The Mundrabilla Incident

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It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at CVS.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location. Thanks to our sponsors and Patreon supporters, Astonishing Legends is free to listen to. We appreciate your support of them and us. In January of 1988, a family set out on a journey through one of the most desolate stretches of road in the world, across the Nullarbor Plain in Southern Australia. While it's somewhat of a rite of passage for adventurers, it's not a trip to be taken lightly due to the remoteness and distantly scattered refueling locations. That alone is enough to make most folks wary. But for the Nulls, this road trip became a nightmare, turning into an astonishing legend that made international headlines. Faye Nulls and her three young adult sons drove along the remote air highway in the dark pre-dawn hours of January 20th with 21-year-old Sean Nulls at the wheel. Ahead of their car, they saw a peculiar light. It moved erratically, then suddenly shot toward them. They described a glowing mass with a yellow center and the unusual shape of an egg in an egg cup. In one interview, Sean said he could make out something similar to wings. But what was it? As the object pursued them, a profound and physical encounter began. The family reported hearing a high-pitched humming and smelling a foul odor. Inside the car, a gray mist appeared. They then claimed the vehicle was violently shaken and actually lifted up off the highway by a few meters before being dropped. When it was dropped, it blew a tire, and the Nulls got out and fled into the scrub. They later reported the car was dented and covered in a strange black powder. Patrick Nulls also noted that during the event, their voices changed somehow. He described them as sounding alien. A police officer confirmed the family was visibly shaken and believed their account, and a truck driver corroborated seeing an unusual light in the area that night and many other times. What attacked the Nulls family on that dark, lonely road, and why did it single them out? Tonight, on Astonishing Legends, a close encounter of the second kind, the Mundrubilla incident. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Faye Nulls, matriarch of the Nulls family from an Australian news interview in 1988, archived by the Australian UFO Research Network. They're saying, it's sort of calling us lies, and that's not true. We know what happened to us, and it did happen to us. There's definitely something out there. Join us tonight as Forrest and I take a wild trip into an Astonishing Legend from the Australian Outback. And we're back. That we are, folks, and now my cold is gone, but Forrest is getting one, because, you know, everything all at once. Yeah, I'm not full blown. I'm fighting off something, and it's going around the country, probably around the world. Well, as we said last week, it is also, in addition to cold and flu season, it's a spooky season. And Tess is doing blog-stonishing again, which means a new blog entry every day at astonishinglegends.com. It's truly the destination for all things weird. So if you've never visited astonishinglegends.com or read Tess's blog, now is the time to do it. No better time. Indeed, and Halloween merch is live now in our store. And the only people that don't know that are people who skip the housekeeping segment. So we've got special limited edition glow-in-the-dark hoodies and long-sleeve tees available now. In past years, we printed to order. That's how we did it. And, you know, that lets us avoid excess inventory. But it made it harder to get orders to buyers in time for Halloween if they ordered late. That's right. So this year, we've printed a very limited quantity. So when we say supplies are limited, we mean it. If you want a 2025 limited edition shirt or hoodie, go to astonishinglegends.com slash store, click apparel and gear, and grab one while they last. And finally, tonight, we've been wanting to tell you about the new wallpaper in Blanket Fortiana. It has... Oh, wait, who's that? Oh, it looks like we have some company. Well, looky here. It's Ed and Chris from Scared All the Time. Oh, my God, dudes, what's going on? And also, how did you find Blanket Fortiana? How did you get in here? Your security is lax. They give us the pattern. We invite and welcome interlopers. Yeah. Well, hello. We are here. We're poking our heads into Blanket Fortiana to talk Scared All the Time for a few minutes. Yeah. So what's going on? How's October going for you guys? So we just had... We did Haunted Hotels. We did Haunted Hotels at the beginning of the month. And then we're very excited for October 16th. We have an episode that we did in honor of Black Phone 2 being released on October 17th because our longtime friend Maggie Levin is an executive producer of that film and the second unit director. And so we did a Ghost Calls episode to talk to Maggie about the haunted history of telephones and telecommunications. Because ever since we've invented telephones and any kind of long distance wire-based communication, people think they hear ghosts on the other end. So tons of stories to cover there. And then for our Halloween episode on October 30th, the day before Halloween, we're doing a curses episode with a real... An actual witch who's a friend of my wife. She lives in New York City. Her name's Sarah. And she has been doing this for years and years and years. And so we're going to talk to her about witchcraft and curses and... What, she's been cursing people for years and years and years or...? Because I got a list of podcasts that are doing better than us. I think she's like a white witch. I mean, one of the things that's going to be interesting about the show is I don't really know her all that well other than as my wife's friend and like sometimes sort of like spiritual advisor. So I've never even met her in person. We've always just like talked on Zoom when she's talking to my wife and stuff. So it's going to be a journey for myself and the audience learning about her process and journey and all that kind of stuff. So and then, of course, we have all of our bonus episodes. If you sign up at patreon.com backslash... Forward slash. It's always been forward slash. You know, everybody knows which way the slash leans, Ed. Give him a break. I mean, what if someone puts in backslash and then they get sent to some virus site? Oh, that's a great idea. Talk about a curse. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Either way. Yeah, we do do biweekly Patreon shows and they're really fun. And we have two live shows this month, live stream shows this month. Nice. One on the 19th for our two year anniversary. Yeah, we have an anniversary coming up and I'll probably have one or two designs for stuff that I'm just behind on if people like designs on things that are for October. But unlike you guys, I'm not anywhere near being done with ours. Yeah. Well, I think that sounds awesome. One last question I have for both of you. Since doing the show, has anything strange happened? Because Ed is a bit of a magnet for weird stuff happening. Yeah, we have had a streak of manifestations that gives us pause before we do any episodes now. Because starting with our episode on sudden death, which is a whole episode about being killed in a way that you don't see coming and you just drop dead. Ed got in his car to go to a friend's house and was nearly sudden death by a car that hit him, hit his car that he didn't see coming and smashed him into the barrier, the side part of the highway. And starting with that, all of a sudden. I don't want to say every episode, but there were a streak of episodes where we would do the episode about earthquakes or fires or hurricanes or whatever. And then there'd be a huge one in the news. Bridge collapses was like right before that Baltimore bridge collapse. So we tried to do winning the lottery. Good thinking. And that did it. How is that a fear? Well, because a lot of people who win the lottery, their lives get destroyed. Oh, right. Like Shakespeare. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. If you've never had anything, then there's no pain with losing anything. If you've once had the whole world in your hands, then you lose it. That's the fear. That's the pain. So I would say, folks, for no other reason, you got to tune in next to Scared All the Time to see what happens next. We'll survive another year. That's the goal. Well, dudes, thank you so much for coming by. I think we need to do another crossover show in early 2026 if the schedules allow. Well, and why don't you tell our listeners again where they can find and listen to Scared All the Time besides Patreon? Yeah, for real. Anywhere you get a pod, you know what I mean? Anywhere you can find the other greatest on stream legends network shows, you know, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the other ones that we're told exist that we're out there. We're on YouTube. We're on YouTube. All the episodes starting in October have been video as well. So you can find that on YouTube. You know, if you're looking for something that's a little different, you know, we swear and we're silly and we're not necessarily, you know, we do fears. We're America's number one fear-based podcast. So that's right. You know, it's a totally different angle on how a lot of these types of shows work. So yeah, it's very different from us people. So if you're sick of us and looking for something much more refreshing, you got to check out Scared all the time, please do come on by. All right, guys, thanks for stopping by. Be careful out there in the dark. Let's get into tonight's episode. The first in our tribute to horror from Down Under for 2025. Well, we've always had a kind of love affair with astonishing legends from Australia, mostly because of our seminal series on the unidentified body on the beach that was found there. The Somerton Man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, which was a lot of fun for us to do. We posted that back in 2016. We've done a few follow-ups since then, too, on that. Yeah, but there's something, I think from my childhood, I've always been fascinated with Australia, just as a continent, because it's so down under. And also, I mean, it's exotic in a way, and just learning about it as a kid. And then that growing over the years into adulthood, as you studied more about it. Like I said, in college, I took a music ethnology class. A large part of that dealt with Bruce Chatwin and the song lines. And just the fascinating cultural concepts and the mythology that comes from Australia. Plus, it's an ancient and mysterious and mystical land. Now, I know some folks don't like us to focus on the mystical aspects and some of the mystery of certain cultures and places. But from my point of view, I think it's fine to have a natural fascination that you can't help with a place and want to know more about it. I think that's healthy. And there's always been something about Australia. It was funny that I've seen some ads here running locally for a law firm called The Advocates. And there's Donnie, who's in all the commercials. And she's been giving out factoids as kind of a theme to some of the commercials. But one of them had to do with Australia and that Australia is wider than the moon. The Australian continent is technically wider just east to west. So Australia is 4,000 kilometers across. East to west, the moon's diameter is about 3,474 kilometers across. Oh, that's wild. However, the moon is a sphere, of course. Right. If it's real. And so the surface area is greater. It's real? How do you think they got all those bases inside? Well, yeah, but it was dragged there 30,000 years ago, if you didn't know. Yeah, there you go. Depending on what your feeds are telling you. A big tow truck. So yeah, it's about five times the surface area of Australia because of all the mass. But just in width, and then also just the age of the continent. And another aspect I always found fascinating is just the age of the continent. Because it is considered one of the older continents, one of the oldest here, because of its geological history, especially the western part of Australia here. The Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons has some of the continental crust that is believed to be billions of years old. Well, one of the oldest known pieces of earth material, which is a zircon crystal, which was discovered in the Jack Hills of western Australia, is believed to be 4.4 billion years old. So I think when it's been around that long, you're going to soak up a lot of just the mystery of life on earth. Yeah. So it's just been a fascinating place. But getting back to what you were talking about with the Somerton Man, there's some other great stories, too, that come out of there that are just as fascinating that we've covered. Talk about Frederick Valentich. So in early 2021, we covered that story. And the synopsis on that is that he took off from Moorabbin Airport. He was a student pilot, but had a lot of experience. So he was, if I remember correctly, training to be a commercial pilot. Yeah. So very studious, depending on who you talk to, but certainly had a lot of hours under his belt. So Frederick Valentich takes off from Moorabbin Airport in 1978. And this is about, Moorabbin Airport's about 2,000 kilometers or 1,200 miles to the east, southeast. Of tonight's legend. Yes, of tonight's legend. And this is just 10 years before the Knowles family encounter. But the Frederick Valentich story is in our back catalog. It's one of our favorites. So search for that if that piques your interest. I really didn't think about that. But yeah, these two events, possibly UFO-oriented, are only 10 years apart, both in the south of Australia, albeit a good distance apart. Well, yeah, especially for a car, 1,200 miles on the road. But it's about 200 miles less as the UFO flies or coasts or flutters like a leaf, however you want to view it. Whatever they are. Yeah. So but that's unless you take into account the whole thing, bending time kind of aspect here in the bending time space, space-time bending. Yeah, who cares how far away it is? Right. And so to our view, it's kind of a long ways. It's a long drive. Well, as we used to say quite frequently, and I'm about ready to bring it back, everything is connected. Indeed it is, sir. All right. Well, we gave a light overview of the legend at the root of tonight's episode. But before we dive into the particulars, let's hear the story in its entirety with all of the details. Forrest, I know you have a cold. But I would posit that its major voice even more gravelly and appropriate for this one. The Nullabore Plain is an enormous stretch of arid land measuring roughly 200,000 square kilometers or just over 77,200 square miles, roughly the size of Nebraska, with only a few hundred scattered people calling various small outposts home. Its name, derived from Latin, means no tree, describing its characteristic flat, nearly treeless landscape. In Australian folklore, it is so associated with the strange and unexplained that a roadside sign near the western and southern Australia border has historically warned travelers to beware of UFOs. It is on this lonely, isolated expanse that the Knowles family encountered something that fundamentally shattered their reality. The plain is crossed by the long, lonely ribbon of the air highway, which is not merely a road. It's the only sealed road linking Western Australia and South Australia, a ribbon of asphalt running 1,664 kilometers or just over 1,000 miles across one of the most desolate regions on Earth. Traveling this route is considered an endurance test. It includes a section known as the 90-mile straight, a precise stretch measuring 146.6 kilometers without a single bend. It was the longest stretch of straight road in the world until Highway 10 in Saudi Arabia surpassed it a few years ago. On this road, isolation is absolute, with essential roadhouses spaced nearly 200 kilometers or 120 miles apart. On January 20th, 1988, a family from Perth was driving toward the town of Seduna on their way to Melbourne in the pre-dawn hours. Faye Knowles, along with her three adult sons, Sean, Patrick, and Wayne, and their dogs were traveling east, approximately 40 kilometers west of the Munderbilla Roadhouse. Sean was at the wheel when he suddenly saw a strange bright light ahead on the road. Initially, they all mistook it for distant truck headlights, but soon realized its movements were erratic. The object, which they described as bright white with a yellow center and shaped like an egg in an egg cup, shot straight toward their blue Ford Telstar, an Australian version of the Ford Tempo in the U.S. Terrified, Sean floored the accelerator, pushing the car to speeds of up to 200 kilometers per hour, or 120 miles per hour, in a frantic attempt to escape. But the object caught them quickly. In one interview, they estimated it capable of at least 300 