this, she continued to receive threats. She would receive threatening phone calls in her office in the prison. She also would receive like veiled threats from other prison officials in person. They would be like, I think one instance she was.

forget the exact wording but basically she saw another like a higher ranking prison official just like in the lunchroom or whatever and she was like hey has anyone recently told you that like you might get killed and she was like oh at that point i knew that like everybody around me was in on it just casual lunch conversation ever told you that you might just end up dead and nobody would know who did it right i'm like i'm trying to put myself in this situation and wondering if i wouldn't laugh my ass off or if i'd just be scared as fuck because i'm like i should be like really that's the best way that you can fucking say that it's hilarious but in thompson's shoes she's like fuck they really killed just like they're really gonna fucking kill me they killed terry like i am time to get a new job and then after a simple after seven months of routine threats. Thompson was shot at from a moving car in front of her home in June 1988. She immediately called the police. They came to her home to take a report, and then afterwards she got a phone call that said, next time we won't miss. She seemed impressed that the police even took her report and wrote it down.

The level of corruption was so high that when she called this in and then got that phone call, she was like, and the officer saw that I was scared and he actually wrote that down. Like her standards at this point are so low that anyone's going to help her. It's horrible. And so this became a scandal that was covered in several front page articles in the Orange County Register over insider accounts of drug dealing and corruption within the women's prison. Betty Thompson and five other guards testified in a state Senate hearing over the alleged offenses. When Unsolved Mysteries was taping their segment, prison officials...

declined to comment, obviously. A spokesman for the California Department. Yeah, not a surprise. We would not like to comment on the corruption that has been going on in our facility. Sorry. This is like maybe one of my favorite moments of Unsolved Mysteries is Robert Stack quoting the official that they like gave a canned statement or whatever, the California Department of Officials. We're not saying that something didn't happen at the prison, but there's no evidence. And like Stack, Stack puts so much snark on that end quote. And I was like, I always wanted to cheer. I'm like, yes. Like this is, I can't believe it. Like this is almost like them saying like.

Well, fuck you. Yeah, it was going on, but we don't give a shit. Yeah, prove it. Jessalyn Rich at the time of this taping remains missing and Terry Lucas's death remains, I mean, unsolved, although the prison claims that it was diabetes. I'm just looking at Unsolved Mysteries Wiki. I'm going to see if there's any updates. I don't think there is. It says that it remains unsolved. Remains believed to be Jessalyn's were located and identified. However, more recently, her daughter has claimed that DNA testing determined that those remains were not those of Jessalyn. Terry and Jessalyn's cases both remain unsolved. It doesn't seem like there's been any developments on these, unfortunately. And I'm sure it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in looking at a Terry's death, honestly.

yeah that's the problem yeah so this one was i mean it's a rough story but it was interesting i mean it's a very good segment it's a it's a i mean it's a terrible tragedy but i think it's very well covered on this yeah and i'm glad this corruption got exposed because fuck all this bullshit oh yeah god and this honestly betty thompson is like the hero of liz isn't gonna salute the flag but we will salute betty thompson we will salute betty right now yep Okay, so now we get an update on Kathy Loving, which we already talked about her case. She was the supposed delinquent who was trying to get away from her abusive father and then ended up sent to like some school for wayward girls. And it was the person taking her to the place that was the only person that believed her story because her dad was a cop. If you remember that case, we already talked about it, but I don't think we saw this reunion before. No, I don't think so either. Because like I remember watching that episode that that story appeared on and it wasn't in there. They were still looking for him at the time, I think. The reunion is fucking adorable. It's like the best reunion I've ever seen.

She, like, makes a banner that's like, Fred is my hero. And she makes him, her and her friends make him a dinner of all his favorite foods. And then they have this, like, feast together. Oh, my God, yeah. She's like, the first thing she tells him is that she loves him. Oh, my God. It's so sweet. And, like, the way that Fred says it, he's like, I wanted to come here because I wanted to thank her because, you know, it made me feel something and it made me feel like something that I did in life helped somebody. So it's like, God damn it, I wanted to hug all of those people. I know, they're so sweet. Well, I feel like he really put his job and, you know, who knows what else on the line standing up for her in this cover-up.

