Hellier (2019): Season 1, Episode 1 - The Midnight Children - full transcript

Synchronicity is a
meaningful coincidence.

Basically, it’s when these
two events correspond

in a way that seems highly improbable,
highly unlikely,

but also deeply meaningful
for that person.

It relates to some aspect of their life

in a way that feels significant

and purposeful and intended.

Almost by some other kind
of consciousness.

Now coincidences happen for sure,

but this is almost
in the realm of deja vu

where it seems like there’s
something more to it,



particularly when the
synchronicities drop all at once,

and there’s one after another,
after another

in a way that feels
something else is going on,

something bigger.

That’s what started this case

And that’s what plagued us
throughout the case.

In order to trace the synchronicity
back for me,

we have to go back to the spring of 2016.

I was finishing up my work
at the Stanley Hotel,

I was the Resident Paranormal
Investigator there.

I was shooting a web series
called Spirits of the Stanley

and the final public paranormal event
that they hosted in April

was the first time that I met
Greg and Dana Newkirk

who run the Traveling Museum
of the Paranormal and the Occult,



a popular blog website
called Week In Weird

and they’re doing a ton of very novel,
very interesting paranormal experiments

in the broader field in general.

We became instant friends.
We kept in touch.

A couple months later, in June,
Dana posted a blog entry on Week in Weird

about the top five indie paranormal
projects people should check out.

And she was very kind enough to include
Spirits of the Stanley on the list.

As I scrolled through the article,
I noticed another post

about the Euphomet podcast
that Jim Perry puts on.

In the article,
there was an embedded episode,

and that one that they chose
was an interview with Greg.

It was about an hour long interview,

and it was all about this very bizarre,
strange case of these Kentucky Goblins

and these weird emails that Greg
had gotten starting in about 2012.

I didn’t get a chance
to listen to it that June,

but I returned to it in September,

and I got immediately
enthralled in the story.

Take us back

to after you received
that second message from David.

He describes events that have
pretty much left his family in terror,

small, hairless entities, and someone
who calls himself "Terry Wriste?"

I thought it was a good story,

but I wasn’t totally on board.

I mean, anyone can write a great story.

Was this ringing a bell with Kentucky?

Was there evidence that there were mines?
That this was…

The only thing that it seemed
to have anything in common with

was there were some themes that related
to the Hopkinsville Goblins case

that happened back in 1955.

And in 1955, this family
in this farmhouse was besieged

by these tiny creatures
that they thought were from outer space.

I got about halfway through the episode,

paused it, went over to Twitter,

and I blasted it out.

Couple minutes later,
Greg hit me back…

I wrote him back.

And then I noticed their Week in Weird
account posted an article

about the same Kentucky Goblins case.

Now, thinking that Greg and Dana
had used that as an opportunity

to plug their page and their website

because I was talking about it already,

I hit them back with a post that said
“I see what you did there”

or something along those lines.

Greg writes back and says,
“That wasn’t us who posted that.”

What he told me was that
it was a random auto-post

that draws from the entire archive
of different Week in Weird articles

and posts throughout the day.

And further, there were 1700 articles

on Week in Weird,

that it could have drawn from,

and there were only two
about this Kentucky Goblins case.

Greg had recorded that entire interview
six months beforehand

and it was random that I even clicked
on the blog

and started listening
to the podcast at the time

and equally random that
we had this 1 in almost 900 chance

that their account should post,

let alone at the time that it did,
right in the middle of me listening to it.

It felt extremely unlikely,

and it felt very pointed,

particularly as I listened
to the end of the episode

and I realized:
this was a cliffhanger.

There was more work to be done.

And not only did I want
to be a part of it,

I felt supernaturally
called to be a part of it

by this synchronicity.

And in the two weeks that followed,
it was a synchronicity storm,

there was just one after another
after another

all tangentially relating
to this Kentucky Goblins case.

So here we are,
almost a year to the date

after that series of synchronicities
that called me to this case,

and we’re going out to Kentucky…

And we’re going to do our best
to try and figure out what was going on.

When I say that I’ve investigated
the paranormal for like twenty years,

I typically just don’t even count
the first five

because it was all stuff based on
things that I’d read

or things that might’ve
been on television,

watched a lot of World’s Scariest Places
and stuff like that,

and based everything
we’d done off of that.

But eventually,
the longer we were in this...

Dana and I even met because we ran
rival ghost hunting websites as kids

and eventually we got together

and we started to try and think of things
a little bit differently.

So we come from a pretty hardcore
ghost hunting background.

That was really what we started out as.

And then eventually we started
to look into things like bigfoot

or we’d start to look into things
like UFO sightings

and then we’d start to get into
people who believed

that there was some kind
of weird unifying theory

that mixed all this stuff together.

And so that’s where we’ve stayed.

We really strongly believe that
if more paranormal researchers

would communicate with each other

from different communities...

Like ghost hunters don’t typically
talk to bigfoot hunters

and bigfoot hunters don’t really talk
to UFO investigators,

but if they did,

they’d notice that there’s a lot
of weird crossover there.

So as far as we’re concerned,
there’s really nothing that’s too weird.

In fact, the weirder, the better.

I think that…

I mean, initially,
it started off as a joke.

Our first kind of adventure
away from ghosts was bigfoot

and it was as a joke,
again like by accident,

we went out to have fun with a guy
that we thought was probably crazy

and he was crazy,

but he also brought us to places where
we were experiencing legitimate activity

You’ve got five rounds in here.

Five rounds...

- You always save the last one
for yourself…

- Okay.

It kind of felt the same way

that it did when we both
first started ghost hunting.

The first few times that you
experience something

that you legitimately can't explain,

it fuels your curiosity and
continues to push you forward.