kilometers per hour. What happened next transformed a high-speed chase into a nightmare. The family heard a loud clunking sound as the object seemed to attach itself to the car's roof. A high-pitched humming filled the interior, accompanied by a strange, noxious odor likened to electrical burning. Inside, a gray mist or smoke materialized. Faye Knowles reached out the window and touched the object, describing it as having a soft, spongy, or rubbery texture. The family reported profound physical distress. Their voices slowed, becoming deep and strange, and Patrick claimed it felt as though his brain was being sucked out. The family claims the car was violently shaken and lifted entirely off the highway by a few meters. The lift ended as suddenly as it began. The car crashed back onto the road with such force that the right-rear tire exploded. The Knowles family fled the vehicle and hid in the desolate scrub for about 15 minutes, believing the object was waiting for them. When they returned to the car, they discovered it was covered inside and out with a fine, black ash or powder, and the roof was dented in multiple places. Later, a truck driver named Graham Henley soon encountered the historical family at the Mundrabilla Roadhouse. Henley, too, had seen the unusual light that night, describing it as a big fried egg hung upside down. When the Knowles eventually reached Seduna, the local police sergeant found the family so shaken, he was certain they believed what they were saying. He also confirmed the presence of ash and damage to their car. For an hour and a half, the Knowles family was harassed by whatever this thing was on one of the loneliest roads on Earth. They were so collectively frightened by what happened that they refused to ever drive across the Nullabore plain again. And in fact, when it came time to return to their home in Perth, they took the Trans-Australian Railway instead. Forest Audible has really upped its audiobook game. Oh, I know. It's pretty cool. They are doing some amazing original content now, including the new season two of The Prophecy. And if you're not familiar with the show, it is a genre-defining project. And the cast is unreal. Oh, you're not kidding about that, sir. It really is. You know, for season two, Emmy Award winner Kerry Washington returns as Dr. Virginia Edwards. Oh, she's amazing. I loved her in The Last King of Scotland, Django Unchained. Oh, yeah, both of those. And she's just done so much stuff. I actually was looking her up because I was like, God, what else have I seen her in? And, you know, her first Broadway play was a David Mamet play. Oh, really? One of our favorites, yeah. Well, you know, the rest of the cast is all A-listers, too. Check this out. Giancarlo Esposito, Dulé Hill, Renzi Feliz, and Ebony Obsidian. This really is an action-packed sequel where the battle between good and evil reaches new heights. It's faith against fear, and that pushes the fate of humankind to the edge. It's like you're there for every twist and turn as Virginia and her miracle son Joshua flee from Detroit, pursued by the sinister Luther Bell, played by none other than Giancarlo Esposito and his mourning star's cult. Oh, yeah, you know, Esposito really is one of the greatest villains of all time. Oh, come on, he's Gus Fring. That's true, or he was anyway. Well, with her estranged husband, Ryan and Moses, a devotee with a mysterious past, Virginia finds unlikely allies in Samson and Delilah. Together, they uncover the truth about her son Joshua's place in an ancient prophecy. Ah, ancient prophecies for the win. As was predicted a long time ago. Well, Virginia's haunting visions guide her path as Bell's force close in, threatening to tear their world apart. And as natural disasters erupt, Virginia must embrace her role as both mother and chosen protector. But will she figure that out in time? Evil is rising and time is running out. Don't miss Kerry Washington and Audible's new Must Listen, The Prophecy Season 2. Go to audible.com slash prophecy2. That's the number two. And start listening today. Man, fall is falling fast, friendo. And you know what that means. Does it mean you're finally going to stop wearing cargo shorts with ironic hipster t-shirts? Ha! Okay. Well, first of all, sir, I'll have you know, yeah, it is time to vacuum bag the shorts. And hey, you know, my linen shirts from Quince had me looking cool, calm, and collected all summer. And secondly, my t-shirts ain't that hip. And thirdly, fall means we can finally wear some more stylish pieces. Okay, you're right about that, man. And Quince has all the pieces that'll soon become what Forrest and I call your daily drivers. Clothing that's your go-tos in your closet. They look great, feel great, and are built to last. Yep. And one of the best things about Quince are the terrific deals. Like, 100% Mongolian cashmere is all the rage, and Quince has it from just $60. Outrageous! And they have other fall staples, like classic fit denim and real leather and wool outerwear. And we're talking quality tailoring that'll keep you warm and looking sharp all through the seasons. Yeah, man. And I was talking about zeroing in on a leather jacket last time, and I think one of Quince's suede trucker jackets is going to fit the bill. Ah, yes. You know, I love the cut of a trucker's jacket, and Quince's suede version is perfect for layering and the perfect blend of casual with classy for any occasion. You can really see and feel the quality with Quince. And you can also feel good about buying from Quince, because by partnering directly with ethical factories and top artisans, Quince cuts out the middlemen to deliver premium quality at half the cost of similar brands. Exactly. And folks, you should know that Quince isn't just about quality clothing at affordable prices. They also carry a lot of other necessities, everything from bedding and bath to cookware and travel accessories. Like, I just picked up a sweet pair of real Napa leather key fob holders for my Apple AirTags, and now I'm impressing the valets all over town. Oh, so valet everywhere you go, do you, Mr. Burgess, when you're out and about? No, just my keys. I know exactly where they are. Yeah. Okay, good deal. Well, Quince delivers in so many categories on so many levels. So layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to Quince.com slash A-L for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash A-L. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash A-L. This is a lot, and I just want to hear at the outset say, this is another one of those stories that's so infamous, a lot of skeptics have come at it. But we've watched the interviews with his family as well as investigators, and as usual, there's a lot more to this story than what you see in blurbs about it online. Boy, that's the truth, man. You know, not the least of which is the very clear idea when you watch Faye and her three sons, Patrick, Sean, and Wayne Knowles, talk about what happened to them. But it's abundantly clear that they are extremely shaken. I guess there's several, you know, logical ways to look at it. Either they're making the whole thing up, and they're just very good actors, which I find most regular folks who haven't studied acting are not great actors. No, acting is difficult. Or they saw something, and it wasn't exactly what they thought, but they were still terrified, so they're genuinely scared. Yeah. Or maybe there's a combination of the two. And that's the thing I always come back to. When you have the benefit of accessing eyewitness testimony like we do with this story, and especially eyewitness testimony that's basically contemporaneous to when the event happened, that has a lot of veracity to it. Now, and we know investigators poo-poo witness accounts, but you cannot watch these folks talk about what happened and not see that they are still kind of petrified. And the interviews I'm talking about, I think, are a week later or maybe a few days at most. Yeah. And they're still freaked out. And you know what it righted me of, Scott? What? Well, in Mothman Part 2, we talked about one of the wackier stories that came out during that time. You must remember. The attack on the Red Cross Bloodmobile by the UFO that we talked about in our Mothman series. Yes, right. Yes, I actually do love that story. And that's – well, yeah, because the wackier it is, again, there's other ways to look at it. Either it's so outrageous and it's just ridiculous, but then all of the paranormal in some way is ridiculous through the lens of normal experience. So it's all crazy. It's just levels of that. It's like, okay, if you're in for a penny, in for a pound is my view on it. So – That was a young guy driving that Bloodmobile, right? Well, yeah. Yeah, so Bo Schertz, love the name, by the way. Oh, Schertz. You know, he's only 21 years old. Can you imagine, like, that's – it's got to be one of his first jobs. And it's a serious one. You're driving around blood. It's not, you know, it's not an ice cream truck. Although that's also worthy of attack and absconding with. Indeed. But, you know, he was driving this Bloodmobile, and this is March of 1967, nine months before the Silver Bridge collapse. And he said this UFO came down with, like, some giant claws in a claw machine, in a toy claw machine. Came down with just as much efficacy. It's going to be trying to attack the panel van somehow and either just take the whole thing away with it or peel off the top, which was, of course, filled with a fresh supply of blood. It's weird. In my memory, a giant straw came down, but I guess I made that part up. No, you're thinking of starship troopers with the bugs that suck your brains out with the straw. No, it was – I remember a story where there was a straw, but maybe I'm thinking about there will be blood. Oh. I drink it up. I drink it up. You see, I have this milkshake. Drink it from over here. Yeah. Well, I know that sounds ridiculous. Yeah, of course it does. But the idea, though, is that there's some resource there. And as we always talked about, something did attack the truck, but is it in a way that you pictured – especially when you talk about Woody Derenberger, is that exactly what he saw? Well, you know – Or is it what is mind-fabricated? You know what I'm saying? It's like something attacked the truck. Yeah. I don't know about that. To pick it up, but was it like some giant thing with the old-fashioned claw that comes down, or it's going to have a proboscis and root around in there and suck the blood up? Isn't it proboscis? That sounds like a cookie. Am I saying it wrong? Proboscis. Well, anyway, whatever it is, John Keel didn't believe that story, though. That's the thing, and I had to look that up to remember. I did look back at our transcript today. He thought it was too far out. He thought it was maybe a hoax. And he also – he contacted the Red Cross, and they couldn't back it up. Still, the whole thing with a craft coming down and attacking a moving vehicle, that's in there. But as crazy as the Budmobile story is, I have to say – and the Knowles family incident is similarly bizarre. I still find theirs more believable, frankly. Well, see, that's the thing. If you're John Keel or somebody who's studied this a lot and you're willing to go a certain distance with some of the details, then where is your line of rationale with some of this? Because, I mean, how crazy does it have to be, crazy sounding, before you say, you've gone too far? Now I think you're probably – this is probably a hoax. We've talked about the phenomenon of things being apparently manipulated to be crazy because of the theory that, you know, I know I have, and I think you agree with me. And this comes from Terry Lovelace's stuff, this idea that they're making it crazy on purpose so no one will believe you. Right. Which I know is – that's kind of conspiratorial. It's like, oh, yeah, of course it's really weird because it's circular argument. But it's an interesting idea. It's like tiny monkeys came in the room. Right. Little clowns came in the room. A thing came down with a claw and tried to take the Budmobile. And it's almost like are they really – our show is family friendly, so I'm not going to say are they with us because that's what it seems like sometimes. Well, again, I think that's a rational way to look at it because if you're thinking that these are – whatever this phenomenon is, is of advanced intelligence and has some basic understanding of human behavior and awareness, then they must know that, like, yeah, there's levels. If you tell somebody, hey, I saw these flying black triangles, they were silent, and they zipped off, they made 90-degree turns, and you said, hey, I don't know what that is, but I swear I saw it. Then people are likely to believe that you did see something like that, but you're mistaken if you think it's UFOs. It's just our own advanced technology that you weren't aware of. But I believe that you did see it. You seem genuine to me. It seems frightening. I'll believe you on that. And then there are levels beyond that. And like I said, one of the big barriers here is actual contact. So it's like, okay, I'll believe – I'll go with you if you say you saw something strange in the skies or that even had some kind of effect on your – it stopped your vehicle, stopped the radio dead. As soon as it left, everything turned back on again. I'll go with that. But the abduction line is one that most people aren't willing to cross, even as light as it could be. Like they came down, I blacked – I saw some creatures come out of this thing, and then I blacked out, and it was four hours later, and my socks were on backwards. Yeah. Now it's some kind of hoax. You're trying to make money off this. So that's what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what kind of evidence you present because photos, videos, people have some of that, and you're still not willing to believe it. So as far as people saying like, well, eyewitness testimony isn't enough, I would say for a lot of people, some kind of physical or media evidence still isn't enough. And until you experience something like this yourself, you're not going to budge. So the story segment we just did, it touched on the vast emptiness of the Nullabore Plane a bit, but there's a few things we have to reiterate here. Indeed. It is beautifully stark, and as I said in this story, the name is derived from the Latin nullus, meaning no, and arbor, tree. And now I'm thinking of Mad Max. Well, the newer ones, yes, of that lone tree, but also these vast plains being crossed by the last vehicles on Earth with the last bits of gasoline. Yes. But in this case, the name, it's literally defined by what it lacks, which is also interesting because we often talk about how I believe in aboriginal mythology and spirituality, they count the black spaces in the sky as being significant rather than the nights, the lights in the sky, the stars forming constellations or patterns. They will tend to look at the spaces in between. So it's derived also by what's not there. Yeah, that's interesting. But getting back to Nullus and Arbor, technically, I guess that probably puts it in the liminal spaces category, right? Mm-hmm. So lack of evidence is not evidence of lack also comes to mind here. And this is also something that the internet has become obsessed with over the past five or ten years, just the emptiness of it, the desolation. Yes. But also within that, there is life and there is activity in those spaces. That's right. And the scale of this, again, is what's staggering. We're talking about a vast, arid to semi-arid region that stretches approximately 1,100 kilometers or about 684 miles from east to west. It covers this enormous 200,000 square kilometer or 77,000 square miles of flatland, which, as we already said, is roughly equivalent to the size of the state of Nebraska. Just this one area. Just this one part of Australia. And this isn't just dirt and sand. It's the world's single largest exposure of limestone bedrock. We're back to limestone and its stone tapiness. And because similar territory in the U.S. southwest, it's a former shallow seabed, also fascinating. There was life there at one time. Yeah. I took a road trip, talk about desolate spaces, through Death Valley looking for that old miner's cannon. Yes. And so we drove, we four-wheeled it up to one of the highest points in the Panamint area. And, you know, we're hiking up, and it starts to get cool, which is just a godsend at that point. And then we're hiking on this trail, and we could see kind of the valley. And I look over, you know, and there's like crusted rock, a lot of sedimentary rock formations. And something caught my eye. I started picking at it, and it's a little tiny shell. Right. And so at one point, that was all underwater, and there was life there. But now it's Death Valley. Yeah. But anyway, when you consider that, talking about back to Australia here, you're essentially driving across a solidified ocean floor that extends for hundreds of miles. And the