It clearly changed the course of her life. And it was so nice that she got to thank him. And they had this dinner. I don't know. It was just the cutest. And that food looked really good. Yeah, I really wanted to try some of it. She was like, I want to see your face when you eat this mac and cheese. That's love. I was like, oh, I want it. So we don't usually, I don't usually like it when they throw in these updates of cases we've already covered. But this one, for some reason, has other information. So that was OK. All right. There's one last one. It is a missing person from Houma, Louisiana, which Robert Stack describes as in the heart of Cajun country, steeped.

In the romance of backwater bayous and sweeping magnolias. Which is like, wait, it's a romance novel. All set to this like old west kind of melody going on. Yeah, it's a little odd. But this is the case of AJ Brew, who lived in Houma, I think his whole life. He had three daughters and he had worked for the same clothing store for 30 years. So everybody in town knew him. He was a very recognizable figure. He was known for being kind of a dapper dresser because he worked in this clothing store. He was like sharp.

And he had in the past struggled with alcoholism, but by 1991, he had been, which is when this takes place, he had been sober for eight years. He was often at the Easy Does It Club, which is the most adorable name for a support group I've ever heard, which was this group for alcoholics that met in a warehouse to like support each other in sobriety. So sort of like AA, but I don't know, like their own thing, I guess. He was there all the time. He was very serious about it. And he was always trying to help other people with their sobriety. So on Wednesday, August 28th, 1991, AJ left the club at 8.30 PM. Half an hour later, he's seen stopping by a convenience store to buy milk.

At that time, he told the cashier he was on his way home where he lived with one of his daughters, but he never arrived home. I think the next day, or maybe a couple days later, his car is found abandoned by a park. The reenactment of his daughters on a fucking mission. I was like, do not get in these ladies' way because they will run you over. Don't fuck with these women. Full on, full contact, clothesline, you're going down.

So I think someone alerted them that their dad's car was at the park. So they go to see it and then they call the police and the police come over and one of the daughters is like insisting, like open up the trunk. I'm worried my dad is dead and in the trunk. Well, he wasn't dead and in the trunk, but the daughters still think that it's foul play because why would he just leave his car there for everyone to find? And also his wallet and his checkbook had been talked under the front seat of the car. So once again, except for that one dude in Canada, most people do not just ditch everything to go start a new life.

do that without a wallet or a car. Are you talking about the guy who, like, stole a paperclip from his job and then was like, fuck, I gotta get out of the country. It's frustrating because I always want to say, oh, no one does that, but that one guy did. So... I'm just gonna warn you because when I did some other Unsolved Mystery stuff with some other people last Halloween, there is another legitimate amnesia case coming up. Yeah, it's coming up. Two seasons from now. Or no, next season. It's next season. Legitimate amnesia is not nearly as frustrating as a guy who needed to, like, run from the law except the statute of limitations and way run out. Right.

For stealing a paperclip? Yeah. Yeah, for some minor cry. Okay. So the daughters were insisting it was foul play. The police were saying there's no evidence of foul play for us to investigate. But three witnesses came forward to say that they had seen AJ after he had disappeared. One was local resident Kenneth Pilgrin, who says he saw him outside a convenience store the day after he disappeared. And that what he remembers being unique about was that he was wearing kind of like sloppy clothes.

And that this guy had known him like most of his life and known him to be like a very sharp dresser. So he sees him standing outside on the payphone wearing like pants that don't fit him and like a flannel shirt. And he says hi to him, but AJ doesn't really say anything. And he just thought it was weird, but he didn't know at the time he was missing. Because he was like, if I had known he was missing, he would have been found. But that's just an odd statement to make. But I'm like, hell yeah, buddy. I know you would have done something. He's like, yeah, he's like, I knew him, you know, since I was seven years old. I obviously recognized him. Things did seem a little out of sorts, but I didn't think too much of it until later he found out that he was missing. He also noticed that there was three men waiting for him in a small compact car, which relates to this other eyewitness who saw him in a small compact car driving down the road with three other dudes. This was about eight miles outside of town. And this guy was getting the mail, at least in the reenactment, and waved at AJ. But listener, AJ did not wave back.