I think it tends to happen
that the longer

somebody researches this type of stuff,

and the more broad that they decide
to cast their net,

the more they realize things are
so much stranger on an even deeper level.

So it’s anything from:
“Are we causing hauntings with our mind?”

to “Is bigfoot just the ghost
of a Neaderthalic man?”

Stuff like that. The longer you do it,

the more you start to see this stuff
that never quite adds up in popular theory

but when you start researching
a little bit deeper,

you start to see people like John Keel,
who believed in window areas

and that all kinds of stuff came from it.

And then you start to believe things like:

“Well, maybe UFOs aren’t
coming from outer space,

maybe they’re coming from here,
from another type of dimension.”

And that’s the type of stuff
that’s really hard to tell people

and get them to swallow,

because it’s hard enough to tell them

that there’s a giant,
hairy creature in the woods,

or that there’s aliens
coming and abducting people

and performing experiments
on cows and stuff like that.

It all just comes from continuing
to follow these rabbit holes,

and it just gets weirder
and weirder the longer you’re in it.

I think when you start to invite that type
of weird thinking into your life,

that type of stuff just has a habit
of finding you then.

And I don’t know if that’s because
you’re paying more attention to it,

and you’re trying to look
for those weird connections,

or if it’s because they’re like,
“Oh, somebody's paying attention,

let’s go screw with that guy.”

It's nice...

to be married to someone
who is equally as weird as you are.

It’s always nice,

especially when both of us have
such huge histories in the paranormal

because then you can go on all these
weird adventures together.

Our dynamic is different, and
it changes from case to case

and from even just subject to subject.

There are specific things,
like for instance,

when it comes to UFO research,

I tend to take a little bit more
of a skeptical stance.

And that’s really just because
it’s not my world,

and I don’t know as much
about it as Greg does,

so I tend to come at it
from an outsider’s perspective,

which makes me analyze people a lot more

than I would from a ghost perspective,

which is, I’m all in

That’s where I feel the most comfortable.

For the most part, Greg tends to go
in to all of the things we investigate

ready to believe.

Not in a, like,
“everything’s a ghost!”

or “everything’s a bigfoot!”

It’s not necessarily like that,
he’s just ready to believe people.

And I think that I tend to be
a little bit more standoffish.

So I’m more about observing
how people tell me their stories

and the nuances of those stories

and then comparing them to evidence
at the same time.

So it’s good because I think that we will
balance each other out

and we don’t let each other
get too carried away

because when one starts to go
into a place where “everything’s a ghost”

or “everything’s a bigfoot,"

the other person is there to go,
"Let’s reign it in a little bit,

pull back and look at it.”

And we’re good at pulling each other out
of that running around screaming,

"everything’s paranormal!"

We’re pretty good at that
for the most part.

So, I started as a ghost hunter.

That’s what I started doing.

And the name of my ghost hunting
team when I was a kid

was Ghost Hunters Incorporated.

It wasn’t because we were incorporated.

We just thought that it sounded cool.

We were like 13-years old
and thought it was badass.

So we were Ghost Hunters Incorporated

and it was something that we kept up
for the better part of a decade.

We had this website that we maintained

and it had all of our adventures on it

and it was pretty
irreverent to put it lightly.

We weren’t the most serious.

That’s kind of the reason why I say

I don’t really count
the first five years of my history

because it was basically just kids
screwing around

in graveyards and
abandoned houses at night.

There was a point where
I had left my hometown in Pennsylvania

and I'd moved out to Seattle.

And that was about the time
when GHI just kind of fell apart.

And it just kind of died.

But, with a lot of stuff,
the website just sits there.

And we didn’t really want to kill it

because it had all of our fun adventures
and stuff like that.

And one of the things that still just
sat there was an email address.

And it was for Ghost Hunters Incorporated.

And I would occasionally check it.

Like, every few months
I’d give it a check.

And at this point, it was 2012.

I was living in Canada,

was getting ready to go
through Canadian immigration

,

And I went to check the email address,

and there was an email in it

from this guy
who called himself “David Christie.”

It was this urgent email...

I think actually if I remember correctly,

the title was: “Urgent.

Need Help, Please Advise"
or something like that.

The email was about how these little
creatures on this man’s property

in a town called Hellier, Kentucky,

were coming out of mine shafts,

and they were terrorizing his family.

And I was like:
“oh, that’s different…

I don’t normally get anything like that.”

Especially as a ghost hunter.

Like, why would this guy email
ghost hunters?

So I sat there and I thought about it,
and I was like:

“Alright, the website hasn’t been
updated in like seven years,

does he have the wrong address?”

I mean, one of the main pictures
on the front of the website

was a bunch of kids in bowling shirts,
carrying medieval weapons...

Like, that was our thing!

We had medieval weapons
and we had torches

and BB guns and stuff.

We weren't really...

We weren’t really
the picture of professionalism,

especially for an honest case.

So I thought, okay,

either this guy's got
the wrong email address

or it’s just somebody screwing around.

So I just wrote an email back
and I was like,

I think I kind of jokingly said,

“I’m sorry but I don’t really have any
expertise in alien, monster cases,

but if you want to fill me in
on more details, I’d love to hear it.”

And I thought,
oh, I’ll never hear that again.

Or one of my friends will be like,
“Ah, I did it. It was funny.”

It wasn’t too much later that a longer,
like three-page email arrived…

For the past six months,

I have been living in a rural home

located on the border
of West Virginia and Kentucky,

where my family is
nightly assaulted by creatures

that I have come to believe
are of an extraterrestrial origin.

These beings appear to be
the size and stature of a small child,

devoid of any facial features save for
large, oily eyes and lipless mouths.

They frighten my children by peering
through their bedroom windows,

chirping at one another.