local indigenous population had a name for it, too. Undiri, meaning the waterless. So here again, we have a second name for it based on what is not there. Yes, exactly. And as if that weren't all spooky enough, there's caves. Yeah. Which is typical of limestone. It's not just flat on the surface. There's a whole submerged world underneath it. The Murrow-Widgeny Caves in South Australia, they're actually open to the public. It's just about six miles north or 11 kilometers north of the Nullerbor Roadhouse. So you park right at the roadhouse, and you drive out further into the outback, and you can get to these caves. And that roadhouse is actually going to come up quite a bit tonight. That's quite a roadside attraction. Yeah. So I did a bit of digging on this man, and it turns out that James Cameron executive produced a movie in 2011 called Sanctum. Oh. I don't know if you've heard of that. This was a 3D action movie based on a real event that also took place in 1988 when an Australian screenwriter and producer named Andrew White went diving in the Panikin Plains cave and nearly died. And sadly, White passed away in a helicopter accident in 2012. Good Lord. This is a whole string of events here. Now, I hadn't heard of that movie. Yeah, me neither. But I guess the critics didn't like it. But it did over 100 million at the box office. Boo! Today's tangent has been brought to you by Sanctum. Right. Anyway, coming back to what's above ground at the Nullerbor Plain, we've talked a lot over the years about whether or not geology influences the supernatural. You know, this huge, flat, treeless expanse is primarily known to modern travelers as the stage for one very long road, which I mentioned earlier, the Air Highway. And I probably also mentioned this in my state, forgetting. But to me, it sounds like the Alaskan Highway. Yes. Where you have to really carefully plan. People drive it all the time. I know several people that did. Yeah. But what we're talking about here is that you have to carefully plan your trip, right? You don't just, like, fuel up the car and go. Yeah. You have to know how long it's going to take to get to the next station, how much gas you have, plan for any contingencies here. That's right. But anyway, they call this the Highway of Endurance. Yes. It forms part of the Australian National Highway Network connecting Perth and Adelaide, which is a lengthy trip of about 2,700 kilometers or just under 1,700 miles. The highway itself covers 1,664 kilometers or a little over 1,000 miles. It's an absolute test of will, concentration, and patience. It doesn't seem like, oh, I'm going for a drive, big deal. But if you've not done a long road trip on a road like this, and I have just in the United States, I mean, just frankly, going from El Paso to the east side of Texas is grueling to Texarkana. That's 1,300 kilometers or 813 miles. That whole time, you're in one state. That's a drive I've done, but it's like 12 hours. And while stretches of Texas are desolate, this trip in Australia is 20% longer and much more remote. Yeah. So why is it called the Air Highway? Well, it's named after Edward John Air, and he was a British colonial administrator and explorer. Air was the first European to traverse the coastline of the Great Australian Bight and the Nullarbor plane by land. And this trek, which began in late 1840 and finished in 1841, was nearly 2,000 miles or 3,200 kilometers long. And that journey was also a horror show. Air originally led the expedition with his Aboriginal companion, Wiley, John Baxter, and three other Aboriginal men. And they struggled through dense scrubland with virtually no water and had to eat one of the sick horses at one point. I do feel bad for that horse, but not as bad as I do for Ernest Shackleton's dogs. Oh, I know. We rank our animals. Well, the Air expedition, things got even worse for them. On April 29th, 1841, two of the Aboriginal men killed Baxter and took most of the supplies. Air and Wiley survived only because they lucked out and encountered a French whaling ship near Esperance commanded by an Englishman, Captain Thomas Rossiter, who gave them food and rest. Oof, geez. You know, the sheer grinding hardship of that crossing is almost unimaginable, just what it does to your mental state as well. Exactly. Air couldn't even give Baxter a proper burial because the ground was solid rock. So now compare that to today, where the Air Highway, carved in 1941 and then fully sealed by 1976, makes that same crossing possible in a car by your well-prepared but average civilian, although it's still highly remote, still can kill you. That's right. And the Nullarbor, even with a sealed road, remains remote and unfamiliar, which contributes heavily to the stress of the trip. And that's the theme that'll keep coming up. But even going back to the guy who was the reason it got built, all the way through history, people are having a hard time on this road. Travelers are often under emotional stress and fatigued from the long, continuous driving. Again, I'm picturing Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior, the 80s version of that. Just that one shot where he's just falling asleep because it's just long, vast stretches of nothing. You got to go a long way for revenge, man. Yeah. It's just a long drive. Well, you got not many other places to go. So, yeah. But here, you know, the road itself is designed to challenge human psychology. I think you would agree. Yes. Because it is so flat and featureless that concentration becomes difficult. So, that's what I'm talking about, road hypnosis. The lines, also the dashed lines. It's like a metronome, visually. That's right. A lot of people fall asleep. Yeah. But we're talking about one stretch here, the famous, quote unquote, 90 miles straight, which runs for 146.6 kilometers without a single bend. Now, it's like, you know, Americans probably have to picture some of the highways in Arizona, you know, in the Monument Valley. At least there's a hill there, though. Right. So, in that famous shot, there's a hill there. And you're, at least psychologically, you're heading towards something or getting away from something. Here, it's just without end. So, here, though, that straightness, that monotony, it can drain your conscious mind of just rationality and cohesion. And that monotony actually poses the biggest threat, the most mundane danger, like you said, driver fatigue. It's cited as the most common cause of death in the desert, not hitting a car or a train, but simply falling asleep, because the roads are exactly the same throughout the entire thousand kilometers. The authorities even resort to scare tactics on signs, like drowsy driver dies to deter fatigue, you know. You just need a little poem to keep people awake and scare them straight. Anything they can think of, because what else are you going to do? But are we getting to a point here where are we saying there's some psychological effect of the land itself, because beyond fatigue, the isolation also makes it an ideal setting for strange, unexplained phenomena. Because, again, where else better to have it if you are the phenomena, because you got a lot of space to play in. Yes. You know, the clear skies, the immense horizons, the sparse traffic means a couple of things. You know, as anyone knows, when you get away from civilization, you see a lot more strange things. And I think that's true because, you know, people always say, why does this stuff always happen to farmers or hunters out in the wild? Well, I think it happens also if you study the phenomenon, the history, you know, it happens in urban areas too, but there's a lot more noise going on and things aren't noticed as much. And so here you have a blank canvas to notice things. You know, things that theoretically we might see all the time, especially at night, you know, if it weren't for light pollution and an absence of wildlife. But the other thing that might happen is that you might mistake these strange things for something else. Or, on the other hand, one could posit that you're more likely to see a UFO or something legitimately paranormal or unusual in these circumstances too. Again, because you filtered out all the human noise. So really, it creates a perfect stage for both illusions and actual encounters. We can't overlook the other major hazard either, which is wildlife. Drivers are strongly advised not to drive at night because of roaming animals such as kangaroos, dingoes, of course, and wandering stock. The road trains, which are giant semis with sometimes up to four trailers, can be a length of up to 163 feet long, which is insane. Once, one of these hit two camels at 1 a.m. in 2021, and it jackknifed, which I don't even know how you do that with four trailers, shut down the highway in both directions, which, how are you even going to hear about it? Like, how far do they have to travel to block that off? They got to go three hours to be like, yeah, it's closed. Stop at this roadhouse tonight. You know? When it's not going to be open for quite some time. You know? Sorry. Send your emails to Forrest. No, you know, there's a reality show, I think, about traveling those roads and what it requires. Oh, that's right. But I also watch a late night reality show, just comes on one of the subchannels, about Big Rig Recovery and what that takes. Oh, yes. So just imagine waiting for that. Yeah, like you said. Yeah. And just what you would need to do. I like that YouTube channel with the off-road guys who go way out and rescue the people that no one else will rescue when they've fallen off the lion's back in Utah and they cable them up from, like, you know, 200 yards away and stuff like that. Yeah, God bless them. Hey, it's Jay Shetty from On Purpose. Check out the best of a moment we did presented by eBay. I'd never owned a vintage camera before. There was something about it that felt almost unnecessary in a world where everything lives on our phones. But I wanted to change that. So I started the hunt for a point-and-shoot camera. When I finally found the perfect one on eBay, I didn't keep it to myself. I left it out on a table. Always within reach, people started picking it up without asking. Family, friends, everyone to take a photo of whatever felt important to them in that moment. There was no editing, no retakes. You took the photo and that was it. The moment became real right away. It was about choosing something. 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Pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Do more stash. Get more cash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms. Max $100 cash back per month. Shake it up with Vital Proteins Collagen and Protein Shake. It's a high-quality, ready-to-drink shake with 30 grams of protein and 10 grams of collagen to support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints. With zero grams of added sugar, no artificial sweeteners, and absolutely no carrageenan, it's a clean, delicious way to fuel your day. So you don't just age gracefully, you age powerfully. Vital Proteins, stay vital. Learn more at vitalproteins.com. Here's a quick podcast for all you true crime fans. The case of the missing Reese's. It was me, at the store, with my mouth. Motive? Um, they're Reese's. What was I gonna do? Stop myself? Tune in next time to see if I do it again. Spoiler, I will. Wow, that had everything. Reese's. Suspense. Reese's. Hi, I'm Amy in Boulder, Colorado, and you're listening to Astonishing Legends with Scott Fullbrook and Forrest Burgess. Now back to the show. Well, circling back to the story, there is something, it just, this just seems really cool, and part of me really wants to go take this trip now. Actually, not a part of me, all of me wants to go take this trip. Maybe we'll get a chance to travel, Forrest, in the coming years, because this would be something fun to do, and we have lots of listeners in Australia. It'd be fun to go visit folks there. But apparently out here on the Norlbor Plain, and this particular stretch of road, and probably a lot of the other roads that are out in remote areas of the outback in Australia, there's a roadhouse culture. Right, right. There's like, the roadhouses are the anchors for this. Well, Patrick Swayze would agree. Yeah. The roadhouses themselves, they really kind of, they punctuate the void, Scott. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, they're outposts. We think about space, deep space nine, all these outposts of loneliness, and yeah, they're waypoints between two distances, but people inhabit them. Yes. Roadhouses here stand as tiny, isolated bastions against the immense, arid nature of the Nullabor. And these aren't bustling towns, mind you. They're just, they have to be supplied as well. You know, supplies have to be brought there. They're, you know, they're islands of humanity, separated by huge distances. Missing a stop is not an option. You're not going to stumble across a Buc-ee's down the road. Boy, we'd love Buc-ee's. Those who know, know, especially if you're Texan. They got everything. The cleanest bathrooms in the world. The thing about road trips like this, it's like, just imagine driving the 90 mile straight on the air highway, this kind of driving, it's cool, but it's also supremely dangerous because it can truly lull you into a trance, which has happened to me as well. And I've nodded off once and it was very scary. Oh my gosh. Recovered, but yeah, it's terrifying. And then you're really awake after that. Yeah. Listen, either way, it's prime conditions for danger. And yes, maybe a hallucination or two. So what we're saying is that we're, we're painting the picture here of a rational explanation for what people have experienced here, you know, but that doesn't mean that something isn't real. Okay. Because something is, is not rational and it doesn't mean it's not that the weird can't happen too. In fact, the paranormal is aware of itself. If it is, it stands to reason that isolation is the ideal place to try something like this. If the goal is it for to go unnoticed by the rest of humanity, which is also something we're talking about here is that, are they wanting to listen? That's why area 51 is where it is. Now the Nullarmore Roadhouse offers experiences like exploring historic caves, as we mentioned earlier, playing a hole on the, are you ready for this? The world's longest golf course, getting views of surreal cliff faces and watching whales up close. Wait, wait, wait a second. Are you saying the world's longest golf course here? Yes, the world's longest golf course, the Nullarboard Lynx, 1,365 kilometers or 848 miles long, which again, I pretty sure is close to the distance between El Paso and Texarkana. It runs from Kalgoorlie, I didn't look that one up folks, so hopefully I'm saying it right, Kalgoorlie to Seduna with one hole at each roadhouse or stop on the air highway. Oh, that's fun. And that's going to take something heavy. But the other thing you see when you're researching this area, as you just mentioned here, are these amazing cliffs called the Bunda Cliffs or Bunda, didn't look that up either, which I guess there's only two options for pronunciation. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Which overlooked the Great Australian Bight, B-I-G-H-T, which is what Frederick Valentich was flying over the eastern end of when he vanished. Yes, the Bunda or Bunda Cliffs look amazing. They remind me of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, which I actually had the good fortune to see in person. Yeah. Just stunning. But whether you're focused on the natural wonder or the road ahead, that sheer isolation shapes your human experience. You drive this desolate, seemingly infinite expanse, and you realize that the emptiness isn't just a geographical feature. It's a profound social condition that can leave people kind of vulnerable. Yeah. So in the 1970s, even well into the early 2000s, possibly, it was considered bad luck actually not to help stranded motorists or hitchhikers in desolate areas like this in the desert southwest of the US. But these days, folks are probably more wary of that thanks to all those serial killer movies and horror films like The Hitcher. Well, we have to touch on a tragedy that happened not too long ago. In this case, it's frankly right out of a Coen Brothers movie. Cricketer Ibrahim Hodak was traveling with a longtime 32-year-old friend, Mwand Rahimi, from Melbourne to Perth, east to west, or opposite the way the Knolls had traveled, across the Knollibor Plain, just like the Knolls family had been. Now, Ibrahim was 29 at the time and apparently had known his passenger for years. And a farmer wound up picking Rahimi up by himself after coming across him seemingly out of fuel on the air highway. His car was broken down the side of the road, but it wasn't his car. It was actually Ibrahim's car. Well, yeah, probably the most likely thing to happen to you on that road. Yeah, running out of gas, right? So the farmer picks Rahimi up, takes him to an aboriginal community along the highway there called Yolata, and the cops take him back to his car with fuel, at which point the police see blood on the car. And this connects back to a family who also, in a similar time frame, were driving down the air highway when the woman in the car saw a body at a rest stop about 104 kilometers east of the Nullibor Roadhouse, which is just right on the road. Now, apparently, Hadek and Rahimi had some kind of fight before parting ways, as the police described it. And when Rahimi went back to the car and the cops were like, what is all this blood on the car? He just told police that Hadek was missing. Hadek had known Rahimi a pretty good while. And then there's an implication that he was down on his luck. And Hadek, whose cricket nickname was Hotshot, nice, might have been going out of his way to help a friend in need by giving him a ride to Perth. But Rahimi was unemployed and possibly unhoused as well, and perhaps down on his luck. And he didn't even request bail at his hearing and was ultimately sentenced to life in a mental health facility. Oh, and OK, this is sad. At the time, Hadek's wife was pregnant with her fifth child. That's an awful story. Hadek was well-loved by his friends and the people he played cricket with. But here we are, kind of another spooky story on the Nullibor plane, albeit one without UAP. Yeah, just imagine all the stories that did happen out here that we have not heard of. Yeah. But anyway, it emphasizes the isolation of that trip. And it's not hard to imagine, frankly, that something about the nature of that drive sent Rahimi over the edge or led both of them to argue, of course, that that seems also pretty likely that you're both going to go stir crazy and leading them to argue to the point where, you know, there's a fight that then led to murder. And it confirms that when a crime occurs in such vast isolation, the roadhouses in towns like Sedona immediately transform from simple fueling points into critical operational and judicial hubs, right? Because you have no other place to operate out of. So that's right. The authorities had to appeal for dash cam footage from anyone traveling the air highway between Port Augusta and the West Australian border to kind of reconstruct the events. And the isolation here is the weapon. You know, allowing a crime or perhaps even a paranormal event to occur far outside the observation of anyone. So that story contrasts sharply with the typical UFO attack media hype that the Nullarbor is known for, which it is worldwide, presenting a very real, very human danger, which is just as scary, if not more than UAP trying to grab your car. That's right. Well, there you go. Once again, humans, perhaps scarier than aliens. And I will once again mention the movie, uh, Jerry, which you still yet to see, but talking about isolation and a desperate situation causing one person to act in a way that they later claim was, uh, what the other person wanted. Yes. Yes. Well, anyway, as far as we know. Well, as we've said, this place is a collection of conditions that puts people on edge. Is that part of what happened to the Nulls in 1988? It almost certainly is a contributing factor, but is it enough to categorically declare that 100% of what happened to them was a result of that? I mean, even if the environment is, is conducive to strange lights or whatever else, a nonstop trip, like the one they were taking that was 13 hours before their encounter, would that cause four separate people to hallucinate the identical thing happening? That's a big question. Right. Well, then now we're getting into the mass hysteria thing again, which man, you've, we've covered a million times here, but so I know that's what people are saying. Is it a, a, a, a pas de deux or what's the French word for four? Un, deux, trois. Quatre. Quatre. Quatre. Quatre. Quatre. Quatre. Quatre. Quatre. A dance of four where you're all imagining the same, you're feeding each other the same illusion and delusion. Yes. And after a while you all believe it. That's right. And then would all the details match? I don't know. We'll talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. So, but the foundation of the Knowles family saga here is the journey itself. And that's why we've been talking so much about the highway and this, and the environment and everything. Faye Knowles and her three adult sons, adult sons, by the way, young adults, but adults, Patrick, Sean, and Wayne were driving that Ford Telstar from Perth to Adelaide, January 1988. This all happened around 2.45 a.m. near, as we said, the Mundrabilla Roadhouse. That's 262 kilometers or 163 miles west of the Nullabore Roadhouse. They had been traveling virtually nonstop for 13 hours, as I just said. Well, you know, what they encountered then, to me, seems like it transcended mere fatigue, Scott. Because Sean, who was driving, initially saw a light ahead that he mistakenly thought was just a truck approaching. That right there points out that he was conscious that it might be a truck. Right, right, right. And I think that's really important here. Yeah. Because a lot of the investigators who looked at this later are like, oh, no, it's a light, it's Fata Morgana, it's a Mirage, or whatever. He has said, he's like, oh, no, at first I thought it was a truck. That tells me, as a person and a witness, he's like, yeah, I know what a truck looks like. At first I thought it was a truck, but it wasn't a truck. It's not like, oh, my God, I'm so confused by this thing that's not a truck. Right, that's not the first leap that you leap to, right? It's just that it's something UAP-ish. It's just, it's got to be another truck. And we have a close friend who also saw something similar where it was like two headlights coming over the hill. And then he said the headlights just rose into the air, like 30 or 40 feet. Yeah, yeah. And then I'm not sure if he drove under them or they just kind of flit off. But yeah, that's your first thought of like, oh, there's a car approaching. So exactly, you know, here we go. Sean thought at first it was a truck approaching from the east. But then this thing quickly demonstrated that it was anything but conventional. He described it as a bright white light with a yellow center shaped specifically like an egg in an egg cup. And people don't see those very often. I don't know if people have soft-boiled eggs much anymore. But the thing that stands the egg up. I know what an egg cup is. Yes. Yeah. Faye herself said simply that it just looked like a big ball. Yeah. So this is where, and with good reasons, skeptics will say, well, if it was more like a big ball, could it just have been Jupiter and a temperature inversion illusion? Or again, truck headlights, which I'm not buying because that was the first thing he thought it was. And as he was dealing with it longer, he decided that's not what it was. Okay. So I think that this theory falls apart when you examine the physical and psychological effects they reported once the object allegedly caught up to them. You know, Sean floored the accelerator driving up to 200 kilometers per hour in this desperate attempt to escape, get away from it. And remember, you know, the family described hearing a high-pitched humming sound as well. So a lot of those tracks were the usual, a lot of these encounters, right? Right. And so he said sometimes it was referred to these witnesses as a voom, voom, voom, which is then you're suggesting some kind of engine with intense power. And also, here we go, another thing that tracks or check the box on, accompanied by a dreadful smell, some kind of noxious odor that some likened to electrical burning or even dead bodies. Boy, I know that smell. You can picture it in your mind, can't you? That the smell of hot electronics. Yes. Very specific. Well, you know, this goes beyond some kind of atmospheric distortion unless people are going to say like, oh, well, static, you know, the smell of static or ozone. Here's the thing, the foul odor and the smoke were investigated. While police confirmed the family were visibly shaken and they noted ash on the car, forensic analysis later commissioned by a TV station and subsequent investigations concluded that the so-called black ash, in quotes, was composed of clay, salt particles, and fine brake dust, entirely consistent with road grime and material from worn brake lines, especially after driving at extreme speeds. They said the burst right rear tire was likely caused by driving that 1984 Telstar at excessive speed, again, up to 200 kilometers per hour, far beyond its tire rating. And I have some thoughts on that that are going to come up here in a minute. Ah, okay. Well, you're focusing on the debris. Yes. But what about what they smelled and what they saw and they felt? Well, Faye said she rolled down her window and reached out and touched something spongy. Pretty brave of her, by the way. Do not touch or lick the UFO. We know those rules to be steadfast. Unless there's a pancake being offered. Right, unless there's pancakes, might as well have one. But this was, this spongy stuff was, it was on the roof and then she was feeling the strange object physically attach itself just before the car was supposedly lifted up. And inside, what she said, quote, was something like a grayish black mist filled the car. Boy, that would just also inspire terror here. Yeah. Now it's physical. Now it's invasive. But the most terrifying detail, perhaps, is the effect on them internally. This thing with their voices. That was one aspect that when I first read about this story a few years ago, at least, that captured my imagination. Yeah. Is that what's happening? Is it kind of slowing down or melting space time here? And I, cause I can picture it and I can hear it in my head. You know, the, the voice is becoming distorted, slowing down and then lower in pitch like time perhaps was slowing down somehow, but you're still cognizant of it. You know what I'm saying? If you're, if everything's slowing down, like you and I might be slowing down our talking here. Right. And we seem normal or it seems normal, but to an outside observer, maybe we're slowing down or. Right. Maybe we think it's slowing down and vice versa. People think like, no, you said it fine. Right. So the pitch, the voice is slowing down, went with a description by Patrick as saying, he felt his brain was being sucked out of his head. It's weird to watch him say that in the interviews. And yeah, so I, I completely agree that the trauma was real. The family was terrified. They thought they're going to die, but the psychological interpretation here is strong. Dr. Robert Bartholomew classifies this as a classic small group panic, which I think is, uh, we're going now from mass hysteria to tiny amount of hysteria. When people are isolated, fatigued under extreme emotional duress, they misinterpret mundane events. According to this theory, like a refracted light in a tire bursting. And they redefine them as supernatural attacks, especially under the cover of darkness. The fact that they were noncommittal about whether the car was actually lifted off the road saying only, uh, quote, we don't really know, but we think it has been lifted off the road that suggests that maybe there was a psychological shock that shaped that memory, perfectly aligning the terror with the consequences of a collective panic attack. This is Sophia Bush from work in progress with Sophia Bush. Check out this special moment we did on our show presented by eBay. When I was living in Chicago, I took part in my first ever giant charity sale, and I was able to auction several items from my personal closet on eBay. They were items that marked huge moments in my life and in my career. And though I was ready to pass them along, I also wanted to make sure they were going to someone who would love them. One of the things I loved the most about doing this with eBay is there was a way for everyone to shop. It wound up being so much fun to see where each and every item was going, where it was going to be loved. And in passing items along like that, authenticity really matters to the person who's getting them. That's why I love eBay's authenticity guarantee. They weren't just listing my items. They were verifying them, making sure something was genuinely from where it claimed to be. In this case, my closet. To listen to more, check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Find what you love, sell what you don't. eBay. Things people love. With the Venmo debit card, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking your rewards. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more. Pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Do more stash, get more cash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at venmo.me slash stash terms. Max $100 cash back per month. Here's a quick podcast for all you true crime fans. The case of the missing Reese's. It was me at the store with my mouth. Motive? Um, they're Reese's. What was I going to do? Stop myself? Tune in next time to see if I do it again. Spoiler, I will. Wow, that had everything. Reese's. Suspense. Reese's. Hi, I'm Christina McKnight. And when I'm not writing historical romance novels, I'm listening to Astonishing Legends. Let's get back to the show. So now the climax is hit. The car has been supposedly lifted, dropped. The tires burst. The family's convinced they've been attacked by a strange egg-shaped object. But what happened immediately after the violence subsided is crucial to the store's veracity. Indeed. You know, it's a moment of pure survival instinct. You know, just imagine the terror. You know, Faye was screaming that they were going to die. And the first response was primal. You know, they fled the vehicle immediately, ran into the scrub, and then hid behind the low bushes nearby, staying there for about 15 minutes, thinking that the object was searching for them. And that's, I think that's what's recommended, too. And any, for a human intruder. Get out, hide in the bushes. Yeah. Well, you know, you could stay in the, well, depending on what it is. Sometimes you're supposed to stay in the car, shelter in place, and then other times, like, it's after the car, or just go hide in the bushes. Yeah. Yeah. Good call. You got to figure out what the target is. But when they do this, when they get out, they're right back in the middle of the vast, dark Nullabore, where the landscape is described as a hideous anomaly. So when they finally gathered the courage to return to the car, they didn't waste time observing the scene, did they? They swapped the blown tire, and they bailed. Well, you know, Sean, the driver, said he changed that tire in about two minutes. Is what I'm saying? Just like a, you know, that's like an amateur pit stop. So they were in such a frantic rush to escape the area that they even confessed to leaving the jack and tools behind in the bushes. You know, this hyper-focused, panicked action tells us that they were past the financial worries of needing to buy a new jack. That's right. They drove 500 kilometers after that, or 310 miles further east to the nearest major hub, Seduna. Now, it's notable that Seduna is known as the gateway to the Nullabore, often dealing with Travers, who are already stressed. And the family immediately headed to the police station. And now just think, they've probably been driving several hours since what happened happened. Do you think they would still be upset? Like, if they were confused about it, maybe rationality would settle in on the way. And when they got there, they might, why would they maybe be like, you know what? I think we mistook that. Oh. Let's not go to the cops. Let's just. Yes. No, I'm sure your brains are racing, trying to figure out what just happened. And, you know, if it was like, look, I think we overestimated this thing. I think we jumped to some conclusions. Let's all settle down here. That's not what happened. Because when they arrived in Seduna, the family was, according to Sergeant Fred Longley, clearly shaken up and hysterical, his words. The initial physical evidence supported their distress. The sergeant reported that the car was visually damaged and covered in ash. And this is important because it gets contradicted later. That's right. And the police officer in charge, Sergeant Jim Furnell, said he had no reason to doubt their story, given the sight of the visibly shaken people and the damaged car. And the media coverage immediately seized on this with headlines screaming, UFO attacks family. There you go. You know, the physical traces were what made this case sensational, though. Also sounding like the legend of Skateboard Swamp, right? So, Chris, the young man, had physical damage. That's right. The policeman believed, the sheriff there, believed he was so panicked that something did happen, something unusual. That's right. Because in this case here, though, there's dents on the car roof. There is black ash covering the car's exterior. And then there's the burst tire. Now, when UFO investigator Keith Basterfield