And that was not like AJ because he knew everyone and he was nice to everyone. God damn it. He would wave to everyone. I liked how at the beginning of this segment, I think it was like Robert Stack that said like, AJ was a guy that you could depend on. Yeah. People described him as he had had these.

I don't even know if he really, he had, I think a DUI or something previously because of his alcoholism. But since getting sober and getting his life together, like people really changed their opinion of him and thought of him as this like upstanding character in the community and this very like trustworthy guy who would definitely wave at you. I think it's funny that this is like clearly a small town where like everyone knows everybody. And if you don't wave back, that's like something people will remember and be like notable, right? Like, oh yeah, I remember last Tuesday when they didn't wave back at me.

He knows the date. He saw AJ in a car just driving by. He didn't wave. Here's an interesting, because this kind of just blew my mind now that I'm thinking of it. I'm actually in the middle of writing this true crime episode that I've been wanting to cover because I don't usually do true crime. And one of the guys that were involved in the case literally would get upset if he waved at someone and they didn't wave back. He would be upset for days. Wow. That's taking Minnesota Nights to a whole other level. A level of vengeance. Okay. So two weeks after this, the police get a handwritten note at the police station, which...

It sounds like it was written for a telegram. I don't understand why the sentences are like this. But it says, AJ Brew was drunk at the time. Self-inflicted gunshot wound. Stomach. Drawstring sack. Put in by a friend. Rolled over steep grassy bayou bank near dam. And then it was signed Helene. So that's super weird. Very confusing. But the police didn't follow up on that. They sort of figured out where this area would be by the dam. And they dredged it on three occasions, but nothing was found.

I like how in the reenactment, the guy, the detective is staring at that piece, that little note card so intently, like, ugh. Who's fleeing? Why does she know so much? And why would someone put someone in a drawstring sack after they shot themselves in the stomach? Which also sounds like...

a slow horrible way to die it's the slowest fucking death that you can have like it's like slowly dying and he's like i'm not gonna take you to a hospital what i am gonna do is put you in a drawstring sack and roll you into the bayou yeah exactly holy fuck all right also it reminded me that uh detective troy was my mvm because his mustache had like frosted tips it did holy fuck it did yeah i mean this is clearly just like going gray but it looks like he like dipped the ends in some like white paint okay i would call that mustache the ricky martin in honor of his previously frosted tip hair that he sported for some time. Yeah, that guy seemed like he was living la vida loca. It all adds up. Okay, so four weeks after AJ disappeared, this is one of the strangest reenactments I have seen on top of the screen. A woman named Christy Bardot is sitting on her porch in front of her home in Lockport, Louisiana, which is about 30 miles away. She sees a van pass by on the street a couple times, eventually stop, and a very nervous, disheveled-looking man gets out, walks up to her, and asks if she wants to buy some frozen fish.

Which apparently is just in a fucking Ziploc bag. They didn't even look kind of frozen in the Ramac bag. No, it looked fresh. Fresh as fuck. You were getting salmonella from that fish. Yes. This reminds me of, I was once, this was in New Mexico. I was at the museum. I was working there on a Saturday morning and a guy came in and was trying to sell me cheesesteaks. What? And I think it was maybe for like a fundraiser. Maybe it was just a scam. I don't know. But anyway, I was trying to be polite. So I said like, oh, I shouldn't eat any cheesesteaks. Whatever. I just thought that was like a nice way of saying no. And then the guy went, are you prepared to make a sacrifice?

