On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, conspiracy theories, and urban legends,

examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities

we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

I reacted like someone who had been attacked, assaulted.

They're most interested in the scene in all the things that make us particularly human.

Like, I'm laying right here, my bed are right there.

I usually see they call them the shadow people.

I don't know what happened.

You can remember everything now.

I'll remember if it's the last thing I do.

It can run in families, both believers and skeptics agree these experiences with the

extraterrestrial paranormal. On a beer run on a dark wooded road

in the early 1980s, my dad used to tell a story of driving his pickup truck with his buddy

Jarshaw when all of a sudden, bang. They hit something that sounded like solid metal, but they hadn't

seen anything at all. When they got out to look, there it was on the pavement, a metal sphere

a little smaller than a soccer ball. As they got close, it shot straight up in the air, stopped in front of them, and then

zipped into the woods and disappeared. It's a whopper, I know, but my mom even backs this one up.

My mom, who has seen her own unexplained objects, a bright green light over the trees. She was at that party, when the boys

came back beerless, their faces drained to white, a dent on the front bumper of the truck.

As a kid, perhaps you too would have found a story like this inspiring. I certainly did, and my friend

Johnny and I kept lying out on blankets in the yard at night, clocking more and more unidentified

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