They actively attempt to enter my home
in the middle of the night.

Last month, they took my dog.

I believe that they are coming
from an abandoned mine

located on the edge of my property.

Though I am armed,

I’m afraid that I’m far too frightened
to enter the mine by my lonesome

and cannot convince any
sympathetic friends to accompany me,

though I cannot blame them.

I was given your contact information
through a man by the name of Terry Wriste.

When these disturbances
first began occurring,

I was only inclined to confide
in a personal friend

who I knew had fringe interests.

He offered to share my concerns with a man

that had dealt with somewhat similar
experiences in pervious years.

I accepted his offer.

Within a week,
I was informed that this gentleman

had long since retired
from pursuits of this kind,

but was willing to provide me with
contacts who may be willing to help.

This is how I came to contact you.

I do not have any answer to why,

other than a referral and
a recommendation from a gentleman

I do not know personally.

I was under the impression
that you would answer that question.

Most of Pike County is made up
of small towns and rural communities.

It is not uncommon to go days
without seeing my closest neighbors.

I moved to this area
for the peace and quiet.

I have received neither.

I have lived in this area for
just under seven months

and in that time,
the majority of the harassment

has occurred within the past three.

I did not become aware of any strangeness
until early December,

although that is only when I began
to keep a record of these events.

At first it was merely strange tracks
in the snow around my home.

I had initially imagined that
they were some kind of animal,

though it closely resembled a human
footprint, minus the heel.

At that time, I was under the impression
that it was simply a single creature.

It wasn’t until weeks later
that I began to suspect

that I was dealing with a number
of what I thought

were individuals hazing me
upon my arrival to the area.

In the weeks leading up to this
particular evening,

I had awoken to find my shed doors
open on several occasions,

many of my children's toys
missing or moved

and my yard in general disarray.

The second week of January,
I am having breakfast with my family

when my five-year-old daughter begins
talking about the kids without hair.

When my wife inquired about these kids,

she informed us that she had spent
the previous night

watching them play in the yard.

As you can imagine,
this was some concern.

I asked my daughter
what these kids looked like.

She told me they were bald like Grandpa,
and weren’t wearing any clothes.

The very same day I found the wreath
that hangs inside our rear porch

stuffed into our mailbox.

I purchased and installed motion-activated
floodlights the following day

and for a time, the problem ceased.

It wasn’t until the end of February
that our daughter informed us

that the bald kids had returned.

I was awoken to the sound
of my daughter screaming.

I rushed to her bedroom only to meet her
halfway down the hall.

When my wife and I were finally able to
calm her down enough to speak,

she told us that the kids were trying
to peer into her window,

but they couldn’t reach
and instead had taken to tapping on it.

She hasn’t slept in her own bedroom since.

Almost every day for the following week,

I would find some evidence

that something or someone
had been on my property

the previous night.

On Wednesday, the seventh of March,

I finally witnessed the kids
without hair for myself.

The dog woke me up around 1:30 a.m.,

scratching at the back door
and whimpering to be let out.

I noticed that the motion floodlight
was on and went to the kitchen window

to check that the shed doors
were still closed,

when I realized I could see the shadow
of an individual cast across my lawn.

From the angle I was positioned
at the window,

I could not actually see the source
of the shadow or the floodlights.

The dog was pacing circles
around the back door,

and I could hear someone rifling
through a box on the porch.

Filled with a little more anger
than common sense,

the only reaction I could muster

was to bang loudly on the window
and yell,

at which point I heard the screen door
on the porch swing open

and slam against the house.

I heard what I can only describe
as chirping at this point.

It sounded much like a skunk,
if more guttural.

I then realized that there were more
than two people on my property.

And the shadow, which had been reacting
as if it didn’t know which way to run,

was quickly joined by another.

For a moment, I watched as the shadows
chirped at one another,

when I noticed a figure
out of the corner of my eye.

Standing in the flower bed,
just to the bottom left of my window

was a small, humanoid figure with silky,
pale skin, completely hairless,

standing roughly four feet.

It was looking in the direction
of the shadows,

and had clearly come from
around the left side of the house,

opposite the porch

and had not noticed me
as far as I could tell.

It’s face was devoid of features,
save for large, round eyes,

very reminiscent in shape
and color of a birds’ eye.

It had no nose to speak of
and only a small slit for a mouth.

It didn’t appear to move its mouth
as it chirped,

sounding more as if noises
originated from its throat.

It was most certainly not a wild animal,
and even more certainly not a child.

I was too terrified to move,

and watched as the creature
hopped to the others,

and together they scrambled into the woods
on the right side of my property.

It was clear that there was
at least five in the group.

I have not mentioned this
particular incident to my wife.

The only other person who I have spoken to
about these creatures are yourself

and the close friend who introduced me

to our mutual friend, Mr. Wriste.

At that point, I said,

“We’d love to come check it out,
but we need some kind of proof,

we need some kind of evidence

that there’s something
actually going on here,

and that you’re not just pulling our leg.”

And “would you let us film this
if we came out and did it?”

And the guy said,
“Yeah, that’s totally fine.

I just want complete anonymity
because I’m a doctor,

and it would hurt my reputation
if any of this stuff got out.”

So, my initial response to all of it was…

You know, I was suspicious.

And I was...

I was kind of like,
“Yeah, okay.”

He would read me the emails,
and I would be like, “Okay. Goblins. Sure.”

And then when... I mean...

For me the first time that
I actually stopped and went,

like: “Okay,
this is legitimately strange”

was when we got the pictures.

At first I was like,
“holy shit, these are crazy,

these are nuts.

I’ve never seen anything like it.”

But I’m not an outdoorsy person.

I don’t know a ton of animal tracks.

So I sent it to every
outdoorsy person...