What? And then there was just a long pause, and I said, I don't know what you're asking, but the answer is no. And he meant, like, sacrifice my diet, but... It sounds like he meant your life, honestly. He said it so ominously, and I just remembered that the other day. Oh my god.

But if someone just came up to you and was like, so do you want to buy some frozen fish? Like, obviously you're going to say no. You're not going to be like, oh, what a great deal. Yes, I'll take some. This thing goes off the rails, though, a little bit more when she's brought in by the detective to look at his photo and she can only recognize the drug photo of him, not the other photo. It's got to be the drug photo. This woman is unreliable to me. I'm just saying.

the other eyewitnesses this isn't someone that knew him right so i don't really take it nearly as seriously she said that as he was leaving she realized he had she had seen his face in a missing poster at the post office but yeah she didn't recognize when they later showed her that same photo she didn't recognize him she recognized his mug shot when he was a bit thinner and according to untold mysteries drunk right that's so mystery thinks that alcohol changes your physical appearance um yeah it's very strange you know alcohol grows out your hair immediately like five fucking inches and oh, he was a little bit thinner like this and I could smell the alcohol on him. It's like this mugshot, which also they show the mugshot and it's not a very good picture. It's like kind of, I forget, overexposed or something. Yeah, it's very overexposed. There's not a lot of definition to it. I think this woman was trying to help. I just, I don't really think that was probably him. Right, right. And if the reenactment is accurate, she realizes that it's this missing person as he's walking away, but she doesn't go like, I'm sorry, sorry, do you need help? She lets him like go back to the van, get in the van and is like, okay, I'm calling the police. Also, like at the same time, the detective says,

Oh, he just might have gotten, you know, like blackout drunk and forgot who he was. Like, what? I've never heard of that happening. Like, I would think you'd have to be perpetually drunk, like in a total state of drunkenness the entire time to forget who you fucking were for any extended period of time. I think this guy has possibly had like one beer. I don't understand that description of being drunk.

It's confusing. It's as confusing as that guy that was pretending to stumble down a hill in the Stefan Mikkelak story. It's all fucking confusing at this point. But then, for some reason, we only now learn that a couple days after AJ's disappearance, a golf course maintenance worker called the city police to say that while he was out there picking up trash or something, at the park where AJ's car was found, he saw a man getting forced into a car. That doesn't make sense, though, because it happened during the day and he went disappearing at night. It's true. But I don't understand why we don't hear that until the end. It's also a different car. It's a white car.

It's not a red compact car like he was seeing. I think it's because they checked it out and it didn't really go anywhere and it didn't really add anything to it. So I don't think it has anything to do with anything, to be honest. But there's also no known reason why someone would kidnap him. The police at this point conclude that the note is a prank, which, Helene, rude. Please stop doing that. That's not a prank, but buying yourself a rat tail and sewing it into their hair at night is a prank. Yeah, that's a hilarious prank that everyone should do. Oh yeah, totally.

Yeah, this is just cruel. I don't know what that was about. And then at this point, the cop says, well, we have no evidence of foul play. We have no evidence that he just left and left either. The end. And I'm sorry to tell you there's no update to this. No, it's just we don't know what the fuck happened to this dude. Poor AJ. I know. He seemed like he had his life together. He'd been sober for eight years and all of a sudden he just fell off the wagon. I'm not saying that it's not possible, but it just seems very unlikely. I don't see how he could be in a constant state of being blackout drunk when he didn't even have his wallet. Exactly. Like, what's he buying booze with? How's he getting married with her?

car where are you getting the fish there's a lot of questions um i will say now that i think about it the uh the amnesia case that i was talking about involves a guy that has a tilapia farm oh well maybe it's people who have maybe it's the same maybe i don't know interesting i feel bad for aj i feel like it's unlikely that he just fell off the wagon since he had all these people to support him with sobriety like If that had happened, I think he just would have reached out to people at his club. I don't think he would have gone missing for the rest of time. He went missing in 1991, and we still don't know what happened to him. He has not been drunk this whole time. It's mysterious. Yeah, it's very mysterious. Okay, that is the end of the episode, and it's time, by law, to read it. Yes, and our first category, which we can give a thumbs up, a thumbs down, or a thumbs sideways, is mysteriousness. I have to say thumbs up. I think it's very mysterious, actually. Yeah. We don't have a lot of concrete answers at all, actually.