was brought in, he initially stated it appeared to be an extraordinary example of a close encounter that had left physical traces. Okay, so now, who is Keith Basterfield? Keith Basterfield is a prominent Australian UFO researcher and investigator. And he's specifically well known for compiling the history of reported unusual aerial phenomenon, UIP, sightings in the lower plain region. Now, he was actively involved in investigating this case. Initially, he viewed the case as, quote, an extraordinary example of a close encounter that had left physical traces, end quote, as we said. However, after further investigation, he changed his tune, though, saying that the light the family saw was likely a mirage caused by a temperature inversion. And he suggested it was, quote, simply a case of misunderstanding of seeing a light in the distance, a tire bursting, and those things had built up into a story, end quote. And he also noted that later forensic analysis of the black dust found on the Knoll's vehicle was simply brick dust. So now it sounds like he's trying to debunk the case, but he was taking a measured approach. Okay, so I'll give him that. Because he is a compiler of Project 1947, a reference catalog of UAP reported from the Nullabore Plain region. And so this guy's gig is to document sightings on the Nullabore. So you can't look at his investigation and say he's just trying to break this down. He's what you want in a UFO, UAP investigator. Okay, skeptical, but open to belief. And I personally think that, yeah, you should look at all angles, and especially the mundane first, and see if anything fits. Now, he even drove to remote locations to take soil samples for analysis and attempts to get to the bottom of these perplexing sightings. Okay, so he's the real deal. Now, it's time to talk a little bit about our theories here. We've got a lot to cover on this one because it's been thoroughly investigated. We probably have to start with the idea of the superior mirage. Okay, right, right. Fata Morgana, which sounds like a cartoon character, lady. So, yeah, it's okay. It's seemingly the most accepted skeptical viewpoint of the story. It's related to this phenomenon called Fata Morgana, or inversion-prone mirages from atmospheric refraction. Think about the picture of the ship. That seems like it's floating off the ocean, the surface there. We've talked about this effect numerous times over the years. But skeptical researchers feel that the conditions on the nullibore plane are perfect for creating these unusual lights that may actually just be headlights or other vehicles in the distance, or possibly just objects in the sky, just not necessarily UAP or UFOs. So, there was a meteorological investigation into what happened to the nulls, and it found that what happened to them happened during highly stable, cloudless, calm conditions that can be associated with a strong temperature inversion. Okay, so that's making sense so far. But, see, now this bothers me a little bit here because this falls into the don't tell me what I saw category. You know, investigations into this type of way out kind of stuff should be done in this manner because you need some kind of framework. And that's where groups like MUFON, you know, they have very strict rules to go about this. So, you're uniformly gathering data to make an intelligent assessment of this kind of stuff. Also believing that this kind of stuff is possible. That's another thing that we always state. So, I think you have to accept firsthand accounts of an experiencer and eyewitness testimony, no matter how fuzzy the details may be. Because a lot of times that's all you have, right? That's right. Or that's the main part. Otherwise, you've got like a banged up car with some weird dust on it. You know, it's just not right to tell people definitively, though, what happened to them when you, as the investigator, you know, you weren't even there. And I know you've investigated a lot of cases. But in this case, we know people that have done cases similar that involve very strange things. And they'll have a theory. It's like, okay, I can see that. That makes a lot of sense. But usually to you and I, I think, Scott, it doesn't answer all the questions. That's right. And I think it's a little hypocritical to say, perhaps, that, you know, eyewitness accounts, they're faulty and can't be trusted. And then immediately follow that with assertions of what happened when the person investigating it was not there at all in the first place. Exactly, man. The Knowles family experience was far, in my opinion, from mundane headlights. They described an egg-cup-shaped object, a humming sound, their voices changing pitch and slowing down, the car supposedly being lifted off the road and dropped. All of that stuff is pretty intense in its description. So I guess experts might suggest that the strange, intense light they saw was merely what's called a superior mirage, a refracted, distorted image of distant truck headlights, which I guess with this process can be as far as 100 or 150 kilometers away, made more dazzling by the atmosphere. But still, I think the intense physiological, the vehicular effects they reported in the car, that points to something more physical and external. But the counterpoint to their story is that we do know that the conditions present regularly on the Nullarbor Plain are well-known to cause mirages, like in the desert. I mean, that's where mirages happen is the oasis, the desert, and this is a desert-like environment. So that definitely has a little street cred in the mundane column. And then on top of that, honestly, there's the physical evidence isn't really there according to the forensic investigations for the ash that was on the car and stuff like that. The road grime or brake dust is what the investigators later said was what was all over the car. So I don't know. Right. Those are always going to fall short for me. And in my opinion, rarely do the mundane explanations, while valid in their own right, are fully satisfying. Well, all right. Let's go deeper on the mirage theories, though, here and come back to the car stuff. There was a meteorological investigation, believe it or not. Retired meteorologist A.T. Brunt meticulously studied the conditions prevailing on the air highway in January of 1988 when this happened. And he found that the environment was perfectly set up for an optical anomaly. He said that the incident occurred during clear, calm conditions, which fostered a marked temperature inversion in the lower atmosphere. He states that temperature inversion is the mechanism by which the impossible becomes visible, effectively transforming the immense flat expanse of the nullabor, the world's largest exposure of limestone bedrock, into a giant chaotic lens with warmer air resting over colder, denser air. That's like a refracting lens, and it bends light rays downward and following the curvature of the earth. This is how objects normally hidden below the horizon can be brought into view, floating in the sky. That is fascinating. Yeah. And a great explanation of how that works. Right. Especially with something like a temperature inversion, which I think a lot of us, you know, you watch the news reports and nobody's really paying that much attention. You just want to see, should I wear a jacket tomorrow? Right. And when you have the idea that you have hotter air over colder, denser air, and that's actually affecting optics, that's what could be happening here. Right. For the visual, okay, that makes sense. It's some type of Fata Morgana. And is that just one element of this experience? Right, right. That's a good question. Well, I did some further research on this because we're talking about 3 a.m. Yeah. In the morning when this happened, or 2.45. I was wondering if it would happen that long after dark, but apparently the effects that cause it, if they're right, at the beginning of the night, can increase and be even more likely to cause it as you approach sunrise. Interesting. So, Brunt concluded that the mysterious light that the Knowles family saw, or initially thinking it was a truck, or at least Sean did for sure, was most likely the distorted image of distant truck headlights. That's what he said. He's saying that it's a perfect explanation for why they saw light approaching from the east, but never actually saw the source reach them. It simply refracted and disappeared as they moved through different air layers. Here's my thing about this, though. I mean, I guess I get what he's saying, but initially they were driving eastward on the air highway, and they saw the light ahead of them. Right, right. And then they said it was approaching them. It got brighter and brighter, and it appeared to vanish and jump about a bit, which sort of fits in with what Brunt was saying, right? But then Sean is swerving the car to avoid a collision with it. The light then appeared to chase after a truck they passed that was heading in the opposite direction, too. It then turned and began to pursue the Knowles family. So, this is the thing that I don't get. I don't feel like you would be anywhere near swerving to avoid a collision with a Mirage, because they're always in the distance. Yes. I don't feel like it's coming right up on you. And the closer you get to it, usually it either gets further away or it disappears. That's right. So, that's the thing about the Mirage. It doesn't make sense. You never get to it. Yeah. Okay? So, right, that's the part of the optical illusion. It's the rainbow. You never get to the end of it. It's the Mirage. You never get to the oasis of water. It's a Mirage. And so, here we have, like, that's what I'm saying. It doesn't completely fit. Now, initially, sure, you could be seeing something that resembles it, that seems anomalous, and you're frightened of it, even. Right. But not where it's chasing you or heading towards you. Yeah, exactly. So, I think there's some parts of this that do fit with Brunt's theories on this, but the parts where it becomes like a close contact or it's on the roof of the car or it's disappearing. Other thing is, they said it came back after they got back in the car, after hiding in the bushes. They saw it again, but then it went away when it got to be daylight and they turned off their headlights. Yeah, yeah. So, and by the way, that comes back to tracking with what Brunt said. It's like, well, in the earlier part of the day, I think after the sun rises, you're less likely to see it. Right, right. But I still just can't see these guys, like, swerving and, you know, it's in front of them and it's behind them. I mean, that is a super complicated Mirage. Yeah, well, it's like, look, it's like with everything else. It's like infrasound explaining all ghost sightings. It's just, okay, maybe a small fraction. People are seeing a gray blob out of the corner of their eyes. And that does not, with a broad brush, paint over everything. Right, right. So here, yeah, there's more to this than just that. They just reported some very strange things off in the distance and that changed and even seemed to change size or direction or this and that. Okay, but there's so much more to this story. Right. Okay, so that's a pretty, I think, comprehensive discussion on the Fata Morgana angle. But there's something else that's pretty cool and unusual and anomalous about Queensland, Australia. Another thing, I guess, kind of like Fata Morgana, called the Min Min lights. Yes. I want to talk about the Min Min lights for sure because there's an important component of that here. And also, we have to mention the Kahn and Report, and we've talked about it on the show. Look it up if you don't know what it is. But it notes that mirage images can be grossly distorted, exhibiting exaggerated elongation or broadening, and frequently involve multiple images. And more dramatically, rapid movement of the image can result from the focusing and interference of wave fronts in the refracting layer. So the families report that the light jumped about a bit might match that, I guess. At least that's what investigators have said. But if you believe in the mirage idea with the lights and the temperature inversion, you've got to acknowledge that this idea is global, to your point about Min Min lights and other stuff like that. In the Arabian desert, particularly the empty quarter, travelers report a mysterious light known as Abu Fans. And it's not Fans like Fans. It's F-A-N-O-U-S. But I did find a video on YouTube of an Arabic-speaking person talking about it, and it's Abu Fans. You don't hear the O-U-S, just the S. I don't guess Fanoos. It looks like Fanoos, but I guess it's Fans. But it's also called Abu Nuwaira or Abu Suraj. And it appears as an orb or glare that looks like car lights at night or a ball of light from a distance. It moves unpredictably, approaching and retreating before vanishing suddenly. And I'm going to keep that video. I sent you the link to it, too. We'll put it in the show notes. It's interesting. It's like a TikTok, you know, show or whatever. But it describes it, and it shows footage that, you know, may be AI. But it looks like good examples of what they think this looks like if you see it. And it's a little bit like the Pukwiji and other things that, like, if you follow it, first of all, it's not real. And if you follow it, you're never coming back kind of thing. And, you know, and that connects to the djinn as well, which we've talked about. So the Abu Fonz is actually sighted along the Nullarbor lights and the Min Min lights, as well as the Marfa lights in Texas, because they share this core characteristic. They are mysterious moving lights in highly isolated areas that might be conducive to atmospheric conversions. And, you know, here in North Carolina, too, we have the Brown Mountain lights, which Micah Hanks lives very close to and sees frequently. I still want to maybe do a special with him on those. But in Texas, and I think you and I have just touched on this before, there were some physics students that tried to study the Marfa lights. And they came to the conclusion that they were associated with headlights in the distance, which I still have a hard time with that. I know that people have talked to, it's like with the Brown Mountain lights, there's no, nobody living, there's no cars or highways where these lights are being seen. And it's the same thing with Abu Fonz. There's not cars, it's the desert, it's the empty quarter, it's empty. There are not cars in the distance. The car thing, it just, it's like the swamp gas deal. It's just too much for me with every light you see. You're jamming that in. It's like the walking lighthouse at Rendlesham. Folks might know that explanation. It's like, that's what you got? Okay. Okay, because that's all you got. To counterpoint that, Scott, getting woo here, you know, there are local traditions that interpret Abu Fonz as a djinn, right? Or supernatural entity. And I always love considering those angles because it's so fascinating and interesting on another level other than just atmospheric, which I also find, you know, I find the science interesting. But this is anthropologically and socially interesting. So its stated goal here, though, is to intentionally mislead travelers. Something like the fairy lights, perhaps, come into the woods, come into the brambles. Exactly. Leading them off the path until they become lost and sometimes disappear in the desert. Now, some Islamic traditions even link it to ghouls or ogres who then take the form of a light. It's so fascinating how across cultures and the world we have similar themes and patterns for, you could say, for natural phenomenon or for supernatural phenomenon, depending on what your beliefs are. And, Scott, you mentioned the Min Min lights, too, of course, right? Yeah. That's one of Australia's most persistent and intriguing aerial phenomenon, often reported across remote outback. And their appearance is commonly described as what some describe as fuzzy, a disc-shaped light hovering just above the horizon. And while usually seen as white, there are accounts that they also change color. They'll transition from white to red to green and back again. And sightings are widespread, particularly in the channeled country of Australia, but also in areas like Junta in South Australia. And the earliest stories predate European colonization, originating in several Aboriginal Australian cultures, with the name possibly coming from an Aboriginal language near Cloncurry or the Min Min Hotel, where a Stockman reported a sighting in 1918. So that's where you get Min Min. Was he right? And there you go. And also, they didn't have road trains or trucks or cars or headlights prior to colonization, did they? Nope, I do not believe so. But they did have Jupiter, I suppose, to be mistaken. Or Venus, that's the other. Venus is the often, yes, people are just seeing Venus. Okay, so dismissing the experience simply as an illusion. However, it overlooks the distorted reality to such an extreme degree. Because if