I think, actually,
I posted it to Facebook first.

And was like, “look at this weird stuff
that we’re getting.

What in the world are these?”

And a lot of people chimed in saying,
“Maybe it’s an emu…

But that’s really strange.

I don’t know why there’d be an emu
at this place,

and their pacing isn’t proper.”

But a lot of the bigfoot hunters
that I know started to go:

“What’s really interesting about this is

these all look like they
have dermal ridges.”

And dermal ridges are basically
like fingerprints for feet and hands.

They’re like the crease lines in the feet

and they’re extremely hard to fake.

So whatever was leaving these actually
had some creases in the foot,

these dermal ridges.

So, it was a fleshy footprint,

which means it wouldn’t have been an emu,

because I think they have talons.

And it kind of just looked
like fat fingers.

Like three fat fingers.

After that point, I was like, okay,

maybe there is something
really strange going on here.

The emails were weirdly written.

They felt… almost like…

It’s strange going back
and re-reading them

because for me, when I do read them,
they almost feel a little…

Like there’s something completely off
about whoever is writing it.

It almost for me felt like someone
trying to get us to go somewhere,

and that was setting off alarms.

So yeah, when we did get the pictures,

I didn’t lose that kind of fear

that was innately already there,

but then I was curious.

So I sent him another email

and I said, “Yeah, okay,
you got my attention. We’re into this.

How do you want to go about this?”

Because I was in Canada at the time.

Going to Kentucky wasn’t
an easy trip for me.

I wasn’t even allowed to leave the country
while I was going through immigration.

So I told him, “We’re definitely
interested in doing this.

Are you still going to be there?

Are you going to be able to take pictures
of more stuff?

I need something that shows
how big the footprints are.”

Because you can’t really tell
how big they are.

And I think it was three...
Two or three months later,

he emails back and says
“I had to flee the house.

I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch.

I had to move my family out.
Things just got too crazy.

We just don’t feel safe here.”

And he said, “I’m going to be
going back to the house,

I will take more photographs

if I can find anything else,

and I’ll do my best to show you
how big everything is.

I’ll be there for like
three or four nights.

I’m going back to collect
all of our stuff.”

I think it was with his brother-in-law.

And sure enough,
couple days later,

another series of photos come in,

and they’re the same type of footprint.

They look like they were
taken somewhere else.

But they had a measuring stick next to it.

And it showed that they were like
half the size of a regular human footprint.

So they were tiny
and they were kind of round.

They didn’t look like they had
any kind of heel on them.

And also attached were a series
of really dark photographs

that he claimed were of
the creatures themselves

that he had taken from his back porch.

Like, it doesn’t…

Yeah, it’s nothing.

One of them we just kind of
threw out immediately

because you can’t really see anything.

It almost looks like a big round thing

with like two big black eyes possibly?

But the other ones
were a little more interesting.

That one
looks like a fucking "gray" alien.

One of them looked like the side profile

of a typical extraterrestrial
"gray" that you’d see.

Shoulder. Eye. High cheekbones.

That one, to me…

Again, it could be anything…

Because that's like a profile
shot of an extraterrestrial.

That’s what that looks like.

And then the other one looked like
something was leaning around a tree.

And it was really hard to make out
what size it was.

But you could see that whatever it was
had a completely bald head,

wasn’t wearing any
kind of clothes to speak of,

it was a kind of weird
whitish, yellowish color.

You could see what looks like a shoulder
and a hand reaching out.

It’s like, why is it glowing?

I know.

Which was an interesting detail
of the original Hopkinsville case

is they glowed.

Mm-hm.

I was like:

I’m in. We’re going.

We’re gonna go check this thing out.

We’re gonna put everything on hold.

This is crazy.

I have no idea what this could be.

But if this guy is serious…

I don’t think we’re equipped
to blow up a mine

But,

I definitely want to go check this out,

especially if we can video
all of this stuff.

And I said, “Yeah, that’s it.
We’ll come down.

We’ll check it out.”

And...

Never heard from him again.

And that was the end.

So I posted this stuff
to my Facebook page

and people were like, just freaking out.

We kind of unofficially put together
what we called

The Alien Cave Base Task Force

which was going to be
just a big group of people

and we were going to go down

and we were going to find these things

and we were figure out
what was going on.

And then I decided to write an article
about it for Week in Weird.

And it was one of those
further calls where it was like:

“Can anyone tell me something
that sounds similar to this?”

And the only thing that we found

that really kind of matched
up with everything

was an old sighting that
happened in Hopkinsville,

the other end of Kentucky,

back in 1955.

And in this case, it was an entire
family of people, living in a farmhouse...

I think there were eleven people.

And there was a UFO sighting
that happened.

It was witnessed by police officers.

One of the most well-documented
UFO cases ever,

especially in terms of
extraterrestrial encounters,

because so many credible witnesses
saw these things and drew these things

and gave credible testimonies.

Eleven people in a farmhouse

said that after this UFO crashed

not too far from their land,

these little creatures that were
about 3-feet tall,

showed up at the house,
were looking in the windows

especially at the children,

were showing up in the doorway,

just freaking everybody out.

And they actually fired
at these creatures.

And they ended up fleeing.

It was a media circus at this point.

Tons of people were camping out
in this family’s lawn,

trying to figure out what
these things were.

They dubbed them “goblins”

because back then they didn’t
really know what to call them.

The only thing that was weird
is these things had these big ears

that the ones that this David guy,

he didn’t describe any ears on them.

He just said that they had these
kind of bald, round heads.

But, in some of the early drawings
by the police officers,

they look like they were wearing
goggles and headpieces.

So those ears might not
have even been ears at all,

they could have been something different.