No, we don't. Why are aliens so rude? What happened to most of these people? We don't know. We don't fucking know. How would you rate the reenactment? Oh, that's a tricky one. We have some scary reenactments, but then we have that CGI UFO. So it's a real mixed bag. I would say if you kind of remove the guy trying to sell a fish in a Ziploc bag. I mean, that is fucking incredible. That made the episode. I think that pushes it. I think that pushes it to thumbs up. Yeah, I would agree. It's better CGI than we've seen. So for like, we're just like comparing unsolved mysteries to unsolved mysteries.

feel like they really struggle with ufos in the daytime and they look much better when they do the ufos at night yeah i cheat with just some lights in the sky when you have to actually see the whole ufo that's when things get a little cgi murky but the fish reenactment just i did not see that coming no you never know when you get hit with a fucking fish fucking reenactment it's just boom there it is in a ziploc bag and all i can think about is those ziploc bag commercials from when i was a kid and you know they're showing you how strong the ziploc bag is you can hold you could throw a whole freaking bunch of like spaghetti sauce in there and it's not gonna break through this is a thing through yeah uh so thumbs up Okay, with fast fashion. I gotta say, there is some good fashion in this one. Robert Stack, first of all. That honky-tonk fashion, holy shit. Plus honky-tonk fashion. We got some 90s looks from The Witnesses. Ah, yeah, thumbs up. I'm totally down with that, you know, plaid shirt that Mikalak had. I'm just down with that. Yeah, I feel like if most people were wearing that, it would just be, particularly in Minnesota, like, he was wearing the clothes he wore every day. We wear it all the time up here. AJ wears it, it was like, he was a disheveled slob. I barely recognized him. You wear that outfit in Minnesota, people ask you if you have a job interview. That's, like, dressed up.

yeah yeah okay yeah that's fair that's fair it's a casual place um robert stack i gotta give a thumbs up we got we got smirks we got we got smirks yeah we've got a new trench coat look yeah we got a new trench coat look that i'm gonna come out of quarantine and put on the fucking map uh he can't say people's names right but neither can i so i'm gonna give him a pass on that thumbs up again yeah and now we're gonna rate it on our robert stack scale zero to five robert stacks uh i'm curious what you you two think i would say four yeah that's what i was thinking i'm landing on a four it's not magic rock which is like five but it is a good episode i would say it might even be a four and a half i really enjoyed this episode um we get some variety to the cases a lot of mystery uh none of the segments felt like they were overly long nope No, worth watching. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. So we're landing on a four, maybe four and a half. I think so. Yep. Now, usually at the end of these episodes, we make a recommendation. Rob, do you have something you would like to recommend? Something that is maybe getting you through this difficult time in the world? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So for me, I work in a nursing home and nursing homes in New York are like, it's like a worry fest constantly because you don't know if the virus is going to find its way into the building. Yeah, it hasn't happened for us. Thank God we only have.

14 cases in our county right now, which is good. We actually, there was 15 and they knocked it down by one. It was an error in the test. But one thing that I've been using to get through on YouTube, you can find these. these accounts where people will restore things like toys and stuff like that. And like just watching them, it's almost like ASMR because like the sounds, because some of them are sped up like when they're like pounding on a piece of metal with a hammer or something like that. And like sandblasting metal and stuff like that. It kind of calms me down to the point. It actually puts me to sleep. So if I need to fall asleep, I'll watch these. So there are a few pages that if you want to check out, you can. There's one called Rescue and Restore. And the guy on there primarily does like, it's mostly toys and stuff like that. There's another one called...