the car was genuinely lifted and their voices altered, as was reported, that energy came from somewhere, okay? Also, and this is the kind of thing that gets under my skin, perhaps, is it's when science dismisses Aboriginal or ancient cultural beliefs. Or just, you know, we talked about this quite a bit. And so we're not saying we buy into everything we hear in that realm just because it is of the Indigenous culture. But I like to consider it. You're right. And the origin of the Min Min lights is deep within the Indigenous consciousness of the land. So now we're back to me talking about the land and the people being one. You are so interconnected and also the sky and that plane of reality that they recognize, especially the Indigenous peoples of Australia. And so I think characterizing them as, you know, mysterious but sometimes benign entities, this is fitting within the context of Australian folklore. Because there is a consciousness and a living aspect to the land. And I think you find that with a lot of Indigenous cultures, certainly Native American cultures, it's a living thing. You're living within it. It's not just something to take from. You interact with it. You depend on it as you are one with it. So in any case, you know, the light's behavior is what truly separates it from mundane phenomena, I think. It's reported to be frightening and unknowable. You'll never understand exactly what it is. They are said to follow or approach people, these lights, sometimes keeping pace with moving motor vehicles. Folklore even warns that anyone who chases the lights and catches them will never return to tell the tale. Okay. And now you're getting back to the leprechaun or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or chasing the fane. If you go chasing it, you fall into their world or they lure you into their world with the promise of riches and you never return. Okay, so now this connection between the lights and folklore is so strong that they too are associated with djinn or supernatural entities elsewhere, believed to lure travelers off their path. That's the theme here. So here we go again, full circle. Right. And I totally believe in Fata Morgana. I've seen it myself on long road trips out west. It's even been filmed in movies by particularly talented directors and cinematographers because it's a real thing. It's not a perception thing, but I just feel like it's a bit reductive to dismiss everything at this, especially in a case like this. Still, I can see how it might just be that simple if you're talking about a visual occurrence. Where I trip up is all of the physical stuff in this case. None of these lights have any tales of smells or physical aspects like what the Knolls experienced. Are we saying four adults all thought a faraway light smashed into the roof of their car and left ashes all over it and also smelled putrid? Well, it doesn't make sense to me. No, again, as I've mentioned just recently, the smell would stay for me and my brain bank forever. Totally. And when you back up a little bit, the mundane explanation here is strong. The meteorological investigation showed the prevailing conditions, like we said. Some researchers said that the light source could have been Jupiter, and especially as it relates to another account, which we'll talk about here in a minute with a bus full of people. But Jupiter's position was in the correct direction to the northeast to be seen above the low hills, and the temperature inversion could have distorted and enlarged it, making it appear as a huge, terrifyingly close UFO, according to experts. I would love to see that myself. I'm not saying I don't believe it. I mean, it's science, but it's like, and I do believe in science. It's wild to think of folks as being like, no, we're being chased. The planet is a UFO that's chasing us, this planet that's pretty far away. But hey, could be, could be. Hey, it's Jay Shetty from On Purpose. Check out the best of a moment we did, presented by eBay. Music has always been one of my teachers. There was a vinyl record I used to play during a quiet, very formative season of my life. Late nights, no distractions, just me, the music, and my thoughts. Over time, life changed, schedules filled up, and somewhere along the way, that record disappeared. I didn't notice right away, but I felt the absence of what it represented. So I searched for that same vinyl, same version, the same cover, and I found it on eBay. When it arrived, I couldn't wait to listen. And when I finally did, the music was the same, but I wasn't. I heard it differently. I understood it differently. And that's when it really hit me. Objects can evolve us. They can remind us of practices we want to return to, of values we don't want to lose, of versions of ourselves that still matter. That's what I love about eBay. It's not just about buying things. It is also a place where you can let go of items that are no longer serving you, or that you no longer need. You can give items a new life, a new story with someone else. To listen to more, check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Visit ebay.com to shop your favorite finds. Find what you love, sell what you don't. eBay. Things people love. With the Venmo debit card, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other, means you're stacking your rewards. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment, and more. Pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Do more stash. Get more cash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at venmo.me slash stashterms. Max $100 cash back per month. Reese's peanut butter cups. They go perfectly with music, podcasts, and welcome back to the show. Even nature sounds. Oh, and the thing where someone crinkles tissue and whispers at you. Hello. Look, I'm not here to judge what you listen to. I'm here to judge you for not eating Reese's while you listen to it. Reese's. Actually, go back to the nature sounds. Nice. Yeah, it was really nice. Forrest and Scott, thank you for supporting their sponsors. I'm Stephen Buksovich. Now back to the show. Let's look back at the physical evidence. Once the Knowles family arrived in Sedona, hysterical and visibly shaken, the story gained immediate credence because of this physical evidence that we've talked about. We're talking specifically about the residue they described as a grayish black mist or black stuff that filled the car and covered their hands after Faye reached out the window. Sergeant Fred Longley confirmed the vehicle was, quote, covered in ash when they arrived at the police station. Okay, so it's covered in something mundane or otherworldly, but who knows what it was? You know, that initial observation is vital because it moves the event beyond mere hallucination and into the realm of the tangible. You've got some, you've left behind some physical evidence here. Faye described touching the roof and feeling something spongy, remember, before bringing her hand back inside covered in that blackish dust. And the foul odor, they reported, likened to electrical burning or even a, like a putrid black mist, according to Faye. That suggests some kind of physical toxic emission. And of course, you know, it's like the dust that ended up on Betty Hill's dress. You never get really as satisfying, you know, because if it's out of this world, it's just like, well, we don't know what it is. That's the answer you get. So now, while subsequent tests by UFO researchers and a television station found samples to differ between the interior and exterior of the car, the lingering question really is whether that substance was truly extraordinary. As I was saying, it's like, okay, what did they find? The forensic evidence, according to the investigations they did, did not line up with the null story. An investigation conducted by the Australian Mineral Development Laboratory analyzed the ash from the car's exterior and found it consisted primarily of clay and salt particles, which is entirely consistent with a vehicle that had recently crossed the sand-laden Nullerbore plain. So that essentially debunked the idea of exotic residue. And police inspections later noted a black deposit on the metal rims of the front tires, which was attributed to residue from worn brake linings or brake dust. Other analysis also concluded that substance was mostly iron oxide, which is typical of brake lining residue. So the overall contention was the car was just dirty from a very long road trip. But here's the other thing, though. All of this is predicated on the idea that if there's not exotic material, then the whole event didn't happen. Right, right. So that's like, oh, well, if there's a UFO, it has to be from another world, and it's going to be covered in things we've never seen before. And it's like, well, yeah, now as we in the modern society are like, well, UFOs might just live under the ocean. Right, right. They may have been here all along. Are they coming through portals? Are they, they may be as organic as we are. Some of them may even be alive. They're not necessarily, you know, oh, well, the car wasn't radiated, so it couldn't have happened. Yeah, it's not like the rings were shot on the UFO's engine, you know what I'm saying? And it's like, it's choking out black smoke, and it's from another planet. And that would definitely prove this was something extraordinary, not just mundane. It could very well likely, whatever, this force of energy was kicking up dust. Right. More so, and surrounding the car with it, or, you know, inside and out. And, okay, so, yeah, I didn't expect much from analyzing the dust, because that usually never, it's just, that's just part of the, that's part of the narrative. It just never pans out that well, or it's inconclusive. So, it's never very satisfying, but, but then again, that does, all that does not account for the felt effects, Scott, or, or the vehicle damage, right? So, now the family firmly believed the car was lifted off the road and then subsequently dropped, which is why they say the right rear tire blew out. And they testified, specifically Sean, that the object's weight on the roof was the only reason the car didn't overturn when the tire exploded at such a high speed. That's interesting here. And that suggests a massive physical force acting upon the car. Right. When folks who knew about tires looked at the tire, they said that when it burst, that was a kind of a normal event. Given that Sean admitted accelerating up to 200 kilometers per hour, which is 125 miles per hour, exceeding the typical speed rating for a car that type, which was an S rating, tire failure was highly likely, if not an inevitable outcome. And investigators also said the violence and shaking they felt was just because of catastrophic tire failure at a high speed. And maybe even they were driving on the rim for a short distance, but by the same token, the tire was still on the rim. It wasn't gone. It definitely, the sidewall is completely blown out. So there's a little bit of something between the road and the wheel there. But if you've ever driven on a blowout, yeah, that's a pretty crazy feeling, especially It is. Has that happened to you? Actually, no. So I don't know what I'm talking about. I've never had a blowout. I've had tires low on air and I'm like desperately trying to get to the gas station, but that's just around town or something. Well, I was on an LA freeway a few years ago, connecting from the 110 to the five, but there's that tunnel there. So I'm not going very fast, but it just, it was a very strange sensation of like, it felt like I was traveling over golf ball size gravel. Like it just felt. It's like, well, that's odd. This is pavement here. And we're going into the tunnels there. I didn't hear a blowout. It was just like, just this odd sensation in the car. So of course, you know, it's not a great place to pull over, but I've managed to find a little island of dirt there before it headed into the tunnel. Cause you would have been screwed. I would have, because no, yeah, you're not going to be able to change the tire anywhere there. So I pulled over and I went out and the right rear tire had shredded and I didn't experience a blow. Like that was so weird to me. Like it just started to come apart and not really old tires or ball. They were, you know, the midlife and it just, for some reason it failed, but the sensation inside was very odd. Just driving. Cause it didn't seem like a junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, you know, any kind of, or just like that. You hear, you've heard that before. When the tire starts to shred, it just felt like I was driving over gravel. I don't know. It was very, it was very strange. So, okay. I'll give you that where that could be confused, especially in that very tense situation where you're, you're kind of, uh, you're frightened. Your nerves are on edge. Your senses are, uh, are overloaded. But let's say even if the blowout was due to speed, okay. The family's collective sensation of being lifted and drop speaks to the intense psychological shock, as I'm saying, imposed by that event. So it's not merely a flat tire if it was a perceived violent external attack, if you know what I'm saying. It's like, so you got to consider the gestalt of all this happening to them and their perception of it. And then what about the structural damage? So while skeptics argue that the roof dents were insignificant or consistent with a previous roof rack, the police officer at Seduna confirmed the car was visually damaged when they arrived. So that's confirmed by authorities and it leaves us in this eternal nullable gray area where the evidence only proves the family experienced real terror because that was evident and recorded. So, and this is irrespective of whether the cause was brake dust and heat or something like an egg in an egg cup, which I, we haven't mentioned this yet, but people laugh at the egg shape, I think. But our, our good friend, Rob Christofferson saw a floating egg in the sky with a witness. Lots of people have seen egg shaped UFOs. Mork and Mindy, Robin Williams. Remember that? I was, uh, this was probably in a long time ago discussion, but, uh, that was the old joke on, uh, Mork and Mindy for those who don't remember that, uh, made Robin Williams career. It's a sitcom, but he arrives from outer space, uh, from his planet in a flying egg. And it seemed funny at the time because not a lot of folks know. And then, and maybe because it's pop culture, there have always been reports of egg shaped craft. It's a very natural, simple biological shape. Why not travel? And then just quickly, the joke is that he's talking to some therapist, I think, because somebody wanted Mork to go see a psychologist or something. And, uh, he says, so how did you get to this planet here? Earth? He's like, well, you know, the flying egg. And so the, the counselor thinks he's shining him on and playing a prank. And so sarcastically he says, oh, well, I got here in some frying bacon. And then Mork goes, oh, the sizzler express. But like the point is that the flying egg shape is pretty common within UFO lore. That's true. And the thing, the other thing that I come back to is them talking about the smell of the dust, which it's like, I'd still like to know how an illusion or a superior mirage creates a foul smell like that, which they said was like electrical burning or even dead bodies, just putrid. And they noted that that dust covered the inside of the car as well. Now, later scientific analysis found the dust on the inside of the car and the dust on the outside was different, but they couldn't conclusively determine its origin, which leaves the door open for something anomalous. Even if the primary scientific theory suggests the smell and the interior dust were from worn brake linings and the friction of the blowout caused by high speed, brake dust though, well, I'll get to that in a second. I'm just saying, supposedly the damage to the car also wasn't enough. It didn't satisfy folks based on the story. Closer examination revealed the dents on the roof were kind of minor and maybe preexisting, possibly caused by a roof rack. Although I don't know how you forensically determine the age of them unless there was like rust present and, you know, an exposed steel or something. And the burst right rear tire, that was characteristic of a normal tire failure resulting from going too fast outside the safety rating. But here's my thought on all this. First of all, brake dust doesn't really have an odor as somebody who's had it all over by hands a million times. But you have been near a semi, like on a hill, like in the mountains or something, where you smell that asbestos smell. Yes, but pads aren't asbestos anymore, which is why brakes are so much squeakier. No, I know. There is a distinctive smell though with, yeah, trucks leaning on the brakes a lot. Yeah, I guess that's true with a truck that's like coming down the hill and in trouble. But, you know, I don't know. It's like, because the other thing too was the