And if you remove those
and take them away,

everything fits:

They look the same,
they were interested in the children,

they were terrorizing a farmhouse

in the middle of nowhere, in Kentucky.

But, it was in the complete
opposite end of the state.

So, we thought,
well that’s the closest thing

that we can find to something like this,

so there’s a precedent for this stuff,

there’s a precedent for it
happening in Kentucky.

Sure, there’s like 60 years
in-between them,

and a few hundred miles, but...

maybe it’s these Kentucky Goblins.

And that’s as far as we got.

The guy that told David to contact us,

apparently had a mutual friend of ours

whose name was Terry Wriste.

The name doesn’t even sound real.

Like, when you’re reading it,
it sounds like a normal name,

but when you say it out loud,

“Terry Wriste,”

it’s “terrorist.”

It’s obviously like a pseudonym
of some kind.

And I wracked my brain to think like,

“Do I know anybody who uses this?

Is this somebody’s online handle?

Is it anybody I know?”

I couldn’t figure out anybody
who would use it,

especially in this day and age, right?

And so I started to Google “Terry Wriste.”

The only hit that I would get
for that name

came from a really weird,

obscure book about using magic rituals
to summon extraterrestrials.

And it was by a guy by the name
of Allen Greenfield,

who was an occultist
and also a UFO investigator.

It was from 1994.

It was calledSecret Cipher of the UFOnauts

And nothing in the book
mentions Terry Wriste

until the appendix
in the back of the book,

because there’s like a 3-4 page
interview with this guy,

who goes by the pseudonym
“Terry R. Wriste.”

And it was all about this guy
who claimed that

him and a bunch of
other Vietnam veterans,

they went around to
different underground bases

where there were extraterrestrials,
had set up shop

and they would go in there
and basically clean them out.

So they were kind of like a real
Alien Cave Base Task Force.

But again, as crazy as that sounded,
this whole book,

this Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts

was presented as complete fact.

And it was all about using

occult rituals

to contact extraterrestrials.

And it just seemed strange
that this whole thing

about these crazy, fantastical,
cave explorations

by ass-kicking alien cave base task force
Vietnam vets

would be in there
if it wasn’t relevant somehow.

And that was the only reference
to a Terry Wriste I could find.

And it was from 1994.

So, at this point,

we had started working
on another project.

We were doing a little web series

and we went out to
Brown Mountain, North Carolina.

Part of the project was,
you know, these experiments,

asking these big questions like

“Can you get abducted by aliens?”

So yeah, we went to a place
that technically

we should have been able to be
abducted by aliens.

So we went to Brown Mountain.

Didn’t get abducted by aliens.

But a friend of ours,
Micah Hanks, said,

“Hey, while you’re out here,

there’s something really cool that
I think I should show you guys.

A psychic told me that there's
an entrance to an underground base

where aliens have set up shop.”

And we were immediately like,

“Oh god, this reminds us of the goblins.

We’ve got to go check this thing out.”

Now you’ve heard stories, clearly,
that there are underground bases

somewhere here in these mountains?

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, one of the popular
legends is that there’s one

mostly associated with the
Brown Mountain area,

which is just of back over behind us,

we’re on Table Rock right now.

But a lot of the stories are that there
are indeed rumblings and happenings

right here under Table Rock,
where we are right now

One of the best stories that I heard
years and years ago

was from a man, he was a UFO investigator
here in the region,

who had said that he had been
contacted by people

who had kept talking about
the military presence

at Brown Mountain and
in the Linville Gorge

and furthermore that a
psychic had told him

that there was an entrance to a base

right under this mountain.

And so I kind of, you know,
took that with a grain of salt,

but in truth, with all the cave
openings and entrances

like the one I brought you through

to get to this majestic vantage
here on Table Rock,

in my opinion, if there was any place
that you'd want to hide

something like that, this would be
ideal for it, wouldn’t it?

So he led us on this crazy path
that went down,

around the side of the mountain,

and then just as the
psychic had predicted,

there were these two big pillars,

and then between the pillars
was the entrance to this cave.

We are now at the entrance
of the cave here.

But I know that there are
people that are convinced

that the Brown Mountain Lights

emanate from a UFOlogical
kind of phenomena of some sort

and then of course that there is
a base under Table Rock

and so for all we know,

we’re entering the lower extremities
of that base right now.

And it went in a fair amount,

but once we got in there,

you could see that there was this
big rock slab that had kind of...

It almost looked like it had
just been placed there.

And it looked weird enough
for you to go, like,

“that shouldn’t be there.”

That didn’t just like,
fall off that mountain,

and perfectly slide into this hole

that is a cave,

You know, that a couple of us
tried to actually get into it.

And you could see kind of through it.

It wasn’t like a perfect square,
like a door, but...

it was enough that
the shape of it was strange.

If you stand right here,
you can feel the air moving down

through the chimney.

Look at that!

That looks like that was
placed there, doesn’t it?

That’s what I said
when I first came here.

That rock, it juts out at you.
It’s just really weird.

You know, you can see back up
to the chimney.

It’s a surreal environment,
you know?

You know, all jokes about
alien cave bases aside...

Now watch, I’m going to
turn over some rock,

and then a panel is going to open,
and there’s going to be a stairway

and an alien waiting for us

- What do you guys think?
- This is amazing.

- Do you think that this is the
entrance to an alien cave?

- Do you know what?
If there was an entrance...

Hey can get a light over here
real quick, you guys?

Yeah.

Here, grab this big guy.

Your mind will play tricks on you…

You’d have to...

I wonder if you’d have to climb up
over that rock right there,

on the top.
Because there’s definitely an opening

big enough for a body up there.

I never even looked at that.

Is there though?

Well,
it looks like you'd have to...