EasyTube, T-Y-S-Y tube. And he does like kind of like almost wrenches and like equipment and stuff like that. There's My Mechanics is another good one. If you're on Facebook and you want a kind of compilation of all of this kind of stuff and all these guys, there's a page called We Restore and you can just watch videos of people restoring shit. And it just like, it mellows me out to the point where I'm not having a bad day anymore and I can.

fucking sleep at night that's a solid recommendation have you ever watched those videos where people make those candles that are different colors where they dip them over and over again i find that so relaxing those will sometimes be like served to me as like an ad on facebook i don't even know what it's what they're selling but every once in a while those will come up as i'm perusing social media and i have to stop and watch them every time i never get that it's so relaxing okay rob have you watched a show on netflix called the repair shop i haven't it is just a shop possibly just made for the show it's like a reality show in england but it's literally just people bringing things to get fixed and then english people soothingly fix them I like this. I'm going to check that out because I need more of that in my life. This woman has a clock that her blind father made that stops chiming, and so she brings it in, and then they restore it and fix it for her. It's extremely pleasant content. Yeah, it does sound extremely pleasant. I think it's the fact that no matter how bad something is, it can be fixed. It can be brought back to some kind of level that it was when it was first made, and it's really kind of...

amazing to watch them do it like it's amazing what sandblasting any kind of metal will do to like bring it back to its like bare bones uh level and then watching them like do all these things polishing it and sanding it and stuff it really is probably one of the most relaxing things you can actually watch on the internet that is a solid recommendation that's really good okay i have a really quick one which i shared with samantha earlier in the week and i feel like a lot of people discovered this this week but the actor leslie jordan makes these little videos on instagram that are the most pleasant thing I've ever watched. You might know him from Will and Grace or American Horror Story. He just turned 65. I swear once you see a picture of him, you'll know exactly who I'm talking about if you don't know the name. But he, like most of us, is quarantined right now and is clearly really bored and is making all these videos where he starts off, hey, hunker downers, and just, like, tells random memories or, like, cute things that are happening. The one I sent Samantha was him showing off his journal and the stickers that he posted in it, and then he was, like, so excited about his pretty stickers that came. Or he just, like, tells stories from, like, famous people he's met or...

Or why he was baptized 14 times growing up, which is because he's gay. Yeah. He's just so charming and I wish he was my friend. So everyone should go follow him on Instagram because it's really adorable. It's been fun to watch him blow up like this entire time. And I'll tell you, like, if you go to like TikTok and TikTok has become this resource for me for random bios of people that were on the Titanic and what they did on the Titanic when it was going down. And like, yeah, it's been pretty amazing. Like there'll be one guy who's like, and they'll use the movie as a reference. You're like, you remember this guy in Titanic? This is so-and-so. When the boat was going down, he literally started getting everybody to boats as quick as they could. There were two women that tried to run away and say, oh no, we'll wait.

for another one he literally threw them on the boat yes there is a lot of like there's great cooking content on tiktok like i found a wonderful cookie recipe on tiktok that i've made like three or four batches of at this point and it's the simplest recipe i will just give you the recipe right now you take a cup of uh brown sugar a cup of peanut butter a one egg one teaspoon of baking soda a half a cup of chocolate chips mix that together put it on a baking sheet put it in the oven at 350 for 12 minutes. You're good to go. This is fascinating because the only recipe I found on TikTok is the white cloth slushy, which I'm not knocking. Let me tell you right now. But this is fantastic that this content is out there. Different strokes for different folks. Exactly. Here's the most amazing thing that I found out because I have another podcast. It's called The Coda. It's a music podcast. And we were doing news stories there for a while. And one of them involved TikTok and how it used to be called musicallymusic.ly. And when the company that owns TikTok bought it, they bought basically half a million user.

accounts. So when they formed into TikTok, they had half a million user accounts and they engineered it to a way in which people go viral very quick on TikTok. There are people at Arista Records that represent people on TikTok. Yeah, people from a music label represent people on TikTok. It's very wild. That is wild. Okay, Samantha, do you have a recommendation for us or is it just to play more? That's all I've been doing, so that's really the only thing I can recommend. But I second both of your recommendations. Okay, but do you have a recommendation for, say, new players to Animal Crossing such as myself? What should we work on?

