Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart 3D Audio.

For full exposure, listen with headphones. We know now that in the early years of the 20th century this world was being

watched closely by intelligences greater than man's yet as mortal as his own.

We know now that as human beings visit themselves about their various concerns. They were scrutinized and studied.

Perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their

dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or

design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space.

Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, mines that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle.

Intollects, vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes,

and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

If, like we are doing here, you look at the UFO era in the United States as a developing

modern legend, then one of the protagonists is Alan Heineck.

Heineck, who we met in the last episode, was the consulting scientist for Project Blue Book,

and in that capacity was deeply involved in the early years of official investigation into UFO reports.

But what really makes him noteworthy in this context is that he went from a vowed

skeptic at the beginning of his work to, if not exactly endorsing the view that

extraterrestrials were visiting Earth, certainly making the case that the UFO phenomenon was real and required scientific scrutiny. I'm Toby Ball and this is strange arrivals. Episode 6, Quicksand.

In 1949, Joseph Campbell, a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, published his

Opus of Comparative mythology The Hero with a thousand faces. In it, he described a type of folk narrative

he called the hero's journey like this. Quote, a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of

supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive

...