Terry Wriste talked about three
different entrances into these cave bases,

and one of them was on
Brown Mountain in North Carolina.

We could have been standing
in that entrance right then.

But we couldn’t get any further,

so there was nothing much we could do.

And so again,
it’s kind of like that idea of trusting

and just going with it.

Because it might sound absurd,
but at the end of the day,

we were all standing in front of a cave
that looked like the entrance

to what could have been
an underground base,

and there was a big, huge,
giant slab of rock there

stopping us from being able to get inside.

It wasn’t too long after we’d
returned from all these trips

that we got an email…

from a guy who was going
by the name

"Terry Wriste."

And it said,

“Why did you stop when you were so close?

I have something for you. One week.”

And it was like, weird and misspelled.

There was this really strange
kind of cadence to it.

At that point, I’m like, okay,
somebody is fucking with me at this point.

It was all lower-case.
Everything was strange about it.

Whether or not this is involved
in the original emails from David or not,

somebody is messing with me.

Because a lot of the information
about the goblins

that we’d had at this point
was on the internet.

Because we’d written
a little post about it.

Sure enough, a week later,

another email comes in.

This one read,

“Hellier was just a symptom.

The Ink and Black are isolated still
and third order MIA.

Bare in mind, for every door closed,

a window must be opened.

The door is closed.
The window is open.

Use the numbers.”

Right off the bat,
this one struck us

because he specifically
mentions “Hellier.”

But in all of our postings, we never once
released the name of David’s town.

So there’s no way
he should have known that.

And the attachment was a photograph.

And it was a photograph
of a slip of paper

that had a whole mess of numbers on it.

The numbers...
I think there were sixteen numbers.

And, as with everything else,
I put it on Facebook and I said,

“What the heck is this?”

One of my friends
immediately pointed out,

“Oh that’s a credit card number.”

And I thought, oh, geez,
so I should pull it down

because who knows whose
credit card number this was.

That’s when somebody else pointed out:

“No, those are GPS coordinates.”

And at that point,
I had this cold chill run down my spine

because when I put them into a GPS,

they actually pointed

right to where this cave was...

Or at least, the similar
vicinity of this cave

in North Carolina that
Micah Hanks had taken us to.

I mean, there’s literally only one or two
people who should have known that,

the exact spot where we were.

That’s weird. And...

that freaked me out.

Whoever it was knew
we were there at this cave.

Very few people knew where we were
going or what we were doing.

As far as I know, only Micah
really knew where this cave was.

It was actually really frightening

because we both kind of
looked at each other like,

“what is actually going on?”

It kind of made a lot of the other
stuff seem more concrete,

which in retrospect for me
specifically was a bit upsetting.

The only thing that this was
similar to that I could find

was letters that were sent to John Keel.

Most people know John Keel because
he wrote The Mothman Prophecies.

He was the guy who popularized
the Mothman sightings.

There was a lot of really
weird high strangeness

that happened around that,

a lot of really
strange coincidences,

and he was the guy who
made that what it is.

But he had a lot of really interesting
theories that I’m really into,

which are that there are window areas

and in these window areas,

things can come in and out
a little more easily:

The veil is thinner.

UFOs aren’t coming from outer space,
they’re coming from here,

from another dimension.

As are most of the creatures
that we run into in cryptozoology,

extraterrestrials, that kind of stuff.

He used to get letters
from these people

who called themselves
The International Bankers.

And they came from weird postmarked
places in other countries.

Sometimes they didn’t even have
a postmark on them,

They were just sent through the mail
without any postmarking.

Sometimes they just showed up
in his mailbox.

But they were the same kind of
weird misspellings,

almost purposeful misspellings of things.

But they were super direct in

“you need to stop doing what you’re doing.

You need to stop looking into
what you’re looking into.”

But it was weird because
this read differently.

It said “why did you stop?”

Not, “Stop.”

“Why did you stop?

Here’s GPS Coordinates.

Go find the window.

The door is closed.
Go find the window.”

We continued to look around
and look into this type of stuff,

and occasionally something would pop up

or someone would say,

“Oh, the story that you guys shared,
something like this happened

to my grandfather, and
he called them ‘the Gobsows’”

or “my grandparents used to tell me about
the ‘holler goblins’ in eastern Kentucky…”

So little things kept popping up
here and there,

but no matter what we would do,

we never heard back from Terry Wriste,

we never heard back from David.

Really interesting thing happened
about a year and a half ago.

We got into contact with
Geraldine Sutton-Stith,

who is one of the last relatives
of the Sutton family

who lived in the farmhouse,

her father was Lucky, who actually
shot at one of these goblins.

There’s two living relatives of hers
that were present for the case,

but they refuse to talk about it.

She said that they were just made fun of
way too much in the media.

So Geraldine has taken it upon herself
to keep sharing stories about this

and to keep that story alive.

And I just… There was…

All this stuff with caves
and the goblins...

that kept coming up:
monsters in the Appalachians,

they would come out of caves,

people were meeting strange
little creatures in caves…

Turns out, the Mammoth Cave System
sits right below the center of Kentucky,

runs almost the stretch from Hopkinsville
all the way over to Hellier,

and then all the way up
through the Appalachians.

And there could be a way
that this is all connected.

So I asked Geraldine and I said,

“You know, I realize
this is a weird question,

do you remember at the farm house,
where this stuff crashed,

and where all these sightings took place,

were there any caves
nearby the farm house?

Is the farmhouse still there?

Could I come out and see it?”

The farmhouse was long gone.

The property was owned by somebody else.

And she wasn’t sure
that there were any caves.

But she was really good friends
with people from the town,

and she said that she would ask.

A day or two later,
she got back and she goes,

“You know what’s really interesting,

there’s a big cave right next to
where this thing crashed.