So my recommendation, and this is going to be controversial, but my recommendation is to time travel when you're getting first set up. And I know some people are like really against this. And if you are in it, if you're in it for like the process where like waiting an entire day to like have something finished is satisfying to you, then I mean, that's a different experience. But for me, I kind of wanted to get going faster. And the beginning of the game is pretty slow. Like it's meant to be done in like every day you get something. It's supposed to be with real time, but you can artificially speed up time by going into the settings on your Switch.

and basically just saying it's tomorrow so you can trick it into thinking it's the next day and you can get through the first like setup process faster which can be kind of a for me it was a slog and I didn't want to wait and I'm also an impatient person so I see no harm this is a controversial opinion trust me but I see no harm in doing some time travel at the beginning casting people having meltdowns oh yes like internet meltdowns about the fact that other people are doing this. And I don't, it doesn't affect your game at all. It literally affects no one. This is not competition. I don't know why people care, but people are like having a meltdown. People see it as like cheating, which I don't understand because you can't win this game. Like it's not, it's not. So that is honestly my recommendation is if you find the beginning of the game, be slow. You really want to get going. I do play the game all you want and do some time trial. The other thing that I did a lot was I just, I Googled because there's things about the game that are just hard to figure out or find like a Facebook group.

There's actually a specific Facebook group for people who are playing Animal Crossing that are over the age of 25. That's amazing. That's awesome. People will give you tips. The same questions you might have will be asked. It's like anything else. And then people will also trade. So if you really want to get into it, people will trade. I actually did a villager swap. I traded one of my villagers for a hamster named Flurry. And I do not regret it. Flurry is adorable. I would love to get one of mine.

I think everyone has this experience where you get like an ugly or an annoying villager that you just want gone. For me, it's, first of all, she's ugly. But every time I talk to her, she's like, why are you talking to me? Like, all right, diva. Fine. Yeah. She's out of there. The first chance I get.

brings everything to a close friends and enemies i think we are now at the end so everybody should check out rob on our strange skies podcast yeah rob tell people how they can find both of your podcasts so uh yeah if you if you have a podcast app that you love uh our strange skies and the koda music podcast is on it uh if you want to check out my website it's ourstrangeskies.com we got a lot of cool stuff over there um If you want to check out the sources that we use in any episode, you can find them in the show notes for those. Oh man, imagine if we did that. It would just be Unsolved Mysteries Wiki every time. We have some cool merch over there too if you want to check that out. We have links to Patreon and all that good stuff. So rstrangeguys.com. Well, thanks for being with us today, Rob. Thank you for having me on.

I love you, lady, so much. I love your podcast. You bring me joy every week. So it was an honor to be here. Well, and it's really nice just to have someone that actually knows what they're talking about coming on the show. So you can find us on all the social medias at Perhaps It's You. Yep. And we have a Patreon that's almost Patreon slash Perhaps It's You. I spelled it wrong. I don't know what happened. What happened? We don't know. But it's close to that. You can find it. Or you can go to our website, PerhapsIt'sYou.com, and that will show you the way. Our newest bonus episode that came out was about celebrity ghost stories.

And not all of those people were celebrities, but some of them did have some good ghost stories. And this month, we're going to be talking about Scream 3. A controversial choice as my favorite Scream. It's a, you know, it's a seminal classic. It's a controversial classic. I agree. But it's a seminal classic. I learned the other day how much people hate that movie. A lot of people do. A lot of people do. Is there something else we're supposed to say to the entities? Oh, you have to give us five stars. Five stars, no less. Yeah, it's required. But we don't accept less than five stars. And oh, if you want to send in something for the zine, yes, we are still accepting submissions, perhaps.

It's you, podcast, gmail.com. Take a break from solving mysteries. You're off the hook. Bye.