dust on the outside of the car. Initially, two cops were like, oh yeah, that's weird. And the truck driver who came over, we'll talk about him in a minute. Another witness, he was like, yeah, the dust is weird. You know, and I don't know what nullable or environmental dust smells like. It probably just is like a dry dirt smell, which, you know, everybody kind of knows. I know what the desert smells like in the southwestern US. But I had a theory, like, what if the car was never picked up? What if they were mistaken about that? But if you believe any of this at all, that the story did happen, but it was just kind of squished down. Like the thing on top of it was mashing it down on the suspension. And that's why the tire blew out. And within all the confusion, they had a sense that maybe they had gone airborne, but maybe it was more about this thing, whatever it was, just pounding down on the car. And here's the other thing about the tires. Supposedly the tires on it were S-rated. Those are good to 112 miles per hour. And, you know, I used to be, I'm in my older age, I'm mellowing out. But I used to be into cars a great deal. And I've had sports cars over the years. And a long time ago, I'd learned about the speed ratings. And what I remember, at least in the past, and I don't know if it's still this way, it was just something I learned like 10 years ago, was that the speed ratings were, whatever the speed they're rated for, what that used to meant was you could drive 30 minutes at that speed before the tire would disintegrate. So, you know, if you had a Z-rated tire, like on a Corvette or whatever, I think that was like 150. It would go 150 for half an hour before you should maybe think about putting a different tire on. So my thing is like, they're like, oh, well, you just went too fast. That's a little bit, again, dismissive, I think, because it's not like the speed rating is like, oops, you went three miles an hour over the speed rating, and the tire immediately comes apart. It doesn't do that. But by the same token, Sean was driving 125 for a little while, and there's nothing in the story that indicates how long he was doing that. But I don't think it was half an hour. On the other hand, the tires could have been worn, they could have been bald, they could have been old. I don't know. Like when you look at the picture of the blown out tire, it's not exactly a new looking tire. So that's another factor. But I think it's like kind of dismissive to just be, oh, it's an S-rated tire. They're only rated to 112. He went 125, so it blew out. It's like, it's not that simple. It's not that simple. And then with the dents, they're like, well, it could have been a roof rack or whatever. It's like, okay, so now we're like, it's not dented enough. It should be more dented based on the story. Yeah, I know. Yeah. So I don't know. It does look like when you look at the tire, it does look like the rim bit into the side wall because it's just, the sidewall is, it's a circular rip that goes almost all the way around it. And that's what you see if a tire is like really low on air. Or like I said, if something squished, there's a huge weight down on the car, or maybe it was picked up and dropped to a certain extent. It's hard to imagine being dropped from several meters in a Ford Telstar, which is a pretty cheap car. It's not, the suspension just probably couldn't take that. I mean, you know, you think about every episode. I was about to say, it's not the General Lee. Five Dodge Chargers. Yeah, it's just, you can't, you have to build a stunt car to go from several meters. So that part of it is weird, but you know, for them, the time is slowing down. Their voices are changing. There's all these weird smells and all this stuff. So who knows what really happened? So let's move past the physical evidence. Let's say the ash was just road grime. The tire burst was consistent with excessive speed for too long. The dents were insignificant. What about the psychology? And this is where Dr. Robert Bartholomew's theory of small group panic comes into sharp focus. That explains the extreme reality of the terror without requiring an external extraterrestrial force in this case. Now, Bartholomew posits that these incidents involve otherwise normal, healthy people, the small group panic situation, who through a series of stressful events, grow paranoid and redefine ambiguous stimuli as supernatural attacks. In this specific case, the environment was the perfect incubator for panic, according to him. The Knowles family's driving virtually nonstop for 13 hours. They're under the cover of darkness, isolated, unfamiliar location. Dr. Bartholomew notes that prolonged fear, fatigue, lack of sleep, drastically enhance suggestibility of unknown things and inhibit critical thinking. So his theory is they're tired, they're stressed about possibly relocating from Perth to Adelaide. They're suddenly confronted by a dazzling light in the middle of nowhere. The fatigue and isolation allows them to redefine what was an atmospheric mirage of distant headlights, a strange optical effect of the temperature inversion into a malicious, egg-shaped, extraterrestrial craft intent on harming them. Okay. Well, that's a pretty extreme reaction, I'd say. Not impossible, perhaps, but yeah. All four of them, too. So now we're talking about an extraordinary psychological event. So, but even, you know, Faye Knowles herself admitted that if her son Patrick had come home and recounted the story without her having experienced it, she would have thought he was crazy, her words. Right. Their emotional state was so profound that Faye said that she thought they were going to die. Okay. So this is, yeah, as extreme as it gets. And according to Dr. Bartholomew, when that level of sheer horror is established, whether the light was a planet or a plasma discharge or merely distorted headlights, it's kind of irrelevant at that point to their personal reality. I don't know. This just, it seems like a stretch to have four adults all having the same level of panic, especially a family who is close and knows each other. Right. Because it's conceivable to me that everybody wasn't exhausted. It's conceivable to me that two of the boys or even Faye might've been sleeping or resting. You know, Sean's the one driving. Okay. Yeah. Let's say he is tired. He's been driving a long time. They haven't rotated in a minute. Everyone else could have been taking naps, could be resting. So we're making assumptions that they're all just wide awake with their eyes on the road, even though they're not having to drive. Everyone's at the same level of exhaustion and susceptibility. Yeah. That doesn't seem logical to me. The other thing about this is, and, you know, we've talked over the years about mass hysteria. Now we're talking about small group panic, which is just a miniaturized version of that is, does this really exist? Where is a case study? You know, and I want to see a paper about folks who have actually experienced this, who on the backside of it, they've analyzed it and they've said, look, we know this is what happened here. And the people are like, you're right. We got things wrong. This got out of control. We were mistaken, or it was done in a laboratory environment, or there was a clinical study that says this is a thing. Because to me, this whole theory feels very much like conjecture designed to turn this narrative into a scientifically explainable psychological break that isn't necessarily something that occurs very often, if ever. Like, where else is it occurring? And I'm not saying those studies don't exist. I did look around for papers on this and I couldn't find it initially. Now, granted, that was cursory research, but, you know, the small group panic thing, you know, I get it. I get the idea. You say you're, you know, it's a small group of people in a lifeboat and it's got a hole in it. Is everyone going to panic? Yes, I get that. I get that idea, but I just don't know if it fits here. I don't know. I mean, what do you think about that? First of all, I think earlier I said, the dance of four, it's a pas de deux, the dance of two. Now I meant folie a cat, right? So that would be a delusion shared now by four people, but this is seriously why this is connected. This story is connected to the Trump family road trip freak out because it's some kind of similar in some ways, like a shared delusion. They all start to go a little batty on a road trip of sorts. Which by the way, that's an episode of Astonishing Lens. Yes. If you haven't heard it, it's in our back catalog. Also took place in Australia, by the way. Well, that's why people, when you study one or the other, the other is brought up. Is that, oh, was it something similar? Well, okay. There might be some underpinnings that of a psychological phenomenon that's happening without any extraterrestrial force on it, but very different experiences here and very different outcomes. Yeah. And what if instead of a small group panic, it's four people in fight or flight mode and that's it. Cause they are being assaulted and they're scared and they're all four of them are in fight or flight mode and they're all choosing flight. Right. So, well, that's what I'm saying is you can compare some things very limitedly, it's not a word, with the Trump family experience, but remember those people had much more of a psychological break. Here we have just sheer terror, but still threads of rationality, you could say, about an extraordinary experience, which then was like a temporary fugue state. Maybe you could say like, oh, then they got over it, they're still scared enough not to take the road trip pack and they took the train, but very different. And you cannot compare the two or just say that's Australia. No, I think it's, I think it's just very different things, but you know, there are themes that are kind of similar here, but, but again, these people did not have that severe of a break. They just experienced something and I agree with you. It's too much of a stretch to say now they're all somehow in the same wavelength because we have studied, precursor early, this idea of mass hysteria, even in a small group, or you say here mass, small mass panic, or even social contagion. Yeah. Those small group panic, these things don't fit with this scenario, in my opinion. Well, enough with the rational explanations, which frankly are all, well, almost all plausible. Let's embrace the fringe. Fatigue, superior mirages, and small group panic, poppycock. For those who believe something physical did happen, I feel like there's a couple of compelling fringe theories to share here that, that try to explain. And one of them, I'm betting a lot of people haven't heard this, going to try to explain the strange combination of noise, smoke, and the physical impact that goes beyond just refraction or an illusion. All right. So in acknowledging the physical accounts too, which should be done, you know, the family reported, remember, hearing a high-pitched humming sound, a terrible smell of electrical burning, a grayish black mist filling the car, and then a big physical, you know, some kind of thump on the roof. Right. That made an impression on all four of them. And these physical sensations stubbornly resist the explanation that this was just some kind of a mirage or distant truck lights, as we've been saying. Exactly. So one explanation offered by researchers focuses on celestial mechanics rather than extraterrestrial ones. That's the carbonaceous meteorite theory. Ooh, fancy. So Nullerbor, particularly around Mundrabilla, where this incident occurred, is internationally famous for its meteorite deposits. The Mundrabilla-strewn field of meteorites is vast, stretching over a 60-kilometer range, making it one of the largest meteorite sites in the world. Wow. Yeah. It's a perfect convergence of environmental factors for meteorite discovery. It's fertile grounds there. And those things are worth finding because they sell for quite a bit of money. Yes, they do. But this immense flatness here, the ancient limestone surface combined with the arid climate, it's really great for preservation of these extraterrestrial objects. And when we say extraterrestrial, just none of this earth. And some are here are found that they're thousands, even tens of thousands of years old. So it's really just a, it's a vast repository of space rocks. Right. So this theory suggests the encounter might have been caused by the falling of a carbonaceous meteorite. The lights, the violent shaking, the vehicle damage, the smell, and the powdery residue were all interpreted by researcher Glenn Moore as consistent with the atmospheric entry and subsequent pressure wave from a large meteorite. Moore noted that in cases involving large meteorites, the pressure wave can be so powerful, it knocks down trees and strips leaves. Yeah. And, you know, that violent shock wave could account for maybe some of the terrifying vibrations, the sudden tire blowout, perhaps forcing the car down even, exactly as that family claimed happened, you know, when this thing landed on them. And if the object was a carbonaceous chondrite, they are known to contain a rich mix of complex organic compounds. Now, could this possibly account for that noxious smell, something burning and putrid? And then the residue, which the forensic police labeled it as simply clay and salt particles. Maybe this was initially sampled by UFO researchers who noted a strange difference between the interior and the exterior dust. Yeah. And to be clear, and we did research this, there's a ton of meteorites in the Nolibor Plain, not because they land there more often, but because the environment is so static that when they do impact, they wind up just hanging out forever. And, you know, no people are moving in. There's no development. And the region is pretty much in a stasis, so it's easier to find them there. So if that means, I mean, we're saying if we're saying a meteorite came down, you know, crashing and exploded or just impacted nearby and then scared the Nolibor to death, it's not because they hit the Nolibor Plain more than other spots on Earth, right? Okay. Just to keep that in mind, it would have to be a right place, right time thing, right? Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So, but we have to move into an even deeper shade of gray here to cover the second major fringe theory, which suggests the incident wasn't accidental at all, but rather a deliberate, terrifying intervention by human forces. And this is kind of a fascinating angle here. This is the helicopter and electromagnet theory. Yeah. This is a classic cover-up narrative that suggests the object was a military helicopter operating under conditions of extreme secrecy. It hinges on Fay Knoll's famous description and sketch of the light being shaped like an egg and an egg cut, but some argue that this description with a cone-shaped front and a wider body precisely matches the view of a helicopter fitted with a powerful searchlight and some kind of mechanism beneath it viewed from the highway below. And the reported physical effects are retroactively fitted into that narrative. The humming electrical noise, the vroom, vroom sound combined with hot fumes and soot from twin turbo shaft engines are all claimed evidence of a helicopter. The car being hoisted off the road and the four dents seen by this truck driver, which we can talk about in a second, are explained as a result of being the result of a giant electromagnet lowered from the helicopter by a steel cable. Well, this theory gets deeply specific, claiming the distortion of the family's voices was due to the helicopter rotors causing, quote, a compounding and oscillating effect, end quote. The most sinister aspect of this is, of course, the suggestion that this wasn't surveillance, but a case of attempted murder, maybe, and a case of mistaken identity by terrorists using the helicopter. Okay, now we're into Rich Haddam's Under Siege 2, Dark Territory, which had a helicopter and the terrorists. With the subsequent police media denial here, though, is that, you know, being, it's an orchestrated attempt to cover up the truth. So that gets pretty fringy, you know, conspiratorial. Yeah, but, you know, here's the thing, this isn't too far from a sensitive Australian defense infrastructure there where they did nuclear tests back in the 50s and 60s, the Maralinga nuclear test site. That is about, I think, 90 miles northeast of Mundrabilla. Okay, yeah. Well, this case here, you know, the British conducted seven major nuclear tests at the Maralinga site in South Australia between 1956 and 1963. And, oh, here we go, connection to Somerton, man. You know, this area is part of the Woomera prohibited area. It's only about, yeah, 800 kilometers northwest of Adelaide and in the general vicinity of the Nullabore's eastern edge. So this is also a vast, remote, restricted military zone. In the history of unexplained events, as anyone who listens to our show knows, coinciding with these kinds