The cave system runs
all the way through there

and connects to the
Mammoth Cave system.”

And I was like, “holy cow!

This is all connected!”

But as we continued to plot these out,
we started to notice that

there is a theme that occurs.

And it’s not just goblins stuff.
It’s very similar stuff.

And it pops up all through
the Mammoth Cave System,

all the way through
the Appalachians,

even up as far as Vermont,

there are all of these stories
about people seeing these things

in and around caves.

A lot of them have
three-toed footprints,

a lot of them look kind of
like the same type of deal,

some of them look like a variation
of an extraterrestrial creature.

But they’ve all given
them different names

because regionally they’d never
heard of the Hopkinsville stuff,

so some of them call them Tommyknockers,

that are in the mines and get disturbed
when there’s these big loud sounds,

and it sounds like dudes are mining.

So we started to think,

“What if it was never extraterrestrials
to begin with?

What if it was something that
was in these caves

and dwelled in these caves?”

They all fit, the whole thing fits!

The map is there,

you can look at the map, you can see

these black spots that
just fit this whole trail.

From the fifties on, there have
been all of these sightings

and all of these people are
giving them different names

and they don’t think that
they’re related because

they don’t have an option.

They don’t know
that this stuff is going on.

The other thing that led us to believe

that there’s even more
credibility to this theory was…

A production company that
wanted to shoot this

project with us about the goblins,

it was like a one-off thing,

it was never supposed to be
made for public consumption;

it was just to sell the show.

It was a sizzle reel.

They’d found the stuff that we’d
written about the goblins,

and thought, “Well this is perfect.

This is just weird,

this is interesting.
We’ve never seen this before.”

And they said,
“Would you guys be interested

in being part of the sizzle reel?

It’s just for internal use.
No one’s going to see it.

Obviously we don’t need to go
out to the actual town,

Obviously we don’t need to go
out to the actual town,

we’ll meet in the middle.”

Because this guy was from Tennessee.

We were like, yeah, you know,
we’ll get a free adventure out of it,

it’s a weekend,
they’ll feed us and put us up.

So we went down to Cave City, Kentucky.

Kind of in the middle of Kentucky.
Middle of the Mammoth Cave system.

It’s one of those places where there’s
lots of recreational caves

that have been roadside traps
since the 50s and the 60s.

They’ve got the big dinosaurs and
stuff like that everywhere.

They’re all tearing down the cameras
and everything afterwards,

and there had been this little girl
who was riding her bike

back and forth, seeing all the
people with the cameras,

wondering what was going on.

She ended up walking over to Dana and I,

just kind of sitting there killing time
while everybody was breaking down.

She said, “That man over there said
you two are monster hunters.”

“You guys look for monsters!”
And she was psyched and really excited.

I said, “Yeah. Why,
have you seen any monsters?”

And she said, “Yeah.

My friends and I,
we see them all the time.

And my parents see monsters too.”

“Are they scary? Are they under your bed?”

You know, that kind of thing.

And she says, “No!
They come out of the caves!”

And I started to look around immediately,

and I was like, okay,
which producer put her up to this?

Because this is a fun story twist.

Okay, which of the producers did this?

No one’s paying any attention.

They’re all just tearing
down their equipment.

We’re not even wearing
lav mics at this point.

So there’s no audio, there’s nothing.

We were like, “well can you
draw what they look like?”

And so I scramble and found
a piece of paper and got a pen

from the dude behind the counter.

And she started off by drawing their feet,

which was a random detail
that initially I thought,

Okay, now I was 100% sure that
a producer had put her up to it,

because the first thing she drew
was a little three-toed footprint.

And kids drawing feet, they don’t
just randomly draw three…

And it’s even kind of the same
shape, it’s an elongated,

slender in the middle footprint,
with like three bulbs on the top.

I mean, it looks like a kid’s drawing,

but it still fits what these
goblin prints look like

I’m freaking out!

And at this point I’m telling everyone,
“Turn the cameras on!

Turn them on!
Bring them over here!

Mics or not, turn them on and watch this!”

And she started talking about
how her parents were like,

“Oh yeah, they tell us not to
go near the mines,

and it’s coming from this one
over here,

it’s like two streets away.”

I said, “can you draw what one
of these things looks like?”

And she drew, it looks like a kid’s
version of a Kentucky Goblin.

There are two completely
fascinating points on it

that she should not have drawn
for any other reason

other than she had legitimately
seen these things.

Often, the Hopkinsville Goblins,
they’re often described as

having glassy, large eyes.

Very large, glassy eyes, and very
weird elephant-shaped ears

that protrude from the
sides of their heads.

And she nailed it.
She drew both of those things.

She basically drew an alien face
with those two attributes

and we were like, “There’s no way
a kid would just randomly...

Number one, would draw
a three-toed footprint,

but draw the face of
the Hopkinsville Goblins,

there’s no reason on the planet for that.”

And at this point I freaked out.

The fact alone that this little girl,

not knowing anything about
the Hopkinsville case,

not knowing anything other
than we were “monster hunters,”

was able to draw, not
only a three-toed footprint,

but the head of a creature that looks
exactly like the Kentucky Goblins

was really strange.

And it happened smack-dab in the middle
of the Mammoth Cave System.

The weight of that moment
for us was just like...

Again, another one of those
moments when you’re like...

It aligns everything thats already
happened in a weird perspective

because you have to kind of
stop and go like,

“Holy shit, that maybe
actually really happened!”

It’s those moments of gravity
that change the past,

and change the way that
you looked at stuff.

And that keeps happening,
those solidifying moments

where you can’t just go,

“Oh, it was just someone
sending us a stupid email.”

Because it really doesn’t
feel like it at this point.

So, we thought, after
we moved to Cincinnati,

Hellier is only about 31/2,
4 hours away from here.

We’d never been there before,
and thought,

“Well, we’re not doing anything,

we’ve got a free weekend,

let’s just go.

Let’s just go and let’s ask around
and see what we find.”

Shocked when we got to this place,

because you can only tell so much
from looking at a GPS map.

This place was totally dead.

Tiny, tiny town, with no cellphone
service there, middle of nowhere.

Clearly it was like an old mining town.

They had really one store,
and it was the gas station,

the grocery store,
and the pizza restaurant.

And we thought, well that’s
as good a place as any to start.

- I’m going to go ask
about the goblins.

Dana sat in the car.

And I put a little lapel mic on.

And she shot me from inside the car.

And I went in and I just started asking
people and showing them these pictures.

How’s it going?

Alright, how are you?

Not bad.

Can I ask you a weird question
while I’m here?

- Sure

You ever seen anything
that looks like that?

I was really nervous.

And when we got there, Greg and I
were looking at each other

and going like,
“this is probably a bad idea.”

And we were like, “We’ll stop at one
or two places, and we’ll talk to people.”

And it just opened a whole can of worms.

What is it?

That’s what I’m
trying to find out, man.

Before too long, I mean,
it was not even half an hour,

there were like, a dozen, two dozen
people that had shown up at this place,

because we were calling people and said,
“hey there’s somebody here,

he’s investigating this weird thing.”

And everybody had some kind of story.

He’s seen bigfoot!

You’ve seen bigfoot?

Yeah.

What was it like?

Hopped off the hill,

ran across the road
in just a couple of steps,

and it put its hand on the guardrail...

- No joke?
- And just hopped across and was gone.

Like it turned and looked at me
and then just hopped and gone.

It was, ah, I’ve never said
nothing about this for, I guess years.

You know, before I’d ever seen anything.

And other people was,
you know what I mean,

was saying, “hey, we’ve
seen something…”

And they was describing about
the same thing that I was…

It ranged anywhere from little things
that were running across the street,

to people saying “oh yeah, we get weird
prints on our property all the time,

I’ve got an old mine on my property,

everybody around here has
old mines on their property.”

And they said, “Oh you know,
it was weird because a few years ago,

there was this giant UFO.”

And it hovered above the town.

And they said it hovered there for
hours and hours and hours.

And they were like,
“it was as big as a jumbo jet.

This thing was massive.”

Like I said, years ago
people think you was crazy.

But we’ve seen it. You’ve seen it.
I’ve seen it.

My whole family down there’d seen it.

We watched it. It was there all day long,
right in the middle of the day.

Seems like it was in October,
about two years ago.

What’s the name of the newspaper?

Appalachian News Express.

Appalachian News Express.

- Yep
- Okay

It was on the front page.
Thousands of people seen it.

- mmhm.

And you could see it pretty good,
it was like a cylinder shape,

and it wasn’t moving,
it was just there.

Wow.

Just in the same spot.
And it was there for a long time, man.

All day, that day.

And it just hovered?

And it was like
it must’ve been like spinning

because when it was rotating,
it would catch the sun

and it would get real bright.

- No joke!

And as it was rotating, it would go away.

These images,
snapped by Allan Epling

has the man stumped,
and that’s saying something

coming from a long time
amateur astronomer.

I know a satellite when I see it.

I track satellites with my HAM radio
and the telescope.

But this object is like
nothing he’s ever seen.

For 21/2 hours, he watched and
photographed this object

as it hung in the air, until
eventually it disappeared.

And he wasn’t alone.

Police say they received numerous calls

and Epling found other observers online.

No one knew who David Christie was,
no one had any idea.

Somebody actually asked, like,

“Oh ask this guy,
he’s been living here for forever,”

and this super-old dude was like,

“I’ve lived here my whole life,
and I’ve never heard that name.

No idea who this guy is.”

We thought okay, well let’s go
see if we can find David’s house.

I mean, the town’s not big.

So we drove up this road
and there was a house

sitting there on the left side
of this road…

There’s an abandoned house,
all grown up.

Maybe that’s David’s House.

- Oh, my gosh there’s a car back
there and everything too…

- See that could be it!
That could be like...

But look, it’s abandoned,
it looks like it’s been abandoned...

- There’s exercise equipment
on the front lawn.

- It looks like it’s been abandoned
for like three years.

There’s a basketball net back there,
that’s where kids would be,

Old fucking Christmas lights still up.

- There’s a shed.
- There’s a fucking shed there!

- Yep

There was a stream nearby,
there were caves nearby. Old mines.

And it looked like it had been abandoned
for about two or three years.

Which would have been the time that David
was going through all of this stuff.

The house still had stuff all on the
front lawn, but no one,

clearly no one was living there
at the time.

When we saw this specific house,
it was like a weird...

Something was just like,
“This is it.”

Like, I felt like chills almost,
looking at it.

Because it was just like a family home
that had been totally abandoned.

It creepily still had like kids toys,
and it had the window that

would have been the window that
they would have been looking in.

And all of these details that felt right.

And it felt in my gut
like it was the house.

It creeped me out.

So that’s as far as we’ve gotten.

That’s as far as we’ve
investigated Hellier.

I’ve often thought that it meant more…

It was more about the town,
and that David was one person

who was experiencing it.
And maybe he left

and our chances of getting
into David’s cave are over

but it doesn’t matter because
we know this caving system exists

all around that area and all
up and down through Kentucky

and pretty much halfway
across the country.

That’s one instance of potentially…

I don’t know, thousands of them?

So, for me I’ve often thought that
it was more kind of egging us on,

like, “You need to go back.
You have to go back

and start asking questions.”

So I mean, obviously we have to go.

There’s just no way around it,

we have to go.