of sites is long. You don't have to look far from the Nullabore for regional examples that reinforce the idea of UAP concentration near military installations. In fact, there is another incident in Australia called the 1985 Uldea train stop incident. This is pretty fascinating. Yeah, it is. You know, that event, which occurred near the remote Uldea railway siding here near Woomera and Maralinga, it's pertinent here because, in this case, a freight train traveling between Adelaide and Perth suddenly lost power as two locomotive engineers watched a mysterious light hover above their engine. And the men claimed the UFO reduced the train's power, forcing them to uncouple wagons just to get up a steep embankment. Yeah, so the Australian National Railway denied the UFO claim, blaming mechanical troubles and suggesting the driver's claims were a joke. The sense of panic and physical interference was real for the crew. One station assistant who heard the whole event over the radio even claimed the UFO went up steeply and crashed into the sandhills, leading him to call the U.S. Air Force space base at Pine Gap to report the crash. Now, the pattern is clear. Lights, isolation, power loss, proximity to a secret nuclear site or a former test facility. There you go. And this phenomenon of strange aerial occurrences in the Nullabore region long predates the Cold War missile range at Woomera and even the Knowles family incident here. Now, if we look back through Project 1947 catalogs, we see that the Nullabore has always been a hot spot for unexplained aerial phenomenon, or UAP. Yes, so we see cases like another train driver in 1951 between Adelaide and Perth who claimed an object illuminated the countryside, came close to the train, appeared to land, and then sped off. All right, but the most compelling historical case, I think, is the 1954 Eucla sighting because it introduces the element of official suppression or cover-up right in the same area. In this case, three young men traveling near Eucla reported being followed by a saucer-shaped object for about 80 kilometers. And they even claimed the object was low enough that they could see portholes. I always love when you can see portholes and people peeping out at you. And a little face looking at you. The extraordinary detail here is the alleged government response. The men stated they took over 92 photographs using five cameras. And when they reported it to the police, authorities allegedly flew in by helicopter, interviewed them, subsequently took away their cameras, which they later returned, but you guessed it, without the film. Yeah, never say you have photos. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Just don't report. Until you got them backed up, printed, and in an envelope on the way to five newspapers. Well, okay. So anyway, the repetition of that behavior there, physical evidence being the film being immediately confiscated by official-looking authorities, only strengthens the theory of an intentional some kind of ongoing cover-up operation, spending decades in this highly isolated, military-sensitive region. Yeah. So there's an idea here. And this, you know, coming around, folks, where these guys were all losing their minds, it was just a mirage, a piece of space rock burning up, or whatever, a secret helicopter trying to pick up their car with an electromagnet. There is a lot of other things that have happened out here over the years, and those are important to take into account, too. Now, there was, this is another important thing, another significant independent witness present on that lonely stretch of the air highway the night that the Knolls were molested, truck driver Graham Henley. Yes, exactly. Now, Henley's account is fascinating because he saw the light before he encountered the distressed family. And he described seeing a strange light in his rearview mirror that was, quote, too high up to be another truck or vehicle, end quote. Yeah, and his description echoes the family's bizarre egg-in-a-egg-cup shape. He described it as being like a strong spotlight or like a big fried egg hung upside down. He also specifically noted he could not see car headlights below it. Aha, there you go. Again with the eggs. Yes. Well, Henley later stopped, and the Knolls family arrived, running toward him, freaked out, and eager to share their story. And crucially, Henley then visually confirmed the physical traces on their car. Now, he confirmed the presence of black ash or dust on the car's roof and interior and the four indentations on the roof and the damaged tire. And he likened the ash to fine silicon sand with a burnt odor. Right. So what's interesting, too, about this is that black ash being on the roof of the car, brake dust is on wheels. Right, right, right. It's down near the wheels, maybe near, maybe in some cases along the lower sides of your car. It's not on the roof. It's not on the hood. It's not in any of these other places that some of these witnesses, including police, said there was black ash present, which also, if it's silicon, fine sand could have blown away pretty quickly after they got to Sedona. Or just, you know, environmentally, it may have separated itself from the car. Of course, you know, I guess you would say, well, why didn't it do that when it was driving? Because it took, they did go 300 kilometers between the incident and then their arrival in Sedona, but I did wonder if some of the original physical evidence was gone by the time the deeper investigation happened. Well, I'm sure that's likely, but we all know what brake dust looks like because just go out and take a look at your, especially your front wheels that take the most of the brunt of the disc brakes here. It's a rust-colored powdery substance that collects and you have washed off at the car wash. Right. That's what that is. Right. So coming back to A.T. Brunt and his particular opinion of Henley's sighting, he says, given the time and proximity, Henley was estimated to be maybe 10 or 15 kilometers ahead of the Knowles family. And he said, quote, it's possible this lone corroborating sighting was actually of the Knowles family themselves. He proposed that the lights that Henley saw were the headlights of the Knowles Ford Telstar refracted and distorted by the widespread temperature inversion into that bizarre floating fried egg shape. So that's what he said was appearing behind Henley's truck. Okay. Back to the egg here. And then on top of all of that, something else happened months later. Now, this is in October, 1988, October 17th, to be precise, about 1 a.m. And this is close to the Munderbilla Roadhouse. Now, this time it involved Peter Chapman, a Pioneer Express bus driver who was driving west with 25 passengers, although only five were awake at the time. Now, Chapman and his passengers saw a bright light on the right hand. This would be the northern side of the bus. And he said he was buzzed and pursued by a glowing sphere that appeared to hover about 20 meters above the ground. And the light followed the bus for about eight kilometers or about 10 miles as Chapman drove at high speed trying to escape. So the irony here is palpable because Chapman initially admitted he had laughed off the Knowles family claims earlier that year. Yet after his own experience on that remote road, he completely changed his mind, stating, quote, I didn't believe in it at all, but I do now. It's totally different. Of course it is because you have to experience it yourself. Yes. Well, he did report it to the Eucla police, even though he feared people would think him, quote, a nut. So we've walked through the full arc of the Knowles family's horrific night on the air highway in 1988 from the initial blinding light to the chaos in the car. Now we're going to stand back and look at the core of this case, the profound sincerity of the witnesses pitted directly against the somewhat overwhelming weight of a mostly disagreeing scientific explanation. Yeah. Okay. Well, you've got a family here, Faye Knowles and her three adult sons who were so utterly convinced that they were being pursued and attacked by a gigantic egg-shaped object that they described their experience with palpable raw terror, all noted by all observers here. Now, Faye stated unequivocally that she would have thought her own son was crazy that he had he repeated that story without her being there to witness it. And that genuine level of, you know, the shared conviction against a terrifying presence, I think this is one of the main things, the human angle here, the greatest challenge to any purely mundane explanation. Yeah. Their sincerity is not in doubt. If you don't believe it, just look, and we have links to them. Look at some of their interviews, their on-camera appearances about what happened to them. Their interpretation of the events is what is a little in doubt. And the case remains remarkable because their strong testimony, coupled with visual corroboration from truck driver Graham Henley, forced investigators to take it seriously. But when you look beneath the small group panic or whatever else you want to call it, the physical reality does kind of point towards something mundane, but it's the psychological aspects are different. They seem to be against each other. Well, I think in this case, the trauma was certainly real. That cannot be doubted. Patrick felt his brain was being sucked out. That must be a horrible feeling and experience. And their voice is distorted. That's one of the more fascinating things to me. Seeming to slow down and deepen in pitch. That must have been, again, pretty freaky. They fled into the bushes and hid. Imagine having them do that with your family for any reason. Yeah. Believing the object was hunting them. Thank goodness most of us will never have to experience trying to get your family to safety by hiding in the brush. Yeah. Well, there's also snakes and other kind of massive blue spiders and things that could kill you out there. Everything's poisonous. Right. But so their reaction, you know, hiding for 15 minutes, changing the burst tire in two minutes, and then refusing to drive back across the Nullarbor, opting for a train instead. This shows, I think, or proves the terrifying consequences of their belief. So they believed, certainly in my opinion, I believe that they believed it. They behaved exactly as if they had been attacked by space aliens, perhaps. I want to add something here that I thought, you know, once you look through all the notes of this and the research and everything, it was a quote from Sean in one of the interviews, actually. On camera, he said, you know, I was still about 200, meaning the speed he was going, when he got a blowout. And once the car stopped, he says he blinked out. And I don't know what happened after that. What does that make you think of, Forrest? Well, it's, yeah, it's an abduction missing time, or just that kind of hiccup in the time-space fabric. Yeah, exactly. And so how many cases have we covered? How many have we talked about where folks, you know, blacked out for a minute and didn't really realize something had happened, even Pascagoula, until much later in life? And so I do have to wonder if, you know, if you believe any of this at all and believe they actually did have an encounter, I have to wonder if maybe they got snatched. And don't remember it. And that's why they wound up in the bushes. Yeah. And then they got back in the car, because if they weren't, like, paying attention to their watches or what time they were on this interminably long drive anyway, they might not have even noticed an hour disappeared or something. So when he says he blinked out and doesn't know what happened after that, that is very suspect to me, given the nature of this particular case. Yes, Scott. I think those are all fascinating concepts to consider because the blinking out, the changing of the voice pitches and slowing down, the alteration of time, the strange smells, the gross smells could possibly fit into abduction theory. And that that's the point where you're being transported into this other reality or space. You know what I'm saying? All that is the teleporting or however they grab you and, you know, slip you through the space between the nuclei and the electrons. And, you know, like, like Buckaroo Banzai cutting through space and physical reality, how some people claim they're transported through walls and buildings in their cars and teleported. Or as Rich Haddam tuned us into, there's one case where somebody claimed they just kind of nodded out and they claimed they had been abducted while they're in the car driving with somebody else as a passenger. Right. And the driver just said they look like they just kind of passed out for a second. And they came to and said, I was just abducted. Who knows what's going on? But in this case, it's so strange. I think overall, which is why we like it and why we feel so bad for the Knowles family here. But my just overall opinion, I mean, there's so many wild elements to the story. Most likely something anomalous happened, whatever that was. But there is no argument that it was definitely terrifying. Yeah. I mean, was it just the environment? We've learned the desert facilitates optical illusions because of the large radiative cooling or heating of the surface, which makes those temperature inversions. We've learned that the flat terrain can extend visibility for tens or even hundreds of kilometers, allowing things below the horizon to appear in front of you, whether it's headlights of a road train or a celestial body low in the sky. We know that is possible. That's a known thing. But still, it's a hard row for me to hoe the whole thing with that light that you thought chased your car at 120 miles an hour, picked it up, dropped it, felt spongy when you reached out of the window to touch it, and made your voices slow down was just Jupiter. That's going to wrap up episode 319 of Astonishing Legends. Links in our show notes. This was the second of three Astonishing Legends main shows in a row for October. So we'll be back next week. As always, look for new episodes of the Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays, and keep an eye on our Patreon for more bonus content. Don't forget the 2025 limited edition Halloween merch is in the store right now, and this year in particular, supplies are limited. So visit AstonishingLegends.com and click on store and AL apparel and gear to get to those. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendel at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vokola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Bolin, for lending his voice to our shows. I'm Liz Barkley. Hi, I'm Amy Lancer, president of Future Compensation. Hi, my name is Christina McKnight. I'm Stephen Vuksevich. I understand this is... Be as in Victor. Said. Galaxy-wide. And perpetuity. 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No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing, whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. It's, yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? 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Reese's. Ashley, go back to the nature sounds. Nice. Yeah, it's really nice. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research, Jake Embatta. We discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing. At IBM Research, what we always do is answer what is the future of computing, whether it's coming up with new algorithms, coming up with better AI, coming up with quantum, or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together. It's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future. Isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff? Yes. Building actual physical machines. It's, yeah, it's why I came to IBM. I wanted the experience, the culture of building hard things that others have not done before. Where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology? There will come a point when it will mature, right? Yeah. My cell phone is a mature technology at this point. How far are we from that point with quantum? By 2029, we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer. That is one that can run a very, very large, large problem. To learn how IBM is building the future of computing, visit ibm.com slash quantum. This is Sophia Bush from Work in Progress with Sophia Bush. Check out this special moment we did on our show presented by eBay. There's a different kind of care that comes with letting something meaningful go, especially when it has a story attached to it. When you pass something on, you want to know it's being handled with respect. I took part in my first ever giant charity sale, and I was able to auction several items from my personal closet on eBay. Some of them were truly one-of-a-kind pieces connected to specific moments, TV sets, or from personal collections. One of the things I loved the most about doing this with eBay is there was a way for